Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Hark!’ by Ed McBain

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It had been many years since I’d read a novel by the late Ed McBain (who was actually Evan Hunter, which name was itself at first a pseudonym for Salvatore Lombino, who legally changed it to Hunter). I was a fan of McBain’s 87th Precinct novels for a long time, but Eight Black Horses offended me. It had to do with a rapist who was targeting pro-life women, and at one point the author had a policewoman musing that she thought both sides were wrong. I thought it was awfully generous of McBain to concede that pro-lifers were no worse than rapists, and stopped reading the series.

But Hark!, an 2004 87th Precinct book, came up on a deal recently, and I figured, after all we’ve been through since, Eight Black Horses was actually pretty mild stuff. I figured I’d give it another chance.

Verdict: Hark! wasn’t bad, but I don’t like McBain’s writing as much as I used to.

The 87th Precinct books are set in a city called Isola, which is obviously New York City under an assumed name. The central character has always been Detective Steve Carella, but a regular cast of other detectives supports him. A recurring character in many of the books has been a criminal called “the Deaf Man.” The Deaf Man is a genius, and bears a grudge against the 87th. So he periodically reappears sending them mocking messages that provide cryptic clues to whatever major score he’s planning on their doorstep in order to prove how dumb they are.

This time he’s sending them hand-delivered notes containing quotations, mostly from Shakespeare. Much of the book consists of the detectives brainstorming what the messages might mean. There seem to be recurring themes of word reversals, palindromes, and anagrams. Also hints about books. But there really isn’t enough information to guess, which is just the Deaf Man’s game.

Several subplots involve man-woman relationships. Steve Carella is planning a double wedding – remarriages for his widowed mother and his sister. Detective Burt Kling is dating a black doctor, and feeling the social pressure. Detective Cotton Hawes is dating a television reporter and wondering whether she cares more for him than for her career. Another detective is dating the only woman on the squad. Even the Deaf Man is living with a prostitute who’s helping him with his scheme but may be smarter than he assumes.

But the best part of the book, for me, was a small subplot involving a detective from another precinct named Fat Ollie Weeks. Fat Ollie is a perfect comic relief character – he’s fat (of course), and he’s not too bright. His ideas of police procedure are Neanderthal, and he’s a bigot and a sexist. But recently he started dating a Hispanic woman cop, and he’s finding better impulses blossoming within him, to his own surprise and discomfort. Also, he’s working on writing a novel which is apparently pretty good.

Hark! was an okay novel, but I found it a little slow, and all the police brainstorming got a bit wearying (though there were amusing moments of cop ignorance about Shakespeare). I was reminded how society has changed during a scene where a superior is apologetic for asking the woman detective for “a woman’s point of view.” Back then that kind of talk was considered sexist — today the woman’s point of view is considered the only acceptable point of view.

Also, I rebel against the whole idea of the Deaf Man. At the beginning, Ed McBain’s books were praised for their authentic descriptions of police procedure. But the Deaf Man is pure Hollywood. Real criminals don’t act like that, or so I’ve been informed.

Still, Hark! wasn’t bad, in its way.

Fiction, Reviews

Star Wars: Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn

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I’ve never been inclined to pick up books based on movie franchises. The movies have been enough for me, but the Disney Star Wars list of sorry productions provoked me to seek out Star Wars novels. I learned Timothy Zahn’s trilogy was the best set, so I picked up Heir to the Empire, published in 1992.

“Now, for the first time: the authorized continuation of the legendary Star Wars saga . . .” The story picks up five years after Return of the Jedi, with the Rebel

forces trying to put together a new republic. Princess Leia is the leading figure in every diplomatic endeavor, which is increasingly difficult for the soon-to-be-mother of two. Her husband, Han Solo, is also working too much to make the new government as functional as it needs to be. Luke Skywalker has the smallest role of the three, that of friend, security guard, and last living Jedi. What can he do to train Leia and the children when the time comes?

What they don’t know is that an Imperial Grand Admiral has survived. They know the Empire still has loyalist planets, stormtroopers, Star Destroyers and other ships, but they don’t know that a gifted military strategist is rebuilding a fleet. Raids on Republic outposts look like mere harassment, but Grand Admiral Thrawn is working a long-term plan to bring every Republic planet to its knees, if not its grave.

