‘Return Fire,’ by Tom Barber

Tom Barber, author of Return Fire (part of the Sam Archer thriller series) is apparently a very young man. So I suppose I should cut him some slack in criticizing his prose. He seems to have been pretty successful as a novelist (which I certainly can’t claim), so he must be doing something right.

Return Fire, which I got through a free offer, is another example of the genre I call… what do I call it? I forget. Tonight I’ll call it Movie Thrillers in Print. The idea is to give readers the same irrational thrill they get from a John Wick kind of movie. The story won’t stand up to much logical analysis, but there will be thrills galore.

Sam Archer, our hero, is a former London policeman who moved to America (he has dual citizenship) to join the FBI, then joined an antiterrorist unit in the New York City Police Department. He is engaged to Alice Vargas, a member of the same squad (how did they work that?), but she went on vacation to Spain after a lover’s quarrel. Now she’s been kidnapped, and evidence suggests she’s being held in London. Sam and several of his friends from work are assigned to fly to London and assist in the investigation (we’re supposed to believe a cop would be allowed to work a case involving his fiancée). But little do they know they’re all being maneuvered into a kill zone by a vengeful master criminal.

Plausibility is not a high priority here. As in action movies, our hero and his friends suffer incredible physical punishment (including one guy being technically dead for a couple minutes) and just keep on fighting. About a ton of lead gets expended through firearms, both Glocks (all handguns are Glocks) and automatic weapons, but somehow only peripheral characters get killed, at least at first. Cars get shot to pieces before – eventually – somebody thinks of shooting out a tire to stop one. A pistol shot is used to open a padlock (safety tip: you can’t generally do that).

Aside from logic problems, the prose was weak. The author has a university degree in English and should know not to misplace his modifiers. Example: “Dressed in tracksuit bottoms and a sweat-stained t-shirt, blood was spattered on a white wall.” (You’ll note that the sentence is telling us how the blood was dressed.) There are awkward lines like, “Before long, what had been lying just under the surface between them had quickly caught fire.”

And finally, the author has an annoying tick of not knowing when to quit. He likes to close chapters with a zinger, which often doesn’t zing but just weakens the previous line with a redundancy. For instance, he says of the kidnap victim, who has spent a terrifying day in brutal captivity:

She’d never been to London before and so far the jury was out on whether she’d ever want to come back.

Today hadn’t exactly been the most pleasant of welcomes.

Now re-read that passage without the last line. Works better, doesn’t it?

However, I did finish Return Fire, so I can’t claim it wasn’t readable. Author Barber is young enough that he might possibly someday refine his craft.

‘The Tale of Sarcastic Halli’

Stained glass image of Harald Hardrada in Kirkwall Cathedral, the Shetland Islands. Credit: Colin Smith.

Tonight, another tale from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. This one is called The Tale of Sarcastic Halli. It’s a little longer than the last one’s I’ve read and offers several points of interest, though there are a few problems as well.

Halli is an Icelandic poet who has a string of adventures in Norway and elsewhere during the time of King Harald Hardrada. His adventures tend to involve rather coarse jokes and tricks.

Halli first meets Harald while sailing up the Trondheimsfjord. With amazing impudence – especially considering King Harald’s well-known temper – he takes an insult from him (an insult, by the way, which was particularly offensive to Norsemen), and turns it back on the king. Harald is apparently in a good mood, because when he returns to the town he accepts Halli into his household. He seems to keep Halli around as a kind of a jester (along with a dwarf about whom I’d never read before), permitting him quite a lot of leeway. He even lets him get away with an ambivalent insult to his wife (Thora, Erling Skjalgsson’s granddaughter), using the opportunity to score off her himself.

Some of the references to Halli’s poems are hard to understand. At one point, in the court of King Harold Godwinsson of England (who would later defeat Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge), he gets away with a reward for a poem which he privately admits is just a load of rubbish. Apparently we’re meant to understand that the English were so unsophisticated about skaldic poetry that you could unload anything on them at a profit.

Two of the stories prominently feature what we like to call the “f-word.” No doubt this is faithful to the text – however, such earthy subject matter harmonizes rather poorly with the sometimes stilted quality of the literalist translation.

Still, this was an intriguing tale, showcasing the famously ruthless Harald Hardrada in a surprisingly genial light.

