I wasn’t impressed enough by the first Rafferty novel, by W. Glenn Duncan, that I read, to plan on reading more. But somehow I am doing so. And I’m enjoying the books, originally published in the 1980s. I actually read the first book, Rafferty’s Rules, and failed to review it recently. But it won me over, especially with a pleasant plot twist at the end.
Wrong Place, Wrong Time is the fourth book in the series. Rafferty (no first name, like Spenser) is a Dallas private eye whose business is somewhat marginal. He’s in no position to turn down fast, honest money, so when a guy comes in identifying himself as a bounty hunter, wanting backup for a quick apprehension job, he agrees. Not long later he sees his client blowing the target away with a shotgun, and then Rafferty is driving for his life as the guy pursues him, to tie up loose ends.
After extricating himself from that problem, Rafferty gets a request for help from a woman in the next office, with whom he’s been carrying on a pleasant flirtation for years through a window. Her grandfather needs protection, she explains. Local kids have been harassing him. She’s afraid they’ll hurt him, but she’s also afraid he’ll hurt them – he’s a tough old guy who’s been around the block.
As Rafferty gets to know old “Thorney,” he comes to respect and admire the guy, who’s not exactly enthusiastic about having a “nursemaid.” And when things escalate to shots fired, Rafferty can’t be sure whether the target is Thorney or himself – could his murderous client be back for another shot at him?
Wrong Place, WrongTime was good, hard-boiled fun. What intrigues me most – and makes me a bit uncomfortable – is how male-female interactions are handled. Author Duncan gives Rafferty a raffish, flirty attitude, and women generally respond in good humor. The assumption is that, in spite of feminist rhetoric, men and women still like each other.
I’m not sure that’s true anymore in the 2020s. I don’t think you could write that way nowadays.
In any case, Wrong Place, Wrong Time was fun to read, and not very demanding. Mild cautions for language and adult themes.
Left to his own devices, it seems quite likely that Tolkien would never have finished a single book in his life. What he needed were publishers’ deadlines and a keen audience.
…C. S. Lewis stepped into the breach….
I’d heard of John Garth’s book, Tolkien and the Great War, before, and when it came up at a bargain price on Kindle I snapped it up. It kept me engrossed all through.
If you’ve read any biographies of Tolkien, like Humphrey Carpenter’s or Tom Shippey’s, you’re already familiar with the author’s war years, and the fact that they affected his creative work. What John Garth does in this book is to look at the story in detail, collating the biographical facts with the progress of Tolkien’s composition of his poetry and The Book of Lost Tales. A certain amount of guessing and supposition is inevitable, but author Garth avoids over-certainty.
As a student at Oxford, Tolkien bonded with a group of like-minded students with literary aspirations who called themselves the TCBS, the Tea Club and Barrovian Society. Together they worked out literary theories (rejecting modernism) and dreamed of future days when they’d storm the critical barricades and change the world.
The First World War ended all that. On the battlefields of France, in the midst of the mud and the blood and the poison gas, two of them died, and Tolkien and the other surviving TCBSian were never as close again. (We often say that the poor are “cannon fodder,” but that wasn’t true among the English in World War I. “Of every eight men mobilized in Britain during the First World War,” Garth writes, “one was killed. The losses from Tolkien’s team were more than double that… among former public schoolboys across Great Britain – about one in five.”)
As Garth indicates, the very nature of Tolkien’s vision and work was altered by his war experience. What had begun as a scholarly hobby – the creation of a “Gnomish” language – developed into a cycle of stories (The Book of Lost Tales) meant to re-imagine the forgotten myths of ancient England. It was while he was recovering from the Trench Fever that sent him home that Tolkien began to re-cast the story as an epic of an ancient, imagined Middle Earth.
For anyone fascinated with Tolkien’s books, Tolkien and the Great War is a fascinating and engaging read. John Garth is an excellent writer with a real flair for words (he speaks, for instance, of an early parodic poem by Tolkien featuring “boys charging around in names that are much too big for them”). I highly recommend this book.
It was shortly after I started reading David J. Gatward’s latest Inspector Grimm book, One Bad Turn, that I recalled my earlier decision to stop reading the series. The writing’s good, and I like Grimm and his team. But the author’s insistence on bringing God (or spirituality) into the books by way of a lesbian vicar just doesn’t work for me.
