It’s always nice to discover a new hard-boiled detective writer (and character) who’s worth reading. All in all, I’m pretty satisfied with Chris Orcutt’s first Dakota Stevens mystery, A Real Piece of Work.
Dakota Stevens, the hero and narrator, is a former FBI agent who’s set himself up as a New York P.I. He mentions appreciating the classic detectives Marlowe and Spenser, which is a good sign. He leans more to the Spenser side, I think, being essentially an optimist. And he has plenty to be optimistic about, having for his partner not some dull John Watson but the sexy Svetlana Krüsh, a long-legged Russian-born chess master.
The plot involves the art world (oddly, I’ve been reading a lot of books involving art forgery lately), Middle Eastern terrorists, and Nazis (who make for pretty old villains by now, but I suppose you can wring a few more plots out of them).
The best thing about the story was the writing. Orcutt is an excellent wordsmith. The dialogue is good, the characters generally believable (except for the unusual percentage of gorgeous women in Dakota’s world, almost every one of whom throws herself into his arms. Perhaps this is an homage to the old days of the sexy paperback detective, like Shell Scott). My main complaint is with the plotting. One major plot point in particular was so obvious they might as well have perched a raven over one character’s door.
Cautions for language and adult situation. There’s lots of sex, but thankfully it’s not as explicit as I’ve seen in other novels recently. All in all a pretty good piece of work.
“I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express on the small of the back.” (The Inimitable Jeeves, 1923)
“Like so many substantial Americans, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.” (Summer Moonshine, 1938)
I ran across it just now while reading about what little we know of P.G. Wodehouse’s meeting F. Scott Fitzgerald in New York in the 1920s. Both were successful authors and shared a literary agent. Both lived in Great Neck on Long Island. Wodehouse saw “Scott” on the bus once and wrote a letter about it, but then the curtain falls. (via Books, Inq.)
Today I was reminded, for some reason, of my first introduction to The Lord of the Rings. The image above is the same edition I got, back around 1966 (the publication page says that was the year of the printing). I would have been about 16 years old at the time. The trilogy was offered by Scholastic Books, a major force in my life in those days. There was no bookstore within practical distance of my home. I had never been in a bookstore in my life – bookstores were distant Rivendell to me. So those periodic (Monthly? Quarterly? I don’t remember) Scholastic catalogs were to me what the wandering peddler was to my ancestors.
I’d never heard of The Lord of the Rings or Tolkien in my life (I knew C. S. Lewis, but had no “inkling” of his friendship with Tolkien). The catalog descriptions were intriguing. But the books cost ninety-five cents apiece – more than three bucks for the trilogy with postage figured in. That was not the kind of money I spent casually in those days. Fortunately I mentioned the books to my brother, and he was interested too. So we went in together. The only drawback was that he demanded first dibs. I had to wait for him to finish The Fellowship of the Ring before I got my chance at it. I chafed as he worked through the long book, saying things like, “This is really good. You’ll like this a lot.”
At last I got my turn and opened the pages onto a whole new world. It was better than I hoped (Lewis himself described it as “good beyond hope”) and gave me satisfactions I’d never known a book could offer.
I still have all three books in those original editions. They’re not actually falling apart (I’ve always been pretty gentle with my books), but they’re so battered that I replaced them with a new set a few years back, for actual reading. These copies are personal relics. When I touch them as I do now (the Fellowship is at my elbow as I write) it brings me back to a moment in my life when new possibilities opened up. And believe me, I needed new possibilities just then.
I finally got to read Overstreet’s The Ale Boy’s Feast, and I loved it. The story that appears to be about a magical rebellion to small, oppressive rulers in the first book becomes an adventure about radical reconciliation by the fourth book. It asks big questions: Can the great curse be revoked? Can a traitor return to his kingdom or be accepted in a new one? Can criminals build a new place of law and order? And more than these questions are the ones driving the narrative behind the scenes: Does the glorious beauty we see in this world point to a glorious otherworldly source? Is that beauty sewn together with love, peace, joy, and hope? Is life (in the land of these books) about rejoicing in the hope of beauty, both natural and crafted?
Of course, this weaves cleanly and smoothly into the biblical theology of this world, because our goodness is defined by the Lord and peace on earth will be to those on whom God’s favor rests, but that doesn’t appear to be the central thrust. Wonder and beauty as they pull us back to God appears to be what this adventure is all about. (Blue flowers are signs that magically refreshing water is nearby.)
