The Newfangled Four from Southern California can’t sing sober song to save themselves.
‘You Can’t Make Old Friends,’ by Tom Trott
He looked like a bullet standing on its end. And yet he was very calm, and came across altogether more thoughtful than the other two. That is to say, he came across as though he had thoughts.
In some ways, I’d have to say that Tom Trott’s private eye Joe Grabarz channels Philip Marlowe pretty well. He’s got the patter down, and a lot of the character. If the first Joe Grabarz novel, You Can’t Make Old Friends, didn’t entirely work for me, that’s very likely my own fault.
Joe Grabarz walks the mean streets of Brighton, the beach-front holiday town in England. As he describes it, it’s a little like a smaller New York City, where only the rich and the poor live. Joe definitely comes from the poor side, and he makes no secret of his grudge.
As the book starts, his private investigation business is in a slump. He used to help the police out; now he’s been blackballed. One of his clients is not only refusing to pay him, but suing him.
And then he’s asked to look at a body that’s washed up on the beach, and it’s a friend of his, Rory. Rory was his best friend in childhood, but they’ve been alienated since Rory became a drug addict and pusher. Still, he was a good guy once, and Joe’s going to get justice. On his own, if the law won’t do it.
His inquiries lead him to meet Rory’s sexy sister, whom he takes under his protection. And a beautiful woman cop who sparks off him like flint on steel. Respectable businessmen with lots of skeletons in their closets. And various thugs for beating up and getting beaten up by. In the end he’ll get a measure of justice, and a little redemption for Rory’s memory.
The writing in You Can’t Make Old Friends was good. Joe is an interesting character with a compelling voice. (He’s also very much opposed to drugs, even pot. I liked that.) What rubbed me the wrong way was the resentment in his voice, a persistent class envy. Class envy is understandable and forgivable, but it doesn’t make for pleasant company. So, regretfully, I don’t think I’ll continue this series.
You may like it better. Cautions for language, violence, and fairly graphic sex.
‘Broad Reach,’ by Rob Avery
Overall, however, I concluded that if she were Terrence Well’s trophy wife, he hadn’t won first prize.
I liked the writing and the characters in Rob Avery’s first Sim Greene novel, Close-Hauled, but I didn’t like how it ended. The promise, however, was enough to persuade me to try the second book, Broad Reach. This one was more to my liking, and the author even did a little retcon work to soften the hard landing in the last book.
Sim Greene, former Navy CPO, has left his career in California. He’s steering his sailboat, Figaro, to the British Virgin Islands by way of the Panama Canal. Doing it solo is a challenge, but not an overwhelming one. When he gets to BVI, he plans to use some cash he and his buddy Al acquired in their last adventure, and open a dive shop and salvage business.
But when he arrives, he finds a message from Al. He’s been arrested on suspicion of murder, and is being held without bail. Sim hastens to hire him a lawyer.
Al says he was approached by a beautiful woman, who gave him a plastic bag containing someone’s pocket contents, including a passport, which she found. She asked him to turn it in to the police for her. When he did so, he was arrested for the murder of the passport’s owner. The police seem satisfied they have their man, and are not investigating further. Al has an alibi, but it’s in the form of a woman whom he doesn’t wish to name.
Sim starts asking questions around the islands, discovering that the dead man was involved with drug smugglers, and that the police have been compromised. He also meets a beautiful woman who might just be able to lure him away from life on a boat.
Rob Avery is a good writer, and has done a fine job with characters and plotting here. This is a series I could get to like. I’m waiting for the next book, not yet published.
‘Under Cover of Daylight,’ by James W. Hall
She was tall with wide shoulders and thin limbs. She had a gawky gracefulness to her movements, like a fashion model slightly out of practice.
Another day, another boat-bum detective. I’ve been trawling through them, looking for that ever-elusive successor to Travis McGee. The hero of James W. Hall’s Under Cover of Daylight, Thorn (no other name is used), hangs out in Key Largo, Florida. There’s much to like in this book, though it didn’t please me in the end.
Thorn is an orphan – his parents died in a car accident the day he was born. He was raised by a loving couple, Doc and Kate. Kate is still living, and is leading the fight to save an endangered species called the Key Largo Water Rat from encroaching development.
