It’s Friday, and I don’t have a book to review. What shall I do, what shall I do?
I note that yesterday was the anniversary of the Viking raid on Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumbria, in 793. It would have been more appropriate to mention it yesterday, I suppose. The day before would have been even better, so you’d have time to plan your Lindisfarne celebrations. On the other hand, the Gregorian calendar reform of 1582 threw all our calculations off by 10 days anyway, so when we cite ancient dates we’re always approximating.
There’s some controversy among Viking scholars about the Lindisfarne raid. We have a strong movement going to downgrade the importance of the 793 date as the “official” beginning of the Viking Age. The Portland raid in 789 is often advanced as the true beginning — though there are disagreements whether that one should be considered a proper raid at all. Could have been just a harbor-side brawl with an officious customs officer. Some historians have begun pointing to the discovery of a ship burial containing dozens of men’s bodies on an island in Estonia and dated sometime between 700 and 750.
Personally, I’m inclined to continue accepting Lindisfarne and 793. When we consider the Viking Age as a historical period, we’re talking primarily about its impact on Western Europe. 793 was a 9/11 moment in that region, the moment when a previously disregarded threat suddenly became real and serious. The Portland raid didn’t have that effect, but Lindisfarne hit like a bomb. It was the equivalent of a raid on Oxford or Harvard today. It sent a message.
Above, a very nice video, a few years old, describing an exhibition of the famous Lindisfarne Gospels (a treasure the Vikings never got their hands on) in England.
The sixth volume in Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet series is Lucky Man. As usual with this series, I felt a bit disoriented as I read, like a newcomer to a social group trying to keep up with people discussing personalities and events I’m not familiar with.
Anyway, in the last book, Tubby, a New Orleans lawyer, served as campaign chairman for Judge Hughes. Now Judge Hughes comes to him with a problem. He’s been subpoenaed by the new district attorney, a fanatical reformer. The DA is threatening to indict Hughes for a sexual indiscretion at work unless he fingers other judges for corruption. The trouble is, Hughes says, he doesn’t know about any serious corruption (a little hard to believe in New Orleans, this reader thought) and he doesn’t want to perjure himself (or for his wife to find out).
Meanwhile, Tubby is dealing with the presence in his house of his friend Raisin, temporarily between addresses. Raisin turns out to be a difficult roommate, and he’s going through relationship drama. Tubby himself is contemplating moving to the country, under the influence of a girlfriend who hates the city.
The story involves a homeless man living under a house, an escort service, and a man who dies from swallowing poker chips. It features that favorite fictional trope of our age, the hypocritical born-again Christian. Lucky Man was colorful and entertaining, but left no major impression on me.
She twisted in her seat to reach her shopping bags, from which she produced a black Gucci purse. She twitched a check from it and laid it on my desk. The check was blank and hopeful, like the women’s eyes.
There’s a lot to like in Alan Lee’s Mackenzie August novels. Their relentless optimism is perhaps the best part – these are no noirs; when Mack or his buddy Manny Rodriguez, US marshal, start feeling down, they do something about it – and they’re more likely to work out than get drunk. There’s a lot of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser here, without the creeping wokeness that spoiled that great series for me.
I like some of the books better than others, but I think Dirty Deals may be my favorite in the series to date.
Mack is visited in his office by a group of wealthy, middle-aged ladies from a Baptist Sunday School in Lynchburg (Kentucky? Tennessee? I was never sure). By some obscure reasoning, she believes she can score heavily against her hated rivals in the Presbyterian Sunday School by hiring Mack to find the fugitive convict Caleb James. Caleb was convicted of murdering a Lynchburg police officer and crippling another while under the influence of crystal meth. But he managed to escape from a high security prison and has dropped out of sight.
Mack takes the case, discovering a story that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why was a cop killer only convicted of second degree murder? Why do the Lynchburg cops – even the retired one whom Caleb crippled – want the whole business forgotten? Why do the descriptions of the crime make so little logical sense? As is his wont, Mack will stray from the narrow confines of his job description, determined to figure out the real story and to see that true justice is done. Which will force a very difficult decision on him.
Dirty Deals was well plotted and moved right along. The mystery was engaging, and the solution involved a surprise I really didn’t see coming.
