“Please, God,” I said to myself, “don’t kill us today. I’d rather not go out like this, if it’s all the same to you, but if that’s your will, at least don’t let me pee myself.”
Couldn’t resist immediately picking up the second book in Scott Bell’s Sam Cable series, about a modern Texas Ranger.
As May Day opens, our hero, fully vindicated in respect to the criminal charges he faced in April’s Fool, is sent to California in a state-owned small airplane (which Cable hates), to pick up a fugitive in custody. This is a young woman, Jade Stone, accused of stabbing a man to death. About the time somebody shoots their plane out of the sky over New Mexico, he begins to suspect that this woman may be telling the truth when she says she was set up.
The story then becomes a wilderness cat and mouse tale, as Cable, Jade, and their injured pilot attempt to evade a crew of rogue federal agents. It won’t be a surprise to the reader that Jade Stone is gorgeous, and increasingly drawn to Cable – but she’s a fascinating character in her own right, and provides a very well-done plot twist toward the end.
Wilderness chase stories are not my favorite kind of fiction, but Sam Cable remains an appealing character, and the dramatic tension ran high. I judge that Cable came out lucky in a few too may close calls, but that’s common in the genre. I certainly enjoyed May Day, and I recommend it.
Cautions for violence, rough language, and a sex scene.
Photo credit: weston m, shootnmatch. Unsplash license.
Beautiful day in Robbinsdale; the first really beautiful day of the year. The temperature soared to 70 degrees. Tomorrow will only be 45, and Friday colder yet, but still. It happened. We had a nice day. Means a lot in Minnesota.
I went to see my doctor this morning, to have him look at a small infection in one of my fingers. It wasn’t swollen to the size of a Hostess Twinkie, and it didn’t hurt all that much, but it just wouldn’t heal up. I’ve tolerated it for about a month, faithfully feeding it Neosporin and re-bandaging it twice a day, but it refuses to take the hint. So, shame-faced, feeling like a sissy, I went to see my personal physician. I fully expected him to sneer and tell me to rub some dirt on it, but he dutifully prescribed an antibiotic.
Now I’m waiting for the prescription. I am, to tell the truth, growing disillusioned with Walgreens. The last prescription my doctor sent them sat unfilled for a week, until I went in personally and requested an explanation. (They needed my new insurance information as it turned out, but they might have – you know – sent me a message informing me of the problem.) Now I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to go in and hold them up for my Miracle Bread Mold. I remember an old gag from Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip, where somebody wanders into the Dogpatch post office and asks if there’s any mail for him, and the postmaster drawls, “Well, looky here – Ah got this Speshul Dee-livery letter fer yuh 20 years ago. Ah been meanin’ to drop it off next time I was in your neck o’ the woods.” Walgreens seems to have adopted a similar policy for prescriptions.
That wasn’t even what I meant to post about tonight.
I wanted to talk a little more about April’s Fool by Scott Bell, the delightful cop novel I reviewed last night. When I ask myself, what made it so much fun? the answer was easy – the hero was cheerful.
You realize how rare cheerful main characters are in today’s fiction?
Now I’m not exactly a world ambassador for happiness. I’m known, among my constantly shrinking circle of friends, as the Ancient Mariner at every wedding, the Banquo at every feast.
But I am not immune to the charm of a cheerful voice. I can’t produce the effect, but I can respond to it.
We have a highly false stereotype in literature, it seems to me, that says happiness equals shallowness (I blame the Russians). Anyone who acquires a teaspoon full of wisdom, our stories proclaim, must necessarily be plunged into despair.
Several of the police mystery series I follow – and enjoy – have heroes that blur together in my memory. I can’t distinguish one from the other, because they all have the same back story. Every bloody one of them is mourning the death of a beloved wife. He has never gotten over it, and he obsesses on his job to mask his grief.
I’m not saying it’s entirely unrealistic. But it’s become a trope.
Life, you’ll note, isn’t like that. Aren’t the best leaders people who know how to raise other people’s spirits? Aren’t optimistic people more likely to succeed than pessimists (such as I)?
