Category Archives: Fiction

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Poetry

A Fictional Lewis, Miłosz in California, and Blogroll

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Gina Dalfonzo reviews Once Upon a Wardrobe, the second book from author Patti Callahan with a fictional story that draws in many actual details of C.S. Lewis’s life and habitat.

Czesław Miłosz, born in Šeteniai, Lithuania, 1911, spent 40 years in California before his death in 2004. Cynthia Haven has labored over a book on this great poet of last century and Czesław Miłosz: A California Life released this month.

“The Nobel poet spent more time in California than any other place during his long 93-year life,” Haven writes. “He wrote poems about the California landscape, engaged with our culture, and taught generations of students at UC-Berkeley. Some of those students became eminent translators of his work.”

David Zucker has written some pretty funny scripts, which cross the line too often for my taste. In Commentary, he writes about an opinion he often hears from fans: “You couldn’t do that scene today.” (Via Books inq)

Humor happens when you go against what’s expected and surprise people with something they’re not anticipating, like the New York Jets winning a game. But to find this surprise funny, people have to be willing to suppress the literal interpretations of jokes. In Airplane!, Lloyd Bridges’s character tries to quit smoking, drinking, amphetamines, and sniffing glue. If his “addictions” were to be taken literally, there would be no laughs. Many of today’s studio executives seem to believe that audiences can no longer look past the literal interpretations of jokes.

Dracula: How did Bram Stoker’s novel become a pop-fiction hit?

Malcolm Muggeridge: “If it should prove to be the case that Western man has now rejected these origins of his civilization, persuading himself that he can be master of his own destiny, that he can shape his own life and chart his own future, then assuredly he and his way of life and all he has stood and stands for must infallibly perish.”

To close, here are a few words plucked from Miłosz’s “City Without a Name,” written in California, 1968.

The Earth, neither compassionate nor evil, neither beautiful nor atrocious, persisted, innocent, open to pain and desire.

And the gift was useless, if, later on, in the flarings of distant nights,
there was not less bitterness but more.

If I cannot so exhaust my life and their life that the bygone crying is
transformed, at last, into harmony.

Like a Noble Jan Dęboróg in the Straszun’s secondhand-book shop, I am put to rest forever between two familiar names.

Photo: George Joe Restaurant, La Mesa, California, 1977, John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress.

Authors, Fiction, Reading, The Press

Not 1, but 2, Scandinavian stories

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My own photo of the reconstructed Viking houses at L’Anse Aux Meadows, some years back.

File this under “News That Surprised Absolutely Nobody:”

Counting tree rings reveals that wooden objects previously found at an archaeological site on Newfoundland’s northern peninsula were made from trees felled in the year 1021. That’s the oldest precise date for Europeans in the Americas and the only one from before Christopher Columbus’ voyages in 1492, geoscientists Margot Kuitems and Michael Dee and colleagues report October 20 in Nature.

You can read the rest here at Sciencenews.org.

1021 is actually fairly late in the game, if you give the sagas any credence. But most of us believe the Greenlanders were here for quite a few years. The sagas describe three expeditions in detail, and it seems probable that the Greenlanders would have exploited American resources (especially lumber) for quite a long time, even after they gave up on the idea of a colony.

I hold to the widely-held theory that the L’Anse Aux Meadows site in Newfoundland is not the entire Norse American enterprise, but merely a station – possibly a pretty insignificant one. The only real activity we can identify there from the archaeology is boat repair and its ancillary crafts.

Our good friend Dave Lull sent me this article from The American Conservative: A Norwegian American Journey, by Sam Sweeney.

Growing up in rural Montana, I was a bit removed from the Norwegian enclave in western North Dakota that my mom’s family is from. We ate lefse at Thanksgiving, but other than that, compared to my cousins I was not particularly in touch with my Norwegian heritage. I never felt a particular connection to Norway as a country, but do mention my heritage to Norwegians I meet, as there are a surprisingly high number of them in the Middle East, where I’ve spent much of the last decade. Reading Giants in the Earth, however, was an enlightening experience, and it brought to life the journey that my ancestors took from Norway to the Dakotas.

