Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Hitardal People’

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I’m assuming very few of you are going to go out and buy The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, but I continue with my reading reports as I work my way through the volumes. I’m still on the poets’ sagas, and it occurred to me (and I should have remembered this) that most of the big ones are included in the Penguin volume, Sagas of Warrior-Poets. And the translations there are perfectly good.

My latest saga is the Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Hitardal People. We have only an imperfect text for this one, since the first five chapters have been lost, as well as a page and a half out of the middle. The missing first chapters are fairly adequately supplied by text from a shorter version included in the Separate Saga of Saint Olaf by Snorri Sturlusson. About the second lacuna nothing can be done. But enough remains to provide an interesting tale. Scholars believe this to be one of the earlier sagas to be written down.

Bjorn Arngeirsson’s story begins in a way reminiscent of Laxdalasaga. Bjorn goes out into the world to make his fortune, but not before he and his father arrange his marriage to the lovely Oddny. The agreement is that he must come back to Iceland before five years have passed, or else the deal is canceled. Bjorn goes out and has adventures, including fighting a duel on behalf of King Valdemar (Vladimir) of Kiev, which earns him the tile of “Champion.” But he suffers a wound that prevents his returning home as soon as he’d like. Meanwhile his childhood enemy, another poet named Thord Kolbeinsson, travels back to Iceland and reports that Bjorn is dead. Thord then takes Oddny for his own wife.

Once Bjorn returns, a long succession of mutual offenses follow. Aside from personal hatred, one suspects an element of professional jealousy – the way the saga tells it, Bjorn is superior both as a man and as an artist, and Thord can’t forgive that. However, I imagine the story could be told just as well from the other point of view. Unlike the Saga of Hallfred, the last one I reviewed, Christianity seems to have little influence on this cycle of violence. People try to make peace, but these two men share an implacable hate.

There are interesting elements from the historian’s point of view. Bjorn, knowing that Thord has been at King (Saint) Olav’s court and will have slandered him, goes personally to set the record straight – showing considerable courage. (Olav acts just as I portray him in my novels, urging Bjorn to give up Viking raiding as an un-Christian activity.) There’s an interesting scene involving baths – the saga says that baths in tubs are “the only kind” that were available in Norway at the time. I assume the reference is to the custom of sauna bathing in Iceland (where thermal springs are plentiful). I’d always thought the Norwegians took steam baths too – but I’m not sure this saga can be trusted on historical details. The bath scene involves the wearing of garters by men, a subject of some contention among reenactors. It ends with Bjorn in possession of one of Saint Olaf’s own garters, which in time will become part of the bishop’s regalia in Iceland. Descriptions of shields in a battle scene are clearly anachronistic – the writer assumes a shield with arm straps and a point, which weren’t commonly in use at the time of these events.

Another interesting point comes up when the men are gathered at the Thing to work out a legal settlement between Bjorn and Thord. They actually go to the trouble of making up competing lists of all the lampoons each man has written about the other. When it’s found that Thord has written one fewer, he’s allowed to compose another on the spot so that they’ll balance.

A matter that’s mentioned, but rather underplayed in the saga, is the question of who is the actual father of Thord’s son Kolli. If I’m not mistaken, I I believe this is given more attention in Laxdala Saga (and in my novel West Oversea.)

The Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Hitardal People is a flawed and somewhat artless story, but of considerable interest to the saga scholar.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Someone Savage,’ by Mike McCrary

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There’s a kind of story that I hate and love. The kind of story where an ordinary man (or woman, I suppose, but I avoid those books) finds him (or her-) self in the middle of a violent crime situation for which they’re entirely unsuited, and they have to find a way to survive and overcome. I over-identify with such stories, knowing I wouldn’t survive ten minutes, but I read on, fascinated.

Mike McCrary’s Someone Savage is exactly that kind of story. Nicholas Hooper is a well-known and successful author who’s recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. His only family is his sister Allison, with whom he has an affectionate but contentious relationship. He also has several ex-wives, but he doesn’t talk to them and he’s never fathered a child. Never felt up to the responsibility.

Now he’s rented a huge luxury home in the Poconos for 15 months. Ostensibly he’s there to write his last book, but actually he’s come to die. He even brought a gun with one bullet, in case he wants to go out that way. Mainly, he anticipates drinking heavily.

