Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

Dark Comedic Mystery “City of Angles”

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You’ve been devoted to the Church. As you know, we like to say that we don’t have followers. We have lenders. You give us your love and passion devotion, and we’re obligated to pay back the debt.”

Lars reviewed Jonathan Leaf’s debut novel, City of Angles, earlier, and with it being a mystery novel, that’s about as much of the plot as you’ll want to know before reading. What you don’t get from reviews is the style of humor Leaf employs.

[Disclaimer: I picked up the novel in response to the author’s request, having seen a friend’s referral days before.]

City of Angles isn’t a dark story. It’s standard fare for a character-driven murder mystery, and from almost every character you read something like the quotation above: “We don’t have followers. We have lenders.” Also from this same church context, we get this: “Selva had attained the status of FUP. This mean a fully unrepressed person. Those who opposed the Church were EMEs, or enemies of man’s emergence.” An FUP. That’ll catch on.

This actually rings true with my experience, in that some folks like to make acronyms and others like to use terms, and the Church of Life in this story resembles Scientology, which is probably just as debauched and oppressive as the Church is depicted. But in a way, everyone in this novel is debauched. Everyone is friendly, while it serves their purpose, and they drink sexual allure from the tap. Everything they can control they will try to control. And when a character finds himself at a dead end with all of his plans disassembled, he tells himself all PR is good PR and begins to wonder if he can sell his story. Even the cops are thinking this next thing could be their big break.

I enjoyed reading this book and look forward to Leaf’s success with it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Kormak’s Saga’

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Kormak, as this old illustration shows, was not shy about public displays of affection, even with married women.

When the brothers put out from their place of anchorage, a walrus surfaced beside the ship. Kormak fired a weighted staff at it, hitting the animal, so that it sank. People thought they recognized Thorveig’s eyes when they saw it. The animal did not surface from then on; and it was reported of Thorveig that she was dangerously ill, and people say that she died as a result.

When we think of troubled poets today, we tend to imagine languid aesthetes wasting away with alcoholism or drug addiction. Troubled poets in the Viking Age seem to have been rather different sorts – pugnacious types and psychopathic killers. We discussed the greatest of them, Egil Skallagrimsson, a little while back. Today our topic is a lesser poet in a lesser saga, Kormak’s Saga, as published in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, but available in other formats as well.

Kormak’s name, I might mention, is the same as the Irish name Cormac. This is yet another testimony to the heavy infusion of Irish and Scottish elements into Icelandic society and culture (the same is true of the saga hero Njal’s name, which is the Irish Niel). Like Egil, Kormak is big and strong, though less ugly.

Kormak first notices Steingerd Thorkelsdatter of Tunga when he catches a glimpse of her foot through a doorway. Immediately he dedicates a poem to the foot, and when he sees the rest of the girl he’s not disappointed. He pursues her, and their marriage is arranged. However, when the wedding day occurs, he doesn’t show up. Yet when her family tries to marry her off to other men, Kormak routinely makes war on them – in some cases killing them. This behavior looks like prolonged adolescence and fear of commitment to the modern reader, but the saga explains it as the consequence of a witch’s curse. One looks in vain here for the kind of psychological insight we find in Egil’s Saga.

The most interesting character in the saga, in fact, is not Kormak himself but Bersi the Duelist, who dominates the middle part of the story. Though a famous man-killer, he’s far more sympathetic than Kormak, something like the Old Gunfighter trope in Western movies.

Kormak’s Saga is believed to be one of the oldest ones that’s been preserved, but that’s no guarantee of artistic quality. The episodes in the story appear to have been reconstructed (rather freely) from hints in the poems the hero left behind. And the hints look very much as if they’ve been misinterpreted a fair amount of time. Many of the incidents, frankly, make little sense.

Kormak’s Saga is interesting for its age, and also – in particular – for accounts of dueling customs in the Viking Age. As a piece of art, it’s fairly middling.

I should mention that a couple of Kormak’s love poems include pretty explicit descriptions of sexual organs.

Fiction

Egil’s Saga: On the ground

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In the video above, Dr. Matthew Roby discusses Egil’s Saga (which I reviewed the other day), filming at some of the precise Icelandic sites where the action occurred. I found it atmospheric and fascinating.

I was also interested to note that the large blue book from which he reads Egil’s poem to his dead son is the very volume I’ve been reading myself (thanks to Dale Nelson’s generosity) from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead of Night,’ by Robert McNeill

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Maurice Hillard is a French scholar teaching at the University of Edinburgh. He has a reputation as a ladies’ man, not discriminating between his own students and other men’s wives. So there’s no lack of suspects when he’s found dead in the Union canal, his neck broken. But all the chief suspects seem to have good alibis. Meanwhile, Inspector Jack Knox is under pressure from his superiors to solve the crime quickly, without scandal.