The best part, though, was a moment in a sub-plot when Mack’s wife Ronnie delivers an impassioned defense of marital fidelity that will have social conservatives standing up and cheering.
I read and reviewed Thomas Benigno’s first Nick Mannino novel, The Good Lawyer, some time back. I liked it quite a lot, but I missed the sequel, The Criminal Lawyer. I’m making that up now.
In the first book, Nick gave up the practice of criminal law to please his wife, who hated it. But after they separated he went back to it, though he’s not doing it any more. He and she are still friendly (he hasn’t given up hopes for reconciliation), and he adores his two adult children, John and Charlotte. So he’s horrified when John’s fiancée is kidnapped, and taunting messages are sent by the kidnapper from her cell phone. The most puzzling thing is that this serial killer has been abducting prostitutes, which this girl is definitely not.
Nick has connections with organized crime. He’s not involved with their business, but he took the money when his mobster uncle left him his fortune. This means Nick has considerable resources to draw on in his effort to find this serial killer and rescue John’s fiancée. What he doesn’t expect is that it will lead him eventually to a violent, personal encounter with the monster – an encounter that could end his life – or transform it.
I have to admit I didn’t like The Criminal Lawyer as much as The Good Lawyer, though I did like it. The story was compelling, the plotting good, the characters interesting. I thought the prose was a little flaccid; it could have been tightened considerably. The author is also prone to misplaced and dangling modifiers. And the big scene where Nick unloads his deepest secrets to another person for the first time in his life seemed improbable and awkward to me. The epilogue was probably too long, but it provided satisfying closure.
Number ten in the amusing Mackenzie August private eye series is Fool for a Client. Business is good for Mack, a private eye in Roanoke, Virginia. Better than he’d like, actually. His last case got written up in a national magazine and now he’s a celebrity sleuth, turning business away. His home life is also going well – he’s still living with his father along with his own wife (lawyer Ronnie) and their small son. Also his best friend, Manny Rodriguez the federal marshal, who likes to sleep on the floor.
Then two cops arrive to ask a few questions “just to eliminate you as a suspect.” Ronnie knows what that means and cautions Mack not to tell them anything. Turns out two men have been murdered, and Mack’s DNA has been found under their fingernails. Also, Mack’s DNA has been found in another woman’s bed. Mack hasn’t murdered anybody, and he hasn’t been having an affair. He has to assume he has an implacable enemy out there, one with considerable resources. He’ll have to find that person to clear himself.
Which will be tough after he’s arrested and put in jail. He’s got Ronnie for an attorney, but can she trust him now?
The Mack August books are light and fun. They’re marginally Christian too. Fool for a Client is another of the same. I enjoyed it.
I’m assuming very few of you are going to go out and buy The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, but I continue with my reading reports as I work my way through the volumes. I’m still on the poets’ sagas, and it occurred to me (and I should have remembered this) that most of the big ones are included in the Penguin volume, Sagas of Warrior-Poets. And the translations there are perfectly good.
My latest saga is the Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Hitardal People. We have only an imperfect text for this one, since the first five chapters have been lost, as well as a page and a half out of the middle. The missing first chapters are fairly adequately supplied by text from a shorter version included in the Separate Saga of Saint Olaf by Snorri Sturlusson. About the second lacuna nothing can be done. But enough remains to provide an interesting tale. Scholars believe this to be one of the earlier sagas to be written down.
Bjorn Arngeirsson’s story begins in a way reminiscent of Laxdalasaga. Bjorn goes out into the world to make his fortune, but not before he and his father arrange his marriage to the lovely Oddny. The agreement is that he must come back to Iceland before five years have passed, or else the deal is canceled. Bjorn goes out and has adventures, including fighting a duel on behalf of King Valdemar (Vladimir) of Kiev, which earns him the tile of “Champion.” But he suffers a wound that prevents his returning home as soon as he’d like. Meanwhile his childhood enemy, another poet named Thord Kolbeinsson, travels back to Iceland and reports that Bjorn is dead. Thord then takes Oddny for his own wife.
