Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Death of a Minor Character,’ by E. X. Ferrars

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I’m not sure how I came to do it again. I bought a mystery written by E. X. Ferrars, an author who uses initials instead of a first name, which is usually a sign of a female writer. I tend to find mysteries by women a little alien, but somehow I ended up with this one. I assume I must have gotten it for free. And, as with the similarly named author M. K. Farrar a few days back, I found the book surprisingly enjoyable. For the most part.

E. X. Ferrars was a British author, born Morna Doris MacTaggert. She had a long and successful career. Among her series characters were Virginia and Felix Freer, the protagonists of Death of a Minor Character, published in 1983.

Virginia Freer is a physical therapist living and working in a town some distance from London. A young friend is planning to return home to Australia, and asks her to a farewell party at her flat – in the same London building that’s home to her ex-husband (separated) Felix, with whom she’s still friendly. A fairly mismatched group, including Felix, show up for the party, including a jewelry artist and an old lady who lives in the building.

Not long after, a shopkeeper in Virginia’s town, a casual friend of hers, is murdered, as well the old lady from the party. What ties them together seems to be the dragon-motif silver jewelry the artist designs. Felix is moved  to investigate – not so much for the sake of the shopkeeper as for the old lady, whom he compares to one of those minor characters who get killed in books and movies without anybody giving a second thought to them.

E. X. Ferrars was a lively and original writer. What makes this book work is the characters of Virginia and Felix – especially Felix, who is a constant surprise. He is, we are told, a liar and a petty thief, always on the edge of legality. He doesn’t seem to really grasp ordinary moral concepts. But underneath he has a deep sense of justice.

I enjoyed the book, but I have to say I never really believed in Felix. I suspect the author (who was an atheist and a leftist) wanted to open people’s minds to the idea that there were more ways of being a good person than the stuffy old mores we grew up with.

I reject that. Liars and thieves are not “morally creative” (as I put it in my novel, Wolf Time), but people who lack a moral core. The way you do little things is the way you do big things. Dishonesty is, at bottom, just another kind of cowardice.

But I can’t deny that Death of a Minor Character was an entertaining and well-written novel. The conclusion, though, was a little anticlimactic.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Arms and White Samite,’ by B. A. Patty

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What Arthur saw was nothing like what Moren saw. He saw no silver trees, nor the shining suns of souls, nor the blue glow of possibility, of hope, or of longing. Arthur saw before him the legends, rising up in shapes like griffins and dragons, growing about him in the way that lilies grow up like miracles in a forest where once stood some forgotten cottage. They stole his breath, and for a time it was so quiet in his tent that even the roar of celebration outside seemed to vanish away.

B. A. Patty blogs at Grim’s Hall, one of the blogs I’ve been following for years. He’s a reader of my novels too. But he’s even less aggressive about marketing his novel, Arms and White Samite, than I am in regard to mine. In fact, I’d forgotten he had one until he offered a deal recently, and I picked it up. It’s an impressive book, one that deserves greater recognition than it’s received.

Our hero is Moren, a warrior of Arthur’s Company of the Wall (the book is set in “King” Arthur’s original historical context, with certain supernatural intrusions). One day a lady dressed in white rides into Arthur’s hall, pursued by a great, fearsome knight armored in black. In spite of Arthur’s men’s attempts to protect her, the knight carries her off. Moren takes upon himself the quest of rescuing the lady. He follows her through a forest, where he rescues another lady who becomes his companion, and later into a fortress, where he is taken prisoner. A group of his brothers follow to help – or rescue – him. Meanwhile, the Saxons are harrying the land, and Arthur faces the challenges and sacrifices of total war against an enemy led by a king who is more than human.

For me, the greatest appeal of the Arthurian stories has always been, more than the tales of chivalry and valor, the hints of mystery behind it all – ancient names of places lost to history, shadowy characters who seem not quite human in some undefined way. Arms and White Samite is rich in those elements. It’s actually as much about the realms of faery as about this world (though the battle scenes are excellent, and seem historically plausible).

