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 But the old man has withdrawn from the world since his son Cotton was lost in combat in the Pacific.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.
I have shelves of encyclopedias, foreign dictionaries, and all the reference books I use. And I must have five or six English dictionaries of various sizes and editions. I even have slang dictionaries. When I’m really stuck I look at a thesaurus, but it never helps me. I know all those words, but I always think, “Well, there’s one word I’m not remembering that would be better than the one I’m stuck on.”
City of Fear, by Alafair Burke, “a tight, pacy police procedural, in which three Indiana college girls hit New York for their spring break.” One of them doesn’t come back.
The Album of Dr. Moreau, by Daryl Gregory, “deliberately and imaginatively breaks every one of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Rules of Detective Fiction.'” It’s a crazy premise, a genetically engineered boy band who find their producer dead in his hotel room, that apparently works.
Martin Luther: How Luther helped my depression. “I somehow found myself holding a copy of a Luther biography written by Roland Bainton.”
Halloween meditation: Jesus defines hell as the place when everyone is “salted by fire.”
No matter what you call your church or church movement, I think you’ll go astray if you claim your side is the one breathing life into dead orthodoxy. The message of the Reformation is still needed.
I recently reviewedThe 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.
The tree of life my soul hath seen, Laden with fruit and always green: The trees of nature fruitless be Compared with Christ the apple tree.
Seraphic Fire performs “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree” by Elizabeth Poston
This traditional Christmas carol would fit well during apple season, in September or October when many of us look for cider at a farmers market or visit orchards to pick or buy Jonagolds, Mitzus, and Arkansas Blacks off the trees around us.
So it was that each autumn we ate apples until we grew tired of them. And when it was clear that we’d eat no more, he turned to pies. Late into the night, night after night, he peeled apples relentlessly, while my bemused mother baked on and on. Our kitchen became a pie factory, and by the end of the season there could be eighty or a hundred pies in the freezer.
“Jesus Christ the Apple Tree” has been found in print from 1761 and possibly a bit earlier, attributed to Rev. Richard Hutchins, a clergyman of Northamptonshire, England.
…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.
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.
Leyburn, North Yorkshire, England — A highly important collection of C.S. Lewis titles from the library of the author’s lifelong friend Cecil Harwood (1898-1975) is to be offered in Tennants Auctioneers’ Books, Maps & Manuscripts sale on 28 July 2021. […]
Leading the collection is C. S. Lewis’s personal annotated copy of Snorri Sturlason’s Heimskringla (Cambridge, 1932), a hugely evocative literary artefact shedding light on his mature engagement with the Norse sagas which had first stimulated his ‘imaginative Renaissance’ as a young schoolboy (estimate: £700-1,000 plus buyer’s premium).
I can’t find any information as to who got the book.
“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.
Notions of personal honor aside, a clash between the Cowboys and lawmen was inevitable. Since November 1878, the Cowboys—from Bob Martin to Curly Bill to the Clantons and McLaurys—had been largely unopposed. On the border the Cowboys had bullied and raided and smuggled and robbed. They had killed anyone who dared oppose them. They had, prior to that fateful October day, murdered at least thirty-two men in New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico.
Over the years, I’ve read a number of books on the Earp brothers and the OK Corral gunfight. To be fair, plain “debunkings” of the “Earp myth” have grown rare of late. Writers tend to concentrate on the ambivalence in the historical record. The Clantons and their Cowboy allies look bad, but the Earp brothers look pretty bad themselves. Writers find it hard to take sides.
John Boessenecker, author of Ride the Devil’s’ Herd, has no such problem. He reports on the Earps’ corporate and individual transgressions with perfect candor (as far as I could tell), but makes a valuable contribution by doing a job most historians have skipped – he clearly documents the long and bloody history of the Cowboys who were the Earps’ enemies. And balanced in that scale, he has no problem siding with the Earps.
I’d always assumed that the horrific first scene of the movie, “Tombstone,” was an example of cinematic hyperbole – like the entirely fictional opening to “Braveheart,” designed to get us to hate King Edward I from the git-go. But although the specific incident of the wedding massacre never happened, it’s entirely consistent with their habitual behavior. The Cowboys’ history as a criminal organization went back to the 1877 Salt War in Texas. The Salt War, a fight over mineral rights to salt in dry lakes, was a vicious racial conflict between Anglos and Mexicans, and the Cowboys took the opportunity to give full vent to their cravings for theft, rape, and murder. Afterward they mainly specialized in cattle rustling, primarily stealing cattle in Mexico and selling them in the US, though they were perfectly willing to do it the other way around when convenient. They also stole horses, robbed stagecoaches, and walked off with anything not nailed down. They could be charming when they wished to, but made sure to beat or kill anyone they thought might not fear them sufficiently. These were not the “rustlers” of the northern range wars, small ranchers resisting being bulldozed by the big cattle interests. They were, in fact, a terroristic organization. They scared off capital investment, and more than once they precipitated diplomatic crises between the US and Mexico.
The Earps, when they arrived in Tombstone, Arizona, were not a respectable family. They were gamblers (not above cheating), and had been confidence men, horse thieves, arsonists and pimps. A couple of them still were wanted in other states.
But (at least as author Boessenecker portrays it), they came to town intending to turn over a new leaf. Gambling was considered a respectable occupation on the frontier, and as a group they’d built a reputation as formidable police officers. Their record for courage is remarkable, and they were men with “no back-up in them,” as they used to say. They couldn’t be intimidated. They were exactly the men to take the Cowboys down. And that, they came to hope (especially Wyatt), would make them respectable at last.
The rest is history. The proximate reason for the gunfight at the corral was trivial, but the conflict was essential to the time and place. The Earps (as the author sees it) were the necessary implements of civilization to remove a deadly social cancer.
Boessenecker sees Wyatt Earp’s Vendetta Ride in much the same way, but more extreme. By now Wyatt had acquired a Deputy US Marshal’s appointment, and he possessed legal authority to arrest the men who killed his brother Morgan. Instead he chose to murder them. He didn’t trust the Cochise County sheriff, his enemy John Behan, to keep them locked up for trial (Boessenecker defends Behan’s record, however, saying he was never complicit with the Cowboys, only friendly with some of them). Wyatt’s means were illegal, immoral and “in the worst tradition of American law enforcement.’ But they were effective. When he was done, the Cowboys were broken, never to rise again.
Just like in the movies.
I enjoyed Ride the Devil’s Herd very much. The writing wasn’t of the top rank, but it did the job of communicating the narrative. There were lots of interesting anecdotes along the way, and good photographs, well placed in the text. Sources are well-cited. If you’re a Western buff, Ride the Devil’s Herd is well worth your time and money.
Publishers Weekly has their 2021 best books list out. They more than anyone can publish a Best-Of list early. If you were throwing out your own nominations for best books of the year, what you would say?
