Note: I used Grammarly to grammar check this post, because they promised me remuneration, and like any good novelist I am for sale. (lw)

People have been telling me I needed to read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game for years, but I resisted. Science Fiction generally doesn’t interest me a lot, and to be honest Card’s LDS faith put me off. But now the book is coming out as a film, and gay activists want everybody to boycott it because Card’s a pro-family Mormon. So suddenly he’s an ally, and I’m almost obligated to see the film. And if I’m going to do that I might as well read the book. Which I did.

I’m glad I did. It’s very strange, very intense, and heartbreaking.

Andrew (Ender) Wiggin is the result of genetic experimentation in a future where reproduction is regulated by law. His brother and sister were part of the same experiment, and they’re all brilliant, but the brother is a sociopath and the sister too empathetic for the purposes of the program.

The purpose is to create a super-general, a military genius who can lead the forces of Earth against the insectoid “Buggers,” who attacked and nearly destroyed us a generation previously. Knowing we can’t survive another such attack, the world government has created a space station Combat School and filled it with hotshot young students, all of them geniuses. But it’s actually all about Ender. The whole thing exists to hone little Ender (he’s only six when he’s recruited) into a master strategist and tactician, without mercy or hesitancy.

Ender’s compassionate side – which is part of what the government wants from him – agonizes over the choices he has to make, and the things he must do, not only to win the war games but to survive in an environment where several other kids, most of them older than he, envy him enough to kill him. His handlers are ashamed of what they put him through, but they do it anyway, in order to forge their perfect human weapon.

Some have complained that the kids in this book don’t talk like kids, and they’re right. I had to keep reminding myself that these were children and pre-teens. But Card himself responds that we’re talking about geniuses here. There’s nothing normal about the situation. And realism isn’t exactly the point.

I don’t think I’d have guessed a Mormon wrote this book if I hadn’t known beforehand, though there are a couple clues. I was surprised by a kum-bah-ya element in the final resolution. I don’t know enough about LDS theology to know whether they believe (as this story seems to suggest) that there’s no such thing as evil. Or (more likely) I’m reading it wrong.

Intense, compelling. Recommended.

Cheap and free e-books from sources like the Gutenberg Project are increasingly becoming the public libraries of our time. The ability to acquire them for our electronic readers at no charge has (I suspect; I haven’t done a survey) caused an uptick in readership for classic books. And so it is that I finally came to read Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers.

In 1836, the first installment of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club appeared. It began as an example of a kind of publication which was very popular at the time, and for which I can’t find a technical name. Such books were published in booklet form chapter by chapter, and were a little like comic books. An artist would produce a series of humorous engravings, and a writer would be hired to pen a brief comic description of that action. The idea for The Pickwick Papers was that a group of Londoners would take trips out into the countryside to participate in sporting activities like hunting, fishing, and ice skating, getting shot at, hooked, and dunked for their pains. The artist retained for the project was a prominent illustrator named Robert Seymour, and the writer they hired was a young up-and-comer named Charles Dickens.

Dickens had entirely different ideas for the project than what Seymour had counted on. Dickens wanted fewer pictures and more text, and he wanted the pictures to follow the text instead of the other way around. Seymour was very unhappy with this plan, and expressed his views through the eloquent means of committing suicide with a shotgun. But publishing is publishing, and another artist was secured, and then another when he didn’t work out. This third artist was Hablot Knight Browne (better known as “Phiz”), who would forever after be the artist most associated with Dickens’ work. As the episodes in the series appeared, it became more and more an illustrated novel, and a bestseller, and Charles Dickens became an international celebrity.

The evolution of the project is very apparent as the reader proceeds. The first chapters are “funny” in a dated sort of way, but the reader (or at least this one) finds himself wondering whether this is all there is to be to it. Dickens clearly felt the same way, and as the story goes on the comedy of character comes to replace the comedy of slapstick. Gradually we see the development of the classic Dickens story, in which the emphasis is on exaggerated characters with funny names, and social criticism.

When Mr. Pickwick comes to hire Sam Weller, a Cockney bootblack he meets at an inn, as his personal valet, the story finds its footing. Pickwick and Sam are very different characters from Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, but I think we could call them their ancestors, in terms of the nature of their master-servant relationship. Though Pickwick is no idiot like Bertie, his areas of innocence concerning the world make it necessary for Sam, who genuinely loves him, to act as a sort of rough-hewn nursemaid and counselor.

The great crisis of the story is the prosecution of Mr. Pickwick for breach of promise, due to a misunderstanding. In a few harrowing chapters, Dickens gets the opportunity to describe the hellish world of the English debtor’s prison of that time, a world he himself knew too well from his childhood.

