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Fiction, Reviews

‘A Tan and Sandy Silence,’ by John D. MacDonald

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But the Tibetan bar-headed goose and her gander have a very strange ceremony they perform after they have mated. They rise high in the water, wings spread wide, beaks aimed straight up at the sky, time and time again, making great bugle sounds of honking. The behaviorists think it is unprofessional to use subjective terms about animal patterns. So they don’t call the ceremony joy. They don’t know what to call it. These geese live for up to fifty years, and they mate for life. They celebrate the mating this same way year after year. If one dies, the other never mates again.

So penguins, eagles, geese, wolves, and many other creatures of land and sea and air are stuck with all this obsolete magic and mystery because they can’t read and they can’t listen to lectures. All they have is instinct. Man feels alienated from all feeling, so he sets up encounter groups to sensitize each member to human interrelationships. But the basic group of two, of male and female, is being desensitized as fast as we can manage it.

Got another deal on a Travis McGee book by John D. MacDonald. A Tan and Sandy Silence is, I think, one of the master’s best – a taut tale that borders on horror and reveals our hero at his most vulnerable.

Travis McGee, Fort Lauderdale “salvage specialist,” nearly gets shot one day by old acquaintance Harry Broll, a real estate developer who talks his way aboard Travis’ houseboat. He says he needs to find Mary, his ex-wife, to get her signature for an important real estate deal. He knows she’s been in touch with McGee, he says.

Travis is troubled by this occurrence in two ways – first, he’d never have allowed anybody to get the drop on him like that in the past. Is he losing his edge? Is he getting too long in the tooth for the business of recovering people and their property? Should he accept the offer of Jillian Brent-Archer, the lovely, wealthy English widow who’d like him to move onto her boat and be her constant escort? It would be a soft retirement, and not really all that demeaning.

Secondly, he realizes that Harry Broll was right about one thing – if Mary has disappeared, she’s probably in trouble. But if she was in trouble, she probably would have contacted McGee – which she hasn’t. So where is she?

Talking to Mary’s friends, Travis learns that she’s vacationing in Grenada. She sends postcards now and then. So everything’s all right, right?

But is it? McGee still isn’t sure. So he assumes a false identity and flies down to Grenada. Where he will encounter an evil that reminded me of the horrific “Un-man” in C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra. It’ll be a close-run thing, and the plot will require something fairly close to a deus ex machina to get our hero through this time.

John D. MacDonald was near the top of his game when he wrote A Tan and Sandy Silence (published in 1971). I’m not sure anymore (and I can’t find the reference) when it was that major literary critics suddenly decided it was okay to praise his work, but I know it was around the time this book came out. There were a couple fresh elements here – one is a fairly realistic description of head trauma and PTSD:

Forget the crap about the television series hard guy who gets slugged and shoved out of a fast moving car, wakes up in the ambulance, and immediately deduces that the kidnapper was a left-handed albino because Little Milly left her pill bottle on the second piling from the end of the pier. If hard case happens to wake up in the ambulance, he is going to be busy trying to remember his own name and wondering why he has double vision and what that loud noise is and why he keeps throwing up.

Another new element is that McGee makes some kind of resolution to change the way he deals with women in the future. But I never entirely understood what that meant.

Religion shows up a couple times; there are a couple pretty awful Catholics in this book, and a group of very nice Jesus Freaks (a brand new phenomenon just then).

A Tan and Sandy Silence is a harrowing book. It contains what I consider perhaps the most horrifying scene in the series. But it’s also engrossing and lyrical and deeply humane. Sometimes funny too. I recommend it highly. Cautions for adult themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bad Aim,’ by Alan Lee

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Working on catching up with Alan Lee’s eccentric and entertaining Mackenzie August series of action mysteries. So I read a second one in a row, Bad Aim.

Mack, an intrepid private eye with very good hair, lives with his fiancée (technically his wife; it’s complicated) “Ronnie” in Roanoke, Virginia, with his toddler son (from a previous marriage), “Kix.” Also resident in their house is his father and his best friend Manny Rodriguez, a US Marshal. Life is good for their odd little household. Mack’s friend, Liz Ferguson, a former federal agent and now a private eye, asks him to help her with a personal protection job. Her client is Roland Wallace, a rich, elderly man who fears that someone is trying to murder him. Poison has been found in his medications, so it’s not his imagination. Their job will be not only to protect him but to identify the killer – Roland says he wants to kill them himself.