Having started the book, though, I figured I might as well carry on. Maybe my perception has been altered by my religious intolerance, but I wasn’t entirely happy with this one.
Harry Grimm, you may recall, is a former paratrooper, facially scarred by an IED. Then he became a policeman in Bristol, but now he has been transferred to bucolic Wensleydale in Yorkshire. In the great tradition of English small-town copper stories, though, the troubles of the big city follow him.
In One Bad Turn, Harry is recalled from holiday when a body is found in a house in a nearby town. Though terribly decomposed, the body shows clear signs of having been subjected to torture. And then a claymore mine concealed with the body explodes, killing two crime scene technicians. The dead woman herself is something of a mystery – beautiful, but not well known to her neighbors. Her identity, it turns out, is a false one, and her means of support unknown. Not long after, another torture murder will be discovered, and another mine will explode.
I felt, personally, that One Bad Turn was kind of predictable. It’s a story we’ve run into before, and is objectively a little far-fetched. It’s not a bad book, but I’m going to try to remember not to buy the next Harry Grimm adventure.
“You’ve got too much imagination, Nobby,” said Parker.
“You wait, Charles,” said Lord Peter. “You wait till you get stuck on a ladder in a belfry in the dark. Bells are like cats and mirrors—they’re always queer, and it doesn’t do to think too much about them. Go on, Cranton.”
Dorothy L. Sayers achieved some remarkable things in her classic Lord Peter Wimsey series of mysteries. One of their impressive elements is the way she varies settings, both socially and geographically. I suspect that The Nine Tailors is one of her most beloved books, despite the fact that it spends a lot of time on the arcane English pastime of “change ringing,” in which church bells are rung in varying strings of ever-changing notes. The Nine Tailors combines a kind of epic sweep with profound human tragedy.
It’s Christmas Eve when Lord Peter and his man Bunter, speeding over the East Anglian fen country in his big Daimler car, go into a ditch, bending the axle. They are taken in by the kindly vicar of Fenchurch, a small community nearby. When the vicar announces sadly that they’re going to have to cancel their attempt to set a record ringing “Kent Treble Bob Majors” that night, because one of his ringers has fallen ill, noblesse oblige leaves Lord Peter no choice but to volunteer himself, as he has some experience as a change ringer. This involves nine hours of labor in the church tower when he could use some sleep, but everyone is very grateful. The next day Lord Peter drives away in his repaired car, assuming he’ll never return.
But some months later, the vicar calls and asks his help again. A strange thing has happened. While the sexton was opening a grave to bury a man with his recently deceased wife, a strange body was found in the grave. The face had been bashed in with a shovel and the hands removed, so it’s impossible to identify the man. Lord Peter, always keen for a mystery, quickly shows up and starts investigatin’.
It all seems to have something to do with a scandalous theft that occurred long ago, on the eve of the Great War. A guest at the local nobleman’s wedding had a valuable emerald necklace stolen. It has never been recovered. One of the house servants and an outside accomplice were arrested and sent to prison, shaming his wife, who still lives in the town, remarried after her husband escaped and died in an accident. The accomplice was still alive, though, having recently been released. The body may be his. But if so, who killed him, how did they kill him (there is no visible premortem wound), and why is he wearing French underwear?
Author Sayers turns the pealing of the bells into a kind of chorus that accompanies the drama up to its epic climax in a massive flood on the fens. The Nine Tailors is gripping and haunting. A masterpiece of the genre. Highly recommended.
I was wandering through some of the old reviews on this site, and I found a review of An End to a Silence, by W. H. Clark. I liked the book quite a lot and noted that I wished the sequel were available (it’s intended as a trilogy). I checked again now, and found that the second book, If I Scream, is out, so I bought it. It has most of the virtues of the first book, and engaged me deeply. Except for one thing…
A young woman, pale and emaciated, appears along a Montana highway. A kindly man stops to help her, and seeing her condition and hearing her say something about being held a prisoner, he heads for the police station. But on the way she distracts him, and he smashes into a car in an intersection. They are both rushed to a hospital, where the young woman quickly dies.