Thorn himself lives in a shack and makes a marginal living tying the best bonefish lures in the Keys. His needs are simple. Only recently he’s met a beautiful woman, Sarah, who’s drawing him out of himself. But he has an old secret, and he can’t move forward until he’s dealt with it. Thorn’s secret isn’t the only secret in the mix. He will learn he’s surrounded by secrets – they counter one another and entangle themselves. Those secrets are beginning to get people killed – Thorn will have to face some hard truths before he can set things straight.
James W. Hall is a very good wordsmith – he writes poetry as well, and it shows. This style of writing, however, didn’t always work for this reader, especially at the end. The climax has a dream-like quality that made it implausible to me – kind of like a story you’d hear from a stoner – and marijuana smuggling plays a large role in the story.
There were many Christian references and images, mostly pretty respectful. The “evangelical” church one of Thorn’s friends attends sounded pretty weird, though, especially in terms of sexual practices. Of course, there’s all kinds nowadays, and this is the Keys.
Under Cover of Daylight didn’t work for me, but it had many virtues. You might like it. Cautions for language and sexual situations.
‘Devil King Kun,’ by Dr. H. Albertus Boli
“Well!” said Weyland, “this is a rara avis indeed. The Amazonian strockbroker parrot has been seen only by a priviliged few explorers…. This species is a perfect demonstration of Darwin’s principles of sexual selection,” Weyland explained. “The male with the best-performing stock portfolio is naturally preferred by the females.”
It’s unusual to get good news in these times, but I recently discovered that the web’s greatest blog, Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine, had somehow managed to be revived outside my notice. Of course it has become, once again, a daily resort for me. I also noticed that Dr. Boli had a brand new book out, Devil King Kun. It was for me the work of but a moment to download it onto my Kindle.
Seriously, I don’t think I’ve laughed this hard at a book since the last time I read P. G. Wodehouse. (You may notice, if you are a close observer, that this review is very close to the single review the book has attracted so far on Amazon. That’s because I wrote that review.) Think of the great old, mostly English, adventure novels, by H. Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Sax Rohmer, and others – then blend them into a heaping bowlful of Lewis Carroll. That’s Devil King Kun.
Our intrepid hero, Norbert Weyland, is on the trail of the archfiend Devil King Kun, king of Andorra (a microstate on the Iberian Peninsula). In his ruthless quest for world domination he has already taken over the local Archdiocese in Pittsburgh, the key to control of parish festivals throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. And tomorrow, the world.
We follow Weyland and his faithful chronicler, Peevish, on a madcap chase through North America, South America, and across the Atlantic to the Pyrenees by airship, ornithopter, ski, and other means of transport, pursued by Devil King Kun’s beautiful, cat-suited daughter Princess Kun – who has plans for “having fun” with Weyland before killing him. They acquire a pet tiger and a friendly South American native girl as companions, and face pretty much any cliched, melodramatic peril you would expect to find in an adventure novel, escaping again and again by the skin of their teeth through Weyland’s quick thinking and the reader’s heavily strained suspension of disbelief. Realism is a distant dream, and non-sequiturs flourish in verdant abundance.
Devil King Kun was the book I didn’t know I needed in these insane times – at last, something too bizarre to believe, even in 2020! I loved Devil King Kun. I highly recommend it.
He is without doubt the most devious tactical accordionist in the world.
View From the Bunker
Derek Gilbert interviewed me for his popular “View From the Bunker” podcast. The main subject is how I followed fairly obvious clues to predict bits of the future in my novels. You can listen to it here.
‘Close-Hauled,’ by Rob Avery
I started thinking about my current situation. No girl to share my time with, no boat to sail on the ocean, a commanding officer wanting to pin my hide to his wall, local cops trying to stick me with a couple murders, and a bunch of bad guys trying to kill me. You could say it was a low point.
I’m a sucker for boat-based mystery series, though I haven’t found many that earned my loyalty for long. Sim Greene is the hero of Rob Avery’s series in that sub-genre. Sim lives on board a small sailboat in Channel Islands Harbor in California. He’s a Navy CPO in his day job, hoping to make it up into NCIS someday. He has a rich, beautiful girlfriend (he’s a little astonished at this turn of events), and loves to surf. He likes his life, and is not looking to change it much. But change is coming to him.