Then there’s a soft knock at the door, and he opens it to see two small children, undernourished and filthy. The boy says nothing; the girl just says, “Help.” He lets them in and tries to figure out what to do with them. As a start, he gives them bottled water and Cheetos, and sets them in front of a TV with Sponge Bob Squarepants on.

He calls Allison, who urges him to call the police. But the childrens’ responses make him hesitate. They don’t trust any adult, and are clearly traumatized. When he finally persuades them to go to town with him for a good breakfast, they catch sight of a local cop and panic. That moment is pivotal, and much danger will rise from it.

I identified intensely with Nick Hooper, and agonized through the story, which I pretty much read in one sitting. It grabbed me and held tight to the end. It wasn’t all that plausible (I’m pretty sure I’d have just called the police in [which would have been fatal in this situation] if I were in Nick’s shoes), but that’s fairly standard for stories like this. Someone Savage would make an excellent movie.

I recommend this book highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Stop,’ by Alan Lee

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When I’ve read too many dark, gritty mysteries it’s always nice to pick up a Mackenzie August book by Alan Lee. They’re strong on tough, fairly clever dialogue, and it’s nice to follow a detective with a positive attitude and faith in God. So we have come to a Dead Stop, book nine in the series.

Roanoke, Virginia PI Mack August is married to Veronica, a beautiful lawyer. She surprises him by making him the gift of a trip on a luxury private train, Chicago to San Francisco. Mack has always wanted to take such a journey, in the spirit of the old Golden Age mysteries, and jokingly remarks that he hopes they’re attacked by bandits. That won’t happen, but what does happen will be about as bad. Fortunately, their friend Manny Rodriguez, a US Marshal, comes along too – though he’s disappointed to be stood up by his girlfriend.

Their quarters on the train are luxurious, the views are majestic, and the service is excellent. The main irritant is that some of the other passengers are annoying – especially a Republican couple and a Democrat couple who can’t stop sniping at each other. There also seems to be a fair amount of sexual hijinks going on.

Then one of the conductors disappears. And one by one, other members of the train’s crew vanish as well, to be found in the snow with bullet holes in their heads. Manny declares “marshal law” and they try to keep the other passengers calm (and away from each others’ throats) while doing their best to identify the murderer in their midst.

Dead Stop is a story with a message, and it’s not exactly subtle. Mack and Manny constantly try to remind their fellow passengers that they’re all on the same train and need each other, while those passengers are consumed with mutual hatreds – political, social, racial and international. The conservatives and liberals are about equally caricatured, so I don’t think anyone should take offense.

There’s a civility lesson I’m not sure I entirely agree with in the final solution to the crime. But all in all, the book was pleasant enough, and more positive than not in its (relatively heavy-handed) teaching moments.

As usual, author Lee could use a better proofreader. A particularly odd word error is when he tells us someone is wearing a “toboggan” on his head. Is there a piece of headwear known as a toboggan? Did he mean “toque?” Another mystery, this one unsolved.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Community,’ by Finn Eccleston

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Author Finn Eccleston contacted us through blog comments and asked if I’d like to review his first novel, The Community. I accepted a free review copy and discovered a book worth reading by a promising writer.

Jay Stevens lives in a small, somewhat primitive community whose reason for existence seems obscure. It’s located in an oasis of green surrounded by sand. Jay enjoys the status of being a supervisor. He makes sure all the members of the Community are following the numerous rules laid down for them by the ruling Council. There used to be a lot of building going on in the Community, but their meager forest land is mostly logged over now and projects have stalled.

Recently Jay has been troubled by flashbacks – moments of narcolepsy when he experiences what feels like memories, but they’re not memories of this life. They’re memories of life in a city, where he was a drug dealer and a killer.

When he accidentally discovers an electronic barrier surrounding the Community, and blunders onto the other side, he will begin a journey of discovery that will only lead to greater mysteries and an existential threat to his friends and himself.

The Community is clearly a book by a young writer. The prose could use a lot of polishing – there are many word mistakes – “paramount” where “tantamount” is wanted, “after affect” in place of “after-effect.” There are misspellings and plain awkward verbiage, like “Our paces were both quickened.” And sometimes the descriptions of places and events are hard to follow.

On the other hand, the characters are good, the plot moves right along, and there are occasional sly literary allusions that tell me the author reads and is interested in his craft. I think he shows great promise. The Community is the first book in a series, and I think each installment is likely to improve on the last.

