Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Before Dawn,’ by John Corwin

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Unless you’ve been in a monastery for a while, it would be pretty hard to read John Corwin’s Dead Before Dawn without thinking of Jack Reacher. Corwin’s hero, Amos Carver, is a former operative for yet another super-secret military black ops unit. But some years back the unit was abolished, with Carver left under a cloud of suspicion. His superior, a woman named Rhodes who’d been his friend, felt particularly betrayed. Carver dropped out of sight to live a beach bum’s life in Florida. Then he got a message from Rhodes, asking him to come quickly to the town of Morganville, Georgia, where she is now chief of police. Like Jack Reacher, he travels light, owning few possessions.

When Carver arrives in Morganville, hiking up the highway from the bus stop, he finds a pink pistol lying in the middle of the roadway. He knows that pistol – it belonged to Rhodes, who would never have mislaid it. Carver does not pick it up. He recognizes a set-up, and immediately goes on defense. The attack that’s supposed to kill him fails, and soon he’s in jail in Morganville, where someone tries to murder him in his cell. Those are just the first of the threats he’ll meet and handle in this town. Strategy was never Carver’s forte. He was a strong-arm guy, good at action. Rhodes was the thinker – but Carver will need to learn to think too before he can unravel a plot that just keeps leading to higher and higher-level conspiracies.

I have no complaints about the writing in Dead Before Dawn. It was professional and tight. The dramatic tension ratcheted up nicely all the way. The characters were adequate. There was even a happy ending of sorts.

My reservations are personal. I didn’t like the scenario of a guy going into fire fights against professionals with no backup except for two women (no doubt a concession to feminism, as if many women were going to read this book). I was also uncomfortable with the vigilante elements – vigilantism always troubles me, though I don’t deny it might be necessary in desperate situations. But I found it odd that a vigilante was called upon here to save (minor spoiler alert!) the rule of law in America.

Still, Dead Before Dawn was a good story, written by a professional. Can’t deny that. Worth the money.

Fiction, Non-fiction

A Bad Star Wars Series Bites the Dust

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We learned this week The Acolyte, a Stars Wars television production, would not get a season two. The Telegraph claimed this shows the world is “bored” of Star Wars, noting fans had turned out for lousy movies in the past despite their later criticism. But there’s a big difference in The Rise of Skywalker (2019) making double its production budget in the US/Canada market and The Acolyte being a show fans refused to watch (if they had Disney+ subscriptions). That difference would be media context.

The Last Jedi (2017) was bad enough of a movie that I didn’t watch The Rise of Skywalker, but plenty of people did. It cost hundreds of thousands more to make and also earned double that in the US/Canada market. Fans hadn’t grown jaded, tired, wary–what’s the right word?–afraid that Disney-owned LucasFilms would deliver a sorry story. They learned to fear through years of disappointment with most of the TV series since. The Mandalorian began well-received, but someone took over season three and tanked it. Fans were hopeful for the 2022 series on Obi-Wan Kenobi and they were disappointed. (Earlier this year, news of the original concept came out and you have to wonder why such a good idea was ruined.) The Book of Boba Fett (2021) was dull. Ahsoka (2023) was poorly written. So it’s easy to understand how interested viewers may have little enthusiasm for The Acolyte before hearing reviews. They wouldn’t find their enthusiasm after hearing it was a such a bad show.

Now, some people are worried the show will be pulled from Disney+ all together.

In other news …

Non-fiction recs: Historian Thomas Kidd has top non-fiction and history books of the twenty-first century. Here’s just one interesting title.

Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England, by Timothy Larsen. “Those who lose their faith (then and now) get the headlines, but Larsen delightfully shows how common it was for English skeptics and freethinkers to come to orthodox Christian faith.”

Poetry: War poetry ‘Some Could, Some Could Not, Shake Off Misery’

Leaf art: Take a minute to browse the images this artist shares of his paper cutting designs applied to leaves. Lito’s (リト) work is incredible.

