There are a million injustices in the mean streets of Publishing Town. The greatest of all, it goes without saying, is my own failure to find a new publisher. But not far behind is the tragic fact that Bill Pronzini is not a major, bestselling mystery writer.

He’s published and respected and he wins awards, but he’s never broken out as I think he should. He has everything I want in a mystery writer. He sets out a good puzzle, but he also paints a good character, which is what I really want.

I realized years ago, reading Science Fiction, why I don’t care for most Science Fiction. It’s because the authors treat their characters like specimens on a dissection tray. “Let’s poke the subject here, and see what its reaction is.” They had no compassion for their characters, and I put down their books with relief.

There are mystery writers like that too, but Bill Pronzini isn’t one of them. His characters are 98.6 F warm. They act like real people, for real motives, and Pronzini has compassion on them—even the bad ones.

His continuing character is known as “The Nameless Detective,” not because he’s a man of mystery, but because Pronzini started writing about him in short stories without giving him a name, and once he’d established him that way it would detract from the stories to suddenly drop a name on him (although he did let us know, some years back, that Nameless’ first name is Bill).

Nameless has grown over the years. He started out as a young San Francisco private eye who consciously modeled himself on the hard-boiled sleuths of the old pulp magazines, of which he is a collector. He was also a heavy smoker at the start, which gave Pronzini the chance to kill him off from cancer in one memorable short story. But (like Conan Doyle) he succumbed to the temptation to bring his detective back. Nameless had a remission, and has taken care of himself since then.

He’s middle-aged now, and married to a woman named Kerry. They’ve adopted a little girl. He’s planning to semi-retire soon, and has taken on a partner, a young black woman named Tamara whom he mentored. In this book they also hire an operative, a former cop named Jake Runyon. Runyon has many personal demons, which helps him fit right in.

In Spook, the agency is hired by a San Francisco film company to discover the identity of a homeless man whom everyone called “Spook,” a gentle, mentally disturbed man who was shot to death in an alley behind their studio. It’s not supposed to be a Whodunnit. It’s just that the filmmakers liked the man, and would like to notify his family, or arrange for burial themselves.

Following the clues they turn up, the detectives send their new operative, Runyon, out to a small town in the Sierras to discover the tragic story behind “Spook’s” decline. Runyon doesn’t mind. He has absolutely nothing in his life anymore except for his work, and he provides an empathetic eye as he turns over the old log he finds, to see what worms writhe underneath.

But there’s more than just worms there. There’s a wasp—someone very angry and very crazy, with a brainful of hate and resentment. And a gun.

Pronzini is a fine, professional storyteller who draws you in and makes you care. Profanity and sexual situations are on the low side for the genre. I recommend Spook, and all Pronzini’s novels.

I’ve just got to share this post from Junkyard Blog. Not all pictures are worth a thousand words, but that one is.

I picked up Dead Simple by accident. I’d intended to check a book by J. J. Jance out of the library, having not tried her work yet, and through inattention I went home with the book that had been shelved right next to the volume I meant to take. Once I got it home and discovered my mistake, I figured I might as well give it a shot.

I’m not sorry I did. It was an interesting and well-plotted book. I can’t give it the highest accolades, for reasons I’ll explain, but it kept me turning the pages.

The set-up is tremendous. Michael Harrison is a young English entrepreneur. He makes a lot of money and lives in style. He’s about to marry a gorgeous woman whom he loves very much.

When the book begins, Harrison is half-unconscious in the back of a van, pub-crawling with his buddies as part of his bachelor party. Michael has been a ruthless and rather cruel practical joker, especially in relation to his friends’ bachelor parties, and they have a dandy revenge in store for him.

They put him in a coffin (one of the friends works at a mortuary) and bury him in a shallow grave with a bottle of whiskey, a dirty magazine, a flashlight and a walkie-talkie. There’s an air tube to keep him from suffocating. The plan is to leave him there for a few hours, then dig him up again.

Except that there’s an accident, and his friends end up either dead or in a coma.

And when Michael’s partner, who missed the party because of a delayed flight, comes home and hears the news… he does nothing at all. In spite of the fact that he knows Michael is buried out there somewhere.

I love a neat set-up like that. And James keeps the tension rising, revealing information to the reader in careful, cruel doses. When you think things can’t get any worse, they do.

The hero of the book is Detective Superintendent Roy Grace of the Sussex Police (I wish James had chosen another name. Whenever I read “Grace said…” I think of a woman). He’s the most interesting character in the book. A man alone (his beloved wife simply disappeared a few years back), he lives mainly for his work. The big handicap in his career seems to be his advocacy of the use of psychic evidence in his investigations.

