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Fiction, Reviews

‘Lone Wolf,’ by Gregg Hurwitz

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Clouds boiled up over the opposing ridge, backlit and tumultuous. A scorched violet sangria sky breathed its last breaths. Nighttime had dusk in its teeth already, choking it out. There was electricity in the air, and the sky was vast and dangerous, and somewhere far to the west over the Malibu hills, the tide thrashed against the coast. Alone for a moment on this spot, Evan had the feeling of standing on the planet itself.

At this point in my reading life, there are two annual events I look forward to like Christmas. One is Andrew Klavan’s Cameron Winter novels. The other is Gregg Hurwitz’s Orphan X novels. A new Orphan X is just out. It’s called Lone Wolf, and I think it may be the best so far.

Evan Smoak, our hero, lives his life according to his operational Ten Commandments (essentially based on Twelve Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson, who is a friend of the author). This keeps his existence tight and controlled, as he carries out his vocation of helping the helpless, when summoned by a call to his private phone number.

So it’s out of character for him to lose himself for days on an alcoholic binge. But that’s just what he’s doing at the beginning of Lone Wolf. To be fair, he’s been having a rough time lately. His goth foster daughter Joey, who just started college, has decided she wants to pledge a sorority, and is suffering all kinds of female angst. The neighbors at his condo are trying to involve him in a HOA president takeover scheme. But the real problem is that he just met – at last – his birth father, and the meeting was nothing at all like he’d anticipated.

But he has another family member, also recently discovered – a loser, alcoholic brother. And that brother has a daughter – Evan’s niece. When she calls in desperation, asking Evan to help her find her missing dog (the ugliest dog Evan ever saw), he tries to explain that this isn’t the kind of thing he does. But her tears move him irrationally. Okay, he’ll do what he can.

Little does he know that the search will lead him to a murder – the murder of a brilliant scientist in the Artificial Intelligence field. When he realizes that this murder is just one in a string of assassinations, all carried out against people with connections to cutting-edge computing, he has to go hunting for the assassin, who turns out to be an incredibly dangerous – and ruthless – young woman.

Gregg Hurwitz turns out excellent prose (though I did catch one grammatic error). But where he really excels is as a plotter. Lone Wolf is packed with breakneck action, and the breathing intervals feature hilarious farce, as Evan and Joey, each in their own ways, find themselves operating in worlds way outside their comfort zones.

There’s also a disturbing preview of a possible dystopian future. And in the end, another personal kick in the stomach for Evan.

Lone Wolf is a really, really good novel, in spite of some “girl boss” moments. Cautions for language and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Grettir the Strong,’ part 2

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The father and son parted with little love lost between them. Many people wished Grettir a safe journey, but few a safe return.

I have finished reading The Saga of Grettir the Strong, in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. I have much to say about it, though I fear a lot of it strays into the deep grass.

My main takeaway from the saga, as I stated yesterday, is that the real-life hero, Grettir Asmundarsson, seems to have been a psychopath, very likely suffering from PTSD. Even in a book written in the 14th Century, his status echoes ancient tribal attitudes. The heroes of ancestral times were not admired for their moral virtue. A remnant of this world view remains, in residual form, even in our English language. Our word “great” has two meanings. The common one (in our time) is that of “important” or “admirable.” But its older meaning was “large.” We still speak of a Great Hall or a greatcoat. In the same way, old heroes like Sigurd the Dragon Slayer could massacre whole villages of innocent people and still be considered heroes and great men. Because greatness was about magnitude, not virtue. Likewise, Grettir is a hero because he does things in a big way, whether it’s killing men or lifting heavy objects.

Reading the saga from a historical perspective, I noted that most of the episodes where Grettir comes off as heroic by our standards – a virtuous hero – are implausible scenes involving either invulnerable berserkers or supernatural creatures like witches or ghosts. Even the scenes of Grettir’s death, which are likely to have some factual base, are embroidered with elements of witch’s curses, which the saga writer found necessary in order to explain his invulnerable hero’s death at the hands of common men. (Though in an odd interpolation, Grettir finds a friend who’s even stronger than himself. No actual magic is attributed to this character, but one gets the feeling he’s not entirely human.)

