Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Middle of the Night,’ by Riley Sager

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My parents, immediately concerned about how I’d be affected by my friend’s abduction, made sure to cut me out of the snapshot before it was released to the press. In doing so, they created an ironic reversal of the situation.

Billy, the Lost Boy, was seen literally everywhere, his image almost as prominent that summer as O. J. Simpson and the white Bronco. And I became invisible.

Tonight’s review concerns a novel by Riley Sager, an author I wasn’t familiar with. But he knows his business. The novel is called Middle of the Night.

Ethan Marsh, the narrator, is back (this is another first-person, present tense novel, alas) living in his boyhood home, and not happy about it. But his parents have decided to retire to Florida, and his broken marriage has left him needing a place to stay, so here he is, at least for a while.

It’s not that it’s a bad place to live. Hemlock Circle is a lovely cul-de-sac in a leafy suburb near Princeton University. The neighbors are friendly and engaged with one another.

But this is where, when he was ten years old, Ethan had the worst experience of his life. He was “camping” in a tent in his back yard with his best friend Billy one night, and woke the next morning to find the tent wall slashed open, and Billy missing. Never to be seen again.

Ethan has been haunted by nightmares ever since.

Now, back in Hemlock Circle, he’s constantly reminded of that night. Now and then, in the dark, he has a fleeting impression of Billy’s spectral presence. Some invisible visitor seems to be wandering the circle at night, triggering motion sensors on security lights. And, most troubling of all, from time to time he finds a baseball in his back yard – that had been Billy’s secret summons to get together when they were boys. Nobody knew about it but the two of them.

Perhaps, Ethan thinks, Billy is speaking to him from beyond, asking him to solve the mystery of his murder. Or maybe he’s still alive, playing a vengeful game because he blames Ethan for something – something he himself can’t remember.

Middle of the Night is a well-written and immersive book. It brushed up against the topic of spiritualism, but only brushed it lightly. I found it moving and fascinating to read. As it happens, I figured out whodunnit ahead of time, but only on structural grounds, not because I figured out the clues.

Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Working Stiff,’ by Bill Krieger

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Yesterday I reviewed a book that attempted to take up the mantle of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. I didn’t like it.

Tonight, I review a book that does a much better job of portraying a hard-boiled investigator. Not anywhere near Chandler’s league, but if Bill Krieger had had the audacity to try it, I think he’d have done a better job than last night’s author.

Which is not to say this book is great. Just better.

The hero of Working Stiff is Frank Leland, a New York City private eye in the 1970s. He’s a large, fat man, constantly overeating for comfort as he deals with the trauma of divorce and separation from his wife and young daughter. He used to be in Overeaters Anonymous, but has fallen off the wagon.

Frank is hired by the president of a mid-level advertising agency – only to be appalled to discover that one of their employees, a beautiful young woman, is lying stabbed to death in her office. What his client wants is for Frank to hide the body… temporarily.

Tempted by the money offered, Frank takes the job but surreptitiously calls a friend, a woman police detective, who manages to come in and take control of the crime scene without revealing that Frank dropped the dime. Then the murder weapon – a pair of scissors – is discovered on another employee’s desk, and he is arrested. That employee’s pregnant wife then asks Frank to prove her husband’s innocence. They don’t have much money to pay, but Frank is sentimental enough to take the case anyway, out of compassion.

Frank discovers that the advertising world is a fouler den of serpents than he ever imagined. Before he’s done he’ll have to make hard choices between lesser and greater evils, ethical decisions that will leave him – and the reader – mired in insoluble conundrums.

The story in Working Stiff is pretty good, though I think the police procedures are a little loosely portrayed. I questioned some of the period details – were computers used in many offices in 1977? Did people talk about reality shows and service dogs in those days? I don’t recall that they did, but my memory can’t always be relied on.

But the real weakness was in the writing. The prose here wasn’t awful, but it was (like its hero) a little flaccid. Sentences could have been shortened by stronger word selection. Whole sentences could have been excised, and the writing would have been more effective. The author has talent, but needs to sharpen his tools.

