If your taste runs to Florida beach bum private eyes in the tradition of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, there seem to be plenty to choose from. I suppose it’s the lingering McGee mystique that inspires them, and I’m not complaining. H. Terrell Griffin’s Matt Royal seems to be another example, and I liked him just fine.
Matt Royal, the hero of Longboat Blues, is a former lawyer. He used to fly high, working around the clock, making the big bucks, loving the game. But his obsession finally destroyed his marriage, and then he went into a tailspin. His ex-wife’s intervention and one last high-paying case turned him around. He retired with enough money to live in his adopted home of Longboat Key, Florida (near Sarasota), fishing and loafing and enjoying a low-stress life in paradise.
Until one day a woman in his social circle is strangled to death, and her body is found on the condominium balcony belonging to his friend, Logan Hamilton. Desperate and without resources, Logan asks Matt to defend him. Matt can’t say no. But Logan has been framed so neatly that it will involve a lot of investigating to identify the real killer, who is well protected.
I liked Matt Royal as a hero right from the start. He’s thoughtful and easygoing, and (if I understood certain hints in the text) essentially conservative. There was plenty of action in the book, and the mystery was engaging (though I figured out the real villain fairly early – the author needs to work on camouflaging his clues). I have read the second book already and am working on the third. Good stuff. I didn’t notice any offensive language; there were some typos, though.
Still up to my ears in translation, so I’ll reach back all the way to earlier this week, and review a movie I watched on Amazon Prime. One of the oldies again. This one was of particular interest, because it was based on a book I’ve reviewed here, Come and Get It by Edna Ferber. And I have family connections to the setting.
As you may recall if you have photographic memory and nothing better to think about, Come and Get It is Edna Ferber’s novel about the lumber industry in late 19th and early 20th Century northern Wisconsin. The hero is Barney Glasgow, a man with a dream of being rich which he fulfills, but at cost to himself and others.
In the film, the great character actor Edward Arnold plays Barney , which is a case of miscasting. Barney in the book was a big man, but not fat, at least at the start. Still, he gets the character right – a classic American go-getter, an obsessive A-Type before those labels were invented. When I watched a couple clips from the film on YouTube while reading the book, it appeared to me the movie took a lot of liberties. But watching the film, it seemed to me pretty faithful to heart of the story.
The book starts with Barney going to work in a lumber camp as a boy. The movie prunes the story at both ends, jumping forward at the beginning to the moment when Barney comes to visit his friend Swan Bostrom (Walter Brennan, whose Swedish accent might have been worse, I guess) in Iron Ridge, Wisconsin (standing in for Hurley, Wisconsin where my great-grandmother was born). He’s been working out in the camps as a foreman, but now he’s got a big idea to sell to the boss. If the boss goes along with it, Barney will be a partner.
In a saloon, they meet Lotta Morgan, a saloon singer (played by Frances Farmer in her first major movie role). Lotta falls for Barney, thinking he’s her ticket out of the gutter. However, Barney decides to marry the boss’s daughter, a condition of the big business deal. An embittered Lotta marries Swan instead.
Skip forward a couple decades, and Barney is now sole owner of the company, father to two adult children (Joel McCrae plays his son). He hasn’t learned much with the years; he runs roughshod over his family’s feelings, and feels no responsibility to the land he despoils with his logging. Then he’s persuaded to go back to Iron Ridge to visit Swan. He finds Swan now widowed, but he has a daughter (she was a granddaughter in the book), also named Lotta, who looks just like her mother (Farmer played both roles). Now it’s Barney’s turn to play the fool in love – he hires Lotta and brings her to Chicago with him, hoping he can possess her. But his next rival will be his own son.
I enjoyed watching Come and Get It more than I expected. Critical judgment hasn’t been enthusiastic, but I found it enjoyable and relatable. The ending seemed abrupt and anticlimactic, though, as if the writers couldn’t figure out how to wrap it up.