Mack has no intention of helping anybody to kill anybody, but the mystery turns out satisfyingly complex. Only a few people have access to Roland’s house, and it’s hard to see what motive any of them might have. None of them seems in a position to profit from his death, or to have reason to hate him.

The story proceeds in the breezy manner characteristic of this series, Mack narrating and speaking in a light sort of variation on classic hard-boiled diction. I’ve disparaged the author’s attempts at erudition in the past, but I must admit he threw out a word – “Illeism,” which means speaking about oneself in the third person – that I had to look up. So he gets a point there.

Bad Aim is fun, and the references to Christianity are positive. The author seems to feel strongly about the rights of illegal immigrants, so I suppose he must be happy with our current open borders situation. And I thought the final showdown a little contrived. But other than that I have no objections to this amusing mystery.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Anglo-Saxons at War 800-1066,’ by Paul Hill

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As early as the late seventh century King Ine of Wessex (688-726) was moved to categorize numbers of armed men: ‘We call up to seven men thieves; from seven to thirty-five a band; above that it is an army.’

Anyone interested in the Viking Age is perforce going to be interested in the people we call the Anglo-Saxons. I recall that they intrigued me strangely when I discovered them in an encyclopedia at a very young age, before (as far as I can remember) I even knew about Vikings. The two cultures are sisters after all; many of the Anglo-Saxon tribes were Scandinavian in origin and only a few generations and geographic relocation separated them.

Paul Hill, author of The Anglo-Saxons at War 800-1066, is an accomplished historian and historical popularizer. He has produced here an excellent work targeted at those of us (like historical reenactors) who are interested in looking past generalizations and common assumptions to discover what we are able to know for sure (or can surmise) about warfare in the period. The trick is to separate known fact from guesses, and it seemed to me this book did a pretty good job of that.

The book includes an Introduction (a Survey of the Evidence); and chapters on Warfare, Violence and Society; Military Organization; Strategy and Tactics; Fortifications and Earthworks; Campaigns, Battles and Sieges; and Weapons, Armour and Accessories.

Now and then there are statements that contradict things I’m in the habit of telling people at reenactment events – he isn’t sure that the saex knife was reserved for the use of free men (spears, on the other hand, were, he says). And he doesn’t think the “wings” on a “boar spear” are actually intended to prevent a body from slipping down the shaft. He thinks they’re for parrying, and he probably knows more about it than I do.

General readers looking for a history of warfare in the period should probably find a different book. Certain events and campaigns are described in considerable detail, but they’re examined out of historical sequence. This is a book for enthusiasts interested in the period. Historical reenactors in particular will appreciate it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘These Mortals,’ by Alan Lee

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For a while now I’ve had the unsettling feeling that there was a series of thriller novels I’d been following in the past that I’d forgotten about. The other day I was looking at some of my old reviews and I realized it was Alan Lee’s Mackenzie August series. So I picked it up again with These Mortals after a long delay (turns out the book itself was delayed in publication, so my delay wasn’t so bad).

I needed to get up to speed with the characters and ongoing story, of course. Mackenzie August is a former cage fighter, now a private eye. His best friends are a drug dealer (who goes to the same church as he) and Mannie Martinez, a US Marshal and super-patriot. Mack is now married to the love of his life, Veronica “Ronnie,” a stunningly beautiful lawyer and former prostitute. They have a small boy, known as Kix.

As These Mortals begins, Mack is starting his day. Suddenly his worst enemy, Darren Robbins, a corrupt former government official who has faked his death, breaks into their home, accompanied by a gigantic Hispanic who is pointing a shotgun at a captive Ronnie.

Darren explains that he’s about to disappear forever, but before he goes he wants to see his wife and son, who are in the federal witness protection program. Mack has until Thursday to locate them and arrange a meeting, or else the thug will kill Ronnie (who happens to be Darren’s former mistress).

Mack is not one to despair. He confidently concocts a plan, assisted by Mannie and his partner, and by the local sheriff (apparently everybody in the world except Darren loves Mack and Ronnie because they’re both so good-looking). It calls for close coordination and precise timing, so you know everything that can go wrong will go wrong. But anything remains possible with the right attitude.

