Today I gave my classic Orientation-time PowerPoint on library procedures to the students at the Bible school. As usual it was a hit, and it ought to earn me some tolerance from the students, right up until they actually have to deal with me in person.

I learned yesterday morning, as I lay in bed luxuriating in the Labor Day holiday, that I was supposed to be at school, delivering the thing. The implication was that I’d been informed about this. I have no memory of that (as unindicted co-conspirators like to say). So it was arranged for me to do it today, but I went in and put in a few hours work yesterday anyway. Had to update the PowerPoint, for one thing. New rules on fines, in general more forgiving ones. Naturally, as a Christian conservative, I hate that. All the money we spent on the new pillory and refurbishing the ducking stool, down the drain. There’s just no standards anymore.

I am strongly conflicted about Randy Wayne White’s Shark River. I liked it and disliked it, in about equal proportions. No, I guess I liked it a little more than I disliked it. I shall elucidate.

White’s Doc Ford character is widely considered an heir to John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, and I have to say I haven’t read anything in the field that meets the qualifications better. Like McGee, Ford lives a laid-back life on the water in Florida (though Ford lives on the other coast, and works pretty hard as a marine biologist, while McGee purposely lived as a beach bum between cases). They are both actively involved in the social scenes in their marinas, though Ford’s neighbors are more important to the plot than McGee’s usually were.

But Ford has a dark past. He was formerly a member of an ultra-secret government assassination squad. He came to Sanibel Island, his present home, with the intention of killing a man named Tomlinson, who had been involved in a fatal anti-war bombing plot back in the Vietnam years. For reasons of his own, Ford decided to let Tomlinson live, became his best friend, and hung up his spurs, so to speak.

Shark River begins with the attempt of a Colombian drug lord to kidnap the daughter of an influential American bureaucrat. Ford, in the right place at the right time, prevents it. In the fight he paralyzes a man who turns out to be the drug lord’s son, making himself a target. At the same time he meets Ransom Ebanks, a Bahamian woman who claims to be his long-lost half-sister, but is in fact the daughter of his reprobate uncle, whom Ford never liked much. She has a letter from her father and a sort of treasure map promising to lead to her “inheritance,” and she is relentless in trying to get Ford to help her. But of course the Colombians are waiting over the horizon, planning to strike back at the man who crippled one of their own.

In his casual courage and human tolerance, Doc Ford pleases me in the same way Travis McGee used to. But there are elements in the story that please me less. I can’t help it, but I’m just intolerant of drug use. Ford doesn’t use marijuana, but his friend Tomlinson and his “sister” Ransom are both users.

Tomlinson is presented as a burnt-out case, a little flaky (he is a Buddhist and a teacher of Transcendental Meditation, which also doesn’t win any points with me), but I have trouble with his history as an anti-war radical, as well as his religion. I think his friendship with Doc Ford is meant to be a metaphor for American reconciliation, and that’s nice, but I’m still pretty bitter about the whole thing, so I found Tomlinson kind of hard to take. Especially when he was smoking pot.

The attitude toward sexual morality all around in the book was pretty heedless too, in my opinion. (Yes, even more heedless than Travis McGee’s.)

But I liked Shark River enough that I expect I’ll give White another read.

Here I am, a bona fide professional writer, and I’m stuck for words to describe the loveliness of today’s weather. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art less humid and more temperate….” I should have taken the day off and gone to the state fair and fired questions about Bohemian Grove at Michael Medved. But, as Yogi Berra once sagely remarked, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

If you think you know about the Father Dowling mystery books because you used to watch Tom Bosley in the ridiculous TV version some years back, be assured that you don’t. Father Dowling is a priest named Father Dowling, and he does live in the Midwest and he does have a nosey housekeeper, but that’s about the extent of the similarity.

The original, authorized Father Dowling is a sort of clerical Sherlock Holmes (he’s tall and thin and smokes a pipe), but kinder and more inclined to suffer fools (and sinners). He was once a rising young star in the Roman Catholic hierarchy, but job pressures led to alcoholism, and the church sent him to Fox River, Illinois, a transitional suburb of Chicago, as a sort of second chance-cum-penance. But he discovered that parish ministry is his real calling, and he loves taking care of his little flock. Except for the remarkable number of unsolved murders that seem to crop up. (Also it should be noted that there are no roller-skating nuns to be seen anywhere.)

The drama in Last Things centers on the conflicts and dysfunctions of the Bernardo family, whose patriarch is Fulvio Bernardo, owner of a string of local greenhouses. Fulvio has only been moderately honest in his business dealings, and has been serially unfaithful to his pious wife, Margaret. But now his health is failing, and his children are gathering for the end.

