The Galway Homicides is an Irish police procedural series I’m not familiar with. But in the usual way of such things I got the offer of a free book, and so I read it. I had the impression from the description that it starred a man/woman police detective team, but if that was true of the earlier volumes, it is so no more. The hero of Murder in the Air is Detective Inspector Maureen Lyons. Her former partner (and current “life partner” in the dreary contemporary parlance) is Inspector Mick Hays, who has been kicked upstairs to the administrative office of Superintendent and plays only a peripheral role in this story.
A Galway property developer named Gerald Fortune crashes his small plane in a West Ireland bog and is killed along with his 17-year-old daughter and a business associate. When it’s discovered that the engine was tampered with, the accident investigation becomes a murder case. Fortune was known as a ruthless competitor who profited from others’ failures, so there is no shortage of possible suspects. But the investigation turns in a surprising direction, and the real killer has an unexpected motive and turns out to have no scruples about hurting anyone – even the investigators’ own families.
The writing in Murder in the Air was fine – author David Pearson writes in a competent, professional manner. He has, however, the annoying habit (which seems to be increasingly common these days) of describing as few of his characters and possible – and when he does, it may be half way through the book. I presume he has reasons for this discourtesy to his readers, but I can’t imagine what they might be.
Being who I am, I was of course conscious of the sexual politics involved in the storytelling. This story takes place in one of those now-common fictional police stations where the personnel are evenly divided between men and women. Maybe that’s how it is in Ireland. Maybe affirmative action has forced those proportions on the famous Gardai. But it was at least good to see that Superintendent Mick Hays was on hand to take care of the rough stuff when called upon. We men are still good for lifting things and opening jar lids, it would appear, even in the age of Trans.
Anyway, Murder in the Air was okay. But I didn’t love it and feel no great impulse to read another in the series.
People ask on social media to share gifs of the superhero they imagine themselves to be (when they aren’t fetching coffee for the office team or replying to emails from people who hadn’t read the original email). I don’t join the sharing, because I don’t daydream in previously defined types like this.
Sometimes I imagine catching a falling meteor and it setting my body ablaze, and maybe that’s the signal flare from an extraterrestrial being needing my help. Or I imagine I’m the one who can talk to either large, invisible beasts or poltergeist-like forces nearby, telling them no to tear up the door I’m walking through.
Lately, I’ve taken a different tack. I’ve imagined confronting the bad guys with their full names, telling them they’re on my list, and saying no one would die here except them. If they run, because maybe they shoot at me to no effect, I follow them, like the stalking killer of a horror movie. I’m not so much a superhero in this line of thought as a force of nature, literally an agent or ambassador for the office of Death. No power to use or abuse; only select authority dispassionately exercised.
That sounds like a boring character or a side character at best. But thinking on those lines got me thinking of the flipside, of someone who can heal anything. I’ve imagined putting a hand on the back of someone’s neck and getting an expanding, somewhat undefined sense of their nerves, tissues, and organs, recognizing broken parts or dead cells, and restoring them to life. Sometimes it hurts the healer, sometimes the patient. Sometimes emotional pain rushes out causing both to weep.
There may be a story with a character like that, but more likely it’s fruitless imagination.
Batman: Tim Burton’s Batman was released June 23, 1989. Michael Keaton donned the cowl in that film and again in the sequel, Batman Returns. He and Burton would have returned for a third film, but the studio didn’t like the results of the second well enough to allow it. Now that Keaton is Batman again in the recently released The Flash, Jesse Schedeen tells us what Burton had intended to do in a third film and what the DC Comics series Batman ’89 does to fill in the story.
BTW, it was Keaton who gave us the line, “I’m Batman,” when he was scripted to say, “I am the night,” according to All the Right Movies on Twitter.
Super Movies: What are the best superhero movies, in your opinion? ScreenRant has the original Superman with Christopher Reeve and Blade with Wesley Snipe at the top of their list.
Novels: Superhero novels aren’t big sellers, from what I can tell. I’ve heard writers say the boom in movie sales hasn’t translated into book sales. I heard another writer recommend against any new writer attempting to sell a superhero novel. FWIW, here’s a list of superhero novels that aren’t graphic novels.
Favorite Books: No doubt, you were asking yourself just the other day what would be Umberto Eco’s favorite books. His son, Stephano, provides few titles, including “one of the most beautiful in the world,” Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
Jake Tanner was a somewhat different hero from the kind I’m used to in police procedural novels. In Toe the Line, he’s not a grizzled veteran but a fresh young detective constable, just transferred from London to Guildford in Surrey. He’s insecure and goes through the usual emotions familiar to us all when moving into new social and work situations. He’s told that things ought to be quiet; nothing much ever happens in Guildford.
