On the beach at Southend, England, a ragtag group of young “guerilla filmmakers” is shooting a movie, one they hope will lead to their big break. Their “star,” a washed-up, alcoholic TV actor, appears to be dozing by the pier. But he’s not dozing – he’s dead. It looks as if he fell asleep there the night before and froze to death. But the crime scene investigator notices suspicious signs. This brings in the police team – Inspector Joe Hogarth and his younger subordinates, Detectives Palmer and Simmons. Then, when Hogarth’s oldest, greatest enemy appears, a villain who’s now a member of Parliament (Tory, of course), Hogarth’s back is well and truly put up—for better or worse. So begins The Poison Path, by Solomon Carter.
I’ve read one Inspector Hogarth book before. I found it well-written but rather dreary; the hero is solitary, depressed, and has a drinking problem. This is a later book, and he seems to be doing a little better – there’s some subdued flirtation with his female subordinate, Palmer. Still, he remains driven, lonely, and obsessed. He’d fit in well in a Scandinavian Noir story, I think. One interesting and unusual element was that our hero is not always right, like so many fictional detectives. In fact, he’s wrong quite a lot of the time. Mostly, he lets his feelings run away with him.
So, all in all, The Poison Path wasn’t bad. Not my favorite kind of story, but I’ve got no real complaints.
The Burnside books by David Chill comprise a PI series I’d never heard of. Yet in many ways Bull Rush was exactly what I look for in a detective book.
Burnside (like Spenser he goes by his surname) is a private eye in Los Angeles. An old acquaintance comes to his office to ask him to look for his missing adult son. The young man was once a hot pro football prospect (Burnside himself is a former college player and sports culture permeates the story), but now he works for a slightly shady real estate operation. The young man has had trouble with drugs in the past, so it’s likely he’s passed out somewhere.
Burnside isn’t entirely happy with the job – the father was never someone he liked a whole lot. On top of that, Burnside knows he got the referral from another mutual “friend,” a crooked sports agent who’s always playing the angles. But it’s a legitimate job, and he isn’t in a position to turn it down.
Then, in the course of his search, Burnside stumbles on a murder victim. Now he’ll have to deal with the police. And soon, with politicians and the very wealthy.
What pleased me best about Bull Rush was its traditional qualities. Burnside doesn’t have an ideological agenda. He doesn’t have a kick-butt female partner. He’s not involved in deconstructing or normalizing anything. He’s just doing a human job among human beings. The main way he differs from your classic Golden Age gumshoe is in having a wife and a young son. Oh yes, and a psychotherapist he sees regularly.
The writing in Bull Rush was clean and professional, without either pyrotechnics or illiteracies. The characters were believable, the dialogue sharp. This is honest, meat-and-potatoes detective fiction. I recommend it highly.
Duty is based on something more profound than hope, on faith that what is too wrong to endure will be made right, rectified by a system of justice that underlies all of nature, far beneath the subatomic level, a system that may right a wrong in a day or through the passage of time or outside of time. The schedule isn’t ours to protest or endorse. His duty is to act with all the skill and wisdom he possesses, not with hope but with conviction.
Rejoice! We have a new Dean Koontz book. He just keeps rolling them out – always good, sometimes exceptional. After Death is somewhat reminiscent of Koontz’ recent series of novellas about a character called Nameless. But it handles similar concepts in a different way.
Michael Mace was dead, and is alive again. It wasn’t a miracle in the religious sense, but it still may change the world. Michael was head of security at Beautification Research, a company that was ostensibly a cosmetics business but actually did top-secret genetic and nanotech research. When an accidental leak kills everyone in the building, Michael dies with all the rest. But then he wakes up. And now he’s changed. He has new powers that give him mental access to all the information on the internet. No firewall can stop him.
The first item on his agenda is to help a single mother named Nina Dozier and her son John. Michael’s best friend and co-worker Shelby was very fond of them, and probably would have courted her if he’d lived. They’re in danger from John’s natural father, a gang lord who’s decided it’s time to claim his son and make him his successor. Nina will have to be taught a lesson too, for dissing him.
