Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Egil’s Saga,’ by Snorri Sturlusson

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That same evening that Egil left home, Skallagrim had his horse saddled, then rode away from home when everyone else went to bed. He was carrying a fairly large chest on his knees, and had an iron cauldron under his arm when he left. People have claimed ever since that he put either or both of them in the Krumskelda marsh, with a great slab of stone on top.

Skallagrim came home in the middle of the night, went to his bed, and lay down, still wearing his clothes. At daybreak next morning, when everybody was getting dressed, Skallagrim was sitting on the edge of the bed, dead, and so stiff that they could neither straighten him out nor lift him no matter how they tried.

If you ask a saga fan which is the best saga, they’re likely to say either Egil’s or Njal’s Saga. In my case, it usually depends on which one I’ve read last. Both sagas excel in one quality you don’t expect in a medieval book – complex, layered characterization. In some ways they’re like modern novels.

But they don’t start out like novels. A novel writer tries to start with a bang, to engage the reader in the conflict from page one. Icelandic sagas are localized stories written for a localized audience. The first thing the Icelandic reader wanted to know was where the action would occur, and where in the matrix of interrelationships around him the story falls. So we start Egil’s Saga with the tale of Egil’s grandfather Thorolf, who supported King Harald Fairhair’s conquest of Norway, then fell out of favor and was finally killed by the king Then we see how Egil’s father Skallagrim relocates to Iceland (getting his vengeance along the way), and stakes his claim as one of the early settlers. Finally Egil himself appears – big and strong, ugly and soon bald, but wicked smart and the greatest of all skaldic poets.

Egil goes out as a Viking – what else could he do? – and also tries to claim his inheritance in Norway, becoming a mortal enemy to King Eirik Bloodaxe, whose son he murders. He fights as a mercenary in England (on the English side) and has the kind of set-piece side-adventures that tend to show up in sagas.

Eventually, we come to the dramatic climax of the saga – amazingly, not a battle or even a duel. It’s an act of headstrong audacity. Shipwrecked on the coast of Northumbria, Egil learns that Eirik Bloodaxe is the new king of the country. Instead of putting on a hooded cloak and making tracks, Egil heads straight for York, to beard the king in his den. Supported by his best friend, the king’s man Arinbjorn, Egil offers Eirik a proposition. In return for his life, he will compose a poem for the king so brilliant and memorable that it will secure his fame forever. When he succeeds (brilliantly), Eirik is left with no choice. To kill Egil now would shame him forever.

Make no mistake – Egil is a bad man. He’s a thief, a slave-taker, a cold-blooded killer. He cherishes his hatreds and dabbles in magic. And he doesn’t mellow as he gets older; only weakness makes him a little safer to be around.

Yet there’s pathos there as well. His poetry provides a glimpse into his heart as he mourns the friends and family he’s lost, and the injustices he’s suffered. He’s as faithful a friend as he is dangerous as an enemy. And his courage is mind-boggling. Possibly pathological (there are many theories about brain and psychological disorders he may have suffered from).

I was pretty effusive in my praise of the translation of the Vinland sagas in the collection I’m now reading, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. I must admit I was less happy with this translation (by a different translator). I thought it erred a bit on the side of literalism, suffering the awkwardness that literal translation entails. (Stylistically, I prefer the Penguin edition.) I also noted a couple textual oddities I hadn’t remarked on before. One is name spelling. Some of the choices seem to me odd – Hakon for Håkon, for instance – it gives English reader the wrong impression about pronunciation. And Kari for Kåri – a Norwegian acquaintance once complained to me about using that spelling in The Year of the Warrior, as in modern Norwegian Kari is a woman’s name (I changed the spelling in the next volume). The orthography is oddly mixed – they use double quotation marks in the American style, but English spelling, as in “harbour.” A lot of characters’ nicknames are rendered in novel ways; I’m not sure that adds to the value of the thing.

What we have here, I think, is a scholarly translation. I still recommend the collection for its completeness, if you can afford it. But you can get Egil’s Saga in a perfectly adequate translation for much less.

In either case, I do recommend you read it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin,’ by P.G. Wodehouse

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He was overcome by the poignancy of the situation. Here was a girl who had frankly admitted that in her opinion he was Prince Charming galloping up on his white horse and would have liked nothing better than to be folded in his embrace and hugged till her ribs squeaked, and here was he all eagerness to do the folding and hugging, and no chance of business resulting because the honour of the Bodkins said it mustn’t. Beat that for irony, he thought as he rubbed his shin. It was the sort of thing Thomas Hardy would have got a three-volume novel out of.