Still, Working Stiff wasn’t bad, especially if you’re looking for a detective hero out of the ordinary. Cautions for troubling adult themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Goodbye Coast,’ by Joe Ide

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Assuming one wished, for argument’s sake, to reboot Raymond Chandler’s private eye character Philip Marlowe in a modern setting, there is, of course, some precedent – in the movies. James Garner played him in updated form in 1969. Elliot Gould in 1973. And Robert Mitchum in 1978. But each movie did its best to retain the style of the original books and the essential personality of the main character.

Why would anyone wish to reinvent Marlowe as a slightly naïve young detective in the 2020s, with a suspended cop for a father?

The Philip Marlowe of Joe Ide’s The Goodbye Coast is not a former investigator for the district attorney’s office, but a failed cop. His father, Emmet, is a decorated police detective who went into a tailspin after the death of his wife. Now he’s been suspended and is fighting the bottle, but doesn’t hesitate to wave his badge and strap on his gun when his son needs a hand.

Marlowe gets a referral to a job for a fading female Hollywood star, who wants him to find her missing stepdaughter, who disappeared after the murder of her ex-husband, a has-been director. Marlowe suspects his client’s motives aren’t as advertsied, and he’s soon investigating the ex-husband’s murder, which seems to involve Armenian gangsters. He finds the girl, who does not want to go home, so he stashes her with his dad, who finds himself bickering with her but also growing fond of her.

There is also a subplot about Ren, an Englishwoman who wants Marlowe to help her find her son, kidnapped by his noncustodial father. Marlowe begins to fall in love with her.

It’s a reasonable plot, if a little complex (and believe me, it gets a lot more intricate than this short synopsis suggests). So what’s wrong with the book?

First of all, it’s written in the third person, multiple viewpoints. THAT IS NOT HOW A MARLOWE STORY WORKS. One of the main pleasures we seek in these stories is the “face to face” encounter with Chandler’s meditative, intelligent, compassionate/cynical, mildly erudite detective. Joe Ide removes that pleasure, replacing it with graceless, rambling description.

We love the stories for Chandler’s spare, evocative, quotable prose, like, “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.” Author Ide isn’t capable of that kind of writing. He gives us lines like, “He smelled like a flower show run over by a truck.” What does that even mean?

Chandler was also great at creating vivid characters. Ide’s characters might be described as vivid, I suppose, but only in terms of incoherence. They act like they have multiple personality disorder, taking bizarre and violent action purely (it seems) to advance the plot. I was tempted (though I know nothing of the author) to wonder if he’s autistic and just doesn’t know how normal people think and act.

Ide’s Marlowe is also weepy and apologetic when he makes a mistake – something the real Marlowe was never guilty of.

If The Goodbye Coast had been offered as a stand-alone, with a main character with some other name, I might or might not have finished it and given it a review. It wouldn’t have been a very good review.

But shove this at me with a tag marked “Philip Marlowe” tied to it, and I feel seriously shortchanged.

I do not recommend The Goodbye Coast.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Never Far Away,’ by Michael Koryta

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“Every now and then, a bit of work will come your way with sincerity, Mr. Blackwell. The man in the middle won’t have any skin in the game. He’ll speak honestly to you, asking for the unique help that only a few people on the planet can provide. And if you accept, for one occasion at least, you’ll have the pleasure of working with a clean heart if not clean hands.”

One of the things that keeps me coming back to Michael Koryta, aside from his excellent prose, is his surprising characters. Never Far Away kept me guessing all the way through, mostly because one of the central characters was truly impossible to predict (and I can tell you, as a writer, that that’s a hard trick to pull off).

Leah Trenton is a successful, and highly skilled, Maine outdoor guide. But this is her second life. In the first one, she was a corporate pilot, working for a wealthy family reminiscent of the Kennedys, and a loving wife and mother. But one day she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and saw something she wasn’t supposed to see. The only choice she had was to fake her own death and disappear, leaving her family behind forever. Regret gnaws at her to this day.

But now her husband is dead, and her children need her again. She hurries to collect them, in the personage of a fictional “Aunt Leah.” She then learns that her enemies are on her trail, and they are men she knows well, very ruthless and very good at what they do.

