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Fiction, Reviews

‘The Nice Guy and the Devil,’ by Tom Trott

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If your great complaint about the world of thriller novels is that they all tend to look the same (and it’s often a valid complaint ), Tom Trott’s Cain novels might just be what you’re looking for. I’m not sure The Nice Guy and the Devil was my cup of tea, but it was definitely original.

Harrison Byers (known as “Cain”) is a Canadian, a former CIA operative (not sure how that works). He’s in Nice, France, enjoying the weather, when he notices a small, unprepossessing man asking clumsy questions about his “missing sister.” Cain figures him for an amateur trying to be a private eye. But when he notices the woman the man described sitting alone in a café, he can’t help introducing himself.

They make a date, but the unprepossessing man shows up at Cain’s apartment and commits suicide in front of them. The police come and arrest both him and the woman, and when they’re finally released they spend the night together. She asks him to accompany him to her daughter’s wedding the next day, and he figures why not? Little do they expect that the reception will be attacked by terrorists, one person kidnapped, and several others murdered. Cain sets off in pursuit, soon teaming up with a young Interpol agent who’s the daughter of an old friend.

The most surprising element in the story is Cain himself. He’s not your bog standard thriller hero. He’s middle-aged, bald and overweight (he actually wears a toupee and a girdle). But he still has his shooting skills and his fighting instincts, along with (sometimes insane) nerve. The story is packed with suspense and danger, the big twist at the end comes at you out of left field, and the conclusion is satisfying.

What annoyed me was the author’s habit of not describing characters until they’ve been on stage for a while. This is particularly aggravating when he fails to tell us the character’s race, and then makes race an issue. It’s as if he’s first saying, “Look how colorblind I am,” then turning and saying to the reader, “Why were you so racist as to assume they were white?”

On the other hand, there’s a devout Christian character in the book, and his faith is treated respectfully.

The Nice Guy and the Devil was a very neat thriller, capably plotted and written. I didn’t love it, but it was professionally done.

Reviews

Revisiting ‘Harry O’

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=qP_nvvcdbWk

I should really wait to post this review/appreciation until I’ve had the time to watch the whole series through on YouTube, but I need a topic tonight and I already know what I think. Harry O, starring David Janssen, was one of the best TV PI series of the 1970s, and could have done even better if the network hadn’t clotheslined it.

The series struggled a bit getting launched. The first pilot movie, which you can watch above, was about a grumpy Los Angeles private eye named Harry Orwell (Janssen). He used to be a police detective, but a bullet near the spine put him on the disabled roster, so now he freelances. Only he’s a bit of a misanthrope (though he always seems to have a beautiful girlfriend) and actively discourages business. His injury interferes with his activity at times. He lives in a shack on the ocean, where he’s constantly working on his sailboat, “The Answer,” which is never quite finished (metaphor sighted!). He has a car, but it’s always in the shop and he rides the bus instead – which offers interesting creative opportunities for the writers, as when he loses a “tail” while riding it.

It seems network executives found the first pilot a little dark, so they ordered another one, which was lighter but hardly cheery. But that one was enough to get the series green-lit. (Jody Foster plays a homeless girl in this one.)

As the season begins, we find Harry living on Catalina Island near San Diego. Still in a shack, still working on his boat and riding the bus. His cop buddy is now Lt. Manny Quinlan (Henry Darrow, whom you may remember as Manolito on The High Chapparal). They’re on and off friends, but have each other’s backs when the chips are down.

Then, half-way through the first season, the network decided it was too expensive to shoot on Catalina and moved Harry closer to LA, but in a nearly identical living situation. His police buddy is now Lt. Trench, played by Anthony Zerbe, who won an Emmy as a supporting actor. The two actors’ chemistry was extremely good. Harry’s car was finally liberated from the shop, but it still broke down a lot. The tone was lightened yet again.

In the second season, Harry’s back injury – though never forgotten – became less important. Toward the end, a young actress named Farrah Fawcett-Majors (at the time) showed up as Harry’s stewardess girlfriend. (This attracted my increased interest.)

And then the network decided it wanted to change its entertainment direction. The relatively intelligent Harry O series was cancelled to be replaced by a star vehicle for Farrah – Charlie’s Angels. I’ll confess I was a big fan of the Angels at the time, but today I find I can’t bear to watch it, even when Farrah’s on. Harry O, on the other hand, holds up extremely well.

