Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Post Pattern,’ by David Chill

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I am not reluctant, in my old age, to drop a book unceremoniously when I find the writing poor. Sometimes, if my sensitivities are outraged enough, I’ll tell you about it.

The case is somewhat different with Post Pattern, by David Chill. I found the writing very bad in places – especially in the area of word choice. However, I liked the character and the story enough to stick with it.

Burnside (yet another one-name private eye, in the Spenser tradition) is a Los Angeles private investigator. He was a star football player in college, and then became a cop. He was a good, by-the-book policeman until one day he gave a break to someone who didn’t deserve it. As a consequence he became a laughingstock on the force, and he quit to go private.

A wealthy young man, Norman Freeman, comes to Burnside’s office to hire him. Someone took a shot at him in his car the night before. Only he’s not sure the shot was meant for him. It could be – he’s a former pro football player who is heir apparent to a big auto dealership. He could have business enemies. But he also has a ne’er-do-well brother who hangs out with some sketchy people, and he was driving his brother’s car.

Soon there will be a real murder, and Burnside will wade into a whirlpool of personal motives, business motives, and dangerous dames. The world of ex-jocks is a major element here, which doesn’t do much for me personally, but it didn’t put me off. I liked that Burnside believes strongly in being armed at all times, and there wasn’t a lot of political correctness in view.

What author David Chill does well is create good characters. And good characters make up for a lot with me. I wish he’d had a better copy editor, but I still enjoyed Post Pattern, and went on to buy the next book in the series.

Fiction

Penguin Is Recording All Discworld Books in New Audio Series

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Penguin Books UK is releasing a new, cohesive audiobook series of all 41 books in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. The video here will show you who’s involved and how much work everyone is doing to pull this off.

I can’t quite tell what’s available yet, but the first book, The Colour of Magic, will be released at the end of July 2022. Look over all the books, including all print and digital editions, on Penguin’s website.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Save the Dragons,’ by Dave Freer

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He has a long, double-barreled English name, but is generally known as “Squigs.” He is very tall and thin, has big feet, and is extremely awkward with girls. He studied Alchemy at an English university, which led him, through complex circumstances, to find himself on a watery planet called Zoar, where he’s completely out of his element – and he was never all that at home even on earth. Also, his right hand is missing. He finds himself rescued by a beautiful young girl in a boat, with whom he falls immediately in love. She finds him beneath contempt. Now, Crum the Barbarian, big, blond, dumb and handsome – that’s a guy she could go for.

The girl’s big, pugnacious father is looking for help hunting poachers. Zoar is inhabited by dragons, and dragon teeth are a coveted natural resource. But unfamiliar, interstellar vehicles have been showing up recently and killing dragons way over the hunting limits. Eager to impress the girl, Squigs volunteers to help pursue the poachers. He doesn’t seem well equipped for the quest, but he has qualities nobody has ever appreciated, and he acquires a faithful friend in a fearless dwarf. And the new hand he acquires – black, with eight serpentine fingers, turns out to be useful in surprising ways.

Save the Dragons is by Dave Freer, and showcases his punning, likeable, and satirical style. Lots of fun.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Wrong Place, Wrong Time,’ by W. Glenn Duncan

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I wasn’t impressed enough by the first Rafferty novel, by W. Glenn Duncan, that I read, to plan on reading more. But somehow I am doing so. And I’m enjoying the books, originally published in the 1980s. I actually read the first book, Rafferty’s Rules, and failed to review it recently. But it won me over, especially with a pleasant plot twist at the end.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time is the fourth book in the series. Rafferty (no first name, like Spenser) is a Dallas private eye whose business is somewhat marginal. He’s in no position to turn down fast, honest money, so when a guy comes in identifying himself as a bounty hunter, wanting backup for a quick apprehension job, he agrees. Not long later he sees his client blowing the target away with a shotgun, and then Rafferty is driving for his life as the guy pursues him, to tie up loose ends.