The children include Raymond, who was once a promising young priest, but he ran away with a nun, with whom he now lives out of wedlock in California. Andrew is the underachieving middle brother who teaches English at a local college and has a live-in as well. Jessica is a successful novelist, much envied by Andrew, and remains a believer. She’s planning to write a novel based on her family’s story, and there’s an aunt who is much alarmed at that prospect, going so far as to ask Father Dowling to persuade Jessica to drop the project.

But it’s Andrew who gets into big trouble, when an insufferable colleague blames him for holding back his career, and starts a campaign of harassment against not only Andrew but his whole family. And when the colleague is found murdered in the street, well, who do you think comes under suspicion?

Father Dowling works it all out, of course, relying on his profound understanding of human motivations and sins. Along the way he also helps Raymond come to terms with the guilt he’s been carrying (and denying) ever since his defection.

All things taken together, I think I prefer Father Dowling stories to Father Brown stories. That’s heresy, I know, but although I’m crazy about G.K. Chesterton about 80% of the time, I always found the FB mysteries a little facile, a little too neat. They seem to me analogous to an archer shooting his arrows first and then painting targets around them. The Father Dowling stories are richer and more humane, less didactic (which isn’t to say there aren’t moral and theological lessons).

As a Protestant, of course, I find points in the stories where I disagree with some of the detective’s basic assumptions about Christianity. But it doesn’t interfere much for me, and the quiet, peaceful presence that Father Dowling imparts to these stories make reading them a comfort and a delight.

There are a million injustices in the mean streets of Publishing Town. The greatest of all, it goes without saying, is my own failure to find a new publisher. But not far behind is the tragic fact that Bill Pronzini is not a major, bestselling mystery writer.

He’s published and respected and he wins awards, but he’s never broken out as I think he should. He has everything I want in a mystery writer. He sets out a good puzzle, but he also paints a good character, which is what I really want.

I realized years ago, reading Science Fiction, why I don’t care for most Science Fiction. It’s because the authors treat their characters like specimens on a dissection tray. “Let’s poke the subject here, and see what its reaction is.” They had no compassion for their characters, and I put down their books with relief.

There are mystery writers like that too, but Bill Pronzini isn’t one of them. His characters are 98.6 F warm. They act like real people, for real motives, and Pronzini has compassion on them—even the bad ones.

His continuing character is known as “The Nameless Detective,” not because he’s a man of mystery, but because Pronzini started writing about him in short stories without giving him a name, and once he’d established him that way it would detract from the stories to suddenly drop a name on him (although he did let us know, some years back, that Nameless’ first name is Bill).

Nameless has grown over the years. He started out as a young San Francisco private eye who consciously modeled himself on the hard-boiled sleuths of the old pulp magazines, of which he is a collector. He was also a heavy smoker at the start, which gave Pronzini the chance to kill him off from cancer in one memorable short story. But (like Conan Doyle) he succumbed to the temptation to bring his detective back. Nameless had a remission, and has taken care of himself since then.

He’s middle-aged now, and married to a woman named Kerry. They’ve adopted a little girl. He’s planning to semi-retire soon, and has taken on a partner, a young black woman named Tamara whom he mentored. In this book they also hire an operative, a former cop named Jake Runyon. Runyon has many personal demons, which helps him fit right in.

In Spook, the agency is hired by a San Francisco film company to discover the identity of a homeless man whom everyone called “Spook,” a gentle, mentally disturbed man who was shot to death in an alley behind their studio. It’s not supposed to be a Whodunnit. It’s just that the filmmakers liked the man, and would like to notify his family, or arrange for burial themselves.

Following the clues they turn up, the detectives send their new operative, Runyon, out to a small town in the Sierras to discover the tragic story behind “Spook’s” decline. Runyon doesn’t mind. He has absolutely nothing in his life anymore except for his work, and he provides an empathetic eye as he turns over the old log he finds, to see what worms writhe underneath.

But there’s more than just worms there. There’s a wasp—someone very angry and very crazy, with a brainful of hate and resentment. And a gun.

Pronzini is a fine, professional storyteller who draws you in and makes you care. Profanity and sexual situations are on the low side for the genre. I recommend Spook, and all Pronzini’s novels.

I’ve just got to share this post from Junkyard Blog. Not all pictures are worth a thousand words, but that one is.

I picked up Dead Simple by accident. I’d intended to check a book by J. J. Jance out of the library, having not tried her work yet, and through inattention I went home with the book that had been shelved right next to the volume I meant to take. Once I got it home and discovered my mistake, I figured I might as well give it a shot.