Private eye shows were a staple of prime-time TV in the 70s. Quinn Martin Productions, especially, ran a content factory that turned them out like sausages. QM did some quality work – he’d produced The Fugitive, which made David Janssen a star. But they also turned out shows like Cannon and Barnaby Jones that were almost indistinguishable in format, and even recycled each others’ scripts from time to time. I came to see the Quinn Martin trademark as a sure sign of phoning it in.

But Harry O was a smart show with good writing, good acting, and atmosphere. I’d put it right up there with a very different show, The Rockford Files. It could have been a classic, given the chance.

David Janssen swore never to do a network series again. He did a miniseries, but never a weekly show.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder At the Bridge,’ by Bruce Beckham

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Skelgill reels in and turns his boat. He takes a bearing off Skiddaw Little Man; keeping the false summit dead astern will send him arrowing into Peel Wyke, the tiny hidden wooded inlet that has echoes of the wild oarsmen that once ruled these parts, literally the ‘Wyke-ings’, the Norse ‘baymen’, who left their mark on today’s maps with descriptions that abound, like beck and dale, fell and pike, gill and skel.

The snippet above features one of those not infrequent references to the Vikings of Cumbria that add to the appeal of the Inspector Skelgill books (for me). Skelgill is an odd sort of policeman, operating primarily off his instincts as an outdoorsman and fisherman. In Murder At the Bridge, he actually discovers one clue by following a literal scent in the air, like a bloodhound.

Kyle Betony is an “outcomer” to Cumbria, a brash go-getter who fits in poorly with the other members of the Derwentdale Angler’s Association (of which Inspector Skelgill himself is a low-key member). But he managed to get elected to the board of directors anyway. When his body is found, dressed in evening clothes, floating in the River Ouse, it could mean he accidentally fell from the bridge, but indications on the body, as well as the river currents, suggest foul play. Betony had been attending the annual banquet of the DAA board that night. An old photograph has been stolen from the wall of the inn where the banquet was held. It was a group photo, including the image of a man now a fugitive murderer. Was the man in the photograph the man who was now calling himself Kyle Betony? Or did Betony recognize that man and get murdered for his knowledge?

Murder At the Bridge was largely what I’d call a “shoe leather” mystery. Most of the book is taken up with interviews with various suspects and the comparison of alibis. This lowered the level of suspense until the very end, when things picked up nicely. The conclusion was satisfying, and provided a clearer confirmation of Skelgill’s relationship with his female subordinate, DS Jones, than I think we’ve had before.

Murder At the Bridge was far from my favorite book in the Skelgill series, but it’s worth reading. One nice element is the creative circumlocutions the author employs in order to avoid actual profanity.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Strait Over Tackle,’ by Colin Conway

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What kept coming to mind as I read Colin Conway’s Strait Over Tackle, first book in his “Flip-flop Detective” series, was the movie “The Big Lebowski.”

I did not like “The Big Lebowski.” I don’t, in general, find slackers amusing.

Sam Strait is a former sheriff’s deputy in the same area (around Spokane, Washington) that is the setting for author Conway’s more serious “The 509” police procedural series. He got kicked off the force on false charges, sued them for damages, and won a cash settlement, which gives him some financial freedom. He lives in the lake cabin he inherited from his grandparents. This allows him to live the life he wants to. He lives by a short set of rules, the first of which is, “Only be where flip-flops can be worn.” That makes him a snowbird. He flies off to warmer climes each fall, taking temporary jobs like dishwashing to eke out his expenses. He’s happy with this life (or claims to be), but it angers his on-off girlfriend, a gorgeous local actress who wants permanence and doesn’t give up easily.

Sam comes home to open up for the spring and finds that somebody has held a party in his house and left it trashed. But it gets worse. He goes down to the lake to look at his boat and finds a young woman’s dead body in it. His call to the police brings Detective Shane McAfee, whom we know from the 509 novels.


When Sam discovers that someone has left a bag of drugs in his refrigerator, he ponders calling McAfee, but decides to go around and ask questions himself. This – as he eventually realizes – is a stupid decision, leading to confrontations, threats, and several fistfights (all of which he loses). But in the end he will identify the murderer.

Generally speaking, slackers make poor heroes for novels. Interesting characters operate from some powerful motivation, which is the main thing slackers generally lack. Sam’s chief motivation is avoidance of intimacy and commitment. His motivations for investigating the murder rather than letting the police do their job are unclear to the reader, and apparently to himself. He seems to have a poor conception of personal safety, which is bad because he keeps getting beat up (even by a woman). This is one of those stories where the hero gets “his bell rung” multiple times, and people even warn him of concussion, but he brushes the suggestion off and appears to suffer no serious trauma (which is implausible).

