From our desk of You Don’t Say, there’s a common belief that an old Chinese curse states, “May you live in interesting times.” But the best source researchers have found for this adage is a second-hand anecdote from a British ambassador.
The Quote Investigator says the saying has close ties to the family of Sir Austen Chamberlain (1863-1937), who shared the saying at a meeting of Birmingham Unionist Association in 1936. It’s a statement he may have heard his father, Joseph Chamberlain, say on occasion, not as a Chinese curse, but as his own observation.
In 1898, Joseph was reported as saying this before an audience: “I think that you will all agree that we are living in most interesting times. (Hear, hear.) I never remember myself a time in which our history was so full, in which day by day brought us new objects of interest, and, let me say also, new objects for anxiety. (Hear, hear.)”
It’s not spelled out in the research, but you could easily imagine how a statement like this could be slightly misremembered, if not simply misunderstood in context we do not have.
D. P. Lyle’s likeable Jake Longly series of mysteries continues with A-List, a tale of Hollywood and New Orleans.
Jake and his girlfriend Nicole are called to the Big Easy by her uncle, who is a major Hollywood producer. His company is shooting a science fiction film in the Louisiana swamps, but his star, actor Kirk Ford, has been arrested for murder. He woke from a drug-induced sleep to find his girlfriend strangled. He swears that he didn’t take the drug voluntarily, and did not kill her. But the police think it’s a slam dunk.
What’s worse, the girlfriend was the daughter of New Orleans’s biggest crime boss. If the state won’t execute Kirk, he’ll be happy to do it himself – or maybe he’ll just intervene regardless.
It’s a dangerous job, but Jake and Nicole have the back-up of Jake’s dad, the former secret agent, and his giant associate “Pancake.” Cross Hollywood with New Orleans and you get a swamp full of crocodiles, but they’re up to the challenge.
I find the Jake Longly books agreeable. They’re cheerful, which is a rarity in the genre. Unfortunately, there are less satisfying elements for this reader. The writing isn’t terrible, but it’s kind of “on the nose.” Never let me disparage the discipline of writing clearly, but you can be too clear. Spell everything out and you lose nuance. You’re treating the reader like an idiot. And there were some homophone errors – “oogling” for “ogling” and “lost leader” for “loss leader.” The dialogue was often stilted and (as I mentioned in the last review) all the characters talked the same way.
And Jake and Nicole smoked pot, which always puts me off.
And I figured out whodunnit fairly early on.
I won’t give the book an actual thumbs down, but it wasn’t good enough to persuade me to continue the series. You might like it better. Cautions for language and mature situations.
The supply of fictional beach bum private eyes never seems to run low. Today I review Deep Six, first in D. P. Lyle’s series about Jake Longly.
Jake Longly is a former major league pitcher, retired due to an injury. He runs a bar and grill on Key West, to the disapproval of his father Ray, a former government spook who runs a high-end private investigation company. In spite of this, Ray calls Jake in from time to time to help him with jobs.
One of those jobs has Jake surveilling a house in a wealthy neighborhood one night. Good and bad come from this. The first bad is that his ex-wife, who lives in the neighborhood, discovers him, assumes he’s stalking her, and smashes his car windows with a golf club. The good is that he also meets the girl of his dreams, who kind of leaps into his life and takes up residence there. He’s not complaining about that.
But the worst thing is when he learns that the woman he actually was watching has been murdered in her house, almost right under his nose. He has an alibi for the crime (his new girlfriend, Nicole), but his father Ray is not going to let this affront go uninvestigated. The trail will lead to organized crime and a ruthless Russian mobster who likes to take people on one-way ocean cruises. Jake and Nicole will end up on one of those cruises, culminating in a fairly original – if implausible – showdown.
The story wasn’t bad. The author, however, needs some seasoning, in my view. His dialogue is kind of stilted, and all the characters talk the same way. At one point he gave us a moment of narrator confusion, as if he’d originally written the whole thing in the third person, then decided to break it up between first and third, and missed a spot. The male fantasy element is well provided for in the person of the girlfriend Nicole, who’s pretty much any man’s dream girl. Sex scenes are frequent, but not too explicit. There’s also a little casual pot smoking.
I enjoyed Deep Six, with reservations, and am reading the second book.
From our You Have Heard It Said But I Tell You desk, the Chinese word for crisis, wēijī 危机, is not a pictogram of danger plus opportunity. You can see this definition in action in this 2009 book, Crossing the Soul’s River, in which the author says he was given this explanation first-hand.
