Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Deadly Welcome,’ by John D. MacDonald

Leave a comment

As you’ve noticed, I am working my way (happily) through the old John D. MacDonald paperbacks re-issued for Kindle by The Murder Room. Deadly Welcome was a particular pleasure, because it’s one I hadn’t read before.

Alex Doyle works in sort of troubleshooting capacity (never really explained) for the US State Department. But one day he’s ordered to the Pentagon and informed he’s now on loan to the military. They have an assignment for him, one he’s uniquely qualified to carry out.

There’s a Colonel M’Gann who’s been doing important defense work. A while back he got married to a woman named Jenna Larkin, originally of Ramona Beach, Florida. She seemed to be a good wife, and nursed him back from a stroke. They moved to Ramona Beach together. Then she was murdered, strangled on the beach. Now Col. M’Gann has withdrawn from the world. The military wants him back. They’d like Alex to go down there and see if he can solve the murder. That might bring the Colonel back.

Alex doesn’t want to do it. The very reason they chose him is because he originally came from Ramona himself. He even knew Jenna Larkin (all the boys did). Back there he was considered white trash. He got framed for a theft and only avoided prison by enlisting in the Army. He expects no great welcome in his home town.

Indeed, once he arrives, pretending to have money he wants to invest in a local business, almost his first encounter is with the deputy sheriff, who works him over with a truncheon just to show him who’s in charge. Alex pretends to be properly cowed, but he’s not the same guy who got run out of town so long ago. He’ll get his own back in his own time. Along the way he’ll meet Jenna’s sister, a beautiful woman with a traumatic past. And he’ll uncover a possible motive for the murder, which helps him come up with a way to trap a killer.

Deadly Welcome isn’t a terribly memorable book. There’s a little too much amateur psychology here, perhaps. But it’s a well-crafted, plausible story with a satisfying conclusion. Journeyman work, and well worth the price.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Last of the Vikings,’ by Johan Bojer

Leave a comment

They worked in the herring fisheries in the autumn, and in the winter sailed hundreds of miles in open boats up to Lofoten, perhaps tempted by the hope of gain, but perhaps too because on the sea they were free men.

More than once over the years on this blog I’ve mentioned Johan Bojer’s novel, The Last of the Vikings, which I read in Norwegian (Nynorsk). I even translated a section and posted it once (though I can’t find it now), because I dearly wished to share this book with others, but the English translation was out of print.

I’m delighted to report that this has changed. You can now get The Last of the Vikings in translation for Kindle.

First of all, I must inform you that this book isn’t about Vikings. It’s about the cod fishery in Lofoten sometime around the turn of the 20th Century, when steam was beginning to replace sail. If you see a picture of one of the old Nordland boats, the kind used in this book, you’ll think for a moment that it’s a picture of a Viking ship. That’s because the Nordland boats were descended from Viking boats through unbroken evolution over centuries.

Kristàver Myran is a small farmer (although the text doesn’t say it, his home is in the Trondheim area, where author Bojer grew up). Every winter, like most of the able-bodied men of his neighborhood, he makes the long sail up to Lofoten to participate in the cod fishing, gambling that he can make enough money to get ahead a little in the world. But this year he has great hopes, because he finally has his own boat (purchased on credit). He wondered why the boat was going for such a low price, but only learned after the sale that it’s jinxed. Over the last three winters it has capsized every year. Well, nothing can be done about that now.

Coming along for the first time is his son Lars, proud to be a Lofoten man at last. Lars idolizes his father and dreams of following in his footsteps, but also likes to read and has educational aspirations. He is the main point-of-view character in the book.

Other crew members include Elezeus, Kristàver’s brother-in-law, an abusive, self-loathing husband. And Kaneles (Cornelius), a fun-loving bachelor who’s the sole support of his young sister and blind father. And Arnt, another first-year man, a bad sailor terrified of the sea.

Another skipper from the neighborhood is old Jacob, a limping, black-bearded, drunken, cheerful force of nature. A man with no family and no home on land, who knows nothing but the sea, but knows it like no other.

