Fiction, Reviews

‘The Girl Who Ran Off with Daddy,’ by David Handler

Leave a comment

Think of the big Woody Allen/Soon Yi Previn scandal, where a famous man marries his stepdaughter. Now, instead of Woody Allen, imagine the guy is a legendary macho writer, a cross between Jack Kerouac and Ernest Hemingway. And imagine the wife he abandoned was a famous feminist.

That’s the extreme situation David Handler sets up in The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy, yet another Stewart Hoag mystery. Needless to say, this one involves some pretty cringe-inducing situations – though I think it’s fair for me to tell you the worst parts do get mitigated in the end.

When Hoagy was a young writer, Thor Gibbs was his mentor and inspiration. So when Thor asks him to ghost-write his stepdaughter/girlfriend’s autobiography, giving her side of the story, he doesn’t feel he can say no – creepy though it feels. Hoagy is mostly retired now, living in Connecticut with his ex-wife/current partner, Merilee, and their baby daughter Tracy. His life is fairly idyllic, and he’s not really over the moon about having their farm invaded by an aging Peter Pan with a death wish on a motorcycle, and his seductive 18-year-old lover. Thor Gibbs hates normal living, and none of that is in prospect – until murder occurs.

There’s lots of stuff going on beneath the surface in The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy, and some of it’s actually pretty positive. Especially a subplot involving Hoagy’s father. So if you can get through the initial creeps, you may be glad you read it.

Cautions for language and immature subject matter.

Religion

‘The Beauty Doesn’t Stop on Christmas Day’

Leave a comment

Matthew’s Gospel has the account of the Magi’s visit, and it never occurred to me to wonder why “all the chief priests and scribes of the people” didn’t go with them to Bethlehem. Did they write them off as pagans on a goose hunt?

Valerie Thur makes this point as she writes about how much she has longed for Epiphany this season. In this story of eastern wise men,

we see God for who he is: the Savior of all nations for all time. The same God who perfectly orchestrated Israel’s history so that he was born of the line of David created a specific heavenly object so that he could draw these wise-men to himself: the source of all true Wisdom. We see a Savior who loved the world so much that he chose to become one of us for all of us: Jews and Gentiles alike. No circumstance can deny the will of God. There is no distance that God cannot bridge: if he has already restored the bridge between man and God, how much more will he bridge our earthly gulfs of loneliness, guilt, fear, and doubt?

Authors

What Is Man But Freedom?

Leave a comment

If man is simply good by nature and governed by social or natural laws, then someone somewhere could raise up utopia for the perpetual happiness of all who lived there. Dostoevsky said that if such a place could be constructed, let several years pass and “people would suddenly see that they had no more life left, that they had no freedom of spirit, no will, no personality. . . . they would see that their human image had disappeared . . . that their lives had been taken away for the sake of bread, for ‘stones turned into bread.'”

Gary Saul Morson writes about Dostoevsky’s faith in human independence and that the idea is politically practical.

A passage in Notes from Underground looks forward to modern dystopian novels, works like Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1920–21) or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), where heroes rebel against guaranteed happiness. They want their lives to be their own. Put man in utopia, the underground man observes, and he will devise “destruction and chaos,” do something perverse, and, if given the chance, return to the world of suffering. In short, “the whole work of man seems really to consist in nothing but proving to himself continually that he is a man and not an organ stop. It may be at the cost of his skin; but he has proved it.”

Any politician who believes the right policies or governing body can right all wrongs does not understand the people he claims to serve nor, perhaps, himself. We must be free, even to our ruin. (via Prufrock News)

Fiction, Reviews

‘Blind Vigil,’ by Matt coyle

Leave a comment

Once again, even in the violent whirlwind of my life, I was reminded there was still goodness in the world. Strangers willing to help the injured, the helpless, and the innocent. There’d been times in my life when I’d been all three. Even innocent.

