No review tonight. Instead, a little writing update. I’m sort of at a milestone, having sort of finished the first draft of the next Erling novel, whose name – I think – will be King of Rogaland. I didn’t really want to call it that, having used the word “king” in my last title, but it seems to be what the book wants to be called.
I say the first draft is “sort of” finished because I’ve already identified a major revision I need to make, which will involve ripping up a fair amount of the work I’ve done.
Which is, I keep telling people, precisely the way it’s supposed to be. The first piece of advice I give to young writers is, “Don’t worry about making the first draft perfect. Your first draft is supposed to suck. That’s its function. The first draft is raw material – unshaped clay, unchiseled stone. It’s what you make a real story out of.”
What amazes me is that I don’t follow my own advice. I sit here thinking what a failure the book is, because the first draft is flawed.
It’s like I don’t even listen to myself. Considering all the time and money I’ve spent maintaining this font of wisdom in my life, I don’t even use it.
No wonder I never made the bestseller lists.
Now, to take your mind off my miseries, here’s a short film – about a half hour. It’s an adaptation of a Terry Pratchett story (or at least based on his characters; I’ve never read Pratchett). But it impressed me in many ways.
Jack Mallory is a police detective in (as far as I could tell) an unnamed American city. In William Coleman’s Murder Revisited, first in the series, he is called off the investigation of a murdered young woman when the chief of police (whom he hates, and it’s mutual) orders him to investigate a cold case. 20 years ago, Timothy Waters was convicted of murdering his girlfriend, whose father is now governor of the state. Recently he was released from prison, because all the evidence against him disappeared. Jack is ordered, literally, to find evidence that will send Timothy back to prison, and to look no further. Jack has no intention of railroading anybody, and goes to work doing a real investigation.
Meanwhile, Jack is approached by the cop assigned to assist the detective investigating the first murder – that detective is notoriously lazy and sloppy at his work, and the cop is concerned another miscarriage of justice is coming. So Jack agrees to look into that one too.
Those are just two of the multitudinous plot threads that entwine to make up this unusually complicated story. There were too many coincidences in it for this reader’s taste. Also, author Coleman attempted to make his characters human and complex, but only succeeded (in my perception) in making them one-dimensional in complicated and sometimes contradictory ways.
The chapters were very short, the writing undistinguished. I didn’t care for this book. Maybe smarter people will find it easier to follow along.
(Confusion aid: This is not about the recent movie by the same title.) “Wild Mountain Thyme” is a modern Irish song that’s so popular in Scotland most people think it’s a Scottish song. It’s song about plucking flowers from the blooming heather. That’s pretty Scottish, even in Iowa. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I fear for your education. I mean, it’s not like this is a Finnish song.
According to Irish Music Daily, “Wild Mountain Thyme” or “Will You Go, Lassie, Go” was written by William McPeake of Belfast’s McPeake family, who have apparently sustained traditional folk music for the whole of the last century. This song came about in the 50s. It’s been as successful as wild moun–nevermind.
The song seems inspired by an older piece written in thicker brogue, which starts like this:
Let us go, lassie, go Tae the braes o’ Balquhidder Whar the blueberries grow ‘Mang the bonnie Hielan’ heather
It’s something of the same song to judge by words alone. Hear the difference here. This older piece is a love song with a lot of flower picking in it, but the new song has an odd twist in the third verse.
To back up, the singer asks his lass to pick wildflowers with him, and that’s the idea of the chorus. In the second verse, he says he will build a bower by a crystal fountain for his true love and pile all the wildflowers he can find on this bower. Then he says, “If my true love she were gone/I would surely find another” among the many wildflower pickers.
Is this short shrift for the one women he loved minutes ago? That would give us an image of love being like a quickly withering wildflower or the lovers being like bees flying from one attraction to another. But because lovers in Irish songs so often die or are separated in some way, I wonder if the third verse gives us the picture of the singer standing beside his true love’s grave, asking, “Will you go pick wildflowers with us again? If you can’t, I can find someone else. I mean, everyone picks flowers on the hillside. But will you go? With me?”
A dog walker finds the corpse of a young woman hidden in the bushes at the edge of a golf course. The girl was a student, beautiful, smart and popular. But Detective Inspector Angus Henderson of the Bristol police learns she had a dark side. She’d been a model and actress for a popular porn site. Not only that, but one of her university instructors was among the site’s owners.
That’s the highly colored premise of One Last Lesson, the first volume in a mystery series starring DI Henderson, a native of Scotland relocated to the south of England. The story follows relatively predictable lines, and the characters never really came to life for this reader. Also, the final resolution kind of came out of left field.
There were hints, however, of relatively conservative views on certain issues on the author’s part. So points for that.
My main problem with the book had to do with punctuation. I’ve seen the same thing in a couple books I’ve read recently – a deficit of commas. I’m not talking about omitting the Oxford Comma (though I have opinions on the subject), but about ordinary commas the kind that separate clauses making it necessary for the reader to read the sentence twice in order to sort the thoughts out. No author should do this. One of the things the reader pays you for is to separate those thoughts out for them.
Verdict: It was OK, but it won’t ease your bereavement over the loss of Colin Dexter.
I’m going to do something different tonight, in reviewing David Handler’s short Stewart Hoag mystery, The Girl Who Did Say No. I’m going to give the book a less than enthusiastic recommendation, in spite of my fondness for the series as a whole.
