Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dame,’ by Richard Stark

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Richard Stark, as is well known, was just one of the pseudonyms employed by the prolific author Donald E. Westlake. Stark was his most famous and frequently-employed nom de plume; generally he wrote his humorous books under his own name, and his cold, hard-boiled ones as Stark.

The Dame is one of the Stark books, an offshoot of his Parker series. The hero here is Alan Grofield, right-hand-man to the larcenous Parker and a sometime actor. Westlake/Stark gave Grofield four books of his own, of which this is the second.

The story begins with Grofield arriving at the airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He has been summoned here by way of a mysterious message, relayed by a corrupt general he knows. Someone wants to talk to him, and pays the way. Mostly out of curiosity, Grofield follows instructions, arriving at last at a remote jungle estate, where he meets the wife of a criminal boss along with her house guests. She wants Grofield to be her bodyguard. But he has taken an immediate dislike to her and turns the job down.

That night there is a murder. Soon the mob boss shows up with the announced purpose of identifying the murderer and administering some swift private justice. His chief suspect is Grofield. Grofield will have to come up with some fast moves and fast arguments to identify the true killer and save his own neck.

I can’t fault The Dame in terms of writing. Westlake/Stark was a pro, and he knew his business. The story offers plenty of danger and plenty of suspense, along with a certain mordant humor.

If I say I didn’t like it much, that’s simply personal taste. I tried reading Westlake some years back, reading a few of his much-admired Dortmunder books. But I could never get into them. Basically, I think I’ve never been able to sympathize much with criminals. Call it a prejudice.

I also noted some sophomoric Freudianism in play here, taking it for granted that chastity is just an expression of repression and neurosis.

So, my bottom line is that I recognize the quality of the product, but it wasn’t to my taste. Most readers seem to disagree.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dreadful Lemon Sky,’ by John D. MacDonald

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A fellow who was pretty handy with a boat once said that anything you feel good after is moral. But that implies that the deed is unchanging and the doer is unchanging. What you feel good after one time, you feel rotten after the next. And it is difficult to know in advance. And morality shouldn’t be experimental, I don’t think.

Another deal on a Travis McGee e-book means another Travis McGee review, to the joy of all. Author John D. MacDonald was at the peak of his powers back in the 1970s when The Dreadful Lemon Sky came out; the result is a neat, tight, engaging mystery.

Our hero Travis McGee, Fort Lauderdale boat dweller and beach bum, is not technically a private eye. He basically does favors for friends and friends referred by friends, mostly recovering stolen property, retaining a large percentage of the value as his fee. The Dreadful Lemon Sky begins with something less than a “salvage” job. Carrie Milligan, an old friend, asks him to hold a large amount of cash for her for one month. If she doesn’t come to claim it by then, he should get it to her sister in New Jersey.

But it doesn’t take that long. A few days later, there’s a news item – Carrie Milligan was killed by a truck while crossing a highway near her home in Bay City (which appeared to me to resemble very much the city of Palm Bay, where I once lived). McGee and his economist friend Meyer sail north in McGee’s houseboat for the funeral. There he meets the sister along with Carrie’s circle of friends. And at that point McGee starts getting suspicious. Something is going on under the surface here – he will discover drug smuggling, political corruption, sexual kink and betrayal. The solution will prove to be a complex one, and cruel.

Every McGee novel includes scenes that stick in my mind, even after decades. This one includes a great moment where McGee rescues Carrie’s sister from being fleeced by a funeral director, and McGee’s meditation on the corrosive nature of corporate takeovers of smaller brands. Also, he rents a yellow AMC Gremlin in Bay City, which happened to be exactly the car I was driving back when I first read the book. We Gremlin drivers needed all the support we could get.

Great story. Great reading experience. Cautions for violence, drug use and a pretty lyrical sex scene.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Hidden Realms: Scandinavian Folktales,” by G. K. Lund

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Once, the Lord wanted to test if all people could agree on something, like wishing for rainy weather. For three years, there was no rain on Earth, causing great distress. He thought that now everyone was in agreement to wish for rain, and it came. But on the same day, a woman had hung her clothes out to dry, and she was not happy at all. “That’s typical,” she complained. “If it’s been dry for three years, it certainly could have lasted one more day.”

