Category Archives: Fiction

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.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Lion of Cairo,’ by Scott Oden

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The friend who gave me a copy of Scott Oden’s The Lion of Cairo told me, “I’ve never read an author who reminded me so much of Robert E. Howard.”

And he was right. In terms of setting and atmosphere, this is a very Howardian book. Gilded palaces inhabited by scheming courtiers contrast with dark, fetid alleyways infested by thieves, beggars, and cutthroats. The setting is very exotic, very romantic (in the sense of adventure in faraway lands). Author Oden makes no secret of his indebtedness to Robert E. Howard and of his intention to produce a story in that Weird Tales tradition.

And yet, it didn’t work for me.

Our antihero is Assad, a member of the Assassins cult. He is a skilled and remorseless murderer, armed with a long Afghani knife forged by a magician, possessed by an angry, vengeful spirit.

He is assigned to go to Cairo to protect Rashid, the caliph, who is dominated and manipulated by his ambitious vizier, Jalal. Jalal has made a treacherous pact with the Syrians and the “Nazarenes” (Christians) to deliver the city into their hands, in return for his own political advancement.

The only friend Rashid has in the palace is unknown to him – a minor member of the harem named Parysatis. She has discovered secret passages in the walls that allow her to eavesdrop on conversations. She knows what Jalal is planning, but to whom can she turn for help?

It all sounds pretty gripping, but it didn’t work for me. No doubt much of the problem is my sheer, provincial inability to sympathize with Islamic aspirations. In spite of the way the story was set up, I was still rooting for the Christians. (The author assumes the widely-held contemporary trope that the Crusaders were barbarians who ran around massacring everybody, while the Muslims were sophisticated and compassionate. We are often reminded that the Christians massacred the citizens of Jerusalem when they captured it, while Saladin spared them when he did the same. This is historical cherry-picking. There were rules of warfare, recognized by both sides, which governed when a city could be put to the sword or not. Saladin massacred cities on other occasions.)

But the book was also a little light on sympathetic characters. Assad is a stone-cold killer. The caliph is (at least at first) disengaged and addicted to drugs. Parysatis is a good character, but she shares the stage with a lot of other people, and has limited opportunities for taking initiative.

Also, author Oden is frequently weak in his word choices. Often he fails to say precisely what he’s trying to say. For instance, he tends to use “a sense of” when he means “an impression of.”

I’m afraid I found The Lion of Cairo something of a chore to read. The epilogue seems to suggest that a sequel will be coming, but I won’t be looking for it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Man in the Arena,’ by David Tindell

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I was with a group of guys from my church last evening, and one of them told me he’d started reading one of my books. He said, “I was wondering, ‘How come we don’t have these in our church library?’ And then I read the first page….”

I assumed he was talking about The Year of the Warrior, which begins, as you may recall, with a rape.

That goes to the ongoing issue of how much realism we can allow in Christian literature. I assume this question also faced David Tindell, author of The Man in the Arena. I’m not entirely convinced he got the balance right.

Scott Armstrong, our hero, is a former Air Force Special Tactics officer, whose career was cut short when, in a bad situation, he made the morally right choice rather than the politically prudent one. Now he’s back home in Wisconsin, middle-aged and fit, wondering what he’s going to do with the rest of his life.

He begins to find an answer when he meets Beth, a local single mother. They quickly fall in love, and he starts to act as a father figure to Emily, her beautiful, athletic teenaged daughter.

They have no way of knowing that drug dealers in the area are planning to move into the lucrative business of human trafficking – and they’ve set their sights on Emily for their first abduction and sale. Scott will need all his combat skills, as well as all the principles of character he learned growing up, to protect his nascent family.

The writing in The Man in the Arena wasn’t bad, in terms of word use. But the author tends to talk too much, and the story takes a long time before getting into the action.

But what really threw me for a loop is the presence, in a book which seems to be purposefully Christian (it includes a scene of a pastor sharing the gospel clearly with a misguided young man) of a sex scene that’s borderline porn. I’m not saying you absolutely can’t have any kind of sex scene in a Christian book, but this one got way more explicit and detailed than I was comfortable with.

So I’m not sure I can recommend The Man in the Arena. The author shows promise, though, and ought to keep at it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Made in Blood,’ by W. H. Clark

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Way back in 2015, I found W. H. Clark’s first novel, and praised it in these words:

The book under consideration here is an example of a type of novel I like very much. It’s a “small” mystery, localized and character-driven. No international conspiracies; no shadowy government agents. 

