Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Blackhouse,’ by Peter May

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The northern part of Lewis was flat and unbroken by hills or mountains, and the weather swept across it from the Atlantic to the Minch, always in a hurry. And so it was always changing. Light and dark in ever-shifting patterns, one set against the other – rain, sunshine, black sky, blue-sky. And rainbows. My childhood seemed filled by them. Usually doublers.

I was encouraged to check out Peter May’s “Lewis Trilogy” of Scottish police novels. I have now read The Blackhouse, the first of them. My reaction is positive, but mixed. The writing (witness the passage above) is superior. My main problem with the book was with the main character and sometime narrator (he narrates the out-of-sequence flashbacks which constitute about half of the book), Fin McLeod, Edinburgh police detective. One likes to like the hero of a book, but sometimes Fin is hard to like. However, there’s a reason for that, entirely in line with the purposes of the story.

Fin is a native of the island of Lewis, in the Hebrides, a bleak place where life is tough to sustain and economic times are hard. He got away and became a policeman in Edinburgh, and has been back only once since. But when a man is murdered in his old home town, in a way almost identical to a murder he’s investigating in Edinburgh, he’s assigned to go and see if there’s a connection.

Back at home, he encounters many old friends and enemies, most of them greatly changed physically but much the same at heart. The course of his investigation rouses memories, which constitute the many long flashbacks in the narrative. Gradually he finds that the similarities between the two murders are no accident, and that he will have to confront the deepest and blackest secrets of his past.

As I mentioned, I found it hard to root for Fin sometimes. He often seems cold and unsympathetic to others. But it’s not surprising that he keeps people at a distance, considering the amount of loss he suffered growing up, as we learn. He seems to have been touched by more than his share of tragedy, even in a place where life is a marginal proposition for most.

For the Christian reader, there are interesting implications. Fin describes himself as not a believer, but not an atheist either – he’s just mad at God. Christians – and there are many on Lewis – seem to be uniformly pinched and joyless. On the other hand, one of the most important positive characters in the book reads the Bible constantly and draws wisdom from it. So I think there’s more going on here than mere flippant modern secularism.

The Blackhouse is a beautiful book, but challenging. I’m not sure whether I recommend it or not, but I’ve bought the sequel. Cautions for sex and language and graphic descriptions of murdered bodies.

Fiction

“Nothing drives people to the church faster”

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The second season of Netflix’s “Daredevil” was released today. Aaron Earls of “The Wardrobe Door” talks about the themes of the series.

“Nothing drives people to the church faster than the thought of the Devil snapping at their heels. Maybe that was God’s plan all along,” Father Lantom, Matt Murdock’s priest, says, “why he created him, allowed him to fall from grace to become a symbol to be feared, warning us all to tread the path of the righteous.”

Netflix’s “Daredevil” confronts the problem of evil in the world and challenges viewers to consider how they can be part of the solution. And it does it through the life of a blind Catholic superhero. . . .

When wrestling with the problem of evil, “Daredevil” gives an answer that may not address all of the philosophical wonderings, but addresses a much more practical issue. We see evil in the world and we wonder what God is doing about it. As those created in His image, we have to once again look in the mirror. “Daredevil” reminds us that God is there in the midst of the suffering, able to serve, because we are there.

I’m looking forward to this season. One image from the first season that sticks with me is that while the hero takes up the metaphor of the devil, the villain sees himself as a savior, at least until the very end when he spins another metaphor for himself. Unlike Jessica Jones, Daredevil wants to team up with God in this fight.

Fiction, Writing

Jeeves Was Scarcely Mentioned

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In Wodehouse’s first story of the exploits of Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves, many of the familiar details are present: the language, Bertie’s aunts, and the predicament that needs resolving.

But there was one notable exception: Jeeves scarcely got a mention. “I still blush to think of the off-hand way I treated him at our first encounter,” wrote Wodehouse. He would flesh him out later. “[A] tallish man, with one those dark, shrewd faces” who brings order to the scrape-ridden world of Bertie and his friends with noiseless omniscience. In that first story, however, there is no hint that we are in the presence of a “bird of the ripest intelligence”, who “From the collar upward…stands alone.”

