Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Speak for the Dead,’ by Jack Lynch

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Jack Lynch’s series of mysteries about San Francisco private eye Pete Bragg continues with Speak for the Dead. I’m not sure what the title means in terms of the plot, but the book was enjoyable.

Pete Bragg gets a call from an old friend from his newspaper reporting days. There’s a bad situation at San Quentin prison. A prisoner named Beau Bancetti, a biker gang leader, has attempted to escape with some buddies. The attempt failed. Now he and his friends are barricaded in an activities center, with two guards and two women as hostages. He demands that somebody go up to his home town and help his brother Buddy, who’s been charged with murder. Buddy isn’t like him, he explains. He’s painfully shy and gentle. He couldn’t kill anyone.

Ordinarily the prison administrators wouldn’t worry about hostages being killed. It’s one of the rules – civilians who go inside know the risk. But in this case, one of the hostages happens to be a popular female movie star incognito; they don’t want the bad press. So they need a private eye to go to Beau’s home town and investigate the murder. Would Pete do it?

Of course he will. And from the time he shows up in town he knows something screwy is going on. Nobody believes Buddy Bancetti could murder anyone. But a lot of them are hiding something too. Pete will be attacked by thugs, and shot at by a sniper. Then he’ll uncover a nasty conspiracy.

The story moved along well and kept my interest. My constant complaint in reading this series has been that Pete rarely actually solves a case – he’s usually a step behind and only puts it all together just in time to avoid getting killed. This time he actually solves one – and it’s pretty complicated.

Author Lynch seems (he’s gone now) to have had a thing about marijuana – this story includes an argument for legalization, which annoys me. But I guess that ship has sailed.

Another concern was a scene where he allows himself (purely for information-gathering purposes) to get into a semi-sexual situation with an underage girl. I think that’s the kind of scene you could get away with back in the 80s – you couldn’t do it today.

But generally it’s an okay book. I don’t give it highest marks, but it passed the time and did not bore me.

Fiction, Reviews

Cleansing the palate with ‘When Christmas Comes’

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But he was wrong, you know. Eddie-My-boyfriend got it wrong altogether, evil little troll that he was. That wasn’t what the look on my face was expressing, not at all. I wasn’t feeling shock and horror at the hypocrisy and phoniness and decadence of modern life. In fact, in that moment, it didn’t seem hypocritical or phony or decadent to me at all…. The one solid reality I could cling to… was, again, our Christmases, our past together, my love.

It was a strenuous weekend, by my declining standards. We got a heavy snow Friday night – I’m not sure exactly how much, but I think I read it was about 7 inches. Heavy stuff, too. And my kindly neighbors, who always move the snow for me (we share the driveway) suffered a failure of their snowblower. So they hired some neighbor kids, whose snowblower broke down too. Thus, there I was, with the neighbor lady, shoveling in front of my garage for about a half hour. Somewhat to my own surprise, I didn’t collapse of a heart attack.

Then I had to go and buy a new inkjet printer. Because for the life of me I couldn’t make the old one work with the new wifi. Also the tray has been broken for some time. That meant a trip to my favorite computer store and a long wait in line. And then the inevitable siege, trying to make it talk to the wireless network. I succeeded at last (this always feels like sorcery, employing incantations I don’t understand at all). Which made it possible, at last, to print my Christmas newsletters.

Moving on to books, you may recall how intensely I disliked Trevanian’s The Loo Sanction, which I reviewed on Friday. Fortunately, I had the perfect antidote at hand. Andrew Klavan’s new book When Christmas Comes, which I adore and was planning to re-read anyway.

When Christmas Comes could almost have been written as a counter to The Loo Sanction (I’m not saying it was. I’m just saying they both deal with the same questions in drastically different ways.)

Both the heroes, Trevanian’s Jonathan Hemlock and Klavan’s Cameron Winter, are American academics who formerly worked in covert espionage operations. Dangerous men, skilled at killing.

And both of them walk into situations where hypocrisy is (or is apparently) rife. Hemlock into the world of cutthroat international politics. Winter into a seemingly idyllic American town where a clean-cut, decorated veteran is on trial for murdering his sweet wife. With the Christmas season as a backdrop, offering lots of opportunities for comment on commercialization and the emptiness of tradition.