When Sim discovers a dead body while diving, at the beginning of Close-Hauled, his commanding officer calls him in and tells him to investigate the death on his own – reporting only to him. He wants some papers the victim left behind. Sim is excited to take the case on, but soon realizes he’s in over his head. Not only is he forced to operate without official credentials, but more people get killed, and the police have him tagged as the culprit. He’ll have to do some fast thinking – and enlist his best friend, a former SEAL – to figure what really happened and get through it all with his life, let alone his career.
I generally liked Close-Hauled. I thought it well-written and the characters were mostly pretty good (though the hero’s slacker lifestyle annoyed me at times). But I found the downbeat ending deeply unsatisfying. I think I’ll try the second book in the series, but if it ends as unhappily as this one, I won’t go on.
Herod Heard John the Baptist Gladly
What should Christians do with power?
Years ago, I heard Cal Thomas talk about a book he co-authored with the late Ed Dobson, Blinded by Might. He said Jerry Falwell and others like him believed they were influencing the president and political leaders to take Christian approaches to civil problems, but what Thomas and Dobson saw first-hand was a willingness to compromise any issue for the privilege of remaining in the inner circle.
“Whenever the church cozies up to political power, it loses sight of its all important mission to change the world from the inside out,” Thomas writes in the book.
I thought of that Saturday while listening to the Gospel of Mark. In chapter 6 we read that John the Baptist had been put to death by King Herod, but verse 20 states, “Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he kept him safe. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed, and yet he heard him gladly.”
How often had John preached or spoken to Herod? What did he say? Did John think he could be in a relationship with Herod that would be similar to Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar? He was in prison because he angered Herod’s wife, but while in prison he had the king’s ear on occasion. And the king heard him gladly.
But then Herod made a vow in front of his peers, “the leading men of Galilee,” to give his wife’s daughter anything she asked for, and she asked John’s head. Where did his gladness go then? He was sorry to do it, but he would not admit to a mistake by implying, if not actually stating, that this prisoner’s life was more valuable than his oath. Nothing was more valuable than the king.
How many believers think they are making progress with political leaders because they seem to listen to them gladly, never suspecting that Christ’s call to put God’s kingdom first will never work for them. To them, God must serve their political kingdom, and humility would be great if earned votes.
While the king is in power, he may hear a preacher gladly, but when his power is threatened, then his priorities will become clear.
‘Bad News Travels,’ by James Swain
The bar was busy, as were all the bars in Key West, the town a drunk tank sitting atop a giant sponge.
James Swain is the author of several mystery series. Bad News Travels is the latest of his Lancaster-Daniels books. I liked it quite a lot.
Jon Lancaster is a former Navy Seal and retired cop. Beth Daniels is a working FBI agent. Their occasional partnership is unofficial, but they complement each other. Jon is more of a seat-of-the-pants detective, and he sometimes crosses lines when he feels justice demands it. Beth is more logical and by the book. Getting help from Jon might lose her her job one day.
In Bad News Travels, they go to Saint Augustine, Florida together, for her father’s funeral. Dr. Martin Daniels had been a respected physician. But one day he shot himself, leaving no suicide note. When they examine his house, both are immediately suspicious. They find paper towels soaked with blood in the garbage. Dr. Daniels had installed a panic room in his house, as well as a a hidden safe. And there are hints that he had had some kind of shameful, secret life, leading to his suicide.
Jon and Beth’s investigation will bring them up against Russian gangsters, human traffickers, corrupt cops, and a blackmail ring. Plus a final, shocking revelation about her father’s death.
Bad News Travels was a well-done, enjoyable mystery. I especially liked the ending – others might see it coming, but it blindsided me fair and square.
Minor cautions for language and mature themes.
Friday Singing: Windsor, All About the Bass
Here’s a whole set from a female quartet Windsor from the 2016 Sweet Adelines International competition. They joke about intending to sing Andrews Sisters trios and that Jenny, the bass, won’t fit in. They sing Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, When I Fall in Love, Daddy, and an adaptation of Johnny One Note.