There’s a new installment in Matt Coyle’s hard-boiled Rick Cahill series. I’ve reviewed the previous books about this San Diego private eye, a former cop suspected of his wife’s murder. In previous books he has cleared the memory of his father, unjustly suspended from the police force for corruption, and identified his wife’s real killer. My main complaint with the earlier books was that some were excessively dark, but light has broken in increasingly as the series went on – even now in Blind Vigil, when – ironically – the hero has gone blind, due to a bullet wound at the end of the last book.

It’s been nine months since then, and Rick is well along in his recovery, assisted by his girlfriend Leah and his Black Lab, Midnight. He believes his sight is starting to return, but his doctor thinks it’s only a common illusion, similar to phantom limb syndrome in amputees. But Rick is well enough now to feel the need of some activity.

That need is answered by his former PI partner, Moira MacFarlane, who wants his help with a case. She’s been hired by Rick’s estranged best friend, Turk Muldoon, to surveille his girlfriend, whom he suspects of cheating on him. She’d like Rick to sit in as she meets with Turk, to see if he can tell from his voice whether he’s withholding information. After that, she persuades Rick to keep her company as she watches the girlfriend’s apartment. Next thing they know, the girlfriend has been murdered, and Turk has been arrested. Moira thinks Turk is guilty and washes her hands of him, leaving Rick to investigate the case on his own, without eyesight, backup, or a license.

The idea of the blind detective has been tried before, and I never really bought it. I always felt the author had to stack the deck to provide the specialized circumstances in which a blind detective could triumph. I liked this story better than those others. I thought author Coyle did a pretty good job of keeping the tension high without straining the reader’s credibility too much (at least not more than other detective stories, where heroes routinely survive by the skin of their teeth). What I liked best was that Blind Vigil continues the series’ ongoing story arc, in which an embittered, lonely man gradually reintegrates with humanity.

Cautions for what you’d expect. Recommended, like the whole series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Man Who Cancelled HImself,’ by David Handler

Leave a comment

I did believe that. Of course, you must remember that TV and movie people almost always mistake their business friends for real friends. This is partly because they want to believe that everyone they deal with truly loves them. And partly because they have no real friends.

David Handler, author of the Stewart Hoag mysteries, spent some time as a TV sitcom writer. He mines that vein of experience for background material for his mystery, The Man Who Cancelled Himself, in which we once again follow “Hoagy” Hoag, celebrity memoir ghost writer, and his scene-stealing basset hound, Lulu.

The first few Stewart Hoag books seemed to be heavily disguised portraits of actual characters, but as they go on, the author is spreading his net wider. The main character here, Lyle Hednut, is a lot like John Belushi, with some Rosanne Barr and Pee Wee Herman thrown in. He started in improv comedy, and worked his way up to having his own sitcom, playing “Uncle Chubby,” a sort of degenerate Mr. Rogers. The show was leading the ratings until Lyle got arrested under embarrassing circumstances in an adult theater. Now there’s pressure to cancel the show, and the network wants Hoagie to write a book that will give Lyle’s side of things. In order to fit in, he’s added to the series writing staff.

One of the first things Hoagy learns is that Lyle Hudnut is only marginally human. Big, overdramatic, Gargantuan, mercurial, he is a genuine narcissist with manic mood swings, who jumps from woman to woman and terrorizes his co-workers. He tells Hoagy a horrific story of childhood abuse, but Hoagy begins to suspect he’s left important points out. And when someone begins to sabotage the production, real danger presents itself.

This was one of my favorite books in this series, mainly because author Handler does something I never expected – he offers us a pair of characters, husband and wife, who are ordinary middle-class elderly Americans. They are neither well-educated nor stylish. Nevertheless, they are handled with genuine empathy and respect. The character of Hoagy Hoag generally presents himself as something of a snob, a latter-day Lord Peter or Philo Vance. But this was a nice scene. As a middle American, I appreciated it.

There was also an important development in Hoagy’s own life in this story. I was mostly in favor of it, but I thought our hero had been rather badly used. You can judge for yourself.

Pretty good stuff. Cautions for language and some gross mature content.

