I was wandering through some of the old reviews on this site, and I found a review of An End to a Silence, by W. H. Clark. I liked the book quite a lot and noted that I wished the sequel were available (it’s intended as a trilogy). I checked again now, and found that the second book, If I Scream, is out, so I bought it. It has most of the virtues of the first book, and engaged me deeply. Except for one thing…
A young woman, pale and emaciated, appears along a Montana highway. A kindly man stops to help her, and seeing her condition and hearing her say something about being held a prisoner, he heads for the police station. But on the way she distracts him, and he smashes into a car in an intersection. They are both rushed to a hospital, where the young woman quickly dies.
This is a case for Ward, the mysterious, taciturn former Texas Ranger, now a Montana policeman. Kidnapping and the abuse of children are things he obsesses about. But his bosses won’t devote a lot of resources to the case, because a serial killer has started working in the area. The murderer kills in various ways, and it’s hard to see what connects the men he’s murdering. So Ward is left to work the case as he can, with the help of a cop named Mallory, a victim of child abuse himself and a pariah on the force because of the things he once did at the bidding of his abuser.
Stories about child abuse chill and fascinate me, and If I Scream did the same. It’s very well-written and bears the marks of deep compassion.
My main complaint is how dark the book is. When you’re writing about as grim and tragic a subject as this, I think it’s a good idea to offer the reader a little hope. There isn’t much hope in If I Scream. It troubles me to think what a serious abuse victim might conclude from reading this story.
I do look forward to the next volume, if there is one (this book came out in 2017). If the final volume appears, I hope it has a more uplifting ending.
I’ve become a big fan of James Scott Bell, an excellent mystery-and-thriller writer who also happens to be a Christian. So when I saw he’d published a collection of novellas in hard-boiled style called Trouble Is My Beat, I snapped it up. It was excellent value for money.
Bill “Wild Bill” Armbrewster is a World War I veteran and a successful pulp mystery writer. But it’s hard to make a living doing that, even back in the late 1940s. So he works as a “fixer” for a Hollywood studio. That involves getting stars out of dangerous or illegal situations, avoiding scandal, and sometimes putting the scare on them to keep them on the straight and narrow. It might bring him up against rival studios, or gangsters, or dangerous dames, or the cops. He won’t let himself be intimidated, and he’s a hard man to fool. And at heart he’s a decent guy.
Bill Armbrewster is the kind of simple, old-fashioned hero you don’t run into much anymore, on the page or on the screen. Author Bell does a good job of writing in the hard-boiled voice, though his similes and metaphors aren’t up to Chandler and Hammett’s standards. No effort is made to shock the reader into a raised consciousness. The language is generally mild, and one story involving a Christian evangelist treats him with respect.
There was pretty much nothing I disliked about Trouble Is My Beat. Highly recommended.
If the name Augustus Thistlewood strikes you as something out of P. G. Wodehouse, you and I have that in common. And we’re both right. There are echoes of Wodehouse at the beginning of Dave Freer’s science fiction novel, Cloud Castles, though the book gradually evolves into something quite different.
Augustus is a son of a wealthy, but low-profile, family of industrialists. He went to university to become an engineer, but he’s so brilliant he needed more of a challenge. So he took a degree in Sociology too, and that’s where the trouble began. Convinced of “modern” views of society and economics, he decided he needed to spend time with the less fortunate, “uplifting” the poor.
That mission took him to Sybil III, a floating city in the “habitable region” of a gas-dwarf star. The city floats on antigravity engines and shares the skies with “floating castles” belonging to two alien races who are war with each other but “neutral” (though hostile) to humans. The skies also feature clumps of floating vegetation that nobody cares about much.
Augustus arrives in the floating city as the perfect innocent. The place is the most debased and claustrophobic of slums, but he, having no experience of real life, trusts everyone. He’s immediately spotted by an urchin called Briz (a girl, though he assumes she’s a boy), who “takes him under her wing” with the intention of robbing him blind. Only Augustus proves strangely resilient – the stupid moves he makes tend to work out all right for him (kind of like an old Mr. Magoo cartoon), and his engineering skills prove useful and even lifesaving. And Briz, against her will, finds herself drawn to this gormless do-gooder, developing a genuine sense of obligation.