The men will face many challenges over the winter. They’ll face conflicts with other crews over tangled nets and regional rivalries in drinking shops. They’ll face long hours rowing, and days and nights without sleep when the shoals of fish come in, and boredom when they don’t. They’ll face daunting competition from the new steam-powered boats, along with the arrogance of the authorities. But most of all they’ll face the weather, the killing storms of the arctic sea. They will look in the face of death itself.

I’ve rarely read a book that affected me more than this one. I don’t think it’s just because some of my ancestors must have been involved in this fishery. This is the story of all the poor men over the centuries who’ve taken the poor man’s gamble – risk your very life in the hopes of making a better future for your family, even at the risk of leaving them without a provider. I cared deeply about these characters, and mourned and rejoiced with them.

I have to say I don’t consider the translation first rate. It’s over-literal, in my opinion, which makes the dialogue, in particular, sometimes awkward. But the scenery descriptions were vivid, and the storm sequences sublime.

The Last of the Vikings gets my highest recommendation. It’s unforgettable.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Emperor,’ by H. Albertus Boli

3 Comments

For some years I’ve been a fan of Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine, one of the oddest sites on the internet. Well, just look at it. The humor is the driest of the dry; the sort of thing you either get or you don’t. I don’t always get it, but I enjoy checking to see what’s new each day.

Dr. Boli writes books too. I’ve read and enjoyed a couple of them, so I figured I’d try his newest, The Emperor. It’s rather different from the others.

When I was in college, I encountered a couple of old novels (Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas comes to mind) in which older writer/philosophers told fantastic stories of princes in old times and distant lands as a means to comment on their own times and politics. The Emperor seemed like that kind of story to me at first, but I think I was wrong. Maybe.

The Emperor is a young man, orphaned as a boy, who has lived under the guidance of the Consul and the Tribune most of his life. The empire he rules seems to be Roman, in an alternate world where Rome never fell. The geography doesn’t match our world, but the Christian religion seems to be pretty much the same. They have been at war with an enemy for hundreds of years, and the Sultan (who worships Apollyon and dwells just across the strait) is their most faithful vassal.

The young Emperor is beginning to chafe at the many restrictions that hedge his life around. Every moment of his day is scheduled, every action choreographed. He is never alone. His future is determined – he will marry a princess who was sired by the Sultan expressly for that purpose, once she grows old enough. Any suggestion he makes that it might be a good idea to visit his domains or oversee the war is argued down. The Emperor, it is explained, needs to keep the Empire stable through performing his regular duties in the safety of the Palace.

His only escape (or so he thinks) is at night, when the orchestra that serenades him finally leaves – because he pretends to sleep – and he slips out a window to visit an ancient ruin. One night he gets lost and wanders into an unfamiliar part of the palace grounds. There he meets a young servant woman named Pulchrea, scrubbing a floor. The Emperor immediately falls in love with her, and the rest of the story involves him testing his strength of will against those of the Consul and the Tribune, in order to win the freedom to do what he really wants.

But only at the very end does he learn the Big Secret.

I’m not sure what to say about The Emperor. It started slow – the author indulged himself too long in setting the scene; his character’s constrained life and discontent could have been established much more efficiently. Modern readers won’t generally put up with too much stage-setting. The story was interesting once it finally got going. I’m not sure what to think of the ending.

I’m of two minds about The Emperor. You might try it out if it sounds interesting to you; it’s not expensive in Kindle format.

Fiction, Reviews

‘LA: Wild Justice,’ by Blake Banner

Leave a comment

I had run out of bargain books that I’d picked up through online deals, and noticed a Harry Bauer book by Blake Banner. And I thought, “I haven’t read a Banner for a while. I wonder why I stopped following him?” A check of my past reviews gave no clue, so I bought LA: Wild Justice, the 7th installment in the series. It proved entertaining in a popcorn movie way, but I also was reminded why I’d given Harry a rest.

Harry Bauer is a professional assassin working for an ultra-secret agency called Cobra. His bosses call him in for an assignment: they want him to kill a saint. The saint in question is Sen. Charles Cavendish, a billionaire who famously bankrolls a number of much-needed relief organizations around the Third World. He feeds the hungry, provides clean water, cares for the sick, etc.

In fact, according to Harry’s bosses, he operates those charities only as a blind. The entrée he gets to many corrupt countries permits him to sell drugs, arms, and chemical weapons to some of the world’s worst actors – including Harry’s worst enemy in the world.

