Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Exploding Shop,’ by Michael Leese

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I have reached the fourth and final volume of the set of Hooley and Roper mysteries I acquired. I’ve got no major complaints to make about The Case of the Exploding Shop, but I can’t praise it very highly either.

Just to remind you, Brian Hooley and Jonathan Roper are London police detectives. The gimmick of the series is that Roper is on the autism spectrum. He’s brilliant at analysis, but other cops resent his tactlessness. Hooley is an easygoing sort who manages to get along with him, profiting from his investigative insights. Their current friction rises from the fact that Roper has noticed (correctly) signs of incipient heart disease in Hooley, and is nagging him to eat better and get more exercise.

During a single morning, a world-famous computer mogul is severely burned by a bomb detonated while he’s making a presentation on a new product. Then an Italian politician visiting London is murdered with a shotgun. And a bomb kills a number of shoppers at a fashionable Sloan Square boutique.

Hooley and Roper go to work, assisted now by a new female team member.

I guess, when I pick up a story about an autistic detective, I’m always looking for something along the lines of Monk on TV. Hooley and Roper are just not as much fun (at least to me). Roper’s value is now pretty well acknowledged on the Force, so there’s not a lot of office opposition. Roper, we are told, has been working on his social skills as well. I’m happy for him, but it makes the story less interesting.

Another thing that didn’t work well for me is Roper’s “rainbow spectrum,” a mental filing and classification system he uses to organize his thinking on complex problems. It’s a useful fictional device, I guess, but it’s also a sort of a black box – the reader can’t follow the logical process. That, I think, sacrifices intrigue.

Also, I’d like to see Hooley have more of a life off the job. Give him a girlfriend or something.

I didn’t hate The Case of the Exploding Shop, but it didn’t raise my pulse rate either. No major cautions for language or subject matter are called for.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Return to Evil, by John Carson

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I’d read one of John Carson’s Harry McNeil mysteries before. I reviewed it as being a decent police story, but I thought the cop banter was inexpertly done.

In Return to Evil, Edinburgh Detective McNeil, fresh off Professional Standards (what we’d call Internal Affairs in the US), has been assigned to Cold Cases. The officers he works with there are not happy – it’s considered a squad where careers go to die. They’re looking at the murder of a girl in a cemetery, some years ago. She was 15 years old and pregnant, and someone tipped a gravestone onto her. It happened during the shooting of a science fiction movie, now considered a classic.

And now the movie is being remade on the same location, and  another girl is found dead in the same way. The cold case becomes a hot one.

My main problem with this book is one I’ve complained about in other books recently – most of the characters aren’t described. I had trouble keeping them straight. The cop banter didn’t annoy me as much this time out, but I still thought the male and female characters were excessively interchangeable.

Not bad, but I can’t recommend Return to Evil highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Close Your Eyes,’ by Thomas Fincham

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Here we have a novel with an interesting premise, but in this reviewer’s opinion it was not well written.

Close Your Eyes has a plot consisting of two threads, which of course come together in the end.

One thread involves the lonely hero, Martin Rhodes. He’s a former cop who shot a criminal. He’d do it again, but he understands why he had to go to prison for it. He served his time, and now he’s out, walking the streets of the fictional city of Bridgeton, sleeping at a homeless shelter, trying to figure out what he’s going to do for a living. Idly looking at a display of police notices, he meets a man who recognizes him, knows who he is. The man says his son was murdered by a drug dealer. He would be willing to pay a large sum of money if Martin could find the murderer. On the strength of a decent advance on the reward, Martin agrees to look into it. Along the way he acquires a strange sidekick, a teenaged girl whom he rescues from an abuser.

Meanwhile, in the other plot thread, FBI agent Jo Pullinger is hunting a man who’s been murdering people and leaving them in subway cars. She has a secret she’s not sharing with anyone – she has a potentially fatal heart condition.

On the sidelines, a TV reporter without principles is trying to play the murderer off against the police.

The story in Close Your Eyes was okay, and the characters were interesting in principle. The problem for me was the writing. There are two approaches to the challenge of conveying one’s meaning to the reader. They are generally known as the rifle approach and the shotgun approach. The rifle approach goes for a few words, well aimed. The shotgun approach involves throwing a lot of words at the reader, hoping a few of them will hit properly and say what you want.

The rifle approach is how professionals do it. Author Thomas Fincham is a shotgun writer. This annoys me. At least a quarter of the verbiage could have been cut without loss. So I didn’t enjoy Close Your Eyes, and had trouble finishing it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Where Is Janice Gantry?’ by John D. MacDonald

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“…You’ve never decided what you are, Sam. You want to be all meat and muscle and reflexes. You want to deny how bright and intuitive and sensitive you are. You’re a complex animal, Sam. You try not to think, and so you think too much. You couldn’t just plain love, Sam. You thought us to death. You like to talk ignorant and act ignorant. It’s some kind of crazy protective coloration. Maybe you think it’s manly. I don’t know. You seem to have to diminish yourself. But people sense that good mind, and it makes them uncomfortable because you are being something you’re not.”