But unlike Hemlock, who smashes fetishes and is himself smashed in return, Winter never closes his heart. Much of the book is taken up with his narrative – to a psychologist – of the story of his love for a girl named Charlotte, whom he spent time with every Christmas as he was growing up. And how the magic of those early Christmases was undermined and overwhelmed by old secrets of horrific ugliness.

And yet Winter has the wisdom to discern the truth, even in the midst of lies and hypocrisy. “The great good thing,” as Klavan describes it in his autobiography. As long as he still believes in the great good thing, he remains open to salvation.

A repeated theme in When Christmas Comes is “psychomachia,” the literary device where the characters in a story represent aspects of the storyteller’s own soul.

If that’s so, then in giving life to others, as Winter does at the end of the story, he may also be given life himself.

I don’t know whether it would be better for Andrew Klavan to write a sequel, or just leave us with that hope.

Personally, I vote for the sequel.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Loo Sanction,’ by Trevanian

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Jonathan Hemlock, who appeared in Trevanian’s earlier novel, The Eiger Sanction (which was filmed by Clint Eastwood), is a retired American art professor and world-famous critic. But he had a secret life as a “counter-assassin” for an espionage agency referred to, not so subtly, as the “CII.” He hated both his employers and his targets, but the job made it possible for him to indulge his passion for collecting Impressionist masters. As The Loo Sanction begins (1973) he’s retired and spending a year in London on a cultural visit for the embassy.

Then he’s kidnapped by a British Intelligence agency known as “the Loo,” roughly equivalent to the one he used to work for. He doesn’t want to work for them, but is extorted into doing so by threats against people he likes.

His job, he’s told, is to steal a package of films, films made secretly at an ultra-secret London sex club. The owner of these films will be in a position to blackmail the entire British government into doing what he wants (Jonathan can almost see the head of the Loo – the most hypocritical Church of England vicar imaginable – salivating at the prospect of controlling them).

Jonathan will come up against a formidable enemy, a grandiose crime lord who is both an aesthete and a sadist. Along with a supporting cast of equally appalling psychopaths. He will barely survive.

A lot of people won’t survive. Generally, the better you like a character in this book, the more likely they are to die horribly.

Trevanian can be amusing in his acerbic comments, at least when I agree with him. But the story of The Loo Sanction is a story of unremitting cynicism, where every ideal is laughable and all institutions are not only corrupt but satanically vile. The plot gets crueler and crueler as it goes along, and finally ends in Hell.

I have rarely disliked a book as much as I disliked The Loo Sanction. I’m not even going to link to it on Amazon. Someone depressed or suicidal could possibly happen on it, and I don’t want to risk the consequences.

Reviews

Watching Lord Peter

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I’m having a blast binge-watching the old BBC Lord Peter Wimsey series, with Ian Carmichael. It occurs to me that these adaptations are now far older than the original books were when I first watched these things. Life is cruel that way.

The philanthropist who posted the videos on YouTube (you can buy the DVDs here, but the price they want is extortionate) posted them in the wrong order, so I had to rearrange them for my own perusal. I watched “Clouds of Witness” first, as God intended, and then “The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.”

I’m happy to report that they hold up extremely well. The scene design and costuming are unmistakably 1970s (hairstyles are always a giveaway), but within those parameters they’re very well done. Nowadays a lot of that stuff can be faked with CGI, but the BBC did well with real props and settings as they existed at the time.

The best part of the productions, of course, is Ian Carmichael’s portrayal of Lord Peter. He was, as he himself admitted, a little too old for the role. This creates awkward moments, especially in energetic scenes, or when his double chin makes itself too apparent.

And yet he does the role so brilliantly. He’d already played Bertie Wooster, who’s essentially the same character without the brains. The mannerisms are the same. But there’s a gravity underneath it all, and his human sympathy resonates with the viewer.

But my favorite character, I truly believe, is Mervyn Bunter, Lord Peter’s valet (think Jeeves) as portrayed by the Welsh actor Glyn Houston (another actor plays him, sadly, in “The Unpleasantness,” but fortunately that error was corrected in later series).