The only plausible episode where Grettir exhibits mercy is one calculated to advance his own interests. He spares the life of a son of Snorri the Godi [Chieftain] (an important saga character who makes a brief appearance in my novel, West Oversea), who has come out after him as a sort of bounty hunter. Grettir understands that winning Snorri’s friendship through letting his son live could win him a powerful friend, something he badly needs by now.

Indeed, one remarkable thing about Grettir’s saga is the fact that he had all kinds of prominent connections – “Almost all the chieftains in the country were related to Grettir… either by blood or by marriage.” He’s related to the Norwegian royal family too. And yet he can’t seem to catch a break with the law. (For all I’ve written and said about the importance of the Law to the Norse, your father’s status and who you knew counted for a lot. Rich men’s sons could usually find a way to wiggle out of legal scrapes with their skin intact, even as today. The fact that Grettir couldn’t make this old boy network work for him, seems to have convinced his family and friends that he must have been under some unique curse).

There’s a hint of character development in the later chapters, when Grettir, formerly entirely reckless of consequences, now searches for a way to attain a peaceful life. He’s been outlawed, which means he can’t leave the country and is legal prey for killing. In the end, he will hold the record for survival in an outlaw state – 20 years (though there’s some inconsistency about that figure in the text here). He holes up on the natural fortress of Drangey island, where he fights off repeated attacks. It’s at this point that he becomes a more sympathetic character. He’s terrified of the dark and of being alone – though he knows from experience that few men are to be trusted. Still, I couldn’t help wondering what his killers’ real story is – Grettir has been living by robbery, and he never hesitated to use violence. Stealing sheep and other food could have serious consequences in a marginal economy  The charge that his killers employed witchcraft is not impossible (at least technically – I don’t believe their magic actually worked), but it seems to me more likely the witchcraft stuff was added by the author (who was possibly related to Grettir) in order to make his hero more sympathetic. No small task, with this guy’s record.

An element in the saga which I’d never noticed before (perhaps it was bowdlerized in previous translations I’ve read, or maybe I just forgot) is a couple sexual situations. In one scene, which would have played better in the 14th Century than it does today, a serving woman makes fun of Grettir’s physical endowment, so he rapes her to teach her a lesson. In another, he spends some time sharing a house with a woman whose husband is away, saving her from a monstrous troll woman who’s been ravaging the farm. He leaves a souvenir behind:

Towards the end of that summer, Steinvor from Sandhaugar gave birth to a boy named Skeggi. At first he was said to be the son of Kjartan…. Skeggi was distinguished from all his brothers and sisters by his strength and build. By the age of fifteen he was the strongest person in north Iceland, and then his paternity was attributed to Grettir. Everyone thought he would grow into an outstanding man, but he died at the age of sixteen and there are no stories about him.

In sum, the Saga of Grettir the Strong is a powerful and memorable tale, and an amateur psychologist like me can spend unlimited time picking out clues concerning its underlying facts. That game can go on forever, because there’s no way to prove them wrong.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Grettir the Strong,’ part 1

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This is a partial review. The book I’ve been reading is one of the longer sagas in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, and (as I’ve said before) my reading time has been limited lately. But I’m about half way through with this one, so I thought I’d do what I’ve done with some other longer works in the past. This is an incremental review, my thoughts on what I’ve read so far. The saga under consideration is The Saga of Grettir the Strong, one of the great classics.

I’ve read Grettir’s Saga at least three times before, so the material is familiar. But my response this time is a little different from previous ones. Perhaps it’s this translation, which is more literal than most. I’m not generally a booster of literal translating, but possibly it’s conveying some nuances I’ve missed in the past. In any case, I find I have less sympathy for the hero this time around.

The Icelandic sagas are classic stories of violence on the frontier, stories that anticipate the American Western. One of the standard themes of the Westerns is, “What do we do with violent men, who are valuable but expensive?” We want the gunfighter to come in and clean up the town, but then we’d prefer him to ride off into the sunset and bother somebody else.