Having intensely enjoyed, and positively reviewed, The Luck of the Bodkins the other day, I thought I might as well go right ahead and review the sequel, Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin. (Monty also figures largely in a previous book, Heavy Weather, a Blandings story. I’ll have to be getting on to that one too, though it will be out of sequence.)

PG & MB redresses one of the few niggling problems that exist with TLOtB, otherwise a near-perfect confection. The sensitive reader can’t avoid the nagging sense that in getting engaged to Gertrude Butterwick, All England field hockey player, Monty has made a blunder. Monty is much like Bertie Wooster – except that he wants to be married – and one can hear Jeeves saying, if Bertie had ever found himself handcuffed to La Butterwick, “The young lady is undoubtedly healthy and vigorous, sir. But might I suggest that a person with her record of breaking multiple engagements might conceivably be a touch too volatile in temperament for the establishment of a felicitous domestic partnership?”

In short, the reader wants Monty to be happy, and under Gertrude’s thumb he’s likely to sink to the level of a third-rate power. Monty requires a woman a little more cheerful. A little more trusting. A woman less subservient to the commands of her blighted, vegetarian father.

So when Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin opens, one year to the day from the close of the previous novel –

[At this point I need to break off and blather a moment about the question of time in Wodehouse. The Luck of the Bodkins was published in 1935, and somewhere in the last couple pages it’s mentioned that Prohibition was recently repealed in the US. Monty’s deal with Gertrude’s father calls for him to hold a paying job for one year before they can be married. At the beginning of PG & MB, we’re told that that year has now passed. But PG & MB was published in 1972, nearly forty years later. One of its first pages mentions TV studio audiences. In the dreary world you and I inhabit, there was no point in history at which the first thing could have been separated by a single year from the second. But this is Wodehouse world, that foretaste of Paradise in which time exists only for the purposes of the story, and the world never changes much.]

So, as I was saying, this book starts one year after we left off. Monty has been toiling away, doing unspecified tasks, as a technical advisor at Superba-Llewellyn Studios in Hollywood. His secretary, Sandy Miller, has fallen head-over-espadrilles in love with him, but she knows his heart belongs to Gertrude. And now, he announces, he’s headed back to England to claim his bride.

However, when he arrives, Monty finds old Mr. Butterwick unwilling to close the deal. He has learned, he tells Monty, that Monty acquired his job with Superba-Llewellyn through blackmail (which is true), and so it doesn’t count. Monty finally persuades the old blighter to give him one more year.

Then Sandy shows up, to his surprise. She’s in England with her boss, Ivor Llewellyn, who has taken a country house for an extended sojourn. He has done this at the bidding of his imperious wife Grayce, who wants him to write a history of his studio. In fact, he needs a secretary to help him with the book. The perfect job for Monty!

The action switches to the country house at that point, and comes to focus on a valuable pearl necklace currently belonging to Grayce, a gift from Ivor. Ivor confesses to Monty that, because Grayce has him on a strict budget, he pawned the necklace some time back and replaced it with cultured pearls. Now their daughter is getting married, and the necklace is supposed to go to her. Ivor will pay Monty handsomely to steal the necklace and drop it in the water somewhere. They are unaware that there are three actual jewel thieves also staying in the house, plotting to relieve him of the job.

In terms of classic Wodehouse prose, Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin stands equal to any other work in his corpus, despite the fact that he was over 90 when it was published. Plot-wise, I’d have to say he’d slipped a little. The book seems to wrap up prematurely, with a lot of possible plot twists passed over. There are long stretches where Monty really has no problems at all, and just seems unaware of it.

Still, a very amusing book, and it’s great to see Monty settle with a suitable girl.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Luck of the Bodkins,” by P.G. Wodehouse

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‘…Why not take a chance? You would like Hollywood, you know. Everybody does. Girdled by the everlasting hills, bathed in eternal sunshine. Honest, it kind of gets to you. What I mean, there’s something going on there all the time. Malibu. Catalina. Aqua Caliente. And if you aren’t getting divorced yourself, there’s always one of your friends is, and that gives you something to chat about in the long evenings. And it isn’t half such a crazy place as they make out. I know two-three people in Hollywood that are part sane.’