If we want to be realistic as writers, shouldn’t most of our heroes (unless we’re writing tragedy) be optimists?
I think this qualifies as testimony against interest, so you should pay attention.
The captain lived in his car, ate takeout food every meal, smoked more than a creosote brushfire, and had his admin print all his emails rather than learn how to use a PC. Dinosaurs were more progressive than Captain Marshall.
One of the delights of being a reader is discovering books that are just fun. I’d never heard of Scott Bell (not to be confused with James Scott Bell, another excellent author), but it seems I’ve been missing something. April’s Fool is the first volume in a series starring contemporary Texas Ranger Sam Cable.
Sam has drawn the unwelcome job of providing personal security for a senate candidate. The candidate is a black woman with a chip on her shoulder, who delights in testing his patience. He disliked her, but hardly wanted her dead. So when he wakes up in her hotel room naked, lying next to her strangled corpse, he is completely unable to account for his actions.
Thanks to his commander’s support, he manages to stay out of jail – for the present. His orders are to lay low and let his colleagues investigate, but (of course) that’s not Sam’s way. He pokes into the candidate’s past and her present associations. Along the way he’ll form an alliance with a diminutive female FBI forensic accountant, and they’ll prove a formidable team.
April’s Fool featured many delights. The writing was sharp, in a brightly hardboiled way:
I was not in a good place. The sofa wouldn’t stop an angry fly, let alone a bullet, and it wouldn’t hide anyone bigger than Goldman. I felt like a cartoon bear hiding behind a pine tree.
Also the characters were vivid, and the dialogue often funny. This wasn’t exactly a comic novel, but Sam Cable is an ebullient personality who keeps his sense of humor most of the time. He’s easy to like. Racial issues are dealt with in what I considered an evenhanded way. All references to Christianity were respectful.
Highly recommended, with cautions for adult subject matter.
I have bestowed glowing reviews on previous books in Colin Conway’s 509 series of police procedurals set in Washington state, east of the Cascades. When I purchased When the Wicked Rest and Murder by Any Other Name, I didn’t realize that they were not novels but short story collections set in the 509 area.
I discovered I don’t enjoy Conway’s short stories nearly as much as I enjoy his novels. The novels are well-written, character driven, and compassionate. The stories (at least in these collections) are more concentrated. They mostly deal with criminals – either losers who have no hope, or successful ones who make you fear for the world. Neither is much fun, at least for this timid reader.
One story in particular, in Murder by Any Other Name, is especially horrific. It’s called “Angel.” It’s a prison story, a short peek into Hell. Well done, but the stuff of nightmares.
My bottom line on these two story collections is that they’re good (in Chesterton’s sense of being good shots) but also not good (in Chesterton’s sense of shooting one’s grandmother from a distance of 500 yards).
Maybe you appreciate this kind of stuff more than I do. Cautions for extremely disturbing content and lots of bad language.
Tonight, as is so often my lazy wont, I share with you a Norwegian hymn, performed here by a volunteer pietist men’s choir. But this hymn is different, in a highly insignificant way.
The hymn is called “Den Himmelske Lovsang,” which translates, “The Heavenly Song of Praise.” (“Lovsang” does not mean “love song,” however much you might want it to. “Lov” is Norwegian for “praise.”)
I can’t find an English translation, and that’s kind of the point of this post. The gist of the lyrics is that it’s all about the joy of Heaven, embodied in music. The idea that all nature and the heavenly host are having a wonderful time singing God’s praise, and that through Christ we can hope to join in the fun ourselves someday.
Once a month I get together with a small clutch of old men, most of whom are retired pastors from my church body. At the last meeting, one of them mentioned this hymn, commenting that it’s the most popular hymn among the Lutherans of Madagascar.
(The reason for this goes back to the 19th Century, when international mission organizers “assigned” part of the Madagascar mission field to the Norwegians. These missionaries came not only from Norway, but from the Norwegian-American immigrant church.)
