Fiction, Reviews

‘On the Run,’ by John D. MacDonald

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“One man is a significant entity. A partnership halves that value. Three or more men, working together, diminish themselves to zero. Team effort is the stagnation of the race.”

As great a booster of John D. MacDonald as I may be, there are entries in his oeuvre that disappoint me. On the Run is one of those, but only because of how it ends – and I think I can guess why it turned out that way.

The titular man on the run in the story, Sid Shanley, is a used car salesman in Houston, living and working under an assumed name. He’s on the run because two years ago he discovered another man in bed with his wife and beat him brutally, leaving him permanently disfigured. The man turned out to be mobster, one inclined to hold grudges over far lesser insults. So Sid took to the road. It was easier to disappear back then than it is now, especially when you’re an orphan. Sid has a brother somewhere, but they’re not in touch.

But Sid isn’t as alone as he thinks. He doesn’t know he has a grandfather, a rich old man living in the town of Bolton out east. The old man is remorseful about the way he treated Sid’s mother, and he wants to see his two grandsons before he dies and leaves them his fortune. He hired a very smart, resourceful investigator to locate Sid, and it was done. He understands that Sid’s going to be hard to approach, so he sends his personal nurse, the lovely Paula Lettinger, as his emissary, carrying a memento he’s sure Sid will recognize.

After a difficult (and pretty weird) first encounter, Sid decides he can trust Paula, and they set off on a cross-country road trip back to Bolton. On the way they’ll discover that they’re made for each other. But as for the future – Sid can’t see how that could ever work out.

There’s a lot of sex in this book – not explicit, but as the focus of Sid’s and Paula’s relationship. Very sophisticated for the time, it all seems a little naïve today. And overdone.

Otherwise, the story goes along great until the very end, when the author clotheslines the reader, bringing the story to what was – for me – a most unsatisfactory conclusion.

But I suspect I can guess what happened to the story. On the Run was published in 1963, the same year the first book in MacDonald’s legendary Travis McGee series appeared. I’m guessing that McGee wasn’t the only series character MacDonald proposed to Fawcett Publications when they asked him to come up with one. I’m guessing that On the Run might have been the first installment in an intriguing series about Sid Shanley pursuing a vendetta against the mob. That would have justified the weird ending we face here.

But that series, if it was ever contemplated, never happened. So we’re left with a decent story that ends with a thud. I can’t really recommend it.

Authors

Tim Keller, 72, Now with the Lord

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Yesterday, I read about a controversial figure from the 1950-60s who a thoughtful, serious man, not sticking to a party line because it was his party. His original faith group disowned him. The media hated him. At the end of his life, he was changing his mind on fundamental ideas, and because of that, some have said he was beginning to put his faith in Christ. The writer I was reading said we couldn’t know any of these things, which points to the importance of doing the Lord’s will “as long as it is called ‘today.” We have no guarantee of tomorrow.

By all accounts, Tim Keller made the most of every day. He called us to Christ our Lord and now has been called home, after three years of managing pancreatic cancer.

ByFaith magazine has a good obituary that ends with this, from Reformed Theological Seminary Chancellor Ligon Duncan: “[Tim] in the PCA was a little bit like Gandalf in the Shire. We think he’s just a guy that does fireworks at birthday parties, when he’s actually out there in the world slaying dragons and taking on evil wizards.”

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Mean Street,’ by Colin Conway

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Another installment in the 509 Series by Colin Conway, about a rotating cast of cops in the Spokane area. I’m enjoying them immensely, and The Mean Street is, I think, the best so far.

The hero this time out is Dallas Nash, who was also the hero of The Long Cold Winter, which I reviewed some time back. Dallas is a senior detective, but his work has been slipping. He lost his wife to an auto accident a year ago, and he’s not handling it well. He gets auditory hallucinations. It used to be songs in his head when he woke up in the morning. That was rather nice; he imagined them as messages from his wife in the Great Beyond. But now it’s hard rock music, blasting in his ears. It’s painful and he can’t hear other people talking over the noise. He’s lost a lot of weight, and his personal grooming has declined. His colleagues and superiors are noticing. But he doesn’t want to see a therapist. If word of that got out, he’s convinced, he’d be marked down as weak and they’d restrict him to desk duty.

When a local pimp is shot to death on the street, Dallas is determined to treat it like any other murder. But a lot of people seem to disagree with that approach. Fellow cops consider the death good riddance. The prostitutes on the street don’t miss the guy at all. And advocates for prostitutes and battered women accuse the police of not doing enough to protect women. Oddly, the dead man didn’t seem to be on the outs with the other pimps. Meanwhile, people are starting to comment on Dallas’ unusual behavior on the job. It’s hard to explain a fainting spell.