Monty Bodkin, hero of P.G. Wodehouse’s The Luck of the Bodkins, is a fairly unassuming chap. Decent looking, and rich to boot. All he wants is to marry Gertrude Butterwick, stalwart member of the All England Women’s Field Hockey team. But Gertrude, for all her charms, has a lamentable inclination to jealousy. While they were at Cannes, she noticed Monty appreciating the on-screen beauty of movie star Lotus Blossom, and she promptly broke their engagement. Now she’s about to board the ship SS Atlantic, steaming off to America with her teammates.

So Monty books passage himself. On the same ship, as luck (and the plot) would have it, sails none other but Lotus “Lottie” Blossom herself, along with her fiancé, Monty’s old school chum Ambrose Tennyson, whom Lottie’s boss, movie tycoon Ivor Llewellyn (also aboard), has hired as a screen writer (under the misapprehension that he’s the Tennyson who wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade”). Ivor is suffering internal torments, having been commanded by his masterful wife to smuggle a pearl necklace into New York for her. Also aboard is Ambrose’s brother Reggie, off to take an unwanted job in Canada on the orders of his family. He’d rather marry Ivor’s assistant Mabel, but can’t afford it.

So what we’ve got is three young couples, two of whom are desperately trying, as fortunes alter, to find angles by which to manipulate Ivor into giving the guy a cushy Hollywood job. Except for Monty, who neither wants nor needs a job, but Gertrude’s father expects him to hold one as a demonstration of character. As all this intrigue swirls around the dyspeptic movie tycoon, everyone’s calculations are advanced and frustrated, in turn, by Albert Peasemarch, the well-meaning but not terribly bright room steward, sort of a Jeeves without the intellect.

I first read The Luck of the Bodkins back in the 1970s, and remembered it as one of my favorites. I am pleased to report that age has not dimmed, nor custom staled, its infinite variety. This particular novel is especially rich in Wodehouse Girls – those mercurial, impulsive, implacable creatures who rule their men absolutely and are clearly well on their ways to becoming those formidable Aunts who infest Bertie Wooster’s adventures. Lottie Blossom is a prime example, and one of my personal favorites.

Highly, highly recommended. I laughed out loud, at frequent intervals.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Tale of Frithiof the Bold,’ translated by Magnusson and Morris

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Photo credit: Ssolbergj

I usually top a book review with a picture of the book’s cover, but the Kindle version of the book I’m dealing with tonight is a generic free book design. So instead, I present you a picture of the gigantic statue of Frithiof the Bold that overlooks the Sognefjord in Norway. I’ve seen it, but only from a distance, as I cruised in a ship on the fjord. This statue was erected by none other than Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who was a huge fan of Frithiof’s Saga, which I’ll be reviewing tonight. I figured it had been a while since I’d reviewed a saga, and Frithiof’s, though a legendary one, has many points of interest, not least for its reception in fairly modern times. I’ve written about it before, a number of years ago, but I have more to say now. I read The Story of Frithiof the Bold in Eirikr Magnusson’s and William Morris’ classic translation.

Frithiof (or Fridtjof, there are variable spellings) is the son of a minor Viking chieftain. His family lives on one side of the Sognefjord in Norway, while King Beri lives on the other. The king and Frithiof’s father are good friends, but their sons don’t get along. Frithiof is (of course) tall, handsome, strong, and bold – everything a Viking should be. The king’s sons seem capable enough, but Frithiof always outshines them, and they hate him for it. Their sister Ingibiorg, however, likes Frithiof very well, and they make personal vows to each other. At one point, when the king and the brothers are away, Frithiof dallies with Ingibiorg in the god Baldur’s sacred precincts, where such carryings-on are forbidden.

So when King Beri dies, the kings’ sons send Frithiof on a diplomatic mission, to collect tribute in Orkney. While he’s gone, they burn down his farm and marry Ingibiorg off to old King Ring of Ringerike in eastern Norway.

After many adventures, Frithiof comes to serve (under an alias) in King Ring’s court. In that capacity, he becomes the king’s protector. He gets the chance to kill him, but resists the temptation. This leads ultimately to that rarest of elements in a saga – a happy ending.

If you’d lived most anywhere in western Europe in the early to mid-19th Century, you’d have probably been familiar with Frithiof’s Saga. It went viral while most of the sagas were still largely unknown. This was because a Swedish poet, Esaias Tegnér, discovered it and translated it in verse form. His poem was in turn translated into many other languages. Readers responded to its heroic tone, and also to its (apparent) elements of forgiveness and reconciliation. These made it more accessible to the Victorian, Christian reader than such sagas as Njal’s or Egil’s.

