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Fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘Man and Wife,’ by Andrew Klavan

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And that’s how we really expose ourselves. Not in what we say but in the imagination we lay over the face of things. Because we can choose our words, strike our poses, but our delusions—no, these are wallpapered to our souls.

Andrew Klavan informs us in his autobiography, The Great Good Thing, that he once wrote a novel about Jesus. He’s not very proud of it; it was the sort of sophomoric story that young agnostics are prone to tell, once they’ve “figured everything out.”

But he wrote another novel about Jesus – in a sense. Man and Wife is not a Christian book, but its central character is a very evident Christ figure. And while the author did not quite understand yet when he wrote the book, you can tell he was asking the right questions.

Cal Bradley, the narrator, is a psychiatrist, chief administrator of a private mental facility in Connecticut which was originally endowed by his wealthy family. He’s good at what he does, but the real joys of his life are his wife and children.

His wife Marie came out of nowhere, it seemed, a simple-hearted, uneducated former waitress. She’s beautiful and she’s devoted to her husband, her children, and her church, joyfully serving them all. As far as Cal is concerned, she’s a miracle.

Then, one day while hiking near a local waterfall, Cal spies a woman who looks like Marie down in the gorge, talking to a strange man who seems oddly intimate with her. When he asks her about it, she cheerfully denies being anywhere near the place.

Meanwhile, Cal has admitted a 19-year-old man named Peter Blue to his facility. Peter is charged with striking his girlfriend, setting fire to a church, and assaulting a police officer. But the priest of the church begs Cal to help this boy. There’s something astonishing about his spirit, he says.

And Peter Blue does indeed seem remarkable. Not only is he a cooperative counseling subject, he exerts a healthy influence on the other patients. They follow him like disciples, and their symptoms are improving.

Only Peter Blue turns out to be connected to that same strange man Cal thought he saw with Marie at the waterfall. And Cal starts receiving threats, which he’s sure come from that same man. Is it possible Marie has been lying to him all these years? Can love and untruth exist together?

From a Christian point of view, Man and Wife offers a number of serious problems. But it should be remembered that author Klavan was working his way to faith when he wrote the book. The story is suspenseful and exciting and challenging; also moving and heartbreaking. I recommend it for thoughtful adults. Cautions for language and mature themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dead Don’t Lie,’ by Blake Banner

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On checking my old reviews, I find that I have reviewed at least one book in Blake Banner’s “Dead Cold Mysteries” series before. The book I just read, The Dead Don’t Lie, is a prequel to that series – but it was published just last month, and it actually tells how the Cold Case squad began.

However, I have a suspicion (and all such guesses, it should be remembered, are flimsy things) that this book was originally written for a very different character in another time frame, but was re-written to shoehorn it into the Dead Cold Mysteries template.

John Stone, we are told, is a police detective in a New York precinct. Which makes it rather strange when a sultry dame walks into his office and asks to hire him to deliver blackmail money for her. (The author’s rationalization is that this woman is so alluring that Stone falls for her right off and is putty in her hands.)

She’s lying to him, of course. Soon John Stone is approached again, by a mysterious foreign man who claims to be working for the Vatican, who wants his help in recovering a stolen artifact. As the story goes on, there will be killing and kidnapping, and Stone will work generally without backup or keeping his superiors updated.

If all this sounds like a strange way for a working police detective to operate, I entirely agree. I had a strong feeling that this book had originally been written as a private eye novel, set (probably) in the 1950s (there are no cell phones in view, and at one point our hero uses a pay phone). Also, in one scene, John Stone is addressed as “Mr. Lackland.” That, I would guess, is a failure of the “find and replace” function in the author’s word processing software.

I keep going back to Blake Banner, because I vaguely recall him as an author I like. But in fact, I wearied of him a while back because of the over-the-top improbability of his action scenes. Also, he’s prone to cliff-hangers, though that sin is not committed in this book.

I finished The Dead Don’t Lie, but I can’t really recommend it highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Free Fall In Crimson,’ by John D. MacDonald

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“I woke up this morning feeling great. Absolutely great. Busting with energy. Know something? I want to get involved in the life and times of Esterland and son. I want to go out and con the people. I want to have to bust a couple of heads here and there and have somebody try to bust mine for me. Why should I feel a little bit guilty about feeling like that, Meyer?”

