Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

That Hideous Strength – ‘The Educated Reader Can Be Gulled’

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That Hideous Strength is the third of C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, the first two books being Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. One of my friends recommended it as a suitable stand-alone, and we read it together as a group. I have since listened to Out of the Silent Planet and understand the gist of Perelandra, but while they expand and explain That Hideous Strength, they each have somewhat self-contained stories. In fact, one of us noted you could strip this story of its fantasy gods and planetary symbolism and it would remain intact, lacking only a magical framework for the weird stuff. That framework is explored in the first two books and brought to bear in the third.

The story develops slowly to give us time to understand our central characters, Mark and Jane Studdock, both educated, progressively minded people. Mark wants to be an insider, an opinion-maker or influential voice within Bracton College. Jane wants to be her own woman–married, of course, but equal to and independent of her husband. In chapter one, we see her chafe at what her life, marriage, and career had become. Mark doesn’t begin to chafe at his circumstances until much later, when it appears his wife is a hinderance to his career as a high ranking official of the NICE (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments).

If you know anything about the story, you know something of the trouble caused by NICE. They aim to rewrite the world. They bring Mark in initially to write stories for distribution in diverse publications in order to smooth the way for them, and it takes him a while to understand the point.

PanBooks cover of "That Hideous Strength"

“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

In his preface, Lewis frames his story as a “fairy tale,” and “a ‘tall story’ about devilry”–a fictional take on the thinking that went into another of his books, The Abolition of Man. If you have not read that book, taking it up before reading That Hideous Strength will likely help draw out its meaning and dramatic imagery.

You could say this book is about marriage, because that tension between Mark and Jane runs throughout. You could say it’s a book on the gloriously mythological roots of Great Britain; Arthur, Merlin, and Atlantis all figure in heavily. But the main theme begins with the quote above–that educated people will believe anything.

Experts, who may be rather immature human beings while still highly skilled in their field, can and do cause great harm to society. They acquire authority and use it for their own ends, perhaps compassionately to a point, perhaps with good intentions, but those ‘who know best’ will eventually force the best down our throats in the name of progress.

This danger could come from many sides; many people and institutions undermine the values they profess. Every one of us must seek the light while it can still be found.

Photo by Niklas Weiss on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘Poor Dead Cricket,’ by W. Glenn Duncan

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W. Glenn Duncan’s Rafferty series, about a tough Dallas private eye back before the turn of this century, is not my favorite hard-boiled series by far. Think of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, then move him to Dallas, give him a gun-happy cowboy buddy instead of a black gangster type, and reduce his intelligence and wit by about 25%, and you’ve got Rafferty. But the books are entertaining enough to keep me interested, and refreshingly un-Woke.

In Poor Dead Cricket, Rafferty is hired by an obscure environmentalist group to investigate the death of one of their informants, Sandra “Cricket” Dawes. Cricket was apparently killed by a mugger in her apartment’s parking lot. Crime of opportunity, no arrest likely. But the environmentalists insist she was in the process of delivering secret files she stole from a nuclear power company employer, documents that could blow the lid off dangerous practices in handling fissionable materials. They think the company killed her. They also want those files, if Rafferty can find them.

Rafferty isn’t much impressed with the environmentalists, whom he considers shallow headline-chasers, and he doesn’t even like much what he learns about Cricket. But she’s dead, and nobody seems very concerned about her as a person. So Rafferty gets to work.

Lots of switches and surprises, a couple gunfights, and a pretty neat final twist. I enjoyed Poor Dead Cricket, and recommend it for light reading. Only minor cautions for language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Manual of Detection,’ by Jedediah Berry

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On Suspects

They will present themselves to you first as victims, as allies, as eyewitnesses. Nothing should be more suspicious to the detective than the cry for help, the helping hand, or the helpless onlooker. Only if someone has behaved suspiciously should you allow for the possibility of his innocence.

