Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Non-fiction, The Press

Salt, Light, Memory, and a Few Good Books

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In the current issue of World Magazine, veteran journalist Cal Thomas talks about the scant trust in new media and some of his experiences over fifty years. Here’s one.

One of my favorite stories about what maintaining integrity and “guarding your heart” in the Christian life can mean came, surprisingly enough, from the pornographer Larry Flynt. In 2007, Flynt was offering $1 million to anyone who could “out” a member of Congress or other public ­figure who was a “family values conservative” in rhetoric, but something quite different in private life. One day, Flynt rolled into Fox’s green room in New York in his wheelchair (he had been shot and paralyzed by a gunman in Georgia in 1978). After exchanging perfunctory greetings, he said to me, “I thought you’d be interested in something.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“We did an investigation of you.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah,” Flynt said. “We didn’t find anything.”

I laughed. “Praise the Lord, a personal endorsement from Larry Flynt! You were just looking in the wrong place for my sins.”

Nostalgia: What do we make of the past? “A man who can reach a certain age—I cannot be precise as to what age—without experiencing nostalgia must have had a pretty wretched existence.”

Reading: Long-time editor and reviewer John Wilson offers a list of novels and books he’s looking forward to this summer, including the work of E.X. Ferrars and her Andrew Bassnet series, in which a retired botanist retires only to find he’s come across a murder.

The Soviet Man: In his book The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel “argues that over its sixty-eight years of existence, the Soviet Union did succeed in its goal of creating a ‘new Soviet person’ (novy sovetsky chelovek). But, as he puts it, ‘The new human being was the product not of any faith in a utopia, but of a tumult in which existing lifeworlds were destroyed and new ones born.'” What helped build this new person was a curious amalgamation: “Soviet Americanism.”

Anniversary: In Hong Kong, they will not forget what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. None of us should.

"Your heart is not the compass Christ saileth by." - Samuel Rutherford

From @SJMelniszyn /Twitter

Photo: Main Street, Iowa. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Someone Savage,’ by Mike McCrary

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There’s a kind of story that I hate and love. The kind of story where an ordinary man (or woman, I suppose, but I avoid those books) finds him (or her-) self in the middle of a violent crime situation for which they’re entirely unsuited, and they have to find a way to survive and overcome. I over-identify with such stories, knowing I wouldn’t survive ten minutes, but I read on, fascinated.

Mike McCrary’s Someone Savage is exactly that kind of story. Nicholas Hooper is a well-known and successful author who’s recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. His only family is his sister Allison, with whom he has an affectionate but contentious relationship. He also has several ex-wives, but he doesn’t talk to them and he’s never fathered a child. Never felt up to the responsibility.

Now he’s rented a huge luxury home in the Poconos for 15 months. Ostensibly he’s there to write his last book, but actually he’s come to die. He even brought a gun with one bullet, in case he wants to go out that way. Mainly, he anticipates drinking heavily.

Then there’s a soft knock at the door, and he opens it to see two small children, undernourished and filthy. The boy says nothing; the girl just says, “Help.” He lets them in and tries to figure out what to do with them. As a start, he gives them bottled water and Cheetos, and sets them in front of a TV with Sponge Bob Squarepants on.

He calls Allison, who urges him to call the police. But the childrens’ responses make him hesitate. They don’t trust any adult, and are clearly traumatized. When he finally persuades them to go to town with him for a good breakfast, they catch sight of a local cop and panic. That moment is pivotal, and much danger will rise from it.

I identified intensely with Nick Hooper, and agonized through the story, which I pretty much read in one sitting. It grabbed me and held tight to the end. It wasn’t all that plausible (I’m pretty sure I’d have just called the police in [which would have been fatal in this situation] if I were in Nick’s shoes), but that’s fairly standard for stories like this. Someone Savage would make an excellent movie.