In our gathering, we noted that the hymn has never caught on in the US. Nobody was sure why. I thought it might be because no one had ever done a satisfactory English translation.
You can guess what came next. I decided to give it a go myself.
I’m not working at it full-time; I’ve got several other projects demanding my attention. But I’ve been noodling with it in odd moments, and I’m generally pleased with my progress.
Translating verse is a particular challenge. The only way I can figure out to do it is to first study the text closely, trying to figure out what the poet is attempting to convey, and how. Then I proceed to do my own original poem on the same theme, in the same meter, touching base with the original text whenever I can.
I have no idea where it’s all going.
Anyway, do you think this hymn would be interesting to American Christians?
“This isn’t the fifties, man. Planning a murder is fairly easy now because of TV and the movies. All anyone has to do is pay attention and take notes. Hollywood has done the heavy lifting for them.”
I’ve recently rediscovered Colin Conway’s 509 series, about law enforcement in eastern Washington state. Most of the stories take place in Spokane, but rural areas come into it at times. My personal favorites are the Dallas Nash stories, but all the main characters are good.
The Path of Progress plays out against the backdrop of Camp Faith, a homeless encampment in a distressed part of Spokane. Both political parties are doing their best to exploit the situation, but the neighbors are increasingly unhappy and demonstrative. Lately, area businesses have been experiencing a string of burglaries.
Leya Navarro is a detective on the Property Crimes squad. She’s a conscientious cop, a married working mother (and a church member), not sure what to think about Camp Faith. She’s assigned to the burglaries and given a partner to work with – a detective named Damien Truscott. This doesn’t delight her. Everyone’s suspicious of Truscott, because he used to be in Major Crimes and then transferred to Property. Nobody goes from Major to Property, a step down in status, unless they’ve screwed up somehow.
Their investigations gradually home in on a local pawnbroker, but all his records seem solid. In time the situation escalates to murder, and then the Major Crimes guys enter the story. The chief MC detective here is a somewhat driven fellow named Andrew Parker, and the focus mostly shifts to him.
There are no gunfights or car chases in The Path of Progress. Just realistic police work performed by well-rounded, believable, and sympathetic characters. I like this approach very much.
I also appreciate that, although no preaching is done, Christian characters are treated with respect. You might think a book focused on the homeless problem would involve a lot of politics, but the ordinary people in The Path of Progress seem mostly troubled and confused. Like the rest of us.
I recommend The Path of Progress, along with the whole series. I really can’t think of any content warnings, though I may have missed some rough language or something.
I had a great topic for my blog post tonight. A brilliant intellectual insight. But I wanted to review the last couple books I read while my memory was fresh, so I postponed posting it. Tonight, when I need the topic… nothing. Memory wiped. I know there were two points, but I’ve got nothing to spear them into.
No doubt that lost post would have changed the world. Darkness will now fall on civilization, and millions will die, because I didn’t take the trouble to make a note of my transcendent brainstorm.
My bad.
As a substitute, I’ve got the tourist video above, telling you about Avaldsnes in Norway, a place about which I’ve wearied you multiple times already. This video concentrates on the North Way historical interpretative center, which I visited on my last trip.
Avaldsnes played a major role in my Erling books, and it ought to feature largely in the Haakon the Good book I’m working on now, too. Also I have family roots there, so if I can steer some tourist traffic that way, it’s all to the good.
I recently discovered that the Noah Braddock detective series by Jeff Shelby is still a going concern. So I had a couple books to catch up with. Bail Out comes ahead of the last one I reviewed, in sequence. But that’s not a problem; they stand alone pretty well.
Noah Braddock, San Diego surfer-cum-private eye, needs money to get repairs done on the house on Catalina he inherited from his murdered girlfriend. His massive friend Carter, who is smarter than he looks, says he has a prospective client, but he knows Noah won’t like it.