Then they end up on one of the floating “skydrift paddocks,” vegetation clumps, and discover a thriving, if marginal, civilization – a place mirroring Australian Outback culture, but in the air. And gradually Augustus becomes “Gus,” their strong, inventive, and decisive leader. In this capacity he’ll face war, slavery, and worse from the aliens, on whose domains he can’t help encroaching.
Cloud Castles was a lot of fun – creative, original world-building, and a cast of colorful, well-developed characters. Dave Freer has been a Facebook friend for some time, but I hadn’t tried his science fiction before. This is an extremely good space opera, and I recommend it highly.
He was the living truth. The religious had to kill him because they were religious. The leaders had to kill him because they were the leaders. The people had to kill him because they were the people. The law had to kill him because it was the law.
That was what it was like to be the truth in the world….
As he tells the story, he was troubled by his inability to understand Christ’s teaching. He knew the gospel story. He understood the doctrines (as much as any of us understand them). But how do we follow Jesus’ teachings? Are we really expected to give everything we own to the poor? Not to resist an evil man? To pluck out an eye that leads us to sin? What is Jesus talking about?
His son suggested that perhaps he was trying to solve a problem instead of trying to get to know a Man. So he plunged into the gospels – taught himself Koiné Greek to read them in the original language. And what he began to understand – oddly – led him to the Romantic Poets of England.
The book casts a wide loop, but always returns to those Romantics – Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge on the bright side, and Byron and Shelley on the dark side. And among them, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, in whose novel Frankenstein he finds a key to understanding much of the modern rebellion against nature – Victor Frankenstein, he hypothesizes, was not trying to play God. He was trying to eliminate the Female. Which makes him a harbinger of our times.
There is much to ponder in this book, and I can’t claim I understand it all. I need to read it again. But the answer to the problem of getting to know the mind of Christ, as Klavan sees it, is seeing how in all nature – not only the natural world around us but our own nature – the truth of Christ is revealed. The Trinity is everywhere, giving us glimpses behind the veil, calling out to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. The life that Jesus lives is promised to us. The Romantics at their best glimpsed this, and some of them embraced it in the end.
There were things in this book that troubled me from a doctrinal point of view. I think any thoughtful Christian will have a similar experience. Because Klavan isn’t doing apologetics here. He’s peering into mysteries. He may be wrong at some points, but I’m not prepared to say so on one reading of the book. By and large, I think he’s on the right track.
Highly recommended for thoughtful Christians, especially those who love literature.
If you’re lucky enough to have read my novel, Blood and Judgment (it’s not too late! Click the link), you’ll know that Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, was based on a story about a prince named Amleth, found in the medieval history of Denmark, Gesta Danorum, by Saxo Grammaticus. So doing a Viking movie based on the story seems an obvious enough angle. However, Robert Eggers’ violent new film “The Northman” (which I saw last night, wearing my Viking clothes, in a free preview in Minneapolis) still owes more to Shakespeare than to Saxo.
If I were Danish (come to think of it, I’m a quarter Danish), I’d be a little offended at how my country’s Viking heroes are treated in the entertainment media. The History Channel’s egregious Vikings series took the Danish hero Ragnar Lodbrok and shifted him to Norway. Eggers’ film about the equally Danish Amleth starts in Norway, then moves on to Russia and Iceland.
The set-up is that Prince Amleth is the son of King Aurvandill, of some Norwegian kingdom whose name I didn’t catch (the dialogue was consistently difficult to understand. Maybe I’m just old and deaf). Shortly after his return from a Viking voyage, Aurvandill is killed by his bastard brother Fjolnir (Feng in Saxo, and in my book), who then takes the queen (Nicole Kidman) and tries – unsuccessfully – to kill Prince Amleth, who manages to flee in a boat, repeating his vow: “I will avenge you, father. I will save you, mother. I will kill you, Fjolnir.”
We next meet him as a grownup (played by Alexander Skarsgård) in Russia, where he has joined a group of berserker warriors who fight shirtless (horrific scenes of rapine and plunder). By chance, he learns that Fjolnir has been driven from Norway by King Harald Fairhair, and is now a sheep farmer in Iceland. Amleth cuts his hair to look like a slave (a nice, correct historical detail) and sneaks aboard a ship of slaves headed for Iceland and Fjolnir. Once there, he quietly lays his plans to kill his uncle, aided by a Slavic witch (Anya Taylor-Joy) who vows to help him with her “earth magic.”
