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Fiction, Reviews

‘The Box,’ by Dan Wheatcroft

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Thurstan Baddeley is a police inspector… somewhere in the northwest of England. I’m not sure the city is actually named in Dan Wheatcroft’s The Box, a somewhat oddball novel that I found delightful. He leads the Major Crimes squad, works well with his team, and is good at solving crimes. Unfortunately, his Chief Constable has it in for him. He keeps nagging Baddeley to institute department policies, like wearing preferred pronoun badges and rainbow badge lanyards. Finally, it comes to a head and Thurstan is packed off to a new posting, to investigate cold crimes in the small town of St Helens, Sutton Box station, where police careers go to die.

Soon he is joined by his friend and subordinate Randolph (known as Gandolph), a computer hacker who has massaged assignment records to excuse his presence. Together they begin going through the boxes of cold crimes files. Most of the old cases are uninteresting, but two of them draw their attention. One concerns the murder of a prostitute in 1902, which went unsolved though there was an obvious suspect – the son of the richest man in town. The other comes from the 1970s, and concerns a socially awkward young man, who’d never been in trouble before, convicted of stabbing a man to death. He later committed suicide in prison. Most of the people involved in both cases are dead, but there are people who still know things, and others who remember, with either sadness or fear.

There are no gunfights in The Box (well, this is England, after all), no fistfights or chases. All the violence happens off stage. Yet the author succeeds in escalating the dramatic tension steadily, and I turned the pages with eagerness.

It turns out that The Box is the beginning of a new series for the author, but it branches off from an earlier series. I’ll have to check those other books out. The writing wasn’t absolutely top-shelf – the author sometimes falls into confusing constructions like “fate inhabited him instantly.” But it was good enough to carry a fascinating story with lively characters.

And the cherry on top, of course, is the politically incorrect elements. You don’t run across such bare-faced un-wokeness in many novels today – no wonder the author uses a pseudonym.

The Box is highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Darker Than Blonde,’ by Julius Taven

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Alan Lawson is former Special Forces, former CIA special operations. He left the CIA, disillusioned with what he’d seen there, and returned to his home of Arlington Texas. As Julius Taven’s Darker Than Blonde begins, he’s driving for a ride share service, still struggling with PTSD.

One night he gets a big fare, a pick-up out on a remote ranch. But when he arrives, nobody seems to be around. After waiting several minutes, he starts to leave, and then his fare shows up out of the night – a striking blonde woman. The address where he delivers her happens to be an apartment building where he himself used to live.

And when he gets home and cleans his car out, he finds a money clip holding several thousand dollars. The initials on the clip do not match any of his fares that day. He decides to keep it.

Soon after, the police pick him up for questioning. Turns out they found a man murdered in the ranch house where he made the pick-up, and no trace can be found of the woman he says he drove. The murder victim had the same initials as were on the money clip – but fortunately Alan has hidden it.

Alan knows he’s been set up, but he has resources of his own. He calls his friend Derick, who’s both a skilled fighter and a computer expert. They’ll discover a convoluted and ruthless plot, with millions of dollars of gold at stake – when he’s not avoiding his old CIA boss, who’s trying to re-enlist him, by any means necessary, regardless of the monetary or human cost.

It appears that Darker Than Blonde is Julius Taven’s first published novel, and I must say it’s a very impressive performance. The writing was good (except for the fact that he doesn’t know how to spell “sergeant”), the characters were vivid, and I was fascinated by the story. It was taut and suspenseful. The plot was admittedly convoluted, and it was hard to keep it straight at times. Also, there were a whole lot of characters, so many that I forgot about some of them before they reappeared later on.

I bought this book in part because the title seemed to harken back to John D. MacDonald. Darker Than Blonde isn’t much like a MacDonald novel, but it’s very good in its own way. It seems to be the first installment in a series, and I look forward very much to seeing more.

Cautions for language and violence. A few references to prayer are made, and are respectful.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bent Highway,’ by Craig Terlson

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The rain moved into hail, peppering the windshield and body of the truck, reminding me of stones thrown against metal fences, of pellet guns fired into graineries [sic].

