Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Non-fiction, Reviews, Writing

‘Orkneyinga Saga’

1 Comment

This book review will, on closer examination, turn out to be a sort of bait-and-switch, a partial review embedded in an author’s journal post. I’m still plot-wrestling, and I continue in PAUSE mode, learning the geography and trying to figure out what happens next as I send Erling Skjalgsson home from England by way of the Orkneys (and possibly the Shetlands. Haven’t worked that out yet).

As I told you, I realized the other day that Erling’s journey home to Norway has to bring him into a confrontation with Jarl Thorfinn the Mighty of Orkney, who had a problematic relationship with King (Saint) Olaf Haraldsson, Erling’s enemy. Thorfinn had submitted to Olaf as his overlord, but he felt Olaf had broken their understanding by awarding part of the jarldom to his brother Brusi. He might very well be willing to listen to Erling’s suggestion that he transfer fealty to King Knut of Denmark/England.

However, I discovered a further complication. In reading the Penguin edition of Orkneyinga Saga, the saga of the earls (jarls) of Orkney, I was reminded that Thorfinn ruled not only the Orkneys and Shetland. He also ruled Caithness, the northeastern part of Scotland, an area heavily settled by Norwegians.

And Caithness brings us close to Moray, which was the home of Macbetha – whom I included, you’ll recall, under the name Macbetha, in my last Erling book, King of Rogaland. Macbetha, who wouldn’t have been king yet at this point, would almost certainly have been an enemy of Thorfinn’s. (Though I always think about Dorothy Dunnet’s novel, King Hereafter, which is based on the theory that Thorfinn and Macbeth were the same person. She notes that the annals telling about Macbeth never mention Thorfinnn, and Orkneyinga Saga never mentions Macbeth [well, it mentions an earlier King Macbeth, but he’s a different guy]. In the saga, Thorfinn does fight a mysterious Scottish king named Karl Hundarsson, whom some historians have identified as Macbeth.) Anyway, it would be impolite to my readers not to reunite them with Macbetha while we’re in the neighborhood.

So how will I work all this out? I’m thinking about it. I have some ideas.

In any case, I’ll review the portion of Orkneyinga Saga that I read. I confess I didn’t finish it (this time through), because it covers a lot of history much later than the period I’m dealing with. Some of it, I should note, is very intriguing, especially the conscientious objection of (Saint) Magnus Erlendsson during a raid on Wales, and his subsequent martyrdom.

But my concern was with the career of Jarl Thorfinn. Thorfinn is an intriguing character, bigger than life. Sometimes he’s sympathetic, sometimes emphatically not. His climactic conflict with his charismatic nephew, Rognvald Brusisson, involves some very nice plotting (indicating – probably – a fair amount of fictional embroidering) and dramatic irony. One also notes the appearance of the name “Tree-beard,” very likely where Tolkien found it. The saga also includes one of our sources for the disputed practice of the “Blood Eagle,” a cruel method of execution which showed up in the History Channel “Vikings” series. (I myself incline to the view that there never was such a practice, but that it came from the saga writers misunderstanding a poetic metaphor.)

Orkneyinga Saga is one of the most striking and vigorous of the sagas. It’s not up to Snorri Sturlusson’s literary standards, but it still packs a punch and lingers in the memory.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Butcher on the Moor,’ by Ric Brady

Leave a comment

“My son Graham,” the old woman says over the phone. “I think he’s killed someone again.”

Henry Ward is a retired police detective in North Yorkshire. In Butcher on the Moor, the second novel in a series by Ric Brady, he’s awakened in the night by a call from a Mrs. Thomson, who says the words above. waking him up fully. He has no memory of Mrs. Thomson or of Graham, the son to whom she’s referring, but he met a lot of people in his years on the force, and gave out a lot of calling cards.

When he arrives at her house, he finds that she does indeed have an old card of his. She’s clearly mentally confused, slipping in and out of the present. But he grasps enough to know that she’s seen something that troubled her. He goes down into her cellar to investigate, and finds what looks very much like butchered human remains. Then Graham himself shows up, and Henry barely makes it out with his life, while Graham runs off into the moors, his personal stomping grounds.

Normally, this would be where Henry could drop the whole business in the hands of the working police, but they are severely understaffed and (apparently) generally incompetent. The only one he really trusts is DI Barnes, a woman detective who was badly injured in their previous adventure and is not quite healed up yet. Along with Henry and his bad hips (it’s a long wait for a replacement under National Health Service), they make less than a full-strength team. But Barnes gets approval to bring Henry on as a consultant, and he plunges into the case recklessly.

Henry’s frustration with retirement, along with the fecklessness of the working cops, combine to put him in a lot of places where angels would fear to tread. I found his disregard for his own safety when faced by younger, larger, armed opponents a little hard to swallow. But the story moved right along, the dramatic tension was high, and the characterizations and prose were good.

I wouldn’t rate Butcher on the Moor as top detective fiction, but I’ve read a lot worse.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Deficit of Diligence,’ by Peter Rowlands

3 Comments

I’m ready now to keep my promise to review the second book in Peter Rowlands’ Mike Stanhope mystery series, Deficit of Diligence.

I think this book was a little better-plotted than the first, which is a good indication. Nevertheless, my overall impression was the same – good prose, but the storytelling leaves room for improvement.

Mike Stanhope, you may recall, is an English journalist working in the transportation and logistics field. He fell in love with a girl from Cornwall last time out, and now he’s moved to Truro to be with her. He got a semi-permanent job with the logistics company she works for, but he does freelance work as well (which will get him into some trouble).

When he hears from a lawyer that a woman in Newcastle whom he never heard of has left him her entire estate, he travels up there to learn more. And while he’s at it, he can do some reporting work there. But he allows his reporter’s instincts to confuse his professional loyalties, putting his Cornwall job in jeopardy. Also, he discovers that there’s a competing heir contesting the will, a desperate man who won’t stint at threats and violence.

Meanwhile, he begins to glimpse the outlines of a massive insurance fraud scheme, which puts him in conflict with still more dangerous men.

Deficit of Diligence includes several weaknesses in plotting, from my viewpoint. One is that our hero, though supposedly a seasoned professional man, makes a series of rash decisions, both professional and personal. He doesn’t seem to learn from his mistakes (I can say, from experience, that a few good beatings teach most people some measure of caution).

Much of the plot in this book, as in the previous book, hinges on his recognition of someone he only knew briefly, many years ago. I realize I have a poor memory for faces, but this seemed a little far-fetched to me.

Finally, there’s the matter I blogged about last night – the plotting technique of allowing a “helpless hero” to blunder into a life-threatening situation, and then rescuing him through sheer dumb luck. I mentioned yesterday that it happened twice here, but lo and behold, it happened a third time. That’s just lazy.

Still, the prose was good, and I think the plotting was improved. (Though the book could still have been trimmed back without much loss.)

Fiction, Reviews

‘Alternative Outcome,’ by Peter Rowlands

Leave a comment

Sometimes one great virtue in a book, especially if it’s a virtue that’s grown rare and is much missed, will outweigh a few flaws. That’s the case I have to present for Alternative Outcome by Peter Rowlands.

Mike Stanhope, our hero, is an English journalist in the field of transportation and logistics (think trucks and containers). He makes a fair living, but is not fulfilled. For fulfillment, he wrote a mystery novel, which he self-published as an e-book. The book was sparked by a chance encounter in a railway station, when he ran into a woman who reminded him of a girl he’d known as a boy. He met that girl at a coastal resort where his family vacationed, and had a crush on her, but only spoke to her once. He combines this memory with another event that occurred around the time he knew the girl – a big jewelry robbery nearby. One of the robbers was never caught, and it’s rumored that some of the loot was never recovered.

Then someone burgles and searches Mike’s apartment. That’s only the beginning of his troubles, as he realizes that someone has read his book and assumed that his description of the crime is based on actual knowledge – which is not the case. Now wholly engaged, Mike makes a real effort to find the girl he remembers and learn what really happened with he robbery. This will lead him into genuine mortal danger, but also into a new romantic relationship.

I thought Alternative Outcome lagged at times, and some of Mike’s decisions seemed implausibly rash. Nevertheless, this book had one supreme virtue that I prize and rarely see anymore: Author Rowlands, who is in fact a journalist in the transportation and logistics field, can actually spell and write a grammatical, coherent English sentence. I reveled – I luxuriated – in the clean, comprehensible prose. The weaknesses in the story weren’t enough to put me off as long as I had this good writing to enjoy.

Recommended. Cautions for language and sexual situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Winter Grave,’ by Peter May

1 Comment

And he wondered how something as full of nothing as emptiness could weigh so heavily.

What do you say about a book that was well-written, one which you enjoyed, when you believe that book to be effectively (if unintentionally) in the service of evil? That’s my problem with Peter May’s A Winter Grave.

Actually it’s not that big a problem. The answer is to tell the truth and let the reader make up his or her own mind.

The year is 2051, and climate catastrophe has struck the earth. The tropics are uninhabitable now, and the loss of the Gulf Stream has turned Scotland into a subarctic wasteland. Addie Sinclair, a weather monitor, climbs a mountain near Loch Leven to check her equipment and discovers the body of a man, frozen in the ice.

Cameron Brodie is a Glasgow police detective. When his superior tells him to go up to the village of Kinlochleven to investigate, he begs off at first. He explains, truthfully, that he’s just been diagnosed with terminal cancer and will be retiring from the force. But when he hears Addie Sinclair’s name he changes his mind, saying it was a false alarm. Because Addie is his own daughter, from whom he has been alienated a long time.

Cam boards an electronic, self-piloting helicopter with a friendly forensic scientist. But when they arrive, murder quickly follows, and Cam is soon fighting for his life in the midst of blizzards, while trying to find a way to explain to his daughter – after all these years – the real cause of her mother’s death.

Peter May is one of the best mystery writers out there, and A Winter Grave showcases all his virtues. The prose is excellent, the characters interesting, the setting vivid, the mystery confounding.

But it’s all in the service of the Green religion. The message of this book, when you get down to it, is, “Wake up! If you don’t surrender all your liberties to the government without delay, so they can implement draconian regulations on every area of your life, future generations will be cursed, and it will be all your fault.” It’s a fascist book, though I’m confident the author is a true believer and intends nothing of the sort.

One thing I found ironic was the book’s depiction of the Green movement as a beleaguered, embattled little cause with diminishing political power, rejected even by the news media.

I can only dream.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bloodshot,’ by Mac Fortner

Leave a comment

I gave a mixed review to Knee Deep, Mac Fortner’s first Cam Derringer book, yesterday. I thought I’d give the series one more chance, so I bought Book 2, Bloodshot. My mind is made up now.

Cam Derringer, our hero, big, handsome and irresistible to women, has left Key West temporarily to spend a year in New York City (where he apparently had no trouble obtaining a concealed carry gun permit). The deal is that if he works at his friend Chad’s law practice for a year, he can get his own law license reinstated. Then he figures he’ll go back to the Key. As another inducement, his girlfriend Robin, an FBI agent, has also been assigned to New York.

He’s pleased when Chad announces his engagement to a beautiful heiress, but less happy when he learns that the woman’s father has a questionable legal record. Then a sniper starts shooting and wounding members of the fiancée’s family and circle, and Cam and Robin find themselves facing a dangerous, skilled opponent with an astonishing agenda.

It gradually dawned on me as I read Bloodshot that these books are – from my perspective –   creepy in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. There’s Cam’s ambivalent relationship with his beautiful adult “daughter,” whom he raised but who is clearly in love with him. Then there’s one of the major characters, whom we’re apparently supposed to see as spontaneous and charming, but whom I found psychopathic.

There was also a lot of sex – not explicit, but the author sure kept some of his characters naked a lot of the time.

There were also logical oddities here. Our hero gets shot, in the traditional style, with a .45 caliber slug to the shoulder. This requires (of course) nothing more than in the way of treatment than a sling for his arm, and he’s soon using the arm again. His police detective friend smokes a cigar in his office and drinks on the job (I’m pretty sure that doesn’t fly in today’s NYPD).

More essentially, the writing was weak, with a fair number of mistaken word choices. I thought the plot here was less disjointed than in Knee Deep, but it was still complicated and improbable. The plot resolution failed to satisfy me from a moral perspective (perhaps I’m a legalist).

Personally, I’m done with Cam Derringer.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Knee Deep,’ by Mac Fortner

Leave a comment

I went through three phases in my reading of Mac Fortner’s novel, Knee Deep. At first, when I discovered that the detective hero Cam Derringer lives on a houseboat in Key West, I had a pleasurable moment of imagining there’d be some Travis McGee pleasures in the mix. In this I was disappointed. Then I was less disappointed, but also less than enamored.

Cam Derringer used to be a lawyer. Then he lost his license, and his home. And then his wife disappeared aboard her boat. He suspects she fell victim to boat-jackers, and has devoted his life ever since to discovering her fate, eking out his living through private investigating.

When a woman hires him to look for her missing husband, Cam finds himself once again on the trail of the boat-jacking gang. Along the way he meets a beautiful, mysterious woman who may herself be part of the gang, which is awkward because he’s falling in love with her. It becomes increasingly difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys as a massive terrorist plot hurtles toward its consummation.

Cam Derringer is, as it turns out, nothing like Travis McGee. Which isn’t a sin – there’s more than one good kind of detective. Sadly, Cam isn’t any of those. In contrast to the McGee novels, this book departs from first person narration now and then to show us what the bad guys are doing. Which doesn’t make our hero look particularly smart. In fact, he’s generally a few steps behind them, and his own guesses and actions aren’t very successful. He isn’t even the rescuer at the climax, which employs a rather cumbersome and improbable technical trick.

Author Fortner’s plot is kind of loose and meandering, as well as complicated to follow. The writing is fair – I’ve seen worse, but I wouldn’t call it tight prose. The dialogue lacked tension, I thought. There was a fair amount of sex – not explicit, but Cam turns out to be the kind of detective beautiful women keep throwing themselves at, which can get annoying. For me. OK, I’m jealous.

Still, I bought the next volume in the series. I can’t have disliked it that much. I can state that Knee Deep was sometimes an amusing read.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Return Fire,’ by Tom Barber

1 Comment

Tom Barber, author of Return Fire (part of the Sam Archer thriller series) is apparently a very young man. So I suppose I should cut him some slack in criticizing his prose. He seems to have been pretty successful as a novelist (which I certainly can’t claim), so he must be doing something right.

Return Fire, which I got through a free offer, is another example of the genre I call… what do I call it? I forget. Tonight I’ll call it Movie Thrillers in Print. The idea is to give readers the same irrational thrill they get from a John Wick kind of movie. The story won’t stand up to much logical analysis, but there will be thrills galore.

Sam Archer, our hero, is a former London policeman who moved to America (he has dual citizenship) to join the FBI, then joined an antiterrorist unit in the New York City Police Department. He is engaged to Alice Vargas, a member of the same squad (how did they work that?), but she went on vacation to Spain after a lover’s quarrel. Now she’s been kidnapped, and evidence suggests she’s being held in London. Sam and several of his friends from work are assigned to fly to London and assist in the investigation (we’re supposed to believe a cop would be allowed to work a case involving his fiancée). But little do they know they’re all being maneuvered into a kill zone by a vengeful master criminal.

Plausibility is not a high priority here. As in action movies, our hero and his friends suffer incredible physical punishment (including one guy being technically dead for a couple minutes) and just keep on fighting. About a ton of lead gets expended through firearms, both Glocks (all handguns are Glocks) and automatic weapons, but somehow only peripheral characters get killed, at least at first. Cars get shot to pieces before – eventually – somebody thinks of shooting out a tire to stop one. A pistol shot is used to open a padlock (safety tip: you can’t generally do that).

Aside from logic problems, the prose was weak. The author has a university degree in English and should know not to misplace his modifiers. Example: “Dressed in tracksuit bottoms and a sweat-stained t-shirt, blood was spattered on a white wall.” (You’ll note that the sentence is telling us how the blood was dressed.) There are awkward lines like, “Before long, what had been lying just under the surface between them had quickly caught fire.”

And finally, the author has an annoying tick of not knowing when to quit. He likes to close chapters with a zinger, which often doesn’t zing but just weakens the previous line with a redundancy. For instance, he says of the kidnap victim, who has spent a terrifying day in brutal captivity:

She’d never been to London before and so far the jury was out on whether she’d ever want to come back.

Today hadn’t exactly been the most pleasant of welcomes.

Now re-read that passage without the last line. Works better, doesn’t it?

However, I did finish Return Fire, so I can’t claim it wasn’t readable. Author Barber is young enough that he might possibly someday refine his craft.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Tale of Sarcastic Halli’

1 Comment
Stained glass image of Harald Hardrada in Kirkwall Cathedral, the Shetland Islands. Credit: Colin Smith.

Tonight, another tale from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. This one is called The Tale of Sarcastic Halli. It’s a little longer than the last one’s I’ve read and offers several points of interest, though there are a few problems as well.

Halli is an Icelandic poet who has a string of adventures in Norway and elsewhere during the time of King Harald Hardrada. His adventures tend to involve rather coarse jokes and tricks.

Halli first meets Harald while sailing up the Trondheimsfjord. With amazing impudence – especially considering King Harald’s well-known temper – he takes an insult from him (an insult, by the way, which was particularly offensive to Norsemen), and turns it back on the king. Harald is apparently in a good mood, because when he returns to the town he accepts Halli into his household. He seems to keep Halli around as a kind of a jester (along with a dwarf about whom I’d never read before), permitting him quite a lot of leeway. He even lets him get away with an ambivalent insult to his wife (Thora, Erling Skjalgsson’s granddaughter), using the opportunity to score off her himself.

Some of the references to Halli’s poems are hard to understand. At one point, in the court of King Harold Godwinsson of England (who would later defeat Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge), he gets away with a reward for a poem which he privately admits is just a load of rubbish. Apparently we’re meant to understand that the English were so unsophisticated about skaldic poetry that you could unload anything on them at a profit.

Two of the stories prominently feature what we like to call the “f-word.” No doubt this is faithful to the text – however, such earthy subject matter harmonizes rather poorly with the sometimes stilted quality of the literalist translation.

Still, this was an intriguing tale, showcasing the famously ruthless Harald Hardrada in a surprisingly genial light.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Downeast Enigma,’ by Charles J. Thayer

Leave a comment

When I started reading Charles J. Thayer’s Downeast Enigma, I thought it very poorly written, but I figured I’d give it a chance. Now that I’ve finished it, I’m of two minds. I still think it wasn’t well written, but the story was effective in its way.

Steve Wilson, our hero, is a former bank auditor who took early retirement to become a private investigator. He calls his agency Paradox-Research (ignorance of proper hyphen use is a writing red flag, in my opinion). He lives aboard his Maine lobster boat, where he’s often visited by his girlfriend Amanda, an FBI agent.

When a Boston banker’s private plane crashes in the Gulf of Maine, killing him, his bank asks Steve to look into his affairs. There was a suspicious intrusion on his computer after the accident, and they fear the dead man might have been involved in something illicit. His death might even be murder. Steve goes to work with the help of a hacker friend, and Amanda seems to have lots of freedom to help him out in her spare time.

I found Downeast Enigma a strange mystery novel. Most of Steve’s investigation seems to be carried out through phone calls and online (though he does interview some people). All the violence (and there is some) happens offstage. You might even call this book a cyber-cozy mystery.

My greatest problems were with the prose. The book is written in the present tense, which I consider an affectation – though I can’t honestly say it interfered with my reading. The dialogue was remarkably wooden – all the characters speak as if writing a report, and everybody pretty much talks the same way.

Still, I read through to the end, and the plot kept my interest. I’m not panning it entirely, but I don’t think I’ll rush out and buy another book in the series.