As promised earlier, we have a few more possible book covers for you to look at. Here’s a sentimental favorite (with me at least): Another version including all my buddies, utilizing the central space for a blurb from Hal Colebatch:
Bye Bye, Bertie, by Rick Dewhurst
It’s always embarrassing to admit that I just don’t get a book. But honesty requires me to say that Bye Bye Bertie by Rick Dewhurst pretty much mystifies me. It’s a parody on hard-boiled detective novels, but also a parody on evangelical Christian culture, by a Christian writer. For me, it raised more discomfort than laughter. Maybe I don’t get it because I’m too close to the subject.
Joe LaFlam, the hero and narrator, is a Seattle private eye. A Christian private eye, who lives with his mother and makes his living as a cab driver. Except that his real name is John Doe, and he actually lives in Vancouver, BC, which he insists is Seattle. One day a beautiful (Christian) dame named Brittany Morgan walks into his office, to ask him to find her sister Alberta (Bertie), who has been kidnapped by Druids. He takes the job largely in the hope of winning Brittany as a Christian wife. The hunt leads him on an improbable, slapstick search through Seattle’s (Vancouver’s) back streets, where he encounters a hit man working for a world government conspiracy, who keeps trying (unsuccessfully) to kill him. As well as several other guys who may have been his father (before they were Christians).
It’s all very strange. Lots of jokes are made about popular American Christian culture, which certainly has earned a lot of ribbing.
But I didn’t know how to take the story as a whole. Joe is a sympathetic character, but he’s clueless and heavily delusional. He doesn’t even know what country he’s in. I’m kind of uncomfortable with seeing him set up – it would seem – as some kind of representative evangelical. Maybe we deserve that. But it seemed excessive.
But maybe I just don’t get it.
Suitable for most readers. I can’t either recommend it or dis-recommend Bye Bye Bertie.
The Butterfly Forest, by Tom Lowe
This is the third Sean O’Brien novel by Tom Lowe that I’ve read, which tells me that I must like the books. Yet I see all kinds of flaws in them. So I guess the takeaway must be that, for me, Lowe is a natural storyteller with a genuine talent. But he could use some seasoning.
The Butterfly Forest opens, after some preliminaries, with hero Sean O’Brien, a former Miami detective with some kind of mysterious military background, observing a man stalking two women in a mall parking lot. He intervenes to save them from kidnapping, but the assailant gets away. Both women, mother and daughter, are quite attractive, and Sean (a widower) becomes their friend, even pondering asking the mother out. But the predator from the parking lot was not just a crime-of-opportunity pervert. He has the daughter, a student entomologist, in his sights because she saw something she doesn’t even know she saw.
Sean O’Brien is an interesting and engaging character – low-key and laid back, but capable of very efficient violence when it’s needed. Author Lowe has endowed him with a very appealing habitat, dividing his time between an old cabin on the edge of Ocala National Forest and the marina where he keeps his fishing boat, and where good and faithful friends live. He also keeps a pet dachshund, Max, whom he cares for with appealing devotion.
The weaknesses are in the writing. I thought the plotting was better this time than in at least one of the previous books, but I was troubled by repeated infelicities in the prose. People say things like “as you know” in conversation, which real people almost never say. And the exposition is sometimes just awful, as in “His physical periphery subtly spoke of a body language that was rough but understood.”
I blame our times, in a way. In the old days, a good storyteller like Lowe would have paid his dues in the pulp magazines, getting ruthlessly red-penciled by carnivorous editors at 3 cents a word. Then he’d have worked with an equally pitiless editor at a publishing house. But nowadays, publishing his own work, he’s missed professional boot camp, and has no one to tell him when he’s right and when he’s wrong.
And yet I’ve read all three novels. That’s got to mean something.
Another strange thing about the Sean O’Brien series is that the author openly appeals to the spiritual and supernatural. Sean himself says that he’s learned to value his gut feelings above the evidence, which seems strange by the standards of traditional mysteries. He sees visions too, from time to time. I’m not sure if I like this or not.
Moderately recommended. Cautions for language, violence, and adult themes.
The man and his music
Would you like to hear J. R. R. Tolkien singing one of the songs from The Hobbit?
Of course you would. If you wouldn’t, don’t tell me about it, because I’m not sure we want people like you around here.
(Thanks to Dale Nelson)
Today Only: Klavan Novels 80% off
One of our favorite authors, Andrew Klavan, has eight of his old novels (e-books) on sale for $1.99 or less. I’m getting this one: The Scarred Man
Lars has reviewed most of these, maybe only half of them. Search the blog archives.
Kindle Interests for Today Only
Of potential interest for our esteemed readers, here are some $1.99 deals for today only:
Flyleaf copy: “Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power.” His stories of almost human androids and clairvoyance have pressed in on us as part of a kind of modern mythology. This is a biography or exploration of the author who had many fascinating and some bizarre ideas.
In Memory of Jack
Joel Miller reminds us today is the 49th anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis. He writes,
I read a newspaper obituary about Lewis that my grandmother kept. She preserved the entire paper. The event was buried in the back–barely two column inches if memory serves. The rest of paper, or at least the majority of it, was dedicated to reporting the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Both men died the same day. Coincidentally, both men answered to Jack.