Once Bjorn returns, a long succession of mutual offenses follow. Aside from personal hatred, one suspects an element of professional jealousy – the way the saga tells it, Bjorn is superior both as a man and as an artist, and Thord can’t forgive that. However, I imagine the story could be told just as well from the other point of view. Unlike the Saga of Hallfred, the last one I reviewed, Christianity seems to have little influence on this cycle of violence. People try to make peace, but these two men share an implacable hate.
There are interesting elements from the historian’s point of view. Bjorn, knowing that Thord has been at King (Saint) Olav’s court and will have slandered him, goes personally to set the record straight – showing considerable courage. (Olav acts just as I portray him in my novels, urging Bjorn to give up Viking raiding as an un-Christian activity.) There’s an interesting scene involving baths – the saga says that baths in tubs are “the only kind” that were available in Norway at the time. I assume the reference is to the custom of sauna bathing in Iceland (where thermal springs are plentiful). I’d always thought the Norwegians took steam baths too – but I’m not sure this saga can be trusted on historical details. The bath scene involves the wearing of garters by men, a subject of some contention among reenactors. It ends with Bjorn in possession of one of Saint Olaf’s own garters, which in time will become part of the bishop’s regalia in Iceland. Descriptions of shields in a battle scene are clearly anachronistic – the writer assumes a shield with arm straps and a point, which weren’t commonly in use at the time of these events.
Another interesting point comes up when the men are gathered at the Thing to work out a legal settlement between Bjorn and Thord. They actually go to the trouble of making up competing lists of all the lampoons each man has written about the other. When it’s found that Thord has written one fewer, he’s allowed to compose another on the spot so that they’ll balance.
A matter that’s mentioned, but rather underplayed in the saga, is the question of who is the actual father of Thord’s son Kolli. If I’m not mistaken, I I believe this is given more attention in Laxdala Saga (and in my novel West Oversea.)
The Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Hitardal People is a flawed and somewhat artless story, but of considerable interest to the saga scholar.
“Come, Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove” performed by Laude of First Congregational Church of Los Angeles
Continuing to remember the Holy Spirit on this Sunday after Pentecost, Isaac Watts 1707 hymn, “Come, Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove,” is a thoughtful prayer that can tune our hearts to sing his praise. I suspect the second verse below has fallen out of favor in many hymnals.
1 Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove, With all Thy quickening powers; Kindle a flame of sacred love In these cold hearts of ours.
2 Look how we grovel here below, Fond of these trifling toys; Our souls can neither fly nor go, To reach eternal joys.
3 In vain we tune our formal songs, In vain we strive to rise; Hosannas languish on our tongues, And our devotion dies.
4 Dear Lord, and shall we ever live At this poor dying rate? Our love so faint, so cold to Thee, And Thine to us so great!
5 Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove, With all Thy quickening powers; Come, shed abroad a Saviour’s love, And that shall kindle ours.
In the current issue of World Magazine, veteran journalist Cal Thomas talks about the scant trust in new media and some of his experiences over fifty years. Here’s one.
One of my favorite stories about what maintaining integrity and “guarding your heart” in the Christian life can mean came, surprisingly enough, from the pornographer Larry Flynt. In 2007, Flynt was offering $1 million to anyone who could “out” a member of Congress or other public figure who was a “family values conservative” in rhetoric, but something quite different in private life. One day, Flynt rolled into Fox’s green room in New York in his wheelchair (he had been shot and paralyzed by a gunman in Georgia in 1978). After exchanging perfunctory greetings, he said to me, “I thought you’d be interested in something.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“We did an investigation of you.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah,” Flynt said. “We didn’t find anything.”
I laughed. “Praise the Lord, a personal endorsement from Larry Flynt! You were just looking in the wrong place for my sins.”
Nostalgia: What do we make of the past? “A man who can reach a certain age—I cannot be precise as to what age—without experiencing nostalgia must have had a pretty wretched existence.”
Reading: Long-time editor and reviewer John Wilson offers a list of novels and books he’s looking forward to this summer, including the work of E.X. Ferrars and her Andrew Bassnet series, in which a retired botanist retires only to find he’s come across a murder.