In the end, I figured out that Strait Over Tackle was intended to be taken as comedy. I guess it had its moments, but it didn’t amuse me a lot.

You might like it better than I did. Especially if you liked “The Big Lebowski.”

Reviews

Of brownstones and starships

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Lately I’ve been “doing” Nero Wolfe on YouTube. First the 1981 series starring William (“Cannon”) Conrad and Lee Horsely, and currently the 2001 series with Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton. But in the course of my fumbling about on the site I stumbled on the little-known video above. It’s a 1959 pilot for a half-hour NW series starring Kurt Kasznar and none other than a pre-Star Trek William Shatner. But more about that below.

I sought out the Conrad-Horsely series for sentimental reasons. The series was one of my favorites back when it came out. Critics complained that it violated some of the basic protocols of the ordered household author Rex Stout created. Though I’m fond of the original Wolfe books, I’m not as punctilious about them as I am about, say, Sherlock Holmes or Travis McGee. I thought Bill Conrad was just splendid as Nero Wolfe, and he had excellent chemistry with Horsely’s Archie. The set designers worked meticulously (and at considerable cost) to recreate Wolfe’s office. I particularly liked the big chair. Stout often mentions in the stories that Wolfe’s upholstered desk chair was specially built to support his great weight.

The only problem with that handsome chair was that it was physically too large for Bill Conrad, who kind of got lost in it. I suspect it was designed with Orson Welles, who was originally meant to play the role, in mind.

But after I’d watched that series’ one season of episodes, I moved on to the 2001 series. It’s very well done and very faithful to the original stories. Also extremely stylish and shot in period. Maury Chaykin as Wolfe is growing on me, though I still prefer Conrad. I’ve always seen Wolfe as a dark-haired man. Timothy Hutton seems a little lightly constructed for Archie, but the attitude is spot on.

But now, back to the 1959 pilot. I was surprised how good it was. Bill Shatner may be the best Archie Goodwin of them all. The role plays exactly to his strengths. And Kurt Kasznar (whom I believe I saw in person once, as Moriarty in a road production of William Gillette’s “Sherlock Holmes” play, but I may have him confused with someone else), has a good look for Wolfe and brings the additional value of an Austrian accent. Stout’s Wolfe was Montenegran by birth, but I think this is the only time anyone ever portrayed him with an accent (except for Sidney Greenstreet’s English tones). The plot is stripped-down, as is necessary for the half-hour format (not ideal for the material), and the office set lacks the rich detail of the later productions. But all in all it’s a commendable effort and pretty entertaining.

(It also features the actor Alexander Scourby [whose Bible narration you may have heard], whom I also saw in person once, in college, doing a reading of Walt Whitman. I had a chance to meet him but missed out, as is my custom in life.)

One wonders why it wasn’t accepted by the network. However, if that had happened, Bill Shatner might have still been busy when Gene Roddenberry went looking for an actor to play Captain Kirk a few years later. And the world would have missed out on a rich font of camp, parody, and Facebook memes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder in the Fells,’ by Bruce Beckham

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Her face is big-boned like a Herdwick sheep and in the greenish-blue eyes rests an innate kindliness.

I’m not sure I’d have ever read the Inspector Skelgill novels if they’d been described to me first. An eccentric police detective whose main expertise is as a hunter and fisherman, who detects mostly by instinct and intuition rather than by reasoning, doesn’t sound like my cup of tea. And yet I find these books by Bruce Beckham fascinating, and they seem to get better and better as they go. They are set in the English county of Cumbria, up by the Scottish border.

In Murder in the Fells, a shepherd discovers a lost wallet in a fox’s “earth.” It contains an American woman’s passport. Probability indicates it belongs to a woman whose body was found near a waterfall in the fells, who has not been identified so far. Inquiries are begun to find out more about the woman.

Meanwhile, in a separate plot thread, we follow a woman named Dorothy T. Baum, another American who has traveled to Cumbria to meet a man, a professor of history, whom she met online and with whom she plans to move in. The reader soon realizes she’s the victim of a “catfishing” scheme, that she’s been lured to England to be fleeced of her money, then murdered. One suspects at first that this is the story of the dead woman – but it’s contemporaneous with Skelgill’s team’s investigation, and the dead woman’s name wasn’t Dorothy.

Tension builds as Dorothy survives a couple “accidents,” and Skelgill’s team becomes aware of her and begin trying to locate her in the tangle of mountain and valley paths that crisscross Cumbria.

