Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

Is It Worth Reading the Princess Bride?

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“Look: I would hate to have it on my conscience if we didn’t do a miracle when nice people were involved.”

“You’re a pushy lady,” Max said, but he went back upstairs. “Okay,” he said to the skinny guy, “What’s so special I should bring back out of all the hundreds of people pestering me every day for my miracles this particular fella? And, believe me, it better be worth while.”

A couple years ago, a rumor went around that Sony Pictures wanted to remake The Princess Bride, and many fans respectfully demurred. Remaking it after the pattern of many remakes would produce just another sequel film no one wants to see.

But having read William Goldman’s novel, which is now available in beautifully illustrated hardcover–can you imagine–I could see another movie made from this book. Definitely not a remake of the movie. But another movie based on the book could work if it were done creatively independent from the existing movie.

I’m thinking of something in an artsy style that includes new scenes and probably original material. Maybe the part about dad reading to his son is limited and animated. Inigo’s and Fezzik’s backstories could be told. Prince Humperdink would be a barrel-chested hunter who hated matters of state and enjoyed playing around in his Zoo of Death. There’s enough in the book to do something different with it in a movie–even though while reading the book it’s easy to believe all the best part made it into the existing movie. Goldman did the adaptation himself masterfully.

I think there’s room for a little original material too: another woman to interact with Buttercup and give her some screen time in the castle or before. They could adapt scenes to show how Humperdink noticed her and solicited her hand in marriage like the big jerk he is–no love required. And they could probably insert a Monty Python-style historian toward the end of the first half to comment on Florin and Guilder relations, which of the women alive at the time were known to be uncommonly beautiful, and related innanity.

It would be tough, but I think it could work.

Is the book worth reading? Yes, it is. But if you’ve seen the movie several times already, you may find the book to be a little different.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Scarecrow,’ by Eaton K. Goldthwaite

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It’s possible to appreciate a novel without enjoying it much. That’s my reaction to Scarecrow, the first novel in the Lieutenant Dickerson series, first published in 1945.

Lieutenant Joe Dickerson is a Boston detective with a reputation for case-solving. His superior assigns him to go to the small town of Sudwich, Connecticut as a consultant, to help with the first murder the town has seen in many years. Sudwich has one industry, run by Old Man Kendall. But the old man has withdrawn from the world since his son Cotton was lost in combat in the Pacific.

One day, a strange, misshapen figure turns up in the town square, saluting the flag. Soon after, the town Lothario is found shot to death in his car, and a local beauty is stabbed in her apartment. That’s when they call in Lt. Dickerson. Dickerson sets about painstakingly analyzing crime scenes, interviewing witnesses, and picking his way through a tangle of relationships, hatreds and other motives to finally identify the murderer (whose identity did surprise me).

What I appreciated about Scarecrow was the (relatively) realistic portrayal of professional police work. Dickerson doesn’t rely on flashes of intuition, or on his flashing fists, but on science and reason. I suspect (I don’t know) that this book may have been an advance in the police procedural sub-genre. (Dickerson does, in a rudimentary way, the same sort of thing they used to do on the CSI shows.)

What I didn’t like was that the book was boring. It took forever for the plot to get going. The dialogue was stilted, all the characters speaking in the same formal, unnatural way. Also, this was clearly the work of an Englishman, though the setting and characters are American – there were Britishisms everywhere, “petrol” for gasoline, and “torch” for flashlight, for instance.

So I can’t recommend Scarecrow very highly. Though you may appreciate the utter absence of profanity.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saint to the Rescue,’ by Leslie Charteris

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I recently reviewed The Saint on the Spanish Main, and found Leslie Charteris’ famous hero, Simon Templar, a little different, and more intriguing, than I had guessed based on the TV shows.

The Saint to the Rescue is an earlier series of stories, first published in 1959. In these six neatly constructed little tales, set either in California or the American South, I learned yet more about Simon Templar, and I was a little shocked. In a fun way (in real life it might be different).

Several of the stories involve people being blackmailed. The Saint considers blackmailers lower than murderers, and has no objection to a private death penalty for them. That’s not something I’m accustomed to in fiction, but it provided this reader a genuine frisson of guilty pleasure.

Modern readers, if they are liberal, will appreciate the Saint’s contempt for Florida land developers who ravage the environment. Conservative readers will appreciate his condemnation of foreign aid and his spirited defense of the British Empire (remember that author Charteris himself was a non-white child of the Empire, son of a Chinese father and an English mother).

And those of us, young or old, who are weary of Gender Feminism will appreciate the complete absence of Evolved “masculinity.”

Shocking. Fun. Easy to read. I recommend The Saint to the Rescue, unless you’re Woke.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Unauthorised,’ by Ed Church

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…The guy looked like he’d been chiselled from granite then dipped in a vat of nicotine.

The latest installment in Ed Church’s Brook Deelman series, Unauthorised, seems to take the books in a new direction. I’m not sure I’m entirely happy about that, but the book is worth reading.

Brook is called up, to his own surprise, to join a special task force of the London police. He isn’t there long before he figures out he wasn’t recruited for his investigative skills. His friend Kev is part of the team. Kev has finally reached his career ambition of being on the Homicide Squad. Unfortunately, he has apparently reached his Peter Principle level of incompetence. His superior is easing him into a less demanding job at the police academy, and Brook is just there to babysit him during the transition.

But Brook is fascinated by the crimes they’re investigating, partly for personal reasons. Two police officers have recently been found dead, apparent suicides, surrounded by evidence (likely planted) of deep moral depravity and corruption. But the weird thing is that both had the same name – Jonathan Davies. And that is also the real name of Brook’s best friend, whom he calls Jonboy. And who’s been away in Croatia and is supposed to be back soon, but Brook hasn’t been able to reach him.

Meanwhile, in New York, a UN functionary tries to recruit an agent to help him with a plot to “save the world.” And that plot involves interfering in the London serial murder investigation.

Also, Brook meets a new woman and starts a tentative relationship.

The book was well-written and gripping, though the premise was kind of far-fetched. The UN thread moves us into the realm of Illuminati-style Conspiracy Theory, which I don’t care much for. There’s a character who seems to be a Christian believer, but I’m not sure what to think about him.

All in all, Unauthorized was not my favorite book in the series, but I’ll keep reading to see where the author takes it. Cautions for language and disturbing themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Missing and the Dead,’ by Jack Lynch

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In spite of the unwelcome appearance of pot-smoking in the previous volume of this collection, I enjoyed the first book in Jack Lynch’s Pete Bragg series enough to continue with the second book, The Missing and the Dead.

Here we find our San Francisco private eye retained by a local celebrity, an over-expressive female TV personality, to look for her brother, Jimmy Lind. Jimmy is an insurance investigator, and he’d been sure he was on the trail of a much-sought, missing artist when he vanished. Oddly, a cop disappeared around the same time in the same area, a sort of artist’s colony.

As is characteristic of the series (so far as I can tell so far), our hero works at solving the puzzles he encounters, but the malevolent genius in the background is such as he could never have imagined. Once again, he’ll survive by luck as much as by strategy, and he won’t really know what he’s facing until the Big Reveal, when it’s almost too late.

But one doesn’t read Hard-boiled for the puzzle solving. The Missing and the Dead was fun to read, a page-turner with lots of fighting and (implied) sex. Plus some surprisingly sensitive characterization. And most satisfactorily, it’s pre-Woke. When a drunk persists in harassing the woman Pete is romancing, he decks the guy, and she doesn’t lecture him on how she doesn’t a man’s protection, but rather appreciates his gallantry.

And the pot-smoking, though mentioned, is restricted to off-stage.

I recommend The Missing and the Dead as popcorn reading.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Unpleasantess at the Bellona Club,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

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“Considering the obliging care we take in criminal prosecutions to inform the public at large that two or three grains of arsenic will successfully account for an unpopular individual, however tough, it’s surprising how wasteful people are with their drugs. You can’t teach ‘em. An office-boy who was as incompetent as the average murderer would be sacked with a kick in the bottom….”

Old General Fentiman, a veteran of the Crimean War, was pretty much a fixture at the Bellona Club, a stodgy gentlemen’s club for veterans in London. On Veterans’ Day, he becomes more a fixture than ever, being found dead in his accustomed wing-chair. Certain peculiarities about the condition of the body make it difficult to determine the exact time of his death.

And that becomes an issue, since, as it turns out, the old man had reconciled with his long-estranged sister that same day, and she had also died, after changing her will. The division of her large estate will now depend on which of them passed away first. Lord Peter Wimsey, himself a member of the club, is asked to investigate – as discreetly as possible. Lord Peter grows increasingly interested as he asks questions, and then (as he so often does) begins to dread what he’ll learn. He hopes very much the murderer wasn’t his friend George Fentiman, the old man’s grandson, who is very poor and suffers from shell-shock and the occasional fit of uncontrolled rage.

That’s the premise of The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, fourth novel in the Lord Peter Wimsey series. At this point (in my opinion), author Dorothy L. Sayers is coming into her full powers as a detective novelist. Her writing is sharp and amusing, her characters vivid, and the puzzle is a neat one. Also on display are acid social commentary (especially concerning attitudes toward women) and problems of morality.

I like The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club very much, and recommend it highly.

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.