Houston is splendid in a layered performance. On the surface, his Bunter is the perfect gentleman’s gentleman, discreet, dignified, and proper in speech. But his extremely expressive eyes and delivery manage to convey all this pair’s unspoken history – how he saved his master’s life in the war, and has since nursemaided him through numerous bouts of shell shock and depression. Lord Peter will forever be in his debt, but it’s a matter they never speak about. Words would make it maudlin.

Or Magdalen (though Wimsey was a Balliol man, as I recall).

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Five Red Herrings,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

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“An official personage like you might embarrass them, don’t you know, but there’s no dignity about me. I’m probably the least awe-inspiring man in Kirkcudbright. I was born looking foolish and every day in every way I am getting foolisher and foolisher.”

The seventh novel in Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey series is The Five Red Herrings, a book that, I fear, has not aged well. The Amazon reviews suggest that most other contemporary readers agree.

Back in the 1930s or so, readers loved their puzzles, and spent time on them. Crossword puzzles were a relatively new innovation, and they took the country by storm. A corollary was the railway timetable mystery, in which the culprit’s alibi is based on a clever manipulation of train times, and the detective must figure out the trick. I assume readers worked at these books the same way they did with their crosswords, attacking them with pencils and pads of paper. Railroad timetables were familiar and interesting to them, because that was how urban people traveled back then.

The town of Kirkcudbright, in the Scottish county of Galloway, is home to a renowned, picturesque artistic colony. These people are generally friendly and amiably competitive, but they all share a loathing of Campbell, a black-bearded semi-talent with a massive, defensive ego, a drinking problem, and a reflexive tendency to resort to his fists.

So no one is much grieved when Campbell’s corpse is found one morning in a river at the foot of a steep bank, below an unfinished painting on an easel surrounded with artist’s supplies. But Lord Peter, examining the site, notices something the police have missed. One object that ought to be there is not there – and it can’t be found. So it’s not an accident but murder, and the investigation begins. Suspects are not lacking. The problem is that they all have alibis that seem solid. Several of them involve travel on trains.

For a reader not willing to work the puzzle by means of transcribing timetables and comparing them closely, reading The Five Red Herrings involves a lot of taking things as given that you don’t quite follow. This makes for some fairly opaque reading for long stretches. But Lord Peter is as amusing as usual, and he does get some good lines off. And there’s some very clever work in the final solution to the mystery.

Most readers today find The Five Red Herrings the least interesting of the Wimsey series. But if you’re reading the books and enjoying them, you should probably not skip it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Imposter’s Trail,’ by J. C. Fields

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A quiet, inoffensive man parks his car by a lake, reads a letter from his brother, and shoots himself to death, leaving a letter confessing to a series of murders. The suicide’s ex-wife tells the police her former husband was driven to kill himself by his brother Randolph, who’s a psychopath.

Randolph Bishop, serial killer, is back in action in J.C. Field’s The Imposter’s Trail.

Years ago, retired FBI agent Sean Kruger had a chance to kill Bishop, the worst serial killer he ever encountered, but let him live and be arrested. The man went on to make his bullied brother his scapegoat, and to murder a string of innocent people. Kruger feels personally responsible for every victim.

So now he’ll be coming out of retirement and going after Bishop again. This time he’s not going to let him go. Especially after Bishop proves to have terrorist ties. And even more so after Bishop threatens Kruger’s family.

In terms of storytelling, I found The Imposter’s Trail (third in a series) a pretty compelling entry in the Thomas Harris “stare into the abyss” school of psychological thrillers.

I personally do not like stories where we get to share victims’ last minutes with them. I prefer to be shown the bodies and let my imagination do the rest. But your tastes may vary.

One real weakness in the book was plain proofreading. “Slight of hand” for “sleight of hand.” Infelicities like “Retreating further back.” Using “conscious” instead of “conscience.” The manuscript would have benefited from a good proofreader.

The Imposter’s Trail was a little dark for my tastes, but you might like it better. Cautions for intense situations, but the language wasn’t too bad.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lockdown,’ by Sean Black

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fiction, Reviews

‘Wake Up and Die,’ by Jack Lynch

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

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

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

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

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

Fiction, Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fiction, Reviews

‘Strong Poison,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

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

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

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

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

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

A classic.  Highly recommended.