Quite a lot of time is spent in discussions about the intersection of this world and the Otherworld, and the nature of life and eternity. Questions of theodicy (the problem of evil) are central. Although the matrix of the philosophy seems Christian, there are elements that seem Buddhist and syncretist. This left me puzzled, but I’m not sure I understood it well enough to judge.

There were a couple typos (at least I think they were typos; perhaps I misunderstood the antique diction), and on very rare occasions the author made the questionable artistic choice of using exclamation points in exposition.

Still, all in all, I think Arms and White Samite is the kind of book C. S. Lewis would have liked very much.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Armored,’ by Mark Greaney

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Mark Greaney is the author of the very impressive Gray Man thriller series. I’ve enjoyed them, though I haven’t kept up with them recently. But I saw he’d started a new series, about security specialist Josh Duffy. I got a deal on Armored, so I checked it out. Greaney still knows how to write a gripping story.

Joshua Duffy, private security operative, lost a leg in Beirut, in a heroic action to protect a client’s wife. This left him in the humiliating position of being unable to find any job better than mall cop. Even more embarrassing, his wife is working nights cleaning offices – and making more money than he is.

So when he runs into an old buddy at the mall, and learns that he’s been hired for a job protecting a UN delegation tasked with making peace between drug cartels in Mexico, he asks the friend to get him in. He does not tell him about his missing leg. To his surprise, he gets the job, and soon he’s flying south of the border with a ragtag collection of bottom-of-the-barrel bodyguards – the company they’re working for doesn’t have the best reputation.

Theirs is a mission marked for disaster – and not by chance. Josh and his new buddies turn out to be nothing more than counters in a big game being played by high-level players, who have no plans to let any of them go home alive.

Plotting a story like this one has to be a daunting task – I’m not sure I could do it. The action tends toward what I like to call the “cinematic” – the kind you believe when you see it on a theater screen, but which seems less plausible when reading. That fortune which proverbially favors the bold requires some pretty intricate choreography of events to achieve in a story where every bend of the road brings a daunting new setback. I never entirely believed this story, but it was just believably enough – and exciting enough – to keep me riveted.

I enjoyed Armored immensely, and recommend it without reservation. Cautions for language and violence. References to Christian faith are uniformly respectful.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Kill Chase,’ by M. K. Farrar

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I feel cheated. I was tricked into reading Kill Chase, a book I wouldn’t have read if I’d known more about its author, and what’s worse, I liked it.

Two fishermen on the River Avon, near Bristol, England, hook a nasty catch – a severed human arm wrapped in a plastic bag. They call the police, who drag the river and find more body parts – from two different corpses.

Assigned to the case is Detective Inspector Ryan Chase, who’s having a hard time of it these days. He’s still mourning the death of his daughter, and his divorce from his wife. He works to distract his mind, and has developed symptoms of OCD.

He and his team have little to go on – how do you identify who dumped body parts in a river? Their investigations will lead them into the world of the homeless, and the good samaritans who serve them – but victims and victimizers can be hard to distinguish from one another.

Kill Chase was one of the more compelling books I’ve read in a while. The emphasis was on character, and I cared about Ryan Chase’s life and that of his partner, a young woman caring for her mentally disabled brother. I cared about the other characters too.

At the end, when I saw the author’s bio, I realized the reason for this emotion-intensive approach (Warning: sexism follows). The author, M. K. Farrar, is a woman. I should have guessed. Nowadays, authors who use initials instead of first names are usually female. Most of the time I watch out for that.

The author’s sex probably also explains the abundance of female police in this book. The Bristol force appears to be about 60 percent women, and all the important cops (except for Ryan himself) are female.

But I can’t deny that the author did a pretty good job of portraying her male hero. Fair play to her, as they say in Ireland.

Kill Chase is an impressive police procedural, Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Holy Disorders,’ by Edmund Crispin

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Edmund Crispin (real name Robert Bruce Montgomery) was one of the great names of England’s Golden Age of Detection (under the Montgomery name he was a noted composer of music in various fields, ranging from saucy film scores to reverent sacred works). His most famous literary creation is Professor Gervase Fenn, an English professor at a fictional Oxford college. Holy Disorders is one of Crispin’s later works.

