Happy Friday. Today I saw my doctor, and I was actually eager to see him. Because I was able to show him all the weight I’ve lost (40 lbs. by his figures). It isn’t often a guy my age is able to tell his doctor good things.
Above, Andrew Klavan and Ben Shapiro discuss their 5 favorite movies and books. This clip reinforces my suspicion that Klavan is way, way, smarter than I am.
When I really like a book, I like to post a snippet of good prose from the text up above my reviews, just to give the reader a taste. Oddly, I didn’t find any snippets in Racing the Light, Robert Crais’s 19th Elvis Cole novel, though I was much impressed with the writing. I guess what I appreciated was the effectiveness of the narrative, its efficiency and power, rather than any storyteller’s flourishes.
Elvis Cole, Los Angeles private eye, contemporary Philip Marlowe in a Hawaiian shirt, gets a drop-in visitor in his office. It’s an elderly woman named Adele Schumacher. She wears very inexpensive clothes, but on the other hand she has two armed security guards escorting her.
As best as Elvis can figure out, the woman’s a crackpot. She raves about government wiretapping, and drone surveillance, and aliens at Area 51. But she has a big envelope full of cash, and she offers Elvis whatever he wants to locate her son Josh, who has disappeared.
Elvis is ambivalent, but he agrees to at least look into it. He finds that Josh is the host of a podcast. Most of the time his subject matter is UFOs and that sort of thing, but lately he’s been talking to a porn star who claims to have explosive information about the real estate shenanigans of a number of city council members. And they, in turn, have connections to Chinese criminals. It appears that Josh was wise to drop out of sight. But he’s in way over his head, and he’s going to need a friend to protect him.
Meanwhile, Elvis has gotten a call from Lucy Chenier, the love of his life, who left him a few books back to return to Baton Rouge with her son. Life with Elvis was too dangerous, she said. She had her boy to protect. But now she wants to talk. Elvis dares to hope, but is prepared for disappointment.
What I liked best about Racing the Light was the characters and relationships. There was a lot of wisdom here about families and friends, and learning to trust and take risks.
Highly recommended. Elvis’ dangerous friend Joe Pike is around too, which is always fun.
The dregs of dreams were all of childhood, and in the morning mirror I looked at the raw, gaunt, knobbly stranger, at the weals and the pits and the white tracks of scar tissue across the deepwater brown of the leathery useful body, and marveled that childhood should turn into this—into the pale-eyed, scruff-headed, bony stranger who looked so lazily competent, yet, on the inside, felt such frequent waves of Weltschmerz, of lingering nostalgia for the lives he had never lived.
Another deal on a Travis McGee e-novel by John D. MacDonald pops up, and it is for me but the work of a moment to seize on it and make it my own. This one is Dress Her in Indigo, one of the most memorable installments, I think, in that memorable hard-boiled series. It poses certain challenges for me in reviewing it in this space. This is one of the books, in a series where sex is not infrequent, in which sex is particularly central. The book is an interesting artifact in that it arises from that moment in social history when the Swingin’ Sixties were morphing into the Hippie Era, and will be useful to future historians, if only as an expression of its time.
In general, Travis McGee, “salvage specialist,” makes his living finding lost money and property for people. But this job is different. His best friend, the ursine, affable economist known only as Meyer, asks him to help him do a favor for another friend.
T. Harlan Bowie is an investment counselor who grew very rich almost inadvertently, and is now confined to a wheelchair. His wife died not long ago, leaving him with an adult daughter he barely knew. The girl, “Bix,” was extremely beautiful and a very lost soul. A while back she headed off to Mexico with some friends in a camper, and now word has come that she died in an auto accident on a mountain road. All T. Harlan wants is to find out is what her life was like down there. Was she happy? Did she have good friends?
McGee has a bad feeling about this job from the outset, but he and Meyer set out for Oaxaca, her last known address. What they discover leaves them wondering whether they should just lie to the old man. Because Bix’s circle of friends were not nice people at all. They were involved in drug dealing and drug smuggling, and some pretty kinky sex games too. And murder, in the end.
But wait, it gets worse. The big secret is yet to be discovered, and when it is, McGee will be faced with one of the most difficult moral decisions he’ll ever have to make.
But back to the sex. Travis McGee is very far from being a role model, especially for the Christian reader. And one of the most interesting aspects of this book is a stark – comic in places – contrast that’s set up between his experiences in the sack (well-written without being explicit) with one woman who is extremely seductive and experienced, and another woman who is relatively innocent (at least by comparison). Spoiler alert: the innocent one comes out way ahead. If one were to think this out to the end, it might lead to possible arguments for lifetime monogamy, but of course no such argument is made here. Let the reader understand.
Anyway, Dress Her in Indigo is one of MacDonald’s best. Recommended, with cautions as noted above.
A deal came up for a Louis L’Amour book on Kindle, and I thought, “It’s been a long time since I’ve read L’Amour. I really dug him, way back when I was in radio. Let’s see how he holds up.”
Sadly, for this reader, Monument Rock didn’t stack up all that well.
The book is actually a collection – six short stories plus the novel, Monument Rock, which is the final installment in the “Kilkenny” series. This volume is billed as the final published collection of previously unpublished L’Amour western stories.
I was a bit disappointed. My first complaint was the seemingly formulaic quality of the stories. Each of them (at least in memory) was built on the same basic plot – a mysterious, dangerous stranger rides into town (or onto the ranch), where bad guys are doing bad things. Often a woman is threatened. Often the stranger has a secret connection to the place, to be revealed at the end. The stranger (who is exactly like all the other stranger heroes in all the stories) is dangerous and fast with a gun, and can’t be intimidated. The climax is a shootout, where he triumphs.
Of course, there’s a reason narrative formulas exist. They work. It’s just that when you clump them all together like this, the upholstery looks a little threadbare.
Also, the writing wasn’t as good as I hoped. L’Amour was a great storyteller, but he wasn’t a top wordsmith. (I suppose I’ve become a literary snob in my old age.)
The final novel, Monument Rock, pleased me more than the stories. The longer form provided scope for some narrative variety.
There’s nothing really wrong with Monument Rock. L’Amour fans will enjoy it.
As Northumbria’s lord, Eric Håkonsson continued to use the Norse title of jarl, and this was the first time the title was used in England. It eventually came to replace the Anglo-Saxon title of ealdorman, and continues to be used in England today in its current form—“earl”.
It’s amazing to me that just when I’m mapping out my epic novel about Erling Skjalgsson and Saint Olaf Haraldsson, an invaluable book on this very subject shows up. Divine appointment? Maybe, but I try to confine my personal grandiosity to self-mockery. However it is, Tore Skeie’s book, The Wolf Age, is just what I was looking for, not to mention being an excellent popular historical work in its own right.
The epistemological elephant in the room in any book dealing with the North Sea region in the period under discussion (in particular the reigns of Aethelred the Unready, Svein Forkbeard, and Knut the Great in England, and the two Olafs in Norway) is the question of the reliability of the Icelandic sagas, our sole source of information for much of Norwegian history at the time. Author Skeie tries not to trust the sagas too much, yet the story doesn’t veer far from them either. The book actually begins by talking about Snorri Sturlusson, author of Heimskringla, the sagas of the Norse kings, in order to provide perspective.
Much has been written over the years about the dramatic events leading up to the Norman conquest in 1066. But the tale of the Knut Sveinsson’s Danish conquest is equally fascinating, and arguably more dramatic. It teems with interesting, enigmatic, maddening characters, fateful accidents, and tragic decisions. I suppose it’s only because the Danish dynasty didn’t last that attention has turned away from it.
I was surprised to note that King (later saint) Olaf Haraldsson, about whom we don’t know a lot for certain (especially if you exclude the sagas), still comes off as the most intriguing character in the book. This is similar to my own experience in research.
The book is full of useful information that will be of great benefit to me. But anyone interested in Viking Age history will also learn much. There are details I might disagree with. The author states categorically that the men who rowed Viking ships wore rowing gloves – I’m not sure how he knows that for sure. He states that infant baptism wasn’t generally practiced in Norway in Olaf Trygvesson’s time – I find that dubious. He suggests Erling Skjalgsson wasn’t even present at the battle of Nesjar. I doubt that too.
But all in all, The Wolf Age is a treasure trove. It was a relatively fast read, and well translated. I highly recommend it.
Here’s a relatively new hymn set to an older and familiar tune. It’s a song of trusting the Lord with all our cares, fears, and responsibilities. I think of it as a Thanksgiving-themed song, but giving thanks is only implied.
Lord, “be thou the center of our least endeavour.
Be thou our guest, our hearts and homes to share.”
Barbara B Hart wrote the words to “A Christian Home,” or “O Give Us Homes Built Firm Upon the Savior,” in 1965. I can find nothing biographical on Hart except her year of birth. Perhaps her publisher, Singpiration Music or The Benson Company, will tell us about her one day.
The tune is “Finlandia” by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), which is also the melody for the hymn “Be Still, My Soul.” Sibelius wrote his tone poem in 1899 for the Finnish Press Pension Celebration, “a thinly veiled rally in support of freedom of the Finnish press,” according to Britannica.