In fact, very few Chinese letters represent little pictures of their ideas. More importantly, jī alone is not opportunity; it’s only part of several words.
A whole industry of pundits and therapists has grown up around this one grossly inaccurate statement. A casual search of the Web turns up more than a million references to this spurious proverb. It appears, often complete with Chinese characters, on the covers of books, on advertisements for seminars, on expensive courses for “thinking outside of the box,” and practically everywhere one turns in the world of quick-buck business, pop psychology, and orientalist hocus-pocus. This catchy expression (Crisis = Danger + Opportunity) has rapidly become nearly as ubiquitous as The Tao of Pooh and Sun Zi’s Art of War for the Board / Bed / Bath / Whichever Room.
…
Perhaps it would be worthwhile to offer another example from English that is closer to our Chinese word wēijī (“crisis”). Let’s take the –ity component of “opportunity,” “calamity” (“calamity” has a complicated etymology; see the Oxford English Dictionary, Barnhart, etc.), “felicity,” “cordiality,” “hostility,” and so forth. This –ity is a suffix that is used to form abstract nouns expressing state, quality, or condition. The words that it helps to form have a vast range of meanings, some of which are completely contradictory. Similarly the –jī of wēijī by itself does not mean the same thing as wēijī (“crisis”), jīhuì (“opportunity”), and so forth. The signification of jī changes according to the environment in which it occurs.
“Danger + Opportunity ≠ Crisis“, Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Pennsylvania
He looked like a bullet standing on its end. And yet he was very calm, and came across altogether more thoughtful than the other two. That is to say, he came across as though he had thoughts.
In some ways, I’d have to say that Tom Trott’s private eye Joe Grabarz channels Philip Marlowe pretty well. He’s got the patter down, and a lot of the character. If the first Joe Grabarz novel, You Can’t Make Old Friends, didn’t entirely work for me, that’s very likely my own fault.
Joe Grabarz walks the mean streets of Brighton, the beach-front holiday town in England. As he describes it, it’s a little like a smaller New York City, where only the rich and the poor live. Joe definitely comes from the poor side, and he makes no secret of his grudge.
As the book starts, his private investigation business is in a slump. He used to help the police out; now he’s been blackballed. One of his clients is not only refusing to pay him, but suing him.
And then he’s asked to look at a body that’s washed up on the beach, and it’s a friend of his, Rory. Rory was his best friend in childhood, but they’ve been alienated since Rory became a drug addict and pusher. Still, he was a good guy once, and Joe’s going to get justice. On his own, if the law won’t do it.
His inquiries lead him to meet Rory’s sexy sister, whom he takes under his protection. And a beautiful woman cop who sparks off him like flint on steel. Respectable businessmen with lots of skeletons in their closets. And various thugs for beating up and getting beaten up by. In the end he’ll get a measure of justice, and a little redemption for Rory’s memory.
The writing in You Can’t Make Old Friends was good. Joe is an interesting character with a compelling voice. (He’s also very much opposed to drugs, even pot. I liked that.) What rubbed me the wrong way was the resentment in his voice, a persistent class envy. Class envy is understandable and forgivable, but it doesn’t make for pleasant company. So, regretfully, I don’t think I’ll continue this series.
You may like it better. Cautions for language, violence, and fairly graphic sex.
Overall, however, I concluded that if she were Terrence Well’s trophy wife, he hadn’t won first prize.
I liked the writing and the characters in Rob Avery’s first Sim Greene novel, Close-Hauled, but I didn’t like how it ended. The promise, however, was enough to persuade me to try the second book, Broad Reach. This one was more to my liking, and the author even did a little retcon work to soften the hard landing in the last book.
Sim Greene, former Navy CPO, has left his career in California. He’s steering his sailboat, Figaro, to the British Virgin Islands by way of the Panama Canal. Doing it solo is a challenge, but not an overwhelming one. When he gets to BVI, he plans to use some cash he and his buddy Al acquired in their last adventure, and open a dive shop and salvage business.
But when he arrives, he finds a message from Al. He’s been arrested on suspicion of murder, and is being held without bail. Sim hastens to hire him a lawyer.
Al says he was approached by a beautiful woman, who gave him a plastic bag containing someone’s pocket contents, including a passport, which she found. She asked him to turn it in to the police for her. When he did so, he was arrested for the murder of the passport’s owner. The police seem satisfied they have their man, and are not investigating further. Al has an alibi, but it’s in the form of a woman whom he doesn’t wish to name.