Uncategorized

Aspire to Quiet Living

Leave a comment

It’s been a hard year overall, though not entirely because of Covid. I know one person who died of the virus and many others who had it and recovered without incident. For months, our church has offered two services to allow people to spread out and livestreams one of them for the third of the congregation who won’t return until doctors give them a green light. (For only a few more days, you can watch the recording of our Christmas concert. I’m becoming increasingly dissatisfied with my singing voice, but the rest of the choir and the instrumentalists are great.)

Tennessee has surged in new cases, but it still feels removed from us, at least by a step. I’ve worried about my aunt, who says she lives around many people who have tested positive, but she hasn’t picked it up. My wife and I have been exposed to it technically; two of my daughters could easily have been as well, but we’ve not had reason to pursue tests for it. Like I said, it feels a bit removed from us.

More immediate has been the tornado damage to one of our suburbs. The video above was taken on Tuesday this week and shows the edge of an area that tornados ripped up in April. Large houses were flattened, some smaller ones too, and others were skipped as tornadoes do. The trees tell most of the story. You won’t see the many houses behind me, completely destroyed, or my high school, that had built up since my days there but now has been scraped to the ground. Every building was compromised in the storm.

We had been in lock down for a few weeks when this happened. All of that was shelved when we turned out to clean up streets, help neighbors recover, and share food. I helped a church team build several storage sheds on our parking lot, which other members of the church and community used. (I plan to put up a smaller one in my backyard this year.)

New routines have come since then; normal has taken a hiatus.

I’ve heard many sermons on living a quiet, respectable life of prayer and service based on this passage: “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:1-4 ESV).

Sometimes I wonder if the quite life is evangelical enough. I wonder if we live in noisy times and need bold witnesses to confront materialistic, entertainment-driven people who take their values from today’s famous who are only justifying actions they haven’t thought through. But I also think it’s peaceful, quiet people who clean up storm-damaged neighborhoods, who look after widows and shut-ins, and who take the time to pray for everyone they can think of. They aren’t people looking to make a name for themselves.

Will we continue to nurture the quiet life in 2021 or distract ourselves from it?

Music

‘Auld Lang Syne,’ with Sissel

Leave a comment

What shall we say about the year that is passing? If you’re reading this, you and I are survivors. Our Lord bids us live in hope. Sufficient unto the year is the evil thereof.

Blessings to you and your family, from the highly trained professionals at Brandywine Books.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Boy Who Never Grew Up,’ by David Handler

Leave a comment

I know how to handle stars. The lunch pail ghosts don’t. They treat them like rational, intelligent human beings. I know better.

The adventures of David Handler’s celebrity ghost writer sleuth, Stewart “Hoagy” Hoag (and his excessively anthropomorphic basset hound, Lulu) continue with The Boy Who Never Grew Up.

In most of these books, you can kind of guess who the central “celebrity” is supposed to be – they’re generally based on one or two real-world characters. In the case of The Boy Who Never Grew Up, it’s harder to tell. Author Handler seems to have several Hollywood characters in mind – a bit of Michael Jackson, a bit of Walt Disney, a bit of Steven Spielberg. And the studio depicted doesn’t really resemble anything that exists in our world anymore.

Matthew Wax is (or has been) the biggest producer in Hollywood. A kind of filmmaker-savant, he has made the most popular films in history, and built his own studio, devoted to turning out wholesome, heartwarming fare portraying an idealized American life. He is, however, essentially a big child. He avoids the real world, and even lives on the set where his most successful, family-oriented movies were filmed. With his mother close at hand, keeping a watch on him.

He was married, to Pennyroyal Brim, the actress he discovered to play the cheerleader girlfriend in his movies. But she is divorcing him now, taking their child with her, and through her shark lawyer she is accusing him of various cruelties and perversions. She’s even writing a book about it. So Matthew’s people bring Hoagy in, to write a book from Matthew’s own point of view.

The celebrity subjects Hoagy has dealt with up to now have generally fit the stereotypes – arrogant, thin-skinned, narcissistic. Matthew is rather different. He really is just a nice kid who had a rough childhood and grew up maladjusted. Hoagy not only becomes his friend (how can you resist a guy who owns the car from “Route 66” and lends it to you?), but he works up the personal concern to help Matthew move out of his comfort zone a little.

