I don’t generally read space opera, but I picked up this book on a whim, out of Sarah Hoyt’s regular book plugs. The Hero at the End of His Rope is actually a novella. Author Jason P. Hunt wrote it, he explains in his Introduction, according to a plan to make each chapter precisely 800 words long.
Richard Thorpe is our hero, a sort of a Han Solo character. As the story opens, we learn that he’s wanted by the authorities. Apparently he has blown up a planet. The reasons for this extreme action are revealed gradually as the story goes on, as are his motives for wanting revenge against a powerful space gangster, his former employer.
As he flees in his spacecraft, he is assisted by an alien friend and his redheaded girlfriend, who proves to have a secret of her own. One feels the influences of Star Wars and Star Trek in the faster-than-light speed chases and the banter among the characters here.
The Hero at the End of His Rope is light entertainment, and succeeds at that purpose. I personally was not happy with the format – each chapter precisely the same length. Such strictures prevent an author making the best use of his words – I have often quoted Lincoln, who said that a man’s legs should be long enough to reach the ground. Likewise, a chapter ought to be precisely long enough to do its narrative job, no more nor less.
But overall my response is favorable. Worth the price.
I like to think I keep relatively up to date on Viking studies, both for my writing and for my second life as a Viking reenactor. But as Dunning and Kruger have taught us, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know – and I think I’ve learned to settle for being better informed than most people, to keep up with the state of the art as stuff gets published for popular consumption.
So I bought Embers of the Hands by Eleanor Barraclough, which was recommended to me by a couple friends. And I have to say it’s an impressive book within the limits of its intended purpose.
Embers of the Hands pairs well with Kat Jarman’s River Kings, which I reviewed a while back. Like that book, it considers the Viking world through examination and analysis of archaeological artifacts. But Jarman’s book centered on one artifact (a bead), while Barraclough uses a number of artifacts to elucidate various aspects of the Viking world.
The emphasis here is on ordinary life – the way the people who weren’t famous lived. The clues given us by the things they used and left behind , that enable us – to some extent – to look at their world through their eyes. Author Barraclough possesses a happy gift for description and empathetic thought.
And that gift is needed, because I feel I must admit that I found the book rather dull in stretches. Most of us were lured into Viking studies by way of romantic dreams, of adventure and heroism. Embers of the Hands is pretty relentlessly unromantic. This approach is an excellent corrective for people like me – writers and reenactors. I think it will have more trouble holding the casual reader, who may be looking for bigger and more colorful stories.
Still, it’s a well-researched and well-written book, and ought to be read and pondered by its intended audience.
I might mention that the author seems not much interested in the contentious issue of shield maidens, and I was very grateful to her for that.
Today’s hymn is one I think I’ve sung my whole life, but I can’t remember the last time I sang it. Perhaps that’s because it so common to me I don’t note when we sing it, but it may be that it has that tent revival quality to it that places it lower on the list of hymns my church tends to choose.
New Yorker Fanny Crosby (1820-1915) wrote “Praise Him! Praise Him!” in 1869. The tune by Chester G. Allen (1838-1878) of Cleveland, Ohio, is primarily associated with her text.
“Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised in the city of our God! His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King.” (Ps. 48: 1-2 ESV)
1 Praise him! praise him! Jesus, our blessed Redeemer! Sing, O earth, his wonderful love proclaim! Hail him! hail him! highest archangels in glory; Strength and honor give to his holy Name! Like a shepherd, Jesus will guard his children, In his arms he carries them all day long:
Refrain: Praise him! praise him! tell of his excellent greatness, Praise him! praise him! ever in joyful song!
2 Praise him! praise him! Jesus, our blessed Redeemer! For our sins he suffered, and bled, and died; He our Rock, our hope of eternal salvation, Hail him! hail him! Jesus the Crucified. Sound his praises! Jesus who bore our sorrows, Love unbounded, wonderful, deep and strong: [Refrain]
3 Praise him! praise him! Jesus, our blessed Redeemer! Heav’nly portals loud with hosannas ring! Jesus, Saviour, reigneth for ever and ever; Crown him! crown him! Prophet, and Priest, and King! Christ is coming! Over the world victorious, Pow’r and glory unto the Lord belong: [Refrain]
A story is told of Wild Bill Hickok in his later, declining years. Wild Bill had given up on law enforcement after accidentally killing a friend while stopping a riot (it’s believed his eyesight was failing). He’d tried stage acting with Buffalo Bill Cody, but couldn’t bear it. He was subsisting as a professional gambler, spending his days in saloons and (occasionally) his nights in jail for vagrancy.