My own reading (even in Magnusson’s and Morris’ very Victorian translation) suggests that this interpretation is not entirely correct. Frithiof is admirable, indeed, in not killing the king who had married the girl he loved. But for the saga audience, his virtue lies not so much in forgiveness and finding a peaceful solution (the name Frithiof actually means “peace-thief”), but in his living up to the ethos of his culture, at some personal cost. Frithiof’s enemies are Ingibiorg’s brothers, not King Ring, who has acted honorably throughout. On top of that, he was a good and brave king, deserving of honor. Frithiof has sworn oaths to protect Ring, so protect him he does. His treatment of Ingibiorg’s brothers will be rather different. They’ve treated him treacherously, and can expect little mercy from him.

Reading The Story of Frithiof the Bold from my own perspective, as a lifelong student of Erling Skjalgsson of Sola, I discovered certain parallels to Erling’s own saga, as preserved in Heimskringla. They’re intriguing and (I must admit) a little troubling.

For instance, at one point Frithiof is offered the title of king, but refuses it because none of his ancestors were kings. Erling does that very thing, as you may recall from The Year of the Warrior. (Though Frithiof does accept a kingship at the end of the story.) Also, there’s an objection to Frithiof’s marrying Ingibiorg, because he doesn’t have high enough rank. Similar, again, to Erling’s story. Also, the line from the poem Bjarkamál, “Breast to breast the eagles will claw each other,” is quoted in both tales.

Then we’re told that Frithiof eventually came to rule Hordaland, the homeland of Erling’s own family. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Frithiof was one of Erling’s ancestors. It may well be that Snorri had Frithiof in mind when he wrote about Erling.

The Story of Frithiof the Bold is worth reading, though I’m not a great fan of the antique diction Magnusson and Morris employ. (I have to admit, though, that that gimmick allows them to use actual Old Norse words as archaisms from time to time.) Certainly, as in the 19th Century, it remains one of the most accessible saga tales.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Shelter from the Storm,’ by Tony Dunbar

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I’m also on the waiting list at St. Olaf’s.”

“Saint who? Who the heck is he?”

“I don’t know. It’s a college in Minnesota. One of the boys I met on my trip to France is going there.”

“Minnesota,” he repeated, incredulous. “Please pass me a scone.”

“I’d like to see more of the world,” she said.

The exchange above is from a conversation between Tubby Dubonnet, hero of Shelter from the Storm, fourth book in Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet series, and one of his daughters. It’s typical of the droll quality of the dialogue in these books, though I mainly chose it because it’s a rare reference to Minnesota and a Norwegian-American school.

By the way, it’s “St. Olaf,” not “St. Olaf’s.” A typically Catholic mistake.

Anyway, in Shelter From the Storm, a Texas outlaw named LaRue has hired some local criminals in New Orleans to help him crack a bank safe deposit vault during Mardi Gras, when he figures no one will be paying a lot of attention. (He is correct in this.)

What he doesn’t expect is rain – not just ordinary rain, but a torrential monsoon that cancels parades and floods the streets and knocks out power in the city. When things go wrong, LaRue has a tendency to shoot people. One of the people he shoots happens to be a new legal client of Tubby Dubonnet’s, and Tubby takes that seriously. He can’t call the police because the phones are out and they’re kind of busy rescuing people, but he’ll chase the miscreants on his own. Even if it means neglecting the new girlfriend he’s met.

If that seems a little over the top, well, Tubby can surprise you sometimes. He’s a fairly lazy fellow, but he has spirit. These books are rich in quirky characters – a little too quirky for my taste sometimes, though amusing.

As I’ve said before, I don’t love the Tubby Dubonnet books, but I don’t hate them either. I have a fairly low threshold for quirkiness, and New Orleans isn’t really my kind of town.

I must also complain that Shelter from the Storm ended with a sort of a cliff-hanger, which is an offense in my code.

But the books are popular, so what do I know?

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Only Death That Matters,’ by Colin Conway

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I’ve skipped a few episodes in Colin Conway’s excellent The 509 series of police procedurals. That was because The Only Death That Matters became available free. But they’re stand-alones, so it was all right. I enjoyed this book just as much as its predecessors.

Ray Christy is a police volunteer. He’s 72 and an army vet. Every day he visits his wife, who’s in a care facility for memory loss. His only son became a cop and died in the line of duty; Ray volunteered to help the Spokane police in an effort to understand his son’s commitment. He doesn’t carry a badge or a gun; he does routine work to take pressure off the real cops. It fills his time and gives his days a purpose.