I recommend this book highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Stop,’ by Alan Lee

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When I’ve read too many dark, gritty mysteries it’s always nice to pick up a Mackenzie August book by Alan Lee. They’re strong on tough, fairly clever dialogue, and it’s nice to follow a detective with a positive attitude and faith in God. So we have come to a Dead Stop, book nine in the series.

Roanoke, Virginia PI Mack August is married to Veronica, a beautiful lawyer. She surprises him by making him the gift of a trip on a luxury private train, Chicago to San Francisco. Mack has always wanted to take such a journey, in the spirit of the old Golden Age mysteries, and jokingly remarks that he hopes they’re attacked by bandits. That won’t happen, but what does happen will be about as bad. Fortunately, their friend Manny Rodriguez, a US Marshal, comes along too – though he’s disappointed to be stood up by his girlfriend.

Their quarters on the train are luxurious, the views are majestic, and the service is excellent. The main irritant is that some of the other passengers are annoying – especially a Republican couple and a Democrat couple who can’t stop sniping at each other. There also seems to be a fair amount of sexual hijinks going on.

Then one of the conductors disappears. And one by one, other members of the train’s crew vanish as well, to be found in the snow with bullet holes in their heads. Manny declares “marshal law” and they try to keep the other passengers calm (and away from each others’ throats) while doing their best to identify the murderer in their midst.

Dead Stop is a story with a message, and it’s not exactly subtle. Mack and Manny constantly try to remind their fellow passengers that they’re all on the same train and need each other, while those passengers are consumed with mutual hatreds – political, social, racial and international. The conservatives and liberals are about equally caricatured, so I don’t think anyone should take offense.

There’s a civility lesson I’m not sure I entirely agree with in the final solution to the crime. But all in all, the book was pleasant enough, and more positive than not in its (relatively heavy-handed) teaching moments.

As usual, author Lee could use a better proofreader. A particularly odd word error is when he tells us someone is wearing a “toboggan” on his head. Is there a piece of headwear known as a toboggan? Did he mean “toque?” Another mystery, this one unsolved.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Community,’ by Finn Eccleston

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Author Finn Eccleston contacted us through blog comments and asked if I’d like to review his first novel, The Community. I accepted a free review copy and discovered a book worth reading by a promising writer.

Jay Stevens lives in a small, somewhat primitive community whose reason for existence seems obscure. It’s located in an oasis of green surrounded by sand. Jay enjoys the status of being a supervisor. He makes sure all the members of the Community are following the numerous rules laid down for them by the ruling Council. There used to be a lot of building going on in the Community, but their meager forest land is mostly logged over now and projects have stalled.

Recently Jay has been troubled by flashbacks – moments of narcolepsy when he experiences what feels like memories, but they’re not memories of this life. They’re memories of life in a city, where he was a drug dealer and a killer.

When he accidentally discovers an electronic barrier surrounding the Community, and blunders onto the other side, he will begin a journey of discovery that will only lead to greater mysteries and an existential threat to his friends and himself.

The Community is clearly a book by a young writer. The prose could use a lot of polishing – there are many word mistakes – “paramount” where “tantamount” is wanted, “after affect” in place of “after-effect.” There are misspellings and plain awkward verbiage, like “Our paces were both quickened.” And sometimes the descriptions of places and events are hard to follow.

On the other hand, the characters are good, the plot moves right along, and there are occasional sly literary allusions that tell me the author reads and is interested in his craft. I think he shows great promise. The Community is the first book in a series, and I think each installment is likely to improve on the last.

Cautions for rough language and adult themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The After-Hours War,’ by Colin Conway

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I suppose it’s better to tell a good story with occasional lapses in diction than to write flawless prose but fail as a storyteller. Colin Conway is a good storyteller who could use a better editor. I’ve grown quite fond of his The 509 series, but I liked The After-Hours War less than the previous books, for various reasons.

Several men are found robbed and shot to death in an after-hours smoking club in the Spokane area. Then another group of people are shot in an after-hours, unlicensed bar. The police suffer the embarrassment of investigating crimes committed in private clubs they didn’t even know existed. Turns out that, even though Prohibition has been gone a long time, people still like to break the liquor and tobacco laws with strangers, especially the rules about closing times. It’s a modern form of speakeasy.

