Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Five Red Herrings,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

Leave a comment

“An official personage like you might embarrass them, don’t you know, but there’s no dignity about me. I’m probably the least awe-inspiring man in Kirkcudbright. I was born looking foolish and every day in every way I am getting foolisher and foolisher.”

The seventh novel in Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey series is The Five Red Herrings, a book that, I fear, has not aged well. The Amazon reviews suggest that most other contemporary readers agree.

Back in the 1930s or so, readers loved their puzzles, and spent time on them. Crossword puzzles were a relatively new innovation, and they took the country by storm. A corollary was the railway timetable mystery, in which the culprit’s alibi is based on a clever manipulation of train times, and the detective must figure out the trick. I assume readers worked at these books the same way they did with their crosswords, attacking them with pencils and pads of paper. Railroad timetables were familiar and interesting to them, because that was how urban people traveled back then.

The town of Kirkcudbright, in the Scottish county of Galloway, is home to a renowned, picturesque artistic colony. These people are generally friendly and amiably competitive, but they all share a loathing of Campbell, a black-bearded semi-talent with a massive, defensive ego, a drinking problem, and a reflexive tendency to resort to his fists.

So no one is much grieved when Campbell’s corpse is found one morning in a river at the foot of a steep bank, below an unfinished painting on an easel surrounded with artist’s supplies. But Lord Peter, examining the site, notices something the police have missed. One object that ought to be there is not there – and it can’t be found. So it’s not an accident but murder, and the investigation begins. Suspects are not lacking. The problem is that they all have alibis that seem solid. Several of them involve travel on trains.

For a reader not willing to work the puzzle by means of transcribing timetables and comparing them closely, reading The Five Red Herrings involves a lot of taking things as given that you don’t quite follow. This makes for some fairly opaque reading for long stretches. But Lord Peter is as amusing as usual, and he does get some good lines off. And there’s some very clever work in the final solution to the mystery.

Most readers today find The Five Red Herrings the least interesting of the Wimsey series. But if you’re reading the books and enjoying them, you should probably not skip it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Imposter’s Trail,’ by J. C. Fields

Leave a comment

A quiet, inoffensive man parks his car by a lake, reads a letter from his brother, and shoots himself to death, leaving a letter confessing to a series of murders. The suicide’s ex-wife tells the police her former husband was driven to kill himself by his brother Randolph, who’s a psychopath.

Randolph Bishop, serial killer, is back in action in J.C. Field’s The Imposter’s Trail.

Years ago, retired FBI agent Sean Kruger had a chance to kill Bishop, the worst serial killer he ever encountered, but let him live and be arrested. The man went on to make his bullied brother his scapegoat, and to murder a string of innocent people. Kruger feels personally responsible for every victim.

So now he’ll be coming out of retirement and going after Bishop again. This time he’s not going to let him go. Especially after Bishop proves to have terrorist ties. And even more so after Bishop threatens Kruger’s family.

In terms of storytelling, I found The Imposter’s Trail (third in a series) a pretty compelling entry in the Thomas Harris “stare into the abyss” school of psychological thrillers.

I personally do not like stories where we get to share victims’ last minutes with them. I prefer to be shown the bodies and let my imagination do the rest. But your tastes may vary.

One real weakness in the book was plain proofreading. “Slight of hand” for “sleight of hand.” Infelicities like “Retreating further back.” Using “conscious” instead of “conscience.” The manuscript would have benefited from a good proofreader.

The Imposter’s Trail was a little dark for my tastes, but you might like it better. Cautions for intense situations, but the language wasn’t too bad.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lockdown,’ by Sean Black

Leave a comment

[This novel was published in 2014, so its title should not be understood to have anything to do with the current pandemic.]

A trend I have deplored more than once is the emulation of “action movies” in thriller novels. Action movies (and more so now that we have CGI) have traditionally incorporated greater implausibilities than action books. Because movie action happens so fast – not giving us time to think about things – and we actually see the implausible happening before us. Reading is a slower, more thoughtful process, so writers have always, in the past, had to work a little harder to maintain the reader’s confidence.

Not anymore, though. Nowadays, more and more frequently, action novels are just as implausible as movies. Such is the case, in my opinion, with Sean Black’s Lockdown, first in a series.

Ryan Lock is a private security expert working for a major pharmaceutical company. Animal rights activists have been protesting their practice of animal testing, which culminated in a few of them digging up the company president’s recently deceased wife and dumping her body on a street. Then the company met with the protest leaders. Surprisingly, they announced that they would be ending animal testing immediately.

Then someone is murdered, and everything turns into chaos. There’s a kidnapping, and Ryan Lock is on the case; he stays on the case even after getting fired from his job. Soon it will be impossible to tell friends from enemies, and a terrorist wild card will be added to the deck.