I don’t believe I’ve ever gotten around to this story. My first foray into this part of Wodehouse’s world was with one or two stories from Very Good, Jeeves, which being written in the late 20s was beyond establishing many of the principles. When I saw that another book, Carry On, Jeeves, began with what you might call an origin story (originally published in 1916), I read through that one before returning to the other. I like to keep things in order.

Jeeves and Wooster came into play for Glenn Fisher the other day when he praised these habit of two writers he admires. “Both JG Ballard and PG Wodehouse challenged themselves to write 1,000 words a day.”

That may be just the idea I need to press ahead with my own goals.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Island of Sheep,’ by John Buchan

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I’ve told you often of my fondness for John Buchan’s books, especially the Richard Hannay series, through which I’m working my way. Most recently I read The Island of Sheep, which offered the usual pleasures, with the addition of a Scandinavian element for me.

Richard Hannay, retired British intelligence agent, is settling into a peaceful country life with his wife and son, and feeling a little uncomfortable about it. So he’s up for an adventure when an event from his past reaches forward into his present.

Long ago, in Africa, he and a friend helped to save the life of a well-known explorer, a Dane named Haraldsen. When it was all done, Haraldsen called on both of them to make a vow, in Viking fashion (he’s a Scandinavian romantic), to come to his help, or his son’s, at any time. Now Richard hears from the son. Old enemies of his father’s from Africa have reappeared, with both a lawsuit and an implied physical threat. Young Haraldsen has a daughter, and he’s terrified for her safety as well as his own.

Hannay and the friend who also made the vow sally forth from their respectable lives then, to keep their promise, with the help of another old friend, familiar to the reader from previous books, and Hannay’s teenaged son.

The story climaxes in a struggle on the Island of Sheep, Haraldsen’s home (one assumes it’s really in the Faeroe Islands, since that’s what “Faeroe” means). It’s all fairly preposterous, but Buchan knows how to tell a story, and it’s great fun. As usual.

Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Breakdown,’ by Jonathan Kellerman

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The big problem with a successful, ongoing fiction series is self-repetition. The template for Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware novels is pretty well established. Dr. Delaware, successful child psychologist, gets a call from his police detective buddy Milo Sturgis (overweight, conservative, and “gay”), who asks him to advise him on some case in progress. Alex happily cooperates, and together they uncover motive, means, and opportunity. (In real life, of course, Alex would never be allowed to meddle in police work that way, and defense lawyers would have a heyday with his involvement. But in the real world both Alex and Milo would be long retired by now, so why mess with success?).

In Breakdown, the latest in the series, author Kellerman jiggers the template a little. This time it’s Alex who asks for Milo’s help in a case of his own. Some years ago, he was called in to consult on the welfare of a child at risk. The little boy’s mother was an actress on a TV sitcom. She had personality disorders, but seemed to be functioning all right as a mother, and Alex found her son highly intelligent but otherwise normal.

Now he gets a call from a mental health worker. The actress, long out of work, has been found living on the streets, psychotic. Her primary psychologist is dead, so Alex is now the health care professional of record on the file. Alex talks to the former actress, being held in a ridiculous government-funded facility (which gives the author a chance to make some pointed comments on our current mental health system). She’s almost completely psychotic now. There seems to be no record that she ever had a child, and Alex, driven by concern and guilt, enlists Milo in trying to uncover the actress’s past, to see what happened to the boy.

What they uncover is a dark family secret and a string of unsolved murders going back decades.

I always enjoy the Alex Delaware books, and this one pleased me particularly. I love cold case stories, and Breakdown was a fascinating one.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Black Gang,’ by H. C. McNeile

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I invested in a complete set of Bulldog Drummond books for Kindle. So I’ll review the second book, though there’s little to say about its virtues or failings beyond what I said in my review of the first book, Bulldog Drummond.

The Black Gang is the title of this outing, and the fact that the title refers to the hero and his friends rather than the villains indicates the ambivalent character of the book for the modern reader.

At the very beginning, the Black Gang capture a criminal villain and take him into their own custody, to be sent to a secret prison of their own. The police are aware of their activities, but not too concerned, as the “right sort of people” are disappearing.

The modern reader has a hard time with this sort of thing – though heaven knows we may be quickly moving into a state of nature where every man will again have to do what seems best in his own eyes.