But (of course) that prediction proves false. A ruthless gang of criminals bursts into a local jewelry store, intimidates staff and customers with guns, and cleans out the cash and jewels. Then they shoot a woman to death and kidnap the female manager.
As it happens, we soon learn, this is a gang Jake has faced before; he was responsible for their former leader going to prison. The robbers have a new approach to their work now, and a devious plan involving an exploding collar and their own escape from the country to a new life.
As the investigation ramps up, Jake’s special knowledge will put him in a position to make useful suggestions to his superiors. But he doesn’t know that the gang has eyes and ears within the police force. And even the other gang members don’t know all their new leader is planning…
I didn’t hate Toe the Line. It kept my interest. But it wasn’t very well written. The author is inclined to use words whose meaning he doesn’t understand – he says one character “sauntered” when he was actually in low spirits (you only saunter when you’re feeling self-assured). He has someone making “incredulous” demands. He speaks of a “plethora” of police cars at a crime scene.
A good-faith effort is made to go deep with the characters, to provide insight on psychology and family dynamics. But that effort was pretty ham-handed, attempting to rationalize behavior that often just doesn’t make much sense.
Another problem (for me) was fairly frequent references to the previous adventure Jake had with this gang. But we’re told very little about that story, and this one is the first novel in the Jake Tanner series. I consider this unfair to the reader. If the author wrote a previous novel that couldn’t be salvaged for publication, fair enough. But then give us some back story now.
Toe the Line, I must admit, kept my interest to the end. But it left me unsatisfied. There’s a partial cliffhanger at the end, promising continued conflict in future volumes. But I don’t think I’ll read any more.
Everyone here looks like they strolled out of a skincare commercial or a steaming limited series about amazing people who aren’t you. Each more gorgeous than the next. All of them belong here. All look like they are more than Hank in every way. He knows he needs to stop thinking this way, but this is where his mind goes here in New York. The aching need to tell the city he’s sorry for wasting their time.
I liked Mike McCrary’s Someone Savage, so I took a chance on another of his books. I think this one is an earlier and less polished effort, but it still grabbed me. I rarely think about the relationship between the thriller genre and horror, but Table 13 has a lot of horror elements. It would also make a good movie.
Hank Quinn is a young man from Texas, working as a waiter in New York. He came to the big city to take his chance as a writer, but waiting on tables pays the bills, just about. He has to work under a psychopathic chef who abuses him, but it’s an expensive restaurant and the tips are good. Especially from his favorite customers, a couple named Gina and Nick. They’re beautiful, obviously rich, amusing, and just a little weird in some way. They always ask for Hank, they talk to him as to a friend, and they tip insanely.
Then one night the chef corners Hank in the men’s room and loses control. Hank is frightened for his safety, but Nick and Gina step in. What follows is utterly insane. Suddenly Hank’s old problems fade into insignificance as he finds himself the captive of two monomaniacs who want him to do crazy, criminal things, promising to hurt people he cares about if he won’t play along. Their plan is only gradually revealed, and the more Hank understands, the less sense it all makes.
Their one mistake is to underestimate the country boy from Texas.
The storytelling in Table 13 was good. I cared about Hank and was pulling for him. I worried about him, cared about what was coming at him next.
The writing was imperfect. There were problems with misplaced modifiers and occasional cliches.
The ending of the book was (for this reader) mixed. Good things were said about the value of masculinity (it seemed to me). But the final conclusion was… bizarre. The sort of thing I expect more from a horror story.
In those days, the language in England was the same as that spoken in Norway and Denmark, but there was a change of language when William the Bastard conquered England.
The passage above (whose historical truth is disputed by some scholars) represents one of the moments of particular historical interest in The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue, a saga which is not particularly notable in terms of artistry (in my opinion, though saga scholars rate it one of the best – no doubt for reasons readers in translation, like me, can’t well appreciate).
Most of us are familiar with the character Grima Wormtongue in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. This saga would seem to be the source of that name, since the word “orm,” common (I think) both to Old Norse and Old English, can mean worm, serpent, or dragon. However, in the saga, no moral judgment is implied by the name. I wish some information were provided as to why the nickname was bestowed in the first place, but all we’re told is that our Gunnlaug was named after an ancestor called the same thing. I assume it could mean something like “smooth-tongue,” or even “shrewd tongue,” since dragons were thought to be very crafty.