Needless to say, that’s a problem for me. I consider most (perhaps all) psychics frauds. If any are not frauds, then they are in contact with dangerous spiritual forces, and anyone who contacts them is putting himself in severe peril. The author’s bio on the flyleaf says that Peter James has a “deep interest” in the paranormal.

This is not quite “playing the game,” by the rules of traditional detective fiction. Dorothy Sayers, in her essay “Problem Picture” in The Mind of the Maker, quotes the following question asked of applicants to the Detection Club:

PRESIDENT: Do you promise that your Detectives shall well and truly detect the Crimes presented to them, using those Wits which it shall please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance upon, nor making use of, Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God?

CANDIDATE: I do.

Of course times have changed, and Miss Sayers wouldn’t have cared for a whole lot of what goes on in mysteries today. But I can’t help thinking that appealing to the supernatural in what is presented as a standard mystery is a bit of a deus ex machina. I think I’d feel the same if prayer were used similarly in a Christian mystery (but who knows? Maybe I’m deluding myself).

Detective Grace’s tentative attempts to begin dating again, in his rare free moments, provide an appealing subplot, helping to flesh out what is really the only fully-rounded character in a plot-driven book.

But the plot is driven very well indeed.

All in all an entertaining novel, but I have no great desire to read more by the author.

The word from Our Beloved Supervisors in the Twin Cities today is, “Stay inside. Do not attempt any strenuous work out of doors. The temperature is too high; the ozone level up in the Oh! Zone.”

I defied that advice, rebel that I am. In the first place the temperature was lower than expected, only a little over 80. Also my walking schedule has finally gotten me to the level where my body (like a dog) actually expects and wants its daily walk, and is disappointed if it misses it.

The humidity level was in Jacques Cousteau territory. I thought breathing was a little difficult too, but that was likely psychosomatic. Is ozone really dangerous to breathe, like cigarette smoke or something? Am I going to die now? Maybe I should just take up tobacco.

It says much about my psychological disorder(s) that, although I’m essentially very lazy, I judge a good or bad weekend by what I’ve accomplished. By that standard, it was a pretty good weekend. I mowed the lawn. I mopped the bathroom. I waxed Mrs. Hermanson, my car. And that was all on Saturday. On Sunday I did precisely nothing, as is my preference, except for church and reading. I shall now tell you about my reading.

No full reviews on these, just observations.

I finished Michael Connelly’s Echo Park. It’s another Harry Bosch novel, and a strong book in a dynasty of strong books. Harry is back with the L.A. police department now, working the Cold Case unit. A serial killer is arrested with human body parts in his van, and he confesses to a series of murders, including one that Harry worked on back in 1993, when it was new, and has been revisiting from time to time ever since. The problem is that Harry has been certain from the first that somebody else murdered that particular victim. And Harry is told that he missed a vital clue back in ’93, one that could have saved a number of lives if he’d followed it up. There’s an escape, cops are murdered, and Harry works two puzzles at once.

There’s nothing cheerful in a Harry Bosch book. Harry lives in a dark, confused world, where doing right (and Harry always tries to do right—that’s part of his problem) isn’t always the same thing as following the rules. Harry gets the job done, but there’s always a cost.

I also read an oldie, Robert Crais’ Lullaby Town. I like Crais better with each book of his I read. In this story, L.A. private eye Elvis Cole is hired by Peter Alan Nelson, a powerful Hollywood producer (whose characterization is deftly kept just this side of parody) to locate his ex-wife and son, who left him years before and simply dropped out of sight.

Elvis has to travel far from home to find the two, and when he does he discovers a desperate situation that calls for swift and forceful action. Needless to say, he brings in his dangerous partner, Joe Pike, but the real delight of Lullaby Town is the character arc traced by Nelson, the movie producer, as his family’s danger gradually forces him into a strange new territory known as The Real World, and how he begins to grow up as a man.

I think we lose a lot in contemporary storytelling through the abandonment of belief in objective truth. When you believe that there is an actual “thing” out there called Truth (or Goodness), then you can believe that everyone has an obligation to it, and you can root for them as they approach it, or sorrow for them as they move away from it.

When you believe that everybody makes his own truth, your rooting for a character is only a function of your personal taste (and his). It’s a game without a fixed goal. It’s pointless.