One day he’s called to pick up a “found” item, a woman’s wallet found in a parking lot. On a whim, he decides to take it back to the owner, at the address on the ID. But when he gets there, he learns the woman is dead, drowned in a bathtub. This is a group home for the elderly, and the owner treats him rudely. Surprisingly, that owner is a cop.

Ray is immediately suspicious. He starts doing research on the man and his business dealings. And then everything blows up…

The 509 series, set in eastern Washington state, is a top-rank mystery series, in this reader’s view. Emphasis is heavily on character. The people in the story are faceted and relatable; I wanted to see how things worked out for them. Detectives Quinn and Burkett are here again, welcome like old friends.

The Only Death That Matters is highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Bedroom Window Murder,’ by Peter Zander-Howell

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The other day I reviewed Machinations of a Murderer, by Peter Zander-Howell, a straight-up serious English police procedural mystery set in the 1940s. I enjoyed it immensely, and straightaway bought the first book in the series, The Bedroom Window Murder.

We meet our hero, Inspector Philip Bryce, as he drives to a country house in Hampshire along with his new partner, Sergeant Haig. In the classic tradition of British fiction, these two Scotland Yard detectives have been dispatched from London to investigate a baffling murder out of town. The justification for this official trip (which I understand never happens in real life), is that the victim, Sir Francis Sherwood, was a friend of their boss.

Sir Francis was found dead at his bedroom window, shot in the head by a .22 bullet. The problem that baffles the police is that there seems to be no one in the world – nobody – who hated Sir Francis. He was famously good to his employees, and as a magistrate he was notoriously lenient in sentencing. Everyone who knew him appears genuinely distraught at his death. A rifle found abandoned on the lawn appears to be the murder weapon, but to whom did it belong?

Solving that problem will involve a process of elimination – excluding the impossible, though (as Bryce emphasizes) identifying the impossible is often harder than Sherlock Holmes stories suggest. It will also give Inspector Bryce the opportunity to meet an attractive, available woman – who is, alas, also a suspect. The final resolution presented a moral problem for this reader, but a twist at the end made even that ambiguous.

I didn’t enjoy The Bedroom Window Murder quite as much as the Machinations book, but that’s because this is a classic country house mystery, and lacks the originality of MoaM. But it’s very good of its kind. It plays no modernist games and is faithful to its time and place.

For me, one educational benefit of this book was learning about a landscaping feature called a “ha-ha,” of which I’d never heard before. It’s a wall behind a recess in the earth, intended to block entry to a flower garden without cutting off the view.

A very good book. I like this series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cost of Deceit,’ by H. Mitchell Caldwell

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A little while back I reviewed Cost of Arrogance, by H. Mitchell Caldwell. I found that novel delightful. It was a legal thriller composed with the authority of actual courtroom experience. Highly educational, and well-written to boot.

Could author Caldwell keep that standard up for a second novel, Cost of Deceit? We shall see.

Our hero, Jake Clearwater, teaches courtroom law at a small California university. Before that he was a successful prosecuting attorney. In the last book he was enticed out of the classroom to work the other side of the street – to defend a client on death row.

Now he gets an invitation to do a prosecution again. Lieutenant Cort, a sheriff’s officer, has been tried once already for the murder of his wife. He is known to be angry and brutal, and confesses to striking his wife at least once. According to the wife’s sister, he explicitly threatened her life. Then she disappeared, and no one has heard from her since. The prosecutors can work out a timeline for how Cort could have killed her. No one questions his capacity to kill her. But no body has been found. It’s notoriously difficult to get a conviction in a murder case in the absence of a corpse, so there was a hung jury. The county has decided to hold another trial, and they want Jake to prosecute. It will be during summer break, so he has time, and he can’t resist the challenge. Also, he watched the trial closely, and he wants to see this guy put away.

Over the course of the trial, Jake will come to care very much about the victim’s family, especially her distraught sister, but even about the hapless stripper Cort wants to use as an alibi. Their lives may be in danger if a way can’t be found to get this very dangerous man out of circulation.

I wish I could say Cost of Deceit was as good as the first book. But alas, no.

The first book did an excellent job of incorporating legal information into a well-realized story. Cost of Deceit is less successful. From time to time I got the feeling I was in the middle of one of those industrial training films, where people ask rote questions in such a way that the instructor can give the right answers at the proper place in the lesson plan. The prose was awkward in places too, this time out.

On the plus side, I was anticipating a big, overblown cinematic finale, but the climax was pretty realistic. I appreciated that.