The investigation is further hampered by interdepartmental rivalries. The county detectives hate the city detectives, thinking the investigation belongs to them. The city detectives feel the same way, the other way around. And they all hate Morgan, the Crime Task Force cowboy who breaks all the rules and steps on everybody’s toes.

What I like most about the 509 books is the faceting of the characters. We see each cop through the other cops’ eyes, and then we get to see through their own. There’s a lot of human understanding here.

But there were a couple things I didn’t care for. One was the sheer number of main characters in this book. I don’t like jumping back and forth between too many points of view.

The other problem (for this reader) was that it got into politics. When a couple white supremacists are arrested and interrogated, the accused bring out a lot of talking points, some of which they have in common with ordinary conservatives. I don’t know whether this is intended to suggest that conservatives in general are racists – but there are certainly a lot of people on the left who think so.

As before in this series, there were too many typos and word confusions. The author uses “ascetically pleasing” when he means “aesthetically pleasing,” and “a different tact” when he means “a different tack.” He could use a better proofreader.

Still, The After-Hours War was a good book and worth reading. I hope the politics don’t become a permanent fixture in the series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lieberman’s Folly,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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Dr. Ernest Hartman’s office was in Uptown on Bryn Mawr right next to the el stop. Dr. Hartman’s patients could, while they were waiting or having their fluids drained or taken, indulge in neighborhood bird watching. The trains came rumbling in front of his window and a sharp-eyed woman with the flu or man with a murmur would occasionally spot a Black-Jacketed Daytime Mugger on the platform, though you were more likely to catch sight of a Fleet-Footed Purse Snatcher.

Stuart M. Kaminsky was one of my favorite 20th Century mystery writers, and I’ve reviewed a number of his books before – though not recently, because I think I’ve read most of them. But I’d never read Lieberman’s Folly, which happens to be the first book in his classic Abe Lieberman series.

Abraham Lieberman is 60 years old, a veteran Chicago police detective. He’s a loving father and grandfather, a devout Jew, and an advanced student of human nature. A fragile and old-looking man, he’s no hard-boiled cop. He’s more likely to offer an understanding ear than a punch in the jaw.

His partner is Bill Hanrahan, a tough Irishman who’s crawled into a bottle since his wife left him. Bill’s essentially a good cop too, but he’s been letting his work slide for a while.

Abe likes to spend off-work time – when he’s not with his family – hanging out with a group of old men at his brother’s delicatessen. It’s there that Estralda Valdez, a high-priced hooker and one of Abe’s informants, comes to ask him for protection. Somebody wants to kill her, but she’s leaving town. Could they keep watch on her apartment until she’s gone?

Abe can’t do it that night because of a domestic crisis. But Bill has nothing better to do. Unfortunately, he spends too much time, at his post in a Chinese restaurant across the street, drinking and flirting with a waitress. Estralda is stabbed to death, and their captain is not happy when he hears the story.

Through a narrative rich with eccentric characters and surprises, Abe will do his quiet best to uncover secrets and balance the scales of justice.

Lieberman’s Folly was – like most of Kaminsky’s work – solidly crafted and sympathetic. I enjoyed it very much.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Tan and Sandy Silence,’ by John D. MacDonald

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But the Tibetan bar-headed goose and her gander have a very strange ceremony they perform after they have mated. They rise high in the water, wings spread wide, beaks aimed straight up at the sky, time and time again, making great bugle sounds of honking. The behaviorists think it is unprofessional to use subjective terms about animal patterns. So they don’t call the ceremony joy. They don’t know what to call it. These geese live for up to fifty years, and they mate for life. They celebrate the mating this same way year after year. If one dies, the other never mates again.