My life takes me into the state of Iowa fairly frequently, and back in the 1970s and 80s, a frequent feature of my drives down there was the sight of hot air balloons traversing the broad heavens. Iowa was a center for the sport of ballooning back in those days. Since that time, I’m informed, the activity has moved to the southwest. But that period remains memorialized in John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novel, Free Fall In Crimson, originally published in 1981.

In sequence, this novel follows The Green Ripper, in which McGee lost a woman he loved and hoped to make a future with. So he’s pretty low at the beginning. He’s losing weight, and even pondering dropping his “salvage” business, to become a boat salesman or something. His friend Meyer worries about him.

Then he’s contacted by Ron Esterland, a newly successful artist from New York. Ron explains that he’s troubled by the circumstances of his father’s death. His father was a successful Florida businessman, married several times, once to a movie star. He was dying of cancer when he was attacked in a highway rest area and beaten to death, more than a year ago. Ron had been estranged from his father, and doesn’t care about his money, but the timing seems suspicious. Could his father have been killed by someone connected to the actress ex-wife, for the inheritance?

McGee agrees to check it out, without great enthusiasm. But when he meets Anne Renzetti, manager of a hotel that Esterland had owned, his interest is piqued and his enthusiasm for life rekindled.

The investigation will take him back to Hollywood, to that snake pit from which he barely escaped alive back in the adventure of The Quick Red Fox. Once again he’ll encounter Lysa Dean, the gorgeous, calculating movie queen to whom he once delivered a rare rejection. She’ll connect him with the ex-wife’s boyfriend, a Hollywood director who’s shooting a movie about ballooning in Iowa. And that will lead him into a confrontation with a psycho motorcycle outlaw who’ll unleash a whole lot of reckless violence and death on a lot of people before the final showdown.

I’d read Free Fall In Crimson before, of course. But I hadn’t remembered much about it except for the balloon ride. I found it to be a very well-written and serious book, and I recommend it highly – with cautions for adult themes and a whole lot of innocent bloodshed.

Fiction, Reviews

‘One Day You’ll Burn,’ by Joseph Schneider

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G. K. Chesterton wrote, somewhere, that there are two different meanings for the word “good.” “For example, if a man could shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”

In a similar (not identical) way, a book can be good in terms of its writing, while not being much good for my personal purposes.

Which brings me to One Day You’ll Burn, an interesting cop novel by Joseph Schneider. Its hero is Los Angeles police detective Tully Jarsdel, an improbable policeman who abandoned the pursuit of a Ph.D. (to the despair of his two “gay” fathers) to become a cop, out of a spiritual resolution to make the world a better place. Promoted prematurely to the homicide squad by way of an experimental department program, he hasn’t yet earned the confidence of the veteran detectives, especially his own partner.

One day a body is found in the entrance to a shop in LA’s Thai Town, in front of a statue of Brahma. The body has been roasted like a Thanksgiving turkey, destroying both fingerprints and almost all DNA, which makes identification difficult. Tully’s partner “graciously” lets him take the lead in the case, assuming it will go unsolved and be a black mark on his record.

But Tully is methodical, and gradually he puts a few clues together, leading him into the bizarre world of Hollywood fandom and memorabilia collectors. And to a hideous killing scheme and a criminal so evil as to be (frankly) a little implausible.

The story was interesting, if a bit over the top. But what put me off, as a bigoted Christian, was that Tully sees himself as on a spiritual quest – a sort of undefined, New Age, semi-Zoroastrian crusade to serve Brahma by helping the world achieve its destined perfection. The world, as he sees it, is getting constantly better (I fail to see much evidence for that myself), and every crime he solves is a step to ultimate justice and peace.

I should say in the author’s defense, though, that he makes a point of the proper use of the term “begs the question.” I was very grateful for that. Also for a scene in which he denounces the corruption that permeates contemporary academia. In that, he was right on the money.

So, bottom line, I thought One Day You’ll Burn a pretty good book in its own right, but not for me.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cold Fire,’ by Dean Koontz

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I think I’ve read almost all of Dean Koontz’s novels, but I always understood there might be one or two here or there that I missed. I bought Cold Fire because it was on sale, and figured I’d likely already read it, but had probably forgotten the plot. However, it turned out to be brand new to me.