This is a case for Ward, the mysterious, taciturn former Texas Ranger, now a Montana policeman. Kidnapping and the abuse of children are things he obsesses about. But his bosses won’t devote a lot of resources to the case, because a serial killer has started working in the area. The murderer kills in various ways, and it’s hard to see what connects the men he’s murdering. So Ward is left to work the case as he can, with the help of a cop named Mallory, a victim of child abuse himself and a pariah on the force because of the things he once did at the bidding of his abuser.
Stories about child abuse chill and fascinate me, and If I Scream did the same. It’s very well-written and bears the marks of deep compassion.
My main complaint is how dark the book is. When you’re writing about as grim and tragic a subject as this, I think it’s a good idea to offer the reader a little hope. There isn’t much hope in If I Scream. It troubles me to think what a serious abuse victim might conclude from reading this story.
I do look forward to the next volume, if there is one (this book came out in 2017). If the final volume appears, I hope it has a more uplifting ending.
I’ve become a big fan of James Scott Bell, an excellent mystery-and-thriller writer who also happens to be a Christian. So when I saw he’d published a collection of novellas in hard-boiled style called Trouble Is My Beat, I snapped it up. It was excellent value for money.
Bill “Wild Bill” Armbrewster is a World War I veteran and a successful pulp mystery writer. But it’s hard to make a living doing that, even back in the late 1940s. So he works as a “fixer” for a Hollywood studio. That involves getting stars out of dangerous or illegal situations, avoiding scandal, and sometimes putting the scare on them to keep them on the straight and narrow. It might bring him up against rival studios, or gangsters, or dangerous dames, or the cops. He won’t let himself be intimidated, and he’s a hard man to fool. And at heart he’s a decent guy.
Bill Armbrewster is the kind of simple, old-fashioned hero you don’t run into much anymore, on the page or on the screen. Author Bell does a good job of writing in the hard-boiled voice, though his similes and metaphors aren’t up to Chandler and Hammett’s standards. No effort is made to shock the reader into a raised consciousness. The language is generally mild, and one story involving a Christian evangelist treats him with respect.
There was pretty much nothing I disliked about Trouble Is My Beat. Highly recommended.
If the name Augustus Thistlewood strikes you as something out of P. G. Wodehouse, you and I have that in common. And we’re both right. There are echoes of Wodehouse at the beginning of Dave Freer’s science fiction novel, Cloud Castles, though the book gradually evolves into something quite different.
Augustus is a son of a wealthy, but low-profile, family of industrialists. He went to university to become an engineer, but he’s so brilliant he needed more of a challenge. So he took a degree in Sociology too, and that’s where the trouble began. Convinced of “modern” views of society and economics, he decided he needed to spend time with the less fortunate, “uplifting” the poor.
That mission took him to Sybil III, a floating city in the “habitable region” of a gas-dwarf star. The city floats on antigravity engines and shares the skies with “floating castles” belonging to two alien races who are war with each other but “neutral” (though hostile) to humans. The skies also feature clumps of floating vegetation that nobody cares about much.
Augustus arrives in the floating city as the perfect innocent. The place is the most debased and claustrophobic of slums, but he, having no experience of real life, trusts everyone. He’s immediately spotted by an urchin called Briz (a girl, though he assumes she’s a boy), who “takes him under her wing” with the intention of robbing him blind. Only Augustus proves strangely resilient – the stupid moves he makes tend to work out all right for him (kind of like an old Mr. Magoo cartoon), and his engineering skills prove useful and even lifesaving. And Briz, against her will, finds herself drawn to this gormless do-gooder, developing a genuine sense of obligation.
Then they end up on one of the floating “skydrift paddocks,” vegetation clumps, and discover a thriving, if marginal, civilization – a place mirroring Australian Outback culture, but in the air. And gradually Augustus becomes “Gus,” their strong, inventive, and decisive leader. In this capacity he’ll face war, slavery, and worse from the aliens, on whose domains he can’t help encroaching.
Cloud Castles was a lot of fun – creative, original world-building, and a cast of colorful, well-developed characters. Dave Freer has been a Facebook friend for some time, but I hadn’t tried his science fiction before. This is an extremely good space opera, and I recommend it highly.
He was the living truth. The religious had to kill him because they were religious. The leaders had to kill him because they were the leaders. The people had to kill him because they were the people. The law had to kill him because it was the law.