But there’s a larger danger than that. It comes from the Internal Security Agency, the corrupt law enforcement body that supports the corrupt bureaucracy now running the country. Their chief agent is a psychopath named Duran Calaphas, an efficient killer but increasingly delusional. He takes Michael’s appearance as a personal sign for him, giving him a worthy foe he must destroy in order to achieve his grandiose personal destiny. Without loyalty to anyone or anything but himself, Calaphas will stop at nothing, destroy anything, to kill Michael Mace. And his companions.
Koontz hits every note precisely, manipulates the reader with the deft hand of a master. It’s beautiful to behold. Especially delightful (for me) was one amazing plot twist unlike anything I’d ever read before (it involves storytelling). A delightful moment.
My only quibble (spoiler alert) was that I thought the ending might have been too good to be true. But that’s no great failing in a book. No failing at all, actually. We’re allowed a happy ending from time to time.
‘More and more, people tend to confuse “understanding” with “agreement”,’ he said, leaning forward in his chair, and resting his elbows on his knees. ‘If you say you understand something bad… like a racist or sexist comment, for example… then people accuse you of being racist or sexist. They deliberately confuse understanding with agreement….”
Two “gripping” novels in a row that were actually gripping. I’m on a roll, I guess. Up Close and Fatal, by Fergus McNeill, was a fascinating, sometimes creepy ride.
Tom Pritchard is an Englishman living in New York City. Once a successful journalist, his career is on the skids now. He’s divorced and guilty about neglecting his young son.
One day he gets an envelope in the mail. Inside the envelope is a numbered list. There are names next to some of the numbers, next to others are blank lines. There’s also a driver’s license belonging to a woman, one of the people named on the list. A quick web search shows that the woman is the victim of an unsolved murder. In fact, all the people named have been murdered, but in widely separated locations, and nobody seems to have guessed at a link.
Tom calls a police detective friend to tell him about it. The friend is intrigued, but says this material by itself isn’t enough to take to his superiors.
Soon Tom gets a phone call from the sender. This man, who call himself J, tells Tom he’s been killing these people, because the world is a better place without them. He’s read Tom’s work and was impressed by it. He wants to tell Tom his story, so he can write it the right way.
This gets Tom a meeting with the police, and they agree to give him protection and a tracking chip so he can be bait in their trap. But when he arrives at the rendezvous point, a remote spot upstate, J never appears. However, when Tom gets home he’s attacked, tazed, and dumped in a car trunk.
J still wants Tom to write his story. But he wants him to understand it from up close – through accompanying him on his pilgrimage of murder as he completes his list. And if Tom interferes, J has arranged for his son to be murdered.
It gets worse when they encounter an innocent witness. What will Tom do to prevent J killing her to shut her mouth?
Up Close and Fatal was a well-written book (American location, English orthography) that kept the dramatic tension dialed all the way up. The social awkwardness of enforced socialization with someone you despise, who can nevertheless be charming or even thoughtful at times, compelled my interest. Also, there was a great twist at the end. I was highly impressed.
The only oddity was when Tom and J are riding around in a big SUV and the author keeps talking about its trunk. What’s with that?
If your great complaint about the world of thriller novels is that they all tend to look the same (and it’s often a valid complaint ), Tom Trott’s Cain novels might just be what you’re looking for. I’m not sure The Nice Guy and the Devil was my cup of tea, but it was definitely original.
Harrison Byers (known as “Cain”) is a Canadian, a former CIA operative (not sure how that works). He’s in Nice, France, enjoying the weather, when he notices a small, unprepossessing man asking clumsy questions about his “missing sister.” Cain figures him for an amateur trying to be a private eye. But when he notices the woman the man described sitting alone in a café, he can’t help introducing himself.
They make a date, but the unprepossessing man shows up at Cain’s apartment and commits suicide in front of them. The police come and arrest both him and the woman, and when they’re finally released they spend the night together. She asks him to accompany him to her daughter’s wedding the next day, and he figures why not? Little do they expect that the reception will be attacked by terrorists, one person kidnapped, and several others murdered. Cain sets off in pursuit, soon teaming up with a young Interpol agent who’s the daughter of an old friend.