Two things stand out about this novel. First, the characters sound like their movie representation. Some of that is probably fan-service, callbacks to movie dialogue, but it’s thrilling to read good characters in a good story. Second, it’s a solid story—coincidences or contrivances. Everyone has proper motivations, making reasonable decisions, and conflicting with each other naturally. At one point, the heroes get caught up in an Imperial raid, and they naturally conclude they’re being followed, but they aren’t. The bad guys were there for other reasons. No one acts like an idiot. No motivations shift inexplicably. And Luke comes through like a hero.

I’ll let you know how the next one goes when I get to it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘One Fearful Yellow Eye,’ by John D. MacDonald

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On this kind of a Monday I know I’m going to get killed in this line of work. It should interest the statisticians. As I am the only fellow in my line of work, it would give it a rating of 100% mortality. Just as, until we lost an astronaut, travel in orbit was the safest travel man ever devised with 0% mortality for millions upon millions of passenger miles. Safer than wheelchairs.

It’s always cause for celebration for this reader when another Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald shows up on bargain sale. This time it was One Fearful Yellow Eye, notable (in this reader’s opinion) for the quality of its prose.

Years ago, our hero Travis McGee, lanky and languid Florida “salvage specialist,” found a young woman named Glory contemplating suicide on a beach. She’d had an astonishing run of bad luck and tragedy. He took her home, fed her and reassured her and took her to his bed, and eventually she went on with her life. She met an older man, Dr. Fortner Geiss, a prominent Chicago physician, who admitted to her he was dying, but they gave each other a couple good years, in spite of his adult children’s hostility. Now he’s dead, and she’s discovered that his considerable wealth has disappeared. In his last months, he’d converted everything to cash, which is nowhere to be found. The inevitable – but counterintuitive in such a good man – conclusion is that he’d been blackmailed.

So Glory calls on McGee. His deal is to look for things people have had stolen from them, and if he finds it he keeps half. That’s okay with her.

McGee flies to Chicago and agrees to look into the problem. He’s a little out of his element in a Chicago winter, and Dr. Geiss’s son and daughter are no warmer – especially his daughter Heidi, a gorgeous ice queen. It’s not a big surprise when Heidi becomes McGee’s special rehabilitation project.

One Fearful Yellow Eye is not, in my opinion, one of the best McGee novels in terms of plot. I thought the ending strayed a little close to deus ex machina.

But in terms of prose, I’d rate it one of MacDonald’s best. He was soaring as a stylist in those days. Although I’d entirely forgotten the plot here, I found more lines and passages than usual that had stuck in my mind from previous readings:

“Then, bless you, I fed him that speech you made a lifetime ago on Sanibel Island. If there was one sunset every twenty years, how would people react to them? If there were ten seashells in all the world, what would they be worth? If people could make love just once a year, how carefully would they pick their mates?”

The day was like a dirty galvanized bucket clapped down over the city….

I found a parking slot around the corner from Heidi’s place, and as I was going to enter the downstairs foyer, I turned on impulse and looked upward and picked out a big fat drifting flake, stuck my tongue out, and maneuvered under it. Consumer report: The snow is still pretty good. Cold as ever. Melts as fast. And you can’t hardly taste the additives.

Anyway, I got a kick out of One Fearful Yellow Eye. Cautions for sexual situations and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dancing In the Dark,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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Another Toby Peters novel by Stuart M. Kaminsky. Light, seriocomic entertainment. Can’t go wrong with these. In fact, I think I found Dancing In the Dark a little funnier than most of the others.

Hard-luck Hollywood PI Toby Peters has been having a run of unaccustomed good fortune. He actually has a little money in the bank for a change, and his creditors aren’t hounding him. Then he gets hired by Fred Astaire. Astaire’s job poses certain challenges. A woman named Lyla, mistress to gangster “Fingers” Intaglio (who got his nickname because he likes to cut people’s fingers off) demanded he get her dancing lessons from Astaire. Once Astaire agreed, she started pressuring him to go to bed with her, or else she’d denounce him to her knife-happy boyfriend. Toby’s on the case, even if it involves learning to dance – a pastime for which he has zero talent.