Sam Brice is a former pro football player who left the sport under a cloud, losing his trophy wife in the process. He genuinely loved her, and has never gotten over it. Now he works as an insurance adjuster on the Gulf Coast of Florida. He used to date Janice Gantry, who works in the same office. She grew frustrated with his lack of ambition, and they broke up. But they remain friends. She’s thinking of getting married to someone else now, and Sam wishes her well.

As Where Is Janice Gantry? begins, Sam is awakened by someone scratching at his screen porch. It’s Charlie, a young local man who has escaped from prison. All Charlie wants is a place to sleep a few hours and a short ride. With some misgivings, Sam helps him; he always thought there was something off about the story of his crime. It’s still dark when he drives Charlie to a phone. Then, on impulse, he watches from concealment to see what happens next. Charlie makes a call, and soon Janice Gantry appears. She drives Charlie to the office where she and Sam work. Sam spies through a window as she makes a phone call. Then a suspicious sheriff’s deputy on patrol attacks him and arrests him for prowling. Sam is finally released by the sheriff, who knows him but doesn’t like him. The sheriff warns him to keep his nose clean.

The next morning Janice does not arrive at work, and soon she’s officially a missing person. The sheriff thinks Charlie must have murdered her, or she ran off with him. Sam can’t tell him what he knows, and wouldn’t be believed anyway. He talks to a friend, a local gossip, who directs his attention to the house of a reclusive millionaire who lives on a nearby Key. This is the man whose safe Charlie was originally convicted of robbing. Sam makes a plan to meet the millionaire’s lonely wife, but instead meets her sister, a lovely woman who happens to be visiting. She too senses something is wrong in the house…

Where Is Janice Gantry? is one of those John D. MacDonald non-McGee books that left a particular impression on my memory. Sam Brice is a little like McGee (who wouldn’t be created for about three years at that point), but he has the advantage of the non-serial character in that he’s allowed to grow. Sam is sympathetic, but secretly bitter and openly gun-shy about relationships and life in general. The extreme exertions and dangers he’ll face in this book will change his life.

There’s a lot of sex in this book. Sam’s beautiful new lover spends a fair part of the story pretty much naked, as was suitable for the paperback market at that time in history. Even though the sexual revolution was fairly new at the time, it’s already assumed that lovers will sleep together before marriage. So morality cautions are in order. One character may be meant to be homosexual, but it’s not explicitly stated.

Nevertheless, Where Is Janice Gantry? is a well-written, gripping mystery/thriller by a master of the genre. Recommended for grownups.

Music

Sunday Singing: No, Not Despairingly Come I to Thee

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“No, Not Despairingly Come I to Thee” performed on piano by Andrew Remillard

Today’s hymn of hopeful repentance comes from a Scottish author and hymnist who may not have the name recognition of Wesley and Watts but deserves to be widely known for his rich theological hymns. Honatius Bonar (1808-1889) published this hymn in 1866.

1 No, not despairingly come I to thee;
no, not distrustingly bend I the knee:
sin hath gone over me, yet is this still my plea,
Jesus hath died.

2 Ah! mine iniquity crimson has been,
infinite, infinite, sin upon sin;
sin of not loving thee, sin of not trusting thee,
infinite sin.

3 Lord, I confess to thee sadly my sin;
all I am tell I thee, all I have been:
purge thou my sin away, wash thou my soul this day;
Lord, make me clean.

4 Faithful and just art thou, forgiving all;
loving and kind art thou when poor ones call:
Lord, let the cleansing blood, blood of the Lamb of God,
pass o’er my soul.

5 Then all is peace and light this soul within;
thus shall I walk with thee, the loved Unseen;
leaning on thee, my God, guided along the road,
nothing between.

Authors, Bookselling, Poetry, Publishing

Moral Sanctity, Authors Banned Left and Right, and a Speaking Tree

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I heard a podcast this week that raised the idea of moral sanctity, meaning there is value, nobility, and even peace in the fact that you have never done particular things (and further, that you’ve never even thought that particular things could be done). This contrasts with transactional morality, meaning that we consider some actions wrong and forbidden only because we perceive they have unwelcome consequences.

Perhaps you’ve heard of mock moral dilemmas as intellectual challenges. Someone asks, “Would you do this evil or that one, if you had to choose one of the two?” How do you rationalize the consequences of one action against the other? More transactionally, if you were in a room where no one could see you or know you were there, would you do this nasty thing for a dollar amount of your choice? If all moral choices are transactional, then we determine what is right and wrong after a bit of cost-benefit analysis. Plagiarism is good, if you don’t get caught, and even if you do, it may still be good enough to have attempted it. It’s up to you.