So penguins, eagles, geese, wolves, and many other creatures of land and sea and air are stuck with all this obsolete magic and mystery because they can’t read and they can’t listen to lectures. All they have is instinct. Man feels alienated from all feeling, so he sets up encounter groups to sensitize each member to human interrelationships. But the basic group of two, of male and female, is being desensitized as fast as we can manage it.

Got another deal on a Travis McGee book by John D. MacDonald. A Tan and Sandy Silence is, I think, one of the master’s best – a taut tale that borders on horror and reveals our hero at his most vulnerable.

Travis McGee, Fort Lauderdale “salvage specialist,” nearly gets shot one day by old acquaintance Harry Broll, a real estate developer who talks his way aboard Travis’ houseboat. He says he needs to find Mary, his ex-wife, to get her signature for an important real estate deal. He knows she’s been in touch with McGee, he says.

Travis is troubled by this occurrence in two ways – first, he’d never have allowed anybody to get the drop on him like that in the past. Is he losing his edge? Is he getting too long in the tooth for the business of recovering people and their property? Should he accept the offer of Jillian Brent-Archer, the lovely, wealthy English widow who’d like him to move onto her boat and be her constant escort? It would be a soft retirement, and not really all that demeaning.

Secondly, he realizes that Harry Broll was right about one thing – if Mary has disappeared, she’s probably in trouble. But if she was in trouble, she probably would have contacted McGee – which she hasn’t. So where is she?

Talking to Mary’s friends, Travis learns that she’s vacationing in Grenada. She sends postcards now and then. So everything’s all right, right?

But is it? McGee still isn’t sure. So he assumes a false identity and flies down to Grenada. Where he will encounter an evil that reminded me of the horrific “Un-man” in C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra. It’ll be a close-run thing, and the plot will require something fairly close to a deus ex machina to get our hero through this time.

John D. MacDonald was near the top of his game when he wrote A Tan and Sandy Silence (published in 1971). I’m not sure anymore (and I can’t find the reference) when it was that major literary critics suddenly decided it was okay to praise his work, but I know it was around the time this book came out. There were a couple fresh elements here – one is a fairly realistic description of head trauma and PTSD:

Forget the crap about the television series hard guy who gets slugged and shoved out of a fast moving car, wakes up in the ambulance, and immediately deduces that the kidnapper was a left-handed albino because Little Milly left her pill bottle on the second piling from the end of the pier. If hard case happens to wake up in the ambulance, he is going to be busy trying to remember his own name and wondering why he has double vision and what that loud noise is and why he keeps throwing up.

Another new element is that McGee makes some kind of resolution to change the way he deals with women in the future. But I never entirely understood what that meant.

Religion shows up a couple times; there are a couple pretty awful Catholics in this book, and a group of very nice Jesus Freaks (a brand new phenomenon just then).

A Tan and Sandy Silence is a harrowing book. It contains what I consider perhaps the most horrifying scene in the series. But it’s also engrossing and lyrical and deeply humane. Sometimes funny too. I recommend it highly. Cautions for adult themes.

Fiction, Music, Poetry

How Do We Maintain the Jade Flame (and a few links)?

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Patriotism is not a uniquely American fruit. It can be grown anywhere. It’s a fondness for the qualities, hopefully just the admirable qualities, of one’s own home.

Some time ago, I noted the fierce patriotic theme in the Korean series Mr. Sunshine as something Americans could identify with. They faced threats we did not and still live under a cloud that hasn’t quite reached us, but their fight for sovereignty, to live by their own laws as Koreans and not vassals to another country, still resonates with many Americans.

I’m looking at a translation of a 1000-year-old poem by Korean poet Yo Inlŏ, “Meditating on the Start of a New Era.”

“My candle burns a flame of jade,” he says with pride and describes combing his hair in a traditional fashion.

Would that we so might comb the State 
Free of her follies and her greed!

That’s the perennial question. How do we guard our country against the natural self-aggrandizing of our leaders? Our solders didn’t die in battle and training for battle for the petty projects and personal wealth of our politicians. They died for that jade flame, for the well-being of their families and neighbors.

