We usually specialize in Vikings on this blog, but we are not above tolerating Anglo-Saxons, especially when there’s a Tolkien connection.
Tom Shippey, successor to and biographer of J.R.R. Tolkien, has a review in the London Review and Books of a new book on the Staffordshire Hoard, a rather amazing 2009 find:
What one can say is, first, that the hoard is unique from the period. Previous discoveries have been grave burials, or single finds, not collections buried with (presumably) the intention of later recovery. Second, the general nature of the hoard is clear. It is strongly weapon-related, but without weapons. There are no coins, no brooches, no items of women’s jewellery, not even a single knife or sword blade. Some 80 per cent of the objects are fittings from weapons, mostly sword-hilt parts. An Anglo-Saxon sword typically had a wooden hilt fitted over the iron tang on the blade, but to this were added an upper and a lower guard, each secured by two hilt plates and a hilt collar, fixed by bosses, with a pommel on top. All these appear in the hoard in large numbers.
Read it all here. Thanks to Dale Nelson for sending me the link.
The Origami Man, blank as paper, only folded into the shape of a man.
Years ago, Gibson Vaughn, (former Marine and current master computer hacker) was nearly hanged to death by a remorseless assassin, the same man who had murdered his father. This set off a series of events that resulted in Gibson’s becoming an international fugitive.
Now that assassin, the Origami Man, the kind of man who will hide inside a wall for five weeks in order to murder a family, has reappeared in Gibson’s life. He hands Gibson an encrypted thumb drive. The drive, the assassin says, was taken from a Russian crime boss who double-crossed him. He wants Gibson to unlock it for him. Gibson’s motivation is to be that it contains data on a massive industrial hack. He doesn’t know the details, but he knows that if it’s allowed to proceed, hundreds of thousands of people will die. The Origami Man doesn’t care about the deaths, but he wants payback.
Gibson would rather take a bullet than cooperate with this affectless,
amoral man, a figure who still haunts his nightmares. But lives are at stake,
and he and his team of fugitive friends, who are making a tenuous living as
security specialists, agree that the frog will have to be swallowed, so to
speak.
So begins a quest that will see them making unlikely
alliances and balancing loyalties and treacheries against each other. An old
Russian gangster trying to redeem a few of his sins will be the joker in the
game. The action will move from Ireland to Switzerland to Germany, and it will
be a close-run thing.
I enjoy the Gibson Vaughn series immensely. The stories are exciting, the characters multifaceted and sympathetic, the prose extremely good. I highly recommend Origami Man (as well as the whole series) with mild cautions for language and intense situations.
We move along now to book two in Craig A. Hart’s “Serenity” series, set in a fictional town in Michigan. In Serenity Stalked we find our hero, ex-boxer and ex-“fixer” Shelby Alexander, continuing his affair with Carly, a much younger woman. When Carly tells him she’s being pestered by an old boyfriend, who happens to be married, Shelby (against Carly’s wishes) decides to have “a little talk” with him.
When the old boyfriend turns up murdered shortly thereafter,
along with his family, the local sheriff – who does not like Shelby at all –
makes him his prime suspect.
But the real killer is watching. He’s an accomplished serial killer, and now he’s focusing on Carly as his next victim. The reader will spend considerable time in his creepy company as he makes his plans to eliminate Shelby and take Carly for his own purposes.
True to the form of the first book, Serenity, Serenity Stalked is a fairly straightforward story, opting for action and suspense over mystery. Our hero is reactive in his actions, but fortunately for everyone his reaction time is fast and his fighting skills superior. And there’s a nice surprise at the end. For the action fan, Serenity Stalked offers value for money.
I may read the next one. Haven’t made up my mind yet.
The adventures of Yorkshire Detective Inspector Mike Nash continue in Vanish Without a Trace, the second book in the series by Bill Kitson.
When a young woman named Sarah Kelly fails to return home
after heading out to a nightclub one evening, her mother contacts the police.
Although such missing persons reports usually come to nothing, Mike Nash is
impressed with the mother’s story. But as time passes, no trace of the girl is
found, except for her purse, lying in an alley.
A chance comment gets Mike thinking about other disappearances.
Some research reveals that there has been a string of similar disappearances
all across the north of England – and in each case, the missing girl looks like
a sister to all the others. Is it even possible to identify and stop a killer
who leaves no clues, leaves no bodies, and moves all over the map? Mike and his
team will try, but the threat will come very close to home.
