It had been a couple years since I’d read a Robert Crais novel, and I wondered if I had set my face against him for some reason, as I’m prone to do with authors from time to time. But I discovered that it’s actually been a couple years since Crais has published an Elvis Cole/Joe Pike novel. So I bought and read The Big Empty, and I’m glad I did. I’ve been privileged to read several fine novels in the last few weeks (this seems to be a prime time of year for new book releases), but none of them brought a tear to my eye. The Big Empty did.
Private eye Elvis Cole gets a call from an assistant to Traci Beller. He’s never heard of Traci Beller, but apparently she’s a very popular internet influencer. Pretty and cheery, she does bright videos of herself baking. When Elvis meets with her, she tells her story. Ten years ago, when she was just a little girl, her father, owner of an HVAC company, went out on calls one day and vanished without a trace. Even his van was never recovered. Her mother hired a reputable investigations company to search for him five years ago, and when they were unsuccessful, had him declared legally dead. But Traci is grown up now, and has money of her own to spend. Elvis warns her that chances are poor, but agrees to look into it.
He travels to the town of Rancha, where the father was last seen, and through diligence manages to uncover one previously unknown lead. How is he to know that his inquiries will provoke dangerous people out of the shadows, bringing horror to two families and death to a couple innocent bystanders?
The story of The Big Empty took me places I did not expect to go. It moved me, arousing pity and terror in the classic style of Greek tragedy.
This was an excellent novel. No elegant prose passages to quote, but fascinating and engaging from first to last.
Today’s hymn comes from the Massachusetts-born minister William Orcutt Cushing (1823-1902). It expresses a theme common to popular hymns, that of trusting the Lord through difficulties.
“The Lord repay you for what you have done, and a full reward be given you by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge!” (Ruth 2:12 ESV)
1 Under His wings I am safely abiding. Tho’ the night deepens and tempests are wild, Still I can trust Him; I know He will keep me. He has redeemed me, and I am His child.
Refrain: Under His wings, under His wings, Who from His love can sever? Under His wings my soul shall abide, Safely abide forever.
2 Under His wings, what a refuge in sorrow! How the heart yearningly turns to His rest! Often when earth has no balm for my healing, There I find comfort, and there I am blest. [Refrain]
3 Under His wings, oh, what precious enjoyment! There will I hide till life’s trials are o’er; Sheltered, protected, no evil can harm me. Resting in Jesus, I’m safe evermore. [Refrain]
I suppose the book suffered by comparison with all the great novels I’ve been reading lately. MacDonald, Kaminsky, Kellerman, Hurwitz. Books from authors who know how to hook me and reel me in, feeding my addiction like a pusher. I’ve been going through some personal drama recently, and I discovered that, for all its vaunted capacity to zombify us, the internet failed to provide me the genuine distraction I required. Only the ancient, beloved magic of a really good book could make me lose myself and forget idle care for a while.
So I saw a mystery being offered free in a promotional deal. Looked interesting, and I had nothing to lose downloading it.
And I really started rooting for this author. Unlike so many new authors I see these days, he actually knew how to spell. His usage was correct. His grammar was right. I greatly wanted this guy to succeed.
I held out through about 40% of the book. I really gave him a chance.
But he bored me.
The plot was promising – the reliable old trope of a man falsely accused of murder, hiding from the law, trying to discover the true culprit. There was plenty of potential for peril.
But I didn’t feel the danger as the story was being told. And I thought the hero was acting like an idiot. I just couldn’t care much after a while.
I hope the author gets it together. He can write a sentence. All he needs is to learn plotting.
Plotting. That’s one of those topics where, as the preachers say, I point a finger at someone else and find my four other fingers pointing back at me.
I don’t consider myself a very good plotter myself.
Maybe it’s soft-heartedness. I posted on Facebook a while back that “The true villain of every story is the author.” Plotting comes down to torturing your characters. Every bad thing that happens to them was thought up by you. Giving them a break is bad for the story, a betrayal of the reader.
Or maybe there’s something else I haven’t learned yet. Some holy grail of plotting still hovering outside my ken.
“Hero,” Tommy sneered. “Heroes gotta be dead and half forgotten so they can be rewritten by men with weaker chins. There are no heroes. Not me.” His watery blue eyes looked cloudy in the dimness. They gazed unseeingly at Evan. “And not you.”
I announced a little while back that I was giving up on reading thrillers. When I said that I was making a specific mental reservation for a few authors, chief among whom is Gregg Hurwitz. Hurwitz’s Orphan X novels are another matter entirely – because they’re more than high-adrenaline entertainments. They’re brilliantly written and character-intensive. And when I say character, I mean it in two senses.
In Nemesis, our hero, Evan Smoak, the Nowhere Man, freelance hero, is dealing with a terrible personal betrayal. Tommy Stojack, who provides his weapons, is one of very few true friends he has in the world. And in the last book, Evan saw that one of the worst murderers he’d ever encountered was carrying Tommy’s weaponry. Tommy refuses to explain.