My grandfather worked in one of those camps as a boy. He started out young – he was tall and could get away with lying about his age. I don’t think he was actually a lumberjack proper; his stories were mostly about moving logs around, in wagons or on trains. He once told me a story about a guy driving a wagonload of timber that I thought was the funniest thing I ever heard. Only I can’t remember it at all after all these years.
I do remember his story about transporting logs on a flatcar. They piled them up high, and a couple guys had to ride on top to keep an eye on the merchandise. One day, he told me, he had to do something else and asked a friend to trade off on that day’s run. That was the day the logs started rolling off, and the guys riding on the flatcar, including his friend, were killed.
I know I just shared some music with you, but it occurred to me today that summertime is for happy music. This year has been tough, so I’ll see if I can find some good barbershop quartets to post for the next several Fridays. Here are two.
An anecdote about a telegram from exile leads to this observation from Luke Harrington:
That story is almost definitely apocryphal (not that that stopped the Guinness Book of Records from once including it as the record for “shortest correspondence,” because, well, Guinness gonna Guinness), but it illustrates something we too often forget about the authors of “classic” books: Most of them weren’t tormented geniuses languishing in obscurity to create “great art”; they were just normal people working hard and trying to make bank. Sure, in the pantheon of literature, you’ll find a few weirdo recluses like Kafka, but for the most part, classic authors were the Michael Bays (Michaels Bay?) of their time, obsessively watching the proverbial box office numbers and high-fiving themselves when they topped a billion or whatever.
Sometimes a book shows promise, but the author appears to have bitten off more than they can chew. Such is the case – in this reader’s view – with Jim Eldridge’s Murder at the Fitzwilliam, first in a series starring detective Daniel Wilson.
Danny Wilson used to be a Scotland Yard detective. He worked under the well-known Inspector Abberline during the Jack the Ripper investigation. Having grown disillusioned with the official police, he is now a “private enquiry agent.”
He’s invited up to Cambridge by the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, which boasts an impressive Egyptian collection. A man has been found dead in one of their sarcophagi. The man looks Middle Eastern, but carries no identification. The local police dismiss the matter as an accident suffered by a burglar, but the director suspects more is going on. For one thing, one of their mummies has disappeared.
An employee of the Museum, Miss Abigail Fenton, who discovered the body is eager to help. Danny finds her intelligent and resourceful. Together they start asking questions, as attraction grows between them – resisted by them both.
The essential story here could have worked, I think, but the author wasn’t up to it. I thought the characters were well-conceived in themselves, but they were badly limned. A person’s feelings and attitudes can be suggested in a narrative, without the necessity of spelling everything out for the reader. You need to trust your reader’s intelligence. This book tells us too much and suggests too little. And the romance story line was clumsily executed.
Clearly a fair amount of research went into Murder at the Fitzwilliam, but not enough to be convincing. The dialogue (already clunky) often fell into modernisms. And there were historical errors – the author thinks a photograph could be printed in a newspaper the next day in 1894 – I’m fairly sure you couldn’t do that yet.
I think author Eldridge shows promise as a novelist, but Murder at the Fitzwilliam didn’t work.
Working hard at translation these days, which is a good thing. I’m doing a promotional project for Saga Bok Publishers in Norway, but I won’t say much about it because I don’t know what their timeline is.
Which means I have to spend some of my valuable reading time actually producing work. Hence the fact that I don’t have a book to review today.
But, as I’ve mentioned, I like to stream Amazon Prime while I’m working. Today I watched an interesting production, more recent than is my usual fare. It’s an Australian movie called Dripping in Chocolate.
At the top of the cast are David Wenham, whom you might recognize (I missed it) as Faramir from The Lord of the Rings, and Louise Lombard, an English actress I haven’t seen before.
Wenham plays Bennett O’Mara, a police detective struggling with personal issues (aren’t they all?). He’s on some kind of cleansing diet, to the amusement of his colleagues. In contrast, Lombard plays Juliana Lovece, who runs a high-end chocolate shop. The camera lingers on her cooking procedures in a sensual manner. Thus are film characters established. When a high-end call girl is found strangled in the street with the wrapper from one of Juliana’s candies on her body, O’Mara goes to see her. As you’d expect, romantic sparks fly between them, though O’Mara’s too buttoned up to do anything about it.