The story starts with Fenn’s friend Geoffrey Vintner, a composer of church music, receiving a muddled telegram from Fenn, demanding that he travel immediately to the fictional cathedral town of Tolnbridge – and bring a butterfly net! The lengthy description of Geoffrey’s journey, during which he is attacked three times by thugs, has a fantastical, dreamlike quality that reminded me a little of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.

When he arrives in Tolnbridge, Geoffrey finds that Fenn has completely forgotten about him – which isn’t unusual. But the cathedral organist has been attacked and is in the hospital, and Fenn is investigating. That very night, the bishop is killed in the cathedral, and the organist is murdered in the hospital. Fenn and Geoffrey go to work comparing alibis and witness accounts, eventually uncovering hidden, unsuspected evil.

Holy Disorders is fairly disordered in its own right, in terms of plot. The puzzle is complicated, and the action often less than plausible. I also have to say that I figured out the murderer’s identity before I was supposed to.

The story had other problems too. I liked the writing – very classic English and erudite. But my main problem with the book was that our hero, Gervase Fenn, was one of the most unlikeable heroes I’ve ever encountered (not the worst, but hardly endearing). He shares with Sherlock Holmes a tendency to rudeness. But Holmes possessed some manners, and was only rude when necessary. Fenn genuinely doesn’t seem to care – which makes his occasional moral pronouncements sound unconvincing.

There are many churchmen in this book, and none of them are very saintly, while a couple are unworthy characters. The attitude to Christianity overall seems positive though, though the author’s theology appears weak. I was disturbed by attempts to partly justify the old witch trials (this is a subject on which I have strong views).

Modern readers will be amused by the depiction of “marihuana” in this story. I loathe pot personally, but we know today that it’s not anything like as addictive as it’s portrayed here.

There are no sex scenes, though I was surprised by a scene where a couple swim together in the nude. Very racy for a book published in 1940.

My final judgment on Holy Disorders is that it has its pleasures, but is not a great mystery novel. Edmund Crispin, perhaps, deserves another reading, selecting a better example of his craft. I actually enjoyed the book more than not, in spite of its weaknesses.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Deep Shadow,’ by Nick Sullivan

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Boone Fischer is a divemaster who works guiding scuba excursions on the remote island of Bonaire in the Caribbean. He likes the job, but is restless, so he’s taken another job on another island. The problem is that he’s now falling in love with Emily, an English girl he’s working with, and hasn’t yet worked up the nerve to tell her he’s leaving.

One day while diving, Boone spots something he’s never seen before – a submarine. It’s not military or scientific. Emily snaps a couple pictures of it. These pictures prove of interest to two American customers – who just happen to be military. They make inquiries, and learn that there are rumors that a Venezuelan drug cartel has hired Russian engineers to build them a large sub for smuggling purposes.

What none of them know is that the cartel itself has been betrayed – one of their engineers is a Muslim extremist, and his plan is to take the sub and use it not for smuggling – but as a massive bomb.

That’s the premise of Nick Sullivan’s Deep Shadow. Boone, our hero, aside from being young and strong and agile, is also fortunate in being an expert in Brazilian martial arts. He’ll need them. In fact, luck plays, perhaps, too large a part in this story from a plotting perspective. The Caribbean is a large body of water – what are the odds Luke would stumble on the submarine, not once, but twice, purely by happenstance?

Overall, there was nothing wrong with Deep Shadow. It was a well-told, exciting adventure story. The prose was professional. I found it a little simplistic – it reminded me of those kids’ novels I used to read, where the boy gets involved with spies or detectives or something, figures out what’s wrong before the adults do, and ends up the hero. However, Deep Shadow makes no claim to be Dostoevski – it promises a rousing adventure story, and it delivers just that.

