One of the most interesting tricks of the mystery writer is “the unreliable narrator.” When you aren’t sure if you can believe what the storyteller tells you, it adds a whole level to the puzzle.

Author Mark Goldblatt has added a further level of complexity. Not only does the narrator of Sloth (re-released last year by Greenpoint Press) sometimes deceive the reader, he may in fact not even exist. He never tells us his name. The only name he ever uses in the story (one chosen in order to deceive the woman he loves) is Mark Goldblatt, the name of the actual author of the book. But he didn’t borrow it from his author. He borrows it from his friend Zezel, who is an author and uses it as a pseudonym. (Or is he and does he?)

You see the kind of book we’re dealing with here?

Mark Goldblatt (the real one, I mean. S. T. Karnick assures me he actually exists, and that’s good enough for me) has written a parody of postmodern novels in which he out-deconstructs the deconstructors. Layers of meaning and misdirection are everywhere (as well as a lot of word play and fairly low humor).

The unnamed hero’s initial challenge is to convince a girl he’s never met—a girl he knows only through the television screen—that he’s not insane. A resident of a Manhattan apartment, he’s fallen in love with Holly Servant, a model/exercise instructor on a cable TV show out of California. He writes her erudite, impassioned love letters, not really expecting a response, but desperately hoping she’ll at least read them and bestow on his passion the dignity of her recognition.

When she eventually does reply, he attempts to impress her by assuming the Mark Goldblatt (fictional in two senses) identity.

“But since you’ve inquired, I will confess that I am in fact a journalist. It’s a point of considerable humiliation for me. For what is a journalist except a liar in denial? Truth is the single greatest threat to my livelihood, the sword poised eternally overhead, for if ever the reader asks himself, Should I trust the words? then I am lost.”

Meanwhile, the narrator comes under suspicion in the murder of a male prostitute in his neighborhood, and is questioned by a detective named Lacuna (I kid you not).

And his friend Zezel (their relationship just skirts the edges of homoeroticism, but this may be because the narrator actually is Zezel. Or perhaps he does exist, and the narrator doesn’t. Zezel sometimes sneaks into the narrator’s apartment, turns on his computer, and enters falsehoods [or are they?] into the manuscript, another layer of uncertainty in the narrative) is having an affair, and his spurned wife throws herself at the narrator.

Sloth is a wickedly funny, challenging and brilliantly written novel by an author of rare wit and creativity. Great fun for sophisticated readers (hey, I enjoyed it, so you don’t have to be all that sophisticated). Cautions for language and sexual situations.

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.