With the backing of moral sanctity, you can say no to both of the questions above. You don’t have to choose one evil over the other. Instead, you would attempt neither. You don’t have to name a dollar amount to outweigh the nastiness of doing some vice where no one can see you. You can choose instead the value of being able to say to yourself, if no one else, that you’ve never done such a thing.

And that touches on a truth secular society has ruled out. We are never alone. What we confess in private, we confess in God’s hearing. What we choose, we choose under God’s watch, and the consequences we earn from his hand cannot be sidestepped.

I’m probably out of my depth here, so I’ll move on.

More Rewriting: Not only is the Roald Dahl estate allowing the publisher to edit his books to avoid offending sensitive readers, the Ian Fleming estate is following suit. But R. L. Stine claims his publisher has gone behind his back to change his books. “Altering published works to conform to ever-shifting standards is more Orwellian than just banning them,” he said.

More Banning: Joel Miller talks about this subject in “What Else Can We Censor While We’re Here?” “When novelist Jane Smiley recently discovered a school district in Idaho banned her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1991 novel A Thousand Acres, she was thrilled. ‘Most authors know that banning books can increase sales, so here’s hoping,’ she said.”

Comic Books: Word on the street is that Marvel and DC are struggling to keep their readers and have or will reduce the number of printed comic books they produce. Some might say this is a case of Go Woke and Go Broke. Andrew Klavan had a short discussion about this with comic book author Mike Baron, who notes several writers that have been pushed out of the comic space for not toeing the current party line.

Poetry: Dream of the Rood

Wondrous was the victory-tree, and I was stained by sins,
wounded with guilt; I saw the tree of glory
honored in garments, shining with joys,
bedecked with gold; gems had
covered worthily the Creator’s tree.
And yet beneath that gold I began to see
an ancient wretched struggle, when it first began
to bleed on the right side.

Eleanor Parker writes about this ancient poem for Plough. “The story it tells is shaped to resonate with an Anglo-Saxon audience. By imagining Christ as a warrior and the Cross as his loyal follower, it echoes the relationship found in poems like Beowulf, where the bond between a warrior and his men is invested with the most intense emotions of love and grief.”

Photo by Maxim Lugina on Unsplash

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Republican Party Reptile,’ by P. J. O’Rourke

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Is that any way to have fun? How would your mother feel if she knew you were doing this? She’d cry. She really would. And that’s how you know it’s fun. Anything that makes your mother cry is fun. Sigmund Freud wrote all about this. It’s a well-known fact.

I am feeling a little grim about the world these days, so I thought I’d read something funny. Were I a better man I’d probably have read some Wodehouse, but I listened to the little guy on my left shoulder and bought the cheapest P. J. O’Rourke I could find.

Disclaimer: The ideas and opinions expressed in this book do not necessarily represent those of the reviewer, this blog, or of real persons, living or dead.

When you read the late P. J. O’Rourke, you are guaranteed two things – hilarity, and offense. Republican Party Reptile is probably one of the extreme cases in his oeuvre, because this is National Lampoon-era O’Rourke, young and iconoclastic and frequently stoned on something. Nothing – absolutely nothing – is immune to a joke, including lots of things we (rightly) no longer consider funny. This is how it was in the ‘80s. Deal with it.

In this series of essays, written for various publications, O’Rourke writes about a wide variety of subjects. A condensed history of the world. A user report on the drug Ecstasy. A cruise through Soviet Russia with an earnest group of American lefties. A hostage situation in Beirut. A trans-continental road trip in a Ferrari. Sex acts in moving cars (this one deserves a special content warning). Men’s hats (I particularly liked that one). And finally, an epic history of the author’s own life, recast as a medieval war chronicle. For some reason.

Some of these essays have aged better than others. Some are frankly offensive and could never be published today. (Evangelical Christians come in for a single insult. I believe O’Rourke softened his views later in life.) One detects the subtle influence of various chemical stimulants, legal and illegal, from time to time.

But it was funny. Republican Party Reptile made me laugh. Most of the subjects of ridicule had it coming. Lots of cautions are in order for language and subject matter.

Drugs are a one-man birthday party. You don’t get any presents you didn’t bring.

Fiction, Reviews

‘City of Beads,’ by Tony Dunbar

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Tubby went into his own bedroom and checked the drawer in the little table by the bed to see if his own pistol was still there. It was, and he picked it up. It was an old and heavy gun, a Smith & Wesson .38. When you ordered shells for it at the gun store it was like ordering a double bourbon at a bar. People gave you respect because you were old.

The second Tubby DuBonnet book in Tony Dunbar’s well-known series is City of Beads. The city, of course, is Tubby’s New Orleans home, where he practices law in a fairly desultory manner.

