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Fiction, Reviews

‘Look Down,’ by Ed Church

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Cover of "Look Down" novel saying back of soldier facing empty street and crumbled house

The third entry in Ed Church’s promising Brook Deelman police series is not strictly part of the series, but a novella giving us some background on Brook’s best friend, Welsh-born detective “Jonboy” Davies. Look Down is a flashback to 2004, when Jonboy served as a Royal Military Police investigator in Kosovo. Jonboy is leading a team of four Ghurkas, plus an attractive woman interpreter. Their task is to examine houses destroyed in a massacre, documenting the damage. But as they survey one particular village, people talk about the “red house” down the street, which was hardly damaged. When Jonboy and the team knock on the door and ask to look around, they find it inhabited by a number of soldiers, who tell them they’re not welcome, and this house is none of their business.

Later, Jonboy speaks with a local blind man, who tells him cryptically that if he wants the secret of the red house, he needs to “look down.”

What Jonboy and his team eventually discover is shocking, shameful, and a potential political bomb.

Look Down was a pretty good read. Jonboy is an appealing character, and the mystery is compelling. Also, we’re reunited at one point with an intriguing character from the first book, a mysterious assassin called “The Tourist.” The Tourist is trying to work out his personal karma by killing a few people whose absence will improve the world, and he seems to be the instrument of whatever force of fate is in charge of this particular fictional universe.

Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Probably Dead,’ by Ed Church

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Cover of "Probably Dead" with side of woman in leather jacket looking at street protest

There’s a famous curse, known well to authors, that goes with the second novel. Too often, the second novel isn’t quite as good as the first. This shouldn’t be surprising. A first novel is often the product of years of loving rewriting and polishing; the second book is often written under a deadline.

I praised Ed Church’s first Brook Deelman novel, Non-Suspicious, to the skies. The second in the series, Probably Dead, is not (in my opinion) as good. But the first book was unusually good, so Number Two is still worth reading.

Probably Dead finds London police detective Brook Deelman on a “career break,” touring his home continent of Africa. In South Africa he happens on a bar being robbed, and helps the owner stop the criminals. The grateful owner befriends him. He’s an old London cop himself, he says. He left the force after his daughter disappeared – probably dead according to investigators – after participating in a riot in the 1990s. He’s almost apologetic as he shows him his copy of the police file – could Brook look into the case, when he gets back?

The next day the bar owner is dead – likely suicide, like his daughter – and Brook heads back to the big city, feeling some kind of obligation.

His first stop is to visit an old retired cop in a recreational center. The man seems strangely secretive and hostile. As he’s driving away, Brook is stopped by a policeman, who then searches his vehicle and “finds” drugs. This could mean the end of Brook’s career, and even time in prison.

But Brook barely thinks about that. What he’s mostly thinking about is how mad he is, and how no policeman should use his power that way.

There will be consequences.

There was nothing really wrong with Probably Dead, except that it failed to match the tight plotting and surprises of the first book. Also the villain was pretty one-dimensional. There was a possible hint of politics too, but not too heavy for me to bear. I’m staying with the series for the present.

The running theme of these books seems to be some kind of cosmic balance – something like fate, or possibly even God. There’s a palpable frisson for the reader when fate is revealed. That’s fun.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Missing Amanda,’ by Duane Lindsay

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Cover of "Missing Amanda" novel showing big city traffic at night

Lou Fleener, a private eye in 1950s Chicago, is the hero of Duane Lindsay’s comic novel, Missing Amanda. Lou is not prepossessing in appearance – short, dumpy, and balding. But he’s actually the next thing to a superhero. He’s almost impossible to beat in a fight. It’s something he was born with – lightning reflexes, an uncanny ability to anticipate his opponents’ moves, and a skill for turning any odd object at hand into a deadly weapon. He’s Jackie Chan before there was a Jackie Chan.

He also has ethics. So when he gets a visit from thugs representing Duke Braddock, one of the city’s gang bosses, who wants to hire him, he turns them down flat – then hurts them when they try to get tough.