Admirers surrounded him in the saloons, and he’d regale them with stories. Tall tales about his days as an Indian scout. He’d describe a situation where he was alone on a hill, wounded, his horse dead, nearly out of ammunition, surrounded by thousands of Indians charging on horseback.
“What did you do, Wild Bill?” a wide-eyed audience member would ask.
“I got killed,” he would answer. And everyone would laugh and somebody would buy him a drink.
This illustrates Problem Number Two in story plotting, in my personal sequence.
I think it was last week that I wrote here about plotting problems. I referred to a difficulty I’ve mentioned often – that of the author’s (and by the author’s I mean mainly my) difficulty in testing our characters to the extremes. This is Problem Number One.
Since then, Plotting Problem Number Two has occurred to me. It’s the problem Wild Bill solved with his joke:
You have succeeded in inventing a horrible problem for your hero to solve.
Now, how do you resolve it?
Let me make a revelation – writers are not necessarily more resourceful in real life than the average member of the population. Indeed, I’m not sure most of us are in the upper percentile. If I wanted a non-literary problem solved in real life, I think an author would be one of my last choices for a resource person. I suspect a successful businessman might be optimal.
In general, however, as storytellers, what we do is cheat.
Fortunately, we have the advantage of being in control of time, in our small created worlds.
“I could get my hero out of this corner if he had a Swiss Army Knife,” I decide after pondering the problem for a while.
As the almighty author of the story, I can then go back a few pages and insert a scene to provide him with that Swiss Army Knife. I might show him putting on his coat and feeling its weight in his pocket. Perhaps he thinks then that he never uses the thing and it’s wearing on the fabric. He ponders unburdening himself of it, but he’s in a hurry.
Voila! He now has the knife when he needs it.
(The brilliant William Goldman has a laugh at such a situation in the clip from “The Princess Bride” above.)
But my Swiss Army Knife is a very simple example. Not very creative.
The sneakier you can be, the better.
Suppose he doesn’t need a pocket knife. Suppose he finds out he’s been poisoned. He tries to induce vomiting with a finger down his throat, but he can’t make it work.
Ah, but you, the sneaky author, can go back and add a scene in the first part of the story where the hero’s landlady forces a Tupperware bowl of her onion soup on him. He throws it into the back seat of his car, meaning to discard it. Because she always does this, and he hates onion soup.
But now he crawls to his car, finds the container of soup, and slurps it down. And it tastes so disgusting to him that he’s enabled to empty his stomach, thus saving his life.
I remember a story I read years ago. I think it was one of Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective stories. A couple characters in this particular story comment about how badly the detective hero dresses – they particularly criticize the cheap polyester ties he wears.
Later in the story, the detective discovers his girlfriend, who struggles with depression, has hanged herself with one of his ties.
The author inserts a break in the story at this point, to let us despair along with his character.
Then we have a scene (spoiler alert) where he’s talking to the doctor who treated the woman. The doctor says what saved her life was the cheap polyester tie, which stretched so much that it slowed her asphyxiation.
It’s nice to run into a professional writer these days, one who knows how to lay out a sentence and to spell, and who has a feel for settings and character. All that describes Rhys Dylan’s work in The Engine House, first installment in a series featuring retired Detective Inspector Evan Warlow of Pembrokeshire in Wales.
The story opens with a landslide that uncovers a hidden cave near a cliffside path. Revealed now are the bodies of a pair of hikers who disappeared more than seven years ago. And this was no death by misadventure – the couple had been beaten to death and stuffed into the hole.
Which leads to a call to Evan Warlow, retired chief inspector. He was a successful detective before his early retirement, and he worked on the missing persons’ case. He is reluctant to get involved – for reasons not revealed in this book to his colleagues or to the reader – but at last his great curiosity and the passion he’d invested in the mystery lure him back onto the job. On a temporary basis.
He’s set to work with Inspector Jess Allanby, a highly regarded woman detective. They form a task force to re-open the old files in light of the new discoveries. And the things they discover – and have a hard time discovering – are troubling.
Meanwhile, a young couple has moved into the old house where the deceased couple had lived. They’re creative and eager, though the young woman is disturbed by a sense of being watched, from somewhere on the other side of the ravine, near where the old, derelict Engine House stands in ruin. (The story flirts with the paranormal here, but doesn’t go too far in that direction.)
I have only praise for the writing and storytelling here. Rhys Dylan knows what he’s doing as a novelist.
My own personal reservations rise from a hint – and it’s really only a hint – of conventional stereotyping in the story. The author doesn’t go as far as to suggest – as so many modern novels seem to – that the police force is actually “gender-balanced,” but the team we follow is half male and half female. And it annoyed me when Jess (Inspector Allanby) reprimands Evan for trying to shield her with his body when they’re threatened with a firearm. Blast it, protecting women is what we men do. There’s not much excuse for our existence otherwise.
Also, the scenes set in the present are written in the present tense, something I object to on stubborn principle.
So I probably won’t read on in the series, but that shouldn’t stop you. The Engine House is really a very good police procedural, in a picturesque and exciting setting. I do recommend it.
I have made no effort to read Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Lieberman books in chronological order. So reading Lieberman’s Choice slings me back almost to the beginning – it’s the second in the series. Rather unlike the others; Abe Lieberman himself is almost a peripheral character here, though a consistently present one.
Bernie Shepard, a Chicago police detective, shoots his wife and her lover (another cop) to death one day. Then he climbs to the roof of his apartment building, where he has already constructed a bunker of concrete blocks. He informs the police that he has rigged bombs around himself. He will blow up a good chunk of the city, he says, unless Detective Alan Kearney, whom he blames for turning his wife into a “whore,” comes to meet him on the roof in the early morning.
The story follows as Abe and his partner Bill Hanrahan assist in countermeasures, not always strictly legal ones, meanwhile dealing with a crazy man (sadly, a crazy evangelical Christian) who is abusing his wife and child. Also we follow the mayor as he struggles with his conscience on one side and political calculation on the other. And, as always, Lieberman has quiet domestic drama within his own family.
It all ends in a sort of High Noon showdown, but one where truth is the chief weapon.
Lieberman’s Choice is good, consistent Kaminsky stuff. Recommended.
The breeze was crisp. She turned toward it, her hands jammed into the jacket pockets. I wanted her carved on the bow of my next clipper ship, but it would have to be a good guy to capture the way that silvery hair moved in the wind.
John D. MacDonald actually wrote in various genres before finding his niche in mystery fiction. His first published mystery novel, in 1950, was The Brass Cupcake. I had read it before, and remembered it positively. But it’s clearly an immature work, and a little derivative.
The title is the narrator’s joking nickname for a policeman’s badge. He is Cliff Bartells, an insurance investigator in the fictional (I think) town of Florence City, Florida, somewhere near Tampa. He used to carry a badge himself, but he left the Florence City police force because of its prevailing corruption. Now he has a reputation for brokering the recovery of stolen property – it’s cost-effective for both the criminals and the insurers to buy the stuff back rather than paying out full settlements. He’s trusted by the crooks, because he never informs on them.
Only now a case has come up that’s a whole different matter. A wealthy old woman has been murdered in a jewel robbery. When he hears from the thieves, Cliff’s position is impossible – if he doesn’t betray the robbers, the local police (who hate him) will arrest him as an accessory. And if he does betray them, his professional reputation will be shot.
Then there’s a further complication – the old woman’s beautiful niece and heir. They dislike each other on first meeting, only to find themselves irresistibly drawn together. The police suspect them both. Can he trust her? Can he trust anyone?
It’s easy to see why author MacDonald impressed his publishers with this book. It’s almost ideal for its time – a tough-guy story with a principled hero in a bad spot, featuring fights and police beatings and a little sex (mild by our standards). Noir cinema seems to have been an inspiration: “I pushed the draperies back so that the neon sent its pale redness into the room, off and on, off and on, the furniture bulking oddly large in the intermittent shadow.” I have an idea the story may have been inspired in part by James M. Cain – though that’s an ignorant opinion, as I’ve never read Cain.
The book’s age is made apparent in several ways, not only in the cars and the smoking – but especially in the featured idea that women (or some women, anyway) need a slap or two to figure out what they really want.