Meanwhile, his colleague and fiancée (how do they work that out?) Yvonne Mason is bedeviled by someone vandalizing her car and apartment door. Little does she know that this harassment is just part of a plot by a clever criminal, for whom she’s a means to a sinister end.

I’ve read previous volumes in the Jack Knox series. I like them but don’t love them; they’re well written.

What I personally disliked in this book was a very modern view of marriage. A highly nasty character invokes the Christian view of matrimony for evil purposes (though nothing is actually said about Christianity per se), and divorce is treated lightly – as it tends to be in any book written nowadays. And, of course, the Scottish Presbyterians have a history of easy divorce, as is well known from British history.

But these matters aren’t actually harped on. Dead of Night was professionally written and enjoyable to read. Moderately recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Preacher’s First Murder,’ by K. P. Gresham

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Pastor Matt Hayden of Wilks, Texas is a new creation in more than the spiritual sense. Once a Miami police detective, the hero of The Preacher’s First Murder entered the federal witness relocation program after a horrible day in which his brother and father, both cops, were killed. He changed his name, went to Lutheran seminary, and then the church sent him here. He has learned that the town and the church have their own strict rules of behavior. One of those is that the pastor needs to stay away from the Fire and Ice House, the bar just across the river from his church. It’s run by the beautiful Angie, daughter of Maeve, the owner, who suffers from Alzheimer’s.

Maeve goes missing, and Matt recruits some church members to help with the search – to the outrage of the Wilks family, which owns the town and runs the church. Their matriarch nurses a particular hatred for Maeve, but Matt feels a responsibility as a Christian.

When Maeve turns up dead, shot by a stupid Yankee hunter farther out of town than she should have been able to walk on her own, Matt’s old cop instincts tell him something’s fishy. And when the sleazy local gas station owner is murdered and Angie is arrested for it, Matt has no choice but to start his own investigation. Especially because he’s Angie’s alibi, and she refuses to let him reveal it, for the sake of his reputation in the church.

I’ve often said that I avoid novels written by women; my experience is that they tend to write their male characters poorly. I didn’t realize that author K. P. Gresham was a woman when I read this book, but I’m forced to admit – much against my will – that she didn’t do a bad job. And the writing in general was well done, which counts for a lot in the depressed world of Christian fiction.

I did have a few problems with the story, though. The picture of the Lutheran church in the book was surprisingly negative – the domination of church business by women was certainly realistic, but (although I grew up in a very puritanical church) I never encountered a church as judgmental as this one. We always understood that you can’t ostracize sinners – you have to reach out to them.

Also, I was a little puzzled by the theology. This does seem to be a Christian novel (the complete lack of dirty words is kind of a tip-off), but I wasn’t sure what theology was being promoted. Pastor Matt’s concern with doing good to others was perfectly consistent with Christian morality. But Christian morality seemed to be all he had. There was no mention of God’s grace or of the cross. A reader might get the impression that good deeds are all the Faith is about.

Still, The Preacher’s First Murder was pretty good, all in all. I might be persuaded to read the second book in the series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Killing Game,’ by Jeff Buick

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Curtis Westcott is Chief of Homicide in Boston in A Killling Game, first book in a series by Jeff Buick. In this story, a rich and powerful man’s daughter is kidnapped by a criminal who doesn’t want money, but revenge. And to show the police how smart he is.

As the story proceeds, Curtis realizes that the killer is leaving a series of messages for him. These messages contain hidden riddles which – if he can solve them – will make it possible for him to stop the murder.

That’s really all I think I’m going to tell you about the plot. Because frankly, I don’t think this book deserves a lot of description.

It follows a formula you see often in thrillers – the super-smart criminal mastermind plays a game with the police, confident that his superior intelligence makes him unassailable, but longing at the same time for “a worthy adversary.”

I’m pretty sure this never happens in real life. A writer can make it work, but it takes a lot of skill.

Also, the plot involves a trail of obscure brain puzzles, which the detectives have to solve before the clock runs out.

I’m confident that this never, ever happens in real life. I did not believe this aspect of the story for a single moment.

Also, it struck me as ironic that the plot calls for the interpretation of ridiculously obscure verbal clues, while the author himself didn’t trust the reader to understand his plain words – the book is in fact overwritten. It would benefit from a great deal of cutting.

This happens when an author assumes his audience is too stupid to understand him, or when he doubts his own narrative power, so he reiterates everything he says.