Braddock responds by doing an end run on him. He goes to Lou’s best friend, Monk. Monk is tall and handsome, but socially inept. He’s also depressed, missing the daughter his ex-wife took away in their divorce. So he’s a sucker for Braddock’s sob story about how his little girl Amanda was kidnapped – certainly by one of his gangster rivals. He needs Monk to persuade Lou to find out who’s got her and rescue her.

And, by the way, he’ll kill Monk if Lou refuses.

So, against his best instincts, Lou starts poking around. Soon he’s got various mobsters mad at him, and he’s figured out that Braddock never had a daughter. It was all a scheme to start a gang war and get his rivals to kill one another off. Rubbing Lou and Monk out along the way will be just a detail.

Lou is angry. He knows how to fight, and Monk knows how to strategize. Together (along with a blonde they pick up along the way) they begin a big operation to bring everybody down.

They may not survive, but they’re gonna have a whole lot of fun.

My nutshell reaction to Missing Amanda was, “It would have been better as a movie.”

I can’t really complain about the story. It kept me reading, and it had many amusing moments. Also some heartwarming ones. But the plot maintained a level of implausibility that struck me as more suitable to the screen than the printed page. I was never able to quite suspend my disbelief.

Also, there were a couple hints of politics – not many, but enough to be annoying. And some anachronisms, especially in language and slang.

Still, I was reminded of Donald E. Westlake. A lot of people like Westlake more than I do. If you’re a Westlake fan, you might enjoy Missing Amanda very much.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Non-Suspicious,’ by Ed Church

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Cover of "Non-suspicious" novel with man holding up flashlight and barred wire before him

As a crime-fighting vehicle, the high-seated, silver Ford C-Max scored low on stealth. But its array of adjustable coffee cup holders still made it the most popular CID choice on nights. Brook wasn’t sure if the person who ordered it for the fleet knew nothing about policing or everything.

DC Brook Deelman is a competent, conscientious police detective on the London force, his career hindered by a drinking problem. He and his partner are called to the scene of a death in a cemetery – an old man, apparently drunk, has fallen against a tombstone and broken his neck, his hand on a bottle of cheap whisky. It looks Non-Suspicious, but Brook has doubts. The man appears too well-dressed to be a falling-down alcoholic. When he learns that the deceased was a decorated WW2 veteran, a prison camp survivor, it seems tragic. But then he meets a homeless man who saw the whole thing – the victim wasn’t drunk at all, according to the witness, and he put up a creditable fight for his life. And the whisky bottle was planted as stage dressing by the killer.

Brook gets no support – in fact he gets pushback – from his superiors when he wants to look further into the man’s story. But that doesn’t stop him. He starts piecing together the history of a man who lived with surprisingly few personal connections – only a war buddy in a rest home (who is soon murdered in his own turn) and a mysterious correspondent who occasionally sent Christmas cards from Australia containing a cryptic message.

I liked this book very much indeed. It was an original mystery, and author Ed Church has achieved originality in the right way – through vivid characterization and very tight plotting. I mean, extremely tight. This is one of those stories that ties all its loose ends up neatly, and they all come together in a gratifying way – with a couple really neat surprises.

Non-Suspicious came equipped with a lot of moral ambiguity, but it was the good kind. I appreciate the good kind. The bad kind is when the author shows us all kinds of sociopathic behavior and then explains that we’re all just naked apes, and it’s stupid to worry about right and wrong. The good kind – as in this book – is when the characters wrestle with right and wrong, and have to confront their mutual failings to do what they ought.

I liked Non-Suspicious a whole lot. I’m looking forward to reading more books in the series and spending time with Brook Deelman, a positive masculine character you can root for.

Fiction, Reviews

‘He’d Rather Be Dead,’ by George Bellairs

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Faded image of seaside village postcard with novel title "He'd Rather Be Dead"

Viewed through the golden glass of the vestibule where we first meet him, wondering where he’s left his ticket of invitation and fuming inwardly because he can’t enter without it, he looks like a dogfish in aspic.