And in the end, a big surprise. Very well done.

I liked Murder in the Fells very much. Enjoyed every page. It’s become a cliché for publicists to advertise every English mystery as “gripping.” But in this case it’s true.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder in the Air,’ by David Pearson

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The Galway Homicides is an Irish police procedural series I’m not familiar with. But in the usual way of such things I got the offer of a free book, and so I read it. I had the impression from the description that it starred a man/woman police detective team, but if that was true of the earlier volumes, it is so no more. The hero of Murder in the Air is Detective Inspector Maureen Lyons. Her former partner (and current “life partner” in the dreary contemporary parlance) is Inspector Mick Hays, who has been kicked upstairs to the administrative office of Superintendent and plays only a peripheral role in this story.

A Galway property developer named Gerald Fortune crashes his small plane in a West Ireland bog and is killed along with his 17-year-old daughter and a business associate. When it’s discovered that the engine was tampered with, the accident investigation becomes a murder case. Fortune was known as a ruthless competitor who profited from others’ failures, so there is no shortage of possible suspects. But the investigation turns in a surprising direction, and the real killer has an unexpected motive and turns out to have no scruples about hurting anyone – even the investigators’ own families.

The writing in Murder in the Air was fine – author David Pearson writes in a competent, professional manner. He has, however, the annoying habit (which seems to be increasingly common these days) of describing as few of his characters and possible – and when he does, it may be half way through the book. I presume he has reasons for this discourtesy to his readers, but I can’t imagine what they might be.

Being who I am, I was of course conscious of the sexual politics involved in the storytelling. This story takes place in one of those now-common fictional police stations where the personnel are evenly divided between men and women. Maybe that’s how it is in Ireland. Maybe affirmative action has forced those proportions on the famous Gardai. But it was at least good to see that Superintendent Mick Hays was on hand to take care of the rough stuff when called upon. We men are still good for lifting things and opening jar lids, it would appear, even in the age of Trans.

Anyway, Murder in the Air was okay. But I didn’t love it and feel no great impulse to read another in the series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Toe the Line,’ by Jack Probyn

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Jake Tanner was a somewhat different hero from the kind I’m used to in police procedural novels. In Toe the Line, he’s not a grizzled veteran but a fresh young detective constable, just transferred from London to Guildford in Surrey. He’s insecure and goes through the usual emotions familiar to us all when moving into new social and work situations. He’s told that things ought to be quiet; nothing much ever happens in Guildford.

But (of course) that prediction proves false. A ruthless gang of criminals bursts into a local jewelry store, intimidates staff and customers with guns, and cleans out the cash and jewels. Then they shoot a woman to death and kidnap the female manager.

As it happens, we soon learn, this is a gang Jake has faced before; he was responsible for their former leader going to prison. The robbers have a new approach to their work now, and a devious plan involving an exploding collar and their own escape from the country to a new life.

As the investigation ramps up, Jake’s special knowledge will put him in a position to make useful suggestions to his superiors. But he doesn’t know that the gang has eyes and ears within the police force. And even the other gang members don’t know all their new leader is planning…

I didn’t hate Toe the Line. It kept my interest. But it wasn’t very well written. The author is inclined to use words whose meaning he doesn’t understand – he says one character “sauntered” when he was actually in low spirits (you only saunter when you’re feeling self-assured). He has someone making “incredulous” demands. He speaks of a “plethora” of police cars at a crime scene.

A good-faith effort is made to go deep with the characters, to provide insight on psychology and family dynamics. But that effort was pretty ham-handed, attempting to rationalize behavior that often just doesn’t make much sense.

Another problem (for me) was fairly frequent references to the previous adventure Jake had with this gang. But we’re told very little about that story, and this one is the first novel in the Jake Tanner series. I consider this unfair to the reader. If the author wrote a previous novel that couldn’t be salvaged for publication, fair enough. But then give us some back story now.

Toe the Line, I must admit, kept my interest to the end. But it left me unsatisfied. There’s a partial cliffhanger at the end, promising continued conflict in future volumes. But I don’t think I’ll read any more.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Table 13,’ by Mike McCrary

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Everyone here looks like they strolled out of a skincare commercial or a steaming limited series about amazing people who aren’t you. Each more gorgeous than the next. All of them belong here. All look like they are more than Hank in every way. He knows he needs to stop thinking this way, but this is where his mind goes here in New York. The aching need to tell the city he’s sorry for wasting their time.