But Harry has hardly begun his job when one of his bosses is kidnapped. Now it’s a race against time to complete the sanction and rescue his friend.

Harry is a hero very much in the James Bond mold – and I mean the movie Bond, not the one in the Fleming books. He effortlessly subdues very formidable enemies, even in groups – until the plot points call for a dramatic setback. He suffers traumatic injuries and just fights on. Pain barely slows him.

LA: Wild Justice was fun, mindless entertainment. What annoyed me – and this is probably why I dropped the series before – is that the author likes to leave the reader with a cliff-hanger. That just annoys me. Stand-alone books should wrap up the main plot. There can be larger, ongoing plots over a series of books, but you owe it to the reader tie up the threads on the main problem in the volume in hand.

Still, an entertaining book. Moderately recommended. I’m likely to read the next eventually.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Racing the Light,’ by Robert Crais

Leave a comment

When I really like a book, I like to post a snippet of good prose from the text up above my reviews, just to give the reader a taste. Oddly, I didn’t find any snippets in Racing the Light, Robert Crais’s 19th Elvis Cole novel, though I was much impressed with the writing. I guess what I appreciated was the effectiveness of the narrative, its efficiency and power, rather than any storyteller’s flourishes.

Elvis Cole, Los Angeles private eye, contemporary Philip Marlowe in a Hawaiian shirt, gets a drop-in visitor in his office. It’s an elderly woman named Adele Schumacher. She wears very inexpensive clothes, but on the other hand she has two armed security guards escorting her.

As best as Elvis can figure out, the woman’s a crackpot. She raves about government wiretapping, and drone surveillance, and aliens at Area 51. But she has a big envelope full of cash, and she offers Elvis whatever he wants to locate her son Josh, who has disappeared.

Elvis is ambivalent, but he agrees to at least look into it. He finds that Josh is the host of a podcast. Most of the time his subject matter is UFOs and that sort of thing, but lately he’s been talking to a porn star who claims to have explosive information about the real estate shenanigans of a number of city council members. And they, in turn, have connections to Chinese criminals. It appears that Josh was wise to drop out of sight. But he’s in way over his head, and he’s going to need a friend to protect him.

Meanwhile, Elvis has gotten a call from Lucy Chenier, the love of his life, who left him a few books back to return to Baton Rouge with her son. Life with Elvis was too dangerous, she said. She had her boy to protect. But now she wants to talk. Elvis dares to hope, but is prepared for disappointment.

What I liked best about Racing the Light was the characters and relationships. There was a lot of wisdom here about families and friends, and learning to trust and take risks.

Highly recommended. Elvis’ dangerous friend Joe Pike is around too, which is always fun.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dress Her in Indigo,’ by John D. MacDonald

Leave a comment

The dregs of dreams were all of childhood, and in the morning mirror I looked at the raw, gaunt, knobbly stranger, at the weals and the pits and the white tracks of scar tissue across the deepwater brown of the leathery useful body, and marveled that childhood should turn into this—into the pale-eyed, scruff-headed, bony stranger who looked so lazily competent, yet, on the inside, felt such frequent waves of Weltschmerz, of lingering nostalgia for the lives he had never lived.

Another deal on a Travis McGee e-novel by John D. MacDonald pops up, and it is for me but the work of a moment to seize on it and make it my own. This one is Dress Her in Indigo, one of the most memorable installments, I think, in that memorable hard-boiled series. It poses certain challenges for me in reviewing it in this space. This is one of the books, in a series where sex is not infrequent, in which sex is particularly central. The book is an interesting artifact in that it arises from that moment in social history when the Swingin’ Sixties were morphing into the Hippie Era, and will be useful to future historians, if only as an expression of its time.

In general, Travis McGee, “salvage specialist,” makes his living finding lost money and property for people. But this job is different. His best friend, the ursine, affable economist known only as Meyer, asks him to help him do a favor for another friend.

T. Harlan Bowie is an investment counselor who grew very rich almost inadvertently, and is now confined to a wheelchair. His wife died not long ago, leaving him with an adult daughter he barely knew. The girl, “Bix,” was extremely beautiful and a very lost soul. A while back she headed off to Mexico with some friends in a camper, and now word has come that she died in an auto accident on a mountain road. All T. Harlan wants is to find out is what her life was like down there. Was she happy? Did she have good friends?

