All posts by Lars Walker

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Viking stuff on a winter night

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Andrew Lawler, at National Geographic, writes what I consider a very fine article about slavery in the Viking Age. For years I’ve been arguing against the current fashion for portraying the Vikings as peaceable but misunderstood businessmen. That’s both historically obtuse and insulting to a culture that took pride in its prowess with arms. I’m particularly annoyed by the trope that says, “Well, you know, most of them weren’t warriors but peaceable tradesmen.” I suppose you could say that, if you consider the slave trade a peaceable occupation.

“This was a slave economy,” said Neil Price, an archaeologist at Sweden’s Uppsala University who spoke at a recent meeting that brought together archaeologists who study slavery and colonization. “Slavery has received hardly any attention in the past 30 years, but now we have opportunities using archaeological tools to change this.”

Of course the Vikings were hardly alone in trading and keeping slaves. Other cultures that did much the same thing were… pretty much everybody.

I just get annoyed by the “peaceable tradesmen” line.

In other Viking news, there’s new Russian film that looks very intriguing:

This is an epic about Vladimir the Great, who made the Russians Christian. Like all great historical epics it’s probably stuffed with baloney, but it sure looks good. I can find some fault with the costumes, but this trailer just sings. It could be the good Viking movie we’ve waited for so long. Hope it comes out soon with English subtitles.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Stateline,’ by Dave Stanton

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Dan Reno (pronounced Renno) is a maintenance alcoholic who works for a detective agency whose penny-pinching owner he despises. But he gets along well enough with his ex-wife to be invited to a family wedding, that of one of her relations to the son of a business tycoon in Reno (the town). The wedding never happens though, because the groom is murdered the night before, during the bachelor party. His grieving father hires Dan on the spot to find out who’s responsible. $100,000 to identify the killer, then leave the rest to him.

Dan takes the job, and gradually learns that the dead man was not the person people thought he was. He had been involved with some very unsavory, dangerous people, and Dan is soon struggling to save his life – and that of his cop friend Cody, who comes to help him – in the dangerous mountain country around Reno. Organized crime and corrupt cops both want them to back off, and are willing to kill them if they don’t get the hint.

That’s the premise of Stateline, a throwback to classic hardboiled formulas in a contemporary setting. The book grew on me. Dan seems a little sleazy at the beginning of the story, but as we get to know him he displays some decent qualities, especially in his treatment of women. I grew to like him. The book, in spite of all the vice it describes, has a moral center.

The writing in Stateline is sometimes spotty. I was put off by some infelicities in the style. But it wasn’t bad enough to make me delete the book from my Kindle unfinished (it’s free for Kindle, at least this month). I might mention that I’m reading the sequel now, and the quality of the prose has improved.

Not a bad novel. Cautions are in order for language, drugs, sexual situations, and some serious violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Never Taste Death,’ by Hannah Rose Williams

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Full disclosure: Hannah Rose Williams, the author of this book, is a former student at the school where I’m librarian. She sent me a free copy of her latest novel for review. I’m not sure we’ve ever actually met, but I need to be up front about the connection before offering this review.

Having finished Never Taste Death, I discovered that it’s the second book in a series. That explains a lot. Although the writing impressed me in many ways, much more than many self-published novels I’ve seen, I often felt like a spectator at a ball game without a score card. So although I’m reviewing the second book, I recommend getting the first one, A World Awaits, if you decide to get into this series.

The setting seems to be the future, where things have changed a lot but there are still many Christians. Some kind of interdimensional breach has occurred, and now humans inhabit various dimensions, sharing them with beings something like elves (they are short and have green skin, and can travel through earth). Various groups of humans and elves are at war with each other. Many humans are not Christians, and many elves are. The main character, Carver Winchester, is a genetic mix. When we meet him he is working in some kind of labor center, working off a debt. Then he gets a plea for help from an old acquaintance, and he deserts through an interdimensional portal. His family follows him, resulting in various adventures and a tangle of story lines that converge in the end.

I was impressed with the character development and dialogue in Never Taste Death, most of the time. There are a lot of discussions about religion, in which the author works out her essential arguments about God. The discussions are pretty well written (generally), but I thought there were probably too many of them for one book. You should be warned that the author has decided to employ realistic dialogue, including the occasional obscenity. There are also a couple minor characters who are homosexuals, and I’m not sure whether we’re supposed to approve of them or not.