After extricating himself from that problem, Rafferty gets a request for help from a woman in the next office, with whom he’s been carrying on a pleasant flirtation for years through a window. Her grandfather needs protection, she explains. Local kids have been harassing him. She’s afraid they’ll hurt him, but she’s also afraid he’ll hurt them – he’s a tough old guy who’s been around the block.

As Rafferty gets to know old “Thorney,” he comes to respect and admire the guy, who’s not exactly enthusiastic about having a “nursemaid.” And when things escalate to shots fired, Rafferty can’t be sure whether the target is Thorney or himself – could his murderous client be back for another shot at him?

Wrong Place, Wrong Time was good, hard-boiled fun. What intrigues me most – and makes me a bit uncomfortable – is how male-female interactions are handled. Author Duncan gives Rafferty a raffish, flirty attitude, and women generally respond in good humor. The assumption is that, in spite of feminist rhetoric, men and women still like each other.

I’m not sure that’s true anymore in the 2020s. I don’t think you could write that way nowadays.

In any case, Wrong Place, Wrong Time was fun to read, and not very demanding. Mild cautions for language and adult themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘One Bad Turn,’ by David J. Gatward

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It was shortly after I started reading David J. Gatward’s latest Inspector Grimm book, One Bad Turn, that I recalled my earlier decision to stop reading the series. The writing’s good, and I like Grimm and his team. But the author’s insistence on bringing God (or spirituality) into the books by way of a lesbian vicar just doesn’t work for me.

Having started the book, though, I figured I might as well carry on. Maybe my perception has been altered by my religious intolerance, but I wasn’t entirely happy with this one.

Harry Grimm, you may recall, is a former paratrooper, facially scarred by an IED. Then he became a policeman in Bristol, but now he has been transferred to bucolic Wensleydale in Yorkshire. In the great tradition of English small-town copper stories, though, the troubles of the big city follow him.

In One Bad Turn, Harry is recalled from holiday when a body is found in a house in a nearby town. Though terribly decomposed, the body shows clear signs of having been subjected to torture. And then a claymore mine concealed with the body explodes, killing two crime scene technicians. The dead woman herself is something of a mystery – beautiful, but not well known to her neighbors. Her identity, it turns out, is a false one, and her means of support unknown. Not long after, another torture murder will be discovered, and another mine will explode.

I felt, personally, that One Bad Turn was kind of predictable. It’s a story we’ve run into before, and is objectively a little far-fetched. It’s not a bad book, but I’m going to try to remember not to buy the next Harry Grimm adventure.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Nine Tailors,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

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“You’ve got too much imagination, Nobby,” said Parker.

“You wait, Charles,” said Lord Peter. “You wait till you get stuck on a ladder in a belfry in the dark. Bells are like cats and mirrors—they’re always queer, and it doesn’t do to think too much about them. Go on, Cranton.”

Dorothy L. Sayers achieved some remarkable things in her classic Lord Peter Wimsey series of mysteries. One of their impressive elements is the way she varies settings, both socially and geographically. I suspect that The Nine Tailors is one of her most beloved books, despite the fact that it spends a lot of time on the arcane English pastime of “change ringing,” in which church bells are rung in varying strings of ever-changing notes. The Nine Tailors combines a kind of epic sweep with profound human tragedy.

It’s Christmas Eve when Lord Peter and his man Bunter, speeding over the East Anglian fen country in his big Daimler car, go into a ditch, bending the axle. They are taken in by the kindly vicar of Fenchurch, a small community nearby. When the vicar announces sadly that they’re going to have to cancel their attempt to set a record ringing “Kent Treble Bob Majors” that night, because one of his ringers has fallen ill, noblesse oblige leaves Lord Peter no choice but to volunteer himself, as he has some experience as a change ringer. This involves nine hours of labor in the church tower when he could use some sleep, but everyone is very grateful. The next day Lord Peter drives away in his repaired car, assuming he’ll never return.