That was what it was like to be the truth in the world….
As he tells the story, he was troubled by his inability to understand Christ’s teaching. He knew the gospel story. He understood the doctrines (as much as any of us understand them). But how do we follow Jesus’ teachings? Are we really expected to give everything we own to the poor? Not to resist an evil man? To pluck out an eye that leads us to sin? What is Jesus talking about?
His son suggested that perhaps he was trying to solve a problem instead of trying to get to know a Man. So he plunged into the gospels – taught himself Koiné Greek to read them in the original language. And what he began to understand – oddly – led him to the Romantic Poets of England.
The book casts a wide loop, but always returns to those Romantics – Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge on the bright side, and Byron and Shelley on the dark side. And among them, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, in whose novel Frankenstein he finds a key to understanding much of the modern rebellion against nature – Victor Frankenstein, he hypothesizes, was not trying to play God. He was trying to eliminate the Female. Which makes him a harbinger of our times.
There is much to ponder in this book, and I can’t claim I understand it all. I need to read it again. But the answer to the problem of getting to know the mind of Christ, as Klavan sees it, is seeing how in all nature – not only the natural world around us but our own nature – the truth of Christ is revealed. The Trinity is everywhere, giving us glimpses behind the veil, calling out to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. The life that Jesus lives is promised to us. The Romantics at their best glimpsed this, and some of them embraced it in the end.
There were things in this book that troubled me from a doctrinal point of view. I think any thoughtful Christian will have a similar experience. Because Klavan isn’t doing apologetics here. He’s peering into mysteries. He may be wrong at some points, but I’m not prepared to say so on one reading of the book. By and large, I think he’s on the right track.
Highly recommended for thoughtful Christians, especially those who love literature.
If you’re lucky enough to have read my novel, Blood and Judgment (it’s not too late! Click the link), you’ll know that Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, was based on a story about a prince named Amleth, found in the medieval history of Denmark, Gesta Danorum, by Saxo Grammaticus. So doing a Viking movie based on the story seems an obvious enough angle. However, Robert Eggers’ violent new film “The Northman” (which I saw last night, wearing my Viking clothes, in a free preview in Minneapolis) still owes more to Shakespeare than to Saxo.
If I were Danish (come to think of it, I’m a quarter Danish), I’d be a little offended at how my country’s Viking heroes are treated in the entertainment media. The History Channel’s egregious Vikings series took the Danish hero Ragnar Lodbrok and shifted him to Norway. Eggers’ film about the equally Danish Amleth starts in Norway, then moves on to Russia and Iceland.
The set-up is that Prince Amleth is the son of King Aurvandill, of some Norwegian kingdom whose name I didn’t catch (the dialogue was consistently difficult to understand. Maybe I’m just old and deaf). Shortly after his return from a Viking voyage, Aurvandill is killed by his bastard brother Fjolnir (Feng in Saxo, and in my book), who then takes the queen (Nicole Kidman) and tries – unsuccessfully – to kill Prince Amleth, who manages to flee in a boat, repeating his vow: “I will avenge you, father. I will save you, mother. I will kill you, Fjolnir.”
We next meet him as a grownup (played by Alexander Skarsgård) in Russia, where he has joined a group of berserker warriors who fight shirtless (horrific scenes of rapine and plunder). By chance, he learns that Fjolnir has been driven from Norway by King Harald Fairhair, and is now a sheep farmer in Iceland. Amleth cuts his hair to look like a slave (a nice, correct historical detail) and sneaks aboard a ship of slaves headed for Iceland and Fjolnir. Once there, he quietly lays his plans to kill his uncle, aided by a Slavic witch (Anya Taylor-Joy) who vows to help him with her “earth magic.”
Amleth will learn that his own life story isn’t as simple as he remembers. But that knowledge will not interfere with his vengeance. The final showdown with Fjolnir, on top a volcano, takes the revenge story even farther from Saxo’s account than Shakespeare did.
What shall I say about this film?
First of all, I must say that “IT” has finally happened. By “IT” I mean the arrival of that elusive creature history buffs and reenactors have awaited so long. At long last, there is a good Viking movie. Possibly a great Viking movie.