I suppose the general theme of this book, considering the subplot involving a woman who kills herself under pressure from a man, is the power imbalance between men and women. I’m generally allergic to that sort of stuff, but it didn’t seem too heavy-heanded in The Mean Street. What I appreciated most was author Conway’s treatment of his characters. We get to see new facets of people we thought we understood; that’s one of my favorite experiences in a novel.

I enjoyed The Mean Street excessively. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Crime Czar,’ by Tony Dunbar

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I got a collection of Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet novels cheap, and by golly I’m going to read my way through them. They’re not entirely my kind of book, but I don’t hate them either, and cheap is good at this time in my life. So I’ve gotten to Crime Czar, the fifth book of the series.

When we last saw New Orleans lawyer Tubby Dubonnet, he had survived being kidnapped by bank robbers during the greatest flood in the city’s history. Things generally came out all right from Tubby’s point of view, except that his friend Dan got shot in the stomach saving Tubby’s life. At first it looked as if Dan would pull through, but now he’s back in the hospital, fading out. During a lucid moment, he whispers a cryptic message to Tubby.

Tubby experiences a new sensation now – a need for retribution. He knows who shot Dan – a dead-eyed, jug-eared professional killer who may or may not be dead. But Tubby wants the boss, the mastermind, the “crime czar” behind the killing.

His path to the reckoning will not run smooth – not in a Tony Dunbar novel. There will be frequent interruptions and sideshows involving the birth of Tubby’s first grandchild, a judge’s reelection campaign, the county’s corrupt sheriff, a client framed by the police, the return to town of a girlfriend, and a spunky young prostitute out after her own vengeance. These books often remind me of the stateroom scene in “A Night at the Opera,” where the comedy comes from no particular joke, but simply from the ridiculous introduction of one new character after another into a limited space.

And I guess that has something to do with why I don’t love the Tubby books as well as other people do. They kind of remind me of a party, and I’m uncomfortable at parties.

But Crime Czar was amusing. Also, I noticed for the first time that Tony Dunbar is in fact a pretty good prose stylist, capable of lines like, “she saw that his eyes were like crowder peas with woolly caterpillars crawling over them.”

Pretty good.

Fiction, Reviews

Out of the Soylent Planet by Robert Kroese

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“You know what’s good for adventures,” asked Rex Nihilo, apparently sensing an opportunity to make a sale. “Malarchian military grade plastic explosives. I’ve got a whole hovertruck load.”

“We don’t need any explosives,” said Uncle Blauwin.

The boy looked like he was going to cry. “First you won’t let me go into town to get energy fluxors and now you won’t let me have any military grade explosives. I hate you and this gosh-darned desert planet!”

Communication is about context, and comedy is about context, which means all communication is comedy. That, kids, is logic.

In this prequel to the sci-fi comedy Starship Grifters, if you’re familiar with a general sci-fi context, you’ll get the jokes–the more familiar, the more jokes. Mm, the smell of logic just gets you in the eye, doesn’t it?

A few years ago, I blogged on the second book in this series, Aye, Robot, and I found Out of the Soylent Planet to be a funnier story. The con man Rex Nihilo attempts to unload a truckload of plastic explosives, fails, rolls to plan B, fails, and then finds himself unloaded onto an isolated planet that’s locked down so tight even cans of creamed corn are contraband. The planet is mostly barren. Its civilization is built around producing an artificial nutritional substance called Slop. “It’s not food. It’s Slop!” Since readers would be thinking Slop is made from people, our heroes come across a corporate video that neatly explains that rumor away.

Rex and his robotic Girl Friday, SASHA, go through several silly romps and clever escapes. And explosions. Lots of explosions. Good fun.

I listened to the J.D. Ledford audiobook version, which added to the comedy with good timing and particular word emphases. I laughed aloud many times.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Doomed Legacy,’ by Matt Coyle

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I’ve been following Matt Coyle’s series of hard-boiled mysteries starring Rick Cahill for some time. I like the books quite a lot, but Doomed Legacy proved to be about as dark as its title.

Rick, when he was first introduced, was a loner private eye in San Diego, a disgraced cop who kept office hours in a booth in the steak house where he moonlighted as host. Through his subsequent adventures we’ve seen him reintegrate into human society. Now he’s married and the father of an 18-month-old daughter, the light of his life. At his wife’s request, he’s changed his business model from crime investigation to safe, routine background checks for various businesses.

She knows that he suffers from CTI, “the football player’s disease.” Brain damage from getting hit over the head too many times. What he hasn’t told her is that it’s progressing. He suffers from headaches and memory loss, but the worst of it is the rage attacks. He’s afraid he might endanger the people he loves.