As one reads Gunnlaug’s Saga in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, as I am (or in the book I’m pushing in this review, the Penguin Collection, Sagas of Warrior Poets), along with other sagas about skalds, one can’t help noticing similarities. Not little similarities in style or theme, but great big similarities that look more like plagiarism. It would appear that when a saga writer wished to write the saga of a skald, he had a ready-made template to follow, and most of them did just that. This increases my respect for the author of Egil Skallagrimsson’s saga (very likely Snorri Sturlusson), for resisting that temptation.
The story goes as prescribed – Gunnlaug Illugasson is tall, handsome, and a fine warrior and poet from his youth. He wants to go abroad as a merchant, but persuades his father to arrange his betrothal to a girl named Helga. The contract calls for her to wait for him three years. At the court of Jarl Eirik in Norway (who’s mentioned, but doesn’t appear as a character, in a couple of my novels) he encounters his rival Ravn. Again following the formula, the two men are polite to one another before the ruler, but privately come to hate each other. Gunnlaug stays abroad past the deadline prescribed in the marriage contract, and Ravn rushes home to claim Helga – who bitterly resents it. The saga departs from the script a bit when the first fight between the two men turns into a general melee which ends with everybody but the principals getting killed. This calamity, the saga writer informs us, is the reason why dueling was abolished in Iceland.
Both men agree to go back to Norway and fight there, but (for some reason) Gunnlaug delays for some time before finally meeting Ravn in a duel fatal to them both. The saga ends with a touching coda telling how Helga mourned Gunnlaug the rest of her life, even though married to a third suitor.
I found Gunnlaug’s Saga a bit of a disappointment, and not only for its boilerplate quality. The main obvious failing in the narrative (in my view) was the omission of a martial resume for the hero. The usual pattern is to tell how he fights in wars for his lord or lords, becoming a formidable fighting man. Gunnlaug fights only one duel in the course of his travels, with a berserker – and he wins that not by skill but by overcoming magic. I felt this was a critical failure in character development.
However, the pathos of the ending was pretty moving.
I’ve been reviewing – rather sourly – a collection of Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet novels which I got in a free deal. I’m not in love with the books, but I got them for nothing and I don’t hate them, so I’ve been reviewing as I read along. I’m not sure it’s entirely fair of me to repeatedly criticize books I don’t like a lot, rather than just leaving them alone, but such are the terms of my life at present.
It should be noted that one book is missing from this collection, a story about Tubby during Hurricane Katrina, which is not included due to publisher issues. The next in order is Night Watchman. I liked this one even less than the previous ones, for political and world-view reasons.
As Night Watchman begins, Tubby Dubonnet, moderately lazy New Orleans attorney, is in Naples, Florida with his new girlfriend, who’s beginning to hint that Tubby should relocate there for a more permanent relationship. In a fit of intimacy-aversion he flees back home. As he journeys, he recollects when he first moved to the city as a college student. He fell in with a group of hippies and was present at an anti-Vietnam War rally where he watched a young man he barely knew get shot to death by a drive-by shooter. He wonders who the victim was, and whether the killer was ever punished.
When he arrives back home and starts making inquiries with the police, he’s surprised to encounter not only the blue wall of silence, but threats from the Cuban refugee community. It will all lead to betrayal by a friend, his own abduction and torture, and to the kind of anticlimactic resolution that is so characteristic of these books.
The writing was good, the characters were fine, as usual. And as usual, I don’t get the Big Easy vibe. But particularly in this book, I didn’t like the politics. The big villains here are anti-Castro Cubans, the kind who are on the wrong side of history, don’t recognize the glorious benefits Communism has brought to their island, and still bear grudges about seized property. The prison camps, tortures, mass executions and loss of civil liberties aren’t deemed worthy of mention. There’s even a hint of that hoary old conspiracy theory that anti-Castro Cubans were responsibility for the murder of JFK.
As you’ve probably guessed already, that’s not how I remember the period, and it’s not how I view Communist Cuba.
“Honest” John is a former London bobby who now operates as a private investigator, keeping a sort of an office in the back booth of a pub. He’s jealous of the famous Sherlock Holmes, but doesn’t work very hard to compete with him. Hunting up business would eat into his valuable drinking and woman-chasing time. He’s big and strong and smart, but essentially a slob.
The book Honest John Churchfield is a collection of seven short stories about his cases. The tone is generally light.
Reading the first story, I thought the author had done some research (though not enough) into life in Victorian London. As I read the further stories I realized that, just as the hero doesn’t work very hard at his trade, the author didn’t work very hard at historical recreation. He knows enough to call cookies “biscuits,” but uses “vacation” where the English would say “holiday,” and has characters call men “guys,” which is an idiom that existed in England but wasn’t as common as it is in American speech. And (21st Century) American speech is what most of the dialogue sounds like. He also doesn’t know how to spell “Hampshire” or “Devon.”
