“Sturgeon’s Law” is named after sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon who, when needled by a patronising critic complaining that 90 per cent of science fiction was rubbish, replied that 90 per cent of everything published was rubbish.
Furnell agreed with the premise before he picked up the book. He notes Dobelli chapter titles to show the rationale. News works against your creativity. It gives you the illusion of empathy and obscures the big picture. It create artificial fame.
Dobelli admits that when he was a young man he was constantly reading newspapers, fearful of not knowing what was happening in the world. He describes himself as an addict, a news-aholic. He doesn’t quote Kierkegaard, but I will: “What we need is a Pythagorean silence. There is far greater need for total-abstaining societies which would not read newspapers than for ones which do not drink alcohol.”
Busy, busy today — and it’s a good time to be busy, to keep one’s mind off… things. Translation, big job, deadline, you know the drill.
So, in lieu of my comforting prose, I offer a moment of Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry as Jeeves and Wooster, from way back in 1990. Bertie Wooster, it appears, has imprudently allowed himself to stumble into engagement with Honoria Glossop, daughter of the eminent lunacy expert, Sir Roderick Glossop. Bertie has invited Sir and Madame Glossop to dine in his flat. But Jeeves, in his wisdom, knows the match is unsuitable, and so finds a subtle way to put a boot up the pipe. (I have no idea what that means, but it sounds about right.)
Nobody’s ever done Jeeves and Wooster better, even though Hugh Laurie took the coward’s way out and didn’t work with a monocle.
Patricia Pearson notes ghost stories have been with us since the beginning, but for about a hundred years now, experts have believed seeing or feeling something like a ghost isn’t healthy. Here are two of her paragraphs.
William Dean Howells, editor of The Atlantic Monthly from 1871-1881, defended the belief in ghostly visions from an emerging class of skeptics after his daughter Winny died in her twenties. “I would have the bereaved trust their mystical experiences for much truth which they cannot affirm,” he wrote in 1910’s “A Counsel of Consolation.” “They may be the kaleidoscopic adjustment of our jarred and shattered being; they may be prismal rays of celestial light: who shall say from knowledge?”
…
That the dead do not always stay dead continues to rankle the scientifically minded. When Christopher Kerr, a Toronto-raised palliative care physician who heads Hospice and Palliative Care Buffalo, first worked with patients on rounds, he was completely unprepared for the number of dreams and visions his patients described that featured the consoling dead. “We never had any such discussion on the topic in med school,” he emailed me. In his 2020 book, Death Is But a Dream, Kerr writes, “The acceleration of the science of medicine has obscured its art, and medicine, always less comfortable with the subjective, has been more concerned with disproving the unseen than revering its meaning.”
The Bible doesn’t seem to allow for ghosts as the spirits of departed persons, but it does teach of us souls and life immaterial. We understand that being made in God’s image means we are body and spirit together. Maybe the immaterial nature of our spirits explains the stories people tell of seeing those around them as they are dying or afterward, because we are connected in spiritual ways we cannot dissect. (via Prufrock News)
He blinked, but it was probably just his time for blinking that month.
Having discovered the pleasures of reading Blake Banner, and having exhausted the available books in his Cobra series, I moved on to his Dead Cold Mystery books, about a pair of police detective partners in New York City. An Ace and a Pair was not as much fun as the Cobra books, in my estimation, but entertaining, and with some superior moments.
John Stone is a successful detective with a high case clearance rate. But his superior doesn’t like him. Aside from personal animus, she considers him a dinosaur who ought to retire and make way for younger people. So she assigns him to the Cold Case squad, and partners him with Det. Carmen Dehan, a very attractive (of course) Jewish/Mexican officer with an attitude problem. They mesh immediately, united by their mutual dislike for their superior and a visceral commitment to going to any length to solve cases. There’s some sexual chemistry too, but they both avoid that issue.
The first case John selects is a bizarre one. Ten years ago, a gangster named Nelson Hernandez was found dead at a poker table, along with his chief lieutenants. Each had been shotgunned to death (though Hernandez himself was also grotesquely mutilated), and apparently not one of them moved to defend himself. The chief suspects have solid alibis. Also, the crime made no sense. It didn’t seem to profit anybody.
Stone and Dehan delve into the evidence, which involves a fair amount of travel (even a trip on a gangster’s private plane). Only Stone’s intuitive detective work will enable them to cut through a lot of lies and subterfuges and put some old wrongs right.
