Fiction, Reviews

‘April Evil,’ by John D. MacDonald

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Yes, it’s my birthday, thank you. I guess I was a little obscure about that yesterday.

Aside from his Travis McGee novels, John D. MacDonald was a prolific author of stand-alone thrillers. Today’s pick is April Evil, from 1956.

The setting is the town of Flamingo, Florida, whose most eccentric resident is old Dr. Paul Tomlin. It’s well known that Dr. Tomlin keeps all his money in cash, in a safe in his big stone house, as he doesn’t believe in banks.

This eccentricity attracts interest. Naturally his ne’er-do-well nephew Dil Parks is interested, as is Dil’s sexy, scheming wife, Lenora. And then there’s a more distant relation, young Joe Preston, who came to visit with his wife, Laurie. Dr. Tomlin despises Joe, but he likes Laurie, and so allows them to stay with him, while he teaches Laurie about books and music.

But even more darkly, a man named Harry Mullin has come to town. He’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and he’s heard a rumor about a lot of money in an old man’s house. He’s assembled a team of specialists, and they’re planning a quick, easy job and a clean getaway.

Lawyer Ben Piersall is not involved in any of this. When Dil’s wife, Lenora, tried to get him to help them have the old man declared incompetent, he laughed her off. What he doesn’t know is that the criminal Harry Mullin has moved in next door, and his own son has developed a powerful curiosity about these secretive strangers.

It’s a powder keg situation, with several different fuses burning to it, and it’s all set to go off on one terrible afternoon.

April Evil is not the best of John D. MacDonald’s novels (I found it a little melodramatic), but it’s well-written and fairly representative. As always, the characters are the great strength. They’re varied and believable, and they sometimes surprise the reader.

Recommended. Cautions for violence and sexual situations.

Music, Uncategorized

Birthday post: Going sane

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I’ve loved the song above for a long time. And to my mind, it harmonizes with my theme tonight.

This will be my birthday post (my age is for me to know and you not to care about). In honor of this auspicious occasion, I’m going to break my custom of putting commemorative posts up on the day of the event (so it’s too late) and post it the day before (so you’ll have time to get me a present).

Also because I have something to say that may be significant, and I want to share it. It’s been about three weeks now, and that fact suggests to me that the effects I’m seeing may be permanent.

I believe I’m going sane.

Nobody could be more surprised than I am. Let me tell you about it.

First of all, I think I won’t be surprising anyone when I say that I’ve always been a little… weird. Socially. Depressive. Awkwardly shy. Unable to make eye contact. Easily offended. Not one to pick fights, but one to distance myself, taking refuge in solitude. My great plague has been intrusive thoughts – shameful memories that came into my mind and would not be ignored. I knew of no way to handle them except to face them, experience the full shame, and then try to find something to distract me from them.

This was tremendously tiring for me. In social situations, half my energy got wasted in dealing with those intrusive thoughts. This was how I lived.

Then something happened to me, about three weeks ago.

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Fiction, Reviews

‘Tomorrow Is another Day,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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A deal came up on a Toby Peters mystery by Stuart M. Kaminsky, and I bought it. Turned out I’d read it before, but it was fun to read again, and it turns out I haven’t reviewed it here. So, Tomorrow Is Another Day.

It’s 1943. Toby Peters, small-time Los Angeles private eye, gets a call to meet with Clark Gable. Gable is supposed to be overseas with the Air Force, where he’s trying to get himself killed in his grief over the death of his wife, Carole Lombard. But he’s briefly on leave, and somebody has been sending him threatening notes. It all seems to harken back to an incident during the filming of “Gone with the Wind,” where an extra was accidentally stabbed to death with a saber. The notes are cryptic, but they seem to indicate that the dead man was the note-writer’s father, and that he blames a group of people who were present on set – including Gable. And he means to kill them all, finishing up his murder spree with an attack on the Academy Awards banquet.

Though Gable is clearly a tragic character, the story as a whole is farcical, in the great Toby Peters tradition. Why a star of Gable’s magnitude would hire a PI who can do no better for a security team than his fat dentist, his retired wrestler landlord, and his “little person” best friend is a very good question, but they bring it off in the end, with only a few innocent bystanders lost along the way.

Light entertainment from a master mystery writer. Recommended.

Authors, Writing

Tolkien on world-building

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Just found this fascinating excerpt from an old TV interview with J. R. R. Tolkien. It’s easy to understand how people complained that he often spoke rapidly and was hard to understand — the subtitles are very welcome. He always attributed the slurred speech to an old tongue injury.

The interviewer seems a tad clueless, not only about Tolkien’s mythopoeic philosophy (which is understandable) but about the basic Christian worldview.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Fiction, Reviews

‘Close to Death,’ by Anthony Horowitz

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I’ve been pretty happy with the Anthony Horowitz novels I’ve been able to pick up on special deals. His Hawthorn and Horowitz novels are an intriguing twist on the classic Holmes & Watson template – author Horowitz writes himself into the stories, and Hawthorne, his detective, is secretive and unsociable, a mystery in his own right. Hawthorne works for an equally secretive – and slightly sinister – private agency. Although the books were his idea in the first place, he is often reluctant to cough up the facts.

In Close to Death, it’s been a while since Hawthorne has produced a case for Horowitz to follow, and Horowitz’s agent is pressing for a new book. Hawthorne comes up with an old case that he worked back in 2014 with a different sidekick, about whom (of course) he is reluctant to say much.

The crime took place in Riverview Close, an expensive, gated cul-de-sac in a posh London suburb. The residents of the close were friendly and congenial until the Kentworthy family moved in. Giles Kentworthy was wealthy and ostentatious, and also right-wing (so obviously racist. Is flying the Union Jack actually considered offensive in England? Sad.) Their children are loud and occasionally destructive. They hold loud parties late at night and block a shared driveway with their vehicles. And now they’re planning to build a swimming pool that will ruin a view that means the world to one of their neighbors, a woman dying of a lingering disease.

When the neighbors call a meeting to air grievances, the Kentworthys don’t appear, which only raises tensions. Then Giles Kentworthy is found murdered with a crossbow, and the police call in Hawthorne and his old partner Dudley to consult.

I must give author Horowitz credit for masterful plotting. He’s a “fair play” mystery writer, providing the reader everything he needs to know to figure it out for himself, but diverting attention with expert sleight of hand. And the final solution was extremely clever – I didn’t see it coming at all. Then there was a dark coda that lent gravity to the whole exercise.

I liked Close to Death very much.

Publishing, Writing

Klavan on how to start a writing career

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I’m worthless to you tonight. No book to review, and no thought in my head worth sharing.

You’ll have to settle for some guy named Klavan, who’s supposed to be a novelist. I know it’s a disappointment when you came for Lars Walker, but life is hard and this will make you stronger.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Valley of Fear,’ by Arthur Conan Doyle

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Holmes laughed. “Watson insists that I am the dramatist in real life,” said he. “Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-stated performance.”

The last Sherlock Holmes novel (as opposed to short stories) that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote was The Valley of Fear, which was serialized in the Strand Magazine during 1914-1915. Doyle set the story well back in time, before Holmes’ “death” in a fight with Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. Doyle places Moriarty in the story’s background, laying some preemptive groundwork for the story, “The Final Problem,” where Moriarty, one must admit, appears a little suddenly for an arch-enemy and nemesis.

In The Valley of Fear, Holmes gets a cipher message from an informant inside Moriarty’s organization, warning him of danger to a man at a country place called Birlstone House. Soon after this, a police detective named MacDonald arrives to ask him to help solve a grisly murder at that very place.

They arrive at Birlstone, which is a stately house surrounded by a moat, whose drawbridge is drawn up every night. So it’s virtually impossible that anyone sneaked into the house during the night. But some time that night, the owner of the house, Douglas, was murdered in his study, his face destroyed by a blast from a double-barrelled shotgun. The circumstances make suicide unlikely, but in that case how did the murderer get away? Holmes, of course, goes over the crime scene carefully with his magnifying glass, and it’s not long before he hits on the solution.

I have to admit that The Valley of Fear is one of my least favorite Holmes stories. It follows the pattern Doyle used in A Study In Scarlet, where you have half the story describing the investigation, and the other half consisting of the killer’s confession, in which he explains his back story and motives. (Borrowed loosely in this case from the story of the radical American labor group, The Molly McGuires.)

Doyle seemed to believe (and perhaps he was right in terms of his audience at the time) that people would enjoy stories about far-away, exotic places like the American West or India. I find Doyle a pretty pedestrian writer in these narratives. He tends to get the local details wrong – his American slang here is pretty clumsy, for instance. When I read a Holmes story, I want Holmes, and London. Or at least Victorian England.

So I can’t say I love The Valley of Fear. But if you’re a Holmes fan, you’ll want to read it.

Religion, The Press, Uncategorized

From the sublime (mine) to the ridiculous (Netflix)

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In today’s really important news, my article on the Lutheran Free Church for the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Magazine is now available free online. You can marvel at its awesomeosity at this link.

In even better news, I HAVE FINISHED MY MARATHON SLOG THROUGH THE VIKINGS: VALHALLA SERIES.

It was particularly frustrating watching a series that covered events I’ve researched and dramatized in my own novels, observing how the producers took historical events and characters, shuffled them like cards, and dealt them out in random order. Particularly annoying was their treatment of King Magnus the Good of Norway, who is treated here as a homicidal psychopath. I mean, they called him “the Good” for a reason.

But what’s important is that I can write my article now, with an eventual eye to payment. All through my life, I’ve harkened back to a poem I read somewhere, which went like this (more or less):

There’s a little check at the end of this verse. 
I see it just three lines away.  
And it shall be mine  
For the good of my purse  
If luck is my fellow today.

(I’d credit the author, but a web search doesn’t reveal his name, and I can’t find it in the book where I thought I saw it.)

Music

Sunday Singing: How Great Thou Art

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One of the greatest hymns of the 20th century was written by poet and member of the Swedish parliament Carl Gustav Boberg (1859 – 1940). A member of the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden, he wrote “O store Gud” in 1885 in response to church bells and the beauty of a summer evening. Englishman Stuart K. Hine translated and arranged the text to a Swedish folk melody in 1949. The great George Beverly Shea sings with a choir in the recording above.

“I will give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart;
I will recount all of your wonderful deeds.
I will be glad and exult in you;
I will sing praise to your name, O Most High.” (Psalm 9:1–2 ESV)

Fiction

New Discovery of Old Fantasy

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Praise for the 1989 Ken Follett novel, The Pillars of the Earth.

Also, World released its book issue this month with several reviews, including this list, “Devils and dragons: Eight books for summer.”