The whole thing could be kind of heartwarming, like a Michael Wax movie, if there weren’t a murderer lurking around, and if we didn’t get a very shocking revelation of that murderer’s motives in the end.

Also there’s a big twist in Hoagy’s own life, almost as shocking in its own way.

I’d call The Boy Who Never Grew Up one of the better entries in this entertaining series. Moderate cautions for adult language and themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Woman Who Fell From Grace,’ by David Handler

Leave a comment

I got Lulu, my drafty old fifth-floor walk up on Ninety-third Street, and my ego, which recently applied to Congress for statehood.

Rolling along through David Handler’s Stewart Hoag mysteries. I’m going to need to break the monotony soon, but for tonight I have another one to review.

Stewart “Hoagy” Hoag, former critically acclaimed novelist, is now reduced to ghost writing books for celebrities. This exposes him to a large number of dysfunctional individuals, and before long somebody always gets murdered. Nevertheless, people keep hiring him. We call this fictional license.

In reading The Woman Who Fell From Grace, you need to think of Gone With the Wind – and you will. Oh, Shenandoah is the name of the book and movie in this alternate reality – a historical romance set not during the Civil War but during the American Revolution. It was a bestseller and a blockbuster film, and the leading man died suddenly the very night the shooting ended. The novelist was killed in a hit and run accident shortly thereafter. But she left notes for a sequel which, under the terms of her will, were sealed for fifty years. The fifty years are up now, and her daughter, Mavis Glaze, is working on the sequel. However, instead of following the notes, she claims to be following psychic instructions from her mother, with bizarre results. So her brothers summon Hoagy to come to Virginia and take her in hand. That’s what he’s good at. This will also involve him attending the anniversary ball, which will give him the opportunity to meet some of his childhood heroes. And his beagle Lulu, as is her wont, will go Hollywood.

There are, of course, skeletons in the closet, the kind that people have killed before, and will kill again, to keep locked up.

The Woman Who Fell From Grace was enjoyable, like the other books in the series. I felt the plot broke down at the end though, where Hoagy (who has a bad habit of insulting people without possessing the fighting skills to protect himself from the consequences) walks into a perilous situation with eyes wide open, and the author has to employ a deus ex machina to rescue him.

Not the best in the series, but entertaining. Moderate cautions for language and adult situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald,’ by David Handler

Leave a comment

“You wouldn’t want another writer. We reserve our best qualities for our lead characters. There’s not much left over for real life.”

Continuing with David Handler’s amusing Stewart Hoag mysteries. Like many cozies, these books are sometimes far-fetched and over-cute. But they’re fun, and “Hoagy” Hoag is good company.

In The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald, for the first time in this series, we get to observe Hoagy in his natural environment – the New York literary scene. He’s been hired to help a hot young author write a memoir. In theory, the hot young writer ought to be able to write his own memoir, but handsome, dissipated Cam Noyes is suffering from a malady Hoagy knows all too well – acute writer’s block. That was a lot of what killed Hoagy’s own career as a literary wunderkind. In fact he sometimes thinks he’s looking in a mirror.

Turns out Cam has secrets he doesn’t want anyone to know about. But Hoagy has his own formula for ghost-writing – he doesn’t write fluff, and he won’t be lied to. His method will bring shocking facts to light, uncovering the ugly underside, not only of the cutthroat publishing business, but of the motivations that drive people to pursue fame.

Meanwhile, the framing elements that turn readers into series fans are fully present here – Hoagy’s continuing on-and-off relationship with his actress ex-wife, and the (somewhat implausible) antics of his drama-queen basset hound, Lulu.

Lots of fun. Minor cautions for language (though efforts are made to avoid obscenity as much as possible). Recommended as light entertainment.

(Addendum: I should note that the author made a really dumb mistake about guns in this book, confusing rifles with shotguns. We notice those things in these parts,)