Charles Unwin, hero of The Manual of Detection, is not a detective, but a clerk. He works for a famous detective agency and has the honor of being the clerk entrusted with documenting the cases of Travis Sivart, the greatest detective in the world. Charles is fussy and punctilious, leading an utterly conventional and predictable life in an unnamed city where it’s always raining, and the historical period is ambivalent.

But recently he has changed his routine. Instead of going straight to the office in the morning, he makes a detour to the Central Station, where a young woman in a plaid coat stands every morning waiting for someone who never arrives. Charles fears the day when that person does show up, and he’ll be unable to see her anymore.

One day when he goes to work, he gets a shock. He has been promoted. Detective Sivart has disappeared, and Charles has been named his replacement. This is absurd. Charles is the least qualified person in the world to be a detective. Still, he wants Sivart to come back, so things can go back to normal. So the first case he tackles is Sivart’s disappearance.

Also, the woman in the plaid coat turns out to be his replacement as clerk. He can’t talk to her though, because detectives and clerks are not allowed to socialize.

In his feckless way, Charles will gradually uncover bizarre facts about the bizarre world in which he lives. About old crimes supposed to be closed, and the derelict carnival down by the river, and hypnotism and a criminal mastermind, about the lost final chapter of The Manual of Detection, and about the third, secret division of the detective agency.

I’m told The Manual of Detection is reminiscent of Jose Luis Borges, an author I’ve always been meaning to get around to. It reminded me of Alice in Wonderland, crossed with A Winter’s Tale. In any case it was inventive and amusing, and I read it with great enjoyment. Beautifully written.

Recommended.

Music, Reviews

Streaming review: ‘Runestone! A Rock Musical’

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I went together with a friend to stream the Minnesota Historical Society’s production of Runestone! A Rock Musical on Saturday. This review will be entirely useless to you, because the show’s run is now finished, but I figured I’d report on it anyway, for the benefit of future generations. And also to fill blog space.

The production is a fairly low-budget affair, presented on a circular stage (but not theater in the round – the audience sat in front). A screen behind the actors, for most of the program, concealed the band members. Costumes and staging were minimal – the men tended to wear suspenders or vests, to suggest 19th Century clothing, and a few props were set up to suggest settings – including, oddly, a tractor to indicate the farm, though the main character died well before such vehicles became common. A small cast filled the roles, most of them playing more than one (this was exaggerated in the performance that was streamed, as a couple actors were missing. Other actors filled their parts “on book,” sometimes crossing gender lines).

The production opened with a mealy-mouthed statement from the director or somebody, which included a groveling declaration of their profound awareness of the fact that they were standing on stolen land, and declaring their commitment to the goal of “decolonization.” I’m not entirely sure what decolonization means in real life. I’m inclined to think it means genocide.

The drama goes on to portray Swedish-American farmer Olaf Ohman and his son in 1898, as they discover a carved stone buried in the roots of a tree on their farm near Kensington, Minnesota. The local banker persuades Olaf to display the stone in the bank window, and rhapsodizes about the possibility of making Kensington a tourist destination. Preliminary statements from Minnesota historians tend to support the stone’s authenticity, and spirits are high, until a Norwegian scholar dismisses the whole thing as a hoax.

At this point the actors switch to an alternate narrative, describing how Ohman, the banker, and a neighbor could have colluded to create the stone simply as an exercise in “rural humor,” meant to trick the city folks and have a laugh at their expense.

Now Ohman becomes a pariah, a subject of ridicule. He takes the stone back home with him and tries to forget it all until he’s approached by the writer Hjalmar Holand (they pronounce “Hjalmar” wrong), who takes possession of the stone (there’s some disagreement about whether Ohman sold it to him or not), and turns it into his own meal ticket, giving many lectures and writing several popular books. This leads to a final break between Ohman and Holand.