I’ve long had a minor interest in folk beliefs and superstitions, for incorporating in my stories if for no other reason. The folk beliefs of Scandinavia interest me most, of course, but if you read accounts from further abroad, you tend to see great commonality. Everybody seems to have believed in “little people” who lived at the margins of society, and their tales of human interaction with such folk tend to exhibit very similar motifs.

G. K. Lund’s Hidden Realms: Scandinavian Folktales presents a selection of her own translations of folk stories (called sagn, which is pronounced very much like “song”). These are not fairy tales as such – as she takes pains to explain – they aren’t fully formed fantastic tales. They’re more like anecdotes. Some of them are only one or two lines long.

The greater part of the stories involve what were known as Vættir, a broad classification that includes all the Scandinavian fantastic beings. Mostly these are elves, dwarfs, trolls and what the Norwegians call nisser – like a brownie or a gnome. There is no exact taxonomy, of course; the creatures often mix and match traits and can be hard to distinguish from one another.

There are rules for dealing with them, of course, but the rules can vary from one story to another. It’s generally agreed that it’s not a good idea to follow them “into the hill” where they live, or to eat their food, but both those taboos are sometimes broken without harm. Sometimes humans can fool them and profit thereby, and at other times they pay a high price. Sometimes an act of kindness to them brings rich reward, and but at other times it can be a mistake, as when a kind farm wife sews a new suit of clothes for the “barn nisse” only to have him stop helping with the farm work because he doesn’t want to get them dirty.

Such stories fascinate me; I’ve always wanted to write a story about them that captured their alien logic. I’m not sure I’ve ever come close.

G. K. Lund’s translations in Hidden Realms are generally quite good, though I nitpicked from time to time, as one does. The book features very handsome illustrations – somewhat reminiscent of Theodor Kittelsen (see last night’s post) though a little smooth for my taste.

Very enjoyable, if you’re into this stuff.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Gallows Walk,’ by Giles Ekins

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Lately I’ve been spending too much time scrolling through those short videos you find on Facebook and YouTube (I believe many of them originate with Tiktok, but I’ve never dared cross that threshold). I had conceived a fear that, like so many people nowadays, I was losing my ability to concentrate. Perhaps my impatience with the novels I’ve been reading lately arose from losing my capacity to persevere through a book.

Gallows Walk by Giles Ekins relieved my mind greatly. The book has many flaws, but it engaged my interest and kept me reading.

Gallows Walk is the first volume in a series set in the town of West Garside, near the city of Sheffield in Yorkshire, during the early 1950s. Our hero is Detective Inspector Christopher Yarrow. He was a flyer in World War II, but lost an eye, rendering him unfit for duty. He is mourning the early death of his wife. He is an intelligent and sympathetic policeman, annoyed by the laziness and bullying tactics employed by some of the older detectives.

The story involves many subplots, but the main narrative concerns a robbery that goes badly wrong. A career criminal attempts to grab a bag of payroll money being carried by a messenger, but meeting resistance, ends up killing a man with a shotgun and, in his escape, hitting a little girl with his car, causing her death. The criminal goes into hiding, and we follow the manhunt as Inspector Yarrow follows up every clue with frustratingly slow progress, and the criminal discovers how hard it is to keep a low profile in a country howling for your blood.

Author Ekins has an unusual style. He tells the story in an episodic way, pausing now and then to provide historical information that’s not strictly necessary to the story – the sort of thing some authors would put in footnotes. The story moves at a leisurely pace, which readers could find boring. But it all worked quite well for me. I liked the depth of the characters – good and bad – and Yarrow’s sympathetic nature. Some digs are taken at the traditional sexual roles of the time, and I confess I sympathized a good deal with the old guard. Still, by and large I found the book very congenial.

The author has some bad habits. The grammar isn’t always correct, and he has a bad habit of forgetting the initial quotation marks in subsequent paragraphs of an extended speech. He also sometimes forgets which tense he’s writing in.

Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed Gallows Walk, and have bought the sequel.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Hunted,’ by James Phelan

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I bought this book previous to my recent resolution (dropped a few posts ago) to ease back on buying thrillers. Just as I grow older and more mellow in my tastes, the thriller genre is on an increasing trajectory of ever-more-implausible cinematic violence and suspense too intense for my old heart.

James Phelan’s The Hunted isn’t actually all that extreme in those regards, but I had trouble getting into it nonetheless.

As you probably don’t recall, I liked Lee Childs’ Jack Reacher books, but swore off when he made it obvious how much he despises Christian Evangelicals. James Phelan’s Jed Walker is advertised as in the Reacher vein, and his last name’s Walker, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Jed Walker, former Air Force commando (apparently such creatures exist), former CIA covert operative, is similar to Jack Reacher in size, strength, and fighting skills. Otherwise, he lacks Reacher’s intriguing Zen simplicity. Jed is basically a fairly normal guy, with relationships and everything. A couple years ago he was forced to fake his death and stay dead for a year – during which time his wife grieved and then remarried. He still loves her.

He also has a father, another covert operations type. Jed is searching for him, but not because of filial piety. His father is somehow involved with a project called Zodiac, a planned sequence of terrorist attacks, each to be the trigger for the next.

In his investigations, Jed learns that several members of the strike team that killed Osama Bin Laden have been murdered, all in a short period of time. He believes this is connected to Zodiac in some way. He heads to the Ozarks to locate the one survivor – a wilderness-wise Marine who lives in a remote compound, guarding his family. Jed races with a team of assassins to reach the man first.

On the way he teams up with the man’s cousin – who is, of course, a young, pretty woman who does her best to seduce him (but Jed is admirably resistant – he still loves his wife).

There was nothing particularly wrong with The Hunted. It kept the action going through many very short chapters. The characters were varied and individual, though they never really grabbed me. I thought the villains’ motives were a little muddled, and the climax confused me – though that may have been my fault for not paying close enough attention.

The author has an unfortunate tendency to repeat observational passages, and could have used better editing. He is apparently English, as he occasionally falls into Britishisms, such as “crisps” and “boot” (for a car trunk).

The Hunted was okay. You might like it. I found it a little thin.

Fiction, Reviews

Reasons to Watch ‘Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’

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Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, the latest TV series from a once-beloved franchise, ended this week. It is a space pirate adventure that many compared to Treasure Island, because of a mythical planet loaded with treasure and Jude Law’s character being named (among other things) Captain John Silvo. I watched the show with my oldest daughter, who noticed Silvo’s character arc resembles Long John Silver.

I said when I posted a review of the series’ first half that it wasn’t very Star-Warsy, because nothing essential to the story is essential to the core story of Star Wars; but the second half improved on that front. It would be a big spoiler (perhaps the biggest) to give the strongest bit of evidence on this point, but I could note the introduction of a light saber in episode 5 and an important part of Star Wars history comes into play by the end.

We enjoyed it. The children, who are each roughly 13 years old, mature during the adventure–not much, but noticeably. Silvo is the most interesting, because he’s a charismatic pirate of uncertain motivation. Is he a complete villain or is he just greedy or insecure? Will he do right by the kids at the end?

It’s a good show, not a deep one. It didn’t have syrupy morals found along the way and it had a few moments of … peril. But the final episode leaned hard on the logic of a show made for younger audiences. Again, I don’t want to give big spoilers, but I will note that Dr. Doofenshmirtz has repeatedly taught us the value of not building self-destruct switches into your villainous weapons and that applies to other mechanics as well.

Reports says Skeleton Crew hasn’t drawn many viewers, and the critics I listen to blame previous shows for wasting any hopes the fans may still have. A good show, they say, won’t draw anyone back. It needs to be blockbuster. And a TV show probably can’t get there. Maybe later viewing numbers will improve its reception, but the current outlook is that Disney doesn’t know how to tell great stories.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Chaos Agent,’ by Mark Greaney

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I think I’m getting too old for thrillers. I find (somewhat to my horror) that I want more from my reading than explosions and gunfights and chases. Next thing I know I’ll be reading Trollope and Thackery. Shoot me now.