Before he knows it, Layla has been murdered, and she’s only the first of a string of victims. Backed up by his cowardly dentist friend and his gigantic ex-wrestler/poet office landlord, Toby does his best to avoid gangsters, solve the murders, and keep Astaire out of the newspapers. Meanwhile, he finds himself in a new relationship with a woman who got away many years ago.

The sexual mores here are not ones I approve of (but what else is new?). And Toby makes a decision to let one suspect off that puzzles me.

On the other hand, at one point he finds himself dancing with Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth. That seems to me to qualify as a good day even if somebody’s shooting at you.

Bottom line – Dancing In the Dark is a fun book, and one of my favorites in a fun series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Before Dawn,’ by John Corwin

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Unless you’ve been in a monastery for a while, it would be pretty hard to read John Corwin’s Dead Before Dawn without thinking of Jack Reacher. Corwin’s hero, Amos Carver, is a former operative for yet another super-secret military black ops unit. But some years back the unit was abolished, with Carver left under a cloud of suspicion. His superior, a woman named Rhodes who’d been his friend, felt particularly betrayed. Carver dropped out of sight to live a beach bum’s life in Florida. Then he got a message from Rhodes, asking him to come quickly to the town of Morganville, Georgia, where she is now chief of police. Like Jack Reacher, he travels light, owning few possessions.

When Carver arrives in Morganville, hiking up the highway from the bus stop, he finds a pink pistol lying in the middle of the roadway. He knows that pistol – it belonged to Rhodes, who would never have mislaid it. Carver does not pick it up. He recognizes a set-up, and immediately goes on defense. The attack that’s supposed to kill him fails, and soon he’s in jail in Morganville, where someone tries to murder him in his cell. Those are just the first of the threats he’ll meet and handle in this town. Strategy was never Carver’s forte. He was a strong-arm guy, good at action. Rhodes was the thinker – but Carver will need to learn to think too before he can unravel a plot that just keeps leading to higher and higher-level conspiracies.

I have no complaints about the writing in Dead Before Dawn. It was professional and tight. The dramatic tension ratcheted up nicely all the way. The characters were adequate. There was even a happy ending of sorts.

My reservations are personal. I didn’t like the scenario of a guy going into fire fights against professionals with no backup except for two women (no doubt a concession to feminism, as if many women were going to read this book). I was also uncomfortable with the vigilante elements – vigilantism always troubles me, though I don’t deny it might be necessary in desperate situations. But I found it odd that a vigilante was called upon here to save (minor spoiler alert!) the rule of law in America.

Still, Dead Before Dawn was a good story, written by a professional. Can’t deny that. Worth the money.

Non-fiction, Reviews

Review at last: ‘The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien’

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In no circumstances will I agree to being photographed again for such a purpose. I regard all such intrusions into my privacy as an impertinence, and I can no longer afford the time for it. The irritation it causes me spreads its influence over a far greater time than the actual intrusion occupies.

I have finished, at last, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. (I recommend this revised and expanded edition, not the one I read – which is marred by numerous typographical errors and wrongly hyperlinked notes. I found the book, nonetheless, informational, fascinating, and (occasionally) moving.

The main impression it leaves me with, though (I’m afraid), is that (having read this book as well as C. S. Lewis’ complete correspondence) all in all, I’d rather have spent time with “Jack” Lewis than with Tolkien. Lewis was – if only through self-discipline – a more easygoing man, more inclined to suffer fools (like me). This was indeed one of Tolkien’s criticisms of his friend – Lewis was always letting people take advantage of him.

Tolkien, on the other hand, seems to have been rather tetchy. He was thin-skinned and protective of his turf. I get the impression that he nursed a grudge all his life against the Protestants around him, despite having many Protestant friends. He blamed their persecutions, in part, for the early death of his mother, an RC convert. He resented being made to feel like an outsider in his own, beloved country.

Of course, knowing a man’s letters is different from knowing the man. Much of Tolkien’s correspondence deals with business – teaching at Oxford and communicating with his publishers. He was forever behind in his work – he spent decades finishing The Lord of the Rings, and further decades trying to put the Silmarillion in shape, promising his publisher all the way that he’d get back to them as soon as he was finished with grading essays or handling domestic emergencies. (The Silmarillion was finally published after his death.) No doubt the prolonged stress contributed to his occasional short temper.

