Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lockdown,’ by Sean Black

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[This novel was published in 2014, so its title should not be understood to have anything to do with the current pandemic.]

A trend I have deplored more than once is the emulation of “action movies” in thriller novels. Action movies (and more so now that we have CGI) have traditionally incorporated greater implausibilities than action books. Because movie action happens so fast – not giving us time to think about things – and we actually see the implausible happening before us. Reading is a slower, more thoughtful process, so writers have always, in the past, had to work a little harder to maintain the reader’s confidence.

Not anymore, though. Nowadays, more and more frequently, action novels are just as implausible as movies. Such is the case, in my opinion, with Sean Black’s Lockdown, first in a series.

Ryan Lock is a private security expert working for a major pharmaceutical company. Animal rights activists have been protesting their practice of animal testing, which culminated in a few of them digging up the company president’s recently deceased wife and dumping her body on a street. Then the company met with the protest leaders. Surprisingly, they announced that they would be ending animal testing immediately.

Then someone is murdered, and everything turns into chaos. There’s a kidnapping, and Ryan Lock is on the case; he stays on the case even after getting fired from his job. Soon it will be impossible to tell friends from enemies, and a terrorist wild card will be added to the deck.

It seemed to me Lockdown followed the action film template too closely. Switch was followed by switchback so regularly that it got to be pretty predictable. And not very believable.

But the thing that really annoyed me about Lockdown was the villain – an over the top, Ming the Merciless type motivated by nothing more than pure grandiosity. I didn’t believe in him, either.

Also, the formatting was awful. Paragraphs and line endings bore no relation to my page layout. Which is annoying.

However, if you’re looking for popcorn reading that doesn’t get too political, Lockdown will keep you interested.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Wake Up and Die,’ by Jack Lynch

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The fourth novel in Jack Lynch’s Pete Bragg series, about a private detective in San Francisco in the 1980s, is Wake Up and Die. It started a little slow, I thought, but finished strong.

Pete gets a client referral to a prosperous local bookie. The man has received some photographs of his daughter. She’s naked with a man in the pictures, and they look like stills from some kind of professional film. When Pete suggests the man just ask his daughter about them, he refuses. He doesn’t even want Pete to talk to her himself. Instead he needs to nose around among her circle of acquaintances and find out what’s gone wrong. Pete thinks that’s insane, but families are what they are and the client knows best.

He learns, to his surprise, that the daughter is actually doing pretty well. She’s engaged to the heir of a wealthy property developer. But as Pete noses around that family’s business, he learns that they’re involved in a major oceanside development project. And that project has attracted some pretty shady partners, who are making unexpected and puzzling changes in the plans. People Pete very much wants to talk to all seem to have gone on vacations, or are just strangely unreachable.

Soon there will be murder, and arson, and major battery against someone Pete cares about. And now that he’s mad, the gloves will come off.

I thought Wake Up and Die meandered somewhat in the first half, but once things started happening, it grabbed me but good. The language isn’t bad (the rules were a little different as recently as this), and though the sexual bits were such as I can’t approve of, they’re almost quaint (like ’80s San Francisco itself ) by 21st Century standards. I liked Wake Up and Die, and continue to enjoy the series.

Fiction, Reviews

Dune Messiah: The Future Is Not Set, But It’s Hopeless

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The new movie adaption of Dune has been available for a month, and many people have observed, as if factual, that only the strong fans have read more than the first novel. The publisher claims millions of original series books have sold. The current bestselling paperback list from the Washington Post has Dune leading both fiction and mass market categories, Dune Messiah being second for mass market.

It’s a good story, more sedate than the first one since Paul Atreides is a galactic emperor defending himself against usurpers rather than being a usurper himself. It’s twelve years after the close of Dune. Paul’s beloved wife, Chani, has not been able to bear a child, and his political wife, Irulan, has increased pressure to have the opportunity to bear a child herself. Despite hating the idea, Chani begins to think having any heir is better than none.

But Paul has seen many futures and many shadows he may not be able to avoid. Which path of pain and death will support the most life?

Paul and his teenaged sister, Alia, have prescient abilities, because of the complex eugenic program that preceded their birth and their consumption of melange, the valuable spice of that planet. Their powers of foresight are unmatched by anyone else with prescient talent. The spice awakens all who get enough of it in the right context. But the future is not strictly prophetic nor does their vision catch everything that could be seen, so in some way they see paths and consequences and choose between likely risks and rewards.

