Why I wrote Hostile Intent. Michael Walsh says: “When I created ‘Devlin’ [the lead in Hostile Intent] – a man you could walk right by and never notice, so protected is he by his cloak of anonymity – I was looking to honor the kind of men and women who fight our nation’s battles in the bazaars and back alleys of the world’s least glamorous places, with no public acknowledgment of their bravery or their accomplishments, people who often lead (as Devlin does) lives of surpassing, nearly unbearable loneliness.”
Category Archives: Fiction
“There was nothing but land: not a country at all”
Abandoned book review: Viking: Odinn’s Child, by Tim Severin
There was a time when I made it a point of honor to finish every book of fiction I started. As I’ve aged I’ve grown more surly and impatient, and nowadays if a book bores or offends me, I toss it away. Life’s too short. I’ve got stuff I need to read.
So I’m going to do a new thing here. I’m going to post a biased review of a book to which I may not have given a fair chance.
I’d had Tim Severin’s Viking trilogy recommended to me, and I do try to keep up, to some degree, with my competition in the Viking novels field. I looked forward to the book. Severin is the author of The Brendan Voyage, an account of his own Atlantic voyage in a leather coracle, in emulation of St. Brendan, a book I read, enjoyed, and profited from.
But I got up to page 74 of Viking: Odinn’s Child and just couldn’t take it any further. There were two reasons, stylistic and ideological. I’ll start with the stylistic, so that anyone who doesn’t care about my religious views can just read this part and drop the review, as I dropped the book. Continue reading Abandoned book review: Viking: Odinn’s Child, by Tim Severin
Tickling Ears
Frank Wilson describes The Da Vinci Code‘s reception as I have always understood it.
A Student in Thousand Dollar Bills
Earlier this week, James Lileks posted the cover of a 1941 copy of Reader’s Digest magazine (which just went into bankruptcy reorganization. I could go on an on about the decline of that publication, but that’s a story for another day). Continue reading A Student in Thousand Dollar Bills
The Brass Verdict, by Michael Connelly
The Brass Verdict is Michael Connelly’s second novel about his new character, lawyer Mickey Haller. I wasn’t too sure whether I liked Mickey much when I read the first one, The Lincoln Lawyer, but this book definitely warmed me to him.
Mickey Haller is a defense attorney. He’s just coming off a one-year hiatus when he gets the news that an old friend, another defense lawyer named Jerry Vincent, has been murdered, and has left his stable of clients to him. One of them is a “franchise case,” a big-paycheck, high-profile case involving Walter Elliott, a Hollywood movie mogul.
There are problems with defense lawyers as heroes of stories. We all know that in the real world they’re not Perry Mason. They defend the worst people in the world, and if they’re good they get very rich off it. What makes Mickey Haller sympathetic is that he feels that moral tension, on a deep level. It probably had a lot to do with the cocaine-and-alcohol habit that destroyed his marriage, alienated his daughter, and nearly cost him his life.
On moving into Jerry’s office, Mickey finds two policeman going through the case files—illegally. He kicks them out, but oddly finds himself drawn to one of them, who turns out to be Harry Bosch, the hero of the majority of Michael Connelly’s novels. This is an excellent strategy on the author’s part, and helped me settle into the story.
Harry asks questions—who had Jerry Vincent bribed? How was the FBI involved? Mickey doesn’t know the answers. Harry doesn’t believe him. But they will still be drawn together into the double mystery of Jerry’s murder and the Elliott trial, which turn out to be linked. And the killing isn’t over.
A good story by a master storyteller. Connelly did telegraph one surprise though, at least in my case. He generally keeps politics out of his books (for which I’m eternally grateful), but here he did mention one character’s conservative affiliations. I immediately thought, “I’ll bet this character turns out to be a villain.” And behold, it was so.
Maybe Connelly’s done the same thing with liberal characters in the past, but I never noticed it. (Then again, I probably wouldn’t.)
But storytellers, be warned—we know your poker tells.
“Obnoxious, Supercilious Snob”
Sherry reviews Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street. “Published in 1920, Main Street is proto-feminist, liberal in its politics (to contrast with the no doubt conservative politics of 1920’s small town businessmen), and agnostic in its religious views. Our protagonista, Carol Kennicott . . . mostly stays just this side of being an obnoxious, supercilious snob.”
Frankenstein: Dead and Alive, by Dean Koontz
If I were actually the kind of industry insider I pretend to be as an author/blogger, I would have been aware that Dean Koontz’ long-awaited final volume in his Frankenstein trilogy was coming out at last. (He delayed it, he has reported, because New Orleans, the setting of the books, had suffered enough after Hurricane Katrina, and deserved a break. I’d been very worried the story would go forever unfinished.)
Koontz dedicates Frankenstein: Dead and Alive to “the late Mr. Lewis, who long ago realized that science was being politicized….” It would appear that C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength was an inspiration for this book and for the whole trilogy. That gives me particular satisfaction, as I did an homage of my own in Wolf Time.
Although it’s not necessary to read the first two books before reading Dead and Alive, I would recommend it. It’s a pity there was such a long lag between books, because, in my opinion, this book works best as the capstone to the trilogy experience. Continue reading Frankenstein: Dead and Alive, by Dean Koontz
The Wand Beats the Laser Gun
Fantasy has thrown down Science Fiction in popular literature, in case you haven’t noticed. It’s partly science’s fault. Philip Marchand reports this quote: “We have reached the point where contemporary science is so far out, to most people it is indistinguishable from magic,” comments well-known Canadian science fiction novelist Robert J. Sawyer. “The notion, for example, that black holes might provide not only links between space but links to time is grounded in current theoretical thinking.”
(via Arts Journal)
Where Are the Heroes?
It’s interesting that Lars wrote about villains last week, because I was thinking about them last week too. I quickly a list of 50 greatest from literature, compiled by the UK Telegraph a while back. So when I said to myself, “Dude, what’s the list of 50 greatest heroes look like,” I ran aground searching for a list. That is to say, I didn’t find one.
Of course, now that I search again, I find this list and this one, both broad and not quite what I wanted, especially the latter one. So what about our own list? If you wanted an list of great heroes from literature, who would you expect to see?
Odysseus, Hamlet, Henry V, Petruchio maybe. Frodo, Sam Gamgee, Aragorn, Faramir (unless we limit it to one per work). King Arthur, Erling Skjalgsson, Beowulf, Theseus. Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, Edmund Pevensie, Robin Hood. (This is getting beyond me, and if I had to rank them, I couldn’t do it.)