Informational, but written with less care than the last book. Cautions for the usual stuff.

Authors, Fiction, Religion

Snow and hope

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Photo by hideobara. Unsplash license.

Disclaimer: You did not mistake the date on your calendar. This is a rare Saturday post by Lars Walker. Due to a certain weirdness in my life right now, I’m posting book reviews every day (two yesterday). What you’re reading now is a personal post, so I’m squeezing it in on the weekend.

March did not go out like a lamb in Minnesota last night. It went out like Mike Tyson, or Chronos the Titan, or a Frost Giant, or any kind of large, brutal mythological creature you might want to imagine. Yesterday the spring melt was well underway. Today it’s underway too, but with a difference. Nearly ten inches of snow fell overnight, even though the temperatures only slipped below freezing for a few hours. We woke to piles – sometimes towers – of thick, heavy white precipitate, already congealing into a dense, waterlogged mass. My neighbor with the snow blower cleared the driveway. But I had to clear the steps, front and back. And that meant hacking through knee-high piles of white stuff that looked like Styrofoam but weighed like sandbags.

But I cleared it out, and didn’t have a heart attack. I went to a restaurant for lunch (went to the farther Applebee’s rather than the closer Applebee’s, because they just closed the closer Applebee’s forever. More fruits of scientific, infallible Progressive governance). It was a strange environment in the parking lot. The sky is clear and the sun shines with full force, producing that wonderful effect (it’s called “apricity”) in which one feels warmer than the actual temperature, due to the intensity of the light. Yet all around us were mountains of snow. Kind of an alien, fantasy world for a day, where the physical laws are different.

Anyway, that’s not what I came to post about. Just thought I’d mention it.

Thursday night I attended a lecture in St. Paul. I don’t generally go out at night anymore; I have gained that wisdom of age that tells me very little good is likely to happen to me after dark in the urban area. But a friend invited me and urged me to come, so I acquiesced. In the end I was glad I did.

The lecture was held at the Cities Church on Summit Avenue, which is the Beacon Hill of St. Paul. It’s where James J. Hill and F. Scott Fitzgerald lived. Where the governor has his mansion. (The roads, by the way, are full of potholes. Even plutocrats can’t get basic services in that city.) The lecture was part of a series sponsored by Bethlehem College and Seminary, a small Baptist school.

The lecturer was one of their professors, Professor Matt Crutchmer, who looked impossibly young to me. He spoke on “Hope Beyond the Walls of the World” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

The core of his theme – as I understood it – was the nature of Christian hope, as portrayed by Tolkien. Hope for the Christian, he said, is not attached to any particular thing in this world (I wish I could recall the word he used for this idea, but it’s slipped my mind). Our hope isn’t for a good election result, or a military victory, or for rain or a successful business deal or a stroke of luck. Our hope is a more basic one – like the star Earendil that Sam spied through the clouds on the way to Mordor. Our hope is just there. It’s part of God’s creation and immovable. We may be defeated; we may suffer; we will surely die. That affects our hope not at all. “It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo.” We believe that God shapes all ends, regardless of what we do or what happens to us now. In that lies our peace.

I needed that message just now, for reasons I won’t detail. I was just glad I heard it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dark Lies,’ by Elliot York

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I do love a story of lost love and old mysteries. I found Elliot York’s Dark Lies a fascinating police novel, though not entirely successful.

Logan Cooper is a detective in Santa Cruz, California. He’s a good cop, but he has a tendency to lose control when he faces a particular kind of criminal – the kind who victimizes the innocent. In those cases he tends to black out and use his formidable fists pretty brutally. His superiors have ordered him to see a counselor. They’ve also assigned him to a new female partner, Reggie, and for the moment he’s reserving his judgment on her.

Then he gets called to view a body. A woman has been found in a local lake, drowned in a car with her hand cuffed to the steering wheel. Logan notices a tattoo on her wrist – it’s his own name. He recognizes this woman as Becca, the girl he fell in love with in high school. The girl who, up until today, he understood to have committed suicide more than 20 years ago.

As Logan and Reggie investigate the murder, clues will begin appearing that point to a single suspect – Logan himself. Even he will begin to wonder whether it might be possible that, in one of his blackouts, he might have killed the greatest love of his life.

Sometimes harrowing, Dark Lies kept me fascinated all the way through. Only at the climax did it fall into the pedestrian and predictable (in my opinion). Cautions are in order for foul language and expressions of contempt for religion.

Still, it was 90% a good novel. The follow-up volumes might be good too.