I’m going to write a piece one of these days about The Static Problem of the Series Hero. The problem is this—the heart of any story is to produce some change in the main character. In its classic form, a story is a drama in which a character employs a series of strategems to overcome a problem, failing time after time until he succeeds at last. The reason he has to go through so many failures and disappointments is because a good story needs to tell how that character learns something and grows. And the solution that involves learning and growing is usually the solution each of us leaves for last.

But series characters make that method difficult or impossible. How many life-changing, existential choices can one character believably make, in one book after another?

The mystery format helps solve (or at least cover over) that problem. Mysteries are generally not stories about transformation through personal change. They’re stories about solving puzzles external to the main character’s personal life. So Sherlock Holmes, for instance, can go on for story after story (long after his author is tired of him), changing little if at all. The faithful reader looks on the detective as a dear old friend. He doesn’t even want him to change. If someone needs to learn something in the story, let it be a secondary character. (Conan Doyle had Dr. Watson fall in love and marry in “The Sign of the Four.” But Watson’s marriage became such a nuisance from a storytelling point of view that Doyle killed her off, in so negligent and confusing a manner that fans argue to this day about how many wives the doctor actually had.)

But there are authors who resist this time-honored mystery formula. One of them (as I’ve said before) is Robert Crais, whose adult adolescent detective Elvis Cole has been growing up before our eyes.

Another is Randy Wayne White, author of the Doc Ford series. As I’ve said before, White manages better than anyone else (anyone I’ve read, at least) to revive the spirit of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee.

But Doc Ford is not McGee. Ford has a darker history, a past career as a top-secret commando and assassin. In the early books, this past served to give the character a textured, somewhat guilty background, and to add credibility to his fighting ability when violence became necessary.

But Everglades appears to have been a pivotal entry in the series (I haven’t read them all). White made the decision in this book to force Ford to change his entire attitude to himself and his past, and to handle his present challenges in a different way.

The story begins when Ford comes home to his stilt house at Dinkin’s Bay Marina, Florida, to find Sally Carmel, a former lover, waiting for him outside. She’s worried and scared. She’s been married to a real estate developer, and he’s disappeared. Supposedly he fell off a boat in the night and was lost at sea, but she suspects it was stage-managed. And she believes someone has been breaking into her house, going through her things. She’s certain someone is following her.

Before his death, her husband had gotten involved with a New Age/Hindu cult leader called Bhagwan Shiva. Shiva’s religion has become extremely successful and profitable, and he’s been investing heavily in Florida real estate, with an eye to partnering with a Seminole tribe to build a casino. Shiva’s religion is extremely “advanced” in its sexual practices, and Sally found that part of it highly traumatic. She separated from her husband, and is now active in a Pentecostal church.

She doesn’t know it, but she’s become a pawn in a very big power game, a game planned by a brilliant man with grandiose plans and no conscience.

The issue of religion looms large in Everglades. As always, Doc’s friend Tomlinson is on hand, often high on pot or booze, spouting New Age “wisdom.” Doc, the narrator, is clear in telling us that he believes in none of it, and yet manages to convey the suggestion that Tomlinson and his psychic friends are actually in touch with legitimate spiritual forces.

This is troubling for the Christian reader.

On the other hand, Sally’s Christianity is treated with respect (although her theology appears a little weak). And a Christian character treated respectfully is something to be thankful for in any popular novel nowadays.

The center of the book, though, is Doc’s personal decision about his life. He starts the story in a bad condition. He’s sleeping badly. He’s drinking too much. He forgets appointments. He’s gotten fat.

His problem, he discovers, is that he’s been fighting his essential nature. Trying to live a quiet life as a marine biologist, working and partying and staying out of trouble, he has been denying his true gifts. If it’s not blasphemous to speak of it in Gene Edward Veith’s terms, he’s been neglecting his Vocation.

But a terrible turn of events shows him that he has a job to do in this world, and that he’ll never be satisfied—and others will suffer—if he neglects it.

The book was published in 2003. Which suggests it was written in 2002.

I wonder if the events of September 11, 2001 didn’t have something to do with Doc Ford’s epiphany.

I found the book very satisfying (with reservations for theological issues and some uncomfortable sexual scenes).

Recommended, as long as you heed the warnings.

First of all, I have to thank our reader and occasional commenter Aitchmark. I chat with him on AIM now and then, and the other night he tentatively diagnosed (sight unseen) the malady that’s been bugging me for weeks. I’d been fading in the afternoons, just feeling leaden. He asked me if I’d been breathing anything that might be bad, and it suddenly occurred to me that the moldy old books I’ve been cataloging for the archive might not be the best thing for me. I took an antihistamine, bought some paper breathing masks, and I feel better already.