George Bellairs is a classic English mystery writer. I wasn’t familiar with his work before I bought He’d Rather Be Dead, first published in 1945. The book has much to commend it.

Sir Gideon Ware is the newly-elected mayor of the English seaside resort town of Westcome. He is a ruthless property developer who built the town into its present prosperity through hard work, loud promotion, flexible ethics and corner-cutting. At a dinner given to celebrate his victory, he falls under the table during his speech, and dies. Cause of death: strychnine poisoning.

Police Superintendent Boumphrey of the Westcome police is very good at keeping tabs on the citizens’ comings and goings, and even at keeping files on them, but feels this case to be above his pay grade. So he applies to Scotland Yard to send one of their detectives (this happens all the time in novels, but I’ve read the Yard never actually does this) to investigate. They send Inspector Littlejohn (he has a first name, but I can’t recall it), who proceeds in a quiet and matter-of-fact manner, working steadily to uncover the secrets of Sir Gideon’s past, and the force from that past that has now struck him down .

What I liked best about He’d Rather Be Dead was the prose. Author Bellairs had the gift of turning out a very apt sentence, like the one at the head of this review, or this one:

Mr Brown’s smiling lips parted to disclose two copious sets of teeth crowding upon one another like passengers for the last bus.

Not quite Wodehousian, but excellent in its own way.

The mystery itself involved a systematic progression through suspects and evidence, without a lot of fireworks. Characterization was not memorable, and even Littlejohn himself doesn’t leap off the page – almost all we learn of him is that he’s in a happy marriage. He isn’t even physically described until almost the end of the book – which loses him points with this reader.

But I must admit that I didn’t guess the murderer, though I thought I did.

I might possibly read another Inspector Littlejohn book, but He’d Rather Be Dead didn’t grab me a lot. The prose was excellent, but the key was pretty low for my debased modern reading tastes. I don’t recommend against the book. There’s much to be said for it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Sexton Blake and the Great War’

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Silhouette of WWI British soldier with map and biplanes behind him

In the course of my reading, I’ve occasionally run across references to Sexton Blake, an English detective/spy hero whose popularity flourished from the 1890s up to the late 1960s. The character’s longevity can be attributed to the fact that, after his creator (Hal Meredith writing as Harry Blyth) stepped aside, other writers took up the pen. He was featured in a number of magazines over the years, always in the medium of pulp stories aimed at boys. For much of his career, Sexton Blake was a more energetic version of Sherlock Holmes (kind of like the Guy Ritchie movies).

I thought it would be amusing to try some Sexton Blake stories, and the collection Sexton Blake and the Great War was cheap, so I bought it for my Kindle.

Alas, immature as I admittedly am, I’m not immature enough for this stuff. I got through the first short novel, The Case of the Naval Manoeuvres, written in 1908 by Norman Goddard, and that was all I could handle.

In this story, our intrepid hero is sent by the Prime Minister to the Shetland Islands, where he’s standing on the shore one night with his two sidekicks and his faithful dog Pedro, when a dangling rope just happens to hit him in the face. Blake, of course, grabs onto it, and is carried out over the sea. He climbs the rope and discovers it’s attached to a huge German airship. Scrambling up into the cabin, he finds that the ship is under the command of no less a personage than Kaiser Wilhelm II himself, to whom Blake has been of personal service once or twice in the past. This saves his life, but he is taken prisoner nonetheless. Predictably, he manages to escape, but clings onto the vessel’s framework and tracks the crew to their secret lair, where they have prepared a mechanism to guide their fleet in an attack on Great Britain. It doesn’t take long for Blake to disguise himself perfectly as a German officer, sabotage their machine, and kidnap the Kaiser. The Kaiser, in turn, will escape from Blake… and so it goes. Plausibility has no place in this scenario.