Authors, Fiction, Reading

Reading report: ‘The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien’

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Theologically (if the term is not too grandiose) I imagine the picture to be less dissonant from what some (including myself) believe to be the truth. But since I have deliberately written a tale, which is built on or out of certain ‘religious’ ideas, but is not an allegory of them (or anything else), and does not mention them overtly, still less preach them, I will not now depart from that mode, and venture on theological disquisition for which I am not fitted. But I might say that if the tale is ‘about’ anything (other than itself), it is not as seems widely supposed about ‘power.’ Power-seeking is only the motive-power that sets events going, and is relatively unimportant, I think. It is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality; and the ‘escapes’: serial longevity, and hoarding memory.

(Letter, Oct. 14, 1958, from J. R. R. Tolkien to Rhona Beare)

I’ll have to admit that I’ve always thought that The Lord of the Rings was about the temptations of Power, but Tolkien himself says, in more than one letter in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (which I continue to read), that the story is about death.

Sauron (if I remember correctly) is a Valar, an incarnate angelic being (fallen in his case). He is not the equivalent of Satan, but of a powerful lesser demon. A creature like he (again, if I understand it right) would ordinarily live till the end of the world. But Sauron, as a repeated rebel, has been “killed” and reborn more than once. He knows, or suspects, that if he’s killed again, he’s not coming back in Middle Earth – and he has no reason for hope where his spirit is going after that. He’s struggling to stay alive, even in the hellscape he’s made for himself in Mordor.

Smeagol has been enslaved by the One Ring, and was given (or suffered) extended life thereby – but the life the Ring imparts is not wholesome. Bilbo, who experiences the same thing, says he feels “stretched.” It’s an addiction too – as the pleasure decreases, the craving grows.

Aragorn, on the other hand, who was granted a very long life through his Numenorean blood, will voluntarily lay down his life before it runs out completely. This is regarded as a noble act (not, I’m confident, comparable in any way with assisted suicide).

The elves regard human death as a gift. It’s a mystery to them, but they envy it in a curious way.

These are matters worth pondering, for a man who, like me, is growing old. I can’t say that my whole Erling Saga is about death, but The Baldur Game certainly is. And I was aware of that before I read these letters.

Authors, Fiction, Reading, Writing

Reading report: ‘The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien’

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J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1920s. Photo public domain.

I’m still working my way through The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. It’s quite a long book (though not nearly as long as the 3 volumes of C. S. Lewis’ letters. But this collection makes no claim to being complete).

In any case, the business takes time. So I hope you’ll forgive my giving the book my “reading report” treatment. I suspect there’s enough interest in Tolkien’s work among our readers to warrant multiple posts.

What may strain your tolerance more is my selection of passages from the letters that I relate to my own writing. I’m keenly aware that, even standing on the shoulders of authors like Tolkien and Lewis, I’m shorter than they are. But as I obsess my way through the final stages of producing The Baldur Game, I snatch at any straw of reassurance I can find – or imagine I find.

Anyway, here’s a nice one, from a September 30, 1955 letter to a reader (friend?) named Hugh Brogan. Brogan had written with a criticism of the archaic prose style Tolkien used in The Two Towers. The professor never actually sent this letter, but dispatched a note instead, saying “it would be too long to debate.” But he kept the letter in his files.

He agrees with Brogan’s rejection of what they called “tushery” – the use of archaic words in literature to give an impression of antiquity – words like “tush,” “forsooth,” and “eftsoons.” Victorian writers liked to toss such morsels into their dialogue, but they’re now considered an affectation.

However, Tolkien insists that he does not employ tushery:

But a real archaic English is far more terse than modern; also many of the things said could not be said in our slack and often frivolous idiom.

I jumped at this, because it relates to my own style (in my Viking books). I actually avoid archaic words, unless I can find no modern equivalent. (I’d love to use the word “leif” as an adjective, meaning “to wish to”, for instance. But I don’t think I ever have, because nobody knows the word anymore.)

I’ve actually chosen to simplify my word choices to achieve an antique effect in these books. The general modern writer’s rule, “Don’t use a Latin word when an Anglo-Saxon word will do,” is taken to an extreme. Rather than use a word derived from Latin or French, I’ll sometimes even invent a compound word (in the German fashion) made out of two simple English ones.