The title of Robert Crais’ The Two Minute Rule refers to a guideline well known to both policemen and bank robbers—if you want to knock off a bank, you need to be in and out in two minutes, or you’re likely to be caught.

Which was what happened to Max Holman ten years ago. Back then he was an alcoholic and a drug addict, addicted to the thrill of danger. In his time in prison he’s dried out, and he intends to make a genuine effort to live a straight life now that he’s being released. He also wants to make amends to his former girlfriend, and to the son they had together, whom he neglected even before his arrest.

But on the day of his release, he gets bad news. His son (who had become a policeman) has been murdered, along with three other officers.

Even the cops treat him with consideration at first, in spite of his ex-con status. But Holman is puzzled by the official story of the ambush that killed his son. The attack happened in the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River. How did anyone sneak up on them in such an open location? And why, when he visits his son’s widow, does he find a police file on a desk, concerning a recent series of robberies by two now-dead felons? What business was that case of a uniformed policeman’s? Was his son a corrupt cop? If so, was that Holman’s own fault?

When he asks more questions, the police become hostile, and finally they threaten him. That’s when Holman turns for help to the only law enforcement figure he knows he can trust.

Katherine Pollard, the FBI agent who put him away ten years ago.

Pollard is out of the agency now, trying to make it as a single mother. She joins Holman in investigating the matter mostly because she’s bored and misses police work. But as the questions get harder, and the violence escalates, she begins to alternate between frustration with the police, anger at Holman, and… other feelings for Holman. She begins to fear that she’s “going Indian”—getting too closely involved with a criminal and his world.



The Two Minute Rule is notable for a remarkable risk (for popular fiction) taken by the author. He doesn’t make his main characters look like movie stars. Holman, we’re told, has put on weight in prison. He’s flabby and pale. Katherine too has put on weight since she left the FBI. She’s always worrying about the size of her bottom. This is a nice touch of realism that (for me) made the whole thing ring much truer.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, but it involves a genuine concern for maturity and responsibility that’s been sadly lacking, I believe, in books and movies for a long time. I was very pleased with the ending, and recommend The Two Minute Rule to most readers. The usual cautions about language and violence that generally go with mainstream novels nowadays apply here, it goes without saying.

I like the direction Robert Crais (author of the Elvis Cole books, in which the main character is also maturing) is taking in his novels. Kudos to him.

Perfect fall day today. The rains finally ceased, and Saturday was pretty nice, giving me the chance to do some maintenance jobs outside. Today was crisp and bright, with gumdrop colors in the foliage.

Which makes it all the sadder to hear about the fires in southern California. Our prayers go out to you folks in that area.

Stephen Hunter’s Pale Horse Coming is another thriller so good, so deeply satisfying on so many levels, that it makes me want to just hang up my laptop and give up telling stories. I’ll never be this good.



Pale Horse Coming is set in 1951 and is a story about Earl Swagger, the father of Bob Lee Swagger, the hero of Point of Impact and other novels. Hunter is as canny at triangulating his market as he is at plotting and characterization. For the liberal reader he offers two of their favorite villains, southern racists and McCarthyites. But that’s not what the heart of the book is. The heart of the book is heroism, and endurance, and keeping promises, and knowing how to defend yourself, and the conviction that sometimes you just have to employ violence to deliver the oppressed.

The story begins with Sam Vincent of Blue Eye, Arksansas, Earl’s lawyer friend who will someday be Bob Lee’s mentor, getting an offer from a Chicago law firm to run what seems to be an unusual but innocuous errand. A black man who once worked for one of their clients has been mentioned in a will, but can’t be contacted. Would Sam go to his last known address, Thebes, Mississippi, to see if he can get legal verification of the man’s death? They prefer a southerner to make the trip, they say, because he’ll understand the local culture better.

The money’s good and Sam needs the work, so he makes the trip. What he finds is an insane and frightening situation. A tiny town stuck in the 1850s, almost cut off from the outside world, where the only local industry is a “colored”-only prison, and where the black residents, even outside the prison walls, are entirely dominated by the white guards.

When Sam’s conscience forces him to protest what he sees, he finds himself in big trouble. Without spoiling the rest of it for you, I’ll say that Sam’s big trouble becomes Earl’s big trouble. Then follows a tale of unspeakable cruelty and incredible endurance, capped by Earl’s retribution, which is epic in scope.

A delightful element toward the end is Earl’s assembly of a commando force made up almost entirely of “old-timers”—famous shooters of the 1920s, all of them based on real characters who will be familiar to any gun enthusiast, and some of whom even I could identify behind their fictionalized names. The name “Seven Against Thebes” is employed a couple times.