[Here’s a Deathless Principle from Walker’s School of Writing: Good writing is like leading a friend along a path to see a beautiful vista. Once you’ve led him to the ridge where he can look out and see it, don’t keep informing him what he’s seeing. If you led him to the right spot he’ll see for himself.]

So I didn’t care much for A Killing Game. Though I have to admit I powered through to the end, just to see how it came out. Which, I suppose, means the author actually did his job, even if he didn’t do it the way I’d have liked.

Fiction, Reviews

‘City of Angles,’ by Jonathan Leaf

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During this time, he had prepared his own lengthy speech, a philippic the equal of Cato’s addresses against Carthage. Everything about her was fake and phony. She was a cheat and a liar and a bad woman. She was a threat to goodness, and, inasmuch as silicone was made from sand, she was a menace to the continued existence of the world’s beaches.

[Disclaimer: The book under consideration here, City of Angles, was referred to me by a friend, and I received a free review copy from the author.]

Billy Rosenberg is a struggling Hollywood writer. On the strength of one successful novel he moved to California to work in the movies. But his career is struggling. He’s painfully aware, in a town where presentation is everything, of the impression he makes with his cheap shoes and rattletrap car.

So he’s surprised when beautiful, surgically-enhanced actress Vincenza Morgan (originally Kelli Haines of Eagan, Minnesota) sits down at his table in a coffee shop and talks to him. Vincenza is, in fact, scared. Her career had seemed about to take off, thanks to an indie film she just helped produce. She’d gotten A-list star Tom Selva to star in it, thanks to their mutual membership in the International Church of Life (think Scientology), the most powerful force in town. Everything looked great, until she opened her car trunk and found Selva’s corpse stuffed inside.

She knew she ought to call the police, but she was on her way to an audition, and the First and Greatest Law of Hollywood is you never blow off an audition; being dead would only be a marginal excuse. And now she thinks she’s being tailed by agents of the Church in a van. She could really use a place to stay tonight…

City of Angles is a comedy of manners – but it’s dark comedy, and the manners are Hollywood manners. The chief thing one learns in this story is that nobody ever says what they mean. Candor is kryptonite. One honest word might undermine the whole town and slide it into the ocean. The plot works out happily, though – depending on what you mean by “happily.” Which leaves the reader with things to consider.

I’m a sucker for a Hollywood tale – I’ve felt the city’s attraction but am very far from having the nerve to challenge it face to face. So I enjoyed City of Angles, which was expertly written and packed with sharp innuendo. [One technical error I noted was that the author places Burnsville High School in Eagan, Minnesota rather than in Burnsville where it belongs both in logic and fact. I can only assume that locations have been changed to protect the innocent.]

Recommended, with cautions for grownup stuff.

Fiction, Goofing

The Sound of Words Change, Reading Courage, and Jargon Demo

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It doesn’t take much to raise questions about the English language that the casual user can’t answer. Why do we pronounce bury and berry the same way? Fury and jury look like the way they sound, but not bury.

In Old English, the word for bury was byrgan, and that “y” was pronounced like a short “oo” or “ew” as in took and few. Many other words used “y” and were converted to an “i” spelling. Bridge and kiss are two examples, but bury didn’t follow the normal route and retains, I gather, something of its historic sound. I suppose berry from Old English berie always sounded like we pronounce it today with bright and shallow 21st century American accents.

I learned another thing while looking this up. No, two things. First, the Internet isn’t great at teaching you how to pronounce certain types of words. Ask it how you pronounce the Old English gecyþnisse, and you’ll get this link, which is good. Ask it how to pronounce dryhten. Oh, it’s “driç.ten.” But I want to hear it, not read another spelling of it. And what about the “oo” sound for y’s?

Second, the words apple and berry are the original words for fruit. If the fruit in your hand isn’t a berry, it’s an apple, even as late as Middle English. Bananas in Middle English were “apples of paradise.” Dates to “finger-apples.” Cucumbers were “earth-apples,” and, yes, cucumbers are fruit. Melon developed in Greek from a word meaning “goard-apple” and was used generally for fruit.

Anyway, what else we got?

Crime Novel: A new comedic crime novel is “morbidly funny” and “lighthearted literary entertainment at its best.” City of Angles is playwright Johnathan Leaf’s first novel. You’ll be reading more about it in days to come.

Downgrading Education: “What worries today’s administrators about [great books] is not their purported irrelevance, nor the allegedly harmful language or controversial arguments they contain. It is rather the example they provide of characters like Huck Finn, who preferred eternal damnation to snitching on his friend Jim.”