Leah, however, can face them on her own ground, far from cities and the internet. In addition to that, she has an ally she knows nothing about – one who may save her family, but possibly at the price of her life.

As I’ve mentioned before, I try to avoid stories with female protagonists, especially in action roles. I like to keep the violence directed at, and inflicted by, males. In Never Far Away, a male action character is introduced, which I appreciated, but my protective instincts were still pretty heavily engaged. This book, therefore, scored high in dramatic tension. And that is, of course, what thrillers are all about.

Recommended, with cautions for language and intense situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Bad Man,’ by Stanley Elkin

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“If the question is can I take it, the answer is no. Regularity is what I know best. I have contributed to the world’s gloom, I acknowledge that. But I have always picked on victims. Victims are used to it. Irregularity is what they know best. They don’t even feel it. I feel it. It gives me the creeps.”

I picked up Stanley Elkin’s A Bad Man by mistake, thinking I was getting a book by some other author. But, having bought it, I gave it a chance. It wasn’t exactly my kind of book, and Elkin isn’t my kind of author, but I can’t deny the book was unexpectedly entertaining.

Think of Kafka’s “The Trial.” Think of Catch-22. Think (a little) of the Book of Job. That’s what A Bad Man is like, sort of.

Leo Feldman is a self-made man. He built his peddler father’s pushcart business up into a large department store – chiefly through black market dealing during World War II. He did not serve himself, due to a congenital health problem – the fetus of a vestigial twin, lodged in his chest next to his heart. If it ever moves, it could kill him.

In the basement of his store, he ran an off-the-books business – not retail, but trading favors, providing referrals to illegal services – abortions, or drugs, or prostitutes. So he was not greatly surprised when the police came for him one day.

He ends up in a penitentiary without a real-world analogue – a modern, high-security complex located in a large tract of no-man’s land. He discovers that the prisoners’ lives are governed by strict rules laid down by the god-like Warden – strict but fluid rules, constantly changing, sometimes mutually contradictory. Whenever Feldman thinks he’s found a way to get by, the Warden stymies him, and once again he finds himself alone, an outcast among outlaws.

What makes the book fascinating is its dark comedy. None of the major characters is really sympathetic. Feldman is, as the Warden terms him, “a bad man.” He has lived a life of greed and petty cruelties. The Warden is god-like, but he’s a petty god – loveless and cruel in his own way. Thus all Feldman’s misfortunes and sufferings are deserved, and often poetic. But the system itself is just as cruel.

Stanley Elkins’ style does a lot to make A Bad Man a fun read. He delights in puns and plays on words – “Little children suffered him.” When the Warden speaks of a small grove of trees he has provided for the inmates’ recreation, he says, “This is your copse, you robbers…!”

What is this book about? It may be a cosmic complaint about the world – the Warden may, indeed, be meant to represent God. It may be a satire on America, from a Jewish perspective. It may be a liberal satire on capitalism.

Whatever it is, I found A Bad Man surprisingly entertaining, far more than I would have expected if I’d known what I was buying. Recommended, for literate grownups.

Fiction, Reviews

‘After That, the Dark,’ by Andrew Klavan

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He was thinking about this when the waiter brought the check to him. Gwendolyn made a motion toward her purse.

“Now, now,” he said, “don’t try any of that twenty-first-century stuff with me.”

“You’re right, she said. “It’s a rotten century. I only stay for the antibiotics.”

It has become a tradition for me to purchase and savor each new Cameron Winter book by Andrew Klavan as soon as it comes out, and to tell the world what a pleasure that annual event has become in my life. After That, the Dark is the fifth in the series, and I enjoyed it, though (I must admit) a little less than I expected. That is for reasons which author Klavan has no doubt anticipated and discounted in his own mind. I’ll get to that.

Cameron Winter, our continuing hero, is a former assassin for a super-secret government division which no longer exists. After its dissolution, he reinvented himself as an English professor, He now teaches at a small college somewhere in the Midwest.