It must be understood that none of this is meant to be taken too seriously. The atmosphere here is fairly close to that of a comic book. The chief charm is the intellectual tough-guy cross-talk between Mack and Mannie. There are here (as I’ve mentioned before) echoes of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Hawk – except that author Lee isn’t quite as good at the erudition part.

Still, it was fun, and Christian in some sense (there’s no doctrine here, only the fact that likeable characters declare themselves Christians). These Mortals is implausible, lightweight, and entertaining. A few references to the plight of illegal immigrants may or may not be meant to convey a political message.

A fun book.

Fiction, Reviews

‘On the Run,’ by John D. MacDonald

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“One man is a significant entity. A partnership halves that value. Three or more men, working together, diminish themselves to zero. Team effort is the stagnation of the race.”

As great a booster of John D. MacDonald as I may be, there are entries in his oeuvre that disappoint me. On the Run is one of those, but only because of how it ends – and I think I can guess why it turned out that way.

The titular man on the run in the story, Sid Shanley, is a used car salesman in Houston, living and working under an assumed name. He’s on the run because two years ago he discovered another man in bed with his wife and beat him brutally, leaving him permanently disfigured. The man turned out to be mobster, one inclined to hold grudges over far lesser insults. So Sid took to the road. It was easier to disappear back then than it is now, especially when you’re an orphan. Sid has a brother somewhere, but they’re not in touch.

But Sid isn’t as alone as he thinks. He doesn’t know he has a grandfather, a rich old man living in the town of Bolton out east. The old man is remorseful about the way he treated Sid’s mother, and he wants to see his two grandsons before he dies and leaves them his fortune. He hired a very smart, resourceful investigator to locate Sid, and it was done. He understands that Sid’s going to be hard to approach, so he sends his personal nurse, the lovely Paula Lettinger, as his emissary, carrying a memento he’s sure Sid will recognize.

After a difficult (and pretty weird) first encounter, Sid decides he can trust Paula, and they set off on a cross-country road trip back to Bolton. On the way they’ll discover that they’re made for each other. But as for the future – Sid can’t see how that could ever work out.

There’s a lot of sex in this book – not explicit, but as the focus of Sid’s and Paula’s relationship. Very sophisticated for the time, it all seems a little naïve today. And overdone.

Otherwise, the story goes along great until the very end, when the author clotheslines the reader, bringing the story to what was – for me – a most unsatisfactory conclusion.

But I suspect I can guess what happened to the story. On the Run was published in 1963, the same year the first book in MacDonald’s legendary Travis McGee series appeared. I’m guessing that McGee wasn’t the only series character MacDonald proposed to Fawcett Publications when they asked him to come up with one. I’m guessing that On the Run might have been the first installment in an intriguing series about Sid Shanley pursuing a vendetta against the mob. That would have justified the weird ending we face here.

But that series, if it was ever contemplated, never happened. So we’re left with a decent story that ends with a thud. I can’t really recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Mean Street,’ by Colin Conway

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Another installment in the 509 Series by Colin Conway, about a rotating cast of cops in the Spokane area. I’m enjoying them immensely, and The Mean Street is, I think, the best so far.

The hero this time out is Dallas Nash, who was also the hero of The Long Cold Winter, which I reviewed some time back. Dallas is a senior detective, but his work has been slipping. He lost his wife to an auto accident a year ago, and he’s not handling it well. He gets auditory hallucinations. It used to be songs in his head when he woke up in the morning. That was rather nice; he imagined them as messages from his wife in the Great Beyond. But now it’s hard rock music, blasting in his ears. It’s painful and he can’t hear other people talking over the noise. He’s lost a lot of weight, and his personal grooming has declined. His colleagues and superiors are noticing. But he doesn’t want to see a therapist. If word of that got out, he’s convinced, he’d be marked down as weak and they’d restrict him to desk duty.

When a local pimp is shot to death on the street, Dallas is determined to treat it like any other murder. But a lot of people seem to disagree with that approach. Fellow cops consider the death good riddance. The prostitutes on the street don’t miss the guy at all. And advocates for prostitutes and battered women accuse the police of not doing enough to protect women. Oddly, the dead man didn’t seem to be on the outs with the other pimps. Meanwhile, people are starting to comment on Dallas’ unusual behavior on the job. It’s hard to explain a fainting spell.