Cautions for rough language and adult themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The After-Hours War,’ by Colin Conway

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I suppose it’s better to tell a good story with occasional lapses in diction than to write flawless prose but fail as a storyteller. Colin Conway is a good storyteller who could use a better editor. I’ve grown quite fond of his The 509 series, but I liked The After-Hours War less than the previous books, for various reasons.

Several men are found robbed and shot to death in an after-hours smoking club in the Spokane area. Then another group of people are shot in an after-hours, unlicensed bar. The police suffer the embarrassment of investigating crimes committed in private clubs they didn’t even know existed. Turns out that, even though Prohibition has been gone a long time, people still like to break the liquor and tobacco laws with strangers, especially the rules about closing times. It’s a modern form of speakeasy.

The investigation is further hampered by interdepartmental rivalries. The county detectives hate the city detectives, thinking the investigation belongs to them. The city detectives feel the same way, the other way around. And they all hate Morgan, the Crime Task Force cowboy who breaks all the rules and steps on everybody’s toes.

What I like most about the 509 books is the faceting of the characters. We see each cop through the other cops’ eyes, and then we get to see through their own. There’s a lot of human understanding here.

But there were a couple things I didn’t care for. One was the sheer number of main characters in this book. I don’t like jumping back and forth between too many points of view.

The other problem (for this reader) was that it got into politics. When a couple white supremacists are arrested and interrogated, the accused bring out a lot of talking points, some of which they have in common with ordinary conservatives. I don’t know whether this is intended to suggest that conservatives in general are racists – but there are certainly a lot of people on the left who think so.

As before in this series, there were too many typos and word confusions. The author uses “ascetically pleasing” when he means “aesthetically pleasing,” and “a different tact” when he means “a different tack.” He could use a better proofreader.

Still, The After-Hours War was a good book and worth reading. I hope the politics don’t become a permanent fixture in the series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lieberman’s Folly,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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Dr. Ernest Hartman’s office was in Uptown on Bryn Mawr right next to the el stop. Dr. Hartman’s patients could, while they were waiting or having their fluids drained or taken, indulge in neighborhood bird watching. The trains came rumbling in front of his window and a sharp-eyed woman with the flu or man with a murmur would occasionally spot a Black-Jacketed Daytime Mugger on the platform, though you were more likely to catch sight of a Fleet-Footed Purse Snatcher.

Stuart M. Kaminsky was one of my favorite 20th Century mystery writers, and I’ve reviewed a number of his books before – though not recently, because I think I’ve read most of them. But I’d never read Lieberman’s Folly, which happens to be the first book in his classic Abe Lieberman series.

Abraham Lieberman is 60 years old, a veteran Chicago police detective. He’s a loving father and grandfather, a devout Jew, and an advanced student of human nature. A fragile and old-looking man, he’s no hard-boiled cop. He’s more likely to offer an understanding ear than a punch in the jaw.

His partner is Bill Hanrahan, a tough Irishman who’s crawled into a bottle since his wife left him. Bill’s essentially a good cop too, but he’s been letting his work slide for a while.

Abe likes to spend off-work time – when he’s not with his family – hanging out with a group of old men at his brother’s delicatessen. It’s there that Estralda Valdez, a high-priced hooker and one of Abe’s informants, comes to ask him for protection. Somebody wants to kill her, but she’s leaving town. Could they keep watch on her apartment until she’s gone?

Abe can’t do it that night because of a domestic crisis. But Bill has nothing better to do. Unfortunately, he spends too much time, at his post in a Chinese restaurant across the street, drinking and flirting with a waitress. Estralda is stabbed to death, and their captain is not happy when he hears the story.

Through a narrative rich with eccentric characters and surprises, Abe will do his quiet best to uncover secrets and balance the scales of justice.

Lieberman’s Folly was – like most of Kaminsky’s work – solidly crafted and sympathetic. I enjoyed it very much.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Tan and Sandy Silence,’ by John D. MacDonald

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But the Tibetan bar-headed goose and her gander have a very strange ceremony they perform after they have mated. They rise high in the water, wings spread wide, beaks aimed straight up at the sky, time and time again, making great bugle sounds of honking. The behaviorists think it is unprofessional to use subjective terms about animal patterns. So they don’t call the ceremony joy. They don’t know what to call it. These geese live for up to fifty years, and they mate for life. They celebrate the mating this same way year after year. If one dies, the other never mates again.