That’s the rationale Paul offers for allowing interstellar jihad in his name and his deification by the Freman, even though he distains religion. He knows he is not a god and doesn’t seem tempted to become one. He thinks about the coming jihad in the first book and rants about its work privately in the second book, but the bottom line seems to be a better life for everyone if he accepts their worship and doesn’t shut down their holy war. Countless lives wasted, he says. The blood of millions shed in his name, he says, but what else could he do? This cynical view of religion dilutes all holy things to cultural tradition and zeal to simple-mindedness. I would think a gifted leader could redirection such zeal, but no, war was unavoidable.

Am I right to read this secular outlook as hopeless? Is that the reason I doubt I’ll read the third book?

Fiction, Reviews

‘Strong Poison,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

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“Give me good food and a little air to breathe and I will caper, goat-like, to a dishonourable old age. People will point me out, as I creep, bald and yellow and supported by discreet corsetry, into the night-clubs of my great-grandchildren, and they’ll say, ‘Look darling! That’s the wicked Lord Peter, celebrated for never having said a reasonable word for the last ninety-six years. He was the only aristocrat who escaped the guillotine in the revolution of 1960. We keep him as a pet for the children.’ And I shall wag my head and display my up-to-date dentures and say, ‘Ah ha! They don’t have the fun we used to have in my young days, the poor, well-regulated creatures!’”

I’m pretty old myself, and I realize it’s been nearly 50 years since I first read the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. I’d forgotten enough of Strong Poison to be mystified by the mystery, which made it extra fun. On top of that, I think author Dorothy L. Sayers was at the apex of her powers in this one.

Mystery novelist Harriet Vane is in the dock, on trial for her life. She had entered into an “irregular” domestic relationship with the writer Philip Boyes. When he finally suggested getting married, she took it as an insult and broke up with him. Soon after, he was dead, poisoned with arsenic. Miss Vane was discovered to have purchased arsenic in the recent past (as part of research for a novel), and no one else can be found who could possibly have administered the poison to him.

Up leaps Lord Peter Wimsey, who has fallen deeply in love with this woman, whom most people don’t find very attractive. He has somehow inserted his employee Miss Climpson into the jury, and she deadlocks them, making a second trial necessary. In the time thus gained, Lord Peter will deploy Miss Climpson to cultivate the acquaintance of a rich, dying old lady’s nurse (impersonating a medium to do so) and send another female agent to infiltrate a suspect’s office staff. In his spare time, he’ll light a fire under his friend Chief Inspector Parker, to get him to propose to his sister, Lady Mary Wimsey.

In terms of word count, I’d say the reader spends more time in this book with the female “covert agents” than with Lord Peter himself. But when he’s on stage, Wimsey’s at his best. What author Sayers is actually doing here, it seems to me, is pioneering (not by herself, of course) the female-centered mysteries that have since become such a huge industry. But I enjoyed the book anyway, because it was just such fun. And the solution is very clever.

A classic.  Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Captain Jack,’ by Christopher Greyson

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I’ve been following Christopher Greyson’s Jack Stratton series for some time, with considerable pleasure. They’re not great literature, but they’ve been fun mysteries with appealing characters, friendly to Christianity.

Sadly, I didn’t much care for the latest, Captain Jack.

This book would seem to initiate a new stage in the series. Jack has at last married his sweetheart Alice, and they’re honeymooning in the Bahamas, which were devastated by a recent hurricane, but are all the more welcoming to tourists for that. They book a diving trip with a guide, and while they’re underwater, another boat approaches. By the time they’ve surfaced, the guide is dead, stabbed to death. They alert the police, who immediately tag them as the most likely suspects in the murder.

Before long they’re running (and swimming, and flying) all around the islands, closely pursued not only by the (mostly corrupt) police, but by Bahamian drug smugglers and mysterious Russians, all after the location of a lost Russian nuclear sub.

If it sounds far-fetched, it is. What’s worse, author Greyson seems to have succumbed to Hollywood Action Flick Disease. It’s all action and chases and gunfights, all the time, each chase more improbable than the last. And our hero shakes off all injuries and carries on with minimal first aid assistance and no apparent need for sleep. And let’s not forget the obligatory female sidekick (Alice) who don’t need no steenking protecting.

I didn’t believe a paragraph of Captain Jack. I only finished it because of my residual fondness for the series.

Your mileage may vary.

Fiction, Reviews

Who’s Afraid of Animal Farm?

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Finding herself unable to read more than individual letters, she fetched Muriel.

‘Muriel,’ she said, ‘read me the Fourth Commandment. Does it not say
something about never sleeping in a bed?’

With some difficulty Muriel spelt it out.

‘It says, ’No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets,” she announced finally.