Grettir Asmundarsson is often referred to in the saga as “an accomplished man.” But the only accomplishments of his (aside from composing poetry) that we observe are fighting and lifting heavy objects. His family and friends support him (cautiously) because of his value in a brawl, but his impulse control seems poor, and he shows little indication of ever being domesticated, or wanting to be.

In fact, he shows all the signs of PTSD. He’s quick to react violently, he’s suspicious and socializes poorly, and he suffers night terrors. In the saga, this weakness is explained by a nightmarish fight with a revenant, what I called a “walker-again” in my novels – the Scandinavian ghost that’s kind of like a vampire or zombie. Grettir’s nightmarish fight with Glam, the ghost, is portrayed as an experience of such overwhelming horror that even our bold hero can’t undergo it without emotional scars (though he does, needless to say, “kill” the ghost.) What happened to the real-life Grettir we’ll never know, but fighting monsters is a pretty good metaphor for a traumatic experience in combat.

And that’s about all I can really say in Grettir’s defense. The rare occasions in the saga where he appears sympathetically are the most fantastic and implausible – like the ghost-fight, or his rescuing of a houseful of defenseless women from rapist berserkers. These are saga set pieces, the kind of episodes that show up again and again in sagas to keep things lively. I doubt they actually happened in the man’s life.

What I do believe is the stories of his murders, which generally seem to be acts of impulse and overkill.

More on Grettir tomorrow.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Bishop Murder Case,’ by S. S. Van Dine

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Tonight, another mystery classic. I was familiar with the name of the author, S. S. Van Dine, but I knew his Philo Vance character only through old movies (William Powell was the first to play him). Raymond Chandler called Philo Vance “the most asinine character in detective fiction,” and now that I’ve read The Bishop Murder Case, I can’t argue with him (though that was before Lawrence Sanders invented Archy McNally).

Philo Vance, New York City esthete and amateur detective, is called upon by the district attorney (who has apparently decided, after a couple of cases, that he can’t operate without the young twit’s help) to visit the home of the mathematician Prof. Dillard. In an archery range next to the house, a young friend of the family has been found killed by an arrow. Suspicion immediately falls on another young male friend, a rival for the affections of the professor’s daughter. But when a cryptic note is delivered to a newspaper, associating the killing with the nursery rhyme, “Who Killed Cock Robin?”, they all realize that this was part of a cold-blooded plan. When other murders, all with Mother Goose themes, follow, it comes down to breaking alibis and analyzing personalities – just the sort of thing at which Philo Vance excels.

What did I dislike about The Bishop Murder Case? First of all, the prose was stilted, over-long, and unnatural. The dialogue doesn’t sound like anything real people (even dilettantes) would say, and the narrative includes such lines as “’Sit down, Pyne,’ said Vance, with peremptory kindness.” (What does “peremptory kindness” mean?) There are some similarities to Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, but Lord Peter was always self-aware, and he played his eccentricities for laughs. Vance is singularly humorless.

Secondly, Vance relies heavily on very simplistic Freudian psychology, which has not aged well. The author goes so far as to affirm that extreme (even cruel) cynicism is a sign of mental health, because it eases repressions(!).

By this time in history, we’re used to seeing amateur sleuths in fiction working in cooperation with the official police, but the kind of slavish devotion the police in this book show to Philo Vance – to the extent that he actually takes the lead in their interrogations – is hard to swallow. They even let him bully them into breaking into a house without a warrant (in a very good cause, I’ll admit, but it was still implausible). The bulk of the district attorney’s business, it appears, is conducted at the stylish Stuyvesant Club, where Vance is also a member.  Also, a man is held in jail on suspicion long after events have pretty clearly demonstrated his innocence. Apparently habeus corpus doesn’t exist in Philo Vance’s world.

There’s a Norwegian character here, and I have to say I hated him cordially (among his other sins, he’s an Ibsen fan).

The author, S. S. Van Dine, is an interesting – and perhaps revealing – case study. His real name was Willard Huntington Wright, and he was a prominent art critic in the early 20th century. He was also a cocaine addict and a German sympathizer during World War I. When his career foundered, he took up writing mysteries, despite the fact that he despised the genre. In an exquisite irony of fate, his books proved popular, and he came to depend on them for a living. Applying a little Freudian psychology of my own, I wonder how much his self-hatred contributed to the generally acknowledged deterioration of his work over time. (And it wasn’t great at its best, if The Bishop Murder Case is any indication.)