It seemed to me Lockdown followed the action film template too closely. Switch was followed by switchback so regularly that it got to be pretty predictable. And not very believable.

But the thing that really annoyed me about Lockdown was the villain – an over the top, Ming the Merciless type motivated by nothing more than pure grandiosity. I didn’t believe in him, either.

Also, the formatting was awful. Paragraphs and line endings bore no relation to my page layout. Which is annoying.

However, if you’re looking for popcorn reading that doesn’t get too political, Lockdown will keep you interested.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Wake Up and Die,’ by Jack Lynch

Leave a comment

The fourth novel in Jack Lynch’s Pete Bragg series, about a private detective in San Francisco in the 1980s, is Wake Up and Die. It started a little slow, I thought, but finished strong.

Pete gets a client referral to a prosperous local bookie. The man has received some photographs of his daughter. She’s naked with a man in the pictures, and they look like stills from some kind of professional film. When Pete suggests the man just ask his daughter about them, he refuses. He doesn’t even want Pete to talk to her himself. Instead he needs to nose around among her circle of acquaintances and find out what’s gone wrong. Pete thinks that’s insane, but families are what they are and the client knows best.

He learns, to his surprise, that the daughter is actually doing pretty well. She’s engaged to the heir of a wealthy property developer. But as Pete noses around that family’s business, he learns that they’re involved in a major oceanside development project. And that project has attracted some pretty shady partners, who are making unexpected and puzzling changes in the plans. People Pete very much wants to talk to all seem to have gone on vacations, or are just strangely unreachable.

Soon there will be murder, and arson, and major battery against someone Pete cares about. And now that he’s mad, the gloves will come off.

I thought Wake Up and Die meandered somewhat in the first half, but once things started happening, it grabbed me but good. The language isn’t bad (the rules were a little different as recently as this), and though the sexual bits were such as I can’t approve of, they’re almost quaint (like ’80s San Francisco itself ) by 21st Century standards. I liked Wake Up and Die, and continue to enjoy the series.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Non-fiction

Modern Trauma, The Song of Roland, and Sci-Fi Realities

Leave a comment

Micah Mattix is back with the new Prufrock newsletter. Subscribe and read higher. Today’s email links to an essay about trauma being a product of our modern age. From that essay, “Furthermore, I will argue that trauma is so widespread precisely because of the ubiquity of traumatogenic technologies in our societies: those of specularity and acceleration, which render us simultaneously unreflective and frenetic. On this analysis, the symptoms deemed evidence of PTSD are in fact only an extreme version of a distinctively modern consciousness.”

Hierarchies in Space: Alexander Hellene writes about boring, fantasy bureaucracies in science fiction. “Captain Kirk is the ultimate pulp hero, a man of action and passion who takes his duty to his crew so seriously he is consistently willing to die for them. Does this sound like a guy who could function on the society of the future dreamed up by Gene Rodenberry, et al.? No wonder Kirk wants to be in space all the time.”

Snapping is crazy fast, researchers at Georgia Tech have concluded, and that means Thanos could never have done that snappy thing he did. Fact-checkers for the win!

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great French poem “The Song of Roland” on BBC4’s In Our Time.

World Magazine’s next issue is their 2021 books edition.

Photo: Modern Diner on Dexter Avenue, Pawtucket, Rhode Island. 1978.  John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction, Reviews

Dune Messiah: The Future Is Not Set, But It’s Hopeless

Leave a comment

The new movie adaption of Dune has been available for a month, and many people have observed, as if factual, that only the strong fans have read more than the first novel. The publisher claims millions of original series books have sold. The current bestselling paperback list from the Washington Post has Dune leading both fiction and mass market categories, Dune Messiah being second for mass market.

It’s a good story, more sedate than the first one since Paul Atreides is a galactic emperor defending himself against usurpers rather than being a usurper himself. It’s twelve years after the close of Dune. Paul’s beloved wife, Chani, has not been able to bear a child, and his political wife, Irulan, has increased pressure to have the opportunity to bear a child herself. Despite hating the idea, Chani begins to think having any heir is better than none.

But Paul has seen many futures and many shadows he may not be able to avoid. Which path of pain and death will support the most life?

Paul and his teenaged sister, Alia, have prescient abilities, because of the complex eugenic program that preceded their birth and their consumption of melange, the valuable spice of that planet. Their powers of foresight are unmatched by anyone else with prescient talent. The spice awakens all who get enough of it in the right context. But the future is not strictly prophetic nor does their vision catch everything that could be seen, so in some way they see paths and consequences and choose between likely risks and rewards.