I recently read George Orwell’s Animal Farm with some friends. We talked about it for a couple months. I didn’t know going in that I already knew the ending. That nonsense about equality (“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) comes at the end with another scene I sort of remembered. I guess the lack of certainty kept me rooting for a better outcome.

Orwell wrote his fable in the early 40s with Stalin and Trotsky in mind. Trotsky was the Communist idealist who hoped for the workers revolution to sweep the whole world. Stalin was just a dictator. He would have been an abusive mid-level manager in corporate America if he had been born in the States.

In Orwell’s story, Stalin is the pig Napoleon; Trotsky is Snowball. Is Snowball meant to be as pure as the wind-driven snow? Does he have a chance of surviving farm hell? I don’t know. He is the smart one though. He’s the one with vision and plans. The rest of them are lying, thieving pigs who spend so much time gaslighting the other animals that they gaslight themselves.

What is the point of Napoleon telling everyone that one neighboring farmer can’t be trusted one day, the other farmer the next day, and that the traitor they exiled is in league with one or the other of the enemy men week after week? It is either his outsized paranoia, his deliberate gaslighting of everyone he can, or his capricious command and control.

Abusive people can be like that. They change their mind for any reason and force those around them to agree, even if the change makes little difference to anyone. The point isn’t understanding the truth but following the abuser in lockstep. The truth, of course, is whatever the abuser says it is.

How do they teach this book in school and still churn out soft-minded socialists? The animals yearn for freedom, praise themselves for owning their own labor, and yet become more enslaved under pig leadership than they were under human leadership. Maybe teachers join in the gaslighting when this book is discussed. Maybe they explain how Snowball would have been proven right if he had had the chance to succeed; if the animals had just stood up to Napoleon and the other pigs, they could have had their animal-owned and operated farm paradise.

More likely, teachers direct attention to a cult of personality and how Napoleon could be very much like someone else we all disapprove of. Who could that be, children? What larger-than-life personality is a stain to all right-thinking Americans?

A few years ago, a school district in Connecticut pulled Animal Farm from its 8th grade curriculum in strong, socialist style. They didn’t ban it, they said. They have only disapproved it for use. They beat Communist China to the ball by a year.

Fiction, Reviews

‘When Christmas Comes,’ by Andrew Klavan

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“I have,” he told her mildly, “a strange habit of mind.”

“Oh?”

“I hear about things. Things people tell me. Stories in the news. Or I read about things online somewhere. And sometimes, I can think my way into them. Imagine my way into them, as if I’m there. And because of that, I begin to discern the causes of events when other people can’t.”

“You’re talking about…”

“Crimes mostly,” he said….

A new Andrew Klavan book is always cause for celebration. In this case, it’s a Christmas celebration. If Graham Greene had written A Christmas Carol, it might have turned out something like When Christmas Comes.

Cameron Winter claims to be, and actually is, an English professor at a midwestern University (apparently it’s in Indiana). But close examination, especially of his hands, indicates he’s something more. He used to be (and probably still is) some kind of a covert government operative. Yet he seems to have freedom to operate on his own.

The story of When Christmas Comes starts with three different narratives, their connections not initially apparent. A young military veteran in the idyllic town of Sweet Haven has confessed to murdering his wife, a school librarian who was universally loved and whom he adored. Cameron Winter, in a session with a psychologist, tells a long, poignant story about his first love, a girl with whom he spent many Christmases in the past. But her family had a dark history, devastating when revealed. And Cameron gets an appeal from a former lover, now married and a lawyer. She’s defending the accused veteran; she knows she can’t get an acquittal, but can Winter discover anything that might give the judge grounds for showing mercy?

As Winter pokes into the lives of the veteran and his victim, he uncovers more secrets. Dangerous ones. If he makes the wrong decisions, he may ruin lives and get people killed.

I loved this book. Wished it were twice as long. Nobody is better than Klavan at delivering, not only a riveting story, but living, breathing characters with palpable inner lives, all packed up in a bed of crystalline prose.

You should read this book. Can’t recommend it highly enough. I pray Cameron Winter will return for another story.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Pieces of Death,’ by Jack Lynch

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I continue reading through the late Jack Lynch’s Peter Bragg novels. Enjoyable, if not top rank. With the added charm of being written before the world went all PC.

In Pieces of Death, San Francisco PI Pete Bragg is hired by a friend in the newspaper business who wants him to bodyguard a friend of his own, coming in on a plane from the east. The guy doesn’t seem like someone who needs much protection, but they get along pretty well – until a couple gunmen show up and kill the protectee.