Although author Banner employs his trademark technique of jumping quickly into the action, without a lot of preliminary stage setting, the story didn’t take off for me until a little way in. But it grew on me, and I started to care. I had a vague idea what the outcome would be, but a number of impossible problems needed solving first.
I thought I found a couple weak spots. At one point, Stone locates a vital clue through driving around in Texas – which seemed to me an improbable needle-in-the-haystack thing, considering the size of Texas. Also, the author used “begs the question” wrong, which disappointed me. This guy’s better than that.
But it was an enjoyable novel with a satisfying conclusion. Recommended, with the usual cautions.
Book three of Blake Banner’s interesting – and modestly impressive – Cobra series is The Einstaat Brief. Once again we follow our hero, “ethical” assassin Harry Bauer, as he fights international evil.
This time out, Harry is facing a situation he never looked for. He’s in love, with a beautiful, red-haired Texas girl. He knows he can’t bring her into the life he’s living, but he figures he’s done enough killing, even in good causes. He’s going to retire, and move with her to a ranch in Wyoming.
Then a team comes to kill him, and they seem to be government agents. Harry’s superiors at Cobra make him an offer he can’t refuse – one last emergency job, and he can retire and they’ll guarantee his and the girl’s safety.
The job is a rush assignment, without adequate preparation time. Harry will have to improvise. He is to infiltrate a luxury resort hotel in Andorra, and assassinate three of the world’s most powerful internet moguls. These three are plotting to inject an algorithm into the world wide web which will give them control of all the world’s markets. But money isn’t their goal. They want to manipulate international economies in order to incite wars in the Third World – to control overpopulation.
Harry manages to get in, but he interprets his instructions freely – he steals the men’s laptops, and kidnaps one of them. But when he gets home, he finds a more dangerous, personal challenge in store.
I am enjoying this series, but this is the last installment available to date. Another is coming in December. Fun reading, with cautions for a high body count and mature language.
I picked up Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party recently, because it’s the season for it, and I found the most interesting part of it on the dedication page.
To P. G. Wodehouse
whose books and stories have brightened my life for many years. Also, to show my pleasure in his having been kind enough to tell me he enjoyed my books.
It’s too bad this story isn’t a real zinger. Even a bold or ambitious effort that doesn’t quite pay off would have been good. But Hallowe’en Party is a somewhat fluffy tale that needs content editing.
A thirteen-year-old girl is drowned in a large bucket of water for apple bobbing during a Halloween party. Who would do such a thing? Perhaps it was a disturbed boy–they’re everywhere nowadays. But the girl did boast of seeing a murder a few years ago. Is it possible someone felt threatened and silenced her?
Many pages are spent rehashing mundane details that don’t advance the plot or open cans of red herring. How many characters need to complain about disturbed individuals who should be cared for in psychiatric wards or the dreadful mental health of modern children? “I don’t need to tell you,” they say repeatedly just before telling you the same thing you heard a few pages back.
Add to this Poirot pulling local history out of the air at a few points and his occasional observation on how remarkable this common something is. And why is he wearing apparently sensible shoes when he climbs into the quarry garden on page 85 and not again for the rest of the book, even though he continues to walk all around the place? He says he wears tight, patent leather shoes that hurt his feet because he thinks they present him properly. How did he ever put on the sensible shoes if he can’t do it again later?
My initial guess of the murderer at a third of the way into it proved true. That was unsurprising but good; any other explanation would have ruined the book.
Here we slowed, but not much, and moved, hooting and honking, among cars and motorized rickshaws, in a city that looked like it was built in the twenty-fifth century to be inhabited by people from the fifth century.
Book 2 in Blake Banner’s Cobra series, about elite assassin Harry Bauer, is Dying Breath. It’s as much fun as the first one.
As I read the Cobra books, I’m reminded, in a way, of Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Except that I like Bauer better than Bond (though I’ll admit I’ve only read a couple Bond books). I find James Bond kind of flat as a character. Harry Bauer is an interesting person, and he occasionally hints at opinions I can get behind. On the heroic indestructibility scale, he’s certainly Bond’s equal.
As I mentioned in my last review, Harry Bauer is a former commando, now employed by a super-secret, non-governmental security organization to take out the worst people in the world. His latest assignment seems relatively straightforward – to infiltrate a New York hotel and execute two Chinese scientists who are working on a plague that could become pandemic.
But, as any reader will expect, things don’t go according to plan. The set-up isn’t what Harry expected, and he ends up on a quest that takes him from New York to Casablanca to Bangkok, and which will introduce him to an intriguing femme fatale with lots of deadly secrets.