In short, I did not enjoy The Bishop Murder Case. It dragged on and on, annoying me increasingly as I read. Recommended only if you want to fill a hole in your education in Golden Age mystery stories.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Fire, Burn!’ by John Dickson Carr

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I’ve read a little John Dickson Carr in my time – mostly short stories. An American who set his stories primarily in England, Carr is most famous for his characters Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale. He was one of the foremost mystery writers of his time, but I’ve always found his work a trifle dull, like most of the “Cozy” subgenre.

I’d never heard of his character Inspector John Cheviot before. A web search told me little about him. I get the impression Cheviot is the hero of at least one other book, and that both involve time travel as well as murder. I would like to know more about the underlying science fictional rationale for the time jump, because while this book, Fire, Burn!, was intriguing, I have questions.

At the beginning of the book, Inspector Cheviot gets into a London cab in the mid-1950s, and suddenly finds himself riding in a hansom cab in the late 1820s. He’s not exactly an intruder in the past – he seems to be a well-known figure in London Society – not always in a positive way. One of his scandalous activities is applying to be part of the newly organized London Metropolitan Police – the very first iteration of Scotland Yard. His application to be their new Superintendent is shocking, as Yard detectives are definitely not supposed to be gentlemen. They are essentially thugs, thieves set to catch thieves, and the population despises them.

But Cheviot – still conscious of being a 20th Century man – is galvanized. He’s long been a student of Yard history, and he’s often dreamed of the things he could have accomplished there with his modern knowledge and investigative techniques.

He soon gets a chance to show what he can do. Sent (rather contemptuously) to investigate the theft of bird seed from exotic bird cages belonging to a prominent society lady, he witnesses a young woman’s murder. The woman is shot to death, but he hears no gunshot, and no one seemed to be in a position to fire the fatal bullet.

On a personal level, Cheviot finds himself already in a relationship with a beautiful, passionate woman. He also makes a deadly enemy – an arrogant and cruel military officer who challenges him to a duel.

Where Fire, Burn! really excelled as a novel (in this reader’s opinion) was in its vivid recreation of early 19th Century London. The author had clearly done a lot of research, and the descriptions were highly convincing.

The mystery was also pretty good. The solution was clever, and I didn’t see it coming – though I thought I did. The book moved a little slowly (by the debased standards of this present age), and the female characters seemed a little stylized, the kind of languid females who are always getting the vapors in old dramas. Nevertheless, all in all, I rate Fire, Burn! high as an original historical mystery.

I do wish we were given some clue as to how Cheviot travels through time, though. Is it a dream? A rift in the Third Dimension? No clue is offered, and the book ends very abruptly.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Non-fiction

Orwell Reviews ‘That Hideous Strength,’ and News from the Wars

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George Orwell both liked and disliked C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. In his 1945 review printed in Manchester Evening News, Orwell outlined the plot and mad scheme of the enemy, saying it was not “outrageously improbable.”

Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.

But he disliked the supernatural elements in it. Bringing in God and demons tips the scales, as it were, “one always knows which side is going to win.” (via Andrew Snyder on Twitter)

And one other thought:

Culture War: Daniel Strand reviews Russell Moore recent book. “Losing Our Religion would be more persuasive if—instead of affecting to be a simple piece of pastoral counseling—it straightforwardly acknowledged its own agenda. Moore has an argument to make, and he wants to advance his project and defeat his opponents. But his book frames the gospel as some pure, otherworldly abstraction that has little to do with power or politics.”

More Lewis: Joseph Pollard has three posts on Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. Here is a link to all three. “While the Narnia series positively oozes with Christian symbolism and biblical allusion, in this, his final work of fiction, Lewis effectually communicates what so many thoroughly orthodox theology textbooks tirelessly aim to do: Till We Have Faces (1956) gently coaxes the reader to come to terms with both the futility of quarreling with the Almighty, and the resplendent beauty of the thrice-holy King.”