Time travel is always an intriguing topic in fiction, and since we haven’t figured out how to actually do it yet, we have infinite options as to how to imagine it. H. G. Wells created his time machine. I built tunnels between worlds in a couple of my novels. Craig Terlson, in his novel, Bent Highway, imagines it as something like a road trip with Hunter S. Thompson, as filmed by some French New Wave director.

We first meet our hero, whose name is only given as “M.”, as he’s sitting in a diner, heating up a teaspoon preparatory cauterizing an arm wound with it – a wound he can’t remember receiving. We gradually learn that he’s engaged in a cross-country road trip, but from time to time he loses consciousness – seeming to slip through cracks in the earth – and awakens somewhere else – in someone else’s car, or in a bar, or in a brightly lit room. Sometimes he’s with a mysterious tall man, and sometimes he’s with a beautiful, white-skinned woman. Sometimes people attack him with cars or guns or knives. Gradually we – and he – realize that he’s been at this for some time, but keeps forgetting the incidents, which he doesn’t experience in strict chronological order. He learns that he has a dangerous enemy, and that he needs to be in just the right place at the right time in order to erase and overwrite some event from his past, to save the world.

The classic time travel conundrum of “What will happen if I meet myself in the past?” is handled offhandedly here – M. not only meets his past self, but an infinite number of his past selves, captured at each moment in his life.

Craig Terlson’s characteristic vivid writing style is showcased once again in Bent Highway. “The morning sun drilled a perfect hole in the cerulean sky,” is a good example. Unfortunately, the effect is marred from time to time by numerous typographical errors.

Sadly, the book is a cliff-hanger, and I don’t believe the sequel has appeared yet. I hope it does.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Fire in Every Vein,’ by Lawrence J. Epstein

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Sometime in the late 1960s, Walker West is a young man at loose ends in New York City. He wants to be a writer, but has had no success. Witnessing an explosion, he helps to rescue a couple victims from beneath the rubble. One of them is a young woman, with whom he immediately falls in love. A moment later, the police come along to arrest that young woman for the murder of her fiancé. Walker impulsively promises her that he’ll prove her innocence.

So begins A Fire In Every Vein, by Lawrence J. Epstein. It’s the first book in a series of mysteries. As a novice investigator, Walker has one advantage the average guy doesn’t enjoy – his Aunt Agatha (a tribute to P. G. Wodehouse?), who is very rich and very influential. Being concerned over her nephew’s lack of motivation to date, she happily encourages his sudden enthusiasm by providing him with an office, an attractive female assistant, and a bodyguard. She also pulls strings to get him hired as a crime reporter by a New York paper, and as an investigator by the insurance company concerned, so he has two excuses to poke his nose into the case.

If that seems like a lot of what’s known nowadays as “privilege,” I thought the same thing. Money can be a great advantage for a fictional investigator (see Lord Peter Wimsey [who gets an endorsement in this book] and Nick Charles), but a protagonist in a story needs to struggle too. It often felt as if Walker was getting along too easily – though he suffers plenty of setbacks, most often because of his own rookie mistakes.

And that’s another problem with the story. A learning curve works just fine as a template for rising dramatic tension, but Walker seems to be almost laughably feckless.

I stayed with A Fire in Every Vein to the end because the author is a decent writer in the grammatical sense. He can string a sentence together, which puts him ahead of most novelists nowadays. And I couldn’t help identifying personally with Walker’s cluelessness.

But overall, the book didn’t work. The characters weren’t distinctive, and the dialogue was unnatural. Graceful and grammatical, yes, but not natural.

What finally disappointed me, though, was the ending, which (in my view) was so inconsistent with the tone of the rest of the book that it felt like a cheat.

I believe author Epstein has written further novels, and I’m glad of it. I think he has the makings of a good novelist. But A Fire in Every Vein just didn’t work for me.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Fooling Houdini,’ by Alex Stone

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A lot of the motivation behind cheating must come from the charge you get. To truly understand the psychology of a cheater, you need to see the world like a con artist. In this worldview, everything is rigged—the casino, politics, Wall Street, life—and there are only two types of people: grifters and suckers. (It’s a lot like in magic, where you’re either a magician or a layperson.) If you look around the table and don’t see a sucker, then, according to an old saying, the sucker is you.