Amleth will learn that his own life story isn’t as simple as he remembers. But that knowledge will not interfere with his vengeance. The final showdown with Fjolnir, on top a volcano, takes the revenge story even farther from Saxo’s account than Shakespeare did.
What shall I say about this film?
First of all, I must say that “IT” has finally happened. By “IT” I mean the arrival of that elusive creature history buffs and reenactors have awaited so long. At long last, there is a good Viking movie. Possibly a great Viking movie.
That is not to say it’s a pleasant movie. It’s dark, dark, dark. You’d think there was never a sunny day in the 9th Century. Almost all colors are muted (I understand this to be a characteristic of Eggers’ style, but my costume historian friend will not be happy with the lack of bright colors). The only exception I recall is one scene early on, when young Amleth covers himself with a vivid red cloak to escape the royal farm unseen (which seems to me slightly counterintuitive, but no doubt there’s some thematic purpose I’m not bright enough to grasp).
Otherwise, the costumes, sets and props were very good (by movie standards). Fjolnir wears lamellar armor, which will annoy many Viking reenactment group authenticity officers. The great hall of Amleth’s father has its high seat at the end of the hall, rather than half-way down one side-bench. A headband with bangles that Nicole Kidman wears is based on a jewelry reconstruction no longer considered accurate (I read this somewhere). The horses in Norway are too tall (though the ones in Iceland are fine).
But by and large the authenticity is pretty good. Better than we’ve seen before.
For me, the Vikings have been the center of my personal Romanticism since I was about 12 years old. When I’ve dreamed of a good Viking movie, this wasn’t the sort of thing I was hoping for. But that’s just me – it’s a fallacy to judge a work of art based on what you’d like it to be. I think “The Northman” is very successful in being what the director intends.
The darkness of the cinematography mirrors the darkness of the story. The kind of revenge-obligation Amleth feels is entirely authentic to the period (and many other periods). Even when Amleth gets an opportunity to walk away at one point, he can’t do it. It would violate his deepest convictions; damage his soul more than death.
But the revenge is in no way glorified. Amleth’s road is mired in blood. His father initiates him in a blood ritual. He and his berserker friends exult in shedding blood. The Viking religion is bloody, he sees visions of blood, everywhere blood is shed cheaply. There’s nothing romantic about it.
But there is something mythic. The gods are around every corner. The wolves (foxes in Iceland, where there are no wolves) and the ravens are always watching. And sometimes the gods themselves appear. Drawn, it seems, by the blood, just like the wolves and the ravens.
I could make an argument, I think, that Christianity is conspicuous in this movie by its absence. Amleth has no way of avoiding his fate in a world without grace.
But I doubt that’s what Eggers has in mind.
In any case, here’s my summation: “The Northman” is bloody, harsh, hyper-violent and disturbing. It is absolutely not for children or the sensitive. But it’s also brilliant and unforgettable.
As almost everybody knows, Arthur Conan Doyle will be forever linked (shackled, as he might have put it) to his epically successful detective character, Sherlock Holmes. And most of you will be aware that Doyle grew very weary of Holmes after a while, and killed him off (temporarily). He hoped he could win the public over to another character he created, an officer of Napoleon named Brigadier Etienne Gerard.
Brigadier Gerard is a Gascon, like D’Artagnan. And like D’Artagnan, he lives for honor and adventure. He is always ready to fight a duel or steal a kiss, and always first to volunteer for dangerous assignments. Where he differs from D’Artagnan is that he’s not terribly bright. His stories are told, we gather, in his old age, in an inn, to a group of friends. Gerard is now living on a pension, which he supplements by growing cabbages. He sighs over hard fate, which has denied him the advancement he has no doubt he deserved. He refers often to the medal for bravery he received from the Emperor himself, but which he never has with him. He keeps it, he says, in his apartment, in a leather pouch. I suspect we’re meant to understand that he actually had to pawn it.