Tubby is settling into the routine of practicing law on his own, after his partner betrayed him in the last book. He’s upset to learn that an old friend, a man who made money exporting peanut oil for foreign aid programs, has been found dead in the hold of one of his own barges. But he didn’t drown in the oil – it was murder. It’s hard to figure out why anyone would kill the man, and Tubby promises the widow he’ll poke around.

At the same time, he’s been retained by a local casino. The money’s excellent, though they don’t seem to have much real work for him to do. But he’s enjoying the company of the beautiful blonde they appointed as his liaison.

There’s another woman too, though – an attractive black woman who just happens to have committed a revenge killing.

In addition, one of Tubby’s adult daughters is involved with an environmentalist group, investigating river pollution. Some people don’t like the questions she and her friends are raising, and Tubby agrees to help out just to keep an eye on her.

I’m still not sure what to make of the Tubby DuBonnet books. At the end of the last one I decided I should approach them as dark comedy, but I didn’t find City of Beads all that funny. And the hero, though he’s supposed to be pretty street smart, seems to me to survive as much on luck as on intelligence.

I wonder if I’d appreciate the books better if I’d ever been to New Orleans….

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Purple Place for Dying,’ by John D. MacDonald

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He looked at me in a way which made me glad I would never have the job of quieting him down—twenty years ago—or now. He had the look of the long hard bones, the meat tight against them, laid on in the long flat webs of hard muscle, ancient meat of the western rider, sunbaked, fibrous and durable. He had made trouble in a lot of far places and settled it his way, or he wouldn’t have lasted.

I’d almost forgotten about A Purple Place for Dying, another in John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. Even though it contains one of the great set pieces in the saga.

Travis is far from his Fort Lauderdale home in this one. He’s out west, where Mona Yeoman, the big, young, beautiful wife of a very rich man, has summoned him to a secret meeting in a lonely mountain cabin. She’s fallen in love with a man her own age, she says, and wants to get free of her husband. She wants Travis to help her work that out.

Travis isn’t much interested, until Mona is suddenly dead, pierced by a high-powered rifle bullet fired from a distance. And when he makes his way down the mountain to report the murder, nobody believes him. By the time the sheriff’s men get to the site, her body is gone. For all anyone can tell, Mona succeeded in running off with her lover, and McGee is just covering for them. Which means he’ll have to figure out what’s really going on.

He’ll meet Mona’s husband, a hard man but not a bad man; a man Travis respects. He’ll meet Mona’s lover’s sister, a lonely, damaged woman who’ll probably be alone forever unless she finds some real man with a gentle touch to heal her spirit (and you can guess where that will lead).

All in all, I don’t think Travis McGee is at his best too far from his house boat, especially when he leaves his economist friend Meyer behind. On the other hand, A Purple Place for Dying features one of his most imaginative fights – the defense, without a gun, of a desert mesa against two armed men. That was pretty cool.

Not the best McGee, but still better than most of the stuff you’ll see nowadays. Extra points awarded for patriarchal sexism.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Clockmaker’s Secret,’ by Jack Benton

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In theory, this was almost an ideal book for me. It’s fairly low on violence (how did I become the kind of reader who relishes a lack of violence in a book?), but it’s too dark to be called a Cozy. The Clockmaker’s Secret by Jack Benton is very British, I dare say, in the sense that eccentricity is often considered a British trait.

This is the second book in a series, and having finished it I see that I reviewed its prequel, The Man by the Sea. I did not like that book at all. I found the characters improbable and the action implausible. I liked The Clockmaker’s Secret a little better, but not enough to endorse it with a full heart.

Our hero is Slim Hardy, a former British commando and current recovering alcoholic, who has decided to become a private eye (without great success) and is spending a holiday in Cornwall to clear his mind.

One day while hiking on Bodmin Moor, he stumbles over an object wrapped in plastic, protruding from the heather. He digs it up and discovers that it’s an unfinished cuckoo clock. He takes it back to the guest house where he’s staying and asks around. It turns out to be the work of Amos Birch, a renowned local craftsman who disappeared more than 20 years ago, leaving behind a crippled wife and a bereaved daughter.

For his own reasons, Slim becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of Amos’ disappearance. He encounters the mulish secrecy of suspicious locals, and meets Amos’ attractive daughter, who seems to know more than she’s saying.

But in the end all Slim’s suppositions will be proved wrong. And he’ll fall off the wagon too.

The Clockmaker’s Secret was one of those books (for this reader) that ends with no clear sense of accomplishment. Some secrets were dug up, but nothing really changed. The characters acted a little more sensibly here than they did in the previous book, but I wasn’t really caught up in the thing. And I don’t like Slim a whole lot.

I don’t generally award stars, but if I did, I guess I’d give The Clockmaker’s Secret three out of five.