I’m not sorry I did. It was an interesting and well-plotted book. I can’t give it the highest accolades, for reasons I’ll explain, but it kept me turning the pages.

The set-up is tremendous. Michael Harrison is a young English entrepreneur. He makes a lot of money and lives in style. He’s about to marry a gorgeous woman whom he loves very much.

When the book begins, Harrison is half-unconscious in the back of a van, pub-crawling with his buddies as part of his bachelor party. Michael has been a ruthless and rather cruel practical joker, especially in relation to his friends’ bachelor parties, and they have a dandy revenge in store for him.

They put him in a coffin (one of the friends works at a mortuary) and bury him in a shallow grave with a bottle of whiskey, a dirty magazine, a flashlight and a walkie-talkie. There’s an air tube to keep him from suffocating. The plan is to leave him there for a few hours, then dig him up again.

Except that there’s an accident, and his friends end up either dead or in a coma.

And when Michael’s partner, who missed the party because of a delayed flight, comes home and hears the news… he does nothing at all. In spite of the fact that he knows Michael is buried out there somewhere.

I love a neat set-up like that. And James keeps the tension rising, revealing information to the reader in careful, cruel doses. When you think things can’t get any worse, they do.

The hero of the book is Detective Superintendent Roy Grace of the Sussex Police (I wish James had chosen another name. Whenever I read “Grace said…” I think of a woman). He’s the most interesting character in the book. A man alone (his beloved wife simply disappeared a few years back), he lives mainly for his work. The big handicap in his career seems to be his advocacy of the use of psychic evidence in his investigations.

Needless to say, that’s a problem for me. I consider most (perhaps all) psychics frauds. If any are not frauds, then they are in contact with dangerous spiritual forces, and anyone who contacts them is putting himself in severe peril. The author’s bio on the flyleaf says that Peter James has a “deep interest” in the paranormal.

This is not quite “playing the game,” by the rules of traditional detective fiction. Dorothy Sayers, in her essay “Problem Picture” in The Mind of the Maker, quotes the following question asked of applicants to the Detection Club:

PRESIDENT: Do you promise that your Detectives shall well and truly detect the Crimes presented to them, using those Wits which it shall please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance upon, nor making use of, Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God?

CANDIDATE: I do.

Of course times have changed, and Miss Sayers wouldn’t have cared for a whole lot of what goes on in mysteries today. But I can’t help thinking that appealing to the supernatural in what is presented as a standard mystery is a bit of a deus ex machina. I think I’d feel the same if prayer were used similarly in a Christian mystery (but who knows? Maybe I’m deluding myself).

Detective Grace’s tentative attempts to begin dating again, in his rare free moments, provide an appealing subplot, helping to flesh out what is really the only fully-rounded character in a plot-driven book.

But the plot is driven very well indeed.

All in all an entertaining novel, but I have no great desire to read more by the author.

The word from Our Beloved Supervisors in the Twin Cities today is, “Stay inside. Do not attempt any strenuous work out of doors. The temperature is too high; the ozone level up in the Oh! Zone.”

I defied that advice, rebel that I am. In the first place the temperature was lower than expected, only a little over 80. Also my walking schedule has finally gotten me to the level where my body (like a dog) actually expects and wants its daily walk, and is disappointed if it misses it.

The humidity level was in Jacques Cousteau territory. I thought breathing was a little difficult too, but that was likely psychosomatic. Is ozone really dangerous to breathe, like cigarette smoke or something? Am I going to die now? Maybe I should just take up tobacco.

It says much about my psychological disorder(s) that, although I’m essentially very lazy, I judge a good or bad weekend by what I’ve accomplished. By that standard, it was a pretty good weekend. I mowed the lawn. I mopped the bathroom. I waxed Mrs. Hermanson, my car. And that was all on Saturday. On Sunday I did precisely nothing, as is my preference, except for church and reading. I shall now tell you about my reading.

No full reviews on these, just observations.

I finished Michael Connelly’s Echo Park. It’s another Harry Bosch novel, and a strong book in a dynasty of strong books. Harry is back with the L.A. police department now, working the Cold Case unit. A serial killer is arrested with human body parts in his van, and he confesses to a series of murders, including one that Harry worked on back in 1993, when it was new, and has been revisiting from time to time ever since. The problem is that Harry has been certain from the first that somebody else murdered that particular victim. And Harry is told that he missed a vital clue back in ’93, one that could have saved a number of lives if he’d followed it up. There’s an escape, cops are murdered, and Harry works two puzzles at once.

There’s nothing cheerful in a Harry Bosch book. Harry lives in a dark, confused world, where doing right (and Harry always tries to do right—that’s part of his problem) isn’t always the same thing as following the rules. Harry gets the job done, but there’s always a cost.