For Evan the next step is clear. Tommy is now a danger to the innocent and will have to be eliminated.
Meanwhile, we spend a lot of time with Tommy this time out. We’re used to seeing Evan getting phone calls asking for help, but now Tommy gets one, from a young man named Delmont Hickenlooper, Jr. “Hick” is the son of one of Tommy’s war buddies. Dying in Tommy’s arms, Hick’s father had asked Tommy to look after his boy if he needed help. Tommy can’t refuse that kind of obligation.
He travels to the town of Calvary (I don’t think the state is named, but it’s somewhere in the Deep South), where Hick is holed up in a rundown farmhouse with a group of other young men as shiftless and useless as himself. They imagine themselves some kind of militia, and recently they broke up a group of picknicking Mexican-Americans by driving a Ford truck through the park. Unintentionally, they lost control and killed four people, one of them a little boy.
Meanwhile, Evan tracks Tommy down in Calvary, and once he learns the story of the killings, and observes that the local sheriff seems to be shielding the killers, he adds a new job to his mission – he has to kill these killers too.
At the same time, Tommy is trying – with great frustration – to knock some sense into the young idiots’ heads, in preparation for getting them to surrender to the law.
Which means there must be a showdown between Tommy and Evan.
Also, four of the most feared hired killers in the world are on their way to Calvary too, also intent on killing Tommy.
Nemesis is an almost perfect thriller, as far as I can tell. Every line, every word, does its job with the efficiency of one of Tommy’s precision-tuned semiautomatic pistols. The main characters come vibrantly to life, arousing the reader’s pity and horror.
As always, the Gospel is conspicuous by its absence. The Gospel haunts the story, looming like a human figure against the night sky, discernable by the stars it blocks out.
My only small quibble is that racial relations, which are an important theme here, are rather idealized. For the sake of avoiding too many complications (I assume), all bigotry in this book is limited to white people (who are nonetheless treated with a measure of understanding). There’s a memorable scene where Evan looks through the window of a brightly lit bar, watching a fairly diverse group of people line dancing together, all in rhythm, all in community, and Evan realizes that for all his physical training this is something he can never do.
Anyway, Nemesis is a delicious book to read. Top-shelf entertainment from a master of the form who shows no sign of flagging.
This is, it appears, the 40th installment in Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware series, about a psychologist who helps out the LA police. Whenever a new one appears, I ask myself, “Is it really worth the trouble? They’re all pretty much alike.”
And then I plunge in and I remember – it’s worth it because it’s so incredibly fun. Yes, the books are formulaic, and the series has long outlived its real-world plausibility. But when Milo the detective calls up Alex the shrink for a consult, we all settle in for a fun ride with old friends. The books never fail to deliver the entertainment advertised.
In Open Season, the initial crime is the mystery of a beautiful young woman, dumped dead at an urgent care facility. She proves to be an aspiring actress (the old, sad story) who seems to have been killed by a date rape drug. A suspect is identified – a sleaze who attended a lot of parties and liked to pose as a movie producer. But before he can be arrested, he’s murdered. Someone shot him neatly through the neck with a rifle as he stood on his apartment balcony (the poor rape victim’s clothes are found nearby).
A search of the records reveals that there have been a couple similar killings in recent years – all with the same calibre bullet and the wound in the same location. So Alex and Milo go on the hunt for a vigilante, a private executioner. An Alex’s psychological insights open up productive areas of investigation.
I enjoyed Open Season all the way through, especially for the characters. Thoroughly reliable stuff, even if less than entirely plausible. The author made me believe it was plausible, and that’s all I ask.
He wore round glasses with steel rims and the glasses were always slipping down his blunt nose and Johnny Flagan would look over his glasses at you and grin wryly about his morning hangover and you would never notice that the grin did nothing to change the eyes. The eyes were small and brown and watchful and they could have been the noses of two bullets dimly seen in the cylinder when you look toward the muzzle of a gun.
The idea of a story in which travelers in a random group are thrown together and react to each other like chemicals in a laboratory is an old one. It certainly goes back to Chaucer, and probably further, though author John D. MacDonald uses the setup for a different purpose in his 1956 novel, Murder in the Wind (also published as Hurricane).
Along Highway 19 in west Florida, several vehicles are traveling north. There’s a hurricane blowing in the Gulf, but it’s forecast to move west and north. Nobody knows it’s going to turn east, block a couple bridges, and strand these particular people in a derelict house, hoping to ride the storm out.
There’s the defeated young businessman, headed back north with his wife and two kids, all their possessions packed into their station wagon. The hotshot property developer sharing his ride with a subordinate he’s planning to humiliate. The tennis bum with his new bride, a plain heiress he married for her money – and she knows it. The young widow, carrying the ashes of her suicide husband home with her. The stolen van with three juvenile delinquents in it. And the federal agent between assignments.
Over the course of the next day some will live and some will die. Some of the least likely characters will display courage and honor, as others will turn out to be cowards, sometimes to their own surprise.
