A Viking’s Story is a privately published novel by a Wisconsin resident (under a pseudonym), available inexpensively in electronic formats only. I bought it in the first flush of Kindle enthusiasm (order a book, have it ready to read in about five seconds!), and I’m not sorry I bought it.

It’s the story of Harald Fairhair (also known as Harald Finehair), traditionally the first king of a united Norway. Andrews combines the traditional story of Harald, as recorded in the sagas, and weaves into it the findings of modern historical scholarship and archeology. The result is a generally coherent fictional memoir, as Harald himself dictates his life story to an English priest never mentioned in the actual historical record.

The result hangs together pretty well. I think this book would be a good introduction to the Viking Age for a general reader looking to learn more about that period. In my opinion, the author underestimates the superstition of a real Viking. Also, he falls into the rookie error of trying to convey emotion with exclamation points! But these are minor errors, and all in all the book was enjoyable.

The issue of Christianity does come up, and I have to give Andrews credit for evenhandedness in that department. The priest/amanuensis, to the extent that we come to know him, is relatively tolerant and reasonable. Harald himself, of course, scorns the religion (though he does admire its bureaucracy), which is entirely consistent with what we know of him.

A Viking’s Story is not a great Viking novel, but it’s pretty good, and has the special advantage of copious and up-to-date research (mostly. I found some things to quibble about, but I could be wrong about some of them myself).

Suitable for teens and up.

It was a shrewd marketing move for author Jack Nolte to entitle his first mystery novel The Gray and Guilty Sea. It makes it nearly irresistible for an old John D. MacDonald fan like me, still suffering the Aching Purple Bereavement of going a quarter century without another color-coded Travis McGee novel.

On the other hand, he set a high bar for himself through the implied comparison. Many fictional detectives have been touted as “the new Travis McGee” since MacDonald’s death, but (in my opinion) none of them has quite lived up to that standard.

Nolte’s detective, Garrison Gage, doesn’t, either.

But he’s still pretty good. Continue reading The Gray and Guilty Sea, by Jack Nolte →

Michael Palin, formerly of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, pretty much ruined the term “ripping yarn” with a satirical TV series he did, years back. In spite of him, though, there is such a thing as a ripping yarn, and The People Of The Mist by the Victorian romancer H. Rider Haggard eminently qualifies as one of that class.

As I read The People of the Mist, the thought that kept recurring to me was, “Why hasn’t this book ever been made into a movie?” The author’s most famous work, King Solomon’s Mines, has been filmed numerous times, but TPOTM contains pretty much all the elements that made KSM so exciting, with the addition of a girl in the original story (movie versions of KSM generally insert one). Not only that, her relationship with the hero is one of those love/hate, “you make me so mad I could kiss you” affairs that filmmakers love. Plus there’s spectacle aplenty. Continue reading The People Of the Mist, by H. Rider Haggard →

I was looking for an excuse to buy more of Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther books. The acquisition of a Kindle provided it. Glad I did, though The One from the Other is far from my favorite of the series.

The Bernie Gunther novels, in case you’re not familiar with them, are classic Hardboiled mysteries in the Raymond Chandler tradition, except that they’re set in Germany, beginning in the 1930s. Bernie, the hero, is a sometime policeman and sometime private detective, a decent man living a life of quiet desperation, trying to retain both his pulse and his integrity in an increasingly Kafkaesque environment. His success at the latter has been mixed, at best.

After a flashback prologue, The One From the Other opens in 1949. Bernie is attempting, with no success, to run a hotel in Dachau. After a strange encounter with an American CIA agent, he admits he’s in the wrong business and moves to Munich, to set up shop as a detective again. He moves his wife, who is institutionalized with clinical depression, to that city as well, where she soon dies.

He is hired by a beautiful woman to look for her husband, a fugitive war criminal. A Catholic, she wants to remarry and needs proof of his death. This sets Bernie on a convoluted trail that leads him to discover dead bodies, get beaten up and shot at, and lose a finger. Gradually a complex conspiracy is revealed, involving a secret organization of ex-Nazis, the CIA, and the Catholic Church.

Frankly, I thought Kerr leaned too much on plot clichés this time out. Sinister CIA and Roman Catholic conspiracies have been done to death, and have (frankly) gotten offensive. He might have tried to surprise us a little.

But all that is redeemed, for me, by the interesting character of Bernie Gunther and the remarkable hard-boiled prose, such as this:

Starnberg itself was a smallish town built in terraces at the north end of the Würmsee…. The sapphire blue water was studded with yachts that shone like diamonds in the morning sunlight. It was overlooked by the ancient castle of the dukes of Bavaria. “Scenic” hardly covered it. After only a minute of looking at Starnberg, I wanted to lift the lid and eat the strawberry crème.

As I said, not the best Bernie, but an entertaining read nevertheless. Cautions for language and adult themes.

Tonight was Part Two of the heavy snow drill. First you blow out the driveway. The second evening, you rake snow off the roof, so that ice dams don’t build up and cause damage. This, unfortunately, causes snow to fall onto your driveway again, because your roof directly overhangs it on one side (if you’re me). Also the snow plow came by today and pushed its usual glacial detritus into the driveway entrance. So that has to be done too.

It would make more sense, of course, to rake the roof first, and avoid blowing out the same section of the driveway twice. But because of the early dark this time of year, that’s not practical unless I want to work by starlight. (Hint: I don’t. Especially when it’s cloudy.) Anyway, the snow plow never comes until that second day, so I have to roll it out and rev it up anyway.

Came in to make supper, and discovered my microwave oven is dead. And yes, I checked the circuit breakers. And I tried it in another outlet. And I tried something else in that outlet.

Tomorrow night: A trip to Sam’s Club. I’m a bachelor. Without a microwave, I’ll starve to death.

No soon. But eventually.

Just a quick review of a book recently finished—the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s CSI: NY: Blood On the Sun. TV tie-in books can be pretty bad, but this is Kaminsky. He elevated anything he touched.

The plot involves the murder of a rabbi, shot execution-style and then crucified to the floor of a room in his synagogue. Then a suburban husband and wife are found murdered in their home, along with their teenaged daughter, who was molested before death. Their young son is missing, and some of the clues point to him as the killer.

I have a vague idea that I bought this book when it was first published in 2006, and then set it aside when I realized it would be dealing with the issue of Messianic Judaism. This is a sensitive subject, and I feared that even an author of Kaminsky’s understanding would be unable to treat it fairly. I’m happy to report I was wrong. I’m confident Kaminsky’s view of Messianic Jews was very different from mine, but I thought he handled the subject, and the characters, with great decency.

An enjoyable book. Better than the show it was based on.