Author M. R. James (1862–1936) is known for his ghost stories. The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, where he was director for fifteen years, called him “the originator of the ‘antiquarian ghost story.'” In doing so, he updated such stories for a new generation. He told these stories to friends and students at King’s and Eton Colleges on Christmas Eve, and since we’ve told our own stories in like manner, allow me to share this wonderful video of Christopher Lee performing “A Warning to the Curious” in a setting akin to James’ Christmas Eve parties.
Category Archives: Fiction
‘The Chalk Man,’ by Adam Lyndon
I think I’ve reached an age where I’m just going to start avoiding thrillers, unless they’re particularly recommended by some dear and trusted friend. Because it seems there’s a kind of arms race going on among thriller writers, to see how implausibly horrible they can make their heroes’ (and heroines’) plights as they weave their ever-tightening plot nooses. How much punishment can the human body – and mind – suffer without actually killing your hero or wearing out your readers?
Rutherford Barnes, the hero of Adam Lyndon’s The Chalk Man does not actually rip an IV needle from his arm and walk out of an emergency ward with bullet wounds and a concussion (my personal most hated thriller trope), but he and his friends certainly endure a lot more than I found plausible.
Detective Barnes is a policeman in Eastbourne, on the Sussex coast of England. In previous books in this series he apparently suffered the loss of his wife in an auto accident, which he is convinced was caused by a particular crime boss. He managed to get that crime boss sent to prison, and during that incarceration the criminal’s family was killed. He blames Barnes personally and has vowed revenge when he gets out.
When a deadly gas is released in downtown Eastbourne during the height of the Christmas shopping season, it brings all personnel out on full alert. Which means there’s nobody paying much attention when Barnes reports his eight-year-old stepdaughter missing. He certainly gets no help from his supervisor, who hates his guts. So Barnes is on the case alone, his only helpers an Inspector friend (who tends to go missing unexpectedly) and a sympathetic civilian data analyst. And that’s only the beginning of an orchestrated plot that will have Barnes fighting to save his new family and his own life, and to prevent an act of terrorism.
For this reader, it was all a bit much. There was nothing really wrong with The Chalk Man. The writing was good, the dialogue believable, the characters adequate – except for their superhuman resilience. Especially in the case of the two main female characters, who were (as one would expect) spunky and absolutely not to be intimidated. Like all the others nowadays.
Anyway, the book was fine, and may be just what you want for an exciting read. It made me tired.
What Christian Art Is All About
A Christian professor of fiction published a piece “To the Christian Writer” in which he recommends good art as a thing separate from Christian faith.
He begins by saying, “there’s no such thing as Christian art.” If someone wants to be a Christian, he should pursue it wholeheartedly, but “bad art comes out when you compromise art-making with some other intent.” Some other intent like Christian morals.
“If your fiction feels like it’s veering toward a moral conclusion, stop.”
I want to understand this professor’s argument and view it charitably, and I agree moralistic fiction is often shallow and ugly. I’m sure if I ever gain the courage to pick up Sheldon’s In His Steps, the novel that gave us the question “What Would Jesus Do?” I’ll regret it. I couldn’t make it past chapter one of The Shack. But separating Christian devotion from art sounds post-modern to me in all the wrong ways. What is art if it cannot be pursued as an expression of Christian truth?
I’m not sure he’s actually saying that, because he also says, “As a Christian person, would you not say it’s a joy to follow God? So follow him through your work. Quit telling him where to stand and how to speak.” That’s good. It calls back to moralistic work which may sound Christian while being far from it. That’s not good art.
“Preconceived moralizing jacketed in fiction aims for the head and the heart. If you want to be a good writer, aim elsewhere.” What does that mean? Aim for the spleen? What is good art if it doesn’t move the heart or elevate the affections (thinking of Jonathan Edwards’s language)? What makes the work of Margaret Atwood, Jack Kerouac, Barbara Kingsolver, Haruki Murakami, Annie Proulx, or Salman Rushdie objectively good that he recommends them over Lewis, Chesterton, and O’Connor?