I don’t know if Crais had that kind of lesson in mind, but that’s what I drew from Lullaby Town, and it was very satisfactory to me.

I said a little about Stephen Hunter’s Point of Impact a few posts back, and I told you I was enjoying it quite a lot.

That was an understatement.

Now, I suppose that’s old news to many of you. I expect I’m far behind the curve (as is so often the case), since this book and its sequels and collaterals have been out for a while. So this review would probably better be called an appreciation. I just want to babble a little about how much I enjoyed Point of Impact, and to share my priceless insights on why I think it’s so great.

The chief beauty here is that the book is centered on a strong, well-rounded, sympathetic hero. If you’ve been reading this blog for any time at all you know I think character is king, and Bob Lee Swagger, the hero of this book, is a hero and a half. I don’t think there’s been a straight-ahead, singleminded, admirable main guy like this since Louis L’Amour died, and L’Amour wasn’t as good a writer as Hunter (I speak as an admirer of L’Amour).

Bob Lee Swagger of Blue Eye, Arkansas is everything books and movies and television have been teaching us to despise for most of my lifetime. He’s a white southerner. His formal education is limited. He’s ex-military, and he loves his guns. He also loves his country, to the point where he destroys evidence that might clear him of a capital accusation, because its release might make America look bad.

Swagger is approached by a mysterious pair of strangers, obviously former soldiers, who offer him a short-term job. They want him to test some new ammunition, they say. His testimonial would be valuable to them, as he was a legendary Marine sniper in Vietnam.

He does the job, and the ammunition is good. But something isn’t right. Bob Lee is not only a shooter, he’s a hunter of men. His hunter’s sense tells him they’re not telling him the full truth, but they entice him with a lure he can’t resist—there’s a plot to kill the president, they say, and the shooter coming in to do the job is a Russian, a famous sniper whom the Vietnamese brought in to take out Bob Lee himself during the war. That sniper crippled Bob Lee and killed his spotter. Bob Lee’s job will be to figure out where the attack will come, and to help them prevent it.

Of course it all goes south from there. Before long Bob Lee is on the run, wounded and the target of a nationwide manhunt.

Another great character is Nick Memphis, an FBI agent who first hunts Bob Lee, and then forms an alliance with him. Nick was a sniper too, years back. He tried to take out a criminal who was holding several women hostage. But he missed the shot and paralyzed a hostage. He married the woman and nursed her for the rest of her life. It doesn’t seem to have ever occurred to him to do anything else.

Even the villains are entirely believable and realistically motivated.

And the women—the women in this book are solid gold, Tammy Wynette, “Stand By Your Man,” grand ladies. They may have moments of envy for the easier lives enjoyed by women who chose lesser men, but they know that they could have had that kind of man if they’d wanted one. (I suppose these women are as much fantasy characters as Bond Girls in the movies. But it’s a whole ‘nother kind of fantasy.)

The plotting is flawless. Tension grows and grows as Bob Lee’s enemies’ plans unfold, and he finds the whole world more and more against him. Yet he never loses his nerve. He never gives up—even with a bullet hole in his chest.

I couldn’t help thinking of James Bond as I read Point of Impact. Like a Bond movie (the books not so much), this novel presents a vision of manhood that most of us can only dream of.

The difference is that, after reading Point of Impact, I wanted to be a better man than I am.

As you’d expect, there’s mature subject matter and harsh language. But I recommend Point of Impact for every grownup man. I have no idea what women think of it.

I’ll be taking a blog break till Monday, probably, unless I get a wireless connection in Moorhead and find the time. I’m going up with the Vikings for the Hjemkomst festival. Drop by if you’re in the area, but I won’t be there Sunday.

On Sunday I shoot back south, overshoot my home, and come to rest in Kenyon, Minnesota, my original home town. I’ve been asked to give a short historical talk for a special service. My home church (Hauge Lutheran) has an old stone church, the congregation’s original building (it was built in 1875 and is on the National Register of Historic Places). A service is held there once a year (it used to be in Norwegian, but that’s kind of pointless nowadays). Anyway, I’ll be helping out with that Sunday morning.

I always look forward to Robert K. Tanenbaum’s Karp/Ciampi books, and I can’t say I didn’t enjoy Counterplay. But I see problems in this old, dependable franchise.

Our friend Aitchmark reviewed it here. He thinks Tanenbaum has succumbed to the temptation to try to make every book “bigger” than the last. I see that, and I agree to an extent. But I think I discern a deeper problem.