I also read an oldie, Robert Crais’ Lullaby Town. I like Crais better with each book of his I read. In this story, L.A. private eye Elvis Cole is hired by Peter Alan Nelson, a powerful Hollywood producer (whose characterization is deftly kept just this side of parody) to locate his ex-wife and son, who left him years before and simply dropped out of sight.

Elvis has to travel far from home to find the two, and when he does he discovers a desperate situation that calls for swift and forceful action. Needless to say, he brings in his dangerous partner, Joe Pike, but the real delight of Lullaby Town is the character arc traced by Nelson, the movie producer, as his family’s danger gradually forces him into a strange new territory known as The Real World, and how he begins to grow up as a man.

I think we lose a lot in contemporary storytelling through the abandonment of belief in objective truth. When you believe that there is an actual “thing” out there called Truth (or Goodness), then you can believe that everyone has an obligation to it, and you can root for them as they approach it, or sorrow for them as they move away from it.

When you believe that everybody makes his own truth, your rooting for a character is only a function of your personal taste (and his). It’s a game without a fixed goal. It’s pointless.

I don’t know if Crais had that kind of lesson in mind, but that’s what I drew from Lullaby Town, and it was very satisfactory to me.

I said a little about Stephen Hunter’s Point of Impact a few posts back, and I told you I was enjoying it quite a lot.

That was an understatement.

Now, I suppose that’s old news to many of you. I expect I’m far behind the curve (as is so often the case), since this book and its sequels and collaterals have been out for a while. So this review would probably better be called an appreciation. I just want to babble a little about how much I enjoyed Point of Impact, and to share my priceless insights on why I think it’s so great.

The chief beauty here is that the book is centered on a strong, well-rounded, sympathetic hero. If you’ve been reading this blog for any time at all you know I think character is king, and Bob Lee Swagger, the hero of this book, is a hero and a half. I don’t think there’s been a straight-ahead, singleminded, admirable main guy like this since Louis L’Amour died, and L’Amour wasn’t as good a writer as Hunter (I speak as an admirer of L’Amour).

Bob Lee Swagger of Blue Eye, Arkansas is everything books and movies and television have been teaching us to despise for most of my lifetime. He’s a white southerner. His formal education is limited. He’s ex-military, and he loves his guns. He also loves his country, to the point where he destroys evidence that might clear him of a capital accusation, because its release might make America look bad.

Swagger is approached by a mysterious pair of strangers, obviously former soldiers, who offer him a short-term job. They want him to test some new ammunition, they say. His testimonial would be valuable to them, as he was a legendary Marine sniper in Vietnam.

He does the job, and the ammunition is good. But something isn’t right. Bob Lee is not only a shooter, he’s a hunter of men. His hunter’s sense tells him they’re not telling him the full truth, but they entice him with a lure he can’t resist—there’s a plot to kill the president, they say, and the shooter coming in to do the job is a Russian, a famous sniper whom the Vietnamese brought in to take out Bob Lee himself during the war. That sniper crippled Bob Lee and killed his spotter. Bob Lee’s job will be to figure out where the attack will come, and to help them prevent it.

Of course it all goes south from there. Before long Bob Lee is on the run, wounded and the target of a nationwide manhunt.

Another great character is Nick Memphis, an FBI agent who first hunts Bob Lee, and then forms an alliance with him. Nick was a sniper too, years back. He tried to take out a criminal who was holding several women hostage. But he missed the shot and paralyzed a hostage. He married the woman and nursed her for the rest of her life. It doesn’t seem to have ever occurred to him to do anything else.

Even the villains are entirely believable and realistically motivated.

And the women—the women in this book are solid gold, Tammy Wynette, “Stand By Your Man,” grand ladies. They may have moments of envy for the easier lives enjoyed by women who chose lesser men, but they know that they could have had that kind of man if they’d wanted one. (I suppose these women are as much fantasy characters as Bond Girls in the movies. But it’s a whole ‘nother kind of fantasy.)

The plotting is flawless. Tension grows and grows as Bob Lee’s enemies’ plans unfold, and he finds the whole world more and more against him. Yet he never loses his nerve. He never gives up—even with a bullet hole in his chest.

I couldn’t help thinking of James Bond as I read Point of Impact. Like a Bond movie (the books not so much), this novel presents a vision of manhood that most of us can only dream of.

The difference is that, after reading Point of Impact, I wanted to be a better man than I am.

As you’d expect, there’s mature subject matter and harsh language. But I recommend Point of Impact for every grownup man. I have no idea what women think of it.