Murder in the Wind caught me up completely. MacDonald ushers us deep into the heart of each one of them, telling their stories, bringing them vividly to life. It’s a masterful tale, carried along in increasing dramatic tension as the barometer steadily drops.
An amusing typo gave the federal agent character the name “Steve Maiden” at the beginning, before a proofreader seems to have caught the OCR error and corrected it to Steve Malden.
The book contains a slur against homosexuals which went over fine back when the book was published, but is offensive today – even to puritans like me.
“Don’t try to understand them,” said Lieberman. “Just rope those cows and brand them.”
“Wisdom according to Rawhide reruns,” said Bill with a smile.
“Don’t knock it,” said Lieberman. “One can learn much from the Scriptures and reruns in the middle of the night. The gift of insomniacs. God keeps up awake when we want to sleep so we can glean knowledge from the secret messages sung by Frankie Laine.”
I don’t know why I’m not more fascinated by the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Lieberman novels. They’re fairly easygoing mysteries, heavy on character. Not more violent than necessary.
Yet they’re deceptive. There’s a lot of realism here – a profoundly Jewish understanding of the world as a dangerous, corrupt place where one needs to try to get along as peacefully and mercifully as possible.
In The Last Dark Place, Inspector Abe Lieberman of the Chicago police is boarding a plane in Yuma, Arizona, escorting a hit man who’s handcuffed to him. Suddenly an airport custodian pulls a pistol and shoots the prisoner dead. The custodian in turn is shot and arrested, but he can’t provide much information about who hired him to carry out the hit. Finding the answer to that question will be Lieberman’s next job.
Along with preventing a gang war between Chinese and Hispanic gangs.
And, perhaps most difficult of all, organizing and paying for his grandson’s bar mitzvah.
The Lieberman books are deceptive. They seem mostly quiet, even cozy. But they are mercilessly realistic, and Lieberman is an ancient kind of law enforcer – almost like the Judges of the Old Testament. As often as not he brokers street justice, even setting up the odd extrajudicial execution. For Lieberman it’s about people and community most of all, and sometimes the law just doesn’t understand.
The Last Dark Place is really a fine police story, for those of us who like our mysteries quiet.
A gospel song that has captured the imagination of many Americans is the 1932 piece written by Oklahoma native Albert E. Brumley called, “I’ll Fly Away.” Brumley wrote over 800 songs and is honored in the Country Song Writers Hall of Fame. The lyric is still under copyright, so I won’t copy it here, but maybe you know half of the words already.
“The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away” (Ps 90:10 ESV).
Meyer can suffer bores without pain. He finds them interesting. He says the knack of being able to bore almost anybody is a great art. He says he studies it.
Among all the riches of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, The Empty Copper Sea holds a place all its own. Aside from being an artifact of MacDonald’s strongest period, it’s also the book where we get to see our hero most emphatically and ecstatically in love. Even willing to (drum roll, wait for it) commit.
McGee, semi-legal “salvage specialist,” is not at his best as the story begins. He’s just gotten home from a grueling voyage, undertaken as a favor for a friend. He just wants to relax a while. He’s tired; he’s feeling old. The world seems dull and full of irritations.
And along comes Van Harder, an old boating acquaintance. Van is a former drunk who’s now a born-again Christian, punctiliously maintaining his sobriety and rebuilding his life. He had been captaining a boat for a rich man up in the town of Timber Bay, when he suddenly got sick and lost consciousness. When he was awakened (by a kick from the sheriff’s boot) his boss had disappeared and he was being blamed for the disaster. The sheriff believes he had fallen off the wagon. Now no one will hire him.
Van says he knows that Trav recovers things for people, in return for half the value. He estimates the value of his personal reputation, he says, at twenty-thousand dollars. So he’ll pay Trav ten-thousand dollars to go up to Timber Bay and prove his innocence. To either find the boss’s body, or locate him wherever he’s run off to.
Trav and his economist friend Meyer travel to Timber Bay, to find that there’s a lot of speculation about the missing boss. The body was never recovered, and an increasing number of indications suggest he has absconded to Mexico with his Scandinavian mistress.
They encounter and interview a series of characters – all of them well-rounded and interesting. But Trav’s heart isn’t in it – he’s flirting with too many women and getting into too many bar fights.
Until he meets Gretel Tuckerman. Gretel is tall and healthy and beautiful, sister to the missing boss’s right-hand man, for whom she is caring, as he has suffered a brain injury. Some of John D. MacDonald’s most lyrical prose follows, as we watch Travis blissfully in love.
It’s doomed, of course, but that’s for another book (The Green Ripper).
I’m not much good tonight, I fear. Got into a spot of pother over on Basefook, and it’s interfering with my concentration. I’ll tell you more later … or maybe not.
Anyway, here’s one of my favorite hymns — “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go,” by the blind pastor George Matheson, who has to be my favorite hymn writer (terrible admission for a Lutheran), because he has only 2 famous hymns, and both are at or near the top of my list.
Have a good evening, and pray for me if it crosses your mind.