I suppose the general theme of this book, considering the subplot involving a woman who kills herself under pressure from a man, is the power imbalance between men and women. I’m generally allergic to that sort of stuff, but it didn’t seem too heavy-heanded in The Mean Street. What I appreciated most was author Conway’s treatment of his characters. We get to see new facets of people we thought we understood; that’s one of my favorite experiences in a novel.

I enjoyed The Mean Street excessively. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Crime Czar,’ by Tony Dunbar

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I got a collection of Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet novels cheap, and by golly I’m going to read my way through them. They’re not entirely my kind of book, but I don’t hate them either, and cheap is good at this time in my life. So I’ve gotten to Crime Czar, the fifth book of the series.

When we last saw New Orleans lawyer Tubby Dubonnet, he had survived being kidnapped by bank robbers during the greatest flood in the city’s history. Things generally came out all right from Tubby’s point of view, except that his friend Dan got shot in the stomach saving Tubby’s life. At first it looked as if Dan would pull through, but now he’s back in the hospital, fading out. During a lucid moment, he whispers a cryptic message to Tubby.

Tubby experiences a new sensation now – a need for retribution. He knows who shot Dan – a dead-eyed, jug-eared professional killer who may or may not be dead. But Tubby wants the boss, the mastermind, the “crime czar” behind the killing.

His path to the reckoning will not run smooth – not in a Tony Dunbar novel. There will be frequent interruptions and sideshows involving the birth of Tubby’s first grandchild, a judge’s reelection campaign, the county’s corrupt sheriff, a client framed by the police, the return to town of a girlfriend, and a spunky young prostitute out after her own vengeance. These books often remind me of the stateroom scene in “A Night at the Opera,” where the comedy comes from no particular joke, but simply from the ridiculous introduction of one new character after another into a limited space.

And I guess that has something to do with why I don’t love the Tubby books as well as other people do. They kind of remind me of a party, and I’m uncomfortable at parties.

But Crime Czar was amusing. Also, I noticed for the first time that Tony Dunbar is in fact a pretty good prose stylist, capable of lines like, “she saw that his eyes were like crowder peas with woolly caterpillars crawling over them.”

Pretty good.

Fiction, Reviews

Out of the Soylent Planet by Robert Kroese

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“You know what’s good for adventures,” asked Rex Nihilo, apparently sensing an opportunity to make a sale. “Malarchian military grade plastic explosives. I’ve got a whole hovertruck load.”

“We don’t need any explosives,” said Uncle Blauwin.

The boy looked like he was going to cry. “First you won’t let me go into town to get energy fluxors and now you won’t let me have any military grade explosives. I hate you and this gosh-darned desert planet!”

Communication is about context, and comedy is about context, which means all communication is comedy. That, kids, is logic.

In this prequel to the sci-fi comedy Starship Grifters, if you’re familiar with a general sci-fi context, you’ll get the jokes–the more familiar, the more jokes. Mm, the smell of logic just gets you in the eye, doesn’t it?

A few years ago, I blogged on the second book in this series, Aye, Robot, and I found Out of the Soylent Planet to be a funnier story. The con man Rex Nihilo attempts to unload a truckload of plastic explosives, fails, rolls to plan B, fails, and then finds himself unloaded onto an isolated planet that’s locked down so tight even cans of creamed corn are contraband. The planet is mostly barren. Its civilization is built around producing an artificial nutritional substance called Slop. “It’s not food. It’s Slop!” Since readers would be thinking Slop is made from people, our heroes come across a corporate video that neatly explains that rumor away.

Rex and his robotic Girl Friday, SASHA, go through several silly romps and clever escapes. And explosions. Lots of explosions. Good fun.

I listened to the J.D. Ledford audiobook version, which added to the comedy with good timing and particular word emphases. I laughed aloud many times.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Doomed Legacy,’ by Matt Coyle

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I’ve been following Matt Coyle’s series of hard-boiled mysteries starring Rick Cahill for some time. I like the books quite a lot, but Doomed Legacy proved to be about as dark as its title.

Rick, when he was first introduced, was a loner private eye in San Diego, a disgraced cop who kept office hours in a booth in the steak house where he moonlighted as host. Through his subsequent adventures we’ve seen him reintegrate into human society. Now he’s married and the father of an 18-month-old daughter, the light of his life. At his wife’s request, he’s changed his business model from crime investigation to safe, routine background checks for various businesses.