In 2022, I reviewed his second novel positively, though I complained that it was rather dark.

My imagination suggests to me that author Clark must have seen my 2015 review and hated it, because he seems to have designed his third novel, Made in Blood, to counter almost everything I said in praise in my first review. Made in Blood is a far-flung mystery, covering a lot of territory. It concentrates on international conspiracies and shadowy government agents. (I’ll concede that it was pretty character-driven, though.)

“Ward,” (he never explains whether it’s his first or last name), our continuing hero, was once a sniper in the Afghanistan war. Later he was a Texas Ranger, and now he’s a cop in Montana. He’s still recovering from the trauma of his last case when he gets cryptic phone call from a stranger. He immediately understands the message. His old friend, his one-time Army spotter Randall, has been killed. It will now be Ward’s job to avenge him.

The story that follows ranges episodically over a lot of country and time. Periods of inactivity will be punctuated with violence, abductions, and torture. Long flashbacks will tell us what happened to him in Afghanistan. Ward will kill men. Women will flirt with him, but he’ll brush them off. He will uncover an ugly story of war profiteering, political corruption, and ruthless terrorism.

I found Made in Blood a little implausible. The character of Randall was so extreme as to challenge belief. The fact that the author strayed into politics did not charm me, though I stayed with the story to the ending – an ending which I found just creepy.

On the plus side, the writing, as always before, was quite good. Though the author is English, he handles American idiom extremely well – except that he seems not to know that what he calls a “catapult” is known as a slingshot over here.

I’m done with W. H. Clark. He’s a good writer, but I’m not interested in what he’s selling these days.

Fiction, Reviews

‘If She Wakes,’ by Michael Koryta

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Abby had been on the fringes of the PI game only a few months, but already she understood what sustained the profession: people lied, and people were stupid.

I am, and have never concealed it, an unreconstructed male chauvinist. For this reason I avoid action novels with female protagonists – I don’t like to see women put in harm’s way.

In spite of that, I bought Michael Koryta’s If She Wakes, just because he’s such a fine writer, and I seem to have run through all his male protagonists for the present. And I can report that it’s a superior, intensely gripping novel.

Tara Beckley is a student at a New England college. She’s assigned to drive a visiting dignitary to his lecture, but he unaccountably insists on taking a detour. Then an auto accident happens. When Tara next awakens, she’s in a hospital, coming out of a coma. She sees, hears, and understands everything going on around her. But no one can tell, because she cannot move any part of her body. She’s “locked in.” To her horror, as she listens, her family discusses turning off her life support. Suddenly, her only hope is in her protective, gratifyingly stubborn older sister.

Abby Kaplan is a former race driver who transitioned to Hollywood stunt work. Life was great until one driving mistake left her movie star boyfriend dead. Now she’s phobic about driving. A friend got her a job as an insurance adjustor, and she’s assigned to examine Tara’s accident scene. But something’s wrong there. The driver’s account doesn’t match the evidence. She does not know that her assessment is very important to a particular group of people, people who will spare neither money nor human lives to get hold of a particular object, an object whose location only the paralyzed Tara Beckley knows.

If She Wakes was an extremely good thriller, full of twists and surprises; the kind of story where we fear for the protagonists even as we root for them to overcome their obstacles and grow as human beings. Well worth reading, with cautions for the usual things.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mystery Explosion,’ by Ed Benjamin

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The mundane title should have tipped me off. Mystery Explosion is actually a novella, the first installment in a series of four books (to date), entitled Bulverde Beat, after the Texas community where the stories are set.

The main characters are Harry Miles, a private investigator, and Luke Remington, police detective, who sometimes hires Harry as a consultant.

A female county prosecutor is killed in a heater explosion in her home. Harry is immediately suspicious – the “accident” was suspiciously timed, and he suspects the victim’s husband from the get-go.

But the story proceeds (commendably) in proper procedural fashion, as Harry and Luke question various witnesses and suspects, gradually eliminating false assumptions.

I didn’t mind the story as such – I like the procedural approach, and this narrative seemed (to this amateur) relatively realistic.

My problem was with the writing. The author isn’t a bad wordsmith, but he needs to learn to cut text. He talks too much – throws verbiage at an idea rather than selecting the exact words he wants. He runs up long lists of redundancies in some places.