In spite of this failure, Pete’s client wants him to help him out with related work. The guy was coming in to participate in the assembly and sale of a fabulous historical treasure several people hadn’t even known they shared until recently. But will they manage to close the deal before a mysterious killer wipes them all out, one by one?

The whole thing’s kind of a riff on the classic Maltese Falcon scenario, and it was competently handled. I found the basic “Maguffin” somewhat far-fetched, though, and the story sort of meandered. Also, it still kind of annoys me that Pete never figures stuff out until it’s too late to avoid the shoot-out. Though I suppose the shoot-out’s the real point of the story.

But Bragg’s a likeable character, with a sense of honor that seems a little old-fashioned in this century. So I recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Way of a Ship,’ by Derek Lundy

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Benjamin had found the work on a square-rigger hard and testing beyond anything he had imagined. Nevertheless, as the barque turned away from the gale to run fast to the south, not slogging into the eye of the wind or hove to, but for the first time truly sailing, he became aware of something else: fascination, and the rapture of a young man in glamorous jeopardy.

Among the many things I didn’t know before I read Derek Lundy’s The Way of a Ship was that, at the very end of the Age of Sail, during the late 19th Century, there was a time when the square-riggers served their own nemesis. It was apparent to all that the steamship was on its way to replacing wind-sailing ships. But those steamships needed coal to run on, and (for technical reasons having to do with engine efficiency and payload) at the time the cheapest way to transport coal was in sailing ships. So the sailors carried the fuel for their usurpers. These last sailing ships were not wooden, but iron, their rigging made of steel. The profit margin in this commerce was narrow, so the companies economized by keeping the crew sizes at a minimum. The food stores were minimal as well. Men died because of it, but that’s one of the costs of doing business.

Author Derek Lundy conceived an interest in a collateral ancestor of his, a young Irishman named Benjamin Lundy who sailed in a coal ship around the Horn in 1885. He hunted for information, and found it sparse. The old logs, and most of the old letters, had disappeared. The best he could do was learn what he could about the commerce in general, and then imagine a voyage for his ancestor, on a fictional ship, The Beara Head, with an imaginary captain and a (mostly) imaginary crew, and send them through a fairly typical voyage from Liverpool to Valparaiso, and then on to San Francisco.

It’s a harrowing journey. The book it most recalled to me was Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. But Dana dwelt less on the horrors of the voyage (fewer sailors die in his book). Author Lundy did some sailing as part of his research, including time on a genuine square-rigger. Also he’s a superior wordsmith. Thus he’s able to convey some inkling of the kind of dangers and sufferings these sailors experienced. The oddest thing about it, when you think of it, was that all this was routine. People took it for granted. If you went through an adventure like this today, you’d be on television and get book deals. It’s as if we’re a whole different species from these men.

I found The Way of a Ship utterly engrossing and educational. I recommend it highly. The rare political asides seem pretty even-handed. Some profanity, which kind of goes with the territory.

Fiction, Reviews

Is It Worth Reading the Princess Bride?

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“Look: I would hate to have it on my conscience if we didn’t do a miracle when nice people were involved.”

“You’re a pushy lady,” Max said, but he went back upstairs. “Okay,” he said to the skinny guy, “What’s so special I should bring back out of all the hundreds of people pestering me every day for my miracles this particular fella? And, believe me, it better be worth while.”

A couple years ago, a rumor went around that Sony Pictures wanted to remake The Princess Bride, and many fans respectfully demurred. Remaking it after the pattern of many remakes would produce just another sequel film no one wants to see.

But having read William Goldman’s novel, which is now available in beautifully illustrated hardcover–can you imagine–I could see another movie made from this book. Definitely not a remake of the movie. But another movie based on the book could work if it were done creatively independent from the existing movie.

I’m thinking of something in an artsy style that includes new scenes and probably original material. Maybe the part about dad reading to his son is limited and animated. Inigo’s and Fezzik’s backstories could be told. Prince Humperdink would be a barrel-chested hunter who hated matters of state and enjoyed playing around in his Zoo of Death. There’s enough in the book to do something different with it in a movie–even though while reading the book it’s easy to believe all the best part made it into the existing movie. Goldman did the adaptation himself masterfully.

I think there’s room for a little original material too: another woman to interact with Buttercup and give her some screen time in the castle or before. They could adapt scenes to show how Humperdink noticed her and solicited her hand in marriage like the big jerk he is–no love required. And they could probably insert a Monty Python-style historian toward the end of the first half to comment on Florin and Guilder relations, which of the women alive at the time were known to be uncommonly beautiful, and related innanity.

It would be tough, but I think it could work.

Is the book worth reading? Yes, it is. But if you’ve seen the movie several times already, you may find the book to be a little different.