So penguins, eagles, geese, wolves, and many other creatures of land and sea and air are stuck with all this obsolete magic and mystery because they can’t read and they can’t listen to lectures. All they have is instinct. Man feels alienated from all feeling, so he sets up encounter groups to sensitize each member to human interrelationships. But the basic group of two, of male and female, is being desensitized as fast as we can manage it.

Got another deal on a Travis McGee book by John D. MacDonald. A Tan and Sandy Silence is, I think, one of the master’s best – a taut tale that borders on horror and reveals our hero at his most vulnerable.

Travis McGee, Fort Lauderdale “salvage specialist,” nearly gets shot one day by old acquaintance Harry Broll, a real estate developer who talks his way aboard Travis’ houseboat. He says he needs to find Mary, his ex-wife, to get her signature for an important real estate deal. He knows she’s been in touch with McGee, he says.

Travis is troubled by this occurrence in two ways – first, he’d never have allowed anybody to get the drop on him like that in the past. Is he losing his edge? Is he getting too long in the tooth for the business of recovering people and their property? Should he accept the offer of Jillian Brent-Archer, the lovely, wealthy English widow who’d like him to move onto her boat and be her constant escort? It would be a soft retirement, and not really all that demeaning.

Secondly, he realizes that Harry Broll was right about one thing – if Mary has disappeared, she’s probably in trouble. But if she was in trouble, she probably would have contacted McGee – which she hasn’t. So where is she?

Talking to Mary’s friends, Travis learns that she’s vacationing in Grenada. She sends postcards now and then. So everything’s all right, right?

But is it? McGee still isn’t sure. So he assumes a false identity and flies down to Grenada. Where he will encounter an evil that reminded me of the horrific “Un-man” in C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra. It’ll be a close-run thing, and the plot will require something fairly close to a deus ex machina to get our hero through this time.

John D. MacDonald was near the top of his game when he wrote A Tan and Sandy Silence (published in 1971). I’m not sure anymore (and I can’t find the reference) when it was that major literary critics suddenly decided it was okay to praise his work, but I know it was around the time this book came out. There were a couple fresh elements here – one is a fairly realistic description of head trauma and PTSD:

Forget the crap about the television series hard guy who gets slugged and shoved out of a fast moving car, wakes up in the ambulance, and immediately deduces that the kidnapper was a left-handed albino because Little Milly left her pill bottle on the second piling from the end of the pier. If hard case happens to wake up in the ambulance, he is going to be busy trying to remember his own name and wondering why he has double vision and what that loud noise is and why he keeps throwing up.

Another new element is that McGee makes some kind of resolution to change the way he deals with women in the future. But I never entirely understood what that meant.

Religion shows up a couple times; there are a couple pretty awful Catholics in this book, and a group of very nice Jesus Freaks (a brand new phenomenon just then).

A Tan and Sandy Silence is a harrowing book. It contains what I consider perhaps the most horrifying scene in the series. But it’s also engrossing and lyrical and deeply humane. Sometimes funny too. I recommend it highly. Cautions for adult themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bad Aim,’ by Alan Lee

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Working on catching up with Alan Lee’s eccentric and entertaining Mackenzie August series of action mysteries. So I read a second one in a row, Bad Aim.

Mack, an intrepid private eye with very good hair, lives with his fiancée (technically his wife; it’s complicated) “Ronnie” in Roanoke, Virginia, with his toddler son (from a previous marriage), “Kix.” Also resident in their house is his father and his best friend Manny Rodriguez, a US Marshal. Life is good for their odd little household. Mack’s friend, Liz Ferguson, a former federal agent and now a private eye, asks him to help her with a personal protection job. Her client is Roland Wallace, a rich, elderly man who fears that someone is trying to murder him. Poison has been found in his medications, so it’s not his imagination. Their job will be not only to protect him but to identify the killer – Roland says he wants to kill them himself.

Mack has no intention of helping anybody to kill anybody, but the mystery turns out satisfyingly complex. Only a few people have access to Roland’s house, and it’s hard to see what motive any of them might have. None of them seems in a position to profit from his death, or to have reason to hate him.

The story proceeds in the breezy manner characteristic of this series, Mack narrating and speaking in a light sort of variation on classic hard-boiled diction. I’ve disparaged the author’s attempts at erudition in the past, but I must admit he threw out a word – “Illeism,” which means speaking about oneself in the third person – that I had to look up. So he gets a point there.

Bad Aim is fun, and the references to Christianity are positive. The author seems to feel strongly about the rights of illegal immigrants, so I suppose he must be happy with our current open borders situation. And I thought the final showdown a little contrived. But other than that I have no objections to this amusing mystery.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Anglo-Saxons at War 800-1066,’ by Paul Hill

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As early as the late seventh century King Ine of Wessex (688-726) was moved to categorize numbers of armed men: ‘We call up to seven men thieves; from seven to thirty-five a band; above that it is an army.’

Anyone interested in the Viking Age is perforce going to be interested in the people we call the Anglo-Saxons. I recall that they intrigued me strangely when I discovered them in an encyclopedia at a very young age, before (as far as I can remember) I even knew about Vikings. The two cultures are sisters after all; many of the Anglo-Saxon tribes were Scandinavian in origin and only a few generations and geographic relocation separated them.

Paul Hill, author of The Anglo-Saxons at War 800-1066, is an accomplished historian and historical popularizer. He has produced here an excellent work targeted at those of us (like historical reenactors) who are interested in looking past generalizations and common assumptions to discover what we are able to know for sure (or can surmise) about warfare in the period. The trick is to separate known fact from guesses, and it seemed to me this book did a pretty good job of that.

The book includes an Introduction (a Survey of the Evidence); and chapters on Warfare, Violence and Society; Military Organization; Strategy and Tactics; Fortifications and Earthworks; Campaigns, Battles and Sieges; and Weapons, Armour and Accessories.

Now and then there are statements that contradict things I’m in the habit of telling people at reenactment events – he isn’t sure that the saex knife was reserved for the use of free men (spears, on the other hand, were, he says). And he doesn’t think the “wings” on a “boar spear” are actually intended to prevent a body from slipping down the shaft. He thinks they’re for parrying, and he probably knows more about it than I do.

General readers looking for a history of warfare in the period should probably find a different book. Certain events and campaigns are described in considerable detail, but they’re examined out of historical sequence. This is a book for enthusiasts interested in the period. Historical reenactors in particular will appreciate it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘These Mortals,’ by Alan Lee

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For a while now I’ve had the unsettling feeling that there was a series of thriller novels I’d been following in the past that I’d forgotten about. The other day I was looking at some of my old reviews and I realized it was Alan Lee’s Mackenzie August series. So I picked it up again with These Mortals after a long delay (turns out the book itself was delayed in publication, so my delay wasn’t so bad).

I needed to get up to speed with the characters and ongoing story, of course. Mackenzie August is a former cage fighter, now a private eye. His best friends are a drug dealer (who goes to the same church as he) and Mannie Martinez, a US Marshal and super-patriot. Mack is now married to the love of his life, Veronica “Ronnie,” a stunningly beautiful lawyer and former prostitute. They have a small boy, known as Kix.

As These Mortals begins, Mack is starting his day. Suddenly his worst enemy, Darren Robbins, a corrupt former government official who has faked his death, breaks into their home, accompanied by a gigantic Hispanic who is pointing a shotgun at a captive Ronnie.

Darren explains that he’s about to disappear forever, but before he goes he wants to see his wife and son, who are in the federal witness protection program. Mack has until Thursday to locate them and arrange a meeting, or else the thug will kill Ronnie (who happens to be Darren’s former mistress).

Mack is not one to despair. He confidently concocts a plan, assisted by Mannie and his partner, and by the local sheriff (apparently everybody in the world except Darren loves Mack and Ronnie because they’re both so good-looking). It calls for close coordination and precise timing, so you know everything that can go wrong will go wrong. But anything remains possible with the right attitude.

It must be understood that none of this is meant to be taken too seriously. The atmosphere here is fairly close to that of a comic book. The chief charm is the intellectual tough-guy cross-talk between Mack and Mannie. There are here (as I’ve mentioned before) echoes of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Hawk – except that author Lee isn’t quite as good at the erudition part.

Still, it was fun, and Christian in some sense (there’s no doctrine here, only the fact that likeable characters declare themselves Christians). These Mortals is implausible, lightweight, and entertaining. A few references to the plight of illegal immigrants may or may not be meant to convey a political message.

A fun book.