In Call Each River Jordan, one of the novels in Owen Parry’s (Ralph Peters’) Abel Jones Civil War mystery series, Abel meets an English valet who praises The Pickwick Papers to the skies. It is the only novel in the world, as far as he is concerned. He reads it constantly, over and over again, and no other novel. Abel, a strict Methodist, rejects such worldly amusements. And it’s just as well, because Methodists don’t come off very well in Pickwick. The Methodists described here are pure hypocrites, drinking heavily while preaching abstention, and leading flocks of silly women astray. In a particular section of the book, the chief Methodist “shepherd” berates Sam’s father in an offensively self-righteous way, simultaneous with an act of genuine Christian grace to an old enemy on Mr. Pickwick’s part. All of this is entirely in line with Dickens’ known opinions on religion, but I think it’s a little hard on Methodists.

Still, a book worth reading, for the reader who can work through an older style of writing (and of humor).

I’m going to take a chance here and review a book that will not be acceptable to a fair number of you. I appreciate that, and I understand. My recommendation is conditional.

To get the objections out of the way, I’ll say that Edward Adrift by Craig Lancaster contains a lot of profanity. This is because the main character is a high functioning man with Asperger’s Syndrome. He uses foul language because he repeats what he hears, and doesn’t really understand why some words are OK and some aren’t. A major character in the story tries to get him to stop, and he doesn’t resent it.

Also the approach to sex was uncomfortable for me. Not because there’s explicit sex, but because a scene that involves only a kiss and some petting is portrayed so intimately that I (personally) found it hard to read. But that may be because I score fairly high on the Asperger’s scale myself (though I don’t qualify for the diagnosis), and I identified more than most people would. The attitudes toward sex generally, in this book, are very contemporary and have little if anything to do with biblical morality.

OK, having warned you of these things I’ll go on to say that I found Edward Adrift engrossing and moving.

2011 has not been a good year for Edward Stanton. First of all, his best friends, a family across the street, moved away from his neighborhood in Billings, Montana to Butte. Then the counselor who’d helped him better relate to the world retired and turned him over to another doctor, whom he doesn’t yet trust. Then he was fired from his custodial job at the newspaper. One of the Dragnet videotapes he always watched at 10:00 every night broke, so of course he had to throw the whole set out. Getting diagnosed with diabetes was almost good news for him, because it gave him a reason to start keeping a new list. He loves lists.

But when he gets a call from Donna, one of the neighbors who moved away, that her son Kyle, his best buddy, is becoming uncontrollable and failing at school, Edward makes the (for him) heroic choice to drive his car to Butte and see if he can help. This movement outside his comfort zone sets him up for an adventure in which he’ll do things he’d never imagined.

I thought some elements of this story, especially its resolution, were a little beyond credibility. But I nevertheless read it with fascination and was moved by it.

Just be warned about the language and stuff.

It’s a pleasure to read a first novel and enjoy it. Doesn’t happen as often as one would wish. I can’t claim Thomas Benigno’s The Good Lawyer as any kind of personal discovery, though. It’s already an Amazon bestseller.

The book shows some of the distinctive marks of a first novel. Author Benigno is sometimes a tad awkward in terms of style, but I’ve seen far, far worse in recent years. Generally the editing’s pretty good. The plot doesn’t really offer a lot of surprises, and contains a fair number of common tropes. But then tropes exist for a reason. A novel entirely without tropes would lack credibility.

The hero and narrator is Nick Mannino, a young Legal Aid lawyer (a job the author knows from experience) doing defense work in the Bronx. For a change, he finds himself with two defendants he thinks might actually be innocent, one a teacher accused of molesting little boys, the other an accused serial rapist. But if he thinks that’s surprising, he has no idea what very nasty shocks are coming his way.

The best thing about this book is the characters. Nick is very likeable, and the friends, family, co-workers, and enemies who show up in the story are easy to believe in. His devout, loving mother, his wealthy girlfriend, and his sympathetic mobster uncle (a little too much Godfather here, but he’s still a good character) draw the reader in. And the villain is so vile and contemptible that we’re all on Nick’s side when, having earlier declared his opposition to capital punishment, he sets out to essentially perform an execution himself.

The politics of the story are hard to discern. Nick seems to be a decent liberal, but the story (it appears to me) has conservative implications, at least in terms of the justice system. I suppose that’s how bestselling authors square the circle and please a large audience. I need to try that.

Christianity comes out pretty well in this story, and I’m happy to report that the author avoided one trope in particular – the pedophile priest. (I don’t think he’s ever been inside a Baptist church, though, judging by his descriptions.)

All in all, pretty good. I enjoyed it. Recommended, with cautions for strong language and mature subject matter.

