Fiction, Reviews

‘Night Watchman,’ by Tony Dunbar

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I’ve been reviewing – rather sourly – a collection of Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet novels which I got in a free deal. I’m not in love with the books, but I got them for nothing and I don’t hate them, so I’ve been reviewing as I read along. I’m not sure it’s entirely fair of me to repeatedly criticize books I don’t like a lot, rather than just leaving them alone, but such are the terms of my life at present.

It should be noted that one book is missing from this collection, a story about Tubby during Hurricane Katrina, which is not included due to publisher issues. The next in order is Night Watchman. I liked this one even less than the previous ones, for political and world-view reasons.

As Night Watchman begins, Tubby Dubonnet, moderately lazy New Orleans attorney, is in Naples, Florida with his new girlfriend, who’s beginning to hint that Tubby should relocate there for a more permanent relationship. In a fit of intimacy-aversion he flees back home. As he journeys, he recollects when he first moved to the city as a college student. He fell in with a group of hippies and was present at an anti-Vietnam War rally where he watched a young man he barely knew get shot to death by a drive-by shooter. He wonders who the victim was, and whether the killer was ever punished.

When he arrives back home and starts making inquiries with the police, he’s surprised to encounter not only the blue wall of silence, but threats from the Cuban refugee community. It will all lead to betrayal by a friend, his own abduction and torture, and to the kind of anticlimactic resolution that is so characteristic of these books.

The writing was good, the characters were fine, as usual. And as usual, I don’t get the Big Easy vibe. But particularly in this book, I didn’t like the politics. The big villains here are anti-Castro Cubans, the kind who are on the wrong side of history, don’t recognize the glorious benefits Communism has brought to their island, and still bear grudges about seized property. The prison camps, tortures, mass executions and loss of civil liberties aren’t deemed worthy of mention. There’s even a hint of that hoary old conspiracy theory that anti-Castro Cubans were responsibility for the murder of JFK.

As you’ve probably guessed already, that’s not how I remember the period, and it’s not how I view Communist Cuba.

Otherwise, Night Watchman was all right.

Music

Sunday Singing: Exalt the Lord, His Praise Proclaim

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“Exalt the Lord, His Praise Proclaim,” performed by Christelijk Residentie Mannenkoor of The Netherlands

It’s Father’s Day in the States, so I could have chosen a hymn with the word father in the first line, but I wanted to finish the month with songs of God the Father, and so we have today’s hymn. “Exalt the Lord, His Praise Proclaim” is a paraphrase of Psalm 135:1-7, 21 written for the Trinity Psalter of 1912. The tune is from Hayden’s The Creation oratorio. It’s grand and noble music, but I had to speed up the video to 1.5x. Maybe I’m singing hymns at a faster pace lately.

1 Exalt the Lord, his praise proclaim;
all ye his servants, praise his name,
who in the Lord’s house ever stand
and humbly serve at his command.
The Lord is good, his praise proclaim;
since it is pleasant, praise his name;
his people for his own he takes
and his peculiar treasure makes.

2 I know the Lord is high in state,
above all gods our Lord is great;
the Lord performs what he decrees,
in heav’n and earth, in depths and seas.
He makes the vapors to ascend
in clouds from earth’s remotest end;
the lightnings flash at his command;
he holds the tempest in his hand.

3 Exalt the Lord, his praise proclaim;
all ye his servants, praise his name,
who in the Lord’s house ever stand
and humbly serve at his command.
Forever praise and bless his name,
and in the church his praise proclaim;
in Zion is his dwelling place;
praise ye the Lord, show forth his grace.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing

Context Is King and They’re Tearing It Away from Us

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Context is critical to interpreting words and actions. We speak and interact with each other in social contexts that include unspoken assumptions and patterns for doing things. Context tells us what’s stylish, professional, acceptable, or rude. You can’t tell jokes without context nor can you be a breath of fresh air.

Usually, we recognize the inside and outside of those contexts—an office climate, a social circle, a family. We know we won’t fit there without meeting certain conditions. If a reader tells you your writing stinks, you might respond with creative advice for him, but if an editor tells you the same thing, you may receive it willing, more or less.