The production seems to lack any interest in making a judgment on the question of authenticity. This is fair, I suppose, and certainly prudent in a state where feelings still run high on both sides in some circles. But it’s also kind of cowardly, and makes the production more a documentary than a work of art. I might mention that the “flashback” scenes depicting the voyage of the Norsemen who may have carved the stone feature very tacky costumes including crude horned helmets. This obscures the important fact that these men (if they ever existed) were 14th Century Scandinavian Christians who’d probably have been offended to be called Vikings. If Vikings ever wore horned helmets. WHICH THEY DID NOT!

I’ve always been touchy about urban productions portraying country people (I hated the Andy Griffith Show and Green Acres back in the day). So it may mean nothing that I found the portrayals here arch and sometimes borderline insulting.

The music was not memorable. This was no Tommy or Jesus Christ, Superstar. None of the songs lingered in the mind. Sasha Andrews did a pretty good job portraying Ohman. But all in all, I found Runestone! A Rock Musical unimpressive.

Fiction, Reviews

Witch Wood by John Buchan

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Witch Wood by John Buchan, cover

Witch Wood, the story of a new minister in a rural parish of Scotland, is said to be author John Buchan’s favorite and his most critically praised. Buchan (1875-1940) wrote a number of novels and may be most remembered now for his 1915 spy novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Witch Wood, published in 1927, is the moving account Rev. David Sempill’s arrival in Woodilee Village, Scotland, on August 15, 1644. We is warmly received and eager to minister to his flock in every duty required of him. Soon he learns of the nearby forest, named Melanudrigill or “The Black Wood” out of fear of spirits living within it. Sempill rebukes the idea as pagan superstition, but eventually discovers a weathered stone table in the midst of a forest clearing. What is written on it is “I. O. M.” — Jovi Optimo Maximo, Roman markings for an altar.

This and other signs tell him members of his own congregation practice the occult in secret. Sempill won’t simply dismiss an issue like that, but no one in his presbytery is willing to believe him. Some accuse him of imagining it. Arguments against him sound too familar.

He worries about his flock. “The profession of religion was not the same thing as godliness, and he was coming to doubt whether the insistence upon minute conformities of outward conduct and the hair-splitting doctrines were not devices of Satan to entangle souls.”

To his immediate superior, who does not believe a pious elder of the church could be involved in this and would prefer to keep the kirk united against the world, Sempill asks, “In the name of God, whose purity is a flame of fire, would you let gross wickedness go unchecked because it may knock a splinter off the Kirk? I tell you it were better that the Kirk should be broken to dust and trampled underfoot than that it should be made a cloak for sin.”

An epilogue in my edition reveals the source of the story; it’s an interpretation of real events during the war between Covenanters and Scottish Royalists. Without revealing more of the story, I want to tell you I worried at a few points that the heroes would not succeed and everything would come crashing down on their heads. I guess that’s a sign Buchan had me gripped.

Definitely a book for the scotophile. The most difficult part for me was that thirty percent of the text is the Scottish dialect of Woodilee folk.

“There’s ill news frae up the water, Mr. Sempill. . . . Marion puir body, has been ill wi’ a wastin’ the past twalmonth, and now it seems she’s near her release.”

“Me! I ken nocht. Me and my man aye keepit clear o’ the Wud. . . . Woodilee has aye been keened for a queer bit, lappit in the muckle Wud, but the guilty are come by an ill end.”

I’ve gotten more used to it, but with whole conversations written in this style, I felt I couldn’t keep up without a dictionary.

Fiction, Reviews

‘But the Doctor Died,’ by Craig Rice

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It’s a strange and somewhat disquieting experience for me to discover a classic mystery series from the Fifties of which I’d never heard. This is the John J. Malone series, written by “Craig Rice,” which turns out to be a nom de plume for Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig, a troubled and alcoholic writer who kept much of her life private. I thought as I read this book that it had the feel of a book written by a woman, because of the nature of the women’s conversations. I didn’t think a man could easily write that kind of dialogue.

However, I am informed, by an Amazon reviewer and by the author’s Wikipedia page, that this is almost certainly a ghostwritten book. So a guy might have written it anyway. And wouldn’t my male chauvinist face be red if that’s true?

