Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Strait Over Tackle,’ by Colin Conway

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What kept coming to mind as I read Colin Conway’s Strait Over Tackle, first book in his “Flip-flop Detective” series, was the movie “The Big Lebowski.”

I did not like “The Big Lebowski.” I don’t, in general, find slackers amusing.

Sam Strait is a former sheriff’s deputy in the same area (around Spokane, Washington) that is the setting for author Conway’s more serious “The 509” police procedural series. He got kicked off the force on false charges, sued them for damages, and won a cash settlement, which gives him some financial freedom. He lives in the lake cabin he inherited from his grandparents. This allows him to live the life he wants to. He lives by a short set of rules, the first of which is, “Only be where flip-flops can be worn.” That makes him a snowbird. He flies off to warmer climes each fall, taking temporary jobs like dishwashing to eke out his expenses. He’s happy with this life (or claims to be), but it angers his on-off girlfriend, a gorgeous local actress who wants permanence and doesn’t give up easily.

Sam comes home to open up for the spring and finds that somebody has held a party in his house and left it trashed. But it gets worse. He goes down to the lake to look at his boat and finds a young woman’s dead body in it. His call to the police brings Detective Shane McAfee, whom we know from the 509 novels.


When Sam discovers that someone has left a bag of drugs in his refrigerator, he ponders calling McAfee, but decides to go around and ask questions himself. This – as he eventually realizes – is a stupid decision, leading to confrontations, threats, and several fistfights (all of which he loses). But in the end he will identify the murderer.

Generally speaking, slackers make poor heroes for novels. Interesting characters operate from some powerful motivation, which is the main thing slackers generally lack. Sam’s chief motivation is avoidance of intimacy and commitment. His motivations for investigating the murder rather than letting the police do their job are unclear to the reader, and apparently to himself. He seems to have a poor conception of personal safety, which is bad because he keeps getting beat up (even by a woman). This is one of those stories where the hero gets “his bell rung” multiple times, and people even warn him of concussion, but he brushes the suggestion off and appears to suffer no serious trauma (which is implausible).

In the end, I figured out that Strait Over Tackle was intended to be taken as comedy. I guess it had its moments, but it didn’t amuse me a lot.

You might like it better than I did. Especially if you liked “The Big Lebowski.”

Blogs, Socials, Fiction

No Fear of Sleep, the Internet Gone to Pot, and Hollywood Noir

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Lee Yong-ju’s 2021 film Seo Bok is a standard sci-fi thriller about a cloned man with telekinesis. It opens with an ex-secret service agent, Min Gi Heon, being offered an outside job, one that’s dangerous enough to require deniability if it goes wrong. He’s asked to deliver an asset, and when he arrives at the lab to pick it up, he learns the asset is a young man, Seo Bok, whom the scientists introduce as undying. He is a lab-created human being who will not die if properly cared for. They say his cells are the key to healing many, if not every, human disease. Not only that, his brain waves are off the charts, enabling him to push and guide material around him. But, what could go wrong with that, eh?

I could tell you more of the plot, but I bring up this movie because of a couple minutes that appear right before the final act.

At one point, Seo Bok reveals he doesn’t need to sleep. Later, when exploring part of his backstory, he and Gi Heon go to a Christian mausoleum. With several crosses on the walls and light shining through stained glass, Seo Bok asks, “Do you believe dying is really like sleep?”

“Maybe,” Gi Heon replies.

“Then how come people aren’t afraid of falling asleep? It’s like dying a little while.”

“Because they’ll wake up the next day.”

“How do they know that?”

“They just believe it. They believe they will wake up in the morning.”

In the context of the story, that dialogue had me wondering if this was the seed for the whole. The scientists think they’ve created a cure for disease and even natural death in one man, and in the mausoleum another man suggests we can wake up after death if we put our faith in the cross. It’s subtle but stands out as the moral of the film.

Let’s move on.

Internet: 30 Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-pocalypse. Here are the first two.

  1. “Create a society that rewards influencers more than truth-tellers—and turn every digital platform, large or small, into a boosting pad for these influencers.
  2. “Make plagiarism, cheating, and deception totally acceptable, so nobody gets fired from a media job, even for the most egregious violations of journalistic ethics.”

Also from the signs above, over 33% of people hired to train AI for better, more truthful output are using AI software to do the training faster, folding in errors that will be baked in if they aren’t removed soon enough.

Democracy: “This spring marks the 30th anniversary of the paperback release of Francis Fukuyama’s controversial book, The End of History and the Last Man.” How has his argument that democracy had and would continue to win over world civilizations panned out?

Hollywood: Brian Patrick Eha recommends the work of Alfred Hayes. “Money promises to give substance, in Hayes’s novels, to those without it; for those with it, though, material wealth proves unsatisfying, even oddly insubstantial. The vast sums that flow from the movie business have a ‘phantasmal quality.’ . . . Laboring for America’s dream machine, his men and women are made to bear, in the end, too much reality.”

(Photo by Hammad Siddiqui on Unsplash)

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder in the Fells,’ by Bruce Beckham

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Her face is big-boned like a Herdwick sheep and in the greenish-blue eyes rests an innate kindliness.

I’m not sure I’d have ever read the Inspector Skelgill novels if they’d been described to me first. An eccentric police detective whose main expertise is as a hunter and fisherman, who detects mostly by instinct and intuition rather than by reasoning, doesn’t sound like my cup of tea. And yet I find these books by Bruce Beckham fascinating, and they seem to get better and better as they go. They are set in the English county of Cumbria, up by the Scottish border.

In Murder in the Fells, a shepherd discovers a lost wallet in a fox’s “earth.” It contains an American woman’s passport. Probability indicates it belongs to a woman whose body was found near a waterfall in the fells, who has not been identified so far. Inquiries are begun to find out more about the woman.

Meanwhile, in a separate plot thread, we follow a woman named Dorothy T. Baum, another American who has traveled to Cumbria to meet a man, a professor of history, whom she met online and with whom she plans to move in. The reader soon realizes she’s the victim of a “catfishing” scheme, that she’s been lured to England to be fleeced of her money, then murdered. One suspects at first that this is the story of the dead woman – but it’s contemporaneous with Skelgill’s team’s investigation, and the dead woman’s name wasn’t Dorothy.

Tension builds as Dorothy survives a couple “accidents,” and Skelgill’s team becomes aware of her and begin trying to locate her in the tangle of mountain and valley paths that crisscross Cumbria.

And in the end, a big surprise. Very well done.

I liked Murder in the Fells very much. Enjoyed every page. It’s become a cliché for publicists to advertise every English mystery as “gripping.” But in this case it’s true.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder in the Air,’ by David Pearson

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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.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction

The Heroes of Your Imagination

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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.

Americans: Nabokov on “The Simplicity and Kindness of Americans” and insightful barbers.

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

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘Toe the Line,’ by Jack Probyn

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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.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Table 13,’ by Mike McCrary

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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.

Still, not bad.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue’

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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.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Night Watchman,’ by Tony Dunbar

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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.

Otherwise, Night Watchman was all right.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Honest John Churchfield,’ by Michael Dell

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When you get a free e-book online, you take your chances. Sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised. Sometimes a dog follows you home.

Honest John Churchfield by Michael Dell has fur and a wet nose.

“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.