We talk broadly about culture as a context we’re all in together, but in reality, we live in various, overlapping cultures at once. You and I may share a culture as English-speakers, as Americans, or as readers, and we will also contrast one another when we reveal other cultures we do not share. The blurred borders of those social contexts may or may not need definition or defense. We may just accept each other. Maybe that’s the creative act of forming a relational context.

The reason I bring up context is to say social media has almost erased the borders between our various contexts by tying us down to mostly verbal communication, removing physical and time limitations, and allowing us to stay anonymous. (Imagine if we had to introduce ourselves before joining a conversation thread.) Without context, we easily misunderstand other people and, if we are so inclined, assume the worst, and the popular climate of our country, if not all Western Civilization, encourages everyone to look for offense and confront the foolish among us.

What are we going to do about it?

Those Who Have Gone Before Us

Literary editor Robert Gottlieb, 92, died June 14. Most recently, he worked for Knopf Doubleday. Talya Zax writes the most remarkable thing about him is “how thoroughly he refuses to think about himself as a creature of distinct talents; he saw himself as talented in the context of working with others, not, necessarily, on his own. To him, there was not really such a thing as a good editor. There was only a good editor of the manuscript in front of him, or, more accurately, the person who wrote it.”

Among many other books, Gottlieb worked on Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, selling it to publishing executives by saying, “The funny parts are wildly funny, the serious parts are excellent.”

Literary author Cormac McCarthy, 89, died June 13. In their statement honoring him, the leaders of the author’s society state, “He never compromised his devotion to the beauty of language and the necessary art of storytelling.”

Ten Texas Writers Remember Cormac McCarthy. Fernando A. Flores says, “Sometimes there’s a writer so singular, so pervasive, who captures a certain poetry from the region where you live so distinctly, that, if you’re also writer, you just have to pretend this other person doesn’t exist.”

Rejection: Speaking of listening to an editor, several authors didn’t listen to their editors when their famous works were rejected.

Of Moby Dick, Melville was told, “First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale? While this is a rather delightful, if somewhat esoteric, plot device, we recommend an antagonist with a more popular visage among the younger readers. For instance, could not the Captain be struggling with a depravity towards young, perhaps voluptuous, maidens?”

And The Wind In The Willows author Kenneth Grahame got this feedback: “An irresponsible holiday story that will never sell.”

Photo by Florian Schneider on Unsplash

Bookselling, Uncategorized

Nordic Midsummer Festival Saturday

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For those of you who live in the Twin Cities area — or are inclined to travel — I’ll be playing Viking and selling deathless literature at the Nordic Midsummer Fest in Burnsville, Minnesota tomorrow. You can read all about it at this address.

Ancient Twin Cities Scandinavians like me remember a celebration called Norway Day, which used to be held in June in Minnehaha Park. I attended once way back in 1980, and there were thousands of people there, with lots of vendors, speakers, and entertainment. Over the years it diminished, and it had died out even before the Covid lockdowns.

But some people are trying to resurrect it as a big all-Scandinavian festival. The venue has been changed to Buck Hill, which is a suburban ski hill in the winter but does other things in summer. I’ve never been there; interested to see it.

The big musical draw will be the Harp Twins, whose videos you’ve likely seen on YouTube. Turns out they’re Scandinavian. Go figure.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Honest John Churchfield,’ by Michael Dell

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When you get a free e-book online, you take your chances. Sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised. Sometimes a dog follows you home.

Honest John Churchfield by Michael Dell has fur and a wet nose.

“Honest” John is a former London bobby who now operates as a private investigator, keeping a sort of an office in the back booth of a pub. He’s jealous of the famous Sherlock Holmes, but doesn’t work very hard to compete with him. Hunting up business would eat into his valuable drinking and woman-chasing time. He’s big and strong and smart, but essentially a slob.

The book Honest John Churchfield is a collection of seven short stories about his cases. The tone is generally light.

Reading the first story, I thought the author had done some research (though not enough) into life in Victorian London. As I read the further stories I realized that, just as the hero doesn’t work very hard at his trade, the author didn’t work very hard at historical recreation. He knows enough to call cookies “biscuits,” but uses “vacation” where the English would say “holiday,” and has characters call men “guys,” which is an idiom that existed in England but wasn’t as common as it is in American speech. And (21st Century) American speech is what most of the dialogue sounds like. He also doesn’t know how to spell “Hampshire” or “Devon.”

