Anyway, you may recall my small involvement with the group devoted to memorializing the 99th Infantry Battalion (Separate), the commando battalion recruited from Norwegian expatriates and Norwegian-Americans during World War II.
I was recently asked to be their “spokesviking,” and they asked for some pictures of me in my kit, in the James Montgomery Flagg “I WANT YOU” style. I meant to get photos taken during our reenactment group’s Viking feast last week, but the forces of nature made that impossible, as is their wont in these parts.
So I got a friend over to take some yesterday. Here’s one. I sent several off to the 99th people, and I’ve seen a preliminary mock-up of what they’re going to do with it. It’s pretty cool. I look forward to sharing the finished product.
A pair of armed robbers, one big, the other small, knock over a store in the rough Compton neighborhood of Los Angeles. The owner refuses to report the crime, but a little boy tells the cops.
The same pair (apparently) hit another store shortly
thereafter, killing a well-liked storekeeper and a wino on the sidewalk.
In Danny R. Smith’s Echo Killers, Detective “Dickie” Jones has a new partner – a feisty Latino woman named Josie – and they join the hunt for a team of outlaws who mirror themselves, in a way – a big Anglo and a Latina. We learn the story of these two outlaws, too. They are Army deserters, and the woman doesn’t know she’s still being hunted by an officer she spent a night with once. Their almost star-crossed story bears the marks of tragedy, as the two hurtle toward one another on a fatalistic trajectory.
This is the third volume in Smith’s “Dickie Floyd” series. “Dickie”
and “Floyd” haven’t actually been partners since the end of the first book, but
they keep gravitating together. Their personal bond is a tight one. The book’s mood
is somber, but the ending is rather sublime – an affirmation of what Luther
would have called the policeman’s “vocation.” Another book is coming, according
to Amazon.
I liked Echo Killers it a lot. Cautions for foul language, cop humor, and intense situations.
Book two in the “Dickie Floyd” police procedural series (make sure to read them in order; author Danny R. Smith routinely spoils the previous book each time out), set in Los Angeles, finds Detective Richard “Dickie” Jones returning to the job after six months. He got shot in the last book, and has been recovering both physically and psychologically. When Door to a Dark Room begins, his wife has left him, and his partner, Martin “Pretty Boy Floyd” Tyler, has been teamed with someone else. As Dickie eases back into the schedule, he’s assigned to the Cold Case Unit. Until something more compelling comes up.
In the wealthy, secure city of Santa Clarita, a woman
realtor disappears. When her car is found, there’s a body in it – but they’re
not sure it’s hers, as the head and hands have been removed. And her husband
seems strangely impassive about the whole business.
Meanwhile, Dickie’s cop instinct is telling him he’s being watched. Soon he becomes convinced a man in a car is staking out his apartment. He keeps quiet about it at first, not sure whether his PTSD has made him paranoid.
In the end, the various investigations converge (I wonder
how often that happens in real life – probably not as much as in fiction), and
the cops begin moving in on a depraved killer who is not all that smart, but has
remarkable animal cunning.
I’m growing fonder of the Dickie Floyd novels. They’re not
as accomplished as other series I could name, but they have much to teach us.
Author Smith is a former detective, and the real heart of these books is a sort
of apologia for good cops – that they shouldn’t be judged by their crude jokes,
but by the things they do. And that they’re under considerable psychological
pressures, pressures that would destroy most people, and which often destroy
them. A little like Joseph Wambaugh, without the despair.
Cautions for lots of profanity, and deeply disturbing crime
situations. Recommended, if you can handle it.
A while back, I blogged about a recent article declaring that a Swedish Viking warrior’s grave, long assumed to be male, was probably that of a woman. I cited Judith Jesch’s critiques of the article, which she considered over the top and under-authenticated.
A recent article in in the Journal Antiquity has addressed those objections. Researchers insist that the body in the grave was indeed that of a woman.
The barrage of questions from the public and other scientists was unrelenting: Were the researchers sure they had analyzed the right bones? Was there more than one body in the burial, of which one was surely a man? And if the warrior’s sex was indeed female, is it possible they were a transgender man? [See Images of the Viking Woman Warrior’s Burial]
Now, in a new study published online yesterday (Feb. 19) in the journal Antiquity, the researchers of the original study have reaffirmed their conclusion that this mighty individual was a woman. The new study addresses all the questions people raised, and more.