McGee has a bad feeling about this job from the outset, but he and Meyer set out for Oaxaca, her last known address. What they discover leaves them wondering whether they should just lie to the old man. Because Bix’s circle of friends were not nice people at all. They were involved in drug dealing and drug smuggling, and some pretty kinky sex games too. And murder, in the end.

But wait, it gets worse. The big secret is yet to be discovered, and when it is, McGee will be faced with one of the most difficult moral decisions he’ll ever have to make.

But back to the sex. Travis McGee is very far from being a role model, especially for the Christian reader. And one of the most interesting aspects of this book is a stark – comic in places – contrast that’s set up between his experiences in the sack (well-written without being explicit) with one woman who is extremely seductive and experienced, and another woman who is relatively innocent (at least by comparison). Spoiler alert: the innocent one comes out way ahead. If one were to think this out to the end, it might lead to possible arguments for lifetime monogamy, but of course no such argument is made here. Let the reader understand.

Anyway, Dress Her in Indigo is one of MacDonald’s best. Recommended, with cautions as noted above.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Monument Rock,’ by Louis L’Amour

2 Comments

A deal came up for a Louis L’Amour book on Kindle, and I thought, “It’s been a long time since I’ve read L’Amour. I really dug him, way back when I was in radio. Let’s see how he holds up.”

Sadly, for this reader, Monument Rock didn’t stack up all that well.

The book is actually a collection – six short stories plus the novel, Monument Rock, which is the final installment in the “Kilkenny” series. This volume is billed as the final published collection of previously unpublished L’Amour western stories.

I was a bit disappointed. My first complaint was the seemingly formulaic quality of the stories. Each of them (at least in memory) was built on the same basic plot – a mysterious, dangerous stranger rides into town (or onto the ranch), where bad guys are doing bad things. Often a woman is threatened. Often the stranger has a secret connection to the place, to be revealed at the end. The stranger (who is exactly like all the other stranger heroes in all the stories) is dangerous and fast with a gun, and can’t be intimidated. The climax is a shootout, where he triumphs.

Of course, there’s a reason narrative formulas exist. They work. It’s just that when you clump them all together like this, the upholstery looks a little threadbare.

Also, the writing wasn’t as good as I hoped. L’Amour was a great storyteller, but he wasn’t a top wordsmith. (I suppose I’ve become a literary snob in my old age.)

The final novel, Monument Rock, pleased me more than the stories. The longer form provided scope for some narrative variety.

There’s nothing really wrong with Monument Rock. L’Amour fans will enjoy it.

Authors, Fiction, Publishing, Writing

Klavan on becoming a writer

1 Comment

In the wake of my fulsome review of Andrew Klavan’s A Strange Habit of Mind yesterday (it was so gushy it even embarrasses me a little, but I meant every word), I thought we could have some advice from the master on starting out as a writer. So here’s a video, which is apparently about a year old, since he plugs When Christmas Comes.

I should probably take this advice myself, though I wonder how many agents are interested in bright young authors in their seventh decades.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Strange Habit of Mind,’ by Andrew Klavan

1 Comment

She made a movement then—just a small one, very subtle. A little nod of the head while her hand tugged gently at the edge of her skirt. That was all. But to Winter it was clearly suggestive of a curtsey, a gesture so ladylike and anachronistic that it seemed to strike clean through him like a saber thrust. When she returned to her table to gather her overcoat and her purse, he felt as if she had left a jagged hole of loneliness at the center of him, front to back.

The paragraph above is as good a description of a certain male experience (one of our nobler ones) as I’ve ever read. Which is just the kind of writer Andrew Klavan is. He’s the best at what he does. We American conservatives (and Christians) aren’t worthy of his talent.

But be that as it may, we are the happy recipients of another book in Klavan’s Cameron Winter series, which is cause for rejoicing. The first Cameron Winter book, When Christmas Comes, was released around this time last year, and it floored me. I prayed there’d be more, and A Strange Habit of Mind, just released, is my Christmas miracle for 2022.