In any case, the book is But the Doctor Died, the final book-length work in the series. I picked it up because I got a deal on the Kindle Version. John J. Malone is a Chicago lawyer, on the seedy side of the profession. He’s scrappy and aggressive and has his own code of conduct, which doesn’t always coincide with the laws on the books. In this story, John is defending a small-time criminal, but the cops have got him locked up somewhere he can’t locate. Then a poor mother comes to him to ask him to defend her son, who is completely innocent (actually he’s a bum, but a client’s a client).

Then he sees his friend Helene Justus, wife of Jake Justus, night club owner, on the street. He’s fond of them both, but secretly in love with Helene. She is walking along the sidewalk in a haze, carrying a bag of confetti, and doesn’t seem to recognize him. He will soon learn that she’s gone to work for a top-secret government agency, where suspicious things are happening.

The whole thing gets pretty complicated. Incredibly complicated. I found the plot wholly impossible to follow. But I understand that’s how these books are – light, improbable hard-boiled stuff.

I should probably read a book by the actual author before I judge her work. I may just do that. Even in this form, I found the characters intriguing.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Pictures to Die For,’ by Stuart Doughty

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If James Bond had been an art theft investigator instead of a spy, he’d probably be something like John Kite. I couldn’t help imagining him with Roger Moore’s appearance and voice.

His real name is not John Kite. He discovered, after growing up in luxury, that his parents were part of organized crime. So he broke all ties with them, assumed a new identity, and devoted himself to fighting art crime.

In Pictures to Die For, Book 3 in the series, John is babysitting the transport of a ridiculously valuable painting by a very hot, recently deceased artist, in Florida. But the armored car carrying the painting is struck by a rocket-propelled grenade and vaporized. Why would anyone want to destroy such a valuable object?

Witnesses report a mysterious man and woman making inquiries at John’s motel just before the crime. He will need to try to trace them and talk to them.

Then suddenly he’s contacted by Rochelle, his former partner, now married to an English lord. She says her husband has disappeared, and she’d like John to look for him. John still cherishes feelings for Rochelle, so he’ll try to help her with her problem too. His journey will take him to Brussels, and at last back to the US for a cinematic final showdown with a criminal mastermind.

If this plot sounds like it belongs in a Hollywood thriller, that’s because it does. Indeed, the author, Stuart Doughty, spent his career in the film industry, and obviously learned the formula. Do not look for realism in this book. John Kite is as indestructible and unbelievable as Jason Bourne or Rambo.

However, I was surprised by the quality of the writing. Author Doughty knows what he’s doing with words. And that bought a lot of goodwill from this reader.

I will consider reading more John Kite books. There’s nothing substantial here, but it’s enjoyable entertainment, suitable for popcorn.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cannon’s Mouth,’ by W. Glenn Duncan

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Number 5 in W. Glenn Duncan’s amusing Rafferty series is Cannon’s Mouth. Hard-boiled detection on the lighter side of the scale (though plenty of dark stuff happens).

Rafferty, as you may recall, is a Dallas private eye. He’s surveilling a delivery man suspected of pilferage on a hot Dallas day, when he steps into a little park to spy from the shade. A small, pudgy man comes up to him and starts talking as if he knows him. Talks about murdering his business partner, who is ruining the business. Rafferty is so hot and impatient that he barely pays attention to the man. But afterwards he does his civic duty by alerting his friends on the police force, providing all the details he can remember. They’re not much impressed.

Until the named target shows up dead, the night before the “contract” had specified. Worse than that, Rafferty is the one who finds the body. Now he needs to do some quick dancing with suspicious cops, including the leader of a drug task force who’s taken an unexplained interest in the proceedings.

Even when he’s released, Rafferty’s problems aren’t over. Somebody is calling him to demand the money they “earned.” And they’re not above throwing a bomb or two to show they’re serious.

