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Word Games, Moscow, and the Secret Life of a Librarian

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I may have just found a book I must read this year.

Joel Miller asks, “If you lived in a society that was strictly and officially materialist in which the state and its officers vetoed disagreement, what would you do if you still recognized the transcendent and dissented from the party line?”

One option would be to “write a surrealist satire that mocked the materialists and dropped the devil and his entourage in Moscow to bend the party line well past breaking.”

That’s what Soviet novelist Mikhail Bulgakov did in his posthumously published work The Master and Margarita (1970). Miller explains one of the author’s themes this way. “For all their anti-capitalistic propaganda, Muscovites were every bit as covetous and grasping as anyone, maybe worse. And as far as the Soviet insistence on strict atheism, Bulgakov replies: Fine, if you won’t have God, you can have the devil—and the devil will have you.”

Word Games: Merrium-Webster shelled out an undisclosed 7-figure amount to purchase Quordle, the word-guessing game that gives you four target words at once. I played many times last year and have gotten away from it for a while. Returning to it this week has not been easy. I want to blame Wordle’s hard mode. You can’t guess four words at once while using all your current hints. Maybe the dictionary has placed harder words.

Quordle is a different challenge than Daily Sectordle, which gives you 32 words at once.

Are word games actually good for your brain? If it’s a challenge, if you aren’t running through them on auto pilot, then yes.

Librarian: There’s a novelization of Belle da Costa Greene, the woman who built J. P. Morgan’s personal library, by Alexandra Lapierre. Gina Dalfonzo writes, “Lapierre is the kind of writer who can make a rare book auction into a thrilling action scene, and make a reader yearn to hold a copy of the bejeweled 8th-century Lindau Gospels. She gets you so caught up in Belle’s untiring passion for her work, it tears at your heart to think that Belle would have been barred from that work if her heritage had been known.”

Finding a Good Home for Books: Steve Donoghue says being a “book person” tends to attract orphan books. “I’m talking about squalling little orphans furtively deposited at the back door of the rectory by tearful (or grateful) parents who have decided that their babies will have a better chance for happiness if cast onto the mercy of a rude stream than if they stay neglected and underfed at home.”

Apocalypse Next Door: Russian sci-fi novelist Dmitry Glukhovsky says his apocalyptic novel set in the Moscow metro system is selling well after his government condemned him for opposing the war in Ukraine.

Coffee: At least among customers of Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, iced coffee has overtaken hot coffee orders by three to one. Next month, Starbucks is changing its rewards program to make getting free hot coffee or tea 100 stars (not 50) and free iced coffee or tea 100 stars (not 150). Fans are upset, maybe because handcrafted drinks cost 50 stars more, maybe because change of any kind upsets people.

Photo by Erik Witsoe on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Bullet Garden,’ by Stephen Hunter

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Now and then the major had to sideline the jeep as a column of Shermans ground along the road, pulling up a coughing fit’s worth of dust as well as releasing spumes of octane consumption and more noise than could be easily borne. They sounded like radiators clattering down a marble staircase.

If you’re my friend on Facebook, you may have noticed a couple “woe is me” posts from me in the last couple days. Those posts have provoked a couple very nice comments on my books, which I appreciate a lot.

But when I read a Stephen Hunter novel, I feel myself larval and unformed. This guy knows how to tell a story.

The Bullet Garden is his latest, and it’s an Earl Swagger book, about the father of Hunter’s regular hero. It’s been a while since he did an Earl Swagger book, and I remember thinking, when I read the last one, that there were signs he might enjoy those stories even more than the Bob Lee ones.

In the somewhat flexible chronology of Earl Swagger’s life, this book comes after his adventures on Tarawa in the South Pacific. In the European theater, the D-Day invasion has occurred, but the advancing Allies are bogged down in the “bocage,” the famous hedgerows of Normandy. One of their worst headaches is a company of ranging enemy snipers who consistently attack American patrols, picking off their officers just at sunrise or sunset, when most men can’t see well, and leaving the troops in panic.

Allied command wants the best sniper in the American military to come and figure out a way to kill these killers. So the summons goes to Sgt. Earl Swagger of the US Marines, who’s training leathernecks at Parris Island just now. The assignment goes with a brevet rank of Major in the US Army (!). Earl agrees to go – it could be interesting.

The story will take us to SHAEF headquarters in London – hopelessly politicized and riddled with spies. We meet Earl’s chief assistant, Lt. Leets (a character from a previous story, and, even better, a Minnesotan!), and Basil St. Florian, hero of Basil’s War. There’s Leets’ gorgeous sweetheart, a secretary at SHAEF, who has to deal with unwanted advances from a corrupt officer. There’s Archer and Goldberg, a couple hapless dogface draftees who turn into unlikely heroes. And there’s also the mysterious sniper, a man with a strange history and stranger motives.

You’ll encounter a lot of name-dropping in this book, especially of the literary kind. Very few names are given, but they’re all easily recognizable; some are delightful surprises. The villain of the story (the physical villain; there’s a strategic villain too) is disguised by a minor name change, but should be fairly easy to identify, at least at one remove (contact me if you have trouble).

But it’s the sheer, masterful storytelling that amazed me. The plot is complex, but as smoothly and efficiently assembled as the lock of a custom hunting rifle. I cared about the characters and my interest never flagged for a moment.

I have only a few quibbles, which seem to be editing problems. The author loses track of a female character’s hair color at one point, and seems to get confused about the mechanics of driving on the left side of the road at another.

But all in all, The Bullet Garden is a tour de force of thriller writing. Highly recommended. Cautions for language and adult topics.

Authors, Fiction, Reading

Interview with Stephen Hunter

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Stephen Hunter has a new book out, and I’ve got it. It is, needless to say, a sheer delight to read. At the rate I’m going, I’ll probably have a review tomorrow. So, in anticipation, I post the short interview above, which is pretty old. But most of the interviews I found with him were heavy on gun topics. I have no objection to gun topics myself, being a gun nut too. But I thought, in this space, I wanted to find something focused a little more on storytelling, because, however much an expert Hunter may be on gun topics, he’s even more knowledgeable about plotting and characterization. I think this interview, from 2010, advertising his novel I, Sniper, showcases that. To an extent.

The interviewer refers to the roman à clef nature of the novel’s beginning. Most of you are probably familiar with the term, and it’s explained as they talk.

Advice to writer’s: If you’re going to write a roman à clef, aim high. Portray famous people – political figures and celebrities. Do not write a roman à clef in which you show that guy you hated in high school dealing drugs or visiting brothels, unless you’ve disguised him beyond all recognition. If he can guess who he is in the book, he can sue you. Public figures can’t do that; they’re pretty much fair game, according to law.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Ground,’ by Justin Warren

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I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel from New Zealand before. The setting in Dead Ground by Justin Warren is kind of exotic. My main takeaway is that it seems to rain a lot on the west coast.

Dylan Harper is a young police detective in Christchurch. He and his older partner are surprised when they’re sent over to Westport on the west coast, to investigate the disappearance of a newspaper reporter who also worked a second job as an environmental inspector. Dylan isn’t keen to go, because Westport was his childhood home, and he has bad memories from the place. Not to mention enemies.

When they arrive, they quickly suspect the missing man’s attractive wife of murdering him. But as they poke around, questions arise about his last known movements, and about water samples he took at a remote farm. Dylan begins to suspect dirty work at a Chinese-owned mining operation in the mountains.

Now, whenever people talk about mining in a mystery these days, you can be pretty certain contamination and some kind of cover-up can’t be far behind. And when the Chinese are involved, that pretty much seals the deal. The real mystery here is who has been corrupted and how high the corruption goes.

The writing in Dead Ground is okay, but nothing to crow about. Author Warren does make some effort to provide colorful descriptive passages for the reader. The major weakness in the writing, from my point of view, was homophone confusion.

What I liked least was that the book ended in a cliffhanger.

There are further books in the series, if this one grabs you.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Million Dollar Staircase,’ by David Crosby

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It’s one of my many moral weaknesses. Whenever I come across a Florida mystery about a detective who lives on a boat, something in my brain says, “Maybe this will be the next Travis McGee.” It never is, and the disappointment skews my critical judgment. And yet I can’t help myself.

The latest self-inflicted wound of this sort is Million Dollar Staircase, by David Crosby. It’s the first in a series starring Will Harper, a retired journalist who inherited money and chose to live aboard a houseboat in a marina in the Tampa Bay area. He’s been enjoying the maritime lifestyle and growing closer to Sandy, a beautiful French woman who runs another marina nearby. One day he finds Sandy in a celebratory mood. She just read that the town is planning to develop a river walk around her property. That will certainly bring business in!

Only it won’t. Turns out the city plans to condemn her property, and that of her neighbors, paying only current market value – though once the development begins, values will skyrocket. It also turns out a local real estate investor has bought out all the homes in the area, at depressed prices. The whole busines stinks of cronyism and corruption.

But Will has a lawyer friend who owes him a favor. He’ll sue the city for them pro bono. There’s a good chance that, if they can’t get the eminent domain process stopped, they’ll at least be able to get the business owners a more reasonable payout.

What they don’t expect is that some people are willing to kill to cover up their corruption.

Million Dollar Staircase wasn’t a bad book. I liked Will Harper and his friends, and was rooting for them. I am entirely sympathetic to those who oppose the way Eminent Domain has been abused in recent decades.

But I thought the story a little… slack. The suspense could have been ramped up more effectively, and I would have liked for Will Harper to be a little more of a fighter (in the physical sense).

But it wasn’t bad. I don’t remember much objectionable language, and the sex scenes weren’t very explicit. I downloaded a three-book package, so I’ll see how I like the next books.

Fiction, Reviews

‘One Wilde Night,’ by Patrick Logan

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Sometimes I read a book and I think, “This writer is following a formula.” Following a formula can even work, depending on how the writer fills in the blanks.

One Wilde Night by Patrick Logan works, but only on a technical level.

Tommy Wilde, our hero, has a PhD in biochemistry, but ended up running a crime scene clean-up business. He works mostly at night. He’s training a new employee one night when he gets a call for help from his loser brother Brian, a drug addict. Tommy runs to meet him – at their church – where Brian is panicking over the body of a drug dealer. The dealer – Brian says – just dropped dead. Not his fault.

Due to an overwhelming sense of obligation, Tommy helps Brian dispose of the body, while eluding the drug dealer’s associates. Or so he thinks. In fact, this is just the beginning of a long, long night in which Tommy will be beaten up, kidnapped, threatened and physically mutilated.

There’s a template for writing a thriller. Start by putting your character in a bad situation, then make it steadily worse. Turn every step forward into two steps back.

Author Logan dutifully follows this template. The problem is that at some point, if you raise the stakes enough, you start losing credibility. Everybody has bad nights, but nobody’s nights go that bad in this many ways. This is the sort of story logic you find in a thriller movie, but in a book the audience has more time to reflect and ask themselves, “Do I believe this?”

Even worse, One Wilde Night never really resolves any of Tommy’s problems. It ends in a cliff-hanger. In other words, what we have here isn’t even a whole story. It’s just the first chapter of a story.

And sure enough, there’s a whole series of Tommy Wilde stories to follow.

But I ain’t reading them.

I should note that the church and their priest come out looking good here, so the author at least seems friendly to Christianity. However, he also drops a whole lot of f-bombs.

All in all, not recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Trilby,’ by George du Maurier

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Well, that was an experience. I went ahead and followed my instinct to download George du Maurier’s novel Trilby, based on my weird fascination with the old John Barrymore movie, “Svengali.” I wasn’t prepared for the degree to which the book would grab me. It was one of those “hard to put it down” reading experiences.

My shame is great at being taken in like this by a Victorian bestseller, and not even a mystery or an adventure tale! A love melodrama, of all things.

Most oddly of all, though Trilby fascinated me, I can’t really recommend it to our readers. I have several objections to the thing.

As you may (or may not) be aware, Trilby is a story mostly about the lives of artists in Paris’ Latin Quarter in the 1850s. This novel’s extreme popularity established that time and place forever in the public mind as a colorful, freethinking milieu. Three British painters – the big war veteran Taffy, the jolly Laird, and the young, innocent Little Billee, share an atelier. There they meet a charming young woman, Trilby O’Ferrall, who is of Irish/Scottish parentage but has spent all her life in Paris. She works as an artist’s model and a washer woman. She’s beautiful, unaffected, uninhibited, and charming. They all fall in love with her to some extent, but Little Billee does most of all. However, he can’t handle the fact that she does nude modeling (“for the altogether,” as she puts it. This is where our phrase “in the altogether” originates), and is not chaste. In spite of his religious freethinking (much is made of that), he’s basically an upper middle-class boy.

Another member of their circle, though generally unwelcome, is Svengali, a Polish Jew and a brilliant musician. Svengali can play any instrument beautifully, except for his own voice. When he hears Trilby’s voice, he’s intrigued, but he soon learns that, though the sound itself is magnificent, she is utterly tone-deaf.

Eventually Billee overcomes his scruples and proposes marriage to Trilby. She agrees reluctantly. Although she reciprocates his love, she understands their social differences would doom their marriage. Soon after, Billee’s mother and sister come to visit, and his mother has a talk with Trilby, who agrees to break the engagement and disappears. Billee then suffers a breakdown which marks the end of his time in Paris. But his talent has now been recognized, and when he recovers, back in England, he is a famous and sought-after man.

Five years later, he, Taffy, and the Laird have a reunion in Paris. They’re surprised to learn that their old acquaintance Svengali is now the talk of Europe. He is famous as the manager of his beautiful wife, “la Svengali,” said to have the most ravishing voice in the world. The trio get tickets to her concert, and are almost – not quite – certain that la Svengali is in fact their old friend Trilby, whom they’d thought dead. When by chance they encounter the Svengali carriage on the street, both their old acquaintances pretend not to know them.

From there it all rolls on to a tragic conclusion, more drawn-out than in the film.

I said, in discussing the movie, that the cinematic Trilby reminds me of a girl I once cared about. It disturbed me, as I read, that Trilby in the book was even more like the girl I knew than the actress (though my girl did not share Trilby’s sexual mores). On top of that, elements in the story took me back to my college days. I think it was a feeling that, in some ways, I was reading about my own life that gripped me as I read Trilby.

But you, Kind Reader, never knew that girl. And you (probably) weren’t there when I was in college. So I have no reason to think you’d react to this book as I did.

For one thing, it’s Victorian literature – that is to say, overwritten. Du Maurier isn’t a horrible over-writer like so many Victorians; often he can be amusing in his frequent digressions. (By the way, there’s a lot of French dialogue in this book, so it helps if you have decent French. Which I don’t). But he does take his time telling the story. This isn’t just a narrative; it’s sort of a leisurely travelogue.

But my main objections are moral and theological. This was a somewhat scandalous book in its time – “Read about all the naughty things they get up to in Paris!” Trilby isn’t a virgin for much the same reason that a girl in the South Sea islands wouldn’t be a virgin. It’s alien to her culture. Du Maurier may have been challenging Victorian sexual mores here, but he keeps it oblique.

Much worse is the antisemitism. A lot has been written over the years about Svengali as a Jewish stereotype. Which he certainly is. He’s arrogant, selfish, grasping, and filthy (an odd accusation to make against any Jew, when you think about it). The passages concerning Svengali are frankly horrifying. However, fortunately, Svengali isn’t in the book as much as in the movie.

It should also be noted that there are several Jewish characters in Trilby, and the others are rather nice.

Even worse, from my perspective, are the theological digressions. The author takes several opportunities to have his characters contemplate – or discover – the complete absurdity of Christian doctrine. Everyone who thinks about it (in this book) soon agrees that the Judeo-Christian God is ridiculous and there is no Hell to fear. Either everyone is saved or everyone just goes to sleep. Nothing to worry about, as long as you do good.

So I don’t really know what to tell you about Trilby. It might fascinate you as it fascinated me. Very likely it won’t. If you do read it, you’ll have to wade through some nasty spots, but there are also many rewards.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Headless Billionaire,’ by Michael Leese

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Roper’s memory had cinematic qualities. He could call up the past and watch it like a TV show. If that wasn’t astonishing enough, he had also revealed another factor. His recall mirrored the technology of the moment. This meant his early memories appeared as if on a VHS tape, while the more recent ones were in digital format. Hooley had once speculated that had Roper been born a hundred years earlier his memories would have been on a flickering black-and-white film reel.

A standard scene in a detective mystery – if it’s not a plain police procedural (a very good thing of another kind) – calls for the master sleuth to stand in a room surrounded by lesser men, as he sees things they don’t see and makes mental connections they can’t make. They often think he’s crazy, until he explains his deductions. From Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot to Monk, this has been a set piece.

So it wasn’t much of a jump, once we became aware of the existence of autistic savants, to come up with an autistic detective. I’ve encountered several examples. Jonathan Roper, hero of Michael Leese’s The Case of the Headless Billionaire, is one of them, and it’s not a bad effort.

When a billionaire philanthropist disappears, Chief Inspector Brian Hooley is assigned to the case. The man vanished into a London crowd in broad daylight, and the police are baffled. Considering the difficulty of the case, Insp. Hooley asks to get Jonathan Roper assigned to assist. Roper is on suspension, having nearly ruined an earlier investigation through his artless honesty. Roper is on the autistic spectrum, and other detectives find him hard to work with. But Hooley has always gotten along with him, managing to adjust to his eccentricities. He treats him as a sort of substitute son.

Roper is the right man for the job. In his time off, he’s been working on his social skills, and he’s learning to ask for explanations of “normal” behavior. He’s also constructing a new way of organizing his own memories, making his deductions more efficient.

Their investigations will lead to corruption in the medical research field, and to human smugglers (human smugglers sure show up in a lot of stories these days. I wish the authorities paid as much attention to them as authors do). The detectives’ lives, as well as those of many innocents, will hang on the efficiency of Jonathan Roper’s remarkable brain.

I liked The Case of the Headless Billionaire. The writing wasn’t bad, and the characters were okay. I won’t say this was a masterful book, but it did the job it set out to do, and I was interested in Hooley and Roper. The issue of fetal stem cell research played a part in the story, but it was framed in a way that sidestepped the controversial issue of whether it’s morally acceptable in the first place.

Worth reading.

[Note: I discover, on searching our files, that I reviewed this book once before under its previous title, Going Underground. I’m surprised I didn’t recognize it, and can only attribute this to old age. But I liked it better this time around.]

Fiction, Reviews

‘Impression,’ by Ray Clark

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Sometimes I hate a book enough to read it all through just so I can tell you in detail how bad it was. That was the case with Impression, by Ray Clark. I’ve read worse novels, but few combined inept writing with such personal offense to myself.

Detective Inspector Stewart Gardener and his partner Sean Riley are the heroes of this police procedural, part of a series set in Leeds in North Yorkshire. When a local prostitute is found dead in her kitchen, stabbed to death with a bayonet, and then a local businessman is found choked to death with sealing wax (!) in a butcher shop doorway, their investigation begins. That investigation, to this reader, seemed a remarkably ham-handed one. A local online journalist comes to them with a theory that these murders are recreations of historical murders in the area. They laugh him off, with tragic results. Also, when a couple whose daughter was recently kidnapped show up on their radar, they treat the two with surprising insensitivity – largely because the husband is a born-again Christian, and so (in their eyes) contemptible.

This hatred for born-again Christians comes up again and again in the book. Author Clark wants to make sure we’re in no doubt how he feels on the subject. “Real practicing Christians,” DI Gardener states authoritatively, “see the born-again converts as part-timers—people who are not really taking the Lord and the good book seriously.” Further on, Riley says that the fact that a man is a born-again Christian “tells me that he is hiding from something in his past.” That’s an odd way, in an English book, of dismissing John Wesley, John Newton, and William Booth, among so many others.

But my complaints aren’t only theological. The author is lazy. His characters never come to life, and most of them are hard to keep straight. He misuses the term “begging the question,” and is prone to misplacing modifiers and misusing words, as in the line, “Despite being still in the throes of summer, [a character] was dressed in a camel hair coat and trilby….”

One major plot point involves a child, decades ago, playing constantly with a Polaroid instant camera. However, we’re also told that the child’s family was very poor. Apparently the author has no idea what Polaroid film used to cost.

Finally, the climax was melodramatic and implausible.

The book made a poor Impression on this reviewer.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Writing

Renting Books to Impress Visitors, Terry Teachout, and Sigrid Undset

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Last week, an independent bookstore in Chicago splashed up attention for many Twitter users with a tweet complaining about a customer who wanted to rent rather than buy some expensive books. Rebecca George, a co-owner of Volumes Bookcafe in Chicago’s Wicker Park, wrote in Jan 9 tweet: “Turns out one of our biggest sales last month was for the person to stage their home for the holidays and now they want to return them all. Please don’t do this to a small business, people. That one sale was a third of our rent.”

The books were eye-catching art and cook book, no doubt published to show off the reader’s good taste. The most modest book in the set was entitled Authenticity: The Vain Attempt at Finding the Real You. (I’m sorry. I made that up.)

The tweet has been seen almost seven million times and picked up by news outlets, making January a very good month for sales by good-hearted book-buyers showing their sympathy.

What else is online?

Reading Good Books: An essential freedom that builds character more than we know. “American kids, more than ever, are stratified into those who read—those who have regular access to books—and those who don’t. I’m not talking here about basic literacy, but being open to the human good that is the enjoyment of literature.”

Kristin Lavransdatter at 100. Sigrid Undset wrote a “medieval romance in the twentieth century (published between 1920 and 1922), [and] she somehow reverses a thousand years of morbidity, bringing a long dead genre back to life. . . . Kristin Lavransdatter is really just a love story—but one of the most savagely honest love stories ever written.”

Mystery: All About Agatha is a podcast that has read all of Agatha Christie’s novels, discussed them, and ranked them against each other. I look forward to looking up All Hallow’s Eve to see if they place it within the worst five.

Writing: Backstory brings characters to life, making them appear as real people, except when it floods the reader with irrelevant details. So it’s a very good, except when it isn’t.

Terry Teachout: The New York art critic died last year on Jan. 13. Patrick Kurp calls that fact “comparably difficult to believe. It’s like saying France no longer exists. Seldom in my experience was so prominent and successful a writer so generous with his success.”

And Titus Techera talks about the conversations he had with Terry about film noir and its relation to men in post-war America.

Photo by Hatice Yardım on Unsplash