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).

Does it really count as a book review when you explain why you tossed the book aside less than half way through? Because that’s what I did with Jeffery Deaver’s The Vanished Man.

I was not disappointed with the author’s skill. He writes a good story, creates a tight plot. His characters are well realized.

No, I just didn’t like the points he was trying to make, and I didn’t want to waste any more time on them.

The Vanished Man is a well-crafted thriller with a clever premise. What if a master magician became a serial killer? What if he felt compelled to re-create the feats of famous escape artists like Houdini, except that he stages them with innocent victims, leaving them no avenue of escape? And what if he were skilled in quick changes, illusion and lock-picking, so that even when the police have him surrounded, he can slip away from them?

That’s the promising scenario of The Vanished Man.



But Deaver lost me as a reader. I doubt if he cares. He clearly despises people like me, and wouldn’t want us for readers.

For instance, I’m a sexist pig. I don’t believe women (in general) make as good policemen as men. I believe men have both an obligation and a psychological need to protect women, and that putting women in harm’s way debases both them and the men.

In Deaver’s world, about half the cops are women, and any suggestion that a guy thinks even for a moment that women don’t make equally effective cops proves that he’s a Neanderthal.

There’s a conservative Protestant pastor in the novel, and at the beginning he seems to be portrayed pretty sympathetically. This immediately made me suspicious, and I was right to be. A little further in, we learn that the pastor is a child molester, and that he’s in New York City to perform a political assassination on behalf of a right-wing militia group.

That was when I lost interest.

Nobody pays me to read these books, and I don’t have unlimited time left in my life. I’m not going to spend that time reading fiction that insults me.

No doubt some people feel the same about my books.

Fair enough.

Today I gave my classic Orientation-time PowerPoint on library procedures to the students at the Bible school. As usual it was a hit, and it ought to earn me some tolerance from the students, right up until they actually have to deal with me in person.

I learned yesterday morning, as I lay in bed luxuriating in the Labor Day holiday, that I was supposed to be at school, delivering the thing. The implication was that I’d been informed about this. I have no memory of that (as unindicted co-conspirators like to say). So it was arranged for me to do it today, but I went in and put in a few hours work yesterday anyway. Had to update the PowerPoint, for one thing. New rules on fines, in general more forgiving ones. Naturally, as a Christian conservative, I hate that. All the money we spent on the new pillory and refurbishing the ducking stool, down the drain. There’s just no standards anymore.

I am strongly conflicted about Randy Wayne White’s Shark River. I liked it and disliked it, in about equal proportions. No, I guess I liked it a little more than I disliked it. I shall elucidate.

White’s Doc Ford character is widely considered an heir to John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, and I have to say I haven’t read anything in the field that meets the qualifications better. Like McGee, Ford lives a laid-back life on the water in Florida (though Ford lives on the other coast, and works pretty hard as a marine biologist, while McGee purposely lived as a beach bum between cases). They are both actively involved in the social scenes in their marinas, though Ford’s neighbors are more important to the plot than McGee’s usually were.

But Ford has a dark past. He was formerly a member of an ultra-secret government assassination squad. He came to Sanibel Island, his present home, with the intention of killing a man named Tomlinson, who had been involved in a fatal anti-war bombing plot back in the Vietnam years. For reasons of his own, Ford decided to let Tomlinson live, became his best friend, and hung up his spurs, so to speak.

Shark River begins with the attempt of a Colombian drug lord to kidnap the daughter of an influential American bureaucrat. Ford, in the right place at the right time, prevents it. In the fight he paralyzes a man who turns out to be the drug lord’s son, making himself a target. At the same time he meets Ransom Ebanks, a Bahamian woman who claims to be his long-lost half-sister, but is in fact the daughter of his reprobate uncle, whom Ford never liked much. She has a letter from her father and a sort of treasure map promising to lead to her “inheritance,” and she is relentless in trying to get Ford to help her. But of course the Colombians are waiting over the horizon, planning to strike back at the man who crippled one of their own.