I have to eat a small amount of crow in this case, but all in all I’ve decided to dig my heels in. I’m suspicious of this story. It doesn’t fit the textual accounts — either the contemporary chronicles or the Icelandic sagas.
I keep coming back to my “dog in the nighttime” argument. If Viking armies were full of fighting females, why are the monastic chroniclers silent about it? How could they resist denouncing “unnatural females” and “monstrous witches” in such a situation?
So I’m waiting for more information. Ms. Jesch seems not entirely satisfied as well.
A book that didn’t grab me at first, but pulled me in as it went on. That’s A Good Bunch of Men, by Danny R. Smith. Smith is a former police detective himself, so authenticity is his strong suit.
A Good Bunch of Men is the first book in the “Dickie Floyd” series. Dickie Floyd is not the name of the main character, but the corporate name of a near-legendary detective team in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. They are Richard “Dickie” Jones, and Matthew “Pretty Boy Floyd” Tyler. Although there’s a mystery to be solved, A Good Bunch of Men is more than anything else a book about a relationship, about how two guys relate as friends and partners in extreme circumstances.
When a transsexual prostitute is found murdered in an alley,
the Dickie Floyd team catches the case. When another prostitute of the same
sort is found murdered nearby, they begin looking for a serial killer. But the
victims’ associates have secrets, and other cops on the case aren’t working
very hard. The team will wreck a couple of cars and get into a couple gunfights
before the case is closed – explosively.
It’s notable that, although the two detectives make plenty of cracks about the murder victim, “her” lifestyle and her job, that doesn’t affect their investigation at all. The victim was a human being who didn’t deserve to die, and they are determined to get her justice like anyone else. I think that’s precisely the proper attitude.
Also, Dickie wears a fedora hat, which always deserves respect.
I didn’t know what to make of A Good Bunch of Men at first. The trick was in understanding Dickie’s and Floyd’s relationship – the way they talked to each other at first, I thought they were mortal enemies. Turns out it was just cop banter. We know cop banter from any number of novels by Wambaugh, Connelly, etc. – but here it is (I think) more realistic and concentrated. We gradually realize that talking trash is a psychological mechanism cops use for survival. If you think of all those dark stories you’ve heard in your life – the kind that keep you awake and night and make you doubt your faith in God – these guys live those stories. They see that stuff in person. Strong measures are necessary to keep one’s sanity, and those methods look ugly to outsiders.
The cop banter here isn’t as witty as what we get in other books.
It’s cruder and less witty. But as I got to know these guys better, I got interested
in them. Danny R. Smith hasn’t mastered storytelling yet, and but he shows
great promise, and I’ve bought the next book in the series.
Cautions for disturbing material and obscene language.
Sofia Helin (Crown Princess Martha) tries to persuade Kyle MacLachlan (Pres. Franklin Roosevelt) to support the Norwegian government in exile, in a scene from Atlantic Crossing.
I happened to check the IMDb page for Atlantic Crossing, the coming miniseries I helped translate, yesterday. I found the above picture there, and thought it might interest you. I happen to know, through my high-level personal connections in the industry, that this scene was filmed in Czechoslovakia, last month. My boss, who’s one of the script writers, sent me a picture of herself sitting at that desk, in the set replica of the Oval Office.
Don’t rush to pencil in a viewing date, though. The thing apparently won’t be released until early 2021 — and that’s in Norway. Heaven knows when it’ll be available here.
We wish that every one may read his book and see what a mind might have been stifled in bondage,—what a man may be subjected to the insults of spendthrift dandies, or the blows of mercenary brutes, in whom there is no whiteness except of the skin, no humanity except in the outward form, and of whom the Avenger will not fail yet to demand—’Where is thy brother?’
Narrative was well-received, selling close to 30,000 copies by 1860.
Oslo, where I work. OK, remotely. But this is how it looks while I’m working. Photo credit: Håkon von Hirsch@hakonvh
Sorry about not posting yesterday. That will happen from time to time, under the new regime. My schedule is not my own.