In a series of semi-comic short stories, he tells of headlong adventures he enjoyed during the great wars. Sometimes on secret missions, sometimes accidentally separated from his company of hussars, he escapes from ambushes, traps and imprisonment, often (like the later Captain Kirk) with the help of some woman who has succumbed to his manly charm.
Generally (but not always) the joke is on Gerard. He can be counted on to run (or gallop) toward the sound of the guns, but he’s often clueless about what’s really going on. So confident is he of his own sagacity and aplomb that (in a manner that anticipates Inspector Clouseau) he often mistakes jeering for cheering. He is, however, never mean or small-minded.
I didn’t like The Complete Brigadier Gerard as much as I hoped to. The author is laughing at his hero (if somewhat affectionately), and the reader is too. For some reason that made me uncomfortable.
Your mileage may vary. No objectionable material. I might mention that I often forgot I was reading a Victorian/Edwardian book. Doyle wrote in a style ahead of his time.
But Ruth wore her own face for the world—wore an expression of strength and humility and goodness. Should you become accustomed to her loveliness, there would still be all that left. This was a for-keeps girl. She couldn’t be any other way because all the usual poses and artifices were left out of her. This was a girl you could hurt, a girl who would demand and deserve utter loyalty.
I’ve read all John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books, and a good number of his non-McGee works. I’m not sure if I ever read A Bullet for Cinderella before, though. I find it hard to imagine I could have read it and forgotten it. This is early MacDonald (1955), but it’s a gem.
Tal Howard is a returned prisoner of war from Korea. Nowadays we’d say he has PTSD. He came home to a job and a faithful, waiting fiancée, but walked away from both of them, because he wasn’t the same man anymore. He wasn’t sure what to do with his life, so he thought he’d go look for the money Timmy Warden, as he lay dying in the camp, told him about. The money he’d embezzled from his and his brother’s business and buried in a secret place. “Cindy will know where it is,” he said.
Tal arrives in Timmy’s home town, Hillston (no state named). He finds Timmy’s brother broken and bankrupt, a bitter alcoholic. He meets Ruth, Timmy’s old girlfriend, who never guessed his secrets. He starts searching for a girl named Cindy, but there doesn’t seem to have been any such girl in the small town in Timmy’s time.
But he’s also reunited with an old acquaintance – Fitzmartin, another camp survivor. He’s no friend, though. A loner, a sneak, a spy, all the prisoners had hated Fitz. He overheard Timmy’s confession to Tal, and he has preceded him to Hillston. But so far he can’t find any Cindy either, and none of the many places he’s dug up have yielded treasure. Fitz has no doubt he can solve the puzzle – or, even better, if Tal solves it, he’ll just kill him and take the dough.
You may recognize in this synopsis a fairly standard Noir set-up. And that’s what it is – a morally compromised hero going for the easy score and finding himself in over his head. What raises it to the level of art is John D. MacDonald’s sheer mastery of his medium, the lucid prose, the complex characters, the essential humanity of the project. This book was written fairly early in the author’s career, but it’s a complete, polished achievement. Superior in its time and superior today.
Diane took a deep breath. “I saw her come at you. I was a hair’s breadth away from gunning her down. But I knew she was just another scared and confused person – a victim in all this. And I let her stab you instead. Which feels like a betrayal.”
I waved a hand at her dismissively. “I’m one of the worst people in the known universe. And I can’t feel pain. People can stab me.”
Frank J. Fleming is a treasure – creator of the hilarious IMAO blog, and now a leading light at the indispensable Babylon Bee, he writes some of the funniest stuff going today. And he’s now three books into his Superego series, a dark-comic space opera about Rico, the greatest assassin in the universe. Rico is untethered by conscience and genetically engineered to be a perfect fighting machine. Only now he has somehow fallen in love with a tortured Christian woman called Diane and is trying to make himself worthy of her. In Superego: Betrayal, this change of course has landed him with responsibility for leading a rebellion against a universal criminal empire run by his own father.
I didn’t enjoy Superego: Betrayal as much as the first two books, but the reason is easy to understand. Every story has an arc, and it’s necessary to include an act where things go from bad to worse and the hero’s goals seem impossible to achieve. This book holds that position in the series (unless it gets even worse in the next book). Hopes are dashed, friends turn to enemies, people you like die. I hope Frank isn’t going to Game of Thrones this series, but can tie it all up and give us our happy ending in the next volume.