Anyway, Bulldog Drummond, our intrepid hero, sets his sights on closing down the operation of the greatest criminal mastermind in the world (a Communist, which pleased me), and there are attacks back and forth, and kidnappings, and Drummond triumphs in the end.

Nothing very challenging. Nothing very plausible. There are some ethnic slurs (especially of Jews), but we’ve come to expect that sort of thing, haven’t we?

Mindless entertainment from a more innocent era. Cautions for racist elements.

Fiction, Religion

Hope for Susan Pevensie

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Joshua Rogers describes how his view of Susan in The Chronicles of Narnia changed when we realized the impact of something Aslan says.

For the first time, it dawned on me that Susan’s story wasn’t over—not at all. It couldn’t be. One day, Susan was obsessing over “lipstick and nylons and invitations,” and the next, someone would telephone her to tell her that her mother, father, sister, two brothers, a cousin, and three old friends were dead.

Also, photos of the rare white stag, which is the animal the Narnian royalty sought when they returned to our world at the end of the first book.

Fiction, Uncategorized

‘One Final Dragon’

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Back in the early ’80s, I sold my first short story to Amazing Stories Magazine. It was called “One Final Dragon.”

Just yesterday, our friend Nathan James Norman posted a dramatic production of the story on his “Untold Podcast” site (with my permission, of course).

You can listen to it here.

Fiction, Non-fiction, Publishing

Melville’s Lost Novel

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What manuscripts by accomplished authors have been lost to us over the years, snatched by bibliophilic Huns or discarded as immature? The Smithsonian has a list of ten of would likely be the best lost books. The Shakespearean play on a character in Don Quixote is incredible to imagine, but here’s a good story of the great Melville doing his normal thing and finding a dead end.

On a trip to Nantucket in July 1852, Herman Melville was told the tragic story of Agatha Hatch— the daughter of a lighthouse keeper who saved a shipwrecked sailor named James Robertson, then married him, only later to be abandoned by him.

The tale would serve as inspiration for a manuscript titled The Isle of the Cross, which Melville presented to Harper & Brothers in 1853. But the publisher, for reasons unknown, turned it down. And no copy of the manuscript has ever been found. In an essay in a 1990 issue of the journal American Literature, Hershel Parker, a biographer of Melville’s, claims, “The most plausible suggestion is that the Harpers feared that their firm would be criminally liable if anyone recognized the originals of the characters in The Isle of the Cross.”

Fiction, Reviews

‘Persons of Interest,’ and ‘In This Bright Future,’ by Peter Grainger

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A while ago I reviewed the first three D.C. Smith novels by Peter Grainger. I was happy to discover recently that there are now two more. I read them with pleasure and review them here.

The continuing hero, D.C. Smith, is an aging police detective in the fictional city of King’s Lake in England. He is utterly uninterested in career advancement, and has no personal life to speak of. For him it’s all about the work – our friend Gene Edward Veith might say he’s a man of his vocation, perhaps to excess.

One of D.C. Smith’s great strengths is the low profile he keeps. He’s physically unimpressive, and he purposely presents himself as less intelligent than he really is. His very nickname, “D.C.,” is a police rank (Detective Constable), but his actual title is Detective Sergeant. Thus from the very beginning he keeps the people he meets at a disadvantage, something he enjoys and exploits.

In Persons of Interest, a low-level convicted felon is murdered in prison, and Smith’s phone number is found among his effects. This is puzzling, as Smith has never met the man. Then a couple teenagers disappear, and it all comes together in an investigation that takes on ruthless and powerful gangsters.

In In This Bright Future Smith takes an excursion into his own past, or at least the ruins of that past. In his youth he served as a British spy in Belfast, North Ireland. There he failed to complete his mission and nearly got killed. Only now, while resting up from a leg injury, Smith receives a summons from the son of an old friend there, learning that a young man he’d liked, one who’d been promising and non-political, had disappeared the same night he fled the city. Smith goes back, impelled by a sense of obligation, once again adopts a false identity, and begins investigating what happened to the young man.

I like each D.C. Smith book better than the last. I’m particularly impressed to learn that author Grainger began in self-publishing – few writers in that field (and I include myself among them) rise to this high level of craftsmanship. Also the language is mild and though there’s much violence in the air, little actual violence happens on stage, largely because Smith is too smart to let it happen.

Highly recommended.