There are many narrative peculiarities. A character in East Indian dress wears “a turban big enough to crack a walnut.” (What does that even mean?) “A disturbingly somber pall descended upon the Rasby household.” (As opposed to a cheerful pall, I guess.)
The puzzles themselves weren’t bad, I thought – except for one that involved mass mesmerism – something the Victorians probably believed in but most modern readers know better than to swallow.
All in all, Honest John Churchfield is not much recommended.
Here we have a book that impressed me up till the very end. Keith Nixon’s Dig Two Graves is the first in a series starring Detective Sergeant Solomon Gray in the Thanet area of Kent. I thought I detected echoes of Scandinavian Noir in it.
Sol Gray reminded me a little of Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole – a dysfunctional cop barely holding onto his job. Only Sol doesn’t have the big successes that keep Harry Hole’s career afloat. Sol lost his six-year-old son ten years ago – literally. He took the boy to a carnival and he vanished forever. No trace of him was ever found. Five years after that, his wife committed suicide. He struggles with alcoholism and his colleagues cover for him a lot. But, to be honest, there’s not a lot of crime to solve in their part of England.
Then one day a young man falls to his death from an apartment balcony. It looks like suicide at first, but there are indications he was pushed. It hits Sol hard when someone tells him the boy had looked a lot like him, and he is the right age….
Then an important member of the community is shot to death, and the Thanet police are plunged into their first serial killer case. As clues develop, they all seem to have one common link – Sol himself. He’ll find himself arrested for murder before the whole mystery gets unraveled.
I liked Dig Two Graves quite a lot. The prose was tight and smart, not very quotable but efficient. The characters were vivid, and I cared about them. What disappointed me was the final solution. It seemed to me melodramatic and implausible – but maybe that’s because it intruded on my personal belief set.
This is a God-haunted book – for pete’s sake, it has a character named Jonah Pennance (!). Sol reflects quite a lot, bitterly, on God’s non-existence. The Christian characters seemed sympathetic and decent, so I was looking for some kind of affirmation of faith. Which didn’t come. That’ll teach me to make assumptions.
Still, Dig Two Graves was a well-written mystery that kept me fascinated to the end.
“I’m angry. I’m furious.” I bent forward on my chair to look at the floorboards, hands in my coat pockets. I looked at the floorboards and through them to the solid earth below. “I’m furious with Doyle. But also at myself. At men. And women. At the 1960s and moral relativism and Atlanta.”
I’ve been liking Alan Lee’s Mack August books right along, but Broken Symphony is my favorite by far. But that’s probably because it echoes my beliefs so well, so your mileage may vary.
Mackenzie August, Roanoke, Virginia private eye and former extreme martial arts fighter, is lying on his office floor one day (to relieve sciatica) when a young woman comes in to ask for help – with plumbing. She’s one of a group of ex-prostitutes who live in a building owned by Mack’s lawyer wife, Ronnie. She says the drains aren’t working and the caretaker is useless. Not being busy just now, Mack goes with her.
But when Mack gets there, there’s no drain problem. Instead, there’s a gangster from Boston named Doyle, with a thug for backup. Doyle is looking for a girl called Lemonade, who has run away. He also seems to think the girls are now working for him. So Mack throws him down the stairs, along with the thug.
Not long after, Doyle shows up at Mack’s office. He says he doesn’t want to fight with him. He’s going to kill Mack’s gangster friend Marcus, he says, but that’s just business; he doesn’t want Mack involved. In fact, he’d like to hire Mack to find Lemonade for him. Mack refuses, they fight, and Doyle breaks Mack’s little finger.
Then Lemonade’s parents show up. They also want to hire him to find the girl. Mack accepts the job from them and starts hunting for her. What he finds is a baby, Lemonade’s baby, abandoned. Further investigation will lead him to a final confrontation with the ruthless, psychopathic Doyle.
And I’ve got to say, that final confrontation was just splendid. It wasn’t what I expected at all, and it was delightful.
But what I liked best was Mack’s personal meditations as the story proceeds. In the midst of all the sordid details of the lives of addicts and prostitutes and traffickers, he ponders the societal ills brought on by our abandonment of family and of traditional sexual roles (although his own household is scarcely a traditional one). I suppose people on the other side of the cultural divide may find Broken Symphony preachy – I reveled in it.