In addition, I make use of my knowledge of Norwegian. Norwegian sentences are often constructed differently from the English. I discovered that when I re-cast a sentence in Norwegian word order, I get an effect that “feels” like Old Norse.

I like to think it works. The most satisfying praise I ever got for my writing was back in the 1990s, when a reader told me he looked up from Erling’s Word and was surprised to find himself in the 20th Century.

Fiction, Reading

Reading report: ‘The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien’

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I picked up the first version of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, getting it a bargain rate that day. You, if you want the book, will probably prefer to get the Revised and expanded edition, which has the further advantage of being cheaper (in the Kindle edition) than the one I’m reading (which, aside from containing fewer letters, features an unfortunate number of typos – “orcs” often comes out as “ores,” for instance.

It is, for me, a somewhat emotional read. Though I am not such a coxcomb as to compare my own work to The Professor’s, I can certainly identify – within my limits – with the agonies he went through getting the whole thing written down and published – a process that took something in the neighborhood of two decades. (He openly admits that he probably wouldn’t have finished it without the encouragement, or even the nagging, of C. S. Lewis.)

His publishing history, at least, is almost as complicated as mine. George Allen & Unwin published The Hobbit. They very much wanted a sequel, but when Tolkien went to work, his story expanded in an alarming way. His correspondence with them, over many years, focused on his frequent excuses why he hadn’t been able to do much work, because of obligations at Oxford. Which was no doubt true, especially during the war years. He was also working on the Silmarillion, and he seems to have come to consider that work the real center of the project, with the Lord of the Rings a more peripheral matter. Allen & Unwin were interested in the “Hobbit sequel,” and happy enough to discuss that, whenever it would be finished at last. When they decided against publishing the Silmarillion, Tolkien clearly took offense. When another publisher (Collins) made noises of interest, Tolkien actually tried to push Allen & Unwin away. He says in one letter to them:

My work has escaped from my control, and I have produced a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody); and it is not really a sequel to The Hobbit, but to The Silmarillion.

But Allen & Unwin didn’t want the Silmarillion (at that point). Then the Collins editor changed his mind, and Tolkien seems to have despaired, having gone from a strong to a weak negotiating position. Eventually Rayner Unwin, his former student, reopened communications, and Tolkien – visibly humbled – agreed at last to let Allen & Unwin publish it without the Silmarillion, and (against his preferences) in three volumes.

The rest is history.

I too know the experience of wrong-footing it with a publisher – without quite so happy an outcome. But I could identify, certainly. One feels so attached to one’s own books that it’s hard to distinguish literary criticism from personal slight. No matter how you try to be objective, it’s hard to keep feelings leashed. The situation is too subjective; there are no landmarks to go by. Especially if you’re slightly unstable – and what author was ever very stable? Publishers must lead frustrating lives and require thick skin, dealing with us. Some of them are rumored to drink, and it’s hard to blame them.

As for my own delayed work The Baldur Game, I’ve got all the notes from my readers now, and am doing (what I hope is) the final read-through. Still waiting for my cover art, which I’m confident will be a masterpiece, and well worth the wait.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Past Transgressions,’ by Dave Sinclair

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A thriller writer’s vocation, when it comes down to it, is simply to write exciting books. All the better if he can write a decent sentence. Any level of wit in the narrative is a definite plus.

So if I wasn’t entirely happy with Dave Sinclair’s Past Transgressions, you can mark it down to personal prejudice on my part. It says nothing about the quality of the work.

Mason Nash, our hero, is a former MI6 assassin who has retired to teach history in a small English town. He believes he has put his past behind him. He’s changed his name and adopted a low profile. He’s even become a Buddhist and sworn off all violence.

But a team of assassins shows up with guns (apparently) to kill him in the pub one evening, and he doesn’t know why. He has no choice but to drop his new life altogether and go on the run. His old habits reassert themselves quickly – and he discovers to his surprise that he’s enjoying it more than he cares to admit.

Past Transgressions soon takes us to South America, to a luxury yacht and to a secret mountain fortress. Nash learns that people from his past are hunting for him for a surprising reason, and he gets drawn into a high-level conspiracy.