Anyway, Mark Greaney’s The Chaos Agent wasn’t actually that bad, compared to most of the competition. There were lots of fights and murders and our heroes took some damage, but it wasn’t the kind of unbelievable action where the hero suffers broken bones and a concussion, rips the IV tubes out of his arm, and stomps back out to carry on the fight and absorb yet more damage. This book was big and loud without being wholly unbelievable.

In fact, its believability is the most disturbing thing about it.

In The Chaos Agent, Greaney’s continuing hero, Court Gentry, the Gray Man, free-lance operative, is living under an assumed name with his girlfriend, defected Russian agent Zoya Zakharova, in Central America, determined to keep a low profile. But Zoya gets contacted by an old friend, a mentor to whom she owes a favor. He needs her help – a number of computer geniuses around the world have been assassinated recently, and he’s trying to get a Russian genius to safety. Court agrees to help with the operation, but it all goes sideways – they barely survive.

Soon the pair is hip-deep in a deep-cover US operation to find and eliminate the assassin. Only it’s not an ordinary assassin. It’s a coordinated operation by killer robots – drones and armed four-legged machines. What’s worse, the robots’ actions and reactions indicate they are not being controlled electronically, but are actually thinking for themselves. This is high level, untethered Artificial Intelligence, faster and more deadly than any human.

The Chaos Agent is really quite a thoughtful book, underneath all the fight scenes and heroics. Serious questions are asked about the implications of AI, what kind of controls we need – and what kind of controls may even be possible. It’s all pretty scary.

The Chaos Agent is a good book. A good entry in one of the best action series out there. Cautions for violence and language, I hardly need add.

My main complaint is the length. I don’t think a thriller needs to be this long. Keep it snappy, authors.

Fiction, Poetry, Reviews

Sir Gawain: What It Means to Be a Real Man

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I didn’t realize Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was set at Christmastime when I picked it up several days ago, so reading it during the Christmas break was seasonal as well as enriching. It could be the poem for modern men today. It’s focus on chastity in the face of strong seduction would make modern readers heads spin.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight begins with a striking man walking into King Arthur’s court.

“For all men marvelled what it might mean
That a horseman and his horse should have such a colour
As to grow green as grass . . .”

He says he’s looking for sport, which is the feeling of everyone in the court already. Arthur loved hearing the exploits of his men. The green knight offered a challenge: Any man could strike him with a fierce blow if he would agree to seek him out in one year’s time to receive a blow in kind from him. Even though everyone thought such a challenge was madness, they also couldn’t refuse it.

“‘By heaven,’ then said Arthur, ‘What you ask is foolish,
But as you firmly seek folly, find it you shall.'”

Sir Gawain, who is the greatest of Arthur’s knights (in the early tales) and his nephew, is the one to suggest to the king someone else accept the challenge in case it goes the way everyone suspects. No need to lose the king to a jolly green giant.

This is the part of the story you’ve likely heard. What follows is another regular year until All Saints Day when Gawain leaves to find the Green Chapel, because “Why falter I or fear? What should man do but dare?” He searched without any prospects until Christmastime. Then he prays and then comes across “the comeliest castle” that “shimmered and shone through the shining oaks.”

He stays there several nights enjoying great and chivalrous hospitality, and that’s when things get weird. The host and all of his men intend to spend the next day hunting, but he urges Gawain to continue resting at the castle, and he proposes this “bargain”: whatever gains they earn in the woods or in the castle will be exchanged. Gawain thinks it’s a great deal.

I found this bargain very strange. What could Gawain possibly achieve within the castle? Spoiler alert: It’s his good host’s wife!

Part three describes three temptations or seductions paired with the exploits of the hunting party. Readers and listeners are meant understand the hunting party illustrates the Gawain’s seduction. That’s the reason I say young men ought to read and talk about this poem. If a woman boldly invited you into adultery, how would you handle it? For Gawain, chivalric manners are high virtue, so he can’t just turn her away. In fact, he seems to agree with her proposal, “but Sir Gawain was on guard in a gracious manner.”