There are many narrative peculiarities. A character in East Indian dress wears “a turban big enough to crack a walnut.” (What does that even mean?) “A disturbingly somber pall descended upon the Rasby household.” (As opposed to a cheerful pall, I guess.)

The puzzles themselves weren’t bad, I thought – except for one that involved mass mesmerism – something the Victorians probably believed in but most modern readers know better than to swallow.

All in all, Honest John Churchfield is not much recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dig Two Graves,’ by Keith Nixon

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Here we have a book that impressed me up till the very end. Keith Nixon’s Dig Two Graves is the first in a series starring Detective Sergeant Solomon Gray in the Thanet area of Kent. I thought I detected echoes of Scandinavian Noir in it.

Sol Gray reminded me a little of Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole – a dysfunctional cop barely holding onto his job. Only Sol doesn’t have the big successes that keep Harry Hole’s career afloat. Sol lost his six-year-old son ten years ago – literally. He took the boy to a carnival and he vanished forever. No trace of him was ever found. Five years after that, his wife committed suicide. He struggles with alcoholism and his colleagues cover for him a lot. But, to be honest, there’s not a lot of crime to solve in their part of England.

Then one day a young man falls to his death from an apartment balcony. It looks like suicide at first, but there are indications he was pushed. It hits Sol hard when someone tells him the boy had looked a lot like him, and he is the right age….

Then an important member of the community is shot to death, and the Thanet police are plunged into their first serial killer case. As clues develop, they all seem to have one common link – Sol himself. He’ll find himself arrested for murder before the whole mystery gets unraveled.

I liked Dig Two Graves quite a lot. The prose was tight and smart, not very quotable but efficient. The characters were vivid, and I cared about them. What disappointed me was the final solution. It seemed to me melodramatic and implausible – but maybe that’s because it intruded on my personal belief set.

This is a God-haunted book – for pete’s sake, it has a character named Jonah Pennance (!). Sol reflects quite a lot, bitterly, on God’s non-existence. The Christian characters seemed sympathetic and decent, so I was looking for some kind of affirmation of faith. Which didn’t come. That’ll teach me to make assumptions.

Still, Dig Two Graves was a well-written mystery that kept me fascinated to the end.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Broken Symphony,’ by Alan Lee

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“I’m angry. I’m furious.” I bent forward on my chair to look at the floorboards, hands in my coat pockets. I looked at the floorboards and through them to the solid earth below. “I’m furious with Doyle. But also at myself. At men. And women. At the 1960s and moral relativism and Atlanta.”

I’ve been liking Alan Lee’s Mack August books right along, but Broken Symphony is my favorite by far. But that’s probably because it echoes my beliefs so well, so your mileage may vary.

Mackenzie August, Roanoke, Virginia private eye and former extreme martial arts fighter, is lying on his office floor one day (to relieve sciatica) when a young woman comes in to ask for help – with plumbing. She’s one of a group of ex-prostitutes who live in a building owned by Mack’s lawyer wife, Ronnie. She says the drains aren’t working and the caretaker is useless. Not being busy just now, Mack goes with her.

But when Mack gets there, there’s no drain problem. Instead, there’s a gangster from Boston named Doyle, with a thug for backup. Doyle is looking for a girl called Lemonade, who has run away. He also seems to think the girls are now working for him. So Mack throws him down the stairs, along with the thug.

Not long after, Doyle shows up at Mack’s office. He says he doesn’t want to fight with him. He’s going to kill Mack’s gangster friend Marcus, he says, but that’s just business; he doesn’t want Mack involved. In fact, he’d like to hire Mack to find Lemonade for him. Mack refuses, they fight, and Doyle breaks Mack’s little finger.

Then Lemonade’s parents show up. They also want to hire him to find the girl. Mack accepts the job from them and starts hunting for her. What he finds is a baby, Lemonade’s baby, abandoned. Further investigation will lead him to a final confrontation with the ruthless, psychopathic Doyle.

And I’ve got to say, that final confrontation was just splendid. It wasn’t what I expected at all, and it was delightful.