After reading O. E. Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth and Peder Victorious, the writer goes on to ponder Scandinavian cinema (I myself have seen The Last King and The King’s Choice, but none of the other films he describes). The article is interesting, though I was wondering by the end what its point was.

I personally am not a fan of much Scandinavian literature or film, as I expect I’ve made pretty clear. I read Giants In the Earth in college, and my major take-away was what a depressing book it was. I never read the sequel, Peder Victorious, but a friend described it to me, and the description didn’t appeal much (here’s a hint – the name “Victorious” [Norwegian Seier] is darkly ironic). The same friend described other books by Rolvaag, like The Boat of Longing, and that sounded even worse. I do not recommend reading Rolvaag if you struggle with suicidal ideation.

Scandinavians have a bent for looking at things coldly and in a brutal, unsentimental light. When the Scandinavians were Christian, I think, they found ways to mitigate that brutal honesty. Now that they’ve mostly “transcended” Christian faith, they seem to have settled on a glum fatalism, like those dogs in the famous Learned Helplessness experiments.

I think that probably explains most of their current social policies.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saint on the Spanish Main,’ by Leslie Charteris

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Besides, a flurry of that kind was practically an obligatory incident at a certain stage of any good pirate-treasure story, and the Saint was rather a traditionalist about his stories. He liked to feel that all the time-honored trimmings were in their proper place. It encouraged a kind of light-hearted certainty that virtue, which of course he represented, would be triumphant in the end.

I think I’m going to have to re-think my opinion of Simon Templar, the Saint, Leslie Charteris’ famous thriller (I won’t say detective) hero. When I was a boy, Roger Moore represented the Saint, and I’ve never much cared for Roger Moore. Always found him unaccountably lightweight. Still not sure why. But a Kindle edition of the story collection, The Saint on the Spanish Main, came up at a cheap price, and I read it and quite enjoyed it.

The Saint on the Spanish Main is a collection of six short stories, all set in the Caribbean. Most of them were written in the period 1952-1953, when author Leslie Charteris had recently married his fourth wife. He was aging by then and had largely given up on writing, but the relationship seemed to invigorate him. The couple traveled much in the Islands, inspiring these stories. By and large they are well-written, efficient, and tight, with plausible characters and a strong sense of justice motivating the hero. The Saint was originally conceived as a kind of puckish trickster, but gradually developed into something smoother and darker. He’s often described as a Robin Hood character – he seems to have plenty of money that enables him to travel, so he mostly waits for Fate to throw some evil in his path. Then he does something about it. Very often, these are “sting” stories. Unlike your average police detective or private eye, the Saint does not hesitate to take justice – even capital punishment – into his own hands.

It seems that whenever you review old books, you have to provide warnings about treatment of race. There are cringe moments in this book, as you’d expect considering the time and locale, but I think it’s educational to understand how people talked in those days. Also, it should be noted that author Charteris was himself Chinese-English, and had grown up ostracized due to racial prejudice, a circumstance that turned him into a reader. (He had a brother, by the way, Roy Henry Bowyer-Yin, who was an Anglican priest and hymn writer.) Simon Templar has a habit of referring to villains as “the ungodly,” but religion is generally avoided, except in the final story, which deals with voodoo. A notable moment of implausibility in another tale involves a giant octopus, which doesn’t stand up in light of what we’ve since learned about those shy cephalopods.

I need to read some more books in the Saint series. This was fun.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dead Never Forget, by Jack Lynch

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I had never heard of the author Jack Lynch, or his private eye character Pete Bragg, who flourished in the ‘60s and ‘70s, roughly contemporary with John D. MacDonald and the Travis McGee books. But The Complete Bragg compendium (final collection in a series reprint) became available at a low price, and I downloaded it to my Kindle. I was pleasantly surprised. The first book in this volume is The Dead Never Forget.

Pete Bragg was once a newspaper man in Seattle, but now he’s a private eye in San Francisco. When a large, dangerous-looking man comes to invite him to talk to Armando Barker, a retired mobster now gone legit (or so he claims), he can’t afford to turn down profitable work.