Vanish Without a Trace was a little less high-tension than the previous volume, What Lies Beneath. That’s OK with me; I prefer mysteries to thrillers. My problem with this series is an element I’d hoped would be a one-off with the first volume – Inspector Nash gets clues from prophetic dreams. To my mind, this moves the books into the realm of Paranormal Fiction, against which I’m prejudiced. So I won’t be reading any more of the Mike Nash books, though they are fascinating and highly readable.
Your mileage may vary. Cautions for the sort of thing you’d expect.
This book is not to be confused with the science fiction TV series, “Serenity.” However, you could plausibly cast Nathan Fillion as the hero.
Shelby Alexander, hero of Serenity, is a former prizefighter. After that he became what he calls a “fixer,” solving people’s problems through the application of violence. Finally, in his ‘60s, he has returned to his home town of Serenity, Michigan (northern Lower Peninsula) for a more peaceful life.
Not going to happen.
One night Shelby looks out his window and sees a human
figure huddled in the snow by his barn. He finds a woman there, a local
character named Jenny Ellis, mentally retarded and the only well-liked member
of her family. The Ellises are local outlaws, known to be involved in the drug
trade. Jenny dies before help can come.
Then, to his surprise, Shelby gets a visit from Jenny’s
brother Harper, the head of the family. He wants Shelby to investigate Jenny’s
death. Bigger criminals from Detroit are moving into the area, trying to take
over the Ellis drug operations. Shelby has no desire to work for the Ellises,
but he did like Jenny, so he agrees to look into it.
Before long he’s got people shooting at him, and the new
sheriff – very possibly corrupt – is trying to frame Shelby for murder. But
Shelby has handled worse.
What you’ve got here is a pretty simple story. This is not a cerebral mystery. In fact, Shelby Alexander never once deduces anything – he reacts to events and generally solves problems with his fists. Action is the watchword here, and in those terms the book is pretty good. There were also moments when Shelby expressed opinions on the social conservatism side, so I liked that.
Serenity is pure entertainment, probably aimed at male readers, and I recommend it after its kind. Cautions for the usual.
Blogger Mary J. Moerbe continues her series of reviews of my work. This one is West Oversea:
The thing that makes me so enamored with Erling Skjalgsson is that he is a man with a real chance of being honorable and lordly. His pagan setting and background highlight how difficult it isto do the right thing and cut through expectations in pursuit of a higher wisdom and trust. All of which makes him a really powerful Christian figure!
Full disclosure – Randall Schanze is a Facebook friend, whom I met through blog-crawling quite a few years back. We’re not close, but I read his previous book Ice Cream and Venom, and liked it pretty well. So I tried his new story collection, Clearinghouse.
Clearinghouse is a collection of stories Schanze has written since the start of his career. The backbone of the assemblage is a series of stories set in an alternate history where the NASA Moon and Mars projects are not cancelled in the 1970s. Tragic, heroic, and funny events happen. Science ain’t my long suit, but the technical details seemed authentic and plausible.
Not all the stories relate to that cycle. There are far future stories, fantasies, and even farces. The majority of the far future stories are tied together and involve a radically altered human situation. But each NASA story is followed by a “Frame” sequence, in which author Schanze communicates with a fan (implied to be his only fan), who keeps urging him to write more while he himself hangs back, discouraged by his lack of publishing success. Such a device might be expected to come off as self-indulgent, but it worked for me, and added a certain piquancy and unity to the whole exercise.
I’m not a Science Fiction fan myself, but I enjoyed Clearinghouse and recommend it.
In a Yorkshire tarn (a mountain lake), a fisherman snags a human skull. When divers are sent in, they find two skeletons, both of young girls. Skeletal abnormalities indicate that they were sexually abused for a long time.
Detective Inspector Mike Nash, who recently relocated from
London to Yorkshire, is on the case, though distracted by concern over his
girlfriend, who is hospitalized and paralyzed. It’s soon apparent that they’re
dealing with international human traffickers, which brings a visit from Russian
police, including a very attractive – and ruthless – woman. Their Anglo-Russian
alliance will be up against a criminal conspiracy led by well-financed and very
dangerous men. Men for whom human life is meaningless, and no atrocity out of
the question.
That’s the premise of What Lies Beneath, first in a series of novels I’ll be following up with. Author Bill Kitson sets a good scene and does good prose. I liked his characters and got caught up in the suspense. The plot had some holes, it seemed to me, but (as in a movie) things moved along so quickly that this reader just went along with it.