The Battle of Holy River, YouTube, and ‘Seraffyn’s European Adventure’

There’s a sort of a book review hidden in this rambling post, somewhere further on, but to start with I just want to bellyache a little about how much I’m suffering my art. Which is writing novels, in case you’ve forgotten due to all the time I take between publications.

I’m happy to say that, to my own surprise, I’ve been keeping up my new regimen of getting up at 6:30 a.m. to write. My goal, nothing superhuman, is 1,000 words a day, and most days I do at least that much.

But right now I’ve been slowed down a little. From time to time my story runs up against actual historical events and real locations, and that calls for research. Stuck in the 20th Century though I am in spirit, I have to admit that the internet provides opportunities that weren’t available back when I wrote The Year of the Warrior (which, if you don’t recall, was only about twenty years after the events in the story).

My challenge is to describe a voyage by Erling Skjalgsson, under the leadership of King Knut of Denmark/England, to the Baltic Sea to attack King Olaf Haraldsson (St. Olaf) of Norway. I have to get them through the Skagerrak and the Kattegat, the entrances to the Baltic, and into the Limfjord, where the saga says Knut gathered his fleet. And then over to present-day Sweden (the border of Skåne, which was Danish at the time) to fight the Battle of Helge å (Holy River). There Olaf pulls off a clever (but slightly confusing) stratagem that I’ll have to work out too. I might mention that historians disagree about the actual location of the battle – there are two Holy Rivers in Sweden, and a third site has also been proposed (purely, I think, out of meanness). I believe I’m going to stay with the traditional site unless somebody makes a strong argument to change my mind.

Anyway, the great thing I’ve “discovered” (and by discovered I mean figured out long after all the other writers did) is YouTube videos. The best resource I found is a series of videos called Sailing Magic Carpet (Episode 1 above), produced by a young couple (I think they might actually be married, which is nice) taking a sailboat into the Baltic. They sail the Limfjord the wrong way for my purposes (it had no western mouth during the Viking Age), but they still provide a lot of vicarious experience with sailing conditions and topography. Unfortunately, they sail up the wrong coast of Sweden for my purposes, but still the videos were useful.

They also recommended a book called Seraffyn’s European Adventure, by Lin and Larry Pardey. This book describes a similar voyage made back in the late 1970s by the Pardeys, in a pilot boat built by Larry himself. Lin was a very good writer, and she does an excellent job describing a simpler – but more dangerous – voyage, back before satellite navigation. Recommended.

I think I may be able to get back to 1,000 words a day tomorrow.

Sunday Singing: He Will Hold Me Fast

Today’s hymn was published in 1906, but the tune we use in my church circles was written within the last ten years. English hymnist Ada Ruth Habershon (1861-1918) wrote the text and many other hymns as well as Bible studies and books. She contributed to the songs distributed and sung during the Liverpool Revival of 1905.

The words performed in the video above are not exactly as copied below; both versions deserve our attention.

1 When I fear my faith will fail,
Christ will hold me fast;
When the tempter would prevail,
He can hold me fast!

Refrain:
He will hold me fast,
He will hold me fast;
For my Savior loves me so,
He will hold me fast.

2 I could never keep my hold,
He must hold me fast;
For my love is often cold,
He must hold me fast. [Refrain]

3 I am precious in His sight,
He will hold me fast;
Those He saves are His delight,
He will hold me fast. [Refrain]

4 He’ll not let my soul be lost,
Christ will hold me fast;
Bought by Him at such a cost,
He will hold me fast. [Refrain]

A Ruined City in Old England and Some Language

Lars has been talking about poetry this week, which provoked me to consider it for the Saturday post.

A 700 A.D. Anglo-Saxon poem called “The Ruin” speaks of a city that was gorgeous even when destroyed.

Well-wrought this wall-stone which fate has broken
The city bursts, the work of giants crumbles.

In this translation by Michael O’Brien, you can see what is and what once was: frost on the stones, brightly color scraps of wood, bath-houses, and attractive homes. It had been a welcoming, beautiful home–a “haven.” Skilled soldiers lived here “proud and wine-flushed.” The baths were obviously luxurious. Only one wall remained standing.

Many men fell in the days of wrath;
Death took all the valor of earth.

Did invaders sack this city? No, it was the curse on all creation that eventually wore it down. One way or another, we all see the day of wrath. How do we live today in the light of what’s to come?