Sim starts asking questions around the islands, discovering that the dead man was involved with drug smugglers, and that the police have been compromised. He also meets a beautiful woman who might just be able to lure him away from life on a boat.
Rob Avery is a good writer, and has done a fine job with characters and plotting here. This is a series I could get to like. I’m waiting for the next book, not yet published.
She was tall with wide shoulders and thin limbs. She had a gawky gracefulness to her movements, like a fashion model slightly out of practice.
Another day, another boat-bum detective. I’ve been trawling through them, looking for that ever-elusive successor to Travis McGee. The hero of James W. Hall’s Under Cover of Daylight, Thorn (no other name is used), hangs out in Key Largo, Florida. There’s much to like in this book, though it didn’t please me in the end.
Thorn is an orphan – his parents died in a car accident the day he was born. He was raised by a loving couple, Doc and Kate. Kate is still living, and is leading the fight to save an endangered species called the Key Largo Water Rat from encroaching development.
Thorn himself lives in a shack and makes a marginal living tying the best bonefish lures in the Keys. His needs are simple. Only recently he’s met a beautiful woman, Sarah, who’s drawing him out of himself. But he has an old secret, and he can’t move forward until he’s dealt with it. Thorn’s secret isn’t the only secret in the mix. He will learn he’s surrounded by secrets – they counter one another and entangle themselves. Those secrets are beginning to get people killed – Thorn will have to face some hard truths before he can set things straight.
James W. Hall is a very good wordsmith – he writes poetry as well, and it shows. This style of writing, however, didn’t always work for this reader, especially at the end. The climax has a dream-like quality that made it implausible to me – kind of like a story you’d hear from a stoner – and marijuana smuggling plays a large role in the story.
There were many Christian references and images, mostly pretty respectful. The “evangelical” church one of Thorn’s friends attends sounded pretty weird, though, especially in terms of sexual practices. Of course, there’s all kinds nowadays, and this is the Keys.
Under Cover of Daylight didn’t work for me, but it had many virtues. You might like it. Cautions for language and sexual situations.
“Well!” said Weyland, “this is a rara avis indeed. The Amazonian strockbroker parrot has been seen only by a priviliged few explorers…. This species is a perfect demonstration of Darwin’s principles of sexual selection,” Weyland explained. “The male with the best-performing stock portfolio is naturally preferred by the females.”
It’s unusual to get good news in these times, but I recently discovered that the web’s greatest blog, Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine, had somehow managed to be revived outside my notice. Of course it has become, once again, a daily resort for me. I also noticed that Dr. Boli had a brand new book out, Devil King Kun. It was for me the work of but a moment to download it onto my Kindle.
Seriously, I don’t think I’ve laughed this hard at a book since the last time I read P. G. Wodehouse. (You may notice, if you are a close observer, that this review is very close to the single review the book has attracted so far on Amazon. That’s because I wrote that review.) Think of the great old, mostly English, adventure novels, by H. Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Sax Rohmer, and others – then blend them into a heaping bowlful of Lewis Carroll. That’s Devil King Kun.
Our intrepid hero, Norbert Weyland, is on the trail of the archfiend Devil King Kun, king of Andorra (a microstate on the Iberian Peninsula). In his ruthless quest for world domination he has already taken over the local Archdiocese in Pittsburgh, the key to control of parish festivals throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. And tomorrow, the world.
We follow Weyland and his faithful chronicler, Peevish, on a madcap chase through North America, South America, and across the Atlantic to the Pyrenees by airship, ornithopter, ski, and other means of transport, pursued by Devil King Kun’s beautiful, cat-suited daughter Princess Kun – who has plans for “having fun” with Weyland before killing him. They acquire a pet tiger and a friendly South American native girl as companions, and face pretty much any cliched, melodramatic peril you would expect to find in an adventure novel, escaping again and again by the skin of their teeth through Weyland’s quick thinking and the reader’s heavily strained suspension of disbelief. Realism is a distant dream, and non-sequiturs flourish in verdant abundance.
Devil King Kun was the book I didn’t know I needed in these insane times – at last, something too bizarre to believe, even in 2020! I loved Devil King Kun. I highly recommend it.
He is without doubt the most devious tactical accordionist in the world.
Derek Gilbert interviewed me for his popular “View From the Bunker” podcast. The main subject is how I followed fairly obvious clues to predict bits of the future in my novels. You can listen to it here.