I remember a time in my childhood when I wanted very much to learn magic. I never had the resources, and today I’m pretty sure my natural clumsiness would have doomed it anyway. But those memories came back as I considered a bargain deal for Alex Stone’s Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind. So I bought it. With some exceptions, I found the book enjoyable and educational, though I don’t think the author is someone I’d care to have lunch with.

He knows how to tell a story, though. He piques our interest by opening with an excruciating personal anecdote – how, as a green magician, he participated in the 2006 World Championships of Magic in Stockholm, and made an utter fool of himself in front of the some of the best practitioners in the world.

Then he tells the story of his journey with magic. He got interested as a kid, and his fascination grew, to the point where he neglected his graduate studies in Physics to attend classes and seminars, and spent more than he could afford on books and paraphernalia. He studies psychology and clowning to gain greater understanding of audience dynamics. He meets a colorful variety of master magicians – most interesting to me was Richard Turner, the world’s foremost “card mechanic,” who happens to be totally blind. He manipulates playing cards purely by touch. (Also, interestingly, we’re told he goes to church.)

The author does not come off as a terribly winning personality, but that may be due in part to his self-deprecating jokes. He writes a lot about the scientific/psychological underpinnings of the practice of illusion, and sometimes draws conclusions which annoyed me. For instance, he states, as if it were self-evident, that Jesus Christ was obviously a magician. In the spirit of all con men, he seems to view everything he sees as a game of one sort or another. Wall Street, he tells us, is just a casino with very high stakes.

His musings on Physics seem (to me) to draw exactly the wrong conclusions – the laws of science don’t rule out the existence of a Creator, as he seems to assume. For some of us, they affirm it. If entropy is the universal fact, where do those orderly laws come from in the first place?

On the other hand, I must admit his prose is excellent. Great lines abound, like: “A shrill carbon stink clung to the air like a bad habit.”

And he rounds his story out with a highly satisfying chapter telling how, more seasoned now, he redeemed his reputation as a magician with an original card trick that mystified the pros.

This is a very good book, with which I sometimes disagreed. Still, the quality can’t be denied, and I recommend it with a few reservations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Fatal Glass of Beer,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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“I find his movies deeply sad,” Jeremy said as we were driving.

“I don’t think he’d be happy to hear that,” I said. “He thinks they’re comedies.”

“Comedy does not mean we must laugh,” said Jeremy. “It is the reverse of tragedy. It suggests that life can continue without hope.”

The late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Toby Peters novels are amusing reads, and they take a high road. I mean by that that a novelist, when producing stories about old Hollywood stars, would naturally be inclined to give the public what they want – sleaze and scandal. But Kaminsky (who was, I think, a very decent man), chose to handle them lightly, in comic stories. We get to see the stars at their best and most sympathetic.

The challenge of that approach seems to have been considerable in A Fatal Glass of Beer, in which Toby’s client is W. C. Fields. It’s hard to make Fields a likeable character, but Kaminsky does manage to make him a sympathetic one.

It’s 1943. Toby Peters, who for comic purposes persists as a low-rent PI, in spite of all the celebrity clients he’s served over the years, is facing some changes in his life. His ex-wife, for whom he’s carried a torch for years, is getting married to a movie star. He consoles himself, however, with a new girlfriend. He’s considering moving out of his broom closet office in a dentist’s office, due to a conflict with the dentist’s wife. And he’s reached a truce with his estranged brother, the cop, now that his sister-in-law has cancer.

W. C. Fields shows up with a problem that could have happened only to him. Over the years, during his vaudeville days, he put his financial eggs in many baskets by opening savings accounts, under assumed names, in various banks across the US. Now someone has stolen a number of his bank books, and is going around to the banks and withdrawing the funds. Fields wants Toby to accompany him on a road trip, to hunt the scoundrel down and recover the bank books and stolen money. Toby can use the business, though Fields is a challenging travel companion. Toby enlists his midget friend Gunther to serve as driver, and they set out on their transcontinental odyssey in Field’s Cadillac, fully equipped with a built-in bar and a stock of liquor in the trunk.