The text seems to say Gawain would not indulge this woman because he is his imminent death at the hand of the Green Knight (line 1285). Maybe that is one motivator, the other and primary one being Christian morality, and if it is factor, doesn’t that strike sparks against modern men who would likely argue the other way. Believing they were about to die, why not take the host’s wife?

One theme we can draw from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a common question that brings out bucket lists: If you knew you were going to die in a year, what would you do? The greatest knight in Camelot not only sought out the man he believed would kill him but also sought every virtue he could recognize.

Why would anyone choose to throw all morality in the bin because he believed he would die in a year? We’re all going to die–this winter or next, this decade or next. Does believing you can see your finish line approaching mean virtue no longer has value? Wouldn’t that argue that you believe virtue has no real value for you now, while your death is still hidden from you?

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder, Mere Murder,’ by Bruce Beckham

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I had gotten a little behind in my reading of Bruce Beckham’s Inspector Skelgill mysteries, set in Cumberland, which is why I’m reviewing another so soon after reviewing the previous installment. This new one, Murder, Mere Murder, is one of the best of the series, I think.

Buttermere is the lake near which Inspector Skelgill grew up, but he doesn’t get up there much anymore. It’s out of the way, and has no good boat access for fishing – beside which, the fishing isn’t very good anyway.

But one day a couple hobby divers discover a woman’s body, wrapped in plastic, at the bottom of the mere. Immediately Skelgill heads for the area, along with his subordinates, Sergeants Jones and Leyton, to find out whether anybody’s missing. Initially, clues are few. Yet there is no lack of shady citizens who seem to have one or two secrets. A couple local men were having affairs with mysterious women who might conceivably have been the deceased. And there’s a strange lesbian couple, one of them a famous mystery writer, who both show an unexpected sexual interest in Skelgill. Meanwhile, an ambitious police rival is jockeying to grab the case for himself.

There’s a lot of subtle humor here as Skelgill deals with the predatory lesbians, but there’s also well-crafted rising tension and a climax worthy of a movie.

My only quibbles are (as usual) the present tense narrative (though it doesn’t really bother me; I only object on principle), and the fact that the author misuses the phrase, “begs the question.” He should know better.

Quite entertaining. Recommended.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘A Short History of England,’ by G.K. Chesterton

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We make the Puritans picturesque in a way they would violently repudiate, in novels and plays they would have publicly burnt. We are interested in everything about them, except the only thing in which they were interested at all…. About the Puritans we can find no great legend. We must put up as best we can with great literature.

Anyone approaching G.K. Chesterton’s A Short History of England in the hope of learning many facts is likely to be sadly disappointed. I expect Chesterton himself would have been astonished at the very expectation – in his day, anyone who bought a Chesterton book knew he’d be getting a polemic. A witty polemic that might be very illuminating – even if one disagrees with the premises – but the author assumes a fair knowledge of the dates and facts from the outset. What Chesterton offers is a fresh perspective.

In this relatively short, very superficial overview of English history, the author has two advantages in creating his provocations – first of all, he’s G.K. Chesterton, a man who forever looked at the world as if in a fun house mirror or a photographic negative; and secondly that he’s a Catholic, a perpetual outsider in a land of lapsed Protestants.

Sometimes he can be surprising – he seems to anticipate interpretations of events that were unusual at the time, but are commonplace today – such as that the Saxon invaders in Arthur’s time may have only been an aristocratic minority.

As Chesterton sees it, England went wrong at two major junctures (aside from the Reformation, something he thinks self-evident) – when Richard II lost his bid to reform the government, and when, more recently, England began to ally itself with the Germans. He is writing, of course, as World War I rages, and is comforted by the fact that England is once again allied with France, which he considers a much more fitting combination.

I do recommend A Short History of England, but only if you already know a good deal of English history. (I’ll admit a lot of the names were unfamiliar to me, too.)