That is not to say it’s a pleasant movie. It’s dark, dark, dark. You’d think there was never a sunny day in the 9th Century. Almost all colors are muted (I understand this to be a characteristic of Eggers’ style, but my costume historian friend will not be happy with the lack of bright colors). The only exception I recall is one scene early on, when young Amleth covers himself with a vivid red cloak to escape the royal farm unseen (which seems to me slightly counterintuitive, but no doubt there’s some thematic purpose I’m not bright enough to grasp).
Otherwise, the costumes, sets and props were very good (by movie standards). Fjolnir wears lamellar armor, which will annoy many Viking reenactment group authenticity officers. The great hall of Amleth’s father has its high seat at the end of the hall, rather than half-way down one side-bench. A headband with bangles that Nicole Kidman wears is based on a jewelry reconstruction no longer considered accurate (I read this somewhere). The horses in Norway are too tall (though the ones in Iceland are fine).
But by and large the authenticity is pretty good. Better than we’ve seen before.
For me, the Vikings have been the center of my personal Romanticism since I was about 12 years old. When I’ve dreamed of a good Viking movie, this wasn’t the sort of thing I was hoping for. But that’s just me – it’s a fallacy to judge a work of art based on what you’d like it to be. I think “The Northman” is very successful in being what the director intends.
The darkness of the cinematography mirrors the darkness of the story. The kind of revenge-obligation Amleth feels is entirely authentic to the period (and many other periods). Even when Amleth gets an opportunity to walk away at one point, he can’t do it. It would violate his deepest convictions; damage his soul more than death.
But the revenge is in no way glorified. Amleth’s road is mired in blood. His father initiates him in a blood ritual. He and his berserker friends exult in shedding blood. The Viking religion is bloody, he sees visions of blood, everywhere blood is shed cheaply. There’s nothing romantic about it.
But there is something mythic. The gods are around every corner. The wolves (foxes in Iceland, where there are no wolves) and the ravens are always watching. And sometimes the gods themselves appear. Drawn, it seems, by the blood, just like the wolves and the ravens.
I could make an argument, I think, that Christianity is conspicuous in this movie by its absence. Amleth has no way of avoiding his fate in a world without grace.
But I doubt that’s what Eggers has in mind.
In any case, here’s my summation: “The Northman” is bloody, harsh, hyper-violent and disturbing. It is absolutely not for children or the sensitive. But it’s also brilliant and unforgettable.
As almost everybody knows, Arthur Conan Doyle will be forever linked (shackled, as he might have put it) to his epically successful detective character, Sherlock Holmes. And most of you will be aware that Doyle grew very weary of Holmes after a while, and killed him off (temporarily). He hoped he could win the public over to another character he created, an officer of Napoleon named Brigadier Etienne Gerard.
Brigadier Gerard is a Gascon, like D’Artagnan. And like D’Artagnan, he lives for honor and adventure. He is always ready to fight a duel or steal a kiss, and always first to volunteer for dangerous assignments. Where he differs from D’Artagnan is that he’s not terribly bright. His stories are told, we gather, in his old age, in an inn, to a group of friends. Gerard is now living on a pension, which he supplements by growing cabbages. He sighs over hard fate, which has denied him the advancement he has no doubt he deserved. He refers often to the medal for bravery he received from the Emperor himself, but which he never has with him. He keeps it, he says, in his apartment, in a leather pouch. I suspect we’re meant to understand that he actually had to pawn it.
In a series of semi-comic short stories, he tells of headlong adventures he enjoyed during the great wars. Sometimes on secret missions, sometimes accidentally separated from his company of hussars, he escapes from ambushes, traps and imprisonment, often (like the later Captain Kirk) with the help of some woman who has succumbed to his manly charm.
Generally (but not always) the joke is on Gerard. He can be counted on to run (or gallop) toward the sound of the guns, but he’s often clueless about what’s really going on. So confident is he of his own sagacity and aplomb that (in a manner that anticipates Inspector Clouseau) he often mistakes jeering for cheering. He is, however, never mean or small-minded.
I didn’t like The Complete Brigadier Gerard as much as I hoped to. The author is laughing at his hero (if somewhat affectionately), and the reader is too. For some reason that made me uncomfortable.
Your mileage may vary. No objectionable material. I might mention that I often forgot I was reading a Victorian/Edwardian book. Doyle wrote in a style ahead of his time.
