Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Crime Czar,’ by Tony Dunbar

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I got a collection of Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet novels cheap, and by golly I’m going to read my way through them. They’re not entirely my kind of book, but I don’t hate them either, and cheap is good at this time in my life. So I’ve gotten to Crime Czar, the fifth book of the series.

When we last saw New Orleans lawyer Tubby Dubonnet, he had survived being kidnapped by bank robbers during the greatest flood in the city’s history. Things generally came out all right from Tubby’s point of view, except that his friend Dan got shot in the stomach saving Tubby’s life. At first it looked as if Dan would pull through, but now he’s back in the hospital, fading out. During a lucid moment, he whispers a cryptic message to Tubby.

Tubby experiences a new sensation now – a need for retribution. He knows who shot Dan – a dead-eyed, jug-eared professional killer who may or may not be dead. But Tubby wants the boss, the mastermind, the “crime czar” behind the killing.

His path to the reckoning will not run smooth – not in a Tony Dunbar novel. There will be frequent interruptions and sideshows involving the birth of Tubby’s first grandchild, a judge’s reelection campaign, the county’s corrupt sheriff, a client framed by the police, the return to town of a girlfriend, and a spunky young prostitute out after her own vengeance. These books often remind me of the stateroom scene in “A Night at the Opera,” where the comedy comes from no particular joke, but simply from the ridiculous introduction of one new character after another into a limited space.

And I guess that has something to do with why I don’t love the Tubby books as well as other people do. They kind of remind me of a party, and I’m uncomfortable at parties.

But Crime Czar was amusing. Also, I noticed for the first time that Tony Dunbar is in fact a pretty good prose stylist, capable of lines like, “she saw that his eyes were like crowder peas with woolly caterpillars crawling over them.”

Pretty good.

Fiction, Reviews

Out of the Soylent Planet by Robert Kroese

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“You know what’s good for adventures,” asked Rex Nihilo, apparently sensing an opportunity to make a sale. “Malarchian military grade plastic explosives. I’ve got a whole hovertruck load.”

“We don’t need any explosives,” said Uncle Blauwin.

The boy looked like he was going to cry. “First you won’t let me go into town to get energy fluxors and now you won’t let me have any military grade explosives. I hate you and this gosh-darned desert planet!”

Communication is about context, and comedy is about context, which means all communication is comedy. That, kids, is logic.

In this prequel to the sci-fi comedy Starship Grifters, if you’re familiar with a general sci-fi context, you’ll get the jokes–the more familiar, the more jokes. Mm, the smell of logic just gets you in the eye, doesn’t it?

A few years ago, I blogged on the second book in this series, Aye, Robot, and I found Out of the Soylent Planet to be a funnier story. The con man Rex Nihilo attempts to unload a truckload of plastic explosives, fails, rolls to plan B, fails, and then finds himself unloaded onto an isolated planet that’s locked down so tight even cans of creamed corn are contraband. The planet is mostly barren. Its civilization is built around producing an artificial nutritional substance called Slop. “It’s not food. It’s Slop!” Since readers would be thinking Slop is made from people, our heroes come across a corporate video that neatly explains that rumor away.

Rex and his robotic Girl Friday, SASHA, go through several silly romps and clever escapes. And explosions. Lots of explosions. Good fun.

I listened to the J.D. Ledford audiobook version, which added to the comedy with good timing and particular word emphases. I laughed aloud many times.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Doomed Legacy,’ by Matt Coyle

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I’ve been following Matt Coyle’s series of hard-boiled mysteries starring Rick Cahill for some time. I like the books quite a lot, but Doomed Legacy proved to be about as dark as its title.

Rick, when he was first introduced, was a loner private eye in San Diego, a disgraced cop who kept office hours in a booth in the steak house where he moonlighted as host. Through his subsequent adventures we’ve seen him reintegrate into human society. Now he’s married and the father of an 18-month-old daughter, the light of his life. At his wife’s request, he’s changed his business model from crime investigation to safe, routine background checks for various businesses.

She knows that he suffers from CTI, “the football player’s disease.” Brain damage from getting hit over the head too many times. What he hasn’t told her is that it’s progressing. He suffers from headaches and memory loss, but the worst of it is the rage attacks. He’s afraid he might endanger the people he loves.

One morning he argues with his wife, which makes him short-tempered when he meets with Sara Bhandari, his contact with Fulcrum Security, of his biggest client. She wants to meet somewhere out of the way, where her colleagues won’t see her. She tells him she’s concerned about some of the people whose security checks have been passed by a new investigative company they’ve hired recently. She thinks the people should never have been cleared, and thinks the investigators are up to something. Rick agrees to look into it as a favor, but he’s in a bad mood and leaves rudely. Something he regrets.

He regrets it even more three days later when, having been unable to reach Sara, he goes to her house and finds her dead – raped and murdered. The police identify the m. o. of a serial rapist in the area, and blame it on him. But Rick isn’t so sure.

Then Sara’s sister hires him to investigate the death. But she fires him abruptly when bad reports (false ones) start spreading about Rick’s own security work. That won’t stop him, of course. It’s personal now. But he has no idea how powerful the people he’s challenging are. And he has no idea the effect it all may have on his family.

I liked Doomed Legacy. It read well except for a couple typos. The occasional references to Christianity and prayer were positive.

But it’s a dark story. I hope the next one proves happier for Rick.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Skald’

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A scene from a production of “Hallfred Vandraadeskald” presented by the Norwegian National Theater in 1908. Photo property of Nationalteatret.

Another Icelandic saga, read by me in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. (Unfortunately, I can’t find another translation in print anywhere.) I’m reading through a section of skald’s sagas, from which you may infer that The Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Skald is another story of a poet.

Hallfred’s Saga bears some (actually a lot of) similarity to Kormak’s Saga, the subject of my last saga review. Like Kormak, Hallfred falls in love with a girl at home in Iceland, fails to show up for their wedding, and harasses any other suitors who appear. Also like Kormak, he sails abroad to make his fortune as a Viking.

But this is where his story distinguishes itself. Hallfred ends up at the court of King Olaf Trygvesson (whom you may remember from my novel, The Year of the Warrior). Hallfred seems to be a predecessor to every song writer who ever nagged record producers in Nashville or Las Angeles. The king has other things on his mind than listening to songs, but he finally agrees to give Hallfred a hearing, calling him a “troublesome skald” (vandræðaskáld). In the event the song pleases Olaf, who accepts Hallfred as one of his court poets.

But this happens at the peak of Olaf’s evangelistic zeal.  Receiving the king’s offer (actually a threat) of baptism, Hallfred makes a counterproposal. He wants Olaf himself to be his godfather, a singular honor. Like a squeaky wheel, Hallfred gets what he wants. But his relationship with the king is an uneven one. He seems to have trouble getting the swing of Christianity. He falls out of favor when he invokes the old gods or falls into heathen customs. Then the king sets him to various tasks to regain favor, opening up opportunities for the kinds of adventures that always show up in sagas.

Although Hallfred’s saga is not one of the best in terms of its artistry, it is interesting for the picture it gives of the religious transition in Iceland in the 11th Century. As compared to Kormak’s Saga, one senses the pressure of the new faith as it alters people’s mores. Hallfred’s attentions to another man’s wife are treated more seriously here, less as merry pranks, and his family urges him to let it all go. In the end even Hallfred decides to leave the woman’s husband alone.

One of the saga’s main weaknesses is that, although it’s based on Hallfred’s own poems, the saga writer appears to often misunderstand them. Poetic allusions (always very thick in Viking poetry) are mistaken for statements of fact. Thus, a man uses a heathen sacrificial trough as a weapon, highly unlikely in real life. Or Kormak’s great enemy is named “Gris,” which means pig. I would suspect that’s an insulting name Hallfred bestowed on him, rather than the name he actually carried. (Pigs enjoyed higher status among the Vikings than they do with us, but I’ve never heard of any Viking actually named “Pig.”)

In short, The Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Skald is a flawed saga which contains, nonetheless, numerous points of interest for the saga enthusiast.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Redemptive Return,’ by J.R. and Susan Mathis

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Book Number Three in the Father Tom Mysteries is The Redemptive Return. This review ought to be taken with a grain of salt, though, because my emotional reaction to it probably colors my judgment.

Father Tom Greer, as you may recall from my previous reviews, is a priest who entered the ministry late in life, having been a husband and a widower already. Before that, he was engaged to Helen Parr who (by one of those coincidences which are a little too common in this series) is now a police detective in the town of Myerton, Pennsylvania, where Father Tom also serves, in his own way. The fact that they are still attracted to one another is a complication in both their lives.

One day Tom gets a call from his sister Sonya, with whom he rarely communicates. It sounds like she’s running away from someone, and she desperately wants Tom to find something (he can’t hear what) and help somebody named Chrystal.