Cannon’s Mouth leans a little too heavily on coincidence in its plotting to please me. And, as always, Rafferty isn’t as funny as he thinks he is. Still, the book was likeable and diverting, and I can recommend it as light reading – the kind of book you’d enjoy taking to the beach this summer. Plus, it’s a couple decades old, so it doesn’t preach at you.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Last Redemption,’ by Matt Coyle

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Her brown hair was slicked back into a bun above a face of sculpted symmetrical beauty. She wore a matching symmetrical smile that exuded all the warmth of a protractor.

I’d been following Matt Coyle’s Rick Cahill series of private eye novels, but somehow I’d missed the latest, Last Redemption, which came out in 2021. I missed a lot, as it turned out.

Rick Cahill is a San Diego PI, formerly a cop and a bartender. He struggles with guilt over past mistakes, and has been somewhat self-destructive in the past. But now his life has changed. He’s engaged to a woman he loves, Leah, and she’s pregnant. They plan to marry before the baby is born.

What he’s not telling Leah is that he’s been diagnosed with CRT, a brain damage condition common to pro football players. Repeated head traumas over the years are beginning to take their toll (I’ve always felt fictional private eyes get knocked out too often, without realistic effect). He occasionally suffers mental fugues, forgetting who he is and what he’s doing. And the doctor tells him his life expectancy is reduced. He’s going to tell Leah soon, but hasn’t made up his mind to it yet. Still, he’s changed his life. He’s not taking the hard-boiled jobs anymore. He’s doing security checks for companies. Simple office work, on his computer. Boring, but the income is good and he wants to be a family man now. To be around for them.

Then he hears from Moira, a fellow private eye who’s saved his life in the past. She’s worried about her son Luke, who’s a computer whiz. Luke had been working for a company that audits computer programs, and was checking out a medical technology startup that’s on the brink of a breakthrough in cancer treatment. But Luke has broken up with his girlfriend, who put a restraining order on him. And now he’s disappeared. And he’s suspected in a murder.

Well, how dangerous can this job be? Quick in, quick out, no hassle, right?

There will be hassle.

Last Redemption was well-written, gripping, and suspenseful. I enjoyed it immensely, and recommend it highly, along with the whole series. But this one was the best of the lot.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The List,’ by Graham H. Miller

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There can never be too many British police procedurals, in my opinion – even though I only really like a few of them. Graham H. Miller’s The List is the first in a series starring Jonah Greene, a detective in South Wales (not New South Wales in Australia, but the original place).

Jonah has just returned from an enforced break from the job, during which he’s been seeing a counselor. He “froze” during a police raid, resulting in injury to another officer. He thinks he’s ready to go to work again, but he’s not welcome with the other detectives. His boss assigns him to a job in the coroner’s office. Basically it’s desk work – he’s just supposed to see that the forms are filled out and the proper people notified.

But the very first corpse he deals with challenges him. It’s a homeless man who froze to death. There are suspicious details – why was the body found in an area where the homeless rarely go? What happened to the warm coat and sleeping bag he was known to have? And how did he come by two bottles of expensive whisky?

Another homeless man comes to see Jonah. He hands him a list of names the dead man left with him, saying the dead man told him that if anything happened to him, he should get that list to the police. They’d know what to do with it.

Jonah has no idea what to do with it.

But Jonah is a little OCD (one of his problems). Although he’s ordered to move on to the next case, he insists on asking questions on his own time. Which alarms certain influential people…

The List wasn’t bad as a novel. I had some trouble reading it, but I have a feeling that’s because it was a little close to home for me. Some of Jonah’s psychological problems are similar to mine; it was uncomfortable.

But my main problem with the story was that (this isn’t a spoiler; it’s fairly obvious early on in the story) it centered on an elaborate conspiracy lasting over many years. I am very suspicious of conspiracy stories. A secret is hard to keep in this world. And this conspiracy seemed to me improbable on the face of it.

Still, the book wasn’t bad. You might like it better than I did.