As I mentioned above, Past Transgressions is a well-written novel, generally speaking. The prose and dialogue are good, and the characters are well-drawn, and there’s quiet humor here and there.

The plot is somewhat outlandish, in the way of thriller novels, but the action isn’t as over the top you see in many such books, so full marks for restraint there.

My petty personal objections were 1) that I found the hero’s persistent efforts to survive in a bullet-rich environment without killing anybody somewhat annoying. In that world, refusing to kill an attacker is unjust to one’s partners – you could easily get them killed themselves.

2) We have the requisite Girl Boss in the mix here – a gorgeous, deadlier-than-the-male female agent actually named “Eva Destruction.”

3) There’s a veiled political dig at one point, and I think I know where it’s directed. I suppose I should be grateful it wasn’t more explicit.

But mostly I think it was the pacifism that annoyed me. I’m probably prejudiced against Buddhists.

In short, I won’t be reading more books in this series, but I must concede that the author did a good job in terms of his own objectives.

Fiction, Reviews

‘With a Mind to Kill,’ by Anthony Horowitz

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The nights are never kind to Moscow. With nowhere to go, the traffic disappears and the streets seem to parade themselves, mile upon mile of empty concrete glinting uselessly in the flare of the sodium lights. The great monuments and buildings, no matter how proud of themselves in the day, stand there like old men in the darkness, their windows black, their doors bolted fast. No lovers meet. No revellers make their way home from jazz clubs or restaurants. The best you will hope to see are clusters of soldiers or policemen, muttering to themselves as they make their presence known because the population needs to be watched and guarded even when everyone is asleep. Otherwise, nothing moves. The entire city takes on the psychopathy of the graveyard; pleased with itself because it will be there for ever, unaware that it is actually already dead.

This guy Anthony Horowitz is a first-class writer; I’m ashamed I’d never heard of him till recently. Aside from writing early seasons of Midsomer Murders, he’s written a series of young adult thrillers, the Hawthorne and Horowitz mystery series, and three authorized James Bond novels. I’ve reviewed the first already, and I picked up this final one the other day on a deal. I’ll have to catch the middle book at some point. As I mentioned previously, I don’t much care for Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, but I like the way Horowitz does them.

With a Mind to Kill fits into the chronology just after The Man With the Golden Gun. James Bond is in Jamaica, still recuperating from brainwashing by the Russians, and having been shot in the last book. But he’s called back to London by his superiors, who have a daunting assignment for him. They want him to return to Soviet Russia, pretending to still be under the Communists’ control. He’s to present himself to his former captors, who will either kill him or put him to work on some very secretive project they’ve got going, one British Intelligence wants very much to learn more about. Bond can expect to be tortured when he returns, but the experts believe he’s back in control of himself.

Bond wants very much to get revenge on the people who nearly erased his personality and turned him into a traitorous living weapon. He expects the beatings, the tortures, and the mind games they’ll subject him to. He does not expect the woman who’ll find her way into his heart, one whom he’ll never be sure he can trust…

In Horowitz’s hands, James Bond (I think) takes on greater depth than we’re used to. This James Bond is feeling his age and his many wounds, and is pondering retirement once this job is finished – if he survives.

I thoroughly enjoyed With a Mind to Kill. It’s expertly written. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Pathways of Magic,’ by Robert Arrington

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I must have enjoyed The Ethics of Magic, the first book in Robert Arrington’s “Haunted Law Firm” series. Because I bought the second book, The Pathways of Magic, and read it in one day.

Our hero (though, oddly, he’s not part of the law firm), college instructor Mitch McCaffrey, has a surprise visit from a strange woman – a very strange woman – at his office. She wears a shirt of mesh mail and is carrying a short sword, which they use together to dispatch a werewolf that’s following her. Then the woman makes the werewolf disappear.

Her name is Alyssa McCormick, and, like Mitch, she has magical skills. She is in fact the niece of Mitch’s magical mentor, and she’d like to look at the books of magic her uncle left to Mitch. He’s happy to show them to her. It turns out they’re very rare and valuable.