Our hero, of course (much like the heroes of our current CGI action flicks), can absorb any amount of physical punishment with barely a wince. He can be lifted high into the sky under a balloon, and plunge 80 feet into the ocean, without noticing the cold or needing any more care than a fresh suit of clothes. Interestingly, he also fights hand-to-hand with the Kaiser – which is less impressive than it sounds when you remember that Wilhelm was born with a crippled left arm (either the author did not know this, or he ignored it).

If you’re interested in pure, unadulterated Ripping Yarns stuff, this is the real goods. I think it would be fun to be able to appreciate stories like this… but I can’t.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Limelight,’ by Dan Willis

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Book Number 5 in Dan Willis’s “Arcane” series about runewright/private eye Alex Lockerby is Limelight. This book takes the series to a new thematic level, and I enjoyed it.

Alex has come up in the world from his humble roots. He’s getting better-paying cases these days, and hobnobbing with the very powerful, among them the Lightning Lord, the sorcerer who provides electrical power to this magic-dominated 1930s New York City. Another is Sorsha Kincaid, the Ice Queen, who provides its refrigeration and air conditioning. She and Alex are carrying on a wary flirtation, but in Limelight they don’t have much time for anything but crime solving and disaster aversion.

First of all, a famous woman mystery writer has been murdered, to the grief of Alex’s mentor, Izzy. Izzy asks him to investigate the case, and it soon becomes clear that someone wanted to stop her writing a novel based on the unsolved murder of a Broadway actress several years back.

But the police are more concerned with a more spectacular crime, one involving magic. A bank’s wall has been breached by an explosion that appears to have been set off by a rune – only everyone knows that there are no exploding runes. Alex sees evidence here of a level of runecraft he has never seen before – oddly initiated by runes that are themselves quite crudely drawn.

Limelight was not crudely drawn. It was tightly plotted, complex, and highly dramatic. It was fun to read, and I look forward to the next installment.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Man Who Wasn’t All There,’ by David Handler

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There’s a precious handful of writers whom I reread every few years just to remind myself what great writing is. Hemingway isn’t one of them.

Several recent releases from my favorite authors have recently been released, but I haven’t bought them because they’re kind of pricey, and things are a little tight just now. But I couldn’t resist David Handler’s latest Stewart Hoag book, The Man Who Wasn’t All There.

As with all the recent books in the series, this one isn’t contemporary, but is shoehorned into Stewart’s past. The Man Who Wasn’t All There is set in the 1990s. Hoagy has finally overcome the writer’s block that metastasized into drugs, divorce and destitution for him, and is clean again, working at last on his next novel. Even better, he has reconciled with his ex-wife, actress Merilee Nash. He’s been living in her New York apartment, but he’s just moved out to her Connecticut farm to winterize the house when he isn’t creating, while she’s in Budapest shooting a movie with Mel Gibson.

It’s great until he’s approached one day by a tubby little man with serious BO, who’s cobbled together something resembling a state trooper’s uniform, and carries a pistol. This delusional man is looking for Merilee and tries to push Hoagy around. Hoagy and his faithful basset hound, Lulu, run him off.

Hoagy then calls the police, and soon a fleet of official vehicles show up. Turns out the weird little man is Austin Talmadge, the second richest man in Connecticut. He’s delusional, and sometimes goes off his medications and harasses people. This is of concern to his brother Michael, the richest man in Connecticut, a recluse who’s close to the governor. The police are soon headed out to bring Austin in again, but it goes wrong, and Hoagy (along with Lulu) gets kidnapped by the loony billionaire. Much violence and mystery follows, until Hoagy figures it all out.

The Man Who Wasn’t All There went down very smoothly. The Stewart Hoag books are consistently fun to read. Hoagy is a bit of a snob and a dilettante, but possesses just enough humor and self-awareness to make his company amusing. Occasionally he hints at opinions I don’t care for, but (as you see above) he sometimes gets it right. He disses Hemingway in this one, and that always pleases me.

Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bring Her Home,’ by C. E. Nelson

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I’ve gotten some pleasure from C. E. Nelson’s Trask Brothers novels, of which Bring Her Home is the third. The author seems to be trying to fill the gap left by John Sandford when he moved his Lucas Davenport character to a wider canvas than Minnesota. And he succeeds to some extent, especially in terms of cop banter (I love cop banter). The Trask Brothers, our heroes, are identical twins, one a county sheriff in northern Minnesota, the other an officer with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension based in Minneapolis. This adds the element of sibling rivalry to their banter, and that’s fun.

In Bring Her Home, the brothers have taken a week of common vacation leave for fishing, their favorite pastime. But it’s been raining all the time, and finally boredom drives them to the local police department to inquire about a missing person’s poster they’ve seen. The local chief is happy to have them review his files on the disappearance of a young woman three years ago. They don’t come up with any new ideas, but when a similar-looking young woman disappears up north, they start to suspect the two abductions might be connected. Don, the BCA brother, assigns a female officer to go north to look into things. After a while she becomes suspicious of a security officer at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.

Having given the Trask Brothers three books to win my favor, I have to say the weaknesses in the stories outweigh the virtues for me. The author isn’t a particularly good wordsmith, and makes a fair number of word mistakes – using “lead” for “led” and “dived” for “dove,” for instance. Also, there’s too much dependence on sheer good luck and coincidence to get main characters out of deadly danger – characters have a right to some luck, but you shouldn’t go to that well too often. I was slightly annoyed that a lot of the actual investigation in this book was delegated to a brand-new character – an improbably attractive female BCA agent whose presence I can only attribute to creative affirmative action. Also, I was supposed to believe that some highly placed people were covering up actual serial killings to avoid bad publicity. Few people have less respect for high officials in Minnesota than I do, but that strained my credibility. Also, the violence in this book was of a particularly distressing kind.

Some amusing banter doesn’t make up for all these weaknesses. I think I’m done with the Trask Brothers. Regretfully.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Dune: Atreides Triumphant

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{Reading Dune for the first time] Update 5: Dune ends in a sudden halt. I suppose everything is wrapped up neatly enough, but there’s no page or two about everyone settling into a new life or looking forward to a new day. Nothing about drawing Rose closer, setting Elanor on your lap, and saying, “Well, I’m back.” It ends with Paul lowering the boom on his enemies, making demands, and done. Maybe the next book picks up immediately, but that brings me to main thing I intend to say in this post–pacing.

(By the way, how do you pronounce Harkonnen? I know how the 1984 movie says it, but I’m more comfortable putting the emphasis on the first syllable. Emphasizing the second syllable strikes me as thoughtlessly American. Herbert frequently agreed with me when he said the name, so I’ve read, but he may have said it the other way too.)

Book 1: Dune builds at an appropriately slow pace to strong climax. Book 2: Maud’Dib felt slow as I read the first few pages, but I may have been projecting. After Paul and Jessica collect themselves on the heels of the main event in book 1, the story kicks back into gear. This section has the one chapter I was tempted to skip. It focuses primarily on the death of an important figure, so it’s good to give such an event proper weight. But it’s also like reading appendix 1 on planet ecology and the visionary who intended to change Arrakis. Too much lecturing. Book 3: The Prophet picks up a few years after the end of the previous section and tells a quick story of longer period of time.

Dune has a lot of fighting, but Herbert doesn’t focus on it. The fights we see are the personal ones. He skips over taking village strongholds, defending hideouts from imperial soldiers, and knocking patrol ships out of the sky. Instead we get an explanation of how the tough, imperial troops are losing 3-1 against rebels, who are supposed to be scattered ruffians, to the disgusting Baron Harkonnen, who had assumed any fighting had already been handled. That’s just one example of how the story tells us where the conflict lies ahead in one chapter and how it’s behind them in the next.

Herbert writes well. He doesn’t try to make irrelevant scenes appealing. He’s willing to wrap them up off camera. I do wish he would have refrained from constantly referring to training. The reader has plenty of time to understand the deep, lengthy training Paul and Jessica have endured. Do we have to mention it every time they try not to blow a gasket?

Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash