‘The Box,’ by Dan Wheatcroft

Thurstan Baddeley is a police inspector… somewhere in the northwest of England. I’m not sure the city is actually named in Dan Wheatcroft’s The Box, a somewhat oddball novel that I found delightful. He leads the Major Crimes squad, works well with his team, and is good at solving crimes. Unfortunately, his Chief Constable has it in for him. He keeps nagging Baddeley to institute department policies, like wearing preferred pronoun badges and rainbow badge lanyards. Finally, it comes to a head and Thurstan is packed off to a new posting, to investigate cold crimes in the small town of St Helens, Sutton Box station, where police careers go to die.

Soon he is joined by his friend and subordinate Randolph (known as Gandolph), a computer hacker who has massaged assignment records to excuse his presence. Together they begin going through the boxes of cold crimes files. Most of the old cases are uninteresting, but two of them draw their attention. One concerns the murder of a prostitute in 1902, which went unsolved though there was an obvious suspect – the son of the richest man in town. The other comes from the 1970s, and concerns a socially awkward young man, who’d never been in trouble before, convicted of stabbing a man to death. He later committed suicide in prison. Most of the people involved in both cases are dead, but there are people who still know things, and others who remember, with either sadness or fear.

There are no gunfights in The Box (well, this is England, after all), no fistfights or chases. All the violence happens off stage. Yet the author succeeds in escalating the dramatic tension steadily, and I turned the pages with eagerness.

It turns out that The Box is the beginning of a new series for the author, but it branches off from an earlier series. I’ll have to check those other books out. The writing wasn’t absolutely top-shelf – the author sometimes falls into confusing constructions like “fate inhabited him instantly.” But it was good enough to carry a fascinating story with lively characters.

And the cherry on top, of course, is the politically incorrect elements. You don’t run across such bare-faced un-wokeness in many novels today – no wonder the author uses a pseudonym.

The Box is highly recommended.

‘Darker Than Blonde,’ by Julius Taven

Alan Lawson is former Special Forces, former CIA special operations. He left the CIA, disillusioned with what he’d seen there, and returned to his home of Arlington Texas. As Julius Taven’s Darker Than Blonde begins, he’s driving for a ride share service, still struggling with PTSD.

One night he gets a big fare, a pick-up out on a remote ranch. But when he arrives, nobody seems to be around. After waiting several minutes, he starts to leave, and then his fare shows up out of the night – a striking blonde woman. The address where he delivers her happens to be an apartment building where he himself used to live.

And when he gets home and cleans his car out, he finds a money clip holding several thousand dollars. The initials on the clip do not match any of his fares that day. He decides to keep it.

Soon after, the police pick him up for questioning. Turns out they found a man murdered in the ranch house where he made the pick-up, and no trace can be found of the woman he says he drove. The murder victim had the same initials as were on the money clip – but fortunately Alan has hidden it.

Alan knows he’s been set up, but he has resources of his own. He calls his friend Derick, who’s both a skilled fighter and a computer expert. They’ll discover a convoluted and ruthless plot, with millions of dollars of gold at stake – when he’s not avoiding his old CIA boss, who’s trying to re-enlist him, by any means necessary, regardless of the monetary or human cost.

It appears that Darker Than Blonde is Julius Taven’s first published novel, and I must say it’s a very impressive performance. The writing was good (except for the fact that he doesn’t know how to spell “sergeant”), the characters were vivid, and I was fascinated by the story. It was taut and suspenseful. The plot was admittedly convoluted, and it was hard to keep it straight at times. Also, there were a whole lot of characters, so many that I forgot about some of them before they reappeared later on.

I bought this book in part because the title seemed to harken back to John D. MacDonald. Darker Than Blonde isn’t much like a MacDonald novel, but it’s very good in its own way. It seems to be the first installment in a series, and I look forward very much to seeing more.

Cautions for language and violence. A few references to prayer are made, and are respectful.

Sunday Singing: Amidst Us Our Beloved Stands

The hymns this month have focused on Our Lord’s Table. Today’s song was written for an 1866 hymnal by the great English preacher Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892). The tune shared here is not one you would find in a hymnal. It’s a 2009 arrangement by Greg Kay.

“Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body’” (Matthew 26:26 ESV).

1 Amidst us our Beloved stands,
and bids us view His pierced hands;
points to the wounded feet and side,
blest emblems of the Crucified.

2 What food luxurious loads the board,
when, at His table, sits the Lord!
The cup how rich, the bread how sweet,
when Jesus deigns the guests to meet!

3 If now, with eyes defiled and dim,
we see the signs, but see not Him;
O may His love the scales displace,
and bid us see Him face to face!

4 Our former transports we recount,
when with Him in the holy mount:
these cause our souls to thirst anew
His marred but lovely face to view.

Are People Buying Books or Not?

Point: Few people buy books that aren’t celebrity aligned. Britney Spears’s autobiography, released October 24, 2023, is currently #1 in Kindle, #10 in hardcover on Amazon. Aside of these, publishing houses stay afloat through backlist sales: Bibles, coloring books, and Don Quixote.

Counterpoint: Plenty of people are buying books, and the big publishers aren’t objective reporters on their own business.

“Someone from a prestige big 5 imprint whose books are often award-contenders and bestsellers once told me any book that sold less than 25,000 in print was a failure for them. OTOH, when I was in an MFA program—where many of the professors wrote experimental literary novels and such—I was told anything more than 5,000 sales was a success. Some small press editors might be happy with 1,000 sales.”

Topping Amazon’s fiction list for most sold this week are The Women,
by Kristin Hannah (12 weeks on the list) and The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese (33 weeks).

As booklovers, we may want many more people to join us in reading, sharing, and enjoying the written or recorded word, but I don’t think the sky is falling yet.

Also in this vein, Ted Gioia offers “10 Reasons Why I’m Publishing My Next Book on Substack.

What else do we need to know?

Poetry: On April 26, 1336, a great poet climbed into the Alps just for the thrill of it, which people didn’t do in those days. Petrarch climbed to the top of Mont Ventoux (which is much higher today because of inflation) and read from Augustine’s Confessions, “Where I fixed my eyes first, it was written: ‘And men go to admire the high mountains, the vast floods of the sea, the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference of the ocean and the revolutions of the stars – and desert themselves.’ . . .”

Memoir: Writing about his life, Marvin Olasky says to be open to change. Don’t set a groove early and try to stay there.

C.S. Lewis: Screwtape praises certain celebrities and the sheep of their flock

Music: Ted Gioia writes western music isn’t what we think it is. “Just stop and think for a moment about the importance of Venice in the history of music. Everything from madrigals to operas found their home in that bustling port city—a key connecting point between West and East in the modern imagination.”

‘Bent Highway,’ by Craig Terlson


The rain moved into hail, peppering the windshield and body of the truck, reminding me of stones thrown against metal fences, of pellet guns fired into graineries [sic].

Time travel is always an intriguing topic in fiction, and since we haven’t figured out how to actually do it yet, we have infinite options as to how to imagine it. H. G. Wells created his time machine. I built tunnels between worlds in a couple of my novels. Craig Terlson, in his novel, Bent Highway, imagines it as something like a road trip with Hunter S. Thompson, as filmed by some French New Wave director.

We first meet our hero, whose name is only given as “M.”, as he’s sitting in a diner, heating up a teaspoon preparatory cauterizing an arm wound with it – a wound he can’t remember receiving. We gradually learn that he’s engaged in a cross-country road trip, but from time to time he loses consciousness – seeming to slip through cracks in the earth – and awakens somewhere else – in someone else’s car, or in a bar, or in a brightly lit room. Sometimes he’s with a mysterious tall man, and sometimes he’s with a beautiful, white-skinned woman. Sometimes people attack him with cars or guns or knives. Gradually we – and he – realize that he’s been at this for some time, but keeps forgetting the incidents, which he doesn’t experience in strict chronological order. He learns that he has a dangerous enemy, and that he needs to be in just the right place at the right time in order to erase and overwrite some event from his past, to save the world.

The classic time travel conundrum of “What will happen if I meet myself in the past?” is handled offhandedly here – M. not only meets his past self, but an infinite number of his past selves, captured at each moment in his life.

Craig Terlson’s characteristic vivid writing style is showcased once again in Bent Highway. “The morning sun drilled a perfect hole in the cerulean sky,” is a good example. Unfortunately, the effect is marred from time to time by numerous typographical errors.

Sadly, the book is a cliff-hanger, and I don’t believe the sequel has appeared yet. I hope it does.

‘A Fire in Every Vein,’ by Lawrence J. Epstein

Sometime in the late 1960s, Walker West is a young man at loose ends in New York City. He wants to be a writer, but has had no success. Witnessing an explosion, he helps to rescue a couple victims from beneath the rubble. One of them is a young woman, with whom he immediately falls in love. A moment later, the police come along to arrest that young woman for the murder of her fiancé. Walker impulsively promises her that he’ll prove her innocence.

So begins A Fire In Every Vein, by Lawrence J. Epstein. It’s the first book in a series of mysteries. As a novice investigator, Walker has one advantage the average guy doesn’t enjoy – his Aunt Agatha (a tribute to P. G. Wodehouse?), who is very rich and very influential. Being concerned over her nephew’s lack of motivation to date, she happily encourages his sudden enthusiasm by providing him with an office, an attractive female assistant, and a bodyguard. She also pulls strings to get him hired as a crime reporter by a New York paper, and as an investigator by the insurance company concerned, so he has two excuses to poke his nose into the case.

If that seems like a lot of what’s known nowadays as “privilege,” I thought the same thing. Money can be a great advantage for a fictional investigator (see Lord Peter Wimsey [who gets an endorsement in this book] and Nick Charles), but a protagonist in a story needs to struggle too. It often felt as if Walker was getting along too easily – though he suffers plenty of setbacks, most often because of his own rookie mistakes.

And that’s another problem with the story. A learning curve works just fine as a template for rising dramatic tension, but Walker seems to be almost laughably feckless.

I stayed with A Fire in Every Vein to the end because the author is a decent writer in the grammatical sense. He can string a sentence together, which puts him ahead of most novelists nowadays. And I couldn’t help identifying personally with Walker’s cluelessness.

But overall, the book didn’t work. The characters weren’t distinctive, and the dialogue was unnatural. Graceful and grammatical, yes, but not natural.

What finally disappointed me, though, was the ending, which (in my view) was so inconsistent with the tone of the rest of the book that it felt like a cheat.

I believe author Epstein has written further novels, and I’m glad of it. I think he has the makings of a good novelist. But A Fire in Every Vein just didn’t work for me.

Author’s journal: Back to revision

Photo credit: Burst. Unsplash license.

This is the week I turned back to the keyboard. Narration practice is on pause, because my readers’ critiques are in. Most of them relate to typos, but some have to do with plot elements. I’m working now, thanks to a good suggestion, on weaving a small plot thread into one section, which ought to improve… the tone, I guess. It’ll make an underused character stronger, and give them a way to help advance the story. (I can’t afford to pay my characters to just loaf around, chapter after chapter!)

I’m still getting up at 6:30 am to get my writing time in, though my body has instituted base countermeasures. In order to prevent me getting more than six (sometimes four) hours of sleep at night, it’s moved my natural wake-up time back to 5:00 a.m. I suppose I could get up and write then, but I have no doubt my body would then start waking me at 4:00, and it would just be a war of retreat by inches, until I became fully nocturnal.

I saw a clip of Jordan Peterson, who has, I understand, adopted a carnivore diet. He said he’s gotten good results against depression by telling his patients to eat a high-protein breakfast shortly after waking up in the morning. I’ve been putting breakfast off till I got back from the gym (gym comes after writing, that’s the schedule) at about 9:00. So I’ll try Peterson’s way now. This morning I had my breakfast sausage first thing instead of later. We’ll see how that goes.

Otherwise, I have a deadline coming up the first of May for the small magazine I’m editing, and I suspect it’s be a nail-biter getting it all done on time.

Right now, my hopes and dreams are focused on getting into May. I figure things will ease up in May.

Come to think of it, that’s what I said about April.

‘Fooling Houdini,’ by Alex Stone

A lot of the motivation behind cheating must come from the charge you get. To truly understand the psychology of a cheater, you need to see the world like a con artist. In this worldview, everything is rigged—the casino, politics, Wall Street, life—and there are only two types of people: grifters and suckers. (It’s a lot like in magic, where you’re either a magician or a layperson.) If you look around the table and don’t see a sucker, then, according to an old saying, the sucker is you.

I remember a time in my childhood when I wanted very much to learn magic. I never had the resources, and today I’m pretty sure my natural clumsiness would have doomed it anyway. But those memories came back as I considered a bargain deal for Alex Stone’s Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind. So I bought it. With some exceptions, I found the book enjoyable and educational, though I don’t think the author is someone I’d care to have lunch with.

He knows how to tell a story, though. He piques our interest by opening with an excruciating personal anecdote – how, as a green magician, he participated in the 2006 World Championships of Magic in Stockholm, and made an utter fool of himself in front of the some of the best practitioners in the world.

Then he tells the story of his journey with magic. He got interested as a kid, and his fascination grew, to the point where he neglected his graduate studies in Physics to attend classes and seminars, and spent more than he could afford on books and paraphernalia. He studies psychology and clowning to gain greater understanding of audience dynamics. He meets a colorful variety of master magicians – most interesting to me was Richard Turner, the world’s foremost “card mechanic,” who happens to be totally blind. He manipulates playing cards purely by touch. (Also, interestingly, we’re told he goes to church.)

The author does not come off as a terribly winning personality, but that may be due in part to his self-deprecating jokes. He writes a lot about the scientific/psychological underpinnings of the practice of illusion, and sometimes draws conclusions which annoyed me. For instance, he states, as if it were self-evident, that Jesus Christ was obviously a magician. In the spirit of all con men, he seems to view everything he sees as a game of one sort or another. Wall Street, he tells us, is just a casino with very high stakes.

His musings on Physics seem (to me) to draw exactly the wrong conclusions – the laws of science don’t rule out the existence of a Creator, as he seems to assume. For some of us, they affirm it. If entropy is the universal fact, where do those orderly laws come from in the first place?

On the other hand, I must admit his prose is excellent. Great lines abound, like: “A shrill carbon stink clung to the air like a bad habit.”

And he rounds his story out with a highly satisfying chapter telling how, more seasoned now, he redeemed his reputation as a magician with an original card trick that mystified the pros.

This is a very good book, with which I sometimes disagreed. Still, the quality can’t be denied, and I recommend it with a few reservations.

‘A Fatal Glass of Beer,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

“I find his movies deeply sad,” Jeremy said as we were driving.

“I don’t think he’d be happy to hear that,” I said. “He thinks they’re comedies.”

“Comedy does not mean we must laugh,” said Jeremy. “It is the reverse of tragedy. It suggests that life can continue without hope.”

The late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Toby Peters novels are amusing reads, and they take a high road. I mean by that that a novelist, when producing stories about old Hollywood stars, would naturally be inclined to give the public what they want – sleaze and scandal. But Kaminsky (who was, I think, a very decent man), chose to handle them lightly, in comic stories. We get to see the stars at their best and most sympathetic.

The challenge of that approach seems to have been considerable in A Fatal Glass of Beer, in which Toby’s client is W. C. Fields. It’s hard to make Fields a likeable character, but Kaminsky does manage to make him a sympathetic one.

It’s 1943. Toby Peters, who for comic purposes persists as a low-rent PI, in spite of all the celebrity clients he’s served over the years, is facing some changes in his life. His ex-wife, for whom he’s carried a torch for years, is getting married to a movie star. He consoles himself, however, with a new girlfriend. He’s considering moving out of his broom closet office in a dentist’s office, due to a conflict with the dentist’s wife. And he’s reached a truce with his estranged brother, the cop, now that his sister-in-law has cancer.

W. C. Fields shows up with a problem that could have happened only to him. Over the years, during his vaudeville days, he put his financial eggs in many baskets by opening savings accounts, under assumed names, in various banks across the US. Now someone has stolen a number of his bank books, and is going around to the banks and withdrawing the funds. Fields wants Toby to accompany him on a road trip, to hunt the scoundrel down and recover the bank books and stolen money. Toby can use the business, though Fields is a challenging travel companion. Toby enlists his midget friend Gunther to serve as driver, and they set out on their transcontinental odyssey in Field’s Cadillac, fully equipped with a built-in bar and a stock of liquor in the trunk.

The hunt is a slapstick affair, until people start getting killed. Secrets are revealed, leading to further secrets. And W. C. Fields comes through it all unfazed, insensitive to others’ needs, dependent on alcohol, securely anchored in the persona he has created for himself, though we perceive more and more that in his heart he’s deeply lonely and sad. That Kaminsky succeeds in making us care about him is a testimony to his characterization skill.

I’d describe A Fatal Glass of Beer as one of the best entries in this classic series.

Sunday Singing: Let Thy Blood in Mercy Poured

Today’s hymn, “Let Thy Blood in Mercy Poured,” comes from the Greek tradition, and maybe if I could type Greek, I could search for the title on Greek pages. But the sources I’ve seen give no date for that version of the hymn, only that is came into English via Glasgow native and Free Church minister John Brownlie (1857-1925). The tune is much older, written by Lutheran cantor at Berlin’s St. Nicholas Church, Johann Crüger (1598-1662).

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1 ESV).

1 Let thy blood in mercy poured,
let thy gracious body broken,
be to me, O gracious Lord,
of thy boundless love the token.

Refrain:
Thou didst give thyself for me,
now I give myself to thee.

2 Thou didst die that I might live;
blessed Lord, thou cam’st to save me;
all that love of God could give
Jesus by his sorrows gave me. [Refrain]

3 By the thorns that crowned thy brow,
by the spear wound and the nailing,
by the pain and death, I now
claim, O Christ, thy love unfailing. [Refrain]

4 Wilt thou own the gift I bring?
All my penitence I give thee;
thou art my exalted King,
of thy matchless love forgive me. [Refrain]