I was, of course, intrigued by what we learn here of his relations with the other Inklings. I was especially surprised by his early references to Charles Williams, which were more positive than I’d expected. I’d understood that Tolkien mistrusted Williams, but he seems to have gotten along well with him. But he explains this in a long 1965 letter:

I knew Charles Williams only as a friend of C.S.L. whom I met in his company when, owing to the War, he spent much of his time in Oxford. We liked one another and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest) but we had nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels.

He goes on to say of “Jack” himself:

But Lewis was a very impressionable man, and this was abetted by his great generosity and capacity for friendship. The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not ‘influence’ as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby.

The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien is well worth reading for any fan of The Lord of the Rings. It will take some time getting through it, but it’s worth it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Past Transgressions,’ by Dave Sinclair

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A thriller writer’s vocation, when it comes down to it, is simply to write exciting books. All the better if he can write a decent sentence. Any level of wit in the narrative is a definite plus.

So if I wasn’t entirely happy with Dave Sinclair’s Past Transgressions, you can mark it down to personal prejudice on my part. It says nothing about the quality of the work.

Mason Nash, our hero, is a former MI6 assassin who has retired to teach history in a small English town. He believes he has put his past behind him. He’s changed his name and adopted a low profile. He’s even become a Buddhist and sworn off all violence.

But a team of assassins shows up with guns (apparently) to kill him in the pub one evening, and he doesn’t know why. He has no choice but to drop his new life altogether and go on the run. His old habits reassert themselves quickly – and he discovers to his surprise that he’s enjoying it more than he cares to admit.

Past Transgressions soon takes us to South America, to a luxury yacht and to a secret mountain fortress. Nash learns that people from his past are hunting for him for a surprising reason, and he gets drawn into a high-level conspiracy.

As I mentioned above, Past Transgressions is a well-written novel, generally speaking. The prose and dialogue are good, and the characters are well-drawn, and there’s quiet humor here and there.

The plot is somewhat outlandish, in the way of thriller novels, but the action isn’t as over the top you see in many such books, so full marks for restraint there.

My petty personal objections were 1) that I found the hero’s persistent efforts to survive in a bullet-rich environment without killing anybody somewhat annoying. In that world, refusing to kill an attacker is unjust to one’s partners – you could easily get them killed themselves.

2) We have the requisite Girl Boss in the mix here – a gorgeous, deadlier-than-the-male female agent actually named “Eva Destruction.”

3) There’s a veiled political dig at one point, and I think I know where it’s directed. I suppose I should be grateful it wasn’t more explicit.

But mostly I think it was the pacifism that annoyed me. I’m probably prejudiced against Buddhists.

In short, I won’t be reading more books in this series, but I must concede that the author did a good job in terms of his own objectives.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Athelstan,’ by Tom Holland

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By the time of Athelstan’s consecration, the Thames estuary, no longer churned by the oars of Viking dragon ships, had become a scene of prosperity and peace. Boats crammed the wharfs built by Alfred within the ancient walls of London; fields stretched unburnt down to the banks of the river as it snaked inland; Kingston, set amid the colours of ripening harvest, provided a fit stage for the awesome ritual about to unfold.

King Athelstan (called “Athelstan the Mighty” in the sagas), is an interesting and enigmatic Anglo-Saxon king. I remember an entry about Alfred the Great in a kids’ encyclopedia from my childhood. It said that Alfred was the only Anglo-Saxon king remembered as “the Great.” But Athelstan certainly might have shared the cognomen – he was the first king to rule a united realm called “England,” embracing all the English speaking sub-kingdoms. And he won a victory over the Vikings (and the Scots) at Brunanburh which equaled or surpassed Alfred’s triumph at Ethandun.

Tom Holland’s Athelstan is part of the Penguin Monarchs series. It’s a short, brisk book for the non-specialist, but the author brings to it scholarship, literary skill, and psychological insight. The big problem with Athelstan’s story is that (although he was as keen on learning and record-keeping as his grandfather Alfred) relatively little documentary evidence remains to us from his reign. Historical focus changed after the Norman conquest, and much was lost.