The set-up is pretty standard for the series. Hoagy, one-time literary wunderkind and current ghost-writer to celebrities, gets a high-priced offer to do an editing job. Anna Childress, a legendary Hollywood sex symbol of the 1960s, died recently and left her personal diaries behind. Rumor has it the diaries contain the straight dope on all the film industry’s dirty laundry from the big studio days. Her agent has arranged to have the removal of the diaries from the bank safe deposit box broadcast on national TV. Millions are expected to watch, and the book is a guaranteed monster bestseller.
But when Hoagy arrives in LA, he’s immediately waylaid by the last of the old studio moguls. The studio head is willing to pay him twice his promised fee to just walk away from the project. The industry’s secrets need to remain secret, he says. That’s what people would really want, if they knew what was good for them. Hoagy refuses.
The story worked out in a fairly predictable way, it seemed to me, and was uncharacteristically downbeat for this usually light-hearted series. Plus, I detected at least one political barb. And it seemed to me the price was a little high for a book of this length.
Postman Nathan Evans of Glascow, Scotland has spent several months or more posting music to YouTube and TikTok. He sings some of his own songs, covers of popular songs, and also traditional Scottish folk. On December 27, he posted a video to TikTok with him singing a New Zealand sea shanty called “Wellerman.”
That’s the song that has been copied and harmonized with a thousand times over to make international media outlets write articles on everyone on social media singing sea shanties. It’s incredible. C|Net has a run down of it with some examples.
Evans told them he is as surprised as anyone with his suddenly popularity, and in a TikTok video posted yesterday he reports he has a record deal to release Wellerman as a single.
He has been planning to do more sea shanties. Fans have offered their recommendations. I thought to suggest “Leave Her, Johnny” and “Bully in the Alley,” but I see he has done these already. (Though TikTok folks may want to dwell on Stan Rogers’s version of “Leave Her, Johnny,” for inspiration. Oh, and I see The Longest Johns have already put together social media choir of “Leave Her, Johnny” with a million views since 12/30.)
Stan Rogers wrote “Barrett’s Privateers” himself, as he says in this video. That’s one worthy of taking social media by storm, despite the swearing in the chorus. Another contender would be John Kanaka, as Lars posted earlier. Here’s another that would light some people up, “Bonnie Ship the Diamond,” sung at the pace a Gaelic storm.
It’s not often I read a book that I actually dislike. Fighting Dirty, by Blair Denholm, is one of that elite group. I usually drop books that fail to please me, but this one sprung its trap at the end.
Technically, Fighting Dirty is not a book. It’s a short story, a prequel to a series about Jack Lisbon, a London police detective and former boxer who relocates to Australia. In this story we learn how Jack came to make the move.
Jack fixed a case for an old trainer friend, who promised him a large bribe, then failed to pay it. Jack threatens him. His “friend” then retaliates by sending some toughs to beat him up while he’s drunk (which he generally is). Then we see Jack going through recovery, during which time he cleans his act up somewhat. Then he decides to move to Australia, and we see a new, more likeable Jack – until the sucker punch at the end, which turned the tale, for this reader, into a horror story.
This is the cover of Trouble In Paradise. There are no flamingos in this book. I can only assume the artist worked from the title alone, and figured it took place in Florida.
“You don’t act like a jerk too often anymore,” Jenn said.
Jesse grinned at her without any happiness in the grin.
“I’m not sure I like the ‘anymore’ part,” he said.
“How about, you never act like a jerk when you’re working,” Jenn said.
“Jesse nodded. “It’s why I work,” he said.
I have a problematic relationship with the late author Robert B. Parker.
I thought his early Spenser books were worthy successors to the high tradition of Hammet and Chandler. But as the series went on, it “evolved” more and more. Spenser became increasingly enlightened in his relationship with his girlfriend, and it seemed to me he let her walk all over him. Also, his contempt for the unenlightened grew more and more apparent. So I dropped the series.
But I’ve enjoyed the Jesse Stone movies, starring Tom Selleck, that I’ve seen on TV. So when a deal for one of the Jesse Stone books, Trouble In Paradise, showed up, I figured I’d give it a shot.
It wasn’t bad.
Jesse, our hero, is settling is as police chief in the coastal Massachusetts town of Paradise. He’s an excellent cop, though not everyone likes him (which proves he’s doing something right). When three teenagers set fire to a homosexual couple’s house, he can’t prove their guilt, but finds a way to make sure they suffer consequences.
Meanwhile, a career criminal named James Macklin is in Paradise with his girlfriend, checking out the possibilities. He has a plan to isolate and loot a gated community on a nearby island, and assembles a team of criminal experts to help out. The stakes are high, and he doesn’t mind a few casualties along the way.
According to my reading, author Parker considered the Selleck TV movies the best adaptations of his books that had been done. I myself was struck by the differences. The Jesse of the books is younger than the one in the movies, and drinks more – he seems to be a maintenance alcoholic relying on his will-power to keep it from affecting his work. I haven’t watched all the movies, but his ex-wife Jenn is always just a voice on the phone in the ones I’ve seen. Here she’s moved to Boston from California, and she and Jesse are cautiously trying to re-establish their relationship, though in a non-exclusive way. This Jesse has no dog (at least yet), and lives in a condominium, not a shoreline house.
For my own part, I detected some of what I’d call the Spenser disease here. Jesse’s relationship with Jenn is so modern and enlightened, with the male in such a supplicant role, that it annoyed me. I don’t think I’ll read any more of these.
I was ambivalent with the ending too (probably because it was ambivalent).
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.