Barker explains that he’s been getting cards threatening him and his employees. He wouldn’t worry about that, but now they’ve threatened his 11-year-old stepdaughter, whom he’s maintaining in an expensive private school. Bragg takes the job, and then one of Barker’s employees is murdered, raising the stakes considerably. Bragg is certain the background of the threats must be hidden in the casino town of Sand Valley, Nevada, where Barker used to operate. Barker doubts that, but Bragg follows his instincts and visits the town.

Homages to Akira Kurosawa’s film “Yojimbo” are almost a subgenre in several different storytelling genres. Most famous of the homages is probably the film, “A Fistful of Dollars.” But (or so I’ve read) the original inspiration for that movie was Dashiell Hammet’s novel, Red Harvest. So mystery homages are a kind of closing of the circle. I saw a lot of “Yojimbo” in this book, where the criminals who run The Truck Stop whorehouse at one end of town go to war with the criminals who run the Sky Lodge casino at the other end, and the bullets fly fast and thick enough to call down government intervention. And in the middle is Bragg, trying to make sense of who’s actually profiting from all the chaos. Deduction is not Bragg’s strong point – he’ll only figure it all out when it’s pretty much laid out for him by the last person he suspected.

The Dead Never Forget was a lot of fun to read, for this reader. Uncomplicated by political correctness, with an engaging narrator and lots of action (and sex, though it’s not explicit), it was pretty much exactly what the doctor ordered. Reminiscent of MacDonald, but a little shallower, I think. My only grumble is that I learned at the end that Bragg’s a casual pot smoker. I always dislike that in my heroes. But I paid for the whole collection, so I expect I’ll read the rest, and even have a good time.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Unnatural Death,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

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Miss Climpson was one of those people who say: “I am not the kind of person who reads other people’s postcards.” This is clear notice to all and sundry that they are, precisely, that kind of person. They are not untruthful; the delusion is real to them. It is merely that Providence has provided them with a warning rattle, like that of the rattle-snake. After that, if you are so foolish as to leave your correspondence in their way, it is your own affair.

In the third volume of Dorothy Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey series, Unnatural Death, the mystery comes along by accident. Lord Peter is having lunch with his friend and future brother-in-law, Inspector Parker, when the man at the next table interrupts their conversation, prompted by an overheard comment. He says he’s a doctor, and he knows of a situation that might have been murder, but he can’t prove it. An old woman under his care, who was living with her grandniece and heir, died suddenly, and something about the circumstances just strikes him as wrong. The old woman was dying of cancer, and had shown great reluctance to making a will. But he considers her death suspicious, though he can’t prove foul play. And he can’t imagine a motive, since the intended heir inherited as planned.

Insp. Parker isn’t much impressed, but Lord Peter is intrigued by the whole thing. He dispatches his faithful agent, the admirable spinster Miss Climpson, to ensconce herself in the town and learn what she can by way of gossip. Very gradually, a ruthless plot will be revealed. (Also, this may possibly be the first appearance in literature of a manner of secret murder that’s since become a cliché. But I’m not sure.)

Having read all these books before, I find Unnatural Death the one that left the least impression on me. I believe the problem was that the book is so slow-moving and talky. Everything gets talked over thoroughly in between actual events in the story, which are brutal but rare. It was, frankly, surprisingly dull work from a writer of Dorothy Sayers’ skill. Though the “moral” of the exercise was a good done.

Also, a warning needs to be added that 1920s attitudes toward race are on display here. By the standards of the time, I think Miss Sayers handled the black character in the story pretty well, making him a decent and sympathetic man. But her descriptions and language don’t fly well with the modern reader. There’s also a passing Jewish slur, unnecessary to the plot.

I recommend all the Lord Peter Wimsey books, but I suspect you’ll love Unnatural Death less than the others.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction

Not alone in my madness

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My friend Gene Edward Veith posted today, on his Cranach blog, concerning a theory about Tom Bombadil, which he found at the GameRant website, by a Melissa C. The conclusion: “Tom Bombadil would be the equivalent of Adam.”

Although Dr. Veith is a self-confessed fan of my novels, it seems he doesn’t follow this blog. I advanced this theory sometime in the dear, dead long-ago, in the earlier version of Brandywine Books that was lost when we changed hosts. But I refer to it in this post from last year.

I hasten to clarify that I do not charge Melissa C. with plagiarism. The theory seems fairly obvious to me, for anyone familiar with the Bible.

I simply reserve the right to do a little gloating dance, in the presence of friends.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Whip Crack,’ by Alex Smith

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I know you probably regard me as a man of iron, inured to all pain, physical and emotional. But in fact, there are limits to my endurance. It’s possible to write books that drive me away just by being too good, in terms of action and dramatic tension.

I think that’s the situation with Alex Smith’s Whip Crack, fourth in his DCI Robert Kett series. (SPOILER ALERT: If you are reading this series and have not yet finished the third book, Three Little Pigs, you should stop reading here. Parts of my synopsis must necessarily give away some of the ending of that book.)

Robbie Kett has been suspended from the force, due to the extremes he went to, to rescue his children and his wife Billie (who had been kidnapped and held prisoner 5 months). Now they’re back together, but they’re all damaged. Especially in his relationship with Billie, he’s walking on eggshells, never sure what to do to help her readjust to freedom and love.

When four young teenagers disappear in a lonely town on the Norfolk coast, his superior doesn’t order Robbie to go investigate, but pointedly lends him his holiday “caravan” (trailer) near the crime scene. He knows Robbie can’t resist this kind of case.

The four teenagers, all close friends, have been lured away from their homes by recordings on cassette players. Similar players have been left behind with messages for the investigators. With difficulty, the police are able to trace the man who bought the players, a local drug dealer. The only problem is that he’s killed himself. If they’re going to locate the missing kids, they’re going to have to solve the recorded riddles he left behind.

But there’s more to the mystery than even that. Robbie can sense something more is going on – and he’s right. I thought I had figured it out, but it was even weirder than I imagined.

Whip Crack is taut, harrowing, and exciting. The prose is good, too. I can’t fault author Smith on his craftsmanship. Also, he employs some tricks to avoid too much profanity.

But give me a break, guy. Poor Robbie has been through four thrillers now, and in each book he gets injured more – physically and emotionally – and he hasn’t been given time yet to heal up from the first book. My empathy needle is spiking here. I don’t think I can handle the next installment.

Recommended, if you’re made of sterner stuff than I am.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Blood Sport,’ by David J. Gatward

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David J. Gatward’s Harry Grimm books are not great literature, but they’re entertaining “English rural” police stories. Harry, you may recall, is a former English paratrooper who joined the police in Bristol after surviving an IUD explosion in Afghanistan. His wounds left him with rather severe facial scarring, which he cheerfully exploits in intimidating suspects. Transferred to a town in the Yorkshire Dales, he’s finding himself – to his own surprise – settling in comfortably with the laid-back, eccentric local force.

In Blood Sport, one of Harry’s colleagues is still smarting from the death, in a previous book, of a close friend who turned out to be a criminal involved in sheep rustling.  When a dog is found dead, torn to pieces, in an abandoned barn, the ensuing investigation into illegal dog fighting leads to links with that sheep rustling operation. It’s all part of a large, organized conspiracy run by greedy and cruel people, something no one had looked for out here in the country. The worst part is that no one can be sure whom to trust.

As the mystery gets resolved, we also get to see Harry Grimm make some surprising new connections in his own life.

Blood Sport is plagued by a few misspellings and typos, but is nevertheless quite enjoyable to read. Only mild cautions.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Clouds of Witness,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

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“It is possible, my lord, if your lordship will excuse my saying so, that the liveliness of your lordship’s manner may be misleading to persons of limited—”

“Be careful, Bunter!”

“Limited imagination, my lord.”

“Well-bred English people never have imagination, Bunter.”

“Certainly not, my lord. I meant nothing disparaging.”

I was first introduced to Lord Peter Wimsey through the BBC production of Clouds of Witness (the subject, in its book form, of this review) broadcast on Masterpiece Theatre back in 1973, with the irresistible Ian Carmichael starring. (He didn’t actually resemble the character described in the books, but once seen, he’s impossible to get rid of.)