What any reader of this book will note is that it’s relevant in a very particular way. A moment of recognition comes packed inside at no additional charge. You’ll know what I mean.
I noted one plot problem: Harry makes use of an EMP (Electro-magnetic pulse) machine to knock out electronic systems, but they don’t seem to affect his or his partner’s cars. This is not explained.
Highly recommended as entertainment. Morally problematic in diverse ways.
The maître d’ sat me next to a table of noisy, overdressed beautiful people; the kind who leave their plastic surgeon’s designer label hanging out of the tucks behind their ears.
Harry Bauer, hero of Blake Banner’s Dead of Night, is an American and an orphan. Somehow his wanderings led him to Britain, where he joined the Special Services. He’s a valued and effective commando, until the night in Afghanistan when he nearly kills a prisoner – an Al Qaida leader who raped, tortured, and murdered an entire village. He gets kicked out of the service, and is soon back home in New York without job prospects.
There is one party willing to hire a guy like him for security work, however, in spite of his hazy military record – a Russian gangster. Harry goes to work for him, but he goes in with a plan – one that will leave a lot of bad guys dead, and Harry considerably richer.
But then he’s detained by some mysterious agents, who escort him to an interview with the head of a secret, international security operation called Cobra. Cobra is not directly sponsored by any government. Its sole purpose is killing – eliminating the worst of the worst, whom the law cannot touch. Harry agrees to join them with little hesitation. Especially because his first target is the same terrorist he had to let go in Afghanistan.
Trouble is, the CIA is holding that monster as an information source, and Harry will have to get through them to get to his target.
Piece of cake.
I occasionally read military action thrillers, but they aren’t my favorite reading fare. But Dead of Night went down real easy with me. I finished it quickly, and had a good time with it. The action never lags, the prose is good (it even made me chuckle occasionally), and Harry comes through as a complex, fully developed character. I hastened to buy the second volume in the series.
I hesitate to recommend this book wholeheartedly, because it’s very bloody, and the body count is high. There’s also the moral question of revenge and whether it’s right to kill just because the victim “needs killing,” so to speak. So the moral ambivalence here is greater than in your average mystery. And, of course there’s always the language and adult themes.
With 600 million pounds of candy sold for Halloween, it seems we’ve given up the tricks in favor of the treats. Here are a couple tongue twister skits from Studio C to sooth your appetite for trickery.
The goal in each skit is a perfect run-through. One flub sends them back to the beginning.
C. T. Ferguson is the scion of a wealthy Baltimore family (his given name is, I kid you not, Coningsby). His only distinctions are skills at martial arts and computer hacking. He just returned from three years in Hong Kong, during which he helped some dissidents out and spent a horrific 19 days in a Chinese prison, before being deported.
Now he wants nothing more than to spend his parents’ money, but they are determined to make something of him. They’ve offered him a deal – work for free at some occupation that helps people, and they’ll provide a generous allowance. After some dithering, he settles on becoming a private eye. Thus he is The Reluctant Detective.
C. T. doesn’t really know anything about private investigation, beyond what he’s learned from TV and novels. But he sets up his office and goes to work. His first case is, as might be expected, a domestic. Alice Fisher is convinced her husband is cheating on her. C. T. uses his hacking skills to examine the husband’s life, does some discreet surveillance, and decides the man is faithful – even devoted. But now he’s curious about Alice, the wife. There are certain irregularities in her life that make him suspicious about what this whole exercise is in service of. Then somebody gets killed, and C. T. is hip deep in trouble and danger.
The Reluctant Detective wasn’t awful. The prose was generally good, which is a distinction in our times. But two elements kept me from getting engaged in the story.
First of all, I didn’t like the hero/narrator. C. T. never comes to life as a character, or inspires sympathy. His actions and thoughts seem uncoordinated, not rising from any central motivational core. I had the idea the author might have intended him to be a modern Lord Peter Wimsey, but Dorothy Sayers did it better. Perhaps C. T. needs to get a monocle.
Secondly, I didn’t believe the story. The author seems to be as clueless about the law, police procedure, and what a private detective does as his hero is. He seems to think that P.I.s carry some kind of official authority. He thinks a private citizen can just waltz into a police station and drop into an interrogation observation room without being challenged. And he greatly overestimates the willingness of cops to invite P.I.s into their investigations (even when, as in the case, the cop is the P.I.’s cousin). He also raises intuition to the level of evidence, which just doesn’t wash.
I read The Reluctant Detective all through, and that sets it above a lot of other books. But I really don’t recommend it. Cautions for language, as you’d expect.