Victims, by Jonathan Kellerman
Vita Berlin was the nastiest woman in the neighborhood. She complained about everything, was rude to everyone, and pushed people around at the first sign of weakness. Still – as even the father of a child with cancer, whom she’d publicly berated, admits – nobody deserves to have their neck broken and be disemboweled in their own apartment.
So begins Victims, another in Jonathan Kellerman’s long-running Alex Delaware mystery series. Alex is a child psychologist, but long ago he became Detective Lt. Milo Sturgis’ go-to expert whenever a psycho murder shows up. Which this most definitely is, because it’s soon followed by the murders of a mild-mannered accountant, a young married couple, and a homeless man, all killed and mutilated in about the same way. No connection between the victims seems apparent.
There are similar themes here to Michael Connelly’s recent book, The Drop, which I reviewed the other day. Both stories deal with the question of evil, and how it comes to exist in human beings. There’s no answer to that question in this world, of course (and even in theology we’re left with a lot unanswered), but there’s plenty of room for both empathy and a sense of justice, though they sometimes have to wrestle each other. Victims ended on an unusually downbeat note, but it was entirely appropriate, and (I thought) rather moving.
Highly recommended, with the usual cautions for language and adult subject matter.
Lost sheep in translation
If I were really professional, I’d probably have postponed beginning my translation of Norge i Vikingtid until I had a signed contract, but phooey. Most of my novels were written before I had a contract, or even the promise of one. And I’m excited about this project. It vitalizes me.
Translation can be a disorienting process. I suspect it’s extremely complex, neurologically. There’s a sort of mental dance that goes on between the original text and the translator’s thoughts. You can get a semi-passable (sometimes) translation of a text by running it through something like Babelfish, but the results testify to the very complex and subtle nature of language. There are nuances in the text that have to be caught, music you need to transpose. Sometimes an accurate translation takes you a moderate distance from the precise words of the original, because the original language is accustomed to taking different paths to the meaning than English is.
I read somewhere that the Italians have a joke, based on the fact that the words “translator” and “traitor” are very similar in that language. I think it’s also the Italians who say (my apologies to anyone who might be offended), “A translation is like a wife. If she is faithful, she is probably not beautiful, and if she is beautiful, she is probably not faithful.”
I have an ambition – and I don’t think it’s entirely arrogant – to make this translation both beautiful and faithful. I honestly think I can do that, or something pretty close.
One of the weird aspects of the process, at least for me, is what I think of as “losing my English.” I’m reading along in the Norwegian, and understanding it just fine, and then when I turn to my laptop to render it my native language, I can’t for the life of me remember the English word I want. It’s there, I know, but I just can’t put my hand on it. It’s very similar to the experience we’ve all had where we search for a word we know perfectly well, but temporarily can’t find it for some reason. Only when I’m translating this happens constantly, again and again. I generally put in a not-as-good word, highlight it, and move on. If I ignore it, it’ll come wandering back eventually, like Little Bo Peep’s flock.
I suspect (I haven’t researched it) that different languages occupy different parts of the brain, and that I’m in the process of running new data lines from the Norwegian section to the English. Perhaps the problem will diminish as I spend time at it.
I bet you I’ll still stink at understanding spoken Norwegian, though.
The Drop, by Michael Connelly
The title of this Harry Bosch novel by Michael Connelly, The Drop, refers to a police department acronym for a special procedure for allowing a detective to stay on past mandatory retirement. Since Harry, an old Vietnam veteran, is already past that point, getting a further extension is important to him. His job is his life, or at least it was until his teenage daughter came to live with him.
Bosch felt a brief stirring in his gut. It was a mixture of instinct and knowing that there was an order of things in the world. The truth was revealed to the righteous. He often felt it at the moment things started to tumble together on a case.
When The Drop begins, Harry and his partner, who are on the cold case squad, are assigned to re-investigate a twenty year old rape-murder. DNA from a blood smear found on the body has been matched to a known sex offender. The only problem is that the offender was eight years old at the time the teenage victim was killed. Is it just an evidence mix-up, or something more complicated?
But they’ve hardly started the job before they’re called up by the Chief’s office to handle a current case. A lawyer, the son of Harry’s old nemesis, the political reptile Irvin Irving, has fallen – or jumped – from a balcony in a posh Beverly Hills hotel. It looks like suicide, but there are discrepancies. And Harry is soon following a trail that winds through the treacherous terrain of city and police politics – what ordinary cops call “high jingo.” Games are being played, and somebody is trying to use Harry for their own purposes.
Running through the story are themes of guilt, forgiveness, and redemption. Harry gets involved with a woman who is wracked by guilt and the question of where evil comes from. Harry deals with the same problem in dealing with a sexual predator who was himself a victim, and with several colleagues who betray his trust.
There’s a lot of serious matter in this story, and few answers beyond whodunnit. For mysteries, generally, it’s enough to raise the questions. I read The Drop with great pleasure.
Cautions for language and adult material.