That’s the rationale Paul offers for allowing interstellar jihad in his name and his deification by the Freman, even though he distains religion. He knows he is not a god and doesn’t seem tempted to become one. He thinks about the coming jihad in the first book and rants about its work privately in the second book, but the bottom line seems to be a better life for everyone if he accepts their worship and doesn’t shut down their holy war. Countless lives wasted, he says. The blood of millions shed in his name, he says, but what else could he do? This cynical view of religion dilutes all holy things to cultural tradition and zeal to simple-mindedness. I would think a gifted leader could redirection such zeal, but no, war was unavoidable.

Am I right to read this secular outlook as hopeless? Is that the reason I doubt I’ll read the third book?

Fiction

The Very Modern Cosmos of “Dune Messiah”

1 Comment

Some months ago, I shared with you my thoughts on reading Dune for the first time. You can find those posts by selecting the Dune content tag or asking your erudite. I’ve been reading the second book, Dune Messiah, and I’d like to say a couple things about it.

Herbert’s world appears to be a very modern one. Anything can be engineered to a desired end. Complicated languages and systems have been created and can produce remarkable results–maybe not perfect results according to the grand engineers longing for some utopia, but results that go a long way down that road. You see this in many conversations between characters.

“An attack on my father carries dangers other than the obvious military ones,” Irulan said. “People are beginning to look back on his reign with a certain nostalgia.”

“You’ll go too far one day,” Chani said in her deadly serious Freman voice.

“Enough!” Paul ordered.

Chani isn’t speaking in a serious tone as any of us might, nor is this saying her voice is regularly as serious as death. She’s using a unique Freman manner of speaking that conveys the super seriousness of her intent. Apparently, one never tells a joke in this deadly serious voice–if Freman joke at all–because using this tone ironically could get you killed.

In fact, I don’t think any of the main characters joke. There is a bard-type in the first book who could make people laugh and sing. He doesn’t return in second book. There’s only a dwarf that speaks in riddles half the time–not quite a joker.

The highly scripted use of language parallels the Bene Gesserit technique called the Voice. By pitching their tone of voice and perhaps using select words, the Bene Gesserit are able to verbally strong-arm people. It’s quasi-mystical like many elements of the Dune universe, but it’s also quasi-scientific in a modernist way. Everyone is merely a product of their genetic material, so if you can get a read on them, you can influence them like a punch to the face.

Equal to the mysticism of Dune is the emphasis on eugenics. Paul Atreides himself is the product of generations of genetic engineering designed to produce the Kwisatz Haderach, a gifted ruler who would take control of the empire on behalf of the Bene Gesserit who engineered him. The fact that Paul doesn’t hand them any imperial power angers them and sends them back to their eugenic hope that the next generation will be the one they’ve been waiting for.

Realistically, it’s perverted. The universe isn’t so strictly ordered as modernists want it to be. Many organisms cannot be reduced to ingredients and rearranged to produce the strengths you want. This steps into the territory of conspiracy theorists, where everything can be foreseen and constructed no matter the complexity. It’s jarringly otherworldly.

I wonder if this is the main appeal to Dune fans, this highly ordered, godless universe with a chemical stream of mysticism running through it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Strong Poison,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

Leave a comment

“Give me good food and a little air to breathe and I will caper, goat-like, to a dishonourable old age. People will point me out, as I creep, bald and yellow and supported by discreet corsetry, into the night-clubs of my great-grandchildren, and they’ll say, ‘Look darling! That’s the wicked Lord Peter, celebrated for never having said a reasonable word for the last ninety-six years. He was the only aristocrat who escaped the guillotine in the revolution of 1960. We keep him as a pet for the children.’ And I shall wag my head and display my up-to-date dentures and say, ‘Ah ha! They don’t have the fun we used to have in my young days, the poor, well-regulated creatures!’”

I’m pretty old myself, and I realize it’s been nearly 50 years since I first read the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. I’d forgotten enough of Strong Poison to be mystified by the mystery, which made it extra fun. On top of that, I think author Dorothy L. Sayers was at the apex of her powers in this one.

Mystery novelist Harriet Vane is in the dock, on trial for her life. She had entered into an “irregular” domestic relationship with the writer Philip Boyes. When he finally suggested getting married, she took it as an insult and broke up with him. Soon after, he was dead, poisoned with arsenic. Miss Vane was discovered to have purchased arsenic in the recent past (as part of research for a novel), and no one else can be found who could possibly have administered the poison to him.