Mike Nash is unusual as a fictional detective in that he has
prophetic dreams. He doesn’t always understand them, and he insists he’s not
psychic. I am prejudiced against this sort of thing, but it does add to narrative
interest.
More character descriptions would have been welcome. There’s
one character named “Viv” who is only revealed to be a man after some pages,
and only revealed to be black toward the end of the book.
Imperfect but cinematically engaging, I enjoyed What Lies Beneath. I was also horrified by some of the details of the human trafficking industry, which the author claims are genuine. Cautions for shocking content, plus the usual.
When Berlin police detective Jan Tommen wakes up in bed with his girlfriend, to discover he’s completely forgotten the last two days, that’s annoying. But when he’s arrested for the torture murder of a judge with whom he clashed in the past, it becomes terrifying. His worst fear is that he might have done the crime – he can’t recall a thing.
But (in the great tradition of improbable detective heroics) he makes a plan to escape from custody with the help of a friend who lives on the margins of Berlin’s underworld. He recruits two more friends, a (gorgeous, of course) female medical examiner and a computer geek (obligatory in every thriller) to figure out what happened. There are further murders from the same culprit, so he knows he’s not guilty – but his police colleagues don’t.
That’s the premise of Until the Debt Is Paid, first in a series by Alexander Hartung, translated from German by Steve Anderson.
First, I’ll say what I liked about it. Until the Debt Is Paid was not what I expected. When I pick up a European mystery, I pretty much assume dark, nihilistic stuff in the tradition of Scandinavian Noir. This book was nothing like that. Jan Tommen is a throwback to older German stereotypes – he’s cheery and optimistic and enjoys life. He has his dark moments, but he snaps back. This was refreshing, especially since the story involves some extremely shocking elements. And the final solution was a surprise (at least for this dull reader).
What I disliked was that the police procedures seemed (to me) more 1970s TV than real life. I don’t believe the German police are this loose in their disciplines and security. I don’t think Jan Tommen would have remained free for more than a few hours in the real world. Also, at one point he foolishly plays around with a gun in a way no professional ever would.
And (without dropping a spoiler) one plot element that pleased me in terms of my values went horribly bad.
As for the translation, I’d call it good. It starts out excellent – I was impressed as a translator myself – but it lost some luster as it proceeded, slipping at times into dull literalism. But I can’t really fault that. I know from experience that translating a whole manuscript is a lot of work, and you sometimes run out of time, so you make sure the first few chapters are polished up nice, hoping you’ll have won the readers’ good will by then.
My takeaway: Not bad, and distinctive as a departure in tone from genre tropes. But poorly researched and lacking in plausibility.
Before I had been in Walpole Street a week I could tell by ear the difference between a rejected manuscript and an ordinary letter. There is a certain solid plop about the fall of the former which not even a long envelope full of proofs can imitate successfully.
P. G. Wodehouse began his very long writing career more than a century ago, in the first decade of the 20th Century. It follows that a number of his earlier works have fallen into the public domain. Among them is his novel Not George Washington, which I read in one of the several collections of his out-of-copyright works available for Kindle.
One can detect the nascent signs of later genius in this
book, but if he’d been hit by a bus in 1908, we probably wouldn’t remember him
on the basis of this work (which was written in collaboration with one Herbert
Westbrook).
The story, narrated by several point of view characters,
starts on the Channel island of Guernsey, where a young woman named Margaret Goodwin,
an island resident, meets James Orlebar Cloyster. The couple fall in love, and
though her mother approves, they agree he needs to go to London to pursue his
career as a writer before they can marry. He can’t hope to support a wife
without achieving some success.
We then follow James to London, where he makes his fortune fairly quickly (his career follows Wodehouse’s own – Wodehouse wrote the “On the Way” column for the Globe newspaper, while Cloyster writes a column of the same name for a paper called the Orb).
At this point Cloyster finds himself in a quandary. He realizes
he doesn’t really desire married life. Even his feelings for Margaret have
faded. He wants to continue as a footloose London writer, but his growing fame
will surely be noticed in Guernsey.
He then hits on a scheme. He pays three friends a ten
percent commission each to submit literary works written by him, but under their
names. Thus he can pretend to Margaret that he’s still struggling.
All of this eventually blows back in his face, as anyone but
a fathead would have expected (channeling the spirit of one of Wodehouse’s
later aunt characters).
As I said, there are foreshadowings of later genius in this work – especially in the employment of impostership in the plot. Otherwise, Not George Washington is a pretty minor work.
But Wodehouse fans (like me) will want to add it to their
list of works read.