I liked Mike McCrary’s Someone Savage, so I took a chance on another of his books. I think this one is an earlier and less polished effort, but it still grabbed me. I rarely think about the relationship between the thriller genre and horror, but Table 13 has a lot of horror elements. It would also make a good movie.

Hank Quinn is a young man from Texas, working as a waiter in New York. He came to the big city to take his chance as a writer, but waiting on tables pays the bills, just about. He has to work under a psychopathic chef who abuses him, but it’s an expensive restaurant and the tips are good. Especially from his favorite customers, a couple named Gina and Nick. They’re beautiful, obviously rich, amusing, and just a little weird in some way. They always ask for Hank, they talk to him as to a friend, and they tip insanely.

Then one night the chef corners Hank in the men’s room and loses control. Hank is frightened for his safety, but Nick and Gina step in. What follows is utterly insane. Suddenly Hank’s old problems fade into insignificance as he finds himself the captive of two monomaniacs who want him to do crazy, criminal things, promising to hurt people he cares about if he won’t play along. Their plan is only gradually revealed, and the more Hank understands, the less sense it all makes.

Their one mistake is to underestimate the country boy from Texas.

The storytelling in Table 13 was good. I cared about Hank and was pulling for him. I worried about him, cared about what was coming at him next.

The writing was imperfect. There were problems with misplaced modifiers and occasional cliches.

The ending of the book was (for this reader) mixed. Good things were said about the value of masculinity (it seemed to me). But the final conclusion was… bizarre. The sort of thing I expect more from a horror story.

Still, not bad.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue’

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In those days, the language in England was the same as that spoken in Norway and Denmark, but there was a change of language when William the Bastard conquered England.

The passage above (whose historical truth is disputed by some scholars) represents one of the moments of particular historical interest in The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue, a saga which is not particularly notable in terms of artistry (in my opinion, though saga scholars rate it one of the best – no doubt for reasons readers in translation, like me, can’t well appreciate).

Most of us are familiar with the character Grima Wormtongue in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. This saga would seem to be the source of that name, since the word “orm,” common (I think) both to Old Norse and Old English, can mean worm, serpent, or dragon. However, in the saga, no moral judgment is implied by the name. I wish some information were provided as to why the nickname was bestowed in the first place, but all we’re told is that our Gunnlaug was named after an ancestor called the same thing. I assume it could mean something like “smooth-tongue,” or even “shrewd tongue,” since dragons were thought to be very crafty.

As one reads Gunnlaug’s Saga in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, as I am (or in the book I’m pushing in this review, the Penguin Collection, Sagas of Warrior Poets), along with other sagas about skalds, one can’t help noticing similarities. Not little similarities in style or theme, but great big similarities that look more like plagiarism. It would appear that when a saga writer wished to write the saga of a skald, he had a ready-made template to follow, and most of them did just that. This increases my respect for the author of Egil Skallagrimsson’s saga (very likely Snorri Sturlusson), for resisting that temptation.

The story goes as prescribed – Gunnlaug Illugasson is tall, handsome, and a fine warrior and poet from his youth. He wants to go abroad as a merchant, but persuades his father to arrange his betrothal to a girl named Helga. The contract calls for her to wait for him three years. At the court of Jarl Eirik in Norway (who’s mentioned, but doesn’t appear as a character, in a couple of my novels) he encounters his rival Ravn. Again following the formula, the two men are polite to one another before the ruler, but privately come to hate each other. Gunnlaug stays abroad past the deadline prescribed in the marriage contract, and Ravn rushes home to claim Helga – who bitterly resents it. The saga departs from the script a bit when the first fight between the two men turns into a general melee which ends with everybody but the principals getting killed. This calamity, the saga writer informs us, is the reason why dueling was abolished in Iceland.

Both men agree to go back to Norway and fight there, but (for some reason) Gunnlaug delays for some time before finally meeting Ravn in a duel fatal to them both. The saga ends with a touching coda telling how Helga mourned Gunnlaug the rest of her life, even though married to a third suitor.

I found Gunnlaug’s Saga a bit of a disappointment, and not only for its boilerplate quality. The main obvious failing in the narrative (in my view) was the omission of a martial resume for the hero. The usual pattern is to tell how he fights in wars for his lord or lords, becoming a formidable fighting man. Gunnlaug fights only one duel in the course of his travels, with a berserker – and he wins that not by skill but by overcoming magic. I felt this was a critical failure in character development.

However, the pathos of the ending was pretty moving.