Favorite Novel: “Simply put, Tristram Shandy is a novel I love, one I’ve reread more often than almost any other. It never wears out . . .” I remember one of my English professors loving it too.

And finally, a brief presentation of Rockwell Automation’s retro encabulator in easy to understand, common sense jargon.

Breaking News: A sequel demo was released last year, “living proof that leveraging existing assets is not plagiarism.”

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

Fiction, Reviews

‘An Inconvenient Death,’ by Dan Walsh

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In the second book of the Joe Boyd series, An Inconvenient Death, Joe, a police detective in the town of Culpepper, is camping with his family (apparently he’s a workaholic, and this is a good development). While his son is walking their new puppy, the dog locates a buried human skeleton. Although Joe calls the discovery in, he manages to convince his superior officer to let him continue his vacation, leaving his younger subordinate Hank to start the investigation on his own.

Hank proves to be very competent. Based on what remains of the clothing, along with a high school class ring found nearby, he manages to pinpoint the likely victim – a boy who worked in a local convenience store and vanished in 1988.

Meanwhile, in a writers’ group that meets at a local church, a couple female members are annoyed by one of the male members. He’s socially awkward and “creepy,” and he keeps bringing in pages from his work in progress – a book about how three high school boys murder a convenience store worker and hide his body in the woods.

G. K. Chesterton once said (I quote from memory), “There are two meanings to the word ‘good.’ If a man were to shoot his grandmother from a distance of 500 yards, I would call him a good shot. I would not necessarily call him a good man.”

There are two kinds of good book — a book that is morally good, or a book that is good in terms of the writing craft. An Inconvenient Death is morally good. Salutary virtues are praised and nobody uses a word harsher than “crap.” Even more admirably, it deals in a genuinely Christian way with the awkward issue of scandal in the church.

It is not, however, good in terms of writing. The author, like so many young authors, overwrites. He informs us what people are thinking and feeling without letting them reveal those thoughts and emotions through gesture and dialogue. He sometimes doubles his dialogue – first recounting a conversation, and then having that conversation repeated to another character in detail (this bores the reader). He tells us how people greet each other at the beginnings of conversations (also boring and unnecessary). There are grammar mistakes from time to time too.

Also, the suspense could have been ratcheted up considerably.

So, my bottom line is, I appreciate the effort to write a clean, uplifting mystery, but An Inconvenient Death wasn’t very well written.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Penitent Priest,’ by J.R. & Susan Mathis

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I suppose this will happen more and more as I grow old and fuzzy-brained, and the list of books I’ve read stretches longer than the unabridged dictionary. I picked up a set of the first three books in the Father Tom series for Kindle, only realizing toward the end of the first volume, The Penitent Priest, that I’d already read it. And reviewed it here. And forgotten it completely.

The Amazon page says this is a revised edition, so maybe the changes were extensive enough to mitigate my embarrassment. I note that my main concern with the book the first time through was the number of coincidences in the plot. I felt the same way this time, but it didn’t bother me as much. Perhaps that’s one of the problems they addressed in the revision.

In any case, Father Tom Greer is a Catholic priest in Pennsylvania. He came to his vocation late in life, following the murder of his wife in Myerton, the town where they lived. The crime has never been solved. Shortly thereafter Tom cut all local ties and left town, eventually attending seminary, getting ordained, and being put to work as an archivist.

But now (the book is narrated in the present tense, something I dislike on principle. Though I can’t say it actually decreased my enjoyment any) the archbishop has assigned him to fill in for the priest at St. Clare’s Church in Myerton. Then one day, in the confessional, someone tells Tom something that makes him believe they witnessed his wife’s murder, and might even be responsible. Then he gets a look at his late wife’s laptop, which a friend has been holding, and learns from her e-mails that she had a stalker. But when he tells the police detective in charge of the case, she says that’s not enough for her to take action on.

This encounter is complicated by the fact that the detective turns out to be a former girlfriend of Tom’s, one he nearly married before he met his wife.

What I liked about this book – the prose is excellent. The dialogue is natural, smart, and engaging. The characters are believable.

What I disliked (though not as much as on my first reading) — the number of coincidences in the plot. They interfered with my willing suspension of disbelief.

Still, considering that this is a “clean” novel, without profanity or sex and with excellent moral values, I was very impressed with The Penitent Priest. Our hyper-Protestant readers may not consider a Catholic novel a “Christian” work, but I think most any Christian can read this book and appreciate its values and even (for the most part) its theology.

So I recommend it, all things considered. I enjoyed reading The Penitent Priest. I think the authors have talent and good instincts.