In the third book, we learn explosive details about Overstreet’s world. The real enemies are revealed. Plots and deceptions are discovered. A new threat, a pervasive weed that lives on blood, is tunneling from its Cent Regus heart throughout the country. Cal-raven is running for his life as well as trying to discover a new home for his people, the House Abascar which is ruined in the first book. At one point, he is compelled to rescue prisoners in House Cent Regus and is broken by what he learns there and in its aftermath.
In this book, Cal-raven begins to wander, despairing of ever answering his life-long questions. In the meantime, his loyal men attempt to follow his plans for establishing a new house without him. As they go, something seems to be poisoning everything around them. This book is the fourth of a rich, complicated series, so begin with book one. There’s no other way.
In fact, the story may be too complicated.
The conclusion of Raven’s Ladder changes everything, and the end The Ale Boy’s Feast changes it all again. Many minor characters have their hours in the spotlight, and while the story always moves forward—yes, there’s always a reward for the detour—I wonder if these books would be stronger with a bit more simplicity. A few critical details in this installment come up short for me.
Among the complexities I love is the development of The Keeper, and I don’t want to spoil it. The idea introduced in the first book which led me to speculate that this mysterious dragon was a god-figure expands to a dramatic crash at the end of book three. The explanation revealed in this book is wonderfully fantastic. This is not the least of all the things to love in these multi-layered stories.
About that which I did not like, I’ll say two things.
In one late chapter, two main characters argue about the larger story being revealed. They talk of lies, liars, and which historic records are true. Perhaps I should have understood by this point that one of these men had a problematic perspective, but I didn’t. I thought these two were on the same page at this point. In their argument, they seem to circle each other, not even holding to one firm perspective. It’s as if they are floating theories to fit all the facts. This argument proves to be a major revelation, both of character and story, and I believe I understand it now, but I didn’t while in the thick of it. My confusion led to frustration when one of these men takes action later on.
Part of this adventure’s conclusion feels a bit forced. It’s like a murder mystery being resolved by cuffing a character introduced in the last chapter. I see a poetic quality in it, a balance of images, but it doesn’t feel organic like so many other threads enjoyed in this series.
I’ll close with a beautiful thought from that chapter I criticized a few lines up. One man says, “It saddens me that you cannot imagine a life without someone to serve.” The other replies, “It saddens me that you think joy comes any other way” (pg 340).
In the end, Auralia’s radiant colors cannot be exploited for commercial or selfish gain. They are a service to others as well as a thing to be served. They “lure people out of the dark, away from all they thought they owned, and show them something grander” (pg 249).
Theodore Dalrymple, in my opinion one of the most interesting writers today, writes over at City Journal about two separate books written about famous English serial murderers. Though the authors were born only a decade apart, they write as if from different worlds. Dalrymple contrasts the two accounts in order to highlight how western culture has changed within living memory.
But the woman of lesser education and humbler occupation displays in her book a much higher level of intellectual sophistication and moral intelligence than her more educated junior. Where one is modest, self-effacing, and straightforward, the other is grandiose and egotistical, her capacity to see clearly clouded by a combination of self-importance and obfuscatory pseudo-intellection. I believe that this contrast results not only from individual differences between the two women but from the different cultural environments in which they grew up and subsequently wrote. A week, said Harold Wilson, is a long time in politics; and it seems that ten years is a long time in the history of a culture.
I’m not sure I entirely agree with Dalrymple’s analysis of the Christian virtue of forgiveness. But I do agree with him that the concept has been entirely corrupted in modern times. I sometimes think that although western culture proudly regards itself as having cast off the shackles of Christianity, it has in fact only sunk into Christian heresy, with the labels switched to confuse the rubes. The theological act of forgiveness has been transformed into a vague principle that we are all morally obligated to forgive everything – even the most horrific crimes – because in fact they’re not crimes at all and there’s nothing to forgive. Our enemy, our tormenter, our murderer, is not a heinous malefactor but merely a fellow victim, the object of forces over which he had no control.
That’s not what Christian forgiveness means. Christianity grants to the sinner the dignity of responsibility. It has been argued that the doctrine of hell is the greatest compliment Christian theology ever paid to the human race. To say that someone is responsible, and to hold them responsible, is to attribute to them the dignity of free agency, declaring them a person capable of choice, rather than just an object subject to blind manipulation.