The hunt is a slapstick affair, until people start getting killed. Secrets are revealed, leading to further secrets. And W. C. Fields comes through it all unfazed, insensitive to others’ needs, dependent on alcohol, securely anchored in the persona he has created for himself, though we perceive more and more that in his heart he’s deeply lonely and sad. That Kaminsky succeeds in making us care about him is a testimony to his characterization skill.

I’d describe A Fatal Glass of Beer as one of the best entries in this classic series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Death of a Minor Character,’ by E. X. Ferrars

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I’m not sure how I came to do it again. I bought a mystery written by E. X. Ferrars, an author who uses initials instead of a first name, which is usually a sign of a female writer. I tend to find mysteries by women a little alien, but somehow I ended up with this one. I assume I must have gotten it for free. And, as with the similarly named author M. K. Farrar a few days back, I found the book surprisingly enjoyable. For the most part.

E. X. Ferrars was a British author, born Morna Doris MacTaggert. She had a long and successful career. Among her series characters were Virginia and Felix Freer, the protagonists of Death of a Minor Character, published in 1983.

Virginia Freer is a physical therapist living and working in a town some distance from London. A young friend is planning to return home to Australia, and asks her to a farewell party at her flat – in the same London building that’s home to her ex-husband (separated) Felix, with whom she’s still friendly. A fairly mismatched group, including Felix, show up for the party, including a jewelry artist and an old lady who lives in the building.

Not long after, a shopkeeper in Virginia’s town, a casual friend of hers, is murdered, as well the old lady from the party. What ties them together seems to be the dragon-motif silver jewelry the artist designs. Felix is moved  to investigate – not so much for the sake of the shopkeeper as for the old lady, whom he compares to one of those minor characters who get killed in books and movies without anybody giving a second thought to them.

E. X. Ferrars was a lively and original writer. What makes this book work is the characters of Virginia and Felix – especially Felix, who is a constant surprise. He is, we are told, a liar and a petty thief, always on the edge of legality. He doesn’t seem to really grasp ordinary moral concepts. But underneath he has a deep sense of justice.

I enjoyed the book, but I have to say I never really believed in Felix. I suspect the author (who was an atheist and a leftist) wanted to open people’s minds to the idea that there were more ways of being a good person than the stuffy old mores we grew up with.

I reject that. Liars and thieves are not “morally creative” (as I put it in my novel, Wolf Time), but people who lack a moral core. The way you do little things is the way you do big things. Dishonesty is, at bottom, just another kind of cowardice.

But I can’t deny that Death of a Minor Character was an entertaining and well-written novel. The conclusion, though, was a little anticlimactic.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Arms and White Samite,’ by B. A. Patty

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What Arthur saw was nothing like what Moren saw. He saw no silver trees, nor the shining suns of souls, nor the blue glow of possibility, of hope, or of longing. Arthur saw before him the legends, rising up in shapes like griffins and dragons, growing about him in the way that lilies grow up like miracles in a forest where once stood some forgotten cottage. They stole his breath, and for a time it was so quiet in his tent that even the roar of celebration outside seemed to vanish away.

B. A. Patty blogs at Grim’s Hall, one of the blogs I’ve been following for years. He’s a reader of my novels too. But he’s even less aggressive about marketing his novel, Arms and White Samite, than I am in regard to mine. In fact, I’d forgotten he had one until he offered a deal recently, and I picked it up. It’s an impressive book, one that deserves greater recognition than it’s received.

Our hero is Moren, a warrior of Arthur’s Company of the Wall (the book is set in “King” Arthur’s original historical context, with certain supernatural intrusions). One day a lady dressed in white rides into Arthur’s hall, pursued by a great, fearsome knight armored in black. In spite of Arthur’s men’s attempts to protect her, the knight carries her off. Moren takes upon himself the quest of rescuing the lady. He follows her through a forest, where he rescues another lady who becomes his companion, and later into a fortress, where he is taken prisoner. A group of his brothers follow to help – or rescue – him. Meanwhile, the Saxons are harrying the land, and Arthur faces the challenges and sacrifices of total war against an enemy led by a king who is more than human.