The most surprising element in the story is Cain himself. He’s not your bog standard thriller hero. He’s middle-aged, bald and overweight (he actually wears a toupee and a girdle). But he still has his shooting skills and his fighting instincts, along with (sometimes insane) nerve. The story is packed with suspense and danger, the big twist at the end comes at you out of left field, and the conclusion is satisfying.
What annoyed me was the author’s habit of not describing characters until they’ve been on stage for a while. This is particularly aggravating when he fails to tell us the character’s race, and then makes race an issue. It’s as if he’s first saying, “Look how colorblind I am,” then turning and saying to the reader, “Why were you so racist as to assume they were white?”
On the other hand, there’s a devout Christian character in the book, and his faith is treated respectfully.
The Nice Guy and the Devil was a very neat thriller, capably plotted and written. I didn’t love it, but it was professionally done.
I should really wait to post this review/appreciation until I’ve had the time to watch the whole series through on YouTube, but I need a topic tonight and I already know what I think. Harry O, starring David Janssen, was one of the best TV PI series of the 1970s, and could have done even better if the network hadn’t clotheslined it.
The series struggled a bit getting launched. The first pilot movie, which you can watch above, was about a grumpy Los Angeles private eye named Harry Orwell (Janssen). He used to be a police detective, but a bullet near the spine put him on the disabled roster, so now he freelances. Only he’s a bit of a misanthrope (though he always seems to have a beautiful girlfriend) and actively discourages business. His injury interferes with his activity at times. He lives in a shack on the ocean, where he’s constantly working on his sailboat, “The Answer,” which is never quite finished (metaphor sighted!). He has a car, but it’s always in the shop and he rides the bus instead – which offers interesting creative opportunities for the writers, as when he loses a “tail” while riding it.
It seems network executives found the first pilot a little dark, so they ordered another one, which was lighter but hardly cheery. But that one was enough to get the series green-lit. (Jody Foster plays a homeless girl in this one.)
As the season begins, we find Harry living on Catalina Island near San Diego. Still in a shack, still working on his boat and riding the bus. His cop buddy is now Lt. Manny Quinlan (Henry Darrow, whom you may remember as Manolito on The High Chapparal). They’re on and off friends, but have each other’s backs when the chips are down.
Then, half-way through the first season, the network decided it was too expensive to shoot on Catalina and moved Harry closer to LA, but in a nearly identical living situation. His police buddy is now Lt. Trench, played by Anthony Zerbe, who won an Emmy as a supporting actor. The two actors’ chemistry was extremely good. Harry’s car was finally liberated from the shop, but it still broke down a lot. The tone was lightened yet again.
In the second season, Harry’s back injury – though never forgotten – became less important. Toward the end, a young actress named Farrah Fawcett-Majors (at the time) showed up as Harry’s stewardess girlfriend. (This attracted my increased interest.)
And then the network decided it wanted to change its entertainment direction. The relatively intelligent Harry O series was cancelled to be replaced by a star vehicle for Farrah – Charlie’s Angels. I’ll confess I was a big fan of the Angels at the time, but today I find I can’t bear to watch it, even when Farrah’s on. Harry O, on the other hand, holds up extremely well.
Private eye shows were a staple of prime-time TV in the 70s. Quinn Martin Productions, especially, ran a content factory that turned them out like sausages. QM did some quality work – he’d produced The Fugitive, which made David Janssen a star. But they also turned out shows like Cannon and Barnaby Jones that were almost indistinguishable in format, and even recycled each others’ scripts from time to time. I came to see the Quinn Martin trademark as a sure sign of phoning it in.
But Harry O was a smart show with good writing, good acting, and atmosphere. I’d put it right up there with a very different show, The Rockford Files. It could have been a classic, given the chance.
David Janssen swore never to do a network series again. He did a miniseries, but never a weekly show.
Skelgill reels in and turns his boat. He takes a bearing off Skiddaw Little Man; keeping the false summit dead astern will send him arrowing into Peel Wyke, the tiny hidden wooded inlet that has echoes of the wild oarsmen that once ruled these parts, literally the ‘Wyke-ings’, the Norse ‘baymen’, who left their mark on today’s maps with descriptions that abound, like beck and dale, fell and pike, gill and skel.