Could it be we’re actually wrestling over cultural respectability — that our work would find approval in the New York Times Review of Books or Harper’s Magazine?
I think art is its own virtue, like planting and tending a tree, and artistic choices are also moral choices. Some choices are going to be more accessible to the public than others. Some will require greater levels of skill to succeed. In all of these choices, the best ones (though maybe not the most popular) will be true, real, and good. Isn’t that what Christian art is all about?
Photo by Peter Ivey-Hansen on Unsplash
‘Murder in the Round,’ by Bruce Beckham
Always reliable. That’s the great thing about Bruce Beckham’s Inspector Skelgill novels, set in England’s lake district, not far from the Scottish border. The setting is as is expected – the fell country where Skelgill loves to fish and run. Dan Skelgill is a police detective, assisted by his (also reliable) sergeants – transplanted Londoner Sgt. Leyton, and attractive local Sgt. Emma Jones.
One of the great traditions in their neighborhood is the Bob Graham Round, a grueling fell running race. Skelgill has come up with an idea for a new variation, one that takes the same route but incorporates lake fishing. He’s taking some vacation time to test the concept out when he learns of the death of a local runner, killed by a hit and run driver, with no witnesses. Although he can’t take an active part in the investigation because he’s on holiday, he keeps in touch with Leyton and Jones as they investigate. That’s the premise of Murder in the Round.
Skelgill is (I think I’ve said this before) almost the opposite of Sherlock Holmes. Logical deduction is not his forte. He’s more like a hominid from the hunter-gatherer period, operating mostly by his senses, getting messages from the scents in the air and the tracks on the ground.
I used to wonder how long his low-key flirtation with Sgt. Jones would go on, but I’ve come to accept that Dan Skelgill lives in one of those fictional universes where no one ever grows older. They’ll both be young and smoldering as long as author Beckham goes on writing.
Good entertainment. Recommended.
‘Kristin Lavransdatter: The Cross,’ by Sigrid Undset
Surely she had never asked God for anything except that He should let her have her will. And every time she had been granted what she asked for—for the most part. Now here she sat with a contrite heart—not because she had sinned against God but because she was unhappy that she had been allowed to follow her will to the road’s end.
So it is done at last. I have completed yet another reading of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter – volume 3, The Cross. Tiina Nunnaly’s translation this time.
It’s a little like completing a long mountain hike, I guess. There’s more than one point where you pause along the path and think about how far you have to go, and sometimes you do get tired. Yet that’s just part of the experience, what you go through to enjoy the clear air and the spectacular views.
In case you’re not familiar with the story, the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy begins with our young heroine, the beautiful daughter of doting parents in 14th Century Norway, rejecting the dull young man they betrothed her to, and running off with a handsome, dashing knight.
In the following two books, she has to live with the consequences. Erlend, her husband, is not a prudent man. He leaves the management of their farm to others (often to Kristin herself) to involve himself in political intrigues, which in the end lose him his ancestral estate. In this book, they have retired to Kristin’s home farm, where Erlend is resented by the neighbors. Sigrid’s chief concern is transferred to their seven sons, and she learns the torments that accompany parenthood. Meanwhile, the Hound of Heaven is always pursuing her.
There’s exquisite irony in watching Sigrid, as she passes through the stages of life, first inspired by romantic ballads, then compared to a ballad, and finally seeing her son inspire a ballad of his own through his misguided actions.
Read Kristin Lavransdatter, and you’ll come to know Kristin better than you know a lot of your friends and family. In a sense, the trilogy is a soap opera – but it’s what soap operas aspire to be; a deep, unwavering examination of the human soul in its glory and its weakness. The scenery descriptions are vivid and immersive. It’s also a paeon to the grace of God.
Not light reading, but highly recommended.
Gazing into the creative abyss
Should I share negative thoughts about my own books on this blog? Is it acceptable to indulge in self-criticism, or should the tone be relentlessly rah-rah and self-promotional?
Oh heck, that ship sailed long ago.
I’m working on formatting The Ghost of the God-Tree, the second part of The Year of the Warrior, for paperback. I’m not saying it’s bad. It’s got some strong stuff in it.
But I think it’s among my weakest books. There are lots of things I’d change, if I didn’t feel obligated to keep the editions relatively uniform.
And I’m pretty sure why.
I am very grateful to Baen Books, and to Jim Baen the maverick publisher, who gave me what little legitimacy in the industry I possess.
But Jim had a system. A program for his authors. And into that program I did not fit well.
Jim felt that nothing contributed more to an author’s success than having a bunch of books with his name on them all together on the shelves in the bookstores. This worked for him again and again. He knew his business. In order to achieve that shelf-space goal, he wanted several books from his new authors, quick. That’s why I got a three-book deal.
The problem is, I’m not a fast writer. I’ll admit that some of my languid output is due to laziness and inattention. Fair enough, mea culpa. But regardless of that, it just takes me a while, and many drafts, to produce decent prose. It took me years to produce Erling’s Word, the first part of the book. The Ghost of the God-Tree was written in haste, and suffers from my parental neglect.
On the other hand, judging by history, I’m probably being a little over-critical here.
And there are parts I like. I enjoyed the section where Ailill (Aillil) and Asta go to Thor’s country and meet the god himself. I thought that was kind of fun.
Cozy, Irish Lit: Small Things Like These
Sheila had written the shortest letter, asking plainly for Scrabble, providing no alternative. They decided on a spinning globe of the world for Grace, who wasn’t sure what she wanted but had written out a long list. Loretta was not in two minds: if Santa would please bring Enid Blyton’s Five Go Down to the Sea or Five Run Away Together or both, she was going to leave a big slice of cake out for him and hide another behind the television.
Claire Keegan’s 2021 novella, Small Things Like These, is a story about Bill Furlong, a hard-working father of five girls. He’s the man who keeps his 1980s Irish town, New Ross, warm, selling timber, coal, anthracite, and slack. It’s honest work that puts a roof over your head, though the windows may be drafty. He regularly remembers his childhood as the son of a single woman who worked for a kindly widow. Surely, he thinks, someone in town knows who his father is, if by nothing else than a strong resemblance. But no one has even suggested a possibility.
With the Christmas holidays coming and typical last-minute fuel orders to fulfill, Furlong makes a delivery that raises significant questions about his role as a man and member of the community.
I don’t know why I love Irish things. I think half of my family hails from Ulster, which probably means they were Scottish, but something provoked me as a teenager to define myself as being half-Irish (in the loose way many Americans talk about their heritage). All that to say, Keegan’s novella had cozy moments in both the Christmas atmosphere and the Irish dialogue. I found those pages nostalgic somehow. I bought the book wondering if the whole story would be that way.
No, this is a sparing, literary work that captures a few days of Bill Furlong’s life. He’s a man of few words, so a brief story like this fits him, leaving us with a good impression of him and perhaps the same questions he has. I don’t want to spoil the book by articulating those questions, but I will say they are relatively timeless and fit with the Christmas story, just as the title echoes the primary theme: “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me” (Mt 25:40 NKJV).
Photo by Dahlia E. Akhaine on Unsplash
‘The Eviction of Hope,’ ed. by Colin Conway
I have enjoyed Colin Conway’s 509 series, detective novels set in the Spokane, Washington area. When the story collection, The Eviction of Hope, showed up, I realized I hadn’t read one of the books in a while, so I got this one.
The concept (based on a real-world situation) is that “The Hope,” a residential hotel, once a grand place but now home to transients and drug addicts, is being sold for gentrification. That means the residents, some of them hard-luck civilians, others low-level criminals, are being thrown out onto the streets. Author Conway gathered a group of established crime writers to imagine some of the stories of those dispossessed people.
I am of two minds about the stories in this book. They are well-written. Several of them grabbed me.
However, most of them are downers. One, in particular, involves a Christian woman who disappoints us morally.
All in all, The Eviction of Hope was depressing but well done.
Cautions for language and mature situations.
‘Double Barrel Bluff,’ by Lou Berney
Why not? he thought.
Understanding, even as he thought it, that asking yourself, Why not? was usually the beginning of a bad decision, the first domino tipping over.
I like Lou Berney’s Shake Bouchon novels very much. The main problem with them is that he brings them out pretty slowly. So it was a pleasure when I saw that there was a new one available – Double Barrel Bluff. It’s an excellent, offbeat, dark comedy thriller.
Charles “Shake” Bouchon, our hero, is a former wheel man for the Armenian mob in Las Vegas. But he’s now married to Gina, a former pickpocket, and they’ve gone straight. Straight to Bloomington, Indiana, where they have square jobs and live a square life. Which they love.
Until one morning Shake finds himself accosted by an old enemy, Dikran Ghazarian, an Armenian thug the size and strength of an ox, with only a little more brains. To Shake’s astonishment, Dikran – who has often promised to murder him – does not want that today. He explains (after catching Shake) that Lexy Ilandryan, the woman leader of the Armenian mob, has disappeared while on vacation in Cambodia. He needs Shake to go to Cambodia with him and find her. Shake feels some obligation to Lexy, and so they fly there, to hunt for Lexy among the slums and ancient temples.
The dark humor of Double Barrel Bluff rises in large part from Shake’s attempts to keep a rein on Dikran, whose idea of investigating is to punch people and break things. Meanwhile we also follow the team of kidnappers, also a “smart” one and a dumb one, oddly parallel to Shake and Dikran. Author Berney excels at characterization – the good guys and bad guys constantly surprise us, but never pass plausibility.
Cautions for language and extreme situations. And some psychic/Buddhist nonsense. But Double Barrel Bluff was a very exciting and amusing light thriller. I enjoyed it a lot.
‘Dark Side of the Street,’ by Jack Higgins
There was a time when I was a great fan of the late Jack Higgins’ books. (His real name was Henry Patterson.) In time I began finding him repetitive, and I gave up on him. But I don’t mind picking one up for old times sake, now and then, if I happen to find one I haven’t read before. Such was the case with Dark Side of the Street.
Higgins explains in a foreword that this book was one of his early ones, written with the idea of competing with the James Bond franchise. His character Paul Chavasse is a very Bond-ian British intelligence agent. In this outing, Chavasse is called in on a special assignment to help the police, based on his experience in undercover work. They want him to commit a crime, get caught, and go to prison in order to ingratiate himself with a prisoner.
The background is this: The criminal he’s supposed to befriend, Harry Youngblood, was one of three men convicted of a major theft, and the money has never been recovered. Both his partners have already been sprung from high security prisons and have utterly disappeared. What nobody knows is that these men have not been spirited off to anonymous lives in foreign countries. They were in fact murdered for their loot. When Chavasse befriends Youngblood in prison and joins him in his escape, they will both be walking into a waiting death trap.
Dark Side of the Street benefits from some decent characterization – author Higgins humanizes the ruthless Youngblood, without romanticizing his essentially selfish and brutal nature. There’s also a sad subplot involving an unattractive, lovestruck girl.
The story includes a scene involving a mortuary and the embalmment of a beautiful young woman. It seemed familiar because it was – I’ve encountered the same scene twice in other books by Higgins – one of his weaknesses was a tendency to recycle material.
The layout of the book was marred by a lack of double spacing between chapter sections – meaning the reader frequently finds himself in a new scene with new characters, with no warning. This is the sort of error that happens increasingly in e-books these days, and it’s annoying.
But otherwise, Dark Side of the Street wasn’t bad as light entertainment.