Highly recommended. Cautions for language and mature themes.
Sunshine pierced the haze that enveloped London. It came down Fleet Street, turned to the right, stopped at the premises of the Mammoth Publishing Company, and, entering through an upper window, beamed pleasantly upon Lord Tilbury, founder and proprietor of that vast factory of popular literature….
Considering what a pleasant rarity sunshine in London is, one might have expected the man behind the Mammoth to beam back. Instead, he merely pressed the buzzer. His secretary appeared. He pointed silently. The secretary drew the shade, and the sunshine, having called without an appointment, was excluded.
As you may recall, I’ve been following the adventures of P. G. Wodehouse’s character Monty Bodkin through the two novels in which he stars. I was then reminded that he actually shows up for the first time (as far as I’m aware) in the novel Heavy Weather, so I went back to that one. And it turns out HW is in fact a sequel to an earlier novel, Summer Lightning. So now I’ll have to read that one too (regretfully leaving Monty behind), caught like T.H. White’s Merlin in a reverse chronology.
This is one of Wodehouse’s more complex tales, so find a comfortable chair and pour yourself a cup of tea if you like.
Monty Bodkin, you’ll recall, tall, handsome, and rich, is in love with Gertrude Butterwick (who does not appear physically in this book; her character is still gestating). But she won’t agree to be married until she gets her father’s blessing. And her father has decreed that Monty won’t be given Gertrude’s hand unless he shows the enterprise to hold down a paying job for a full year.
He’s wangled a position at Lord Tilbury’s Mammoth Publishing, as assistant editor of Tiny Tots Magazine. In that capacity he commits the kind of blunder only a member of the Drones Club could make, and gets cashiered. However, he learns from a friend that Clarence (Threepwood), Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle in Shropshire, needs a secretary. Monty is an old family friend, so he calls Lord Emsworth’s imperious sister Constance, who is happy to hire him on her brother’s behalf.
Meanwhile, the other main plot picks up from the previous novel – Ronnie Fish, Lord Emsworth’s nephew, wants to marry Sue Brown, a charming chorus girl. Lady Constance firmly opposed the match, but agreed to it in return for a concession from her other brother, Galahad Threepwood. Gally, who was a notorious rake and London clubman in the 1890s, has written his memoirs, which contain enough old skeletons belonging to eminent English families to wreck numerous political careers and destroy the Threepwood family socially. Gally has agreed to withdraw publication of the memoirs (which were contracted to Lord Tilbury’s Mammoth Publishing) in return for Constance agreeing to the match and allowing her wooly-headed brother Clarence to release Ronnie’s trust fund.
Clarence, however, is barely aware of all this drama. His concern is with his suspicions that their neighbor, a fellow-pig fancier, is planning to poison the Empress of Blandings, his own beloved prize sow. When Lord Tilbury, who is not a man to let a certain bestseller slip through his fingers, arrives at Blandings Castle to pressure Uncle Galahad, and Lord Emsworth mistakes him for a pig poisoner, complications ensue. Which are not decreased by the arrival of Ronnie Fish’s mother Julia, who doesn’t care a fig about Gally’s scandals, but definitely does not want her son marrying some chorus girl. And, oh yes, Lord Emsworth thinks Monty Bodkin is a pig poisoner too.
What Heavy Weather offers that sets it apart from most of Wodehouse’s peak work is a small strain of pathos. Pathos doesn’t happen much in this fictional world; the reader doesn’t want it. Tragedy might be mentioned in passing, but it’s not dwelt on. However, here for once we do have a tragic subplot. There’s a reason Uncle Galahad is so strongly in favor of Ronnie’s and Sue’s wedding. Once, in his youth, he was in love with Sue Brown’s mother, but the family quelched their hopes and packed Gally off to South Africa. In Heavy Weather we get a rare glimpse into the regrets of an old man’s heart. I don’t think it’s overdone – I identified strongly and was moved. But I don’t recall a similar theme in any of Wodehouse’s other mature stories.
As an extra treat, I embed below a dramatic production of Heavy Weather done for the BBC in 1995. It features no less than the great Peter O’Toole as Lord Emsworth. I wasn’t entirely happy with it – I thought O’Toole (doing what seems like an imitation of Dame Edith Evans) insufficiently sympathetic here. And Richard Johnson, who was a fine actor, overdid the mugging, I thought, in the role of Lord Tilbury. In my opinion it’s almost always wrong to mug with Wodehouse – his humor depends on more subtle effects. (Though, come to think of it, Hugh Laurie mugged quite a lot as Bertie Wooster and I didn’t mind that.)