The Soviet Man: In his book The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel “argues that over its sixty-eight years of existence, the Soviet Union did succeed in its goal of creating a ‘new Soviet person’ (novy sovetsky chelovek). But, as he puts it, ‘The new human being was the product not of any faith in a utopia, but of a tumult in which existing lifeworlds were destroyed and new ones born.'” What helped build this new person was a curious amalgamation: “Soviet Americanism.”
Anniversary: In Hong Kong, they will not forget what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. None of us should.
From @SJMelniszyn /Twitter
Photo: Main Street, Iowa. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
There’s a kind of story that I hate and love. The kind of story where an ordinary man (or woman, I suppose, but I avoid those books) finds him (or her-) self in the middle of a violent crime situation for which they’re entirely unsuited, and they have to find a way to survive and overcome. I over-identify with such stories, knowing I wouldn’t survive ten minutes, but I read on, fascinated.
Mike McCrary’s Someone Savage is exactly that kind of story. Nicholas Hooper is a well-known and successful author who’s recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. His only family is his sister Allison, with whom he has an affectionate but contentious relationship. He also has several ex-wives, but he doesn’t talk to them and he’s never fathered a child. Never felt up to the responsibility.
Now he’s rented a huge luxury home in the Poconos for 15 months. Ostensibly he’s there to write his last book, but actually he’s come to die. He even brought a gun with one bullet, in case he wants to go out that way. Mainly, he anticipates drinking heavily.
Then there’s a soft knock at the door, and he opens it to see two small children, undernourished and filthy. The boy says nothing; the girl just says, “Help.” He lets them in and tries to figure out what to do with them. As a start, he gives them bottled water and Cheetos, and sets them in front of a TV with Sponge Bob Squarepants on.
He calls Allison, who urges him to call the police. But the childrens’ responses make him hesitate. They don’t trust any adult, and are clearly traumatized. When he finally persuades them to go to town with him for a good breakfast, they catch sight of a local cop and panic. That moment is pivotal, and much danger will rise from it.
I identified intensely with Nick Hooper, and agonized through the story, which I pretty much read in one sitting. It grabbed me and held tight to the end. It wasn’t all that plausible (I’m pretty sure I’d have just called the police in [which would have been fatal in this situation] if I were in Nick’s shoes), but that’s fairly standard for stories like this. Someone Savage would make an excellent movie.
When I’ve read too many dark, gritty mysteries it’s always nice to pick up a Mackenzie August book by Alan Lee. They’re strong on tough, fairly clever dialogue, and it’s nice to follow a detective with a positive attitude and faith in God. So we have come to a Dead Stop, book nine in the series.
Roanoke, Virginia PI Mack August is married to Veronica, a beautiful lawyer. She surprises him by making him the gift of a trip on a luxury private train, Chicago to San Francisco. Mack has always wanted to take such a journey, in the spirit of the old Golden Age mysteries, and jokingly remarks that he hopes they’re attacked by bandits. That won’t happen, but what does happen will be about as bad. Fortunately, their friend Manny Rodriguez, a US Marshal, comes along too – though he’s disappointed to be stood up by his girlfriend.
Their quarters on the train are luxurious, the views are majestic, and the service is excellent. The main irritant is that some of the other passengers are annoying – especially a Republican couple and a Democrat couple who can’t stop sniping at each other. There also seems to be a fair amount of sexual hijinks going on.
Then one of the conductors disappears. And one by one, other members of the train’s crew vanish as well, to be found in the snow with bullet holes in their heads. Manny declares “marshal law” and they try to keep the other passengers calm (and away from each others’ throats) while doing their best to identify the murderer in their midst.
Dead Stop is a story with a message, and it’s not exactly subtle. Mack and Manny constantly try to remind their fellow passengers that they’re all on the same train and need each other, while those passengers are consumed with mutual hatreds – political, social, racial and international. The conservatives and liberals are about equally caricatured, so I don’t think anyone should take offense.
There’s a civility lesson I’m not sure I entirely agree with in the final solution to the crime. But all in all, the book was pleasant enough, and more positive than not in its (relatively heavy-handed) teaching moments.
As usual, author Lee could use a better proofreader. A particularly odd word error is when he tells us someone is wearing a “toboggan” on his head. Is there a piece of headwear known as a toboggan? Did he mean “toque?” Another mystery, this one unsolved.