In fact, they’re so valuable that both the FBI and the CIA (who employ magic in their investigations) want to get their hands on them, and are willing to break all the rules to secure them. Which only gets Mitch’s and Alyssa’s backs up, and they fight back, both with spells and lawyers (this is where the Haunted Law Firm comes in). The stakes get even higher when Monica Gilbert, Mitch’s old Woke enemy from the first book, shows up as an FBI consultant.

The story moves right along, alternating legal give-and-take with scenes of action and spell-casting. The prose remains unremarkable (with an annoying number of typos), but the storytelling worked. And the values are conservative.

I liked The Pathways of Magic.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Ethics of Magic,’ by Robert Arrington

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Here’s a light, fun novel, aimed primarily at conservatives and Christians. And it works pretty well.

Mitch McCaffrey, hero of The Ethics of Magic, teaches at a community college in rural North Carolina. He enjoys his work and is dating a woman he hopes to marry.

But he has an enemy. Monica Gilbert, the Compliance Officer at the college, has it in for him. He’s a white male, in the first place, and he teaches the classics in his courses. She suspects him of holding the “wrong” opinions, something she feels must not be tolerated in higher education.

But her motivations go deeper. First of all, she once made a pass at him and he turned her down. Nobody does that. Worse, his girlfriend is a woman she knew as a girl, and hated.

But worst of all, Mitch is a magic practitioner. Monica can tell because she is one herself. She’s eager for a showdown, to awe him with her power.

When a few students make a complaint about Mitch, he’s soon facing a hearing to determine whether he’ll be dismissed. That’s when he retains the services of lawyer Kathryn Turner. All this begins the first adventure in Robert Arrington’s “Haunted Law Firm” series.

I had some quibbles with The Ethics of Magic. The prose was adequate, but there were frequent misspellings and typos. I thought the villains were painted a little broadly – they reveled in evil too much. Most people – even the Woke – honestly believe they’re doing the right thing.

And, although most of our good characters here are Christians, and attend church, Mitch and his girlfriend are sleeping together outside marriage. I suppose that sort of thing flies in some churches nowadays.

But outside of those things, I must say I enjoyed reading The Ethics of Magic very much. It was a lot of fun, sort of John Grisham meets Harry Potter.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mystery of L’inconnu,’ by Dan Grylles

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As the first installment in a series of mysteries starring Miami police detective Remy Ferguson, Mystery of L’inconnu introduces us to the detective and his team. For this reader, it wasn’t a very impressive debut.

“L’inconnu” (French for Unknown) is a very large, state of the art luxury yacht owned by a yacht manufacturing company. As a sales inducement, the company periodically offers free cruises to small groups of the super-rich, so they can enjoy the service, food, and amenities. But this voyage goes very, very bad.

The first part of the book concentrates on the story of the voyage, in which we gradually learn that one of the crew has made a deal with smugglers to take drugs on board at sea, to be delivered in Miami. Then the deal goes very, very wrong, and soon there are cartel gunmen rampaging through the vessel while the crew and passengers try to devise ways to either hide or defend themselves. They do surprisingly well, and the reader is rooting for them.

(Spoiler coming up.)

Then we switch to the investigation, led by our hero, Detective Remy Ferguson. And we are abruptly informed that pretty much all these people we’d been rooting for are dead. Remy’s investigation is subjected to pressure by his superiors, who are being pestered by the (very influential) yacht company to wrap the case up.

Then we get a final section, where we are presented with a Big Plot Twist (admittedly not a bad one), and a perilous situation from which our hero escapes only through a deus ex machina.

In my opinion, this is a very poor way to tell a story.

On top of that, the prose was weak. The author often misuses words, confusing “Cavalry” with “Calvary,” “flare gun” with “flair gun,” and other such errors. He appeared (I wasn’t quite sure because the prose was confusing) to confuse a rifle with a shotgun. He thinks Multiple Personality Disorder is the same as schizophrenia. And he delivers clumsy lines like, “’Whatever works,’ Brewer mumbled his simplistic estimation.”

Mystery of L’inconnu was a disappointing novel. I did finish it, though, so I suppose it wasn’t a total narrative failure.