For me, the greatest appeal of the Arthurian stories has always been, more than the tales of chivalry and valor, the hints of mystery behind it all – ancient names of places lost to history, shadowy characters who seem not quite human in some undefined way. Arms and White Samite is rich in those elements. It’s actually as much about the realms of faery as about this world (though the battle scenes are excellent, and seem historically plausible).

Quite a lot of time is spent in discussions about the intersection of this world and the Otherworld, and the nature of life and eternity. Questions of theodicy (the problem of evil) are central. Although the matrix of the philosophy seems Christian, there are elements that seem Buddhist and syncretist. This left me puzzled, but I’m not sure I understood it well enough to judge.

There were a couple typos (at least I think they were typos; perhaps I misunderstood the antique diction), and on very rare occasions the author made the questionable artistic choice of using exclamation points in exposition.

Still, all in all, I think Arms and White Samite is the kind of book C. S. Lewis would have liked very much.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Armored,’ by Mark Greaney

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Mark Greaney is the author of the very impressive Gray Man thriller series. I’ve enjoyed them, though I haven’t kept up with them recently. But I saw he’d started a new series, about security specialist Josh Duffy. I got a deal on Armored, so I checked it out. Greaney still knows how to write a gripping story.

Joshua Duffy, private security operative, lost a leg in Beirut, in a heroic action to protect a client’s wife. This left him in the humiliating position of being unable to find any job better than mall cop. Even more embarrassing, his wife is working nights cleaning offices – and making more money than he is.

So when he runs into an old buddy at the mall, and learns that he’s been hired for a job protecting a UN delegation tasked with making peace between drug cartels in Mexico, he asks the friend to get him in. He does not tell him about his missing leg. To his surprise, he gets the job, and soon he’s flying south of the border with a ragtag collection of bottom-of-the-barrel bodyguards – the company they’re working for doesn’t have the best reputation.

Theirs is a mission marked for disaster – and not by chance. Josh and his new buddies turn out to be nothing more than counters in a big game being played by high-level players, who have no plans to let any of them go home alive.

Plotting a story like this one has to be a daunting task – I’m not sure I could do it. The action tends toward what I like to call the “cinematic” – the kind you believe when you see it on a theater screen, but which seems less plausible when reading. That fortune which proverbially favors the bold requires some pretty intricate choreography of events to achieve in a story where every bend of the road brings a daunting new setback. I never entirely believed this story, but it was just believably enough – and exciting enough – to keep me riveted.

I enjoyed Armored immensely, and recommend it without reservation. Cautions for language and violence. References to Christian faith are uniformly respectful.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Kill Chase,’ by M. K. Farrar

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I feel cheated. I was tricked into reading Kill Chase, a book I wouldn’t have read if I’d known more about its author, and what’s worse, I liked it.

Two fishermen on the River Avon, near Bristol, England, hook a nasty catch – a severed human arm wrapped in a plastic bag. They call the police, who drag the river and find more body parts – from two different corpses.

Assigned to the case is Detective Inspector Ryan Chase, who’s having a hard time of it these days. He’s still mourning the death of his daughter, and his divorce from his wife. He works to distract his mind, and has developed symptoms of OCD.

He and his team have little to go on – how do you identify who dumped body parts in a river? Their investigations will lead them into the world of the homeless, and the good samaritans who serve them – but victims and victimizers can be hard to distinguish from one another.

Kill Chase was one of the more compelling books I’ve read in a while. The emphasis was on character, and I cared about Ryan Chase’s life and that of his partner, a young woman caring for her mentally disabled brother. I cared about the other characters too.

At the end, when I saw the author’s bio, I realized the reason for this emotion-intensive approach (Warning: sexism follows). The author, M. K. Farrar, is a woman. I should have guessed. Nowadays, authors who use initials instead of first names are usually female. Most of the time I watch out for that.

The author’s sex probably also explains the abundance of female police in this book. The Bristol force appears to be about 60 percent women, and all the important cops (except for Ryan himself) are female.

But I can’t deny that the author did a pretty good job of portraying her male hero. Fair play to her, as they say in Ireland.

Kill Chase is an impressive police procedural, Recommended.