Could not put the book down. It grabbed me from the beginning, and Hunter timed his plot twists and setbacks expertly to keep me on the hook all the way.

And behind it all, I was never allowed to forget that Earl will not live long. All his resolve to care for his family and raise his boy will come to an untimely end, an end Hunter has already chronicled. So there’s irony and tragedy too as seasoning in the stew.

Hunter lifts the thriller form above the level of popular fiction. I suspect he’ll be read and loved for a long, long time.

I had a wonderful time at the Sissel concert, and was completely satisfied personally, but it must have been a tough experience for her and her entourage. I also thought some improvements could have been made in view of the venue.

From what I hear, she and her crew only arrived at the hall an hour or two before the show was scheduled. Passport problems had delayed them. The festival canceled the usual noontime color ceremonies in order to allow them to set up and do sound tests.

Høstfest had decided to book Sissel for two concerts this year (I went to the early one at 1:00 p.m.). I applaud the sentiment of giving her two shows, but it was probably a mistake. Sissel deserves two concerts and more, but she’s just not a big name in America, and it’s the big names that the Høstfest attendees come to see. The first night was Ann-Margret and Tony Orlando. Also scheduled were Charlie Pride, Ronnie Milsap and Bill Cosby, among others. None of these are as talented as Sissel, in my opinion (except perhaps for Cosby, in his own way), but they are famous to the ordinary Midwesterners who come to the festival. Sissel they don’t know. As it turned out, the festival wasn’t able to move all the tickets, and ended up giving a lot of them away to servicepeople at the nearby Air Force base.

Whoever planned Sissel’s concert could have tailored it better to the crowd. The program began with three extremely sophisticated pieces in the classical vein (including a vocal arrangement of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures At an Exhibition”). This would have been great in Chicago, or in Minneapolis. But in Minot, they would have done better to start with something like “Marry Me.” If they’d done that at the start, the crowd would have been eating out of her hand, and she could have done anything she liked afterward.

As it was, a few people walked out at the beginning (Philistines!).

Which was too bad, because the music got more popular as she went on. I can’t recall all the numbers, but I remember that she did her lullaby, “Sarah’s Song,” which I consider pretty saccharine, but which the crowd liked. She also sang “Bruremarsj” (Wedding March), which always goes over well in any language, since it has no actual words. She got a standing ovation in the end, and came back with “Koppången” (oddly enough in an English translation) and “Going Home,” which I’d never heard her do before. Lovely.

She was accompanied by a six-person ensemble of Norwegian musicians, all top-notch and worthy of their material.

Great concert, and I clapped my hands raw. But it was a rocky production.

Well, as it turns out I’ll have a little time I didn’t expect tonight, after all. Let’s see if I can get this review composed and posted (composted?) before time’s winged chariot o’ertakes me, leaving tread marks on my back.

I think you’ll either love or hate Stephen Hunter’s Dirty White Boys. I almost put it down a few pages in, because the story promised the murders of a whole lot of innocent bystanders before it was done, and I don’t have much stomach for that sort of thing anymore.

But Hunter surprised me. The story wasn’t what I expected, and I found it both compelling and complex.

A lot of people in our culture, I think, misunderstand what moral ambiguity in fiction means.

Sam Spade, for instance, in The Maltese Falcon, is a morally ambiguous character. He has major moral failings, especially in that he’s having an affair with his partner’s wife. But when that partner is killed, Sam knows his duty. He has to find the killer and turn them over to the police—even though it turns out to be someone he cares about. He’s not perfect, but he knows what’s right and what’s wrong, and he does his best to choose right.

That’s moral ambiguity.

Or there are situations where everything is so convoluted that one good has to be balanced against another good, or one evil against another. Sophie’s horrible Choice in that novel is an example of such a tragic moral ambiguity.

That’s another kind.

But modern writers aren’t usually willing to wrestle with moral ambiguity that way. They take the easy way out, flippantly declaring that there is no right and wrong, and that everyone’s choices are right for them. For all the theatrics of their characters, nobody really thinks anything important is at stake.

That’s not moral ambiguity. That’s moral nihilism.

Stephen Hunter presents here a classic exercise in real moral ambiguity. It’s a tour de force, in my opinion, with echoes of Greek tragedy.

Oklahoma Highway Trooper Bud Pewtie is Hunter’s tragic hero, the good man with the fatal flaw. He’s a little like Sam Spade, but he has more guilt. A family man with two teenage sons, he wants to be a good father and a good example. But he’s betraying his family, carrying on an affair with a younger woman. In yet another betrayal, the younger woman is the wife of his partner. Bud inhabits that moral no-man’s-land we all know so well, where you can’t make up your mind to end the thing, but can’t make up your mind to make a break the other way either. So you take the path of least resistance and hope things will work out somehow.