Tom isn’t sure what to do about this call. Sonya is a drug addict (supposedly in recovery now), and he’s gotten such calls from her before. They’ve never meant anything. He lets it go.

Shortly thereafter he hears from his mother. Sonya is dead. Her body was found in a dumpster.

And it’s all his fault.

Tom doesn’t want to go home, with all its unresolved issues, but he knows he must. What surprises him is that Helen shows up next to him on the plane, having taken personal leave to help him out.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Because of my own personal history, I found The Redemptive Return hard to read. So I’m incapable of saying whether this element (dysfunctional family dynamics) of the story is handled well or not.

However, it seemed to me the book suffered from what I’m sure others before me have called “Bond Villain Syndrome,” where the villain pauses long enough in the process of killing the hero to explain his/her criminal genius at length – giving the cavalry time to show up and save the day.

Finally, my big problem with the book was the resolution (at this point in the ongoing saga) of Father Tom’s relationship problem with Helen. An arrangement is worked out with the approval of his bishop. I’m not a Catholic, but I found it improbable in the extreme. Both ecclesiastically and psychologically.

I won’t pan The Redemptive Return, but I think it’s relatively weak. Readable, though.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Value in Our Lies,’ by Colin Conway

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I’m quite taken with Colin Conway’s The 509 series of police procedurals, set in eastern Washington state. It deals with cops in the Spokane area, and the cast of officers tends to change from book to book. In The Value in Our Lies, we have a new hero – or at least a new main character. If he’s shown up in the series before, it was only as a minor player.

James Morgan works on the Spokane PD Criminal Task Force. He’s corrupt, but not by his own standards. If he pockets some of the drugs found at a crime scene, it’s not for his own use or profit – it’s to pay off informants. If he takes a sexual favor from a prostitute, who does that hurt? If he cuts procedural corners, that’s just part of the game. In his world there’s only Us and Them – working cops vs. the crooks (and often the Brass). For Morgan, there’s pretty much nothing in his life but the Job.

Word on the street says a new gang has moved into town, but nobody seems to know anything tangible, not even his snitches. A prostitute informant of his is being beaten by her pimp, and Morgan cares about this more than he ought to. A friend of a friend is getting blackmailed and comes to Morgan to get him out of the jam. And Internal Affairs is giving him heat.

Morgan is a liar. Lying is part of the way he does his job. But the lies are starting to pile up on him. Will they get somebody killed?

The writing in The Value in Our Lies is sometimes rough. An editor would be a good investment. But the characterization in the book is big league. Morgan isn’t a likeable character, and he’s clearly self-destructive. But one can’t help sympathizing with him sometimes, and occasionally he even earns our fleeting admiration. The plot was pretty gripping too.

I recommend The Value in Our Lies, with cautions for language and mature subject matter.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Perfect Record,’ by Kerry J. Donovan

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Sean Freeman, a central character in Kerry J. Donovan’s police procedural Perfect Record, is a master locksmith, one of the best in spite of his youth. He also has computer skills. So when he arranges to come to the attention of DB Parrish, a London gangster with a weakness for diamonds, Parrish quickly recruits him as his security chief. Sean has personal reasons for needing the kind of money a job with Parrish’s organization will bring in. But he soon learns that working for Parrish means selling your soul. He’ll be required to do things way beyond the limits of his fairly flexible ethics, and the price of failure is a serious beating – if he’s lucky.

So he starts putting out clues for the police, hoping there’s a detective out there smart enough to figure them out. Finally this brings him to DCI David Jones of the Birmingham Serious Crimes Unit. They begin a cautious dance in which jewelry of great value – and innocent lives – are at stake.

I wasn’t entirely happy with Perfect Record, but that was for purely personal reasons. The character of our hero, DCI Jones, is an interesting one (all the characters are good, in fact), but he’s supposed to be an aging curmudgeon and Luddite. The kind of man who won’t have a computer in his home and dislikes the new building he works in out of loyalty to the old one, despite the fact that it’s more comfortable and efficient than its predecessor.

And yet when it comes to Political Correctness, Jones toes the line. He will stand for no sexist language or use of unenlightened titles (like Mrs.) among his officers. If you’re looking for crude cop banter, á la John Sandford, you won’t find it here. I think I can speak with some authority on the subject of curmudgeons as a class, and PC talk is one of the things we tolerate least in real life.

Nevertheless, I have to admit the story is neatly told, with some very nifty (and delightful) surprises at the end. Neat twists generally involve diminished believability in any story, which is the case here. But as pure entertainment, Perfect Record is very close to perfect. The language is relatively mild.