But some months later, the vicar calls and asks his help again. A strange thing has happened. While the sexton was opening a grave to bury a man with his recently deceased wife, a strange body was found in the grave. The face had been bashed in with a shovel and the hands removed, so it’s impossible to identify the man. Lord Peter, always keen for a mystery, quickly shows up and starts investigatin’.

It all seems to have something to do with a scandalous theft that occurred long ago, on the eve of the Great War. A guest at the local nobleman’s wedding had a valuable emerald necklace stolen. It has never been recovered. One of the house servants and an outside accomplice were arrested and sent to prison, shaming his wife, who still lives in the town, remarried after her husband escaped and died in an accident. The accomplice was still alive, though, having recently been released. The body may be his. But if so, who killed him, how did they kill him (there is no visible premortem wound), and why is he wearing French underwear?

Author Sayers turns the pealing of the bells into a kind of chorus that accompanies the drama up to its epic climax in a massive flood on the fens. The Nine Tailors is gripping and haunting. A masterpiece of the genre. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘If I Scream,’ by W. H. Clark

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I was wandering through some of the old reviews on this site, and I found a review of An End to a Silence, by W. H. Clark. I liked the book quite a lot and noted that I wished the sequel were available (it’s intended as a trilogy). I checked again now, and found that the second book, If I Scream, is out, so I bought it. It has most of the virtues of the first book, and engaged me deeply. Except for one thing…

A young woman, pale and emaciated, appears along a Montana highway. A kindly man stops to help her, and seeing her condition and hearing her say something about being held a prisoner, he heads for the police station. But on the way she distracts him, and he smashes into a car in an intersection. They are both rushed to a hospital, where the young woman quickly dies.

This is a case for Ward, the mysterious, taciturn former Texas Ranger, now a Montana policeman. Kidnapping and the abuse of children are things he obsesses about. But his bosses won’t devote a lot of resources to the case, because a serial killer has started working in the area. The murderer kills in various ways, and it’s hard to see what connects the men he’s murdering. So Ward is left to work the case as he can, with the help of a cop named Mallory, a victim of child abuse himself and a pariah on the force because of the things he once did at the bidding of his abuser.

Stories about child abuse chill and fascinate me, and If I Scream did the same. It’s very well-written and bears the marks of deep compassion.

My main complaint is how dark the book is. When you’re writing about as grim and tragic a subject as this, I think it’s a good idea to offer the reader a little hope. There isn’t much hope in If I Scream. It troubles me to think what a serious abuse victim might conclude from reading this story.

I do look forward to the next volume, if there is one (this book came out in 2017). If the final volume appears, I hope it has a more uplifting ending.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Trouble Is My Beat,’ by James Scott Bell

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I’ve become a big fan of James Scott Bell, an excellent mystery-and-thriller writer who also happens to be a Christian. So when I saw he’d published a collection of novellas in hard-boiled style called Trouble Is My Beat, I snapped it up. It was excellent value for money.

Bill “Wild Bill” Armbrewster is a World War I veteran and a successful pulp mystery writer. But it’s hard to make a living doing that, even back in the late 1940s. So he works as a “fixer” for a Hollywood studio. That involves getting stars out of dangerous or illegal situations, avoiding scandal, and sometimes putting the scare on them to keep them on the straight and narrow. It might bring him up against rival studios, or gangsters, or dangerous dames, or the cops. He won’t let himself be intimidated, and he’s a hard man to fool. And at heart he’s a decent guy.

Bill Armbrewster is the kind of simple, old-fashioned hero you don’t run into much anymore, on the page or on the screen. Author Bell does a good job of writing in the hard-boiled voice, though his similes and metaphors aren’t up to Chandler and Hammett’s standards. No effort is made to shock the reader into a raised consciousness. The language is generally mild, and one story involving a Christian evangelist treats him with respect.

There was pretty much nothing I disliked about Trouble Is My Beat. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cloud Castles,’ by Dave Freer

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If the name Augustus Thistlewood strikes you as something out of P. G. Wodehouse, you and I have that in common. And we’re both right. There are echoes of Wodehouse at the beginning of Dave Freer’s science fiction novel, Cloud Castles, though the book gradually evolves into something quite different.

