As promised, for you Kindle owners, Troll Valley is now available in that sacred format at Amazon.com.
As a side note, I e-mailed Andrew Klavan himself today, offering him a review copy, and he actually wrote back and said he’d like one. (Apparently I won his favor with my favorable review of Agnes Mallory.)
So you might say it’s a good day.
And now you know what to do with that Amazon gift card you got for Christmas!
I’m going to try to do a splashier announcement when the Kindle version is available too, but for now Troll Valley is available for your Nook (plus a couple odd formats for phones and things, as I understand it) from Lulu.
I’m a Kindle guy myself, and strongly object to this discrimination in favor of Nook owners. I shall send myself a stiff letter of protest without delay.
Good writing and good storytelling are two distinct qualities, and don’t necessarily reside in the same practitioner. Bestselling Minnesota author Vince Flynn is a classic case in point.
In terms of storytelling, his performance is flawless. Transfer of Power begins, after some brief preliminaries, with super-secret operative Mitch Rapp leading a commando raid into Iran (this is before 9/11) to kidnap a terrorist ringleader. Then the focus shifts to one of that ringleader’s proteges, Rafique Aziz, who is planning an audacious attack on the White House itself, intended both to kidnap the president and to humiliate the United States. Information the CIA extracts from its prisoner (through torture; Flynn makes no bones about it) allows enough warning to enable the Secret Service to get the president into a safe bunker before the terrorists take possession of the building. But the terrorists have a drill and a weak vice president with whom to negotiate.
The tension never lets up. Hero Mitch Rapp employs all his formidable commando skills, and often defies his superiors, in a dangerous operation to infiltrate the White House and impose summary justice on the attackers. He is ruthless and his actions are viscerally satisfying. Also he gets the girl.
As a piece of prose writing, the book is less successful. The force of the narrative pulls the reader along so quickly that he barely notices frequent infelicities, like “Warch, who was more entrusted with the president’s life than any other person in the Secret Service…,” and “…he wondered if he wasn’t being overly paranoid,” and my personal favorite— “the two junior officers fell in astride their senior.” Best to just move along and not inquire too closely into these careless turns of phrase.
As an entertainment, Transfer of Power is a great success. As a statement of a viewpoint on how the War On Terror should be fought, it deserves respectful attention. As a piece of literature, it’s… a successful entertainment.
Cautions for language, violence and adult themes.
The “Old Stone Church,” Kenyon, Minnesota. Photo: Lars Walker.
[The book is coming out soon. I promise. We’re that close. ljw]
THE PRESENT
“What the—what kind of crap is this?” Shane demanded.
“ʽCrap’ is an interesting word,” said Robert Swallowtail. “Very marginal. I might have to use the soap on you, just to be prudent.”
“I’m talking about this story. You realize what this means, don’t you?”
“It’s a little early in your reading to have discovered a theme.”
“The old man was crazy. All that stuff people said about him, what a great man he was, and all the time he was a loon from the moon. No wonder I got problems. It’s genetic!”
“You may find this hard to comprehend,” said Robert Swallowtail, “but the book is not about you.”
CHAPTER II THE HAUGEANS
They established Anderson & Co., Inc. of Epsom, Minnesota that summer, manufacturers (then) of the Anderson Viking Separator and (eventually) of the Anderson Reaper and the Anderson Traction Engine, first steam then gasoline. The year was 1900, a good round number for our lives to pivot on. I celebrated my eighth birthday on Sunday, September 30.
It was a cool, fine morning. I remember the pinch of my knickerbockers below the knees, and the scraping of the hard brush Mother used on my hair. One of my most enduring impressions of childhood is how much everything hurt. Being young was like being an unhealed wound.
I’m going to take you to church with us now. I know that’s bad manners. But if you’ve come this far and want to know what our lives were like, you need to understand about our church. Continue reading Snippet Five, Troll Valley
Max Allan Collins is probably best known for having written the graphic novel on which the movie The Road To Perdition was based. I myself know him as the author of a very fine mystery novel, True Detective, set in Chicago in the 1930s. Turns out he’s written more books about his Jewish-Irish private eye, Nathan Heller, that I didn’t know about. These include Chicago Lightning, a collection of short stories covering a period of about twenty years.
Nathan Heller differs from the standard fictional private eye in that he’s ethical but not technically “clean.” He does occasional, cautious business with organized crime, and those associations are often useful to him in his investigations. His relations with the police are about as equivocal, as some of them bear him a grudge for helping to expose some crooked cops in the past. The assumption throughout is that both groups are about equally corrupt. Continue reading Chicago Lightning, by Max Allan Collins
Do you know what I was? The Knight of the Unholy Grail.