Jim Ironheart is a recent lottery winner, who could be living his life in leisure. But occasionally he has a mystic experience, and utters the word, “Lifeline.” He then sets out blindly, following his intuition, in order to be in place just in the nick of time, to save somebody’s life.

Holly Thorne is a disillusioned news reporter for a small-town newspaper, But when she witnesses Jim Ironheart saving a kid’s life, she suddenly needs to learn more about him. She locates him, shoehorns herself into his life, and they fall in love. Now they’re a team, following his lifeline summonses together.

But that’s just the beginning. Jim is being drawn home, to the house where he grew up, where he first discovered his gift. There, with Holly’s help, he will begin learning the secrets of his forgotten past, of the personal trauma that put him on the road to his present life.

Cold Fire is one of the early books of Dean Koontz’s bestseller period. I found it episodic and rather less intriguing than his more mature work. But it was worth reading. I enjoyed it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dead Don’t Talk,’ by Alex Robert

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I have a great fondness for the ancient city of York in England, because of its Viking connections. So a novel set in York always appeals to me a priori. Which is why I bit on a deal on The Dead Don’t Talk, by Alex Robert, book 2 in the Jack Husker series.

The aforementioned Jack Husker is a York police detective. In the previous book, we are informed, he cracked a big case and saved lives, becoming a local hero. As The Dead Don’t Talk begins, all that has gone down the toilet. A case he thought he had neatly tied up, against York’s chief gangster, has fallen apart in court, leading to an apology to the defendant and a reprimand for Jack.

To put a cherry on top of it all, Jack’s girlfriend, whom he had lost years ago and won again in the previous book, has had enough of his workaholism, alcoholism, and bad temper, and moved out on him.

His boss “temporarily” reassigns him to Missing Persons, where police careers go to die. Studying a recent case, Jack smells a rat. An elderly couple who disappeared during one of York’s Ghost Tours are supposed to be vacationing in Spain. But Jack finds the story told by their niece and nephew, who have moved into the couple’s house, just a little thin. More troublingly, witnesses are turning up dead.

Suddenly he’s interested in his job again. He’s also interested in Lisa, a young female detective who helps him out.

My takeaway: The Dead Don’t Talk wasn’t awful. The prose was generally grammatical, though it was often flabby. A lot of verbiage could have been cut, making the book move faster, and what was left behind could have done with some sharpening: “…her eyes fiery and offering the look of someone with an axe to grind,” for instance, is a pretty banal construction. In another place, the author writes, “Her fire would be tempered until Lang appeared.” In context, the meaning is that this woman would remain furious until Lang comes to cool her down. But that’s the opposite of what “tempered” means.

Also, Jack Husker is one of the less appealing heroes I’ve come across in a book recently. He’s sour-tempered and prone to pulling petty practical jokes, which just makes him unpopular at work. Yet we’re told that Lisa his associate, who is, we’re informed, quite attractive, finds him sexually fascinating – even though he’s described as considerably older than her, short, and overweight, as well as having a drinking problem. I know love is blind, but it’s rarely that blind in my experience.

I finished the book, and it did keep my interest, but I wasn’t sorry when it was over. I can only recommend The Dead Don’t Talk halfheartedly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Fragile Coast,’ by Scott Hunter

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I gave a mixed review to The Fragile Cage, the first volume in Scott Hunter’s Cameron Kyle series, about an English ex-police detective living with a bullet fragment in his brain that could kill him at any moment. I liked the energy of the story, comparing it to the James Bond books, though I didn’t think the plot made a lot of sense.

In the second book, The Fragile Coast, the author seems almost to have been reading my review. Because now we’re taken straight into MI6 territory. A spymaster offers Kyle an assignment – to go to Spain and help look for a lost American atomic bomb. The agent they had in place has been kidnapped, and it happens to be a woman of whom Kyle is fond – Jude Bates, a former policewoman he’s worked with before.

But he hasn’t even gotten unpacked before he discovers he’s been lied to. Which sets the tone for the rest of the story. Every chapter seems to feature a twist, where something Kyle has learned turns out to be false, and somebody he trusted turns out to be an enemy. At least until the next plot twist.