The antagonist in the book is Lamar Pye, a sort of mythic figure—the baddest white man in McAlester State Penitentiary. He is big and strong and fearless and smart, and when he breaks out of prison along with two other prisoners (murdering two innocent people along the way) he looks forward to blazing a path of robbery and death across the state.

And yet… in his own way, Lamar is a better man than Bud Pewtie. Because, as someone mentions, he knows how to be “true to his own kind.” “His own kind” being the people close to him, the ones he considers his family.

First of all there’s his cousin Odell. Odell is a huge, powerful man with a cleft palate and the mind of a small child. Essentially sweet by nature, he’d never have hurt anyone if he hadn’t been abused by his father (Lamar killed the father) and then become attached to a criminal.

Then there’s Richard, the other escaped prisoner. Richard is an artist, a soft and sensitive type who would have been easy meat for any rapist in the prison if he hadn’t drawn a picture of a lion that Lamar liked. Lamar became his protector then, leaving him no choice but to escape when Lamar escaped.

Later on there’s Ruta Beth, a not-quite-sane farm girl with a dark secret who hides the gang and becomes Lamar’s lover. She calls them all “the family” (Odell is “the baby”).

And Lamar surprises us. After the first two needless murders, he spares the lives of a couple people whom it would be safer for him to kill. We see him caring for his perverse little family in self-sacrificial ways, and we realize that under different circumstances he could have been a great man.

But he keeps running afoul of Bud Pewtie, and somehow he can’t manage to kill Bud. Bud becomes his obsession, his target, and that leads to a final showdown between two extremely complex, morally ambiguous men.

But for all the ambiguity, Hunter never forgets which side is the right side.

Aristotle said (if I remember correctly) that tragedy should rouse “pity and terror.”

There’s plenty of that in Dirty White Boys.

Cautions for offensive language, sex and violence. Not for the fainthearted. But an outstanding moral narrative, for my money.

It may have been “Dirty Harry” on Libertas blog, or it may have been someone else talking about the movies somewhere. But I’ve never forgotten the insight. Whoever it was pointed out that the great moviemakers did not transcend their genres by trying to turn them into other genres. They transcended them by doing the same old thing better—with better stories, more interesting characters, superior artistic techniques.

This, it seems to me, is a problem with many mystery writers today. Everybody (including some authors I like very much) tries to turn the mystery into a thriller. Big explosions. Big conspiracies. Big gunfights. Big, thick, heavy books.

Old pro Stuart M. Kaminsky resists this trend, and like the great movie directors, simply works the old routine, but he does it a little better.

In many ways Terror Town is a small book. It’s short compared to most of the novels you’ll buy these days. The characters are ordinary cops and ordinary citizens, living believable lives and caring for—or damaging—one another in the usual ways.

But there’s more beneath the surface.

Terror Town is one of Kaminsky’s Abe Lieberman novels. Abe Lieberman is a Chicago detective, getting old. He’s not a romantic figure. He looks like a shoe salesman, we’re informed, and he has to watch his cholesterol. He’s been married many years, and he and his wife are now raising the children of their daughter, who ran away to California and carries an unexplained grudge against her father.

His partner is Bill Hanrahan (they call each other “Rabbi” and “Father Murphy”). Hanrahan is a widower who has recently remarried, and his wife is expecting a baby.

The first of three strands of mystery in the book concerns the murder of Anita Mills, a pretty, black single mother who is on the way to building a good life when she is robbed and shot outside a bank. Abe knew her and is assigned to her case, which comes to involve a prominent politician with a very unusual secret.

Then there’s the problem of Carl Zwick, a former Chicago Cubs baseball player who’s trying to stage a comeback in the majors when he’s attacked for no apparent reason by a crazy man who knocks him out with a Coke bottle. What’s worse, the same crazy man seems to want to kill Bill Hanrahan and his wife.

And then there’s Richard Allen Smith, a religious con man who’s practicing extortion to finance (so he claims) a crusade to liberate Jerusalem. (Normally characters like this in books drive me away, but I thought Kaminsky handled it well.)

Meanwhile, Abe’s brother Maish suffers a heart attack. Maish is angry at God. He doesn’t deny God’s existence, he just doesn’t like him much. This plot element, combined with that of Abe’s rebellious daughter, adds an exquisite Job-like subtext to the whole business. In fact the theme of parents, children, and their complaints against one another recurs throughout.

It’s on the low side for sex, violence and bad language (by genre standards). I recommend Terror Town, and all Kaminsky’s books (well, I don’t much care for the Porfiry Rostnikov mysteries, but that’s just me).