One morning he argues with his wife, which makes him short-tempered when he meets with Sara Bhandari, his contact with Fulcrum Security, of his biggest client. She wants to meet somewhere out of the way, where her colleagues won’t see her. She tells him she’s concerned about some of the people whose security checks have been passed by a new investigative company they’ve hired recently. She thinks the people should never have been cleared, and thinks the investigators are up to something. Rick agrees to look into it as a favor, but he’s in a bad mood and leaves rudely. Something he regrets.

He regrets it even more three days later when, having been unable to reach Sara, he goes to her house and finds her dead – raped and murdered. The police identify the m. o. of a serial rapist in the area, and blame it on him. But Rick isn’t so sure.

Then Sara’s sister hires him to investigate the death. But she fires him abruptly when bad reports (false ones) start spreading about Rick’s own security work. That won’t stop him, of course. It’s personal now. But he has no idea how powerful the people he’s challenging are. And he has no idea the effect it all may have on his family.

I liked Doomed Legacy. It read well except for a couple typos. The occasional references to Christianity and prayer were positive.

But it’s a dark story. I hope the next one proves happier for Rick.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Skald’

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A scene from a production of “Hallfred Vandraadeskald” presented by the Norwegian National Theater in 1908. Photo property of Nationalteatret.

Another Icelandic saga, read by me in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. (Unfortunately, I can’t find another translation in print anywhere.) I’m reading through a section of skald’s sagas, from which you may infer that The Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Skald is another story of a poet.

Hallfred’s Saga bears some (actually a lot of) similarity to Kormak’s Saga, the subject of my last saga review. Like Kormak, Hallfred falls in love with a girl at home in Iceland, fails to show up for their wedding, and harasses any other suitors who appear. Also like Kormak, he sails abroad to make his fortune as a Viking.

But this is where his story distinguishes itself. Hallfred ends up at the court of King Olaf Trygvesson (whom you may remember from my novel, The Year of the Warrior). Hallfred seems to be a predecessor to every song writer who ever nagged record producers in Nashville or Las Angeles. The king has other things on his mind than listening to songs, but he finally agrees to give Hallfred a hearing, calling him a “troublesome skald” (vandræðaskáld). In the event the song pleases Olaf, who accepts Hallfred as one of his court poets.

But this happens at the peak of Olaf’s evangelistic zeal.  Receiving the king’s offer (actually a threat) of baptism, Hallfred makes a counterproposal. He wants Olaf himself to be his godfather, a singular honor. Like a squeaky wheel, Hallfred gets what he wants. But his relationship with the king is an uneven one. He seems to have trouble getting the swing of Christianity. He falls out of favor when he invokes the old gods or falls into heathen customs. Then the king sets him to various tasks to regain favor, opening up opportunities for the kinds of adventures that always show up in sagas.

Although Hallfred’s saga is not one of the best in terms of its artistry, it is interesting for the picture it gives of the religious transition in Iceland in the 11th Century. As compared to Kormak’s Saga, one senses the pressure of the new faith as it alters people’s mores. Hallfred’s attentions to another man’s wife are treated more seriously here, less as merry pranks, and his family urges him to let it all go. In the end even Hallfred decides to leave the woman’s husband alone.

One of the saga’s main weaknesses is that, although it’s based on Hallfred’s own poems, the saga writer appears to often misunderstand them. Poetic allusions (always very thick in Viking poetry) are mistaken for statements of fact. Thus, a man uses a heathen sacrificial trough as a weapon, highly unlikely in real life. Or Kormak’s great enemy is named “Gris,” which means pig. I would suspect that’s an insulting name Hallfred bestowed on him, rather than the name he actually carried. (Pigs enjoyed higher status among the Vikings than they do with us, but I’ve never heard of any Viking actually named “Pig.”)

In short, The Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Skald is a flawed saga which contains, nonetheless, numerous points of interest for the saga enthusiast.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Redemptive Return,’ by J.R. and Susan Mathis

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Book Number Three in the Father Tom Mysteries is The Redemptive Return. This review ought to be taken with a grain of salt, though, because my emotional reaction to it probably colors my judgment.

Father Tom Greer, as you may recall from my previous reviews, is a priest who entered the ministry late in life, having been a husband and a widower already. Before that, he was engaged to Helen Parr who (by one of those coincidences which are a little too common in this series) is now a police detective in the town of Myerton, Pennsylvania, where Father Tom also serves, in his own way. The fact that they are still attracted to one another is a complication in both their lives.