Twists are good plot devices, but in my opinion they can be overdone. There’s such a thing as just jerking your reader around, and in my opinion The Fragile Coast committed that sin. The plot (yet again) seemed contrived.

Also, the book ended in a cliff-hanger. I hate those.

The Cameron Kyle series showed some promise, but I’m done with it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Damnation Street,’ by Andrew Klavan

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Bishop looked the man over. He was a big, evil chuckle-head. A white guy approximately the size of Denver. He had short blond hair and stupid eyes and a vague pharmaceutical smile. He had a voice so deep it sounded like an earth tremor.

Andrew Klavan’s Weiss-Bishop trilogy comes to a thundering conclusion in Damnation Street. I’m pretty good with words, but I struggle to express how much I enjoyed it. And I’ve read it before.

Quick background: Big, sad, middle-aged San Francisco private eye Scott Weiss has fallen in love with a woman he’s never even met – a prostitute who calls herself Julie Wyant. He also knows that she’s living on the run, in fear of the Shadow-man, a legendary professional assassin. The Shadow-man has a chameleon-like gift for disguise, and is an utter sadist. His dream for Julie is to catch her and torture her to death. That’s his idea of love.

This dynamic has formed a subplot in the first two books, but it takes center stage in Damnation Street, as very different obsessions draw these two men into a final showdown. In some ways they are mirror images of one another – so which force will prevail? Empathy or diabolic hate?

Weiss could use his partner, Jim Bishop, at a time like this, but Bishop failed him badly in Shotgun Alley. Bishop has always been the kind of man who lives on the edge, and he may have fallen beyond redemption now.

There is one more character in play, though. One I didn’t mention in the previous review.

The narrator of the trilogy is actually one of its most interesting characters. He’s clearly a fictionalized portrait of the author himself in his post-college days. He tells us he took a job with Weiss and Bishop because he’d always loved detective fiction, and wanted to learn about it first-hand, so he could write hard-boiled books himself.

In Dynamite Road, the narrator met Emma McNair, the girl of his dreams. But he was prevented from calling her because – with all the idiocy of young, horny men – he stumbled that very night into a sexual relationship with an older woman, and has been too cowardly to break it off since. In Damnation Street, he encounters Emma once again, and she gives him an ultimatum – “I want a man I can look up to and admire. Don’t come back until you are one.”

Which is how he comes to find himself in a fistfight outside of a brothel, giving Weiss the best backup he’s capable of.

But it all finally culminates in a showdown in a lonely house, where Weiss entices the Shadow-man. Author Klavan sets the scene like Hitchcock, letting us know everything there is to know about the Shadow-man’s plans, dangers Weiss can’t know. Time slows down, and the dramatic tension is exquisite, even after multiple readings.

These books can be taken on several levels. On the surface, they’re well-crafted hard-boiled mysteries. On a deeper level, they’re chivalric romances, transposed into a modern key. And – perhaps – on the deepest level, they’re meditations on that mystery of love and idealism that motivates all of Klavan’s work.

The publishers made a serious error in the Kindle edition, by placing their “Thank you for reading” message after the last numbered chapter, but before the Epilogue. Don’t miss the Epilogue, though. It’s important.

The Weiss-Bishop books are, I contend, an apotheosis of the hard-boiled genre. I recommend them, and even urge them upon you. But cautions are in order for violence, sexual situations, and very rough language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dynamite Road,’ and ‘Shotgun Alley,’ by Andrew Klavan

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“She changed things,” Whip Pomeroy went on in that same overly sweet, overly elevated tone. “She changed… everything. Everyone. She was like…oh—oh, an unreal creature. Like paintings you see. Or daydreams you have. She was the way people never are. You know? You can’t know.”

The time comes, periodically, when I know I need to re-read Andrew Klavan’s Weiss and Bishop trilogy again.

I think we’re all feeling a little out of sorts lately. The news has been pretty awful. Whatever way one feels the world ought to be going, it doesn’t seem to be going that way at all.

I get the feeling Andrew Klavan has been feeling like that too. I like to watch his podcasts – delayed, of course, on YouTube, because I’m too cheap to spring for a Daily Wire subscription. But Klavan seems a little tetchy lately. I get the feeling he’s getting fed up with the community he joined when he chose, some years back, to be baptized. Tired of e-mails from earnest souls asking how he can call himself a Christian when he writes about such awful topics, using such dirty language. I hope we don’t lose him over that, because we need him badly.