In times like these when everyone is wonderful, what is needed is a quest for evil….
“Evil” is surely the clue to this age, the only quest appropriate to the age. For everything and everyone’s either wonderful or sick and nothing is evil.
Honesty comes first. I’m not at all sure I understand Walker Percy’s novel Lancelot. I think I understand some of it, but it’s one of those books that I come away from pretty sure I’ve encountered something written for people smarter than me.
But it was a fascinating read, and I’ll tell you what I thought. For whatever that’s worth.
The main character and narrator is Lancelot Lamar, formerly the scion of a fine old Louisiana family, owner of a handsome estate, successful lawyer with a record of civil rights advocacy, and loving husband to a beautiful wife.
Now, as he narrates the text of this book, he is a patient in a mental hospital, having been declared insane after blowing up his home, killing his wife and her movie industry friends. His confidante is his friend Percival, a priest (or a former priest; it’s never made clear) who never contributes a word to the narrative. Continue reading Lancelot, by Walker Percy
“Meadow Elves,” by Nils Blommer (1850)
I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up to see Miss Margit’s face, faceted in my tears. That face, longish and stern, with the gold blaze in the black hair above her right eye, could be gentle when she chose, and her gray eyes would soften with a sweetness that had nothing of sentimentality in it.
“What’s the matter, Kjære?”
I told her, between sobs.
She sat, elegantly careless of her black dress, in the straw beside me. She took my left elbow and fingers in her hands. I shuddered as I always did when someone examined my deformity. There is no nakedness like it.
My arm was permanently bent. More than anything else it resembled a plucked chicken’s wing. The useless fingers curled back toward the elbow, and the flesh hung loose and flaccid on the forearm. I never willingly rolled up my sleeves where anyone could see, which hid the worst of it, but I was an obvious cripple. I had learned early to expect the quick-glance-and-look-away that people use for politeness, or pity.
“You think you are to blame that your papa is unhappy?” Miss Margit asked, stroking the arm, making me shudder.
“If it weren’t for me—ʺ
“If it weren’t for you your family and Mr. Lafferty would find another way to persuade him. Your papa hasn’t the strength to withstand them. If he must be overborne, it’s just as well he do it for love. It’s a kindness you do him, Christian.”
“It doesn’t feel like a kindness.” Continue reading Snippet Four, Troll Valley
It’s generally a pleasure for me to read novels set on my home turf. Not only do I enjoy being able to visualize known locations as I follow the story, but for some reason I have a childish conviction that places are somehow validated, made more interesting, because they’ve been laminated between the covers of a book.
There was lots of that for me in Deadly Stillwater, by Roger Stelljes. The action ranges around eastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin, but most of it happens in the Twin Cities, and the climax is set near Stillwater, just to the east.
The hero is Mac McRyan, a St. Paul police detective. As one of the police chief’s “boys,” a decorated group of smart and effective cops, he’s called in from a vacation day (this all takes place over the Fourth of July holiday) when Shannon Hisle, daughter of one of the city’s most prominent—and wealthy—attorneys, is kidnapped. There’s added urgency because Shannon is a Type 1 diabetic. The police are already going all out when the criminals up the ante—they kidnap the police chief’s daughter as well. These are smart and organized villains who plan with military precision. It will take hard work, some luck, and a lot of ruthlessness to save the girls and bring a very motivated gang to justice. Continue reading Deadly Stillwater, by Roger Stelljes
They were still discussing it around the wash table outside the mud porch when we got to the house. Bestefar was dipping water from a pail into the washbasin, and as he rolled up his sleeves, loosened his shirt and started to scrub the dirt off he said, “Peter, I think Otto’s got a point. The problem with you is you ain’t got brains enough to know when you’re smart.”
Papa folded his arms and twisted his mouth. “You know how many men try that sort of thing every year and lose their shirts?”
“Ja, some of them fail. But none of the ones who don’t try, succeed,” said Bestefar, lathering his arms with a cake of soap. His hands were red-brown as an Indian’s to the wrist, the arms paint-white from there on up. “Look at me. If I hadn’t been willing to take a chance, I’d still be fishing sild in Norway.”
“You tell him, Ole,” said Otto. Continue reading Snippet Three, Troll Valley
To young men of a studious turn of mind, who did not desire to go into the Church or the Law, magic was very appealing, particularly since Strange had triumphed on the battlefields of Europe. It is, after all, many centuries since clergymen distinguished themselves on the field of war, and lawyers never have.
It is my settled custom to delay discovering great novels until everybody else has already praised the life out of them. And so it is with Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
(I might also add that I forgot the author’s name, and could not recall throughout my reading whether the author was a man or a woman. Coming from me, that’s high praise.) Continue reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke