It’s 1993, and Addison James, The Man In the White Linen Suit, is the most popular novelist in the world (think James Michener), an industry in his own right. A wounded veteran of OSS operations in World War II, he is a foul-tempered, cruel-hearted octogenarian, married to a sexy, manipulative gold digger young enough to be his granddaughter. He treats his lumpish adult daughter with contempt; she in turn is the most hated and unscrupulous editor in New York. His memory is failing, so he employs an assistant, Tommy O’Brien, to do his research and most of the writing. Without credit or a percentage, of course.
But Tommy has disappeared, and with him the only copies of Addison’s latest manuscript. The publishing company asks Stewart Hoag, celebrity ghost writer, to find them, because Tommy is an old friend of Hoagy’s. Hoagy doesn’t believe for a minute their theory that Tommy is holding the manuscripts for ransom. Which is justified when Tommy shows up at his apartment, soaked with rain and terrified. The manuscripts were stolen from him, he explains, and the guys who stole it threatened his life. Hoagy gives him shelter, and gets to work trying to find out where the documents really are – but there will be bodies hitting the ground before the whole thing is unraveled.
What I liked about The Man in the White Linen Suit was that one of author David Handler’s great strengths is on prominent display. The characters are complex. There are some very nasty people in this story, but they’re three-dimensional. They have moments when you actually sympathize with them. I was entirely fooled by the solution too, so high points for the mystery.
Recommended. Minor cautions for the usual grownup stuff. One political comment, but that’s not too bad in today’s climate.
Those eyes glared at me disapprovingly. “You’re a bit of a sneaky customer, aren’t you?”
“I don’t mean to be. It’s just that I’ve spent the past several years hanging around with the wrong sort of people.”
“What sort of people would that be?”
“Famous people.”
A cozy mystery. A clever narrator with a scene-stealing basset hound sidekick. Witty narration, and lots of name-dropping. Stewart Hoag, celebrity ghost-writer, is back in The Man Who Couldn’t Miss. Like the other recent books in the series, it’s set back in time, in the early 1990s, when Hoagy is getting his act back together after ruining his writing career (and his marriage) with drugs. Now his actress ex-wife Merilee is allowing him to live in the guest house on her Connecticut farm and he’s working on his long-delayed second novel. Meanwhile, she’s overwhelmed with producing a one-night, benefit production of Noel Coward’s Private Lives, to try to save the local small theater, a kind of shrine where many big actors got their starts. She’s got a cast made up of old friends, now big movie stars, who studied with her in college.
But one more old “friend” shows up – R. J. Romero, the most talented actor of their whole circle, who utterly wrecked his own life and is now a petty criminal. He’s holding something over Merilee’s head, and blackmailing her – and he pulls Hoagy in as a go-between.
Also, there’s unease in the theater. Aside from the challenge of a leaky roof and a stormy forecast, there are tensions between the cast members. It all looks like fairly normal group dynamics – until somebody gets murdered.
I liked The Man Who Couldn’t Miss, though author Handler didn’t go as deep into his characters as I would have wished – it’s not that they don’t surprise you, but we didn’t see the layering here that was on display in some of the other books.
There’s also the issue of Hoagy’s risk-taking. He has a penchant for walking into mortally dangerous situations with no more back-up than his witty dialogue and his dog’s loud barking. Very politically correct, but stupid in the real world.
Nevertheless, all in all, it’s a fun book in an enjoyable series.
Author Glynn Young reviews The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri, which speaks to the crumbling of some of our institutions and public trust. We cannot be everywhere, so we must trust those who represent us or our values to report to us what has occurred. If the day comes when we cannot trust anyone to tell us the truth about important matters, we will not be able to carry on as citizens.
Gurri’s book was first published in 2014 and updated in 2018. He isn’t talking about the events of this month or last summer.
“No,” Young explains, “the public is us, the people who read books, manage businesses, plow farms, drive trucks, work in hospitals, teach, sell cars, run factories, belong to and lead unions, and do a million other jobs. The age of information has taught us to mistrust authority, seek people of like minds in echo chambers, and increasingly think of opposing views as those of the enemy.”
“Patrick swore to me that he didn’t, but I assumed he was lying to me.”
“Why did you assume that?”
“Because everyone lies to me. It’s what they do. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”
For a long time, The Man Who Loved Women to Death, the last book I reviewed in the Stewart Hoag series, was indeed the last book in the series. According to his Afterword, author David Handler had decided that today’s cutthroat celebrity culture left no space for Hoagy to ghost memoirs and solve mysteries. But he was persuaded to bring the character back in some flashback books. So The Girl With Kaleidoscope Eyes takes place somewhere after the first mystery, when Hoagy is established as a celebrity ghost-writer, but has not yet reconciled with Merilee Nash, his actress ex-wife/domestic partner.
Hoagy’s agent sets him up to write a memoir for TV host Monette Aintree (sort of a Martha Stewart character). The spark for the project is a letter Monette has received from her father, Richard Aintree, who wrote a critically acclaimed bestseller, then disappeared entirely following his wife’s suicide. Hoagy also has a personal interest, as Monette’s sister, Reggie, was his first love, a long time ago.
Against his better judgment he heads to Los Angeles to take up residence on Monette’s estate. Immediately the drama begins, stirred up by Monette’s ex-husband, a TV star and steroid freak, and his new girlfriend, a pregnant teenaged sex symbol. Then there’s a murder (of course), and Reggie shows up to support her sister and settle unfinished business with Hoagy.
It was nice to spend time with Hoagy and his basset hound, Lulu, again. I wouldn’t say this was the best in the series (I thought the characterizations weren’t the best, and I found the resolution kind of problematic.) But it was entertaining and amusing, as expected.
“I’ve worked with seriously disturbed individuals a number of times. We just don’t call them disturbed, we call them celebrities.”
The saga of Stewart Hoag continues with The Man Who Loved Women to Death, an outstanding entry in the series, in my opinion. The usual template for a Stewart Hoag story is for him to take a job ghost-writing a memoir for some fictional celebrity. Then a murder happens, and he helps the police solve it, with the assistance of his cartoon-worthy basset hound, Lulu.
But this one is different. He gets a letter from an unknown (and anonymous) writer, asking him to take a look at the first chapter of his murder novel-in-progress. Hoagy is impressed with the promise of the work – but his reaction turns to horror when a young woman is found murdered the next day – killed in exactly the same manner, and with exactly the name, as in the story.
What makes it worse is that certain hints in the manuscript – including the typewriter used, a familiar one to Hoagy – point to the writer being an old friend of his. Tuttle Cash was once a famous athlete, an Ivy League hero who qualified for the major leagues. Now he’s a drug-addicted empty suit, greeting customers at a bar named after him (but not owned by him). With years and failure he has grown bitter and very mean. Nevertheless, Hoagy can’t bring himself to name him to the police, because Tuttle saved his life once.
Author David Handler performs a very nice trick with his Stewart Hoag books. On the surface they’re light mysteries, starring a supercilious modern gentleman hero with a fedora full of opinions on fashion, food, music, and entertainment. Supported by a too-cute doggie companion.
But underneath all that, we discover perceptive stories about very human, very flawed characters, described with considerable sympathy. I was particularly moved in this book by one of them, a beautiful, fragile, abused woman who broke my heart. But there are lots of others.
Recommended. Cautions, as usual, for language and adult themes.
There are three books so far in David J. Gatward’s Harry Grimm police detective series. Corpse Road is the most recent. In this book we see Harry, battle-scarred former paratrooper and current Yorkshire police detective, come up against a world he knows nothing about – online culture.
When a woman, celebrating her divorce by camping on the Wensleydale moors, is found stabbed to death, the obvious suspect is her ex-husband. But the man suddenly disappears, and gradually Harry’s team begins to realize they’re dealing with a serial killer. Not the sort of thing they’re used to in Wensleydale. And when one of their own team disappears, it will be a race against time.
I am very much enjoying this series – the characters are interesting and amusing (the author makes excellent use of a puppy as a social lubricant here), and the setting is beautiful and well-described. However, this is the second book in a row in this series in which I’ve figured out whodunnit before I was supposed to. What’s worse, I figured it out based on a point of online culture of which I, an old fart, was aware while (apparently) Harry’s young team members were not.
So, recommended for entertainment, with points deducted for plotting.
“Fathers and sons, I don’t think they ever know how to be with one another. My own dad is over there in that room, dying, maybe dead by now, and for the last week I couldn’t even figure out what I’d say to him if he came back for one minute. It’s been a long time since we’ve known how to speak to each other. We never fought, or rarely anyway, not like your dad and grandpa, but . . . I don’t know, I wonder if fathers and sons ever know how to be to each other.”
If you like Christian urban fantasy, and good writing, you don’t have a lot of options out there (aside from some of my own books, of course). But I can highly recommend Shawn Smucker’s’ Light from Distant Stars.
Cohen Marah (whose name, unusual for a Christian, is Hebrew for “priest bitter”) is a haunted man, literally in some respects. Long ago, his father was the pastor of a thriving evangelical church. But a moral failing and scandal lost him that post, as well as his wife and daughter, so that he was left alone with Cohen. That was the end of Cohen’s happiness in life, not least because he himself contributed to the tragedy. They left their idyllic small town for Philadelphia, where his father became an undertaker and they lived in an apartment over the mortuary. His father sank into alcoholism, Cohen into depression.
When Cohen finds his father on the mortuary floor one morning in a pool of blood, he fears he’ll be blamed for killing him, as they were overheard arguing the night before. When he learns that his father is not yet dead, but dying in a hospital, and that the accident is being investigated by a detective who happens to be a girl who was his youthful friend, he’s wracked with guilt. Through flashbacks and his confessions to his Episcopal priest, we learn the story of his past, his sins, his resentments, and his shame. Including the time he went questing with ghosts and killed a man.
Light from Distant Stars is a rococo book, fecund with detail that animates the narrative. It’s moving and lovely. (Though I’m unsure how to understand the fantasy subplot.) It’s a book I’d have been proud to write myself. I look forward to more superior work from Shawn Smucker.
Book Two in David J. Gatward’s Harry Grimm series is Best Served Cold, a story which (as I’m sure you’ve guessed, because you’re smart) is about revenge.
Harry Grimm, scar-faced former police detective from Bristol, is settling in (at least tentatively) in his “temporary” secondment in Wensleydale, Yorkshire. It’s beautiful country, where the people are genuine and honest, the air is fresh, and Harry – in spite of himself – is beginning to enjoy himself. Except for the inexplicable local mania for eating fruitcake with cheese.
When a foul-natured and unpopular local farmer is found crushed under the wheels of one of his own wagons, it looks like an accident at first. But investigators quickly realize that the set-up is impossible. This was murder, and of a cruel sort. Not long after, another farmer – one of the first victim’s few friends – is found drowned to death in a slurry pit. Eagle feathers are discovered in the mouths of each.
The fact that nobody misses the victims much doesn’t mean the police can relax. There has to be some incident in the past that accounts for such terrible revenge. Harry hunts through the records and talks to old schoolmates of the victims, gradually piecing together the story of a horrible cruelty long forgotten by most.
I am enjoying these books for their setting, characters, and mood. I have to admit, though, that I figured out whodunnit before I was supposed to. Fairly obvious, I thought. Maybe I’m just really smart, but I think author Gatward needs to work on his plotting.
Kristofer and Gry Molvaer Hivju. Photo credit: NRK
I have some dislocated thoughts I’m going to try to coordinate in this post tonight. Just subjective responses to a couple recent entertainment experiences. They may or may not mean anything to you.
The picture above is of Kristofer Hivju, a Norwegian actor who’s attained high visibility since appearing in the Game Of Thrones miniseries. Beside him is his wife, Gry Molvær Hivju, who is a documentary film maker. They constitute, as you’ll note, a striking couple.
I heard about a documentary series they made together, and watched it recently on the Norwegian NRK network feed, using a VPN. I don’t know if it will ever be offered outside Norway. The series is called simply “Olav,” and it relates a personal quest to find the historical truth about Norway’s patron saint, Olav (or Olaf. Best known, of course, as a character in my novel, The Elder King) Haraldsson. We learn that Kristofer first learned of Olav as a boy, when his father, also an actor, played Olav in the annual Olav play presented (most years) near Trondheim, Norway. He tells us that Olav has been his hero all his life – the Viking who became a Christian king, and converted his country.
I’m not sure how seriously to take the dramatic arc of the series. Hivju may be playing a role as he presents himself as a lot like a little boy, shivering with excitement to go where his hero went and see all the evidence of his life. His disappointment is palpable as he travels to England, France, and Russia and finds – generally – that evidence for Olav’s life (outside the Icelandic sagas) is pretty sparse. Judging by the evidence, Olav was a fairly minor player on the European scene until after his death, when Norwegian churchmen and chieftains promoted him and his saga for political reasons. (I note that no mention whatever is made of the work of Prof. Torgrim Titlestad, whose book, Viking Legacy, I translated. They even report that a Norwegian translation of the Icelandic Flatøybok has recently been released, but they don’t mention its publisher, Saga Bok, Prof. Titlestad’s publishing house, or even let us see a copy).
The final resolution of the whole thing (and I’d have bet my house that this would be the case) is that they conclude that history and faith are different things, and each is important in its own realm. I reject that principle in terms of the central affirmations of Christianity, though I don’t doubt that many false stories have been told of saints and holy men over the years. I wondered about Hivju’s own faith, which he never really explains. Does his faith include Olav’s God, or only Olav as a hero? None of my business, I suppose.
Around the same time, I was reading a couple books by Blake Banner, whose Cobra series of thrillers I’ve enjoyed very much. So I picked up a couple from his Dead Cold Case series, which I’d started and given up on for some reason. Reading again, I remembered why. I’ve never encountered a more God-bothered series of books, and in a bad way. In each of these books (as far as I could tell) the author felt it necessary to insert a few Awful Christians. Judgmental, repressed, joyless, hypocritical, and often criminal. His knowledge of Christianity seems to come primarily from a bad experience of Roman Catholicism – when he describes an American Methodist Church, he assumes that they cross themselves when they enter the church, call their services masses, and reject sexual pleasure as sin. I feel sorry for whatever bad experience the author must have had, but I couldn’t take much of it.
We live among the ruins of shattered faith today. Those who believe, generally believe in a subjective way that has little to do with the real world. Those who don’t believe seem furious at God for not existing. We who hold onto Christianity have lots of work to do. It may be illegal work, before long. But that’s how Christianity started, after all.
‘It’s a secondment. Think of it like an exchange programme if you want. We’re sending you there in exchange for, well, for you not being here, if I’m honest.’
A new English police series with a fairly original hero. I’m up for that.
Harry Grimm, the hero of Grimm Up North, looks kind of like Frankenstein’s monster, due to scarring from an IUD explosion during his service as a paratrooper. Now he’s a detective in Bristol. He’s pretty good at it too (his face actually helps), but his superiors don’t like him, partly because of his hostile attitude, and most particularly because he never lets up on his personal search for the man who killed his mother and destroyed his family – his own father.
So his boss sends him off on a “temporary” secondment to Wensleydale in Yorkshire, an area made famous by All Creatures Great and Small. It’s a whole other world – clean air, friendly people, tiny towns, an agricultural economic base. Not much crime, to be honest, and certainly very little serious crime.
Except that the very day Harry shows up, a young girl goes missing. And not long after, a murdered body is found beside a lake.
It would be ridiculous to blame this sudden crime wave on Harry, but that doesn’t stop his Yorkshire superior from doing just that. His learning curve will be steep, but in the end he’ll unmask the killer and save a couple lives.
Grimm Up North was an enjoyable fish-out-of-water mystery. The writing was good and the characters were amusing. Cautions for the usual.