So I’ll supplement my previous reviews of the Weiss-Bishop books on this blog, and the one I wrote years back for The American Spectator, by again reviewing the two books I’ve read so far this time around – Dynamite Road and Shotgun Alley.

The heroes of these books are a pair of San Francisco private detectives – Scott Weiss and Jim Bishop. The names themselves are suggestive – “Weiss” means white, suggesting the proverbial White Knight. And if Weiss takes that role, then Bishop suggests another chess man, the oblique piece that never moves in a straight line.

Scott Weiss is a former cop, big, sad-faced, overweight, and middle aged. He foreshadows Klavan’s current character Cameron Winter in being an intuitive detective. He has a knack for getting into people’s heads, for discerning their motivations and fears, predicting their next moves. His ability to track down fugitives is legendary.

Jim Bishop is younger, a handsome, buff risk-taker, a natural outlaw. He treats women like disposable objects, and they love him for it. (Weiss envies him this talent, with guilt.) Weiss pulled him out of the gutter and gave him a second chance. Saw potential in him. He’s a valuable operative, but it’s largely due to his willingness to break the rules, while Weiss looks the other way.

In Dynamite Road, Bishop is sent to a small town aviation company, where one of the owners suspects his partner is using their planes for illegal activities. Bishop, an expert combat pilot, goes to work for them, with a plan to replace the pilot the criminals have selected for their coming operation, incidentally seducing his wife so he can pump her for information.

Meanwhile, Weiss has fallen in love. A woman shows up in an associated investigation – a prostitute with the face of an angel. He grows obsessed with this woman, Julie Wyant. (Her name is reminiscent of Clyde Wynant, the subject of the manhunt in Dashiel Hammet’s The Thin Man.) He gradually becomes aware that he’s not the only man hunting this woman. The other is a mysterious, legendary killer known as The Shadowman, perhaps the most dangerous – and relentless – criminal in the world. (Continued on next page.)

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Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dark Fantastic,’ by Stanley Ellin

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I very much enjoyed Stanley Ellin’s Star Light, Star Bright, which I reviewed the other day. I liked the hero/narrator, John Milano. I compared him to Travis McGee, an easy-going, very masculine, independent-minded detective. The second (and last) book in the John Milano series is The Dark Fantastic. He’s less McGee-esque this time out.

For one thing, the first-person narration is gone. The Dark Fantastic employs two points of view, dividing the time between John Milano and our villain. There’s never any question who the villain is, or what evil he intends. The drama here centers on whether John will figure out the truth and be on hand in time to prevent disaster.

Like Travis McGee, New York investigator John Milano is an untethered male, a boy who never grew up. The difference is that McGee lives that way by choice, taking his retirement in installments because he doesn’t expect to ever grow old. John Milano is merely stuck in adolescence. Unlike the independent McGee, John Milano works for a man he despises, just because the money’s good.

John’s expertise is in the recovery of stolen art, and in The Dark Fantastic his job is to try to locate a couple valuable pre-Impressionist works stolen from a California collection. His suspicions lead him to a shady art gallery in Greenwich Village. Needing an inside source, John approaches Christy Bailey, the beautiful, black receptionist there. She agrees to spy on her boss (this requires a little lying on John’s part), but she wants something in return – an investigation of her own. Her little sister has started spending a lot of money she can’t account for. Christy wants to know what kind of trouble she’s in.

John looks into it, and in the course of his investigation grows increasingly closer to Christie. They come from very different worlds, but the attraction is immediate and powerful.

But all the while, we’re watching the villain planning his atrocity. He’s on a schedule, and time is running out.

I didn’t enjoy The Dark Fantastic as much as Star Light, Star Bright. The story was darker and more gritty this time out, and John Milano seemed to possess less agency. Also, he and Christy spend a lot of time talking about race issues. This book was written in the early 1980s, and – in my opinion – American race narratives don’t age well. What seemed like a reasonable accommodation in the eighties is considered condescending and suspect today. The goalposts are forever moving.

So I don’t think The Dark Fantastic is entirely successful. But it is gripping and moves pretty fast. Cautions for ugly racism and the sexual abuse of a minor.