First, a synopsis: The last couple books have featured Butch Karp’s great nemesis—former New York City District Attorney Andrew Kane, a rich and corrupt man who nearly became mayor of New York. We thought Kane was beaten at the end of the previous book, when his plot to destroy the Catholic Church was unmasked and foiled.

But Kane has escaped from the police, and has made it clear that he is going to a) kill everyone Karp (now District Attorney himself) cares about, and b) perform a major act of terrorism. Security people believe he’s planning to target Russian president Yeltsin on an upcoming visit to the U.S.

You get your money’s worth in entertainment with any Tanenbaum book. He rolls out the beloved stock company of funny, eccentric, well-developed regulars we’ve come to love. The most interesting part of the story for me, actually, was a sub-plot—the cold-case against a millionaire for the murder of his wife, prosecuted by good ol’ Ray Guma, on the basis of a memory recovered by the couple’s son under hypnosis.

But there really is a problem, and I think Tanenbaum needs to do something about it. I think he’s fallen into the Superman Dilemma.

The Superman Dilemma is simple. Once you’ve created a hero who is faster than a speeding bullet, bulletproof himself, inhumanly strong and incredibly smart, what do you do to give him a challenge? Yeah, you’ve got kryptonite, but you can only use that stuff so often before people get bored.

The answer is the Super-Villain. You’ve got to come up with an adversary worthy of his steel skin. Someone who matches him in at least one category, and who is as bad as he is good.

Tanenbaum, over the course of this long series, has gradually loaded the Karp family with a pantheon of super friends. Tran, the former Viet Cong, was the first, I think. He’s a leader of the Asian mob, and will do anything to protect Butch’s wife Marlene, on whom he’s been nursing a crush for years. Then there’s John Jojola, the Taos Indian/Special Forces veteran, who walks unseen and has strange mystical powers. And there’s David Grale, the psychotic who leads and army of the homeless, fighting evil in the city sewers. And there’s daughter Lucy’s new boyfriend, the cowboy Ned, who is (of course) a crack shot and a quick-draw artist. Lucy herself is a language prodigy, which helps in a lot of situations. And Marlene is the Top Gun in Manhattan. She also trains huge attack dogs.

Which means that in real life, a family like the Karps would be safer than the president in the presidential bunker, just giving folks a tour. Thus, for a challenge, we need a super-villain capable of working past all these layers of security.

Andrew Kane has been the super-villain in the last few books, and is again here. And frankly it’s getting to the point where he’s straining credibility. The man is so insane—so filled with hate and yet so omnicompetent, that it’s hard to take him seriously.

Tanenbaum has produced a comic book. A superior comic book, one well worth reading, but a comic book nevertheless.

He needs to drop the end-of-the-world scenarios, kill off some of the family’s protectors, and get back to writing stories about people we recognize. There’s plenty of ordinary evil in the world for a big-city D.A. to fight.

Even Superman shouldn’t fly out of sight.

Thought, thought (for no particular reason) during a visit to the grocery store:



I do not want to see your toes.



Your mother may have told you they were adorable. Your Significant Other may tell you they’re sexy. You probably feel that traditional shoes are confining, especially in the warmer months.

But I, for one, don’t enjoy looking at other people’s toes.

The only toes I have any interest at all in are my own. And I’d just as soon not look at them much either.

This is a purely personal judgment, and I don’t expect anyone to pay any attention to it.

But I feel better now that I’ve shared.

I read one of Robert Crais’ Elvis Cole novels before, at the urging of Aitchmark, who’s a fan. I think I made a poor choice. It was one (probably Voodoo River) where Cole, a Los Angeles P.I., leaves his natural habitat to do a job in New Orleans. It didn’t work for me and I didn’t have any desire to go back to the franchise.

But I picked up The Last Detective last week and underwent an attitude alteration.

For one thing, the book explains how the hero got the name “Elvis,” an element of his persona that repelled me from the start. I can forgive it now.

At the beginning of the story, Elvis Cole is looking after Ben, the teenaged son of his girlfriend, Lucy Chenier, while she’s out of town. Lucy was a character in the New Orleans novel. She fell in love with Cole and followed him to L.A.

But one afternoon, Ben goes outside to play on the hillside (Cole lives in the Hollywood Hills, not far from Michael Connelly’s detective Harry Bosch, who makes an uncredited cameo appearance) and just disappears. A phone call a short time later confirms his worst fears—the boy has been kidnapped.

Examining the site of the abduction, Cole realizes a frightening fact—this snatch was a professional operation, and the kidnappers are military trained. Better than he is, and he was an Army Ranger.

It all goes back to the military, because the kidnapper claims the boy was taken in revenge for something Cole did in Vietnam, on a day of horror when he lost his best friends, but knows he did nothing wrong.

The quest for answers leads him to stir up buried memories, about his own childhood and his wartime experiences. These flashbacks (honestly) feature some of the most affecting writing I’ve ever encountered in a mystery novel. Deeply moving, and emotionally true as a laser sight.

Cole is assisted, as he usually is, by his Psycho Killer Friend®, Joe Pike. (I’ve commented before on how detectives nowadays tend to have PKF’s. That’s probably an unfair description. Pike isn’t a psycho, just an obsessive, a man who’s stripped his life down to warrior efficiency, his friendship for Cole, and nothing else. The kind of man a Scandinavian Modern chair would be, if it were human.) But Pike isn’t 100% right now, due to a gunshot wound suffered in the previous installment.

I liked The Last Detective very much and intend to read more. Aside from the good, tight writing and the perfect emotional pitch, I particularly liked the way the military was treated. There are bad former soldiers in the book, but there’s no hint of the moral condescension you find in so many stories dealing with veterans (especially Vietnam veterans). Cole doesn’t beat a drum about his service (rather the opposite), but he’s got nothing to be ashamed of and he isn’t ashamed. Even a particular minor character, a shadowy former officer who now brokers mercenary deals, is portrayed as a man of honor.

I highly recommend The Last Detective.

You remember all that stuff I wrote last night, about how I had so much to do tonight and might not get to post?

Never mind.

Turned out I forgot the Viking Age Society meeting was postponed this month.

And the project at work got finished up on time, pretty much. Essentially. Except for one small loose end over which I had no control. So I should be breathing a big sigh of relief.

I’ve noticed an odd phenomenon overtaking me in the last few years. I seem to have lost all capacity for taking any pleasure in completed tasks, even challenging ones. When I was young I’d mentally pump a fist in the air and allow myself a minute or two of satisfaction before finding a new subject to worry about.

Nowadays it’s just ho-hum. My primary emotional response to “Mission Accomplished” is to wonder idly what I’ve forgotten that’ll come back to bite me.

Maybe it’s a side effect of something I hesitate to call “success,” because I’m far from successful. But I’ve accomplished a number of the things I dreamed of when I was a kid. That raises the bar on everything, apparently. When you’ve reached the point when finishing the writing of a book is no big deal, most other accomplishments mean even less.

The moral: “Squelch your dreams,” I guess.

John Sandford, Minnesotan author of the Lucas Davenport Prey novels, which I like very much, has come out with a new book, Dead Watch, now out in paperback. He’s trying out a new hero in this one, and (oddly) the book isn’t set in Minnesota, but in Washington D.C. and Virginia (as if anybody’d ever want to read about those places).

Jacob Winter is the new hero. He’s a Washington insider, an established expert on what a friend calls “Forensic Bureaucracy.” Supposedly he’s the go-to guy for government problems that nobody else knows how to fix. But, suitably for the hero of a Sandford novel, he’s also a veteran of Afghanistan, a trained fighter who is only slowed down by a bad hip, the result of a combat wound.

The party who needs Jake’s help this time is the president of the United States, by way of his chief of staff. A Republican former senator, Lincoln Bowe, has disappeared under suspicious circumstances, and his wife has been threatened. The president, a Democrat, is worried that somebody in his own party has gotten out of hand, and that there’ll be political blow-back. Jake’s job is to investigate and clean things up.

One of his first visits is to the senator’s wife, Madison Bowe. Madison is a small, spunky blonde, and Jake likes small, spunky blondes, and you’ve already guessed where that leads.

The book is apparently set in the near future, and seems to also be set in an alternate universe—one where socially conservative Democratic senators aren’t a surprise, and most of the homosexuals in the story are Republicans. This is a little disorienting, but a clever tactic on Sandford’s part, allowing him to write a political thriller without alienating elements of our increasingly polarized electorate. I had trouble keeping my bearings from time to time, but I was never insulted, which earns the book a few notches on my tally stick. The fighting and killing part of Jake’s résumé turns out to be more useful than the forensic bureaucracy part in ultimately solving the problem.

I didn’t like it as much as the Lucas Davenport stories, but I have more history with L. D. I recommend it as light summer reading. There’s violence and sex, but they’re not excessive by contemporary standards. Not bad.