I believe this is the last “new” Lew Fonesca book I’ll be able to read, and that makes me sad. Midnight Pass isn’t the last book in the series (that was Always Say Goodbye, which I’ve already reviewed). But it was the last one I found. Stuart M. Kaminsky’s bald little hero, whose stories would never have appealed to me purely on the basis of their synopses, won me over completely. I miss all the books Kaminsky might have written if he’d lived, but I miss the Lew Fonesca stories most.

Lew Fonesca, if you’re not familiar with him, is a man hiding from life. After the death of his wife he moved from Chicago to Sarasota, where he lives in a room behind his tiny office. His existence consists of delivering summonses during the day and watching old movies on his VCR at night. At least that’s his plan. But life keeps intruding. People need help. He helps them. They tend to become friends. Lew’s saga (I only realized it after reading this book) is the story of the gradual re-integration of a traumatized personality. These books could have been downers, but in fact they’re full of hope.

In this story, Lew is hired by a minister, also a city council member, to find a fellow councilman who has disappeared and whose vote is needed to fight a development project. He also gets involved in the problems of a married couple, involving the wife running off with her husband’s business partner. There’s kidnapping, and shots are fired. Meanwhile, Lew keeps his appointments with his therapist, and contemplates becoming a Big Brother. In the end he solves the mysteries and averts some evil.

Reading a Lew Fonesca mystery is like spending time with the best friend you ever had. I’ll miss you, Lew.

Cautions for language and violence, but nothing over the top.

According to an anecdote, E. Z. C. Judson, better known as Ned Buntline, traveled west to Fort McPherson, Nebraska, to meet the famous pistoleer, Wild Bill Hickok, about whom he wished to write dime novels. He found him in his natural environment (a saloon), and rushed up to him, crying, “There’s my man! I want you!” Hickok pulled a revolver on him and told him to be out of town in 24 hours.

Perhaps it’s the memory of Wild Bill’s nickel-plated Colt Navy .36 that accounts for the jaundiced view of the man we find in the deservedly forgotten little novel, Wild Bill’s Last Trail.

Ned Buntline

I downloaded it to read on my Kindle because I’m a Wild Bill buff, and although I’ve read much about Buntline over the years (whatever they tell you in the movies, he never gave Wyatt Earp a long-barreled revolver) but had never savored the quality of his actual prose.

Well, it’s quality prose, in the sense that pretentiousness is a quality, and floridity is a quality too.

“…there’s a shadow as cold as ice on my soul! I’ve never felt right since I pulled on that red-haired Texan at Abilene, in Kansas. You remember, for you was there. It was kill or get killed, you know, and when I let him have his ticket for a six-foot lot of ground he gave one shriek—it rings in my years yet. He spoke but one word— ‘Sister!’ Yet that word has never left my ears, sleeping or waking, from that time to this.”

I must admit that, although I expected the purple prose and the improbable action, one aspect of the book surprised me. I had expected “white hats” and “black hats,” one-dimensional good guys and bad guys. But in fact, this is a Wild West where the deer and the ambivalent play. Wild Bill is arguably the real villain, and everybody who wants to kill him (there are many) seems to have a good reason. One sympathetic character—shades of Dances With Wolves—is not only a professional killer, but has made common cause with the Sioux and plans to join Sitting Bull.

The only explanation I can think of for all this is that Ned must have really held a grudge for the Fort McPherson incident. He also finds numerous opportunities to condemn Wild Bill’s drinking (Ned Buntline made a sideline of lecturing on Temperance—utterly hypocritically, as he drank plenty himself),

I might add that the climax manages to be at once melodramatic, historically inaccurate, and confusing. If you can figure it out on the first reading, you’re a better reader than I am.

Not a good book, Wild Bill’s Last Trail is an interesting historical curiosity.

I stopped reading Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping the other day, and I’m not sure I want to finish it. It’s character-driven, but with few characters, and very light on plot. I think I can handle that well enough. I’m beginning to doubt myself on that point.

I’m bringing it up here because I ran across this review of Housekeeping on Good Reads. It’s written by someone who claims to enjoy mostly plotless, character-driven literary novels. He writes:

When I say that I have limited access to these characters and this world, and that it ultimately felt untrue, here’s what I mean (this is Ruthie in the final pages of the book): I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined. Really? It’s character revelations and discoveries like this that pepper the book, and for each one that I could say ‘Yes, I get this, I’m with you,’ there were two or three like that quote above where I just couldn’t grasp the experience or couldn’t relate to the introspection.

I haven’t thought I couldn’t relate to the characters, but perhaps that’s the reason I don’t care about the story anymore. It may also be that the characters make me uncomfortable in a way that repels me. I don’t feel a challenge in the book or tension I wish to resolve. I just don’t like hanging around it, doing nothing.

Due to a combination of tight finances and the possession of a Kindle, I’ve been reading a lot of old books lately, of the kind you can get cheap or free in electronic versions. So I came to read, at last, Mr Standfast, John Buchan’s second sequel to The 39 Steps.

Richard Hannay, hero of the series, is now a brigadier general in the British Army, fighting in France in World War I. As Mr Standfast begins, he has been summoned to the War Office for a special assignment. He is ordered to take on the character of a South African political radical, go to a village called Isham, and insinuate himself into a group of radicals he will find there. Further orders will follow.

The story that follows is rather discursive, ranging as far as Scotland and the battlefields of France. Hannay is reunited with several old friends and one very dangerous old enemy.

A point of interest here is that the author finally adds to the narrative the major element all film versions of The 39 Steps that I know of add at that earlier point in the saga—a love interest. Hannay meets, and falls in love with, a charming young woman who is also a spy. It’s amusing to the modern reader to see the delicacy with which her part (a rather scandalous one at the time) is portrayed.

Buchan’s portrayal of radicals and pacifists is remarkably evenhanded, in my opinion. There are German agents among them, but he makes it clear (perhaps even giving them more credit than they were really due) that most of them are patriotic in their own way—one of them even heroic.

James Bond can be reasonably called Richard Hannay’s literary son, but the differences between the generations are telling. We read modern spy stories partly to be shocked, to see what technical wizardry or ruthless killing technique the agent will use to save his life this time. The Hannay books are written with moral purpose, and seem boy-scoutish to us. The title of the book comes from a character in The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the whole story is, in a way, a commentary on that Christian classic, except that the subject is courage rather than faith. I enjoyed it.

Cautions for occasional racial and cultural comments which were acceptable then, but are so no more.