The snippet above features one of those not infrequent references to the Vikings of Cumbria that add to the appeal of the Inspector Skelgill books (for me). Skelgill is an odd sort of policeman, operating primarily off his instincts as an outdoorsman and fisherman. In Murder At the Bridge, he actually discovers one clue by following a literal scent in the air, like a bloodhound.
Kyle Betony is an “outcomer” to Cumbria, a brash go-getter who fits in poorly with the other members of the Derwentdale Angler’s Association (of which Inspector Skelgill himself is a low-key member). But he managed to get elected to the board of directors anyway. When his body is found, dressed in evening clothes, floating in the River Ouse, it could mean he accidentally fell from the bridge, but indications on the body, as well as the river currents, suggest foul play. Betony had been attending the annual banquet of the DAA board that night. An old photograph has been stolen from the wall of the inn where the banquet was held. It was a group photo, including the image of a man now a fugitive murderer. Was the man in the photograph the man who was now calling himself Kyle Betony? Or did Betony recognize that man and get murdered for his knowledge?
Murder At the Bridge was largely what I’d call a “shoe leather” mystery. Most of the book is taken up with interviews with various suspects and the comparison of alibis. This lowered the level of suspense until the very end, when things picked up nicely. The conclusion was satisfying, and provided a clearer confirmation of Skelgill’s relationship with his female subordinate, DS Jones, than I think we’ve had before.
Murder At the Bridge was far from my favorite book in the Skelgill series, but it’s worth reading. One nice element is the creative circumlocutions the author employs in order to avoid actual profanity.
What kept coming to mind as I read Colin Conway’s Strait Over Tackle, first book in his “Flip-flop Detective” series, was the movie “The Big Lebowski.”
I did not like “The Big Lebowski.” I don’t, in general, find slackers amusing.
Sam Strait is a former sheriff’s deputy in the same area (around Spokane, Washington) that is the setting for author Conway’s more serious “The 509” police procedural series. He got kicked off the force on false charges, sued them for damages, and won a cash settlement, which gives him some financial freedom. He lives in the lake cabin he inherited from his grandparents. This allows him to live the life he wants to. He lives by a short set of rules, the first of which is, “Only be where flip-flops can be worn.” That makes him a snowbird. He flies off to warmer climes each fall, taking temporary jobs like dishwashing to eke out his expenses. He’s happy with this life (or claims to be), but it angers his on-off girlfriend, a gorgeous local actress who wants permanence and doesn’t give up easily.
Sam comes home to open up for the spring and finds that somebody has held a party in his house and left it trashed. But it gets worse. He goes down to the lake to look at his boat and finds a young woman’s dead body in it. His call to the police brings Detective Shane McAfee, whom we know from the 509 novels.
When Sam discovers that someone has left a bag of drugs in his refrigerator, he ponders calling McAfee, but decides to go around and ask questions himself. This – as he eventually realizes – is a stupid decision, leading to confrontations, threats, and several fistfights (all of which he loses). But in the end he will identify the murderer.
Generally speaking, slackers make poor heroes for novels. Interesting characters operate from some powerful motivation, which is the main thing slackers generally lack. Sam’s chief motivation is avoidance of intimacy and commitment. His motivations for investigating the murder rather than letting the police do their job are unclear to the reader, and apparently to himself. He seems to have a poor conception of personal safety, which is bad because he keeps getting beat up (even by a woman). This is one of those stories where the hero gets “his bell rung” multiple times, and people even warn him of concussion, but he brushes the suggestion off and appears to suffer no serious trauma (which is implausible).
In the end, I figured out that Strait Over Tackle was intended to be taken as comedy. I guess it had its moments, but it didn’t amuse me a lot.
You might like it better than I did. Especially if you liked “The Big Lebowski.”
Lately I’ve been “doing” Nero Wolfe on YouTube. First the 1981 series starring William (“Cannon”) Conrad and Lee Horsely, and currently the 2001 series with Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton. But in the course of my fumbling about on the site I stumbled on the little-known video above. It’s a 1959 pilot for a half-hour NW series starring Kurt Kasznar and none other than a pre-Star Trek William Shatner. But more about that below.
I sought out the Conrad-Horsely series for sentimental reasons. The series was one of my favorites back when it came out. Critics complained that it violated some of the basic protocols of the ordered household author Rex Stout created. Though I’m fond of the original Wolfe books, I’m not as punctilious about them as I am about, say, Sherlock Holmes or Travis McGee. I thought Bill Conrad was just splendid as Nero Wolfe, and he had excellent chemistry with Horsely’s Archie. The set designers worked meticulously (and at considerable cost) to recreate Wolfe’s office. I particularly liked the big chair. Stout often mentions in the stories that Wolfe’s upholstered desk chair was specially built to support his great weight.
The only problem with that handsome chair was that it was physically too large for Bill Conrad, who kind of got lost in it. I suspect it was designed with Orson Welles, who was originally meant to play the role, in mind.
But after I’d watched that series’ one season of episodes, I moved on to the 2001 series. It’s very well done and very faithful to the original stories. Also extremely stylish and shot in period. Maury Chaykin as Wolfe is growing on me, though I still prefer Conrad. I’ve always seen Wolfe as a dark-haired man. Timothy Hutton seems a little lightly constructed for Archie, but the attitude is spot on.
But now, back to the 1959 pilot. I was surprised how good it was. Bill Shatner may be the best Archie Goodwin of them all. The role plays exactly to his strengths. And Kurt Kasznar (whom I believe I saw in person once, as Moriarty in a road production of William Gillette’s “Sherlock Holmes” play, but I may have him confused with someone else), has a good look for Wolfe and brings the additional value of an Austrian accent. Stout’s Wolfe was Montenegran by birth, but I think this is the only time anyone ever portrayed him with an accent (except for Sidney Greenstreet’s English tones). The plot is stripped-down, as is necessary for the half-hour format (not ideal for the material), and the office set lacks the rich detail of the later productions. But all in all it’s a commendable effort and pretty entertaining.
(It also features the actor Alexander Scourby [whose Bible narration you may have heard], whom I also saw in person once, in college, doing a reading of Walt Whitman. I had a chance to meet him but missed out, as is my custom in life.)
One wonders why it wasn’t accepted by the network. However, if that had happened, Bill Shatner might have still been busy when Gene Roddenberry went looking for an actor to play Captain Kirk a few years later. And the world would have missed out on a rich font of camp, parody, and Facebook memes.
Her face is big-boned like a Herdwick sheep and in the greenish-blue eyes rests an innate kindliness.
I’m not sure I’d have ever read the Inspector Skelgill novels if they’d been described to me first. An eccentric police detective whose main expertise is as a hunter and fisherman, who detects mostly by instinct and intuition rather than by reasoning, doesn’t sound like my cup of tea. And yet I find these books by Bruce Beckham fascinating, and they seem to get better and better as they go. They are set in the English county of Cumbria, up by the Scottish border.
In Murder in the Fells, a shepherd discovers a lost wallet in a fox’s “earth.” It contains an American woman’s passport. Probability indicates it belongs to a woman whose body was found near a waterfall in the fells, who has not been identified so far. Inquiries are begun to find out more about the woman.
Meanwhile, in a separate plot thread, we follow a woman named Dorothy T. Baum, another American who has traveled to Cumbria to meet a man, a professor of history, whom she met online and with whom she plans to move in. The reader soon realizes she’s the victim of a “catfishing” scheme, that she’s been lured to England to be fleeced of her money, then murdered. One suspects at first that this is the story of the dead woman – but it’s contemporaneous with Skelgill’s team’s investigation, and the dead woman’s name wasn’t Dorothy.
Tension builds as Dorothy survives a couple “accidents,” and Skelgill’s team becomes aware of her and begin trying to locate her in the tangle of mountain and valley paths that crisscross Cumbria.
And in the end, a big surprise. Very well done.
I liked Murder in the Fells very much. Enjoyed every page. It’s become a cliché for publicists to advertise every English mystery as “gripping.” But in this case it’s true.
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