Augustus is a son of a wealthy, but low-profile, family of industrialists. He went to university to become an engineer, but he’s so brilliant he needed more of a challenge. So he took a degree in Sociology too, and that’s where the trouble began.  Convinced of “modern” views of society and economics, he decided he needed to spend time with the less fortunate, “uplifting” the poor.

That mission took him to Sybil III, a floating city in the “habitable region” of a gas-dwarf star. The city floats on antigravity engines and shares the skies with “floating castles” belonging to two alien races who are war with each other but “neutral” (though hostile) to humans. The skies also feature clumps of floating vegetation that nobody cares about much.

Augustus arrives in the floating city as the perfect innocent. The place is the most debased and claustrophobic of slums, but he, having no experience of real life, trusts everyone. He’s immediately spotted by an urchin called Briz (a girl, though he assumes she’s a boy), who “takes him under her wing” with the intention of robbing him blind. Only Augustus proves strangely resilient – the stupid moves he makes tend to work out all right for him (kind of like an old Mr. Magoo cartoon), and his engineering skills prove useful and even lifesaving. And Briz, against her will, finds herself drawn to this gormless do-gooder, developing a genuine sense of obligation.

Then they end up on one of the floating “skydrift paddocks,” vegetation clumps, and discover a thriving, if marginal, civilization – a place mirroring Australian Outback culture, but in the air. And gradually Augustus becomes “Gus,” their strong, inventive, and decisive leader. In this capacity he’ll face war, slavery, and worse from the aliens, on whose domains he can’t help encroaching.

Cloud Castles was a lot of fun – creative, original world-building, and a cast of colorful, well-developed characters. Dave Freer has been a Facebook friend for some time, but I hadn’t tried his science fiction before. This is an extremely good space opera, and I recommend it highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Complete Brigadier Gerard,’ by Arthur Conan Doyle

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As almost everybody knows, Arthur Conan Doyle will be forever linked (shackled, as he might have put it) to his epically successful detective character, Sherlock Holmes. And most of you will be aware that Doyle grew very weary of Holmes after a while, and killed him off (temporarily). He hoped he could win the public over to another character he created, an officer of Napoleon named Brigadier Etienne Gerard.

I bought The Complete Brigadier Gerard out of curiosity. There’s no question it’s a change of pace from the Holmes stories.

Brigadier Gerard is a Gascon, like D’Artagnan. And like D’Artagnan, he lives for honor and adventure. He is always ready to fight a duel or steal a kiss, and always first to volunteer for dangerous assignments. Where he differs from D’Artagnan is that he’s not terribly bright. His stories are told, we gather, in his old age, in an inn, to a group of friends. Gerard is now living on a pension, which he supplements by growing cabbages. He sighs over hard fate, which has denied him the advancement he has no doubt he deserved. He refers often to the medal for bravery he received from the Emperor himself, but which he never has with him. He keeps it, he says, in his apartment, in a leather pouch. I suspect we’re meant to understand that he actually had to pawn it.

In a series of semi-comic short stories, he tells of headlong adventures he enjoyed during the great wars. Sometimes on secret missions, sometimes accidentally separated from his company of hussars, he escapes from ambushes, traps and imprisonment, often (like the later Captain Kirk) with the help of some woman who has succumbed to his manly charm.

Generally (but not always) the joke is on Gerard. He can be counted on to run (or gallop) toward the sound of the guns, but he’s often clueless about what’s really going on. So confident is he of his own sagacity and aplomb that (in a manner that anticipates Inspector Clouseau) he often mistakes jeering for cheering. He is, however, never mean or small-minded.

I didn’t like The Complete Brigadier Gerard as much as I hoped to. The author is laughing at his hero (if somewhat affectionately), and the reader is too. For some reason that made me uncomfortable.

Your mileage may vary. No objectionable material. I might mention that I often forgot I was reading a Victorian/Edwardian book. Doyle wrote in a style ahead of his time.