So historians have to do what they can with the sparse surviving records, supplemented by outside reports (including, with caution, the Icelandic sagas), archaeology, and informed speculation. Tom Holland provides an excellent introduction here.

Athelstan was a highly readable book, and I enjoyed it. It increased my admiration for this undeservedly obscure historical figure.

Reviews

Old film review: ‘A Study In Terror’

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It was back in the 1970s, when it was still a fairly recent film, that I first saw “A Study In Terror” – on a small, black and white TV, I believe.

I was very happy with it at the time. I very much liked John Neville (a top rank English stage actor who never quite made the A list in the movies) as Holmes. I was delighted when Robert Morley showed up as Holmes’ brother Mycroft (Mycroft’s first appearance ever on screen). And I relished a fight scene where Holmes snapped a spring-loaded blade from his walking stick and fenced with his attackers (“Nothing like cold steel, eh, Holmes?” says Watson).

I watched it again on YouTube the other day. I didn’t like it quite as much this time (my tastes have matured, I think) but it deserves more attention than it’s gotten.

This 1965 movie was produced in collaboration with Sir Nigel films, a company controlled by the Conan Doyle estate. However, it’s not based on any Doyle adventure, but is rather an original story in which Holmes investigates the Jack the Ripper killings. The story flirts with the slasher/horror genre, within the bounds of what you could get away with in theaters in those days. The blood and gore is mostly just suggested. Which is fine with me.

I was somewhat disappointed by the look of the film. This was “Mod” 1960s, and the costuming is unnecessarily bright for Victorian tastes. I also regretted Donald Houston’s performance as Watson. He’s closer to Nigel Bruce than to Edward Hardwick – though not quite as cartoonish as Bruce.

If you’re fond of Hammer Films’ “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” “A Study In Terror” is very much in the same vein, and John Neville was every bit as good a Holmes as Peter Cushing (whom I revere) was. In some ways, I think, he anticipated Jeremy Brett’s approach. I wish Neville had had a chance to play the role again.

Fiction, Reviews

‘With a Mind to Kill,’ by Anthony Horowitz

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The nights are never kind to Moscow. With nowhere to go, the traffic disappears and the streets seem to parade themselves, mile upon mile of empty concrete glinting uselessly in the flare of the sodium lights. The great monuments and buildings, no matter how proud of themselves in the day, stand there like old men in the darkness, their windows black, their doors bolted fast. No lovers meet. No revellers make their way home from jazz clubs or restaurants. The best you will hope to see are clusters of soldiers or policemen, muttering to themselves as they make their presence known because the population needs to be watched and guarded even when everyone is asleep. Otherwise, nothing moves. The entire city takes on the psychopathy of the graveyard; pleased with itself because it will be there for ever, unaware that it is actually already dead.

This guy Anthony Horowitz is a first-class writer; I’m ashamed I’d never heard of him till recently. Aside from writing early seasons of Midsomer Murders, he’s written a series of young adult thrillers, the Hawthorne and Horowitz mystery series, and three authorized James Bond novels. I’ve reviewed the first already, and I picked up this final one the other day on a deal. I’ll have to catch the middle book at some point. As I mentioned previously, I don’t much care for Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, but I like the way Horowitz does them.

With a Mind to Kill fits into the chronology just after The Man With the Golden Gun. James Bond is in Jamaica, still recuperating from brainwashing by the Russians, and having been shot in the last book. But he’s called back to London by his superiors, who have a daunting assignment for him. They want him to return to Soviet Russia, pretending to still be under the Communists’ control. He’s to present himself to his former captors, who will either kill him or put him to work on some very secretive project they’ve got going, one British Intelligence wants very much to learn more about. Bond can expect to be tortured when he returns, but the experts believe he’s back in control of himself.

Bond wants very much to get revenge on the people who nearly erased his personality and turned him into a traitorous living weapon. He expects the beatings, the tortures, and the mind games they’ll subject him to. He does not expect the woman who’ll find her way into his heart, one whom he’ll never be sure he can trust…

In Horowitz’s hands, James Bond (I think) takes on greater depth than we’re used to. This James Bond is feeling his age and his many wounds, and is pondering retirement once this job is finished – if he survives.

I thoroughly enjoyed With a Mind to Kill. It’s expertly written. Recommended.