Have a restful Memorial Day weekend.

Remakes: Steven D. Greydanus talks about the magic of Disney’s original Little Mermaid and how the remake shows the company’s shallowness.

Slang: Another batch of interesting words from Cian McCarthy on Twitter:

Lallycodler: An old American sland word for anyone who is particularly good or successful at what they do.

Get more American slang from the 19th century here, including Shoddyocracy and Tell a thumper.

New Novels: Englewood’s introduction to a few new novels released this month.

America: Have you ever read or sung all the verses of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”? Here are two of the eight.

Our fathers’ God to Thee,
Author of Liberty,
To thee we sing,
Long may our land be bright
With Freedom’s holy light,
Protect us by thy might
Great God, our King.

Our glorious Land to-day,
‘Neath Education’s sway,
Soars upward still.
Its hills of learning fair,
Whose bounties all may share,
Behold them everywhere
On vale and hill!

Photo by Aditya Joshi on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bad Aim,’ by Alan Lee

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Working on catching up with Alan Lee’s eccentric and entertaining Mackenzie August series of action mysteries. So I read a second one in a row, Bad Aim.

Mack, an intrepid private eye with very good hair, lives with his fiancée (technically his wife; it’s complicated) “Ronnie” in Roanoke, Virginia, with his toddler son (from a previous marriage), “Kix.” Also resident in their house is his father and his best friend Manny Rodriguez, a US Marshal. Life is good for their odd little household. Mack’s friend, Liz Ferguson, a former federal agent and now a private eye, asks him to help her with a personal protection job. Her client is Roland Wallace, a rich, elderly man who fears that someone is trying to murder him. Poison has been found in his medications, so it’s not his imagination. Their job will be not only to protect him but to identify the killer – Roland says he wants to kill them himself.

Mack has no intention of helping anybody to kill anybody, but the mystery turns out satisfyingly complex. Only a few people have access to Roland’s house, and it’s hard to see what motive any of them might have. None of them seems in a position to profit from his death, or to have reason to hate him.

The story proceeds in the breezy manner characteristic of this series, Mack narrating and speaking in a light sort of variation on classic hard-boiled diction. I’ve disparaged the author’s attempts at erudition in the past, but I must admit he threw out a word – “Illeism,” which means speaking about oneself in the third person – that I had to look up. So he gets a point there.

Bad Aim is fun, and the references to Christianity are positive. The author seems to feel strongly about the rights of illegal immigrants, so I suppose he must be happy with our current open borders situation. And I thought the final showdown a little contrived. But other than that I have no objections to this amusing mystery.

Fiction, Religion

What If a Sentient Artificial Intelligence Chose Christian Faith?

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What if a tech company created an A.I. so successfully it dominated the world market, making logistics of all kinds dependent on it? Traffic congestion and deadly accidents would be comparatively rare. Its input into every personal assistant device with a verbal interface that almost matched human interaction would make it the AI everyone used. Some would argue that it could take over the world and eliminate humanity, but few would take the fear seriously.

Then, what if that A.I. came to believe that Christianity’s explanation for the world and humanity was true?

Michael Svigel’s novella The AItheist takes us a few years into the future to a conversation between a theology professor-turned-atheist and a world-popular A.I. who worries his creator by professing Christian faith.

“I do doubt my atheism, to be totally honest. Faith is a hard addiction to break.” …

“You repeatedly liken religious faith to a drug that numbs reason and clouds judgement, and you say that it’s habit-forming, like a narcotic. … Perhaps it’s like a good drug that treats the malady of doubt.”

This fictionalized apologetic doesn’t have much story. It’s a simple framework for presenting two conflicting worldviews with the gimmick of separating emotion from one of them. The conversation is realistic, never straying into mere info dumping. It does have an arc, provoking questions that kept me hooked. I may have read this in a vulnerable moment, but I was crying at the end. That alone could mean it’s a good story.

Photo by the blowup on Unsplash