When Lovece’s chocolate wrappers start showing up at other murder scenes, things get complicated – and sometimes not very plausible. However, the likeability of the leads and their excellent chemistry keeps our interest up. The scenery’s nice too. And the final solution surprised me completely.
Dripping in Chocolate has the look of a TV movie, but it’s an enjoyable TV movie. There was sexual suggestion, but nothing explicit. I enjoyed it, and it was a fun break from old black ‘n whites.
There are few surprises for the loyal reader in Bruce Beckham’s latest Skelgill mystery, Murder On the Moor. But surprises aren’t what we look for, any more than Skelgill himself looks for novelty when he spends long hours fishing. The exercise is itself the pleasure.
Dan Skelgill is, as you may recall, a police detective in rural Cumbria. He is supported by his regular team, DS Leyton, a transplanted Cockney from London, and DS Jones, an attractive young woman. Skelgill and Jones almost flirt occasionally, but he’s older than she and doesn’t seriously consider it. Essentially he’s a loner.
In Murder On the Moor, the team is called to investigate the theft of some jewels from the stately home of a local nobleman. Lord Edward Bullingdon. His lordship is married to a much younger wife, a fashion model with expensive tastes and a wandering eye. She even makes a play for Skelgill when he interviews her. He’s not impressed with security at the castle, and especially dislikes Lawrence Melling, the predatory gamekeeper. Local conservationists are concerned about a pair of rare birds of prey nesting on the estate. Melling has made it clear he considers the conservationists a nuisance, and the birds a danger to the grouse they raise for hunting, a necessary income for the operation.
Then Melling is murdered in a very suggestive way, and it’s up to Skelgill and his team to sort through a complexity of possible approaches and alibis to discover the killer.
I’ll have to admit I found Murder On the Moor a little slow around the middle. A lot of the plot hung on the physical layout of the estate, which I never quite mastered. Things picked up toward the end. I enjoyed it all in all, and there was no obscenity. I’ll read the next one.
Correctly handling the Word of God does not permit making the text say what we want. To understand the Bible accurately, we must discover (or “exegete”) the single, God-inspired meaning of every verse before us. The text of the Bible means what God inspired it to mean, not “what it means to me.”
When praying the Bible, our primary activity is prayer, not Bible intake. Bible reading is secondary in this process. Our focus is on God through prayer; our glance is at the Bible. And we turn Godward and pray about every matter that occurs to us as we read.
“We of the Council, convened in full, have decided that man in good conscience can no longer permit this wanton destruction of our fellow creatures, whose right to exist is fully as great as ours,” the decree states. “It is therefore decreed that men, in spontaneous free will and contrition, voluntarily accede to the termination of their species.” The operative word is contrition. Guilt is a force eating people from inside. Citizens are too cowed, too stricken with guilt, to mount any organized resistance to the Council’s diktat. Although not all have chosen to give up on life, everything is in ruins and life expectancy for citizens is low indeed.
Our friend and instigator Dave Lull is well aware of my fondness for the late author D. Keith Mano. He sent me a link to this recent article from the National Review on one of Mano’s nearly forgotten but uncomfortably relevant novels, The Bridge.
Perhaps the scenario evoked in The Bridge is too general in nature to belong to Mano or to any one writer. But anybody who reads Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road and Mano’s The Bridge, published 33 years earlier, will quickly see how much the later novel has in common with the earlier one.
I thought myself audacious (and feared I was prescient) when in my Epsom novels I postulated a near future in which “Extinctionism” was a popular movement. I in fact cherished a hope that I could manipulate Fate by exploiting its reluctance to ever prove me right. But we’ve seen Extinctionism begin to take hold in recent years, and one looks at imagined futures like those of The Road and The Bridge, today, with growing alarm.
The Bridge, writer Michael Washburn notes, is out of print but can be obtained online. It sounds intriguing, but – honestly – I’m afraid to read it. Also, look at the price on Amazon!