Economic Freedom: When Howard Ahmanson “heard [author John M.] Perkins speak, he heard something like his father’s message from the 1960s: free enterprise works, and small banks help people with modest incomes get mortgages so they have better homes. In India, the free enterprise message would take five more years to sink in, but in 1989 voters threw out Congress Party socialism. The result? India in recent years has been the world’s fastest-growing major economy.”

From History’s Wars: Patrick Kurp shares a few words from letters from a Civil War soldier. “Historians attribute more than half the 618,000 Union and Confederate deaths in the war not to battlefield wounds but disease: dysentery, pneumonia, malaria, typhus, chicken pox, enteric (typhoid) fever.”

Photo: Main Street, Iowa. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Wood’s Reach,’ by Steven Becker

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As I’ve confessed before, I seem irrationally compelled to be forever searching for another fictional detective to fill the gap left behind by John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee. So when I discovered there was a series character named Mac Travis, who’s involved with boats and lives in Florida, my old obsession could not be stifled. Steven Becker’s Mac Travis, hero of Wood’s Reach, however, is nothing like Travis McGee (though the name choice has to be intentional). I hope my disappointment didn’t sour my attitude to the book.

Travis McGee, for all his coolness, was essentially the ultimate Peter Pan, a boy who never grew up. He took responsibility as he took his retirement – in installments. He cared deeply about his clients (often damsels in distress) for the duration of his cases, but never took on the burdens of conventional family life.

Steven Becker’s Mac Travis is the diametric opposite. The owner of a struggling diving business, he frets over his debts and yearns for the woman he loves, who has decided they have no future. When an unethical fortune hunter offers Mac a lot of money to help him find a fabled treasure site, he feels as if he has no choice but to take the job. But when he realizes the kind of deal he’s signed up for, Mac starts planning to plunder the plunderer.

I’ve often said that I like boat stories, which was another reason I should have relished Wood’s Reach. But somehow it didn’t work for me. Maybe it’s sailboating stories I actually like. This book mainly involved people rushing around in power boats, alternately pursuing and fleeing from one another, and intersecting now and then to fight, threaten, or palaver. It all seemed kind of frenetic and implausible to this landlubber.

Still, there was a lot of action. The writing wasn’t bad.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Drowning at Dyes Inlet,’ by D. D. Black

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At Dyes Inlet, an estuary in Washington state’s Puget Sound, a woman walking her dog discovers the body of a drowned, middle-aged woman. The corpse has a crude heart carved into its back. Because the local police department is stretched thin, they call in Thomas Austin, a semi-famous former NYPD detective who has moved there in the wake of his wife’s murder. Austin agrees to help out. He is paired with a new partner, a prickly but attractive female detective recently imported from Los Angeles. So begins The Drowning at Dyes Inlet, by D. D. Black.

It’s soon apparent that this murder is identical to an old unsolved case from the 1970s. A suspect quickly appears – but unfortunately this man is the brother of the sheriff, who is running for governor and desperate to avoid a bad press. It will all build up to a final, tense hostage situation at a wedding.

Thomas Austin has one intriguing characteristic as a fictional character – he has synesthesia – the condition where people experience tastes and smells in response to visual stimuli. This was interesting, though I didn’t see that it contributed to the plot in any noticeable way. Austin himself was not a very interesting character – and in fact, none of the characters here were very interesting (to this reader). They had their quirks and eccentricities, but I didn’t recognize them as people. They didn’t talk like real people – they opened up with personal information where real people wouldn’t. The dialogue simply didn’t remind me of anything I’d ever heard. And the villain’s motivations didn’t strike me as plausible.

I got the impression that perhaps the author is on the autistic scale, and doesn’t understand personalities. Alternatively (and more positively) he might just be such a nice person that he doesn’t understand how bad people think. One way or the other, I didn’t find The Drowning at Dyes Inlet very well-written. This is the sixth book in an eight-book series, so somebody must be reading them, but I can’t recommend them.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Knock at the Door,’ by Peter Rowlands

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I’ve had a conflicted relationship with Peter Rowlands’ novels. I like his prose, and I very much like his characters. But I find his plotting a touch weak. In writing A Knock at the Door, he set himself a daunting plotting task. It was – mostly – successful.