Also, he hasn’t learned how to use quotation marks. Tip: When a character’s speech goes on for several paragraphs, you omit the closing quotation marks at the ends of the interior paragraphs. This tips off your reader to the fact that the character has not stopped talking yet. It saves a whole lot of confusion.

A further sin is that the characters are almost never physically described.

Mystery Explosion wasn’t awful, and it had the virtue of being pretty short. But I can’t recommend it highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Eddie’s Boy,’ by Thomas Perry

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He had lived a life without being aware of species loyalty, partly because at no time after he was fifteen had he been confident of living for long.

The hero of Eddie’s Boy by Thomas Perry calls himself Michael Schaeffer, but that’s not his real name. As a teenager, he was adopted by a man named Eddie, a butcher. It turned out Eddie was a butcher in more ways than one – he carried on a profitable sideline as a professional killer for organized crime. Eddie began teaching Michael that trade, discovering that the boy had a natural gift for it. He’s a born fighter and marksman. After Eddie was gone, Michael did well as a freelancer, killing bad men for the highest bidder, until one gangster double-crossed him. Michael matter-of-factly set that wise guy up for a murder rap, then left the country. Now he’s happily married to a British noblewoman.

Except that, from time to time, somebody recognizes his face. The word gets back to the U.S., and somebody comes to kill Michael. Then he has to take care of business.

In this fourth installment in the Butcher’s Boy series, men have shown up at Michael’s English home, to kill him and his wife. He handles them, but his wife persuades him to try disappearing instead of retaliating, just this once. He tries getting lost in Australia, but that doesn’t work out. He’ll have to go back to the states, find out who wants him dead, and neutralize them as usual. He has a simple, straightforward method of investigation – he kills men, then studies the reactions of others.

Eddie’s Boy was a well-written book. It kept me fascinated, and moved right along. But I was uneasy with it. When I was younger, I got a lot of vicarious pleasure out of stories about remorseless killers. In my old age, I’ve grown more scrupulous. And I’ve come to believe that no one except a sociopath (see last night’s review) can kill a human without suffering some kind of trauma. So the character of Michael Schaeffer seems a little unrealistic to me.

But the story’s great. Cautions for mature content.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Damned,’ by John D. MacDonald

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But the girl’s fine eyes were on his, in helplessness and in appeal. And his father had said, many times, “When you have to do something right, boy, don’t stop to count how much money you got in your pants.”

Sometimes the great John D. MacDonald just liked to play plotting games, dumping an assortment of characters down in some location together, shaking them up, seeing what happened. That’s how his early (1952) novel, The Damned, works. This book reveals interesting strata of art – on the surface, it’s a fairly standard, sexy men’s novel of the time – some tough guys, some pretty women, some discreet sex, and a fair amount of violence. But even at this early point in his career, MacDonald is mining his material for high grade ore.

On the Rio Concho in northern Mexico, a ferry gets blocked. So a string of cars headed back to the U.S., most of them driven by Americans, is left waiting in the hot sun, their occupants impatient and uncomfortable to various degrees.

There’s the businessman coming back from the first infidelity of his married life, his heart full of guilt and his floozy by his side.

There’s the pair of newlyweds, accompanied by his mother (!). The bride is beginning to realize that the guy she’s married isn’t a grownup man, and probably never will be.

A tough petty criminal, wanted for murder, uncomfortably aware that the police are on his tail.

The small-time nightclub comedian, with two country girls he’s trained as strippers. He’s beginning to suspect, uneasily, that the girls are smarter than he is.

And an expatriate American rancher, comfortable in his skin and in the sun, the only one among them who understands – or cares to understand – the Mexican people all around.

We’ll see some fighting, and some death. People will be confronted with hard truth, about themselves and others.

Oddly, the story is left kind of open-ended. The author leaves it to the reader to ponder where these people will end up down the road, once the ferry is running again. And the narrative is framed by the simple life of a local man, as different from that of the Americans as a space alien’s would be – but a valuable life, good in its own way.

There was a remarkable moment in The Damned that moved me a great deal. A rare moment in a MacDonald book, as he rarely deals with issues of faith (except for one novel which I’ve avoided). A couple of the characters – ones you’d never expect – break out into singing the old hymn, “I Love to Tell the Story.” The reactions of the listeners are instructive.

The Damned is 1950s pulp literature that rises above its genre. Recommended, with cautions for adult themes.