She knows that he suffers from CTI, “the football player’s disease.” Brain damage from getting hit over the head too many times. What he hasn’t told her is that it’s progressing. He suffers from headaches and memory loss, but the worst of it is the rage attacks. He’s afraid he might endanger the people he loves.

One morning he argues with his wife, which makes him short-tempered when he meets with Sara Bhandari, his contact with Fulcrum Security, of his biggest client. She wants to meet somewhere out of the way, where her colleagues won’t see her. She tells him she’s concerned about some of the people whose security checks have been passed by a new investigative company they’ve hired recently. She thinks the people should never have been cleared, and thinks the investigators are up to something. Rick agrees to look into it as a favor, but he’s in a bad mood and leaves rudely. Something he regrets.

He regrets it even more three days later when, having been unable to reach Sara, he goes to her house and finds her dead – raped and murdered. The police identify the m. o. of a serial rapist in the area, and blame it on him. But Rick isn’t so sure.

Then Sara’s sister hires him to investigate the death. But she fires him abruptly when bad reports (false ones) start spreading about Rick’s own security work. That won’t stop him, of course. It’s personal now. But he has no idea how powerful the people he’s challenging are. And he has no idea the effect it all may have on his family.

I liked Doomed Legacy. It read well except for a couple typos. The occasional references to Christianity and prayer were positive.

But it’s a dark story. I hope the next one proves happier for Rick.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Skald’

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A scene from a production of “Hallfred Vandraadeskald” presented by the Norwegian National Theater in 1908. Photo property of Nationalteatret.

Another Icelandic saga, read by me in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. (Unfortunately, I can’t find another translation in print anywhere.) I’m reading through a section of skald’s sagas, from which you may infer that The Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Skald is another story of a poet.

Hallfred’s Saga bears some (actually a lot of) similarity to Kormak’s Saga, the subject of my last saga review. Like Kormak, Hallfred falls in love with a girl at home in Iceland, fails to show up for their wedding, and harasses any other suitors who appear. Also like Kormak, he sails abroad to make his fortune as a Viking.

But this is where his story distinguishes itself. Hallfred ends up at the court of King Olaf Trygvesson (whom you may remember from my novel, The Year of the Warrior). Hallfred seems to be a predecessor to every song writer who ever nagged record producers in Nashville or Las Angeles. The king has other things on his mind than listening to songs, but he finally agrees to give Hallfred a hearing, calling him a “troublesome skald” (vandræðaskáld). In the event the song pleases Olaf, who accepts Hallfred as one of his court poets.

But this happens at the peak of Olaf’s evangelistic zeal.  Receiving the king’s offer (actually a threat) of baptism, Hallfred makes a counterproposal. He wants Olaf himself to be his godfather, a singular honor. Like a squeaky wheel, Hallfred gets what he wants. But his relationship with the king is an uneven one. He seems to have trouble getting the swing of Christianity. He falls out of favor when he invokes the old gods or falls into heathen customs. Then the king sets him to various tasks to regain favor, opening up opportunities for the kinds of adventures that always show up in sagas.

Although Hallfred’s saga is not one of the best in terms of its artistry, it is interesting for the picture it gives of the religious transition in Iceland in the 11th Century. As compared to Kormak’s Saga, one senses the pressure of the new faith as it alters people’s mores. Hallfred’s attentions to another man’s wife are treated more seriously here, less as merry pranks, and his family urges him to let it all go. In the end even Hallfred decides to leave the woman’s husband alone.

One of the saga’s main weaknesses is that, although it’s based on Hallfred’s own poems, the saga writer appears to often misunderstand them. Poetic allusions (always very thick in Viking poetry) are mistaken for statements of fact. Thus, a man uses a heathen sacrificial trough as a weapon, highly unlikely in real life. Or Kormak’s great enemy is named “Gris,” which means pig. I would suspect that’s an insulting name Hallfred bestowed on him, rather than the name he actually carried. (Pigs enjoyed higher status among the Vikings than they do with us, but I’ve never heard of any Viking actually named “Pig.”)

In short, The Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Skald is a flawed saga which contains, nonetheless, numerous points of interest for the saga enthusiast.