A thread that ties the books together is his conversations with his psychologist Margaret, who is helping him work through his old traumas and sins. Recently she has been particularly interested in his relationship (or reluctance to initiate a relationship) with Gwendolyn Lord, a widow he met a couple books ago, with whom he struck immediate sparks.

In After That, the Dark, Cameron finally asks her out, only to be blindsided by how well it goes. The two are not simply compatible – they click together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. And in this story, the investigation is sparked, not as usual by Cameron’s sixth sense for hidden mysteries in crimes in the news, but by a puzzle posed by Gwendolyn herself. She tells him about a friend who works in a prison, where a “locked room” murder occurred. A prisoner, who had been strip-searched, is found shot to death with a nail gun in a padded, locked cell.

Cameron goes to the prison town to look into the matter. He is not aware that he’s at the center of a conspiracy, among the moves and countermoves of highly placed, faceless, ruthless chess players. Cameron is a gifted operative, and he’ll need all his gifts to survive this one.

Was After That, the Dark fun to read? Sure was. Was it as good as its predecessors? Maybe not quite – I’m not sure.

My main problem was moral. Gwendolyn, Cameron’s new love interest, is an open and devoted Christian. Yet (minor spoiler alert) she falls straight into bed with him at the first opportunity. I could have understood that plot point if it were treated as a mistake, but in the aftermath she justifies it, saying that they were clearly made for each other by God, so it must be okay.

Andrew Klavan is a wise and perceptive writer. Surely he’s aware that everybody who’s ever fallen in love feels exactly the same way.

It should be noted that Klavan is a convert to Christianity, and comes to the topic from a different angle than “cradle Christians” like me. Also that these books are not intended as “Christian fiction” in the same way that the average CBA book is.

Nevertheless, that rationalization for premarital sex is, in my opinion, too predictable and conventional for a writer of Andrew Klavan’s considerable wisdom.

Otherwise, highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Gun Man Jackson Swagger,’ by Stephen Hunter

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“That’s the problem with battle,” said Jack. “You must kill the people who most impress you.”

When Stephen Hunter sets his hand to writing a Western, he does not skimp. The Gun Man Jackson Swagger would make an epic movie, like “High Plains Drifter,” but on steroids and with CGI. Sam Eliot should star.

When the man who calls himself Jack rides onto the Crazy R ranch in Arizona, on a summer day in a year of drought, he’s just a starved old man on a starved horse. But he offers superior horsemanship skills, and so they take him on.

The Crazy R manages to survive as a business, in these hard times, through purchasing stolen Mexican army supplies, a portion of which they sell in the camp called Railhead No. 4. Railhead No. 4 is like other railroad Hells on Wheels, except more corrupt and cruel.

Jack has business with the Crazy R outfit. He also has business with Railhead No. 4, and with a bizarre army of revolutionaries led by a fanatic Frenchman, training in the desert. What is one man against so many? Quite a lot, when the man is Jackson Swagger.

As with any of Stephen Hunter’s novels about the Swagger family, a fair amount of suspension of disbelief is necessary here. But those willing to so suspend will be rewarded by a gripping and moving tale, a genuine epic.

I had some quibbles. Jack “slap-fires” his Colt pistol, which I take to mean what’s usually called “fanning,” and am reliably informed never happened in a Wild West gunfight – the author admits in his Afterword that he saw a modern shooter do a trick with it and had to put it in a book.

There’s also a scene where a villain rapes a respectable white woman – something I also understand never happened in the West, in those days. One assumes the author is catering to modern audience expectations.

Those nitpicks aside, I devoured The Gun Man Jackson Swagger, and recommend it highly, with cautions for some pretty raw action.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Down These Streets,’ by James Scott Bell

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He was my height—six feet—but if I curled up I could have fit into his chest.

I’m not a big fan of short story collections. Short stories are fine in their natural habitat, taken one at a time. But in bunches I find them bumpy reading – I get invested in a couple characters, and then they find their destinies and I have to jump into somebody else’s life.