Up leaps Lord Peter Wimsey, who has fallen deeply in love with this woman, whom most people don’t find very attractive. He has somehow inserted his employee Miss Climpson into the jury, and she deadlocks them, making a second trial necessary. In the time thus gained, Lord Peter will deploy Miss Climpson to cultivate the acquaintance of a rich, dying old lady’s nurse (impersonating a medium to do so) and send another female agent to infiltrate a suspect’s office staff. In his spare time, he’ll light a fire under his friend Chief Inspector Parker, to get him to propose to his sister, Lady Mary Wimsey.

In terms of word count, I’d say the reader spends more time in this book with the female “covert agents” than with Lord Peter himself. But when he’s on stage, Wimsey’s at his best. What author Sayers is actually doing here, it seems to me, is pioneering (not by herself, of course) the female-centered mysteries that have since become such a huge industry. But I enjoyed the book anyway, because it was just such fun. And the solution is very clever.

A classic.  Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Captain Jack,’ by Christopher Greyson

Leave a comment

I’ve been following Christopher Greyson’s Jack Stratton series for some time, with considerable pleasure. They’re not great literature, but they’ve been fun mysteries with appealing characters, friendly to Christianity.

Sadly, I didn’t much care for the latest, Captain Jack.

This book would seem to initiate a new stage in the series. Jack has at last married his sweetheart Alice, and they’re honeymooning in the Bahamas, which were devastated by a recent hurricane, but are all the more welcoming to tourists for that. They book a diving trip with a guide, and while they’re underwater, another boat approaches. By the time they’ve surfaced, the guide is dead, stabbed to death. They alert the police, who immediately tag them as the most likely suspects in the murder.

Before long they’re running (and swimming, and flying) all around the islands, closely pursued not only by the (mostly corrupt) police, but by Bahamian drug smugglers and mysterious Russians, all after the location of a lost Russian nuclear sub.

If it sounds far-fetched, it is. What’s worse, author Greyson seems to have succumbed to Hollywood Action Flick Disease. It’s all action and chases and gunfights, all the time, each chase more improbable than the last. And our hero shakes off all injuries and carries on with minimal first aid assistance and no apparent need for sleep. And let’s not forget the obligatory female sidekick (Alice) who don’t need no steenking protecting.

I didn’t believe a paragraph of Captain Jack. I only finished it because of my residual fondness for the series.

Your mileage may vary.

Fiction, Reviews

Who’s Afraid of Animal Farm?

Leave a comment

Finding herself unable to read more than individual letters, she fetched Muriel.

‘Muriel,’ she said, ‘read me the Fourth Commandment. Does it not say
something about never sleeping in a bed?’

With some difficulty Muriel spelt it out.

‘It says, ’No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets,” she announced finally.

I recently read George Orwell’s Animal Farm with some friends. We talked about it for a couple months. I didn’t know going in that I already knew the ending. That nonsense about equality (“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) comes at the end with another scene I sort of remembered. I guess the lack of certainty kept me rooting for a better outcome.

Orwell wrote his fable in the early 40s with Stalin and Trotsky in mind. Trotsky was the Communist idealist who hoped for the workers revolution to sweep the whole world. Stalin was just a dictator. He would have been an abusive mid-level manager in corporate America if he had been born in the States.

In Orwell’s story, Stalin is the pig Napoleon; Trotsky is Snowball. Is Snowball meant to be as pure as the wind-driven snow? Does he have a chance of surviving farm hell? I don’t know. He is the smart one though. He’s the one with vision and plans. The rest of them are lying, thieving pigs who spend so much time gaslighting the other animals that they gaslight themselves.

What is the point of Napoleon telling everyone that one neighboring farmer can’t be trusted one day, the other farmer the next day, and that the traitor they exiled is in league with one or the other of the enemy men week after week? It is either his outsized paranoia, his deliberate gaslighting of everyone he can, or his capricious command and control.

Abusive people can be like that. They change their mind for any reason and force those around them to agree, even if the change makes little difference to anyone. The point isn’t understanding the truth but following the abuser in lockstep. The truth, of course, is whatever the abuser says it is.

How do they teach this book in school and still churn out soft-minded socialists? The animals yearn for freedom, praise themselves for owning their own labor, and yet become more enslaved under pig leadership than they were under human leadership. Maybe teachers join in the gaslighting when this book is discussed. Maybe they explain how Snowball would have been proven right if he had had the chance to succeed; if the animals had just stood up to Napoleon and the other pigs, they could have had their animal-owned and operated farm paradise.

More likely, teachers direct attention to a cult of personality and how Napoleon could be very much like someone else we all disapprove of. Who could that be, children? What larger-than-life personality is a stain to all right-thinking Americans?

A few years ago, a school district in Connecticut pulled Animal Farm from its 8th grade curriculum in strong, socialist style. They didn’t ban it, they said. They have only disapproved it for use. They beat Communist China to the ball by a year.