What else can we get into today?

Poetry: David Oates has a few verses on “farthing” and going too far.

Language: “We are lucky that English is our language because it’s better than, say, French for poetry. All those millions of words and all those different ways of saying the same, or similar, things. And new words all the time.” 

Parting Quotes: Here are a couple of statements pulled from Joseph Addison’s 1716 play The Drummer.

“That is well said, John, an honest man, that is not quite sober, has nothing to fear.”

“I should think myself a very bad woman if I had done what I do for a farthing less.”

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

‘Downeast Enigma,’ by Charles J. Thayer

When I started reading Charles J. Thayer’s Downeast Enigma, I thought it very poorly written, but I figured I’d give it a chance. Now that I’ve finished it, I’m of two minds. I still think it wasn’t well written, but the story was effective in its way.

Steve Wilson, our hero, is a former bank auditor who took early retirement to become a private investigator. He calls his agency Paradox-Research (ignorance of proper hyphen use is a writing red flag, in my opinion). He lives aboard his Maine lobster boat, where he’s often visited by his girlfriend Amanda, an FBI agent.

When a Boston banker’s private plane crashes in the Gulf of Maine, killing him, his bank asks Steve to look into his affairs. There was a suspicious intrusion on his computer after the accident, and they fear the dead man might have been involved in something illicit. His death might even be murder. Steve goes to work with the help of a hacker friend, and Amanda seems to have lots of freedom to help him out in her spare time.

I found Downeast Enigma a strange mystery novel. Most of Steve’s investigation seems to be carried out through phone calls and online (though he does interview some people). All the violence (and there is some) happens offstage. You might even call this book a cyber-cozy mystery.

My greatest problems were with the prose. The book is written in the present tense, which I consider an affectation – though I can’t honestly say it interfered with my reading. The dialogue was remarkably wooden – all the characters speak as if writing a report, and everybody pretty much talks the same way.

Still, I read through to the end, and the plot kept my interest. I’m not panning it entirely, but I don’t think I’ll rush out and buy another book in the series.

‘The Tale of Mani the Poet,’ and ‘The Tale of Ottar the Black’

My friends Einar and Tore-Ravn with the statue of King Magnus Erlingsson in Etne, Norway.

Tonight, a couple more tales of skalds (poets) from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, through which I’m working my way at my own stately pace.

The first is The Tale of Mani the Poet, frankly one of the least impressive stories I’ve run across here. The best argument for its historical authenticity is its sheer banality.

The story isn’t even told in sequence. First we hear how Mani the Poet composed a poem for King Magnus V (also known as Magnus Erlingsson, 1156-1184, son of a different Erling from the one in my novels. I visited his birthplace in Etne, Norway last summer. Photo above) while their ship was becalmed in a harbor awaiting a favorable wind, and was rewarded with a shirt.

Then we learn how Mani first met the king. He showed up at the Swedish border, returning from a trip to Rome. His head was shaved (I assume he was a pilgrim), he was thin, and he was near naked. But he knew how to act in front of a king, and better yet, he knew how to compose poems. Then we’re told about a couple poems Mani composed for Magnus. We’re also told the king’s nickname for him. It’s a play on words in Old Norse that doesn’t really translate well.

After that comes The Tale of Ottar the Black. This one is more interesting — especially for the best kind of people, those who read my novels. Ottar the Black was a poet in the court of King (Saint) Olav Haraldsson. He composed a poem in praise of Olaf’s wife Astrid (whom you may recall from King of Rogaland), a boneheaded move which had to offend Olav. So he was thrown into a dungeon, awaiting judgment and execution. Then Sighvat the Poet (whom you may also remember from my novels) shows up to give him advice, resulting not only in his life being saved, but in his being rewarded. The story provides an interesting, rare insight into Olav’s domestic life.

‘Cozy Up to Blood,’ by Colin Conway

I’m very fond of Colin Conway’s 509 police procedural series, so I thought I’d try out one of his Cozy Up series. Cozy Up to Blood is third in a fairly bizarre series of “Cozy” mysteries. Imagine a cozy whose hero is Murray Lee, a 6’ 3” former biker, covered in tattoos (he does, however, like to knit). He’s on the run from Satan’s Spawn, a biker gang he betrayed for the sake of a woman. Now he’s in the FBI witness protection program, but he keeps blowing his cover because he gets involved in murder mysteries. So the Spawn get word of where he is, and he has to flee again.