The book’s chief weakness, in my view, is not enough description. I had trouble understanding what the various racial groups looked like, and what buildings looked like. I had some trouble keeping the many characters straight (though that’s not unusual for me in any book). Also (I never thought I’d say this) a couple information dumps would have been helpful. Some things that wouldn’t be secrets to someone who’d read the first book were opaque to me until the end.

Less than a fully professional work, Never Taste Death is nevertheless a better than average self-published novel, especially in the Christian fantasy genre. Cautions for language, adult themes, and violence. Not for kids.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Whispering Smith,’ by Frank H. Spearman

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I grew curious about the character of Whispering Smith years back. I was reading a book about the Wild West, and the author mentioned, in an aside, that Smith was based – in part – on the real life lawman Joe Lefors. Lefors is best remembered nowadays as the faceless posseman in a straw boater who so spooks Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the movie. In real life, alas, Joe Lefors was less of… well, of a force. He didn’t catch Butch and Sundance, after all, and his greatest achievement was extracting the confession that sent Tom Horn to the gallows for murder in 1903. Historians ever since have disputed the validity of that confession.

The same writer mentioned that the vicious killer Harvey DuSang in the novel is based on another Wild Bunch member, Harvey Logan (Kid Curry).

I first heard of Whispering Smith in a short-lived 1961 TV series that starred Audie Murphy. That series is notorious for being cited in a Senate Juvenile Delinquency Committee hearing as an egregious example of TV violence. The series actually bore almost no resemblance to the book, retaining the hero’s name and pretty much nothing else.

The series was loosely based on a 1948 movie (actually the last of several film adaptations) that starred Alan Ladd and Robert Preston. That movie was based on the book, though they moved it back in time (the novel is set around 1900, and everybody has telephones), and omitted a rather charming romantic subplot.

Having established that, let’s talk about the actual book, Whispering Smith, by Frank H. Spearman. It’s free for Kindle, so I thought that after all these years I’d find out what it was about. I had a pleasant surprise in store.

The story starts with a railroad foreman, Murray Sinclair, arriving at a wreck site to clear the track. He’s a well-paid and competent employee of the company, popular and efficient. But, we also learn, he’s pretty much a man without a conscience. We’d call him a sociopath today. He considers it one of his perks to plunder the wrecks. He’s caught at it by a railroad supervisor, and fired on the spot.

Sinclair withdraws along with his work crew, and becomes an outlaw, dynamiting and wrecking the trains he used to salvage. This causes the railroad president to call in his best detective, Gordon “Whispering” Smith.

Smith has been keeping away from that particular area for some time, out of consideration for a resident of the town. Marion Sinclair is Smith’s old flame, but she married his childhood friend Murray Sinclair. She’s learned Murray’s true character by now and has separated from him, but (in one of those plot points that would be incomprehensible to today’s reader) they both respect the sanctity of marriage and wouldn’t dream of committing adultery together.

But Sinclair is too proud to run, and Smith has principles about doing his job, so their final showdown is inevitable.

When I started reading Whispering Smith, it seemed to me a pretty standard old-fashioned novel. The prose was a little more florid than what we prefer today, and the dialogue doubtlessly bowdlerized. But the more I read, the more I got caught up in the story. The characters are exceedingly well done, especially that of Smith himself. He’s one of those seemingly ordinary men who reveals increasingly intriguing depths.

Everything surprised Whispering Smith, even his salary; but an important consequence was that nothing excited him.

I truly enjoyed Whispering Smith, and I recommend it heartily.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Calendar of Crime,’ by Ellery Queen

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Miss Ypson had not always been dead; au contraire. She had lived for seventy-eight years, for most of them breathing hard. As her father used to remark, “She was a very active little verb.” Miss Ypson’s father was a professor of Greek at a small Midwestern university. He had conjugated his daughter with the rather bewildered assistance of one of his brawnier students, an Iowa poultry heiress.

I think I’ve intimated before that I’m adopting a policy of withdrawing – a bit – from contemporary fiction. We find ourselves in a new Victorian era, where quite a lot of things that are true can’t be said in polite company, and where every story is expected to genuflect, at least for a moment, toward the altar of the accepted pieties. It’s all very boring and annoying, and I need to stretch my legs on older, more gracious paths from time to time.

So I’m going to be checking out some literature of the past. As my tastes run to mysteries, that necessarily involves what’s called the stories of the Golden Age. Which will involve acquiring some new tastes. Golden Age mysteries are primarily puzzle stories, and that approach doesn’t excite me much. I like my stories character driven.

I downloaded Ellery Queen’s Calendar of Crime. Published in 1952, it’s not strictly a Golden Age book, but the approach is pretty much the same. It’s not a novel but a short story collection. The “calendar” of the title means that each of the twelve stories is set, chronologically and thematically, in a particular month of the year. The January story involves a New Year’s Eve party; the February story involves a legend about George Washington, etc. The main character, of course, is Ellery Queen, a sophisticated New York amateur detective whose father happens to be a police inspector.

It’s a good collection. The puzzles are clever, and the writing (by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, who wrote under the Ellery Queen name) can be quite elegant, as witness the excerpt at the top of this review. These are puzzle stories, not character stories, but within the bounds of the form the authors did a good job of making them relatively plausible.

I’ll say this, though. Never hire Ellery Queen to protect either your life or your property. He will always fail, because if he succeeded there’d be no mystery for him to solve.

No cautions whatever are necessary for questionable content. As some mystery fan once said, “I like a good murder, without any immorality in it.”

Fiction, Reviews

‘All Lies,’ by Andrew Cunningham

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I don’t have a sophisticated grading system for novels, like five stars or three thumbs (or noses) up. I should probably develop one. I generally just group them loosely into three categories: “I hated it and didn’t finish it,” “I liked it enough to finish it, but probably won’t look for another book by the same author,” and “I loved it.”

All Lies sits solidly in the middle category. I was interested enough to finish it, but I wasn’t much impressed with the writing. Author Cunningham has good instincts, I think, but he needs to work on his craftsmanship.

The story is told by the main character, Del Hunnicutt. Del’s first words quote his father’s dying declaration: “I come from a long line of idiots…”

Through the course of the story, Del learns things he never knew about his grandfather, who was idiot enough to get involved in an art heist, and then died in a bomber during World War II. He goes out on a date arranged through a computer matching service, and his match turns out to be a descendent of one of his grandfather’s criminal associates. She manipulated their meeting in order to find out what he knew about the “treasure” the gang was supposed to have left behind, a treasure Del has never heard of.

The next day his date is murdered, but he is soon approached by the woman’s sister, Sabrina, a much more appealing and (seemingly) trustworthy person. Together they set out to get ahold of a lost painting, said to contain the secret to finding the treasure. It turns out they’re not the only people looking for that painting, and things get messy.

As I said, the story was interesting enough to keep me reading, though I thought the writing unpolished. The characters’ actions don’t always seem logical in terms of their personalities. And sometimes the prose was very amateurish: “It was going to be a while before we would be able to accurately describe the uniqueness of what we had just experienced.” Nor did the logic of the story always work, as when we’re told that criminals couldn’t sell certain precious objects they had stolen because nobody had any money in the Great Depression.

But I did finish the book, which is better than a lot of self-published novels do with me. So I give it a moderate recommendation. There weren’t any overly objectionable adult themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Ashley Bell,’ by Dean Koontz

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A relaxing massage, and then chardonnay and a silly-fun session of divination, and the next thing you know, you’ve attracted the attention of an incarnation of Hitler, and you’ve invited occult forces into your life, and you’ve been spared from cancer only so that some lunatic can stab you to death with a thousand pencils.

One of the joys of being a Dean Koontz fan is the many surprises he offers. Not for him the comfortable formulas that endear us to other authors (often providing considerable legitimate pleasures). Koontz keeps trying new things. With the exception of a very few series books, such as the Odd Thomas adventures, Koontz keeps tricking us – except that you can almost count on some kind of supernatural dog somewhere in his recent works.

The heroine of Ashley Bell is not the titular character, but a young California woman named Bibi Blair. Beautiful, a superior surfer, engaged to a military hero, her career goal is to be a famous author, and she’s made fair progress in that direction.

And then one day her arm starts feeling funny, and the doctor informs her she has a rare brain cancer. Inoperable and 100% fatal.

Bibi is a fighter. She refuses to give up. She announces that she will fight this thing and win.

That very night, she has a vision, and is healed.

The next day, to celebrate, her hippie parents give her the gift of a massage and a psychic reading. The psychic tells her her life has been spared for a reason. The reason, she divines, is to save the life of a young girl. The girl’s name is Ashley Bell.

Bibi takes the message seriously. She sets out to find Ashley Bell, and finds herself the target of a sinister cult devoted to human sacrifice.

The story starts strange, and gets stranger and stranger. Then, around the half-way point, Koontz blindsides the reader, and it becomes a very different kind of story. I won’t spoil the twist for you, but it’s pretty neat.

I’m not sure that the ending of Ashley Bell is quite worthy of the skillful storytelling that kept me riveted up to that point. But I’m not sure it’s not, either.

I do know it was like no other book I’ve read, and I wouldn’t have missed it.

Highly recommended. Mild cautions for adult themes.

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Free at last! Or next to last.

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Today is the day. I was planning to shout “Free at last! Free at last!” Except that I’m not quite free. Last night I finished the final test for my last class in graduate school – ever (I assume). I still have to do the capstone project in the spring, though, so I’m not quite a free man. More like on parole. But the paroled man hears the prison doors clang shut behind him and surveys a frightening world of relative freedom, for which he’s not sure he’s quite ready. I’ll have to re-learn the art of spending a normal evening – or as normal as evenings get when you write novels in your spare time.

My last two classes were a little disappointing, frankly. One was taught by a venerable professor who’s been doing the same thing for years and doesn’t bother to update his material, or the links embedded in his assignments. The other was taught by a man who is, I believe, an authority in his field. Only the discipline he was teaching us (I won’t say which one) is hard – or impossible – to properly teach at a distance. So he does the best he can, grades generously, and more or less herds us through the routine without high expectations.

It was for that second class that I turned in my test last night. It was part multiple choice and part essay. I’m not sure about my answers to the multiple choice questions – the points covered were pretty fine ones. But the essay part – of which I was more frightened – actually went pretty well, I think. Sometimes it pays off to have a writer’s skills. To be able to gather a handful of scattered ideas and citations and organize them into a sort of a coherent whole. When I was done I was surprised how pleased I was with it.

All that remains is the capstone project, which is some kind of research project, subject yet to be determined. Like a thesis, but less. Later this year they’ll abolish the requirement completely, but it seems to be impossible, due to the arcane rules of registration and academic credits, to simply put off my graduation until that time.

But the bottom line is this – I’m done with the hard part. I’ve been looking forward to this day for more than two years. So consider me jubilant. Even though I’m mostly kind of tired.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Short Drop,’ by Matthew FitzSimmons

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Matthew FitzSimmons is a new author, and he seems to have hit a home run with his first novel, a mystery/thriller entitled The Short Drop.

The story’s hero is Gibson Vaughn, a young man with world-class potential who’s the victim of his own indiscretions. Years ago he was briefly famous when he hacked into the computers of a prominent senator, Benjamin Lombard, uncovering evidence of malfeasance. The whole thing blew up on him when further investigation revealed that the actual author of the malfeasance was Gibson’s father, the senator’s chief aid. Gibson’s father committed suicide, and Gibson himself barely escaped prison when he was allowed to enlist in the marines. On leaving the service Gibson learned that the senator, now Vice President, has neither forgotten nor forgiven. In spite of his skills, Gibson is unhireable.

Then he gets an offer from a security company to do a short-term hacking job. In spite of his desperation, he almost says no, because the head of the company is a man who used to work for Sen. Lombard. He played a major role in prosecuting Gibson. But Gibson changes his mind when he learns the purpose of the investigation. They’re trying to find out what happened to Suzanne Lombard, the senator’s daughter. She was like a sister to Gibson, and she disappeared as a teenager while Gibson was in jail awaiting trial. He joins the team to work with a male/female pair of operatives, and gets involved more deeply than anybody planned.

The story that follows must have been a nightmare to outline. Surprise follows surprise, good guys and bad guys change places, people die unexpectedly, and the plot twists around like a politician’s principles. The tension never lets up.

Highly recommended, with the usual cautions.