One day Tom gets a call from his sister Sonya, with whom he rarely communicates. It sounds like she’s running away from someone, and she desperately wants Tom to find something (he can’t hear what) and help somebody named Chrystal.

Tom isn’t sure what to do about this call. Sonya is a drug addict (supposedly in recovery now), and he’s gotten such calls from her before. They’ve never meant anything. He lets it go.

Shortly thereafter he hears from his mother. Sonya is dead. Her body was found in a dumpster.

And it’s all his fault.

Tom doesn’t want to go home, with all its unresolved issues, but he knows he must. What surprises him is that Helen shows up next to him on the plane, having taken personal leave to help him out.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Because of my own personal history, I found The Redemptive Return hard to read. So I’m incapable of saying whether this element (dysfunctional family dynamics) of the story is handled well or not.

However, it seemed to me the book suffered from what I’m sure others before me have called “Bond Villain Syndrome,” where the villain pauses long enough in the process of killing the hero to explain his/her criminal genius at length – giving the cavalry time to show up and save the day.

Finally, my big problem with the book was the resolution (at this point in the ongoing saga) of Father Tom’s relationship problem with Helen. An arrangement is worked out with the approval of his bishop. I’m not a Catholic, but I found it improbable in the extreme. Both ecclesiastically and psychologically.

I won’t pan The Redemptive Return, but I think it’s relatively weak. Readable, though.

Music

Sunday Singing: Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord

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“Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord” performed by The Redeemer Choir of Austin, Texas

This week’s hymn of ascension is a new one, as hymns go. Edmund P. Clowney (1917-2005) taught practical theology and was the first president of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He published this hymn, based on Psalm 24, in 1987.

The tune, about a hundred years older, is by the Irishman Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. You’ll notice it’s different than many hymn tunes in its triumphal openness. Each verse ends on a high note, perhaps to lift our heads up to Christ above us. With that it doesn’t feel neatly wrapped. It feels as if it anticipates more to come.

The words are under copyright, so I will copy only the first verse here.

Who shall ascend the mountain of the Lord,
to search the mystery in heaven stored,
the knowledge of the Holy One adored?
Alleluia!

Blogs, Socials, Music, Non-fiction, The Press

But How Are You Really? Well, Journalism Is Dead

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This week, I had one of those frequently repeated conversations about what we mean when we greet others with “Hello” and “How are you?” An earnest person might think it’s dishonest to ask someone how they are doing without expecting an answer and may feel a burden to share transparently when others ask them. You may have heard someone argue that Christians shouldn’t say they are fine when they aren’t fine; they shouldn’t paint on a smile when they’re going through a hard time.

But honesty doesn’t require complete transparency. That would expose us all to the fixers, who don’t know when to listen and when to advise. Greeting one another with a word or phrase is essentially verbal acknowledgement. We see and maybe recognize each other. We ask each other how’s the day or the doing or life at large as a way of well wishing. If we’re close to each other, we’ll want more than that, but even then, it may not be the time for it.

We can thank Thomas Edison for popularizing the word hello as a good way to answer the phone. Alexander Graham Bell (why do we give his full name so often? why not Alex Bell or Alexander G. Bell?) wanted us to us say ahoy, as if we were called out to someone in the distance. Prior to the phone, hello was a common word of surprise, which I suppose is the reason Bertie Wooster and co. say, “What ho!” regularly. The Online Etymology Dictionary says there are records from 1849 that show hello, the house as “the usual greeting upon approaching a habitation” in the American west.

Yes, yes, I suppose we should get on to other things, shouldn’t we?

Vocabulary: Here’s a good word for everyday use.

via Cian McCarthy/Twitter

Journalism: News outlets aren’t dead, but their owners may be trying to kill them. Ted Gioia has a compelling piece on news sites that wanted our clicks so bad they killed themselves, and now big news outlets appear to want to die the same way. “The company tried to maximize clicks with shallow gimmicks, when it should have been worrying about the articles themselves.”

Conservatism: A right-wing movement wants a big reset. John Ehrett says critics label it different things, but vitalism is a good name for it. “In place of Ronald Reagan’s famous ‘three-legged stool’—free-market economics, military interventionism, and religious conservatism—the new vitalists would burn the place down altogether, and host a festival around the pyre.”

Bruce Springsteen: “He paints his masterpiece of America as a brand and what it does to people. To me, Nebraska is an album-length description of how America has struggled to find its soul, has never had much of an identity beyond the brand that’s been sold over and over again to people living here. But lives are lived behind the brand, and Springsteen is unearthing them, exposing them to the light.” That storytelling was formed by a love of Flannery O’Connor.

Photo by Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash

Book Reviews, Creative Culture