In Cozy Up to Blood, Murray turns up in Belfry, Oregon, an island town, just before the bridge washes out in a flood. The town is flooded with tourists who’ve come for a festival celebrating a series of books and movies about sparkly vampires, clearly based on “Twilight.” There’s really no murder mystery in this story, but Murray does investigate a couple thefts (styling himself a “salvage specialist” in the Travis McGee tradition) while trying to figure out how to escape his biker pursuers, who are waiting to roar into town as soon as the flood subsides.

This book didn’t work at all for me. I got the impression that it was supposed to be a comic story, but the jokes didn’t work. I liked Murray okay, but I have no interest in reading more of his adventures.

‘Einar Skulason’s Tale’

Sigurd the Crusader in procession through Constantinople.

It’s been a while since I reviewed one of the sagas from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. I’ve come near the end of Volume I, where we find a collection of short stories about Icelandic skalds (poets). Just a couple pages long each. These stories aren’t complex – they’re more in the character of celebrity anecdotes. The old poets, home on their farms after years of adventurous living, tell stories to their grandchildren – “I met this or that king, and this is what he was like.”

Tonight’s story is Einar Skulason’s Tale. Einar was a skald in the court of the kings Sigurd the Crusader (1089-1130) and his brother Eystein (circa 1088-1123). These two brothers ruled jointly under the old Norse laws of succession, and did it without going to war with each other – which later kings generally failed to do. Sigurd is best remembered for going on a crusade, the first European monarch to do so. The saga accounts of their reigns offer fascinating personality contrasts.

Those personalities are apparent in this series of three anecdotes. First of all, Einar (who seems to be renowned for quick composition) shows up late for dinner with King Eystein, and is required to compose a poem before the king has finished draining his goblet of wine. He succeeds (the poem is preserved here) and Eystein is pleased. The end. It’s a good-natured story.

The next two stories involve King Sigurd, a rather different character. In the first, King Sigurd catches a thief who happens to be a companion of Einar’s, and tells him the man will be beaten until Einar completes a new poem. Einar finishes in time to stop the strokes at five. Again, the poem is included in the text.

The final story is a little more complicated, and Einar gets a bit of his own back. Sigurd orders him to compose a poem before a departing ship has passed a certain holm, and Einar demands a reward if he succeeds, which he does. And yes, the poem is here as evidence.

I was reminded, as I read, of a couple friends I have in my Viking reenactment group. They like to tell stories of meeting celebrities. One managed to spend time with celebrities at Høstfest in Minot (something that doesn’t happen much anymore, security being tighter). He’s met Victor Borge, the Mandrell Sisters, and Willie Nelson, among others. Another ran into Lee Marvin and Richard Boone (not at the festival). Which goes to show you, Vikings don’t change much, even after a millennium.

‘Rogue,’ by Alex Parman

This is not a proper review. I quit half-way through Alex Parman’s (the name is a nom de plume for a male/female writing team) Rogue. This is the first novel in a series about a loose cannon FBI agent. Ordinarily I’d just pass by a book I didn’t finish, but I felt I ought to leave a warning about this one… which I readily admit is well written.

Cyrus Jennings had a brilliant career at the Washington DC office of the FBI, until his sense of justice led him to stray out of bounds. That led to his transfer to Denver, a much less desirable posting. His true specialty is cybercrime, but his investigator’s instincts incline him to get involved in hands-on investigations.

When a highly popular politician (party not stated, but clearly a Democrat) running for Senate drops dead while jogging, Cyrus is suspicious. He particularly suspects her bodyguard, whose responses just seem a little off. This leads him to ask questions that aren’t supposed to be asked, getting him suspended by his boss. But he has resources of his own, and won’t be deterred…

It was around this point that it became pretty clear to me that this book was about a right-wing conspiracy to undermine our democracy, financed by super-rich oligarchs. I found it particularly ironic that the things the right wing is accused of doing here are pretty much things the left wing is actually doing in the real world. So this story seemed to be projection, pure and simple.

I dropped it. It was well written. The characters were good. The dialogue was good. The dramatic tension was well orchestrated.

But if, like me, you’re tired of being called a fascist, you might not want to buy Rogue.