In his casual courage and human tolerance, Doc Ford pleases me in the same way Travis McGee used to. But there are elements in the story that please me less. I can’t help it, but I’m just intolerant of drug use. Ford doesn’t use marijuana, but his friend Tomlinson and his “sister” Ransom are both users.

Tomlinson is presented as a burnt-out case, a little flaky (he is a Buddhist and a teacher of Transcendental Meditation, which also doesn’t win any points with me), but I have trouble with his history as an anti-war radical, as well as his religion. I think his friendship with Doc Ford is meant to be a metaphor for American reconciliation, and that’s nice, but I’m still pretty bitter about the whole thing, so I found Tomlinson kind of hard to take. Especially when he was smoking pot.

The attitude toward sexual morality all around in the book was pretty heedless too, in my opinion. (Yes, even more heedless than Travis McGee’s.)

But I liked Shark River enough that I expect I’ll give White another read.

Here I am, a bona fide professional writer, and I’m stuck for words to describe the loveliness of today’s weather. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art less humid and more temperate….” I should have taken the day off and gone to the state fair and fired questions about Bohemian Grove at Michael Medved. But, as Yogi Berra once sagely remarked, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

If you think you know about the Father Dowling mystery books because you used to watch Tom Bosley in the ridiculous TV version some years back, be assured that you don’t. Father Dowling is a priest named Father Dowling, and he does live in the Midwest and he does have a nosey housekeeper, but that’s about the extent of the similarity.

The original, authorized Father Dowling is a sort of clerical Sherlock Holmes (he’s tall and thin and smokes a pipe), but kinder and more inclined to suffer fools (and sinners). He was once a rising young star in the Roman Catholic hierarchy, but job pressures led to alcoholism, and the church sent him to Fox River, Illinois, a transitional suburb of Chicago, as a sort of second chance-cum-penance. But he discovered that parish ministry is his real calling, and he loves taking care of his little flock. Except for the remarkable number of unsolved murders that seem to crop up. (Also it should be noted that there are no roller-skating nuns to be seen anywhere.)

The drama in Last Things centers on the conflicts and dysfunctions of the Bernardo family, whose patriarch is Fulvio Bernardo, owner of a string of local greenhouses. Fulvio has only been moderately honest in his business dealings, and has been serially unfaithful to his pious wife, Margaret. But now his health is failing, and his children are gathering for the end.

The children include Raymond, who was once a promising young priest, but he ran away with a nun, with whom he now lives out of wedlock in California. Andrew is the underachieving middle brother who teaches English at a local college and has a live-in as well. Jessica is a successful novelist, much envied by Andrew, and remains a believer. She’s planning to write a novel based on her family’s story, and there’s an aunt who is much alarmed at that prospect, going so far as to ask Father Dowling to persuade Jessica to drop the project.

But it’s Andrew who gets into big trouble, when an insufferable colleague blames him for holding back his career, and starts a campaign of harassment against not only Andrew but his whole family. And when the colleague is found murdered in the street, well, who do you think comes under suspicion?

Father Dowling works it all out, of course, relying on his profound understanding of human motivations and sins. Along the way he also helps Raymond come to terms with the guilt he’s been carrying (and denying) ever since his defection.

All things taken together, I think I prefer Father Dowling stories to Father Brown stories. That’s heresy, I know, but although I’m crazy about G.K. Chesterton about 80% of the time, I always found the FB mysteries a little facile, a little too neat. They seem to me analogous to an archer shooting his arrows first and then painting targets around them. The Father Dowling stories are richer and more humane, less didactic (which isn’t to say there aren’t moral and theological lessons).

As a Protestant, of course, I find points in the stories where I disagree with some of the detective’s basic assumptions about Christianity. But it doesn’t interfere much for me, and the quiet, peaceful presence that Father Dowling imparts to these stories make reading them a comfort and a delight.

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.