Fiction, Reviews

Dark Comedic Mystery “City of Angles”

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You’ve been devoted to the Church. As you know, we like to say that we don’t have followers. We have lenders. You give us your love and passion devotion, and we’re obligated to pay back the debt.”

Lars reviewed Jonathan Leaf’s debut novel, City of Angles, earlier, and with it being a mystery novel, that’s about as much of the plot as you’ll want to know before reading. What you don’t get from reviews is the style of humor Leaf employs.

[Disclaimer: I picked up the novel in response to the author’s request, having seen a friend’s referral days before.]

City of Angles isn’t a dark story. It’s standard fare for a character-driven murder mystery, and from almost every character you read something like the quotation above: “We don’t have followers. We have lenders.” Also from this same church context, we get this: “Selva had attained the status of FUP. This mean a fully unrepressed person. Those who opposed the Church were EMEs, or enemies of man’s emergence.” An FUP. That’ll catch on.

This actually rings true with my experience, in that some folks like to make acronyms and others like to use terms, and the Church of Life in this story resembles Scientology, which is probably just as debauched and oppressive as the Church is depicted. But in a way, everyone in this novel is debauched. Everyone is friendly, while it serves their purpose, and they drink sexual allure from the tap. Everything they can control they will try to control. And when a character finds himself at a dead end with all of his plans disassembled, he tells himself all PR is good PR and begins to wonder if he can sell his story. Even the cops are thinking this next thing could be their big break.

I enjoyed reading this book and look forward to Leaf’s success with it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Kormak’s Saga’

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Kormak, as this old illustration shows, was not shy about public displays of affection, even with married women.

When the brothers put out from their place of anchorage, a walrus surfaced beside the ship. Kormak fired a weighted staff at it, hitting the animal, so that it sank. People thought they recognized Thorveig’s eyes when they saw it. The animal did not surface from then on; and it was reported of Thorveig that she was dangerously ill, and people say that she died as a result.

When we think of troubled poets today, we tend to imagine languid aesthetes wasting away with alcoholism or drug addiction. Troubled poets in the Viking Age seem to have been rather different sorts – pugnacious types and psychopathic killers. We discussed the greatest of them, Egil Skallagrimsson, a little while back. Today our topic is a lesser poet in a lesser saga, Kormak’s Saga, as published in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, but available in other formats as well.

Kormak’s name, I might mention, is the same as the Irish name Cormac. This is yet another testimony to the heavy infusion of Irish and Scottish elements into Icelandic society and culture (the same is true of the saga hero Njal’s name, which is the Irish Niel). Like Egil, Kormak is big and strong, though less ugly.

Kormak first notices Steingerd Thorkelsdatter of Tunga when he catches a glimpse of her foot through a doorway. Immediately he dedicates a poem to the foot, and when he sees the rest of the girl he’s not disappointed. He pursues her, and their marriage is arranged. However, when the wedding day occurs, he doesn’t show up. Yet when her family tries to marry her off to other men, Kormak routinely makes war on them – in some cases killing them. This behavior looks like prolonged adolescence and fear of commitment to the modern reader, but the saga explains it as the consequence of a witch’s curse. One looks in vain here for the kind of psychological insight we find in Egil’s Saga.

The most interesting character in the saga, in fact, is not Kormak himself but Bersi the Duelist, who dominates the middle part of the story. Though a famous man-killer, he’s far more sympathetic than Kormak, something like the Old Gunfighter trope in Western movies.

Kormak’s Saga is believed to be one of the oldest ones that’s been preserved, but that’s no guarantee of artistic quality. The episodes in the story appear to have been reconstructed (rather freely) from hints in the poems the hero left behind. And the hints look very much as if they’ve been misinterpreted a fair amount of time. Many of the incidents, frankly, make little sense.

Kormak’s Saga is interesting for its age, and also – in particular – for accounts of dueling customs in the Viking Age. As a piece of art, it’s fairly middling.

I should mention that a couple of Kormak’s love poems include pretty explicit descriptions of sexual organs.

Fiction

Egil’s Saga: On the ground

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In the video above, Dr. Matthew Roby discusses Egil’s Saga (which I reviewed the other day), filming at some of the precise Icelandic sites where the action occurred. I found it atmospheric and fascinating.

I was also interested to note that the large blue book from which he reads Egil’s poem to his dead son is the very volume I’ve been reading myself (thanks to Dale Nelson’s generosity) from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders.