I’ve become a big fan of James Scott Bell, an excellent mystery-and-thriller writer who also happens to be a Christian. So when I saw he’d published a collection of novellas in hard-boiled style called Trouble Is My Beat, I snapped it up. It was excellent value for money.
Bill “Wild Bill” Armbrewster is a World War I veteran and a successful pulp mystery writer. But it’s hard to make a living doing that, even back in the late 1940s. So he works as a “fixer” for a Hollywood studio. That involves getting stars out of dangerous or illegal situations, avoiding scandal, and sometimes putting the scare on them to keep them on the straight and narrow. It might bring him up against rival studios, or gangsters, or dangerous dames, or the cops. He won’t let himself be intimidated, and he’s a hard man to fool. And at heart he’s a decent guy.
Bill Armbrewster is the kind of simple, old-fashioned hero you don’t run into much anymore, on the page or on the screen. Author Bell does a good job of writing in the hard-boiled voice, though his similes and metaphors aren’t up to Chandler and Hammett’s standards. No effort is made to shock the reader into a raised consciousness. The language is generally mild, and one story involving a Christian evangelist treats him with respect.
There was pretty much nothing I disliked about Trouble Is My Beat. Highly recommended.
If the name Augustus Thistlewood strikes you as something out of P. G. Wodehouse, you and I have that in common. And we’re both right. There are echoes of Wodehouse at the beginning of Dave Freer’s science fiction novel, Cloud Castles, though the book gradually evolves into something quite different.
Augustus is a son of a wealthy, but low-profile, family of industrialists. He went to university to become an engineer, but he’s so brilliant he needed more of a challenge. So he took a degree in Sociology too, and that’s where the trouble began. Convinced of “modern” views of society and economics, he decided he needed to spend time with the less fortunate, “uplifting” the poor.
That mission took him to Sybil III, a floating city in the “habitable region” of a gas-dwarf star. The city floats on antigravity engines and shares the skies with “floating castles” belonging to two alien races who are war with each other but “neutral” (though hostile) to humans. The skies also feature clumps of floating vegetation that nobody cares about much.
Augustus arrives in the floating city as the perfect innocent. The place is the most debased and claustrophobic of slums, but he, having no experience of real life, trusts everyone. He’s immediately spotted by an urchin called Briz (a girl, though he assumes she’s a boy), who “takes him under her wing” with the intention of robbing him blind. Only Augustus proves strangely resilient – the stupid moves he makes tend to work out all right for him (kind of like an old Mr. Magoo cartoon), and his engineering skills prove useful and even lifesaving. And Briz, against her will, finds herself drawn to this gormless do-gooder, developing a genuine sense of obligation.
Then they end up on one of the floating “skydrift paddocks,” vegetation clumps, and discover a thriving, if marginal, civilization – a place mirroring Australian Outback culture, but in the air. And gradually Augustus becomes “Gus,” their strong, inventive, and decisive leader. In this capacity he’ll face war, slavery, and worse from the aliens, on whose domains he can’t help encroaching.
Cloud Castles was a lot of fun – creative, original world-building, and a cast of colorful, well-developed characters. Dave Freer has been a Facebook friend for some time, but I hadn’t tried his science fiction before. This is an extremely good space opera, and I recommend it highly.
As almost everybody knows, Arthur Conan Doyle will be forever linked (shackled, as he might have put it) to his epically successful detective character, Sherlock Holmes. And most of you will be aware that Doyle grew very weary of Holmes after a while, and killed him off (temporarily). He hoped he could win the public over to another character he created, an officer of Napoleon named Brigadier Etienne Gerard.
Brigadier Gerard is a Gascon, like D’Artagnan. And like D’Artagnan, he lives for honor and adventure. He is always ready to fight a duel or steal a kiss, and always first to volunteer for dangerous assignments. Where he differs from D’Artagnan is that he’s not terribly bright. His stories are told, we gather, in his old age, in an inn, to a group of friends. Gerard is now living on a pension, which he supplements by growing cabbages. He sighs over hard fate, which has denied him the advancement he has no doubt he deserved. He refers often to the medal for bravery he received from the Emperor himself, but which he never has with him. He keeps it, he says, in his apartment, in a leather pouch. I suspect we’re meant to understand that he actually had to pawn it.
In a series of semi-comic short stories, he tells of headlong adventures he enjoyed during the great wars. Sometimes on secret missions, sometimes accidentally separated from his company of hussars, he escapes from ambushes, traps and imprisonment, often (like the later Captain Kirk) with the help of some woman who has succumbed to his manly charm.
Generally (but not always) the joke is on Gerard. He can be counted on to run (or gallop) toward the sound of the guns, but he’s often clueless about what’s really going on. So confident is he of his own sagacity and aplomb that (in a manner that anticipates Inspector Clouseau) he often mistakes jeering for cheering. He is, however, never mean or small-minded.
I didn’t like The Complete Brigadier Gerard as much as I hoped to. The author is laughing at his hero (if somewhat affectionately), and the reader is too. For some reason that made me uncomfortable.
Your mileage may vary. No objectionable material. I might mention that I often forgot I was reading a Victorian/Edwardian book. Doyle wrote in a style ahead of his time.
But Ruth wore her own face for the world—wore an expression of strength and humility and goodness. Should you become accustomed to her loveliness, there would still be all that left. This was a for-keeps girl. She couldn’t be any other way because all the usual poses and artifices were left out of her. This was a girl you could hurt, a girl who would demand and deserve utter loyalty.
I’ve read all John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books, and a good number of his non-McGee works. I’m not sure if I ever read A Bullet for Cinderella before, though. I find it hard to imagine I could have read it and forgotten it. This is early MacDonald (1955), but it’s a gem.
Tal Howard is a returned prisoner of war from Korea. Nowadays we’d say he has PTSD. He came home to a job and a faithful, waiting fiancée, but walked away from both of them, because he wasn’t the same man anymore. He wasn’t sure what to do with his life, so he thought he’d go look for the money Timmy Warden, as he lay dying in the camp, told him about. The money he’d embezzled from his and his brother’s business and buried in a secret place. “Cindy will know where it is,” he said.
Tal arrives in Timmy’s home town, Hillston (no state named). He finds Timmy’s brother broken and bankrupt, a bitter alcoholic. He meets Ruth, Timmy’s old girlfriend, who never guessed his secrets. He starts searching for a girl named Cindy, but there doesn’t seem to have been any such girl in the small town in Timmy’s time.
But he’s also reunited with an old acquaintance – Fitzmartin, another camp survivor. He’s no friend, though. A loner, a sneak, a spy, all the prisoners had hated Fitz. He overheard Timmy’s confession to Tal, and he has preceded him to Hillston. But so far he can’t find any Cindy either, and none of the many places he’s dug up have yielded treasure. Fitz has no doubt he can solve the puzzle – or, even better, if Tal solves it, he’ll just kill him and take the dough.
You may recognize in this synopsis a fairly standard Noir set-up. And that’s what it is – a morally compromised hero going for the easy score and finding himself in over his head. What raises it to the level of art is John D. MacDonald’s sheer mastery of his medium, the lucid prose, the complex characters, the essential humanity of the project. This book was written fairly early in the author’s career, but it’s a complete, polished achievement. Superior in its time and superior today.
Diane took a deep breath. “I saw her come at you. I was a hair’s breadth away from gunning her down. But I knew she was just another scared and confused person – a victim in all this. And I let her stab you instead. Which feels like a betrayal.”
I waved a hand at her dismissively. “I’m one of the worst people in the known universe. And I can’t feel pain. People can stab me.”
Frank J. Fleming is a treasure – creator of the hilarious IMAO blog, and now a leading light at the indispensable Babylon Bee, he writes some of the funniest stuff going today. And he’s now three books into his Superego series, a dark-comic space opera about Rico, the greatest assassin in the universe. Rico is untethered by conscience and genetically engineered to be a perfect fighting machine. Only now he has somehow fallen in love with a tortured Christian woman called Diane and is trying to make himself worthy of her. In Superego: Betrayal, this change of course has landed him with responsibility for leading a rebellion against a universal criminal empire run by his own father.
I didn’t enjoy Superego: Betrayal as much as the first two books, but the reason is easy to understand. Every story has an arc, and it’s necessary to include an act where things go from bad to worse and the hero’s goals seem impossible to achieve. This book holds that position in the series (unless it gets even worse in the next book). Hopes are dashed, friends turn to enemies, people you like die. I hope Frank isn’t going to Game of Thrones this series, but can tie it all up and give us our happy ending in the next volume.
I don’t spend a lot of time in urban fantasy, as you may have noticed. But you may have also noticed that I’ve grown fond of Dan Willis’ Arcane Casebook series, set in the 1930s New York in an alternate universe where the world runs on magic rather than oil and coal, and where it’s possible both to be a magician and a practicing Catholic.
Alex Lockerby is a runewright, who makes his living doing magic through drawing, then burning, complex mystical designs on paper. He started humbly but has now risen in the world, being in business with the richest sorcerer in America, and in a romantic relationship with Sorsha Kincaid, the most powerful sorceress in the country.
But as Hostile Takeover begins, Sorsha is in trouble. Someone has drawn an incredibly complex rune that’s draining her life-force away. What they’re using the energy for is a mystery, but it’s gradually killing Sorsha. If Alex and his mentor Iggy (who is actually Arthur Conan Doyle incognito) can’t unlock the rune and break it, Sorsha will die.
But that’s not all that’s going on. Alex has been approached by a young couple who are being bullied by thugs who want them to sell a historic property they own. Alex promises to figure out what’s going on and stop it. Also, a runewright who held proprietary rights to a rune that gave a technical edge to a radio manufacturing company has died mysteriously. The insurance company suspects he was murdered, but can’t prove it. That’s Alex’s job.
I like these books. I like the characters. The writing’s pretty good, and the world-building fun. I recommend Hostile Takeover, along with the rest of the series. No very objectionable material, not even bad language.
Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the founders of the British “Detection Club,” a group of mystery writers. They enforced certain rules on their membership, including one against allowing their detectives to solve crimes through “jiggery-pokery.” Jiggery-pokery included spirits, magic, and psychic powers.
The rules of detective writing have changed since then (like all the rules), so that now and then we do encounter a mystery book where psychic powers play a part. However, it doesn’t work in practice to make those powers too effective. That ruins the whole point of a mystery. When a “real” psychic appears in a mystery, their gift is generally obscure, constituting a puzzle in itself.
That’s the case with Jack Lynch’s Die for Me, another in his Pete Bragg series. San Francisco PI Bragg, who flourished back around the ‘80s, gets a call from Maribeth Robbins, a woman he’s only encountered once before – over the phone. On the very last day of his newspaper career, then-reporter Bragg took a call from a profoundly depressed Maribeth. He realized he was talking to someone suicidal, and stayed on the line with her until she’d calmed down. Then he referred her to counselors. That call, she tells him now, saved her life. Today she’s a psychic, but a low-key one. She avoids publicity and the media.
She’s learned that Bragg has become a private eye, and she wants to talk to him about a vision she’s been having. She sees a rural location where – she is certain – several bodies are buried. These people were recently murdered and one of them, she thinks, is a child.
It’s pretty vague evidence to go on, if it can be called evidence at all. But Bragg teases some further details out of her, and then gets a pilot friend to fly him and a friendly medical examiner to a particular area along the California coast. In Jack London State Park they find a spot that matches the description. And the M.E. notes that the vivid green color of the grass could well be a sign of burials.
They land and examine the place, and immediately call the county sheriff. This is indeed a burial site. Just as Maribeth feared.
The story that follows mixes Bragg’s involvement with the case with his struggles in his relationship with his girlfriend, who’s increasingly distant. In the end he’ll face a showdown with a hostage-taking killer, in the ruins of Jack London’s house.
I don’t believe in ESP. If it exists, I consider it probably demonic. But suspending my disbelief on that point, I very much enjoyed Die for Me. It was an engaging and engrossing story that kept me turning the pages.
One thing that dated it, I thought (and being dated is no drawback in a book for this reader), was the treatment of feminism. Bragg encounters a female police detective back when such creatures were a rarity. He demonstrates his openmindedness in his conversations with her, but those conversations are cringe-inducing by the standards of the 21st Century. I think that’s because back then we thought feminism was really about fairness, not just about finding ways for men always to be in the wrong.
Anyway, Die for Me was a pretty good, old-school mystery, and I enjoyed it. Recommended unless ESP is a deal-breaker for you.
As for the flat itself, whatever had gone on here, it was highly unlikely that the weapon used was a cat, as there was nowhere near enough room to swing one.
Caimh McDonnell’s series of comic mysteries featuring bibulous police detective Bunny McGarry can well be called ground-breaking, if only for its extension of the category “trilogy” to include a series that’s up to six books now (not to mention the “Bunny in America” side-series). The latest is Firewater Blues, and it’s as inventive and hilarious as all the others.
Nevertheless, I’m done with them. Reasons at the end of this review.
Firewater Blues is a sort of prequel, occurring before A Man With One of Those Faces, the first in the series. Bunny is still with the police force at this point, though on a “sabbatical.” He’s grown disillusioned with the force, and is considering a change.
Then he encounters Rosie Flint, a young woman he once helped out. Rosie is a computer genius and very obviously somewhere on the Autistic scale. Which means she absolutely refuses to have anything to do with the regular police, due to the way they treated her the last time around. But she trusts Bunny… sort of. She has a boyfriend now, and he’s disappeared. On top of that, she’s convinced somebody has been following her. Already agoraphic, she’s terrified of a world of dangers.
Bunny agrees to help, and begins uncovering disturbing clues. Something very big is going on, and poor Rosie is in the middle of it. Bunny will approach the case with his usual blunt object methodology, and many heads will get knocked together before – with the help of a pack of renegade nuns and a twelve-year-old truant – he finds the answers. Not all of them comforting.
Author McDonnell is a genius, and Firewater Blues combines slapstick, crude jokes, and clever wordsmithing with moments of genuine poignancy. This is an excellent, funny book, if you can handle the language.
However (at least for this reader) this is where the author finally came out so plainly with his politics that that element overcame the entertainment. There’s never been any question where Caimh McDonnell stood on the political spectrum, but (it seemed to me) he came out swinging this time. He even went so far as to trot out the old chestnut that “political correctness is just another name for politeness.” (Yeah, pull the other one. What could be more polite than calling everybody you disagree with Hitler?) I’m sure author McDonnell doesn’t want my conservative, fascist money anyway.
In any case, it’s stopped being fun and I’m done with it. But you may be more tolerant than I am. I can recommend it as a really funny, well-written book.
This is a book I mistook for a promising novel by a Christian writer. Having finished it, I still consider it a promising novel (the author has gone on to write several and seems to be doing well). I’m not so sure about the Christianity. Though Preacher Finds a Corpse (awful title) is not exactly anti-Christian either.
Evan Wycliff grew up in Apple Center, Missouri, and then went away to Harvard to study theology. Then he studied astrophysics. Then, after a personal tragedy, he went home again, where he now works as a bill collector for a car dealer and now and then preaches in local congregations. Hence his nickname, “Preacher.”
His return allowed him to reconnect with his boyhood best friend Bob, though they haven’t actually spent much time together. Nevertheless, Evan is shocked when, one morning when he’s on his way to join some buddies on a turkey hunt, he finds Bob’s dead body waiting on the path. Bob has apparently shot himself to death with a pistol.
Evan is not a serious suspect in the case. In fact, the sheriff quickly closes the case, but confides to Evan in private that he wouldn’t mind having someone look a little closer at it. Bob’s financial affairs had been in disarray. A farm he’d been renting to a friend was about to be taken over by the government, and Bob had told the friend not to worry – he’d prevent that from happening. Only now he can’t. And Bob’s beautiful wife, who’s set to inherit all his property, seems less than devastated. And what is it with the property, anyway? Why is there no clear title? Why is an area there fenced off by the military?
Evan will poke around in his low-key way, digging up some history, and some people will feel threatened. Physical attack and involuntary commitment to an institution are just some of the challenges Evan will face. But in the end the truth will out.
I found Preacher Finds a Corpse a promising book in terms of narrative. Evan is a layered character, and the other characters are complex too. I thought the prose a little weak – the author needed to move the story along faster. He’s probably figured out how to do that by now.
The plotting was weak, I thought, in the sense that everything turns out to be less than the reader expects. The conclusion was kind of flat. Another problem was that one surreal plot element – Evan having conversations with the imagined spirit of his dead fiancée – doesn’t start happening until half-way through the book. If you’re going to add that kind of mystical element, you need to establish it earlier in the story.
But my main problem was theological. Evan is supposed to be a popular supply preacher in the small-town churches around Apple City. But, judging by the topics he preaches on, he’s only marginally orthodox (or not orthodox at all). He tells the people in the pews that “God is all there is” (pantheism). He questions whether human souls in Heaven possess personality. I have trouble believing small town preachers would put up with that sort of thing. However, I suspect the author means well. I think he wants us to like these people because they’re open to “original” ideas.
Preacher Finds a Corpse wasn’t awful. But I didn’t like it enough to go on to the sequels.
As you may or may not recall (why should you?) I have a fondness for tales of the sea. The great age of sail warfare, the age of Nelson, has inspired several excellent series of novels. The original, great one is C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower. He may (possibly) have been surpassed by Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey and Maturin. Another contender, not to be scorned, is Alexander Kent’s (a pseudonym; Douglas Reeman was his real name) Richard Bolitho.
The Complete Midshipman Bolitho is a collection of three novellas describing Dick Bolitho’s service from 1772 through 1774, on the eve of the American Revolution. We find him, a sixteen-year-old with experience on a previous vessel, assigned to HMS Gorgon, a 74-gun warship. Richard is the son of a rear admiral, but all midshipmen (at least in theory) are treated the same – and the discipline is hard. His immediate superior, in fact, makes it clear to him that he’ll get no special treatment – rather the opposite.
In the each of these three stories, the young midshipman finds himself facing impossible challenges and pulling victory from the jaws of defeat through unwavering courage, original thinking, and an unusual empathy with the men he leads.
The Complete Midshipman Bolitho was an excellent (and educational) read, by and large. This reader personally had trouble with some of the action scenes. They reminded him of the quick-cut editing in modern action movies – characters seemed to suddenly appear in places without an adequate explanation of how they got there. But it’s possible I was just distracted and missed the clues.
Minimal bad language. Suitable for older teens and all adults. Recommended.
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