Cameron Winter, you may recall, is an English professor at a college in an unnamed midwestern state. (I was pretty sure it was Indiana while reading the last book, but we learn now that it borders Minnesota, so I’m guessing Wisconsin.) He’s independently wealthy and working at a job he loves, but he’s also lonely and depressed.

So he sees a psychologist, an older woman. To her he confides the causes of his depression and isolation. Partly they come from his tragic childhood, but much of it is due to his previous career. He used to work for an organization called the Division, which trained him to be an assassin. Not like in the movies. Their methods were far more subtle than the silenced pistol or the garotte in the dark. They knew ways to destroy people by exploiting their personal hungers and weaknesses, and to kill them in ways that looked like natural death, or accidents.

Cam recently got a text from a former student who’s been living in San Francisco. Just two words – “Help me.” Cam called back immediately, but got no reply.

Later he learns that the young man threw himself off the roof of his apartment building shortly after sending the text. Cam is troubled and looks into it. The young man had left school under a cloud, and his subsequent history said little for his character. A drug dealer. A girlfriend abuser. Really, he was no loss to the world.

But Cam can’t let it go, for some reason. He has, as he tells his counselor, “a strange habit of mind,” a gift that was useful to him in his work for the Division. When he ponders an event, his mind unconsciously reorganizes data, enabling him often to discern underlying crimes. And as he looks into the student’s world, he finds that the girlfriend he beat up just happens to be a sister to Molly Byrne, “the Cinderella girl,” the woman who married Gerald Byrne, the richest, most powerful man in the world. (Think Jeff Zuckerberg, but crazier and with more power.)

That leads him into Byrne’s personal history, and a pattern begins to emerge. People who hurt people Byrne cares about tend to have bad accidents. Not only that, but people who oppose Byrne’s social and political causes tend to suffer similar fates.

And something else is plain to Cam. These are exactly the kind of “accidents” he and his colleagues in the Division used to orchestrate. And now, with a few more strategic deaths, nothing will stand in the way of Byrne fundamentally transforming the global order.

So the showdown is inevitable – Cameron Winter vs. the Most Powerful Man in the World.

There wasn’t a moment of slack in this plot. I was riveted from the first page to the last. Not only that, but the bare act of reading was a pleasure, because the prose was so perfect, so evocative and satisfying, like a delicious meal. I may read it again soon, just to savor it.

I recommend A Strange Habit of Mind as highly as is humanly possible. Thanks, Andrew Klavan.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Little Drummer,’ by Kjell Ola Dahl

Leave a comment

My relationship with the Nordic Noir genre, as you may recall, is troubled. Though I’m generally a Scandinavian booster, I have my pet hatreds (Ibsen and Stieg Larsson, to name a couple), and I’m cold to Nordic mysteries overall (except for Jørn Lier Horst’s Wisting, probably because I worked on two seasons of the TV miniseries). I’ve read one of Kjell Ola Dahl’s Oslo Detectives books before, and didn’t care for it a lot. I found it depressing and distasteful. But I bought Little Drummer on a whim (it was on sale), and I liked this one a little better.

Lise Fagernes is an Oslo newspaper reporter. She finds herself, to her shock, part of a news story herself when she discovers a woman’s body in a car in a parking garage. The police consider the death an accidental overdose, as the fatal needle is right there. But one of the brass, on a hostile whim, assigns the case to his enemy, Inspector Gunnarstranda. And Gunnarstranda, on a hunch, asks for a toxicology test. Turns out it wasn’t an accidental overdose after all. The woman was chloroformed before being injected.

Together with his partner, Frank Frøhlich, Gunnarstranda starts looking into the woman’s background. Turns out she was friends with a student from Kenya who has just been reported missing. When he proves to have fled the country, Frøhlich will have to travel to Africa. There he encounters Lise, who’s still on the story. They circle each other warily before forming a temporary alliance – both in business and personal terms.

The case will lead to international medical conglomerates, African relief, and the general fecklessness and corruption of Western aid to the Third World.

About the highest praise I can give to a Nordic Noir novel is that it didn’t make me want to kill myself. Little Drummer was better than most in that regard. But it was hardly cheery, and I suspect the political underpinnings are anti-capitalist.

Still, not bad, and the translation is good. Cautions for the usual.