Clouds of Witness is one of those stories where coincidence and withheld information combine to confuse a fairly simple problem. Lord Peter Wimsey is in Paris, on his way home from a holiday in Corsica, when he learns that his brother Gerald, Duke of Denver, has been arrested for murder.

The fatal events occurred at a hunting lodge in Yorkshire, where the duke and his family and friends were staying. Denis Cathcart, a slightly-too-smooth young gentleman to whom Peter’s sister Mary is engaged, is discovered in the early hours of the morning, shot to death outside the conservatory. Sir Gerald is standing over him.

Mary claims she was awakened by a gunshot, which is a lie, since the shot had been fired more than an hour earlier. Gerald refuses to explain what he was doing outside at that hour.

Sir Gerald’s lawyer, at his client’s wishes, plans to base his defense on reasonable doubt; the gunshot wound could reasonably have been self-inflicted. But Lord Peter, when he shows up, is determined to get past the intersecting lies and discover what really happened. The true murderer must not be allowed to escape. The investigation will lead him to be shot at, to nearly drown in a Yorkshire bog, and to risk his life on a trans-Atlantic airplane flight in a storm (this story is set in 1920, you must remember).

Clouds of Witness is not Dorothy Sayers at the height of her powers, but it’s a fascinating and original detective problem, enjoyable and well worth reading. I particularly enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek descriptions of the English nobility and their quaint customs.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Whose Body?’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

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“…You want to look dignified and consistent—what’s that got to do with it? You want to hunt down a murderer for the sport of the thing and then shake hands with him and say, ‘Well played—hard luck—you shall have your revenge tomorrow!’ Well, you can’t do it like that. Life’s not a football match. You want to be a sportsman. You can’t be a sportsman. You’re a responsible person.”

“I don’t think you ought to read so much theology,” said Lord Peter. “It has a brutalizing influence.”

It had been a while since I’d read any of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey books. Two collections showed up at bargain prices on Amazon recently, so I snapped them up. Then I settled down with the first novel, Whose Body? The author was still finding her voice as a mystery writer here, but it’s a very enjoyable read.

Lord Peter Wimsey, if you’re not familiar with him, is an English nobleman, the younger brother of a duke. He suffered “combat fatigue” in World War I, and immediately after was jilted by his fiancée. He took up detecting crime as a sort of therapy hobby, and is good at it. His success is aided by the fact that he looks and acts very much like Bertie Wooster (Ian Carmichael played both roles creditably), so people underestimate him. (His valet Bunter, by the way, is hard to distinguish from Jeeves.)

When the man who is repairing the church roof at the Wimsey ducal estate is detained by the police, the dowager duchess turns to her son Peter to figure out what’s really going on. The poor workman walked into his bathroom one morning and found a dead man in his tub, naked except for a pair of pince nez glasses. Inspector Sugg of Scotland Yard (a stereotypical character whom the author wisely faded out of succeeding books) loses no time arresting the poor man and his housemaid.

Meanwhile, a well-known Jewish financier, Sir Reuben Levy, seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. He bore a superficial resemblance to the mysterious body in the bath, but is not the same man.

Lord Peter, assisted by his good friend Inspector Parker, takes advantage of the considerable license the police authorities allow the nobility, and starts his own investigation. It will lead to a horrible discovery and a terrible revelation.

Whose Body? is an enjoyable introduction to a stellar (and groundbreaking) detective series. I was particularly intrigued, on this reading, by certain instances of what today we’d call “cultural stereotypes.” Sir Reuben Levy’s description sounds like a standard, slightly antisemitic trope. But the author is delving deeper. We learn from those who knew him that the man was in fact a capital fellow, and much loved. The same goes for an American character who talks in the kind of broad American accent one sees so often (painfully) in old English books. But again, on getting to know him, we learn he’s an admirable guy. I’ve heard Sayers criticized for “snobbery,” but I think it’s deeper than that. She uses the stereotypes in order to transcend them, and makes a subtextual statement in doing so (Hey! I used subtextual in a sentence!)

I highly recommend Whose Body? Not only is it an intriguing, well-plotted mystery, but there are few literary pleasures that compare with listening to Lord Peter talk piffle.