Rory Cavenham is a web designer, temporarily out of work. He’s staying at a friend’s large house in England’s Cotswolds when on a rainy night a woman knocks on the door. She’s young and attractive, and soaked to the skin. He’s reluctant to let her in, but she seems to have no one else to help her, so he does. To his astonishment, she claims to believe the year to be 1972. Her name, she tells him, is Rebecca. She is adamant that she doesn’t want to go to a hospital or talk to the police.

Rory turns to the internet (something Rebecca doesn’t understand), and soon learns that there was indeed a girl named Rebecca who disappeared in 1972 – a convicted murderer who escaped from a psychiatric facility. But how could she turn up fifty years later, little older than when she vanished? He also discovers another missing woman who could be her, who supposedly died in a fire a couple years back. But, oddly enough, that woman was a documentary researcher who’d been researching the original Rebecca’s story…

And when uniformed thugs show up to try to kidnap Rebecca, the whole thing starts spinning out of control,

I was often reminded of my own novel, Death’s Doors, as I read A Knock at the Door. The author navigated the same kind of plot situations, where a time-traveling newcomer has to be guided – and to some extent protected – through and from culture shock. The mystery of Rebecca’s identity was a compelling one, and kept me reading with fascination.

Rory, our hero, is a good character, but artistically weak in that he commits the sin of acting naively, in exactly the same way, on more than one occasion.

The final resolution – really a series of resolutions – didn’t, in my opinion, quite live up to expectations. It was emotionally satisfying, but less so in dramatic terms. In short, it fizzled a bit – not entirely, but the bang wasn’t quite what I hoped for. Also, I did see it coming, at least to some extent.

Rebecca’s culture shock was handled reasonably well, but in her surprise at how the world has changed, she fails to mention something that would surely have been remarked on by a true time traveler – the major demographic changes in England since 1972. I can understand why an author would feel it necessary to skip that part, but it weakened plausibility a little.

Still, all in all, A Knock at the Door was an enjoyable story.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Fabled Falcon,’ by Neil Howarth

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As I work my way through the backlog of free books I’ve been acquiring through online deals, I found that I’d arrived at two books in a row about art experts. The last one was Aaron Elkins’ A Glancing Light (review a few inches down), which I liked quite a lot. I liked Neil Howarth’s The Fabled Falcon too, at the beginning, but my enjoyment faded as the story proceeded.

Darius Fletcher (known as “Fletch,” not to be confused with Gregory McDonald’s American “Fletch” character) is a former soldier and a former convict. Now he’s a professor of art at the (fictional) Canterbury University in England. His college is funded by the slightly shady Bancroft Foundation. Fletch is a little shady himself, providing occasional help to an art forger friend, but he genuinely loves art in itself.

One day while he’s lecturing, he looks out at his audience and sees a man there who is not a student. That man turns out to be dead. Fletch recognizes him, though – he’s Francis, a young man with whom he recently worked on an archaeological dig on Malta. Francis had confided to him that he’d discovered something fantastic – a signed painting by the master Caravaggio, who only signed one other known work.

Though Fletch is briefly detained by the police, the Bancroft Foundation quickly secures his release, and sends him off to Malta to find out what’s happened to Francis’ discovery. What he doesn’t yet know – but will soon discover – is that this treasure is being sought by competing sinister, ruthless, and deep-pocketed interests. Teaming up with a beautiful Russian Interpol agent, Fletch does his best to stay one step ahead of them, following cryptic clues to uncover ancient secrets.

If all this suggests to you parallels with Dan Brown and Indiana Jones, you’re not wrong. For this reader, the book steadily lost credibility as mystical and supernatural elements began to intrude – implicitly, at least. I probably would be okay with it if those supernatural elements were Christian, but here the flavor is explicitly Gnostic.

On top of that, there was a definite Hollywood approach, not only in the Fighting Girl Boss character of the Interpol agent, but also in the hero’s tendency to quickly heal from injuries and come back battle-ready.

So all in all, I was disappointed with The Fabled Falcon. It was heretical and implausible (but I repeat myself).