Still, I do enjoy James Scott Bell’s writing. So I figured I’d pick up Down These Streets, his big (and I mean big – north of 700 pages) short story collection. (The title is inspired by a famous line from Raymond Chandler’s essay, “The Simple Art of Murder.”) He pretty much throws in everything, from hard-boiled tales to “twist” stories in the O. Henry tradition, to a series of light action stories about a hard-luck boxer named Irish Jim Gallagher (inspired by Robert E. Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan), to flash fiction, including a few that are just re-tellings of old jokes.

I liked the hard-boiled stuff. The Irish Jim stories were fun, particularly one long in which the world, the devil, and the majesty of the law seem to have conspired to prevent his keeping an important date with his girl (this story, amazingly, features cameo appearances by both Marilyn Monroe and Dr. J. Vernon McGee – and how many stories can make that claim?).

Many of the shorter stories seemed to me rather slapdash, but they didn’t take long to read.

I didn’t love Down These Streets, but it kept me entertained for several days, and you may enjoy short stories more than I do.

Recommended. No profanity.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Romeo’s Truth,’ by James Scott Bell

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I always look forward to a new entry in James Scott Bell’s Mike Romeo series. The latest volume, Romeo’s Truth, is (as I announced yesterday) adorned by a quotation from a review I did, on this blog, of a previous installment, placed first among the review blurbs at the front. Proving that not only is author Bell a good writer, but he recognizes fine criticism.

Mike Romeo, if you aren’t yet familiar with him, is a very big, strong man. He’s a former cage fighter and a self-educated genius. He goes about doing good in the world, kicking butt and quoting the classics.

In Romeo’s Truth, Mike is on a job for Ira, his lawyer boss, when he stops at a diner in California’s Central Valley. He observes a big guy beating up a little guy in the parking lot and (of course) steps in. This is the inciting incident that will soon have him involved in a simmering dispute between a local rancher and anti-meat agitators (in case you’re wondering, this book is entirely on the side of the carnivores). Soon his lawyer will have a new client (the little guy who got beat up, up on a murder charge), and a great need to tear the cover off a conspiracy of people who do not hesitate to blow up buildings or shoot people. No matter – getting Mike Romeo mad is one of the classic strategic errors.

Romeo’s Truth isn’t the best of the series, but it’s plenty of fun – a fine entry in a series which provides the joys of hard-boiled detective stories for audiences who prefer their fiction clean. Mike’s relationship with his new wife, Sophie, sometimes approaches the realm of the cutesy, but never goes quite that far. Self-awareness saves them from that.

My only real quibble is with a “fact” delivered in a throwaway line – Mike says that the Vikings had double-headed axes, which isn’t true.

That is, of course, unforgiveable. But otherwise, it’s a great story.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Turn On the Heat,’ by Erle Stanley Gardner

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I suppose the kids today don’t even know who Erle Stanley Gardner was (even though he was once the bestselling author in the world). But my generation, who did know about him, generally got him wrong, I think. This was due to the blockbuster popularity of the Perry Mason TV show, based on his books about that character. The show (though well done and still fun to watch) was slightly bowdlerized. The original Mason of the novels had rougher edges, especially in the early stages.

That goes equally – or more – for his Bertha Cool and Donald Lamm books, of which Turn On the Heat (published 1940) was my first experience. This is pure hardboiled stuff, but handled from a new angle – a hardboiled story without a hardboiled hero.

Bertha Cool is a stout, middle-aged woman, tight with a buck. She runs a private investigations agency in Los Angeles, and her chief operative is former lawyer Donald Lamm. Lamm is tough in his own way, but he’s only a little guy. When the muscle boys work him over (which happens more than once), he bides his time and finds clever ways to get his revenge.

They are hired by a man to find his ex-wife, who disappeared 21 years previously. Donald goes to the town where they once lived. She’s not there anymore, and nobody seems to know where she went. But as he pokes around, Donald discovers that pretty much everybody is lying to him – including their client. A perky female reporter seems to be a useful ally, but a big, brutal police detective invites him – forcefully – to get out of town. It will take a lot of brains and strategizing to finally close this case, but Bertha and Donald have what it takes.

Turn On the Heat was a lot of fun. Pure entertainment for hard-boiled fans. Recommended.