There’s violence, but not too graphic, and hints of sex but no sex scenes. If you’re looking for uncomplicated action entertainment, perhaps for reading on the beach, Deep Shadow is a good choice.

Reviews

Watching Jeremy Brett’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’

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I’ve found myself watching some of the old Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes episodes from the 1990s, on YouTube. They’re all there, I think, or at least most of them. I’d forgotten how truly excellent they were, especially at the beginning. Toward the end, Jeremy Brett was visibly unwell and putting on weight, and those scripts, based on inferior Conan Doyle stories, were (in my opinion) weaker.

I was surprised to discover that Jeremy Brett played Freddy in the 1964 film version of “My Fair Lady.” He was good in that role, but playing what they used to call “Juvenile” parts was not his true destiny.  (I always thought Freddy should have gotten the girl, and indeed that’s what happens in G. B. Shaw’s original play.)

Granada Productions made a serious effort to do Sherlock Holmes in a manner faithful to the original stories. The series bowled me over back in the day, and it has aged excellently. Brett got the job because he resembled Sidney Paget’s original illustrations – except that Paget’s Holmes was pretty bald. The sets were great, the costumes were great, and Brett’s performance was at once faithful to Doyle’s descriptions and wildly original. Doyle tells us that Holmes would have made a great actor, and Brett plays him as an actor, affecting theatrical gestures and vocal flourishes. One wonders whether the man is quite sane (Brett’s life story suggests he wasn’t entirely), but we always wondered about Holmes the same way.

If you’re looking for top-shelf literary adaptations, check these out.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Twist of a Knife,’ by Anthony Horowitz

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Anthony Horowitz is a very famous author and screenwriter whom I don’t recall ever hearing of before. (Though he created both Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War.) I got a chance to read The Twist of A Knife, book 4 in his Hawthorne and Horowitz series, and found it distinctive, well-crafted, and entertaining. Also a little weird. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

In this series, apparently, author Horowitz has cast his real-life self as the narrator. References to his own life seem to be authentic (I have no way of checking). But here he has invented a situation (I assume it’s fictional) where he’s gotten involved with an enigmatic private eye known only as Hawthorne. They solve cases together, and Horowitz turns them into bestselling books. Hawthorne appears to be somewhat autistic. Certainly peculiar. He was kicked off the police force, lives in a sterile flat, and never talks about his life. He keeps his own counsel entirely, and Horowitz can never tell what he’s thinking. He’s not above petty revenge when he feels insulted. There are echoes of Holmes and Watson here, but Hawthorne is Holmesian in a highly distilled form.

As The Twist of a Knife opens, Horowitz is telling Hawthorne that he wants to end their association. The books they’ve produced have done well, but it’s all been too intense for him. He wants to go back to his quiet life of ordinary writing. Anyway, his first West End play is about to open. He hopes this will be the beginning of a stellar playwrighting career, a new stage in his life.

The first night seems to go well. But critic Margaret Throsby is in the audience – the most hated critic in London. She appears at the first night party and insults the cast, and then writes a scathing review. Soon after that, she’s dead – stabbed to death with a dagger which happens to belong to Anthony Horowitz. The police question him, and he suddenly finds himself in personal need of Hawthorne’s detective skills – but will Hawthorne be willing to help?

The tone is generally light, though the dramatic tension is elevated enough. Horowitz is not a great prose stylist, and his characterizations are (in my opinion) a little superficial. But the plot was extremely neat and clever. The book succeeds primarily on the author’s inventiveness, and that is formidable.

The author also deserves credit for venturing into the dangerous territory of discussing race and “cultural appropriation.” He does it in a safe way, by making the minority concerned one whose actual presence in England is negligible, but I think he was brave to address it at all.

The classic Agatha Christie “payoff” scene was artfully done. There was even a positive Narnia reference.