The words are under copyright, so I won’t reproduce them here, but they are reproduced in the video along with additional verse, the third one, that isn’t in the Trinity hymnal I use for reference.
This afternoon, I was wishing for comfort food, blankets, and books. It’s been a long week. Will I take my fatigue to the little comforts around me and drink too much coffee, or will I remember my weakness before the Lord? Will I console myself with my gifts or with the Giver? (There’s a phrase that’s probably said in a pulpit somewhere at least once every Sunday.)
A child may not have a penny in his pocket, yet he feels quite rich enough if he has a wealthy father. You may be very, very poor, but oh! what a rich Father you have! Jesus Christ’s Father is your Father. And as He has exalted His own dear Son, He will do the same for you in due time. Our Lord Jesus is the firstborn among many brethren and the Father means to treat the other brethren even as He treats Him. Your Father has made you one of His heirs—yea, a joint heir with Jesus Christ—what more would you have?
Charles Spurgeon, in a sermon delivered Sept. 17, 1899
And what links do we have today?
Wendell Berry: “The public certainly retains a keen sense that some actions and attitudes are wrong, and public figures often condemn particular offenses with totalizing ferocity. As Berry notes, the ‘old opposition to sin’ remains, but he worries we have narrowed the acts that count as sin. He warns that ‘nothing more reveals our incompleteness and brokenness as a public people than our self-comforting small selection of public sins.'”
Fantasy nihilism: “HBO has succeeded in identifying popularity and prestige with immorality. Things that could not have been shown in prime time 20 years back are now the only prime time fare there is.”
Graham Greene: In 1950, author Graham Greene was stuck on an America-bound ocean liner with a reporter who shoved a mic and camera in his face. The reporter was Jack Mangan, who was working on his ABC TV series “Ship’s Reporter.” Dwyer Murphey shares a video and some details.
Reading: Need a device to help you read several volumes without requiring you to move? Consider this design by Italian military engineer Agostino Ramelli: the bookwheel.
Bookstores: Booksellers adapt to new customer patterns. “We like having browsers, but we don’t depend on it. This idea that a person is going to come to a bookstore and browse, it doesn’t sustain the business now.”
Jokes are evil? Here’s a YouTuber who talks about writing and breaks down comic book stories and select movies to learn more about writing well. Last month, he riffed on an issue of X-Men: Years of Future Past to discuss a theme in that story, that jokes are evil.
Photo: Texaco gas pumps, Milford, Illinois. 1977. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
In the wake of my fulsome review of Andrew Klavan’s A Strange Habit of Mind yesterday (it was so gushy it even embarrasses me a little, but I meant every word), I thought we could have some advice from the master on starting out as a writer. So here’s a video, which is apparently about a year old, since he plugs When Christmas Comes.
I should probably take this advice myself, though I wonder how many agents are interested in bright young authors in their seventh decades.
She made a movement then—just a small one, very subtle. A little nod of the head while her hand tugged gently at the edge of her skirt. That was all. But to Winter it was clearly suggestive of a curtsey, a gesture so ladylike and anachronistic that it seemed to strike clean through him like a saber thrust. When she returned to her table to gather her overcoat and her purse, he felt as if she had left a jagged hole of loneliness at the center of him, front to back.
The paragraph above is as good a description of a certain male experience (one of our nobler ones) as I’ve ever read. Which is just the kind of writer Andrew Klavan is. He’s the best at what he does. We American conservatives (and Christians) aren’t worthy of his talent.
But be that as it may, we are the happy recipients of another book in Klavan’s Cameron Winter series, which is cause for rejoicing. The first Cameron Winter book, When Christmas Comes, was released around this time last year, and it floored me. I prayed there’d be more, and A Strange Habit of Mind, just released, is my Christmas miracle for 2022.
Cameron Winter, you may recall, is an English professor at a college in an unnamed midwestern state. (I was pretty sure it was Indiana while reading the last book, but we learn now that it borders Minnesota, so I’m guessing Wisconsin.) He’s independently wealthy and working at a job he loves, but he’s also lonely and depressed.
So he sees a psychologist, an older woman. To her he confides the causes of his depression and isolation. Partly they come from his tragic childhood, but much of it is due to his previous career. He used to work for an organization called the Division, which trained him to be an assassin. Not like in the movies. Their methods were far more subtle than the silenced pistol or the garotte in the dark. They knew ways to destroy people by exploiting their personal hungers and weaknesses, and to kill them in ways that looked like natural death, or accidents.
Cam recently got a text from a former student who’s been living in San