As in so many cases, it all comes down to what you think human beings are.
Aaron Armstrong passes on some writing tips from Doug Wilson, author of many books including Evangellyfish, which we linked to earlier. It’s good stuff, but I need some help on the fourth one. What does this mean: “4. Stretch before your routines. If you want to write Italian sonnets, try to write some short stories. If you want to write a few essays, write a novel, or maybe a novella if you are pressed for time. If you want to write haiku, then limber up with opinion pieces for The Washington Post.”
Today is the birthday of Prof. J. R. R. Tolkien, who needs no introduction here. As usual, Tolkien fans around the world are participating in a birthday toast, at 9:00 p.m. local time, wherever they happen to be. The formula is to raise your beverage of choice and say, “THE PROFESSOR!”
Tolkien did a bit of translation in his time, being one of the world’s great language scholars. I suppose it’s a stretch to try to use that as a bridge to the subject of my own ongoing translation work. I’m around ¾ of the way through the first draft now, which is a little ahead of my estimates, I think.
The New Year’s holiday gave me the unspeakable gift of two full, unscheduled days to devote to the project. I did 5,000 words each day, and was a little alarmed to realize something I’d never known before. Translating can be addictive. A Facebook friend who’s also a translator told me I wasn’t out of line to compare it to obsessive computer gaming, since he’s done both.
Translating involves its own special challenges and headaches, but it has the advantage of entirely lacking one great roadblock of ordinary writing – you never have to figure out what’s coming next. Figuring out what comes next has always been the hardest part of writing for me.
Of course it helps to be working on a project you find fascinating in its own right.
Intelligently run independent bookshops have a future. I’ve no doubt about that.. We have at least two in the Scottish Borders , one in Selkirk and the other in St Boswell’s, which are a pleasure to visit, precisely because they are run by people who combine an interest in books and literature with an interest in their customers and an awareness of their tastes. Without such interest and awareness, few bookshops will be long for this world.
Among the many pleasures of the reading life, one of the rarest is the unassuming but excellent novel. That was what I found, to my delight, in Hell Around the Horn, by Rick Spilman.
Hell Around the Horn has no grand pretensions. It does not try to be a romance, or a mystery, or a political tract. It is what its manifest states – a straightforward account, fictionalized, of a memorable voyage by a windjammer and her crew in the year 1905.
The windjammer, if you’re not familiar with the term, was the last stage in the age of commercial sail. Like the clipper ships before them the windjammers drove under a cloud of sails, but they were generally steel- or iron-built, and bulkier in the hull to accommodate more cargo. Although a seeming anachronism, windjammer commerce endured as late as 1957.
The story is told through the eyes of four main characters on board the vessel Lady Rachel – Capt. James Barker, a young captain keen to make a profit on his first voyage as a partner, Apprentice William Jones, a teenager just learning the ropes (literally), Able Seaman Fred Smythe, an American sailor with a little education, and Mary Barker, the captain’s wife, who has come along bringing their two children. Continue reading Hell Around the Horn, by Rick Spilman→
Christianity Today has announced their book awards for 2013, and their fiction pick is Douglas Wilson’s satiric novel, Evangellyfish.
Wilson says he wants to “intelligent readers” to find his book “funny, dark, and redemptive.”
Joel Miller has a short interview with Wilson on his Patheos blog, in which he asks: “I wonder about the characters’ moral literacy. The cast is primarily Christian but many behave entirely other. How do we land in a world wherein self-gratification seems the highest virtue? And is that our real state of affairs?”
Wilson replies, “Let me start with the last question. No, it is not our real state of affairs across the board, but it is our real state of affairs in certain quadrants of the church. A few years ago, I got a rejection letter for this manuscript because the set-up for the plot was so ‘out there.’ After having received that rejection letter, the Ted Haggard scandal broke, which put my puny efforts into the shade. That made me happy.”
, which we linked to earlier. It’s good stuff, but I need some help on the fourth one. What does this mean: “4. Stretch before your routines. If you want to write Italian sonnets, try to write some short stories. If you want to write a few essays, write a novel, or maybe a novella if you are pressed for time. If you want to write haiku, then limber up with opinion pieces for The Washington Post.”