I don’t spend a lot of time in urban fantasy, as you may have noticed. But you may have also noticed that I’ve grown fond of Dan Willis’ Arcane Casebook series, set in the 1930s New York in an alternate universe where the world runs on magic rather than oil and coal, and where it’s possible both to be a magician and a practicing Catholic.
Alex Lockerby is a runewright, who makes his living doing magic through drawing, then burning, complex mystical designs on paper. He started humbly but has now risen in the world, being in business with the richest sorcerer in America, and in a romantic relationship with Sorsha Kincaid, the most powerful sorceress in the country.
But as Hostile Takeover begins, Sorsha is in trouble. Someone has drawn an incredibly complex rune that’s draining her life-force away. What they’re using the energy for is a mystery, but it’s gradually killing Sorsha. If Alex and his mentor Iggy (who is actually Arthur Conan Doyle incognito) can’t unlock the rune and break it, Sorsha will die.
But that’s not all that’s going on. Alex has been approached by a young couple who are being bullied by thugs who want them to sell a historic property they own. Alex promises to figure out what’s going on and stop it. Also, a runewright who held proprietary rights to a rune that gave a technical edge to a radio manufacturing company has died mysteriously. The insurance company suspects he was murdered, but can’t prove it. That’s Alex’s job.
I like these books. I like the characters. The writing’s pretty good, and the world-building fun. I recommend Hostile Takeover, along with the rest of the series. No very objectionable material, not even bad language.
Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the founders of the British “Detection Club,” a group of mystery writers. They enforced certain rules on their membership, including one against allowing their detectives to solve crimes through “jiggery-pokery.” Jiggery-pokery included spirits, magic, and psychic powers.
The rules of detective writing have changed since then (like all the rules), so that now and then we do encounter a mystery book where psychic powers play a part. However, it doesn’t work in practice to make those powers too effective. That ruins the whole point of a mystery. When a “real” psychic appears in a mystery, their gift is generally obscure, constituting a puzzle in itself.
That’s the case with Jack Lynch’s Die for Me, another in his Pete Bragg series. San Francisco PI Bragg, who flourished back around the ‘80s, gets a call from Maribeth Robbins, a woman he’s only encountered once before – over the phone. On the very last day of his newspaper career, then-reporter Bragg took a call from a profoundly depressed Maribeth. He realized he was talking to someone suicidal, and stayed on the line with her until she’d calmed down. Then he referred her to counselors. That call, she tells him now, saved her life. Today she’s a psychic, but a low-key one. She avoids publicity and the media.
She’s learned that Bragg has become a private eye, and she wants to talk to him about a vision she’s been having. She sees a rural location where – she is certain – several bodies are buried. These people were recently murdered and one of them, she thinks, is a child.
It’s pretty vague evidence to go on, if it can be called evidence at all. But Bragg teases some further details out of her, and then gets a pilot friend to fly him and a friendly medical examiner to a particular area along the California coast. In Jack London State Park they find a spot that matches the description. And the M.E. notes that the vivid green color of the grass could well be a sign of burials.
They land and examine the place, and immediately call the county sheriff. This is indeed a burial site. Just as Maribeth feared.
The story that follows mixes Bragg’s involvement with the case with his struggles in his relationship with his girlfriend, who’s increasingly distant. In the end he’ll face a showdown with a hostage-taking killer, in the ruins of Jack London’s house.
I don’t believe in ESP. If it exists, I consider it probably demonic. But suspending my disbelief on that point, I very much enjoyed Die for Me. It was an engaging and engrossing story that kept me turning the pages.
One thing that dated it, I thought (and being dated is no drawback in a book for this reader), was the treatment of feminism. Bragg encounters a female police detective back when such creatures were a rarity. He demonstrates his openmindedness in his conversations with her, but those conversations are cringe-inducing by the standards of the 21st Century. I think that’s because back then we thought feminism was really about fairness, not just about finding ways for men always to be in the wrong.
Anyway, Die for Me was a pretty good, old-school mystery, and I enjoyed it. Recommended unless ESP is a deal-breaker for you.
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