Anyway, that’s The Brass Cupcake. Underdeveloped MacDonald, but certainly entertaining and worth a read.
It had been a couple years since I’d read a Robert Crais novel, and I wondered if I had set my face against him for some reason, as I’m prone to do with authors from time to time. But I discovered that it’s actually been a couple years since Crais has published an Elvis Cole/Joe Pike novel. So I bought and read The Big Empty, and I’m glad I did. I’ve been privileged to read several fine novels in the last few weeks (this seems to be a prime time of year for new book releases), but none of them brought a tear to my eye. The Big Empty did.
Private eye Elvis Cole gets a call from an assistant to Traci Beller. He’s never heard of Traci Beller, but apparently she’s a very popular internet influencer. Pretty and cheery, she does bright videos of herself baking. When Elvis meets with her, she tells her story. Ten years ago, when she was just a little girl, her father, owner of an HVAC company, went out on calls one day and vanished without a trace. Even his van was never recovered. Her mother hired a reputable investigations company to search for him five years ago, and when they were unsuccessful, had him declared legally dead. But Traci is grown up now, and has money of her own to spend. Elvis warns her that chances are poor, but agrees to look into it.
He travels to the town of Rancha, where the father was last seen, and through diligence manages to uncover one previously unknown lead. How is he to know that his inquiries will provoke dangerous people out of the shadows, bringing horror to two families and death to a couple innocent bystanders?
The story of The Big Empty took me places I did not expect to go. It moved me, arousing pity and terror in the classic style of Greek tragedy.
This was an excellent novel. No elegant prose passages to quote, but fascinating and engaging from first to last.
Today’s hymn comes from the Massachusetts-born minister William Orcutt Cushing (1823-1902). It expresses a theme common to popular hymns, that of trusting the Lord through difficulties.
“The Lord repay you for what you have done, and a full reward be given you by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge!” (Ruth 2:12 ESV)
1 Under His wings I am safely abiding. Tho’ the night deepens and tempests are wild, Still I can trust Him; I know He will keep me. He has redeemed me, and I am His child.
Refrain: Under His wings, under His wings, Who from His love can sever? Under His wings my soul shall abide, Safely abide forever.
2 Under His wings, what a refuge in sorrow! How the heart yearningly turns to His rest! Often when earth has no balm for my healing, There I find comfort, and there I am blest. [Refrain]
3 Under His wings, oh, what precious enjoyment! There will I hide till life’s trials are o’er; Sheltered, protected, no evil can harm me. Resting in Jesus, I’m safe evermore. [Refrain]
I suppose the book suffered by comparison with all the great novels I’ve been reading lately. MacDonald, Kaminsky, Kellerman, Hurwitz. Books from authors who know how to hook me and reel me in, feeding my addiction like a pusher. I’ve been going through some personal drama recently, and I discovered that, for all its vaunted capacity to zombify us, the internet failed to provide me the genuine distraction I required. Only the ancient, beloved magic of a really good book could make me lose myself and forget idle care for a while.
So I saw a mystery being offered free in a promotional deal. Looked interesting, and I had nothing to lose downloading it.
And I really started rooting for this author. Unlike so many new authors I see these days, he actually knew how to spell. His usage was correct. His grammar was right. I greatly wanted this guy to succeed.
I held out through about 40% of the book. I really gave him a chance.
But he bored me.
The plot was promising – the reliable old trope of a man falsely accused of murder, hiding from the law, trying to discover the true culprit. There was plenty of potential for peril.
But I didn’t feel the danger as the story was being told. And I thought the hero was acting like an idiot. I just couldn’t care much after a while.
I hope the author gets it together. He can write a sentence. All he needs is to learn plotting.
Plotting. That’s one of those topics where, as the preachers say, I point a finger at someone else and find my four other fingers pointing back at me.
I don’t consider myself a very good plotter myself.
Maybe it’s soft-heartedness. I posted on Facebook a while back that “The true villain of every story is the author.” Plotting comes down to torturing your characters. Every bad thing that happens to them was thought up by you. Giving them a break is bad for the story, a betrayal of the reader.
Or maybe there’s something else I haven’t learned yet. Some holy grail of plotting still hovering outside my ken.