The Twist of a Knife is a professionally crafted detective entertainment that will particularly delight fans of the Cozy subgenre. Worth the price for the entertainment.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Farewell,’ by Michael Innes

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I knew of Michael Innes (real name J. I. M. Stewart), one of the foremost classic English mystery novelists. I’ve probably read one or two of his stories before, though I don’t remember them. A deal on The Long Farewell persuaded me to buy it. It wasn’t bad, but it shows its age (the book was published in 1958. I suppose I have to agree that that’s a long time ago, though I remember the year well).

Our hero, Sir John Appleby, Commissioner of Scotland Yard, visits his friend Lewis Packford, an amateur scholar of Renaissance literature, while they are both on holiday in Italy. Lewis appears distracted, and makes several references to amazing possible discoveries of literary documents, and also to forgery.

On his return to England, Sir John is shocked to learn that his friend Lewis has shot himself to death at his family estate. He had recently made a sensational announcement about purchasing an old Italian book of stories – with notes in Shakespeare’s own hand in the margins of the Othello story. As if that wasn’t enough, Lewis has been discovered, posthumously, to be a bigamist.

Sir John is suspicious, and heads out to the Packford estate. He finds that Lewis’ brother has kept all the people who were present at the time of the death on site as guests, so Sir John is able to re-interview them all. Slowly he pieces the wicked plot together.

The mystery in The Long Farewell was all right. The characters were all right too. It was the presentation that slowed it down. Author Innes clung to Victorian – or at least Edwardian – literary conventions. The language is flowery, and the characters tend to express themselves in the style of literary essays. The book was a slow read.

There’s nothing really wrong with The Long Farewell, if you like this sort of thing. But if you’re looking for pulse-pounding entertainment, I’d advise you to go elsewhere.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars,’ by Anthony Boucher

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I was familiar with Anthony Boucher (real name William Anthony Parker Wright), mainly because he wrote the scripts for the old Sherlock Holmes radio program. He was a prominent writer, editor, and critic in his heyday, working both in mystery and science fiction. Among his mystery heroes was a detective named Fergus O’Breen. But Fergus doesn’t appear in The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars; his sister does.

If you’re a fan (like me) of Sherlock Holmes, you’re probably familiar with two different groups known as the Baker Street Irregulars. The original group showed up occasionally in the Holmes stories, a ragtag gang of London street urchins who ran errands and served as informants for the Great Detective. The second group is an organization of Sherlock Holmes fans, originally organized in 1934 by Christopher Morley. It might be (I’m not sure) the first Fandom group. I’ve occasionally considered joining our local affiliate, which was called (last I heard ) The Norwegian Explorers.

Anthony Boucher was himself a member of the Irregulars, and paid his BSI friends the compliment of making them look like complete horses’ rear ends in his novel, The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars.

This is the scenario – the president of Metropolitan Studios in Hollywood is planning to make a movie based on the Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” But he made the mistake of hiring Stephen Worth, a drunken, opinionated hard-boiled mystery writer, to do the script. Worth, however, actually hates the Holmes stories, and has been very public about it. The members of the BSI, of course, are outraged – and some of them are quite prominent and influential (membership has included, over the years, Alexander Woollcott, Isaac Asimov, and Franklin Roosevelt). So the studio head invites a group of BSI members to come to Hollywood at his expense and serve as technical advisors. He puts them all up in a large Hollywood house, and the very first night Stephen Worth shows up drunk and unleashes a tirade on them all. Later that night, he is shot to death in his room. Then his body disappears.

What follows is a very strange sequence in which each BSI member has a bizarre, improbable adventure which oddly echoes various elements from Sherlock Holmes stories. They report on these adventures to a gathering of the whole group, in monologues modeled after the ones you find so often in the Doyle stories (and I’ve always found those monologues the most tedious parts. They are no more riveting here). In the end they all gather once more to try to determine the real murderer.

There’s a lot of clever plotting in The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars. But it’s too complicated, too implausible, and too clever by half. Toward the end I stopped caring, but I did finish the book. (I might mention that Boucher was a leftie, and his political sympathies come through here and there.)

The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars is worth reading for its historical significance, but it’s not a great mystery novel. I found myself sympathizing a little with the murdered, hard-boiled Stephen Worth.