The prospective client is Darren Van Welker, an old schoolmate who was Noah’s greatest enemy in his youth. Now he’s a successful businessman with a not entirely savory reputation. Darren is getting married (for the third time), and he wants his adult son Aaron to be there, only he’s in Las Vegas and won’t return his father’s calls. He wants Noah and Carter to go to Sin City and drag the young man back.
Noah doesn’t like Darren any more now than he did in the old days, but he takes the job – making it clear that he’s not going to kidnap Aaron if he doesn’t want to go. In Vegas, they get a line on Aaron’s girlfriend. Going to her apartment, they run into a group of not very impressive gangsters, who are looking for her for their boss. Noah and Carter find themselves helping the two young people escape a serious and dangerous problem related to unpaid gambling debts.
The story is essentially pretty fun, almost a comedy. The Noah Braddock books are not comic as a rule, but author Shelby had fun with this one. The gangsters are somewhat laughable, and Carter alone is such a force of nature that nobody ever seems in great danger.
I enjoyed Bail Out immensely. Jeff Shelby is an entertaining storyteller, whether he goes dark or light. Recommended.
She scanned the room and landed on Johnny and just stayed pinned on him, like waiting for the heat from her stare to set his shirt on fire and get his attention.
This one surprised me pleasantly. When I got to reading and realized that Kevin Wade’s Johnny Careless was a story about a middle-class boy moving among the privileged kids of Long Island’s North Shore, I prepared myself for an homage to The Great Gatsby, with maybe a little Marxism mixed in. But it wasn’t like that. Or not mostly like that.
“Jeep” Mullane is the chief of police, the son of a policeman, but the circumstances of his childhood threw him together with the wealthy Johnny Chambliss and his girlfriend (later wife and ex-wife) Niven, so he began to live in two worlds. Johnny had all the irresponsibility of his class, but was aware of it, and kept Jeep close – in part – to ground himself. He could be a jerk, but was always a good friend.
Now Johnny is dead, washed up on the beach with what appear to be contact wounds from a marine engine prop on his body. But what was he doing in the water at that time of night, in that place? Johnny’s powerful father wants it explained, and Jeep wants to understand too.
There’s also pressure from the mayor for the police to stop a string of thefts of high-end automobiles in their supposedly crime-free community.
Jeep will learn – to his shock – that the thefts have a connection to a secret out of the late Johnny’s past.
The writing in Johnny Careless was very good (though author Wade, who’s been a writer for the TV show “Bluebloods,” uses “flaunt” when he means “flout” at one point). An interesting narrative device was employed – the whole story is told from Jeep’s point of view, but events in the present are given in the third person, while flashbacks are in the first person. The characters were interesting and layered. The mystery intrigued me. And it all worked out entirely differently than I expected.
Jeep is an admirable character, though (no surprise here) his morality is not quite Christian as far as sex is concerned. I recommend Johnny Careless, with only the usual cautions.
I was reading Colin Conway’s 509 series, about policing in eastern Washington state, for some time, and enjoying the books. I’m not sure why I lost track of the series – maybe because the books feature revolving main characters and I had trouble keeping track of them. But I need to get back to them. They’re really good. I liked The Fate of Our Years a lot.
Dallas Nash is a detective. He lost his wife a while back, and is mourning hard. He talks to her (when no one’s listening) and avoids music generally, because so many songs remind him of her. But this doesn’t interfere with his work – in fact, he works obsessively, because it’s the only thing that keeps his mind off his grief. Nevertheless, he’s afraid the other cops will learn that he’s seeing a psychologist – it marks you as weak and unreliable.
In The Fate of Our Years, he has to investigate the stabbing death of an old man who was once accused of rape, and the beating death of a homeless man. Neither of these cases are the work of super-criminals. We’re dealing with plain, unromantic police work here, the grinding away until something comes loose.
But the real interest is in the characters. I particularly like it when characters surprise you with unexpected character facets – there are a couple such instances in The Fate of Our Years.
Also, it featured a born-again Christian character who is presented in an entirely positive way. There’s no incentive to do that in today’s publishing world, so I was grateful.
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