Last week I got zero assignments. Null, as we say in Norwegian. In the resulting vacuum, I went a little nuts. I developed a sudden mania I’d never had before – I went out to lunch every day, sometimes to restaurants I’d never visited. I felt I needed to discover my options, up my dining game a little. It passed, thank goodness. I ain’t made of money.
Yesterday a job came in – and, not surprisingly, it was a
big one with a tight deadline. I always get a little nervous when I take one of
those on, because I’m still uncertain of my powers. I live in terror of not
meeting a deadline – causing my boss to fail to deliver on a contract, bringing
the whole business down in ignominy. In fact, I’m better than I think, and I don’t
generally have much trouble. I got this job done before I expected to.
And today, another job and another tight deadline. But I
finished the first draft before supper, and I’ll give it a polish this evening
and send it off, so they’ll have it in Oslo when business starts tomorrow. No
sweat.
But I did sweat, a little. I’m a worrier.
General observations on the Norwegian film industry from my perspective: I’d say 60 to 80% of my work is on scripts concerning spunky single mothers trying to make it in a man’s world. (Even the one I can tell you about, Atlantic Crossing, is about a woman raising her children alone – though she’s a princess without many career worries.) That scenario appears to be what they think people want to watch just now. I suppose it indicates that the bulk of the audience, both for movies and TV, is women. Which is probably true. But is it cause or effect?
Not to say that these scripts are heavy with radical feminism
or man-hatred. They’re generally pretty good in that regard. It just seems that
the production companies want to see stories through women’s eyes.
Andrew Collins writes in his article, “How Art Moved Me Beyond the Cliché,” about overcoming a blasé familiarity with Scripture. “I recently read through the Psalms—one song every morning or evening. But when I got to Psalm 23, something happened. I read through it in a minute or two, and not a single substantive thought went through my head. When I reached the end, my mind was blank.
“Why? Because it’s Psalm 23! Everyone knows it. I’ve probably had it memorized since I was 7 years old. Over the years, the psalm has dissolved, for me, into a rote sequence of words. What a shame. Gratefully, I remember Jon Foreman’s song ‘House of God Forever.'”
I’ve had a similar revitalizing through Michael Card’s songs from the Psalms in his album, The Way of Wisdom. His renderings of Psalm 23 and 139 have stuck with me for twenty years.
Today I watched Godzilla: The Planet Eater, the third part of the impressively animated Netflix series released last year. Whereas the second part was largely a UPS van stuffed with technobabble, this story swapped that out for a cathedral stuffed with religiobabble. I thought this part might have a slower build, because the characters must have exhausted themselves by this point, but having to listen to the priest of the deadly death for at least forty-five minutes was boring.
Viewers would be excused for thinking this was a screed against religion as a whole. Words are said to that effect, but the religion in question is the cult of the void, the enlightened understanding that nothing is everything, death is peace, and all struggle should be assisted into oblivion preferably by a physician or qualified government agent.
No, this story seems to come from the root of Godzilla mythology. Those nuclear bombs we made, all that E=MC2 stuff (written clearly on a chalkboard during one of the priest’s expositions), brought judgment on our heads. Godzilla rose from the earth because our civilization was too advanced, but he was only phase one. Ghidorah the Golden Demise is phase two.
I may not be smart enough to run with this, but this series may be an effective illustration against atheism. Godzilla embodies the earth fighting for itself. Ghidorah is a nihilistic void. Mankind has only its own wits to use and cannot keep up. All of the talk here of gods and salvation only makes a kind of sense because of the echoes of actual sense found in the Bible and other major religions. Many atheists understand this implicitly. What they call the nonsense of Christianity is more of an argument against what they think God may actually be, an actual creator who has every right to hold his creation accountable for their actions. Far better to paint priests and believers as a death cult.
But Christians (and Jews, Muslims, and some others) aren’t the ones arguing for death in our civilization. We’re the ones saying the weapons of war must be used wisely. Nuking a city must be a last resort, because we want everyone to live in peace.
But nuclear bombs have been dropped. Maybe the idea of a god-like monster rising up to lay down the smack on our hubris appeals to some who have no knowledge of a far greater, far more terrifying judge.
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