The late great Stuart M. Kaminsky’s series of comic mysteries starring small-time private eye Toby Peters have pleased me for some time. Toby makes a marginal living solving problems for a cast of clients who tend to be the greatest celebrities of the thirties and forties, yet he can’t afford a better office than a converted closet inside the offices of Dr. Sheldon Mink, the world’s most unsanitary dentist. Their building is owned by a former professional wrestler who writes poetry. Toby lives in a small apartment in a boarding house owned by the elderly Mrs. Plaut, who is convinced he’s either an exterminator or a book editor. His neighbor and best friend is Gunther Wherthman, a Swiss-born former munchkin who works as a translator. He has a brother who’s a Los Angeles police detective, and generally has to be physically restrained from punching him.

In other words, Toby Peter’s world is surreal. So who could be a more perfect client for him than the artist Salvadore Dali, who has had three paintings and three antique clocks stolen from him, and hires Toby to decipher the thieves’ cryptic clues in order to recover the property?

What’s hilarious about The Melting Clocks is that Dali fits into Toby’s world more easily than Toby himself does. Through the eyes of Dali, Toby discovers things about his own friends he never realized before.

Don’t look for fresh scandals in a Toby Peters novel. The celebrities in these stories are generally treated as decent folks with flaws like you and me. Pure entertainment here. Recommended.

I’ve read some Peter Lovesey novels in the past that I liked very much, particularly Rough Cider, which was troubling but unforgettable. He’s had a very successful career, and among his detective series is the Peter Diamond mysteries, about a police inspector in the city of Bath. So I tried Cop to Corpse.

Three policeman walking beats have been sniper victims in the Bath and Wells area in a short time. Someone is lying in wait for them with an assault rifle. At the third scene, a detective who discovered the shooter’s hiding place is knocked unconscious while waiting for forensic technicians.

Detective Peter Diamond has to pick his way carefully through puzzling and sometimes contradictory clues while trying to cooperate with competitive fellow cops and rival squads, as he tries to discover the murderer – or murderers – before another policeman is killed.

It is often complained of police procedurals that they fail to convey the full tedium of police work. I think the Peter Diamond books must be more realistic than most, because to be honest I found this one kind of dreary reading. The puzzle was interesting enough, and some opinions were expressed that didn’t entirely offend me. But Peter Diamond is not a charismatic guy, and I didn’t finish the book eager to read more about him.

I’m not saying it’s a bad book. As I mentioned, the low key might just be a touch of realism. You may like it better than I did. Cautions for the usual.

“… And I’m really going to need for you to leave us now. Sitting at someone’s table without being invited is rude.”

“Let me tell you something,” I said, helping myself to her toast, “I’ve been called rude many times and I’ve never believed it. I’m a lovely man. I think when someone calls me rude it’s because they don’t want to talk to me. And the only reason someone wouldn’t want to talk with me is because they have something to hide.”

I’ve expressed the opinion here before that a lot of the best series detective characters are wish-fulfillment figures. Hard-boiled private eyes tend to have lives their male readers dream of having. I assume female detective heroes (which I generally don’t read) fulfill a similar function for women.

William Doonan’s Henry Grave, hero of Mediterranean Grave (sequel to Grave Passage, which I reviewed a couple days back), is a new kind of wish-fulfillment hero, in my experience. He’s pretty much the guy I’d love to be (but am sure I won’t be) when I get old. Older.

84-year-old Henry Grave works as an investigator for an organization of cruise ship owners. His professional technique is reminiscent of Peter Falk’s Columbo character on TV, playing the clueless bumbler who disarms suspects to the point where they get sloppy and make mistakes. Harry takes that game up a notch by presenting himself as a semi-senile, deaf, nearsighted old codger. This method allows him to have a very good time while doing his job, drinking heavily, eating about every five minutes, and flirting with every pretty girl he meets. And yet, when it comes to a showdown, Henry Graves is Shiva, the avenger without mercy.

In Mediterranean Grave, Henry finds himself aboard the cruising yacht Vesper, an unusually small and elderly ship catering to New Agers. The ship is anchored in the Greek archipelago when the story begins. An Egyptian policeman, on board to guard a priceless archaeological artifact, has been found murdered in his cabin. The artifact, an inscribed cup that gives the promise of being a Rosetta Stone for the heretofore undeciphered Minoan language, has disappeared.

Henry proceeds to investigate in his signature fashion, saying anything he darn well pleases and going anywhere he darn well likes, and when he gets in trouble either playing the age card or pulling rank. His shamelessness sometimes makes me laugh out loud, but his serious heart occasionally moves me deeply.

Cautions for adult themes (one male character who abandoned his wife for another woman is described as a “good man,” but I don’t look to Henry for moral wisdom). At $2.99 for a Kindle download, I’d say the Henry Grave mysteries are about as good an entertainment deal as any books you’ll find. After mine, of course.