But what I liked best was Mack’s personal meditations as the story proceeds. In the midst of all the sordid details of the lives of addicts and prostitutes and traffickers, he ponders the societal ills brought on by our abandonment of family and of traditional sexual roles (although his own household is scarcely a traditional one). I suppose people on the other side of the cultural divide may find Broken Symphony preachy – I reveled in it.

Highly recommended. Cautions for language and mature themes.

Authors

Pod People: All Over the Place

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The “All Over the Place” podcast, run by a couple of my old friends from the late, lamented “Threedonia” blog, interviewed me the other day, and you can listen to it at this link: https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/7fvx7nWHmeD3zJSWDr72NP?utm_source=generator

Thanks to Eric, Jim, and Christine.

Update: They’ve posted the video of this interview to YouTube.

Author, translator, and Viking weekend warrior, Lars Walker joins Team AOtP to discuss the wizened ways of the world.
Fiction, Reviews

‘Heavy Weather,’ by P. G. Wodehouse

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Sunshine pierced the haze that enveloped London. It came down Fleet Street, turned to the right, stopped at the premises of the Mammoth Publishing Company, and, entering through an upper window, beamed pleasantly upon Lord Tilbury, founder and proprietor of that vast factory of popular literature….

Considering what a pleasant rarity sunshine in London is, one might have expected the man behind the Mammoth to beam back. Instead, he merely pressed the buzzer. His secretary appeared. He pointed silently. The secretary drew the shade, and the sunshine, having called without an appointment, was excluded.

As you may recall, I’ve been following the adventures of P. G. Wodehouse’s character Monty Bodkin through the two novels in which he stars. I was then reminded that he actually shows up for the first time (as far as I’m aware) in the novel Heavy Weather, so I went back to that one. And it turns out HW is in fact a sequel to an earlier novel, Summer Lightning. So now I’ll have to read that one too (regretfully leaving Monty behind), caught like T.H. White’s Merlin in a reverse chronology.

This is one of Wodehouse’s more complex tales, so find a comfortable chair and pour yourself a cup of tea if you like.

Monty Bodkin, you’ll recall, tall, handsome, and rich, is in love with Gertrude Butterwick (who does not appear physically in this book; her character is still gestating). But she won’t agree to be married until she gets her father’s blessing. And her father has decreed that Monty won’t be given Gertrude’s hand unless he shows the enterprise to hold down a paying job for a full year.

He’s wangled a position at Lord Tilbury’s Mammoth Publishing, as assistant editor of Tiny Tots Magazine. In that capacity he commits the kind of blunder only a member of the Drones Club could make, and gets cashiered. However, he learns from a friend that Clarence (Threepwood), Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle in Shropshire, needs a secretary. Monty is an old family friend, so he calls Lord Emsworth’s imperious sister Constance, who is happy to hire him on her brother’s behalf.

Meanwhile, the other main plot picks up from the previous novel – Ronnie Fish, Lord Emsworth’s nephew, wants to marry Sue Brown, a charming chorus girl. Lady Constance firmly opposed the match, but agreed to it in return for a concession from her other brother, Galahad Threepwood. Gally, who was a notorious rake and London clubman in the 1890s, has written his memoirs, which contain enough old skeletons belonging to eminent English families to wreck numerous political careers and destroy the Threepwood family socially. Gally has agreed to withdraw publication of the memoirs (which were contracted to Lord Tilbury’s Mammoth Publishing) in return for Constance agreeing to the match and allowing her wooly-headed brother Clarence to release Ronnie’s trust fund.

Clarence, however, is barely aware of all this drama. His concern is with his suspicions that their neighbor, a fellow-pig fancier, is planning to poison the Empress of Blandings, his own beloved prize sow. When Lord Tilbury, who is not a man to let a certain bestseller slip through his fingers, arrives at Blandings Castle to pressure Uncle Galahad, and Lord Emsworth mistakes him for a pig poisoner, complications ensue. Which are not decreased by the arrival of Ronnie Fish’s mother Julia, who doesn’t care a fig about Gally’s scandals, but definitely does not want her son marrying some chorus girl. And, oh yes, Lord Emsworth thinks Monty Bodkin is a pig poisoner too.

What Heavy Weather offers that sets it apart from most of Wodehouse’s peak work is a small strain of pathos. Pathos doesn’t happen much in this fictional world; the reader doesn’t want it. Tragedy might be mentioned in passing, but it’s not dwelt on. However, here for once we do have a tragic subplot. There’s a reason Uncle Galahad is so strongly in favor of Ronnie’s and Sue’s wedding. Once, in his youth, he was in love with Sue Brown’s mother, but the family quelched their hopes and packed Gally off to South Africa. In Heavy Weather we get a rare glimpse into the regrets of an old man’s heart. I don’t think it’s overdone – I identified strongly and was moved. But I don’t recall a similar theme in any of Wodehouse’s other mature stories.

As an extra treat, I embed below a dramatic production of Heavy Weather done for the BBC in 1995. It features no less than the great Peter O’Toole as Lord Emsworth. I wasn’t entirely happy with it – I thought O’Toole (doing what seems like an imitation of Dame Edith Evans) insufficiently sympathetic here. And Richard Johnson, who was a fine actor, overdid the mugging, I thought, in the role of Lord Tilbury. In my opinion it’s almost always wrong to mug with Wodehouse – his humor depends on more subtle effects. (Though, come to think of it, Hugh Laurie mugged quite a lot as Bertie Wooster and I didn’t mind that.)

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Mersey Killing,’ by Brian L. Porter

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By the old, abandoned docks on the Mersey River in Liverpool, where first water and now sand has been receding for years, a skeleton is uncovered as A Mersey Killing by Brian L. Porter begins. There’s little to identify it other than a pair of expensive boots and a broken guitar pick, but the surrounding detritus indicates it comes from the mid-1960s.

Detective Sergeant Andy Ross and his female colleague “Izzy” Drake are assigned the case. It’s clearly a murder, as the skeleton shows gunshot wounds to the knees and a crushing blow to the head. But unless they can connect the skeleton to a name soon it will have to be dropped, because they need the resources for more pressing cases.

However, two middle-aged brothers come forward, asking whether the body might be that of their sister, missing since the ‘60s. They don’t know the skeleton has been identified as male. As Inspector Ross listens to their story (more patiently than I imagine would happen in real life in a busy police station), he realizes that another character in the story may just be their dead man. The story is told in two threads, one in the early 1960s, the other “today” (1999). The Sixties thread follows the story of Brendan Kane and the Comets, a rock ‘n roll group riding the wave of the Mersey Sound fad, hoping to achieve stardom like the Beatles. Although they achieve some local success, they never break out. But Brandon and Marie, the sister, a sort of unpaid roadie, fall in love. This is opposed by Marie’s father, a fanatical Irish Catholic who doesn’t want his daughter marrying any bloody Prod. Piece by piece (and with a lot of lucky breaks), the detectives put the true story together, leading to a poignant (if melodramatic and implausible) climax.

A Mersey Killing is another example of an amateurish work that shows some promise in terms of essential storytelling. I was interested to see how it all came out, so I stayed with it in spite of some pretty awful prose.

My main criticism of the writing is something I’ve been seeing a lot of in these days of self-publishing. The text needs cutting, badly. The author doesn’t know how to sharpen his prose, instead just piling words on, hoping one of them will stick. For instance:

Both the inspector and Sergeant Izzie Drake had found themselves being drawn inescapably into the past as they’d sat listening to Ronnie’s story. The man could certainly weave a good tale and had the knack of being able to communicate his thoughts in a way that gave the detectives a fascinating insight not only into the subject they were discussing but into another era, a period in recent history that only those who’d lived through it could perhaps fully appreciate. They were fascinated.

Everything in that passage could be deleted except for the first sentence, and we’d have all the author needs to convey without boring the reader.

Another problem I had with the book was the handling of religious issues. One of the characters is a religious bigot, and certainly not someone I admire. But the author (it seemed to me) wrote from the point of view – common in Europe – that religious faith itself is a kind of aberration that we’ve finally outgrown, thank Freud.

Yet another aspect of the story that troubled me – one you may not agree with me about – is what seemed to me a naïve admiration for the 1960s. The author sees it as a time of innocence and liberation, a wonderful time to live and love. I remember it as a time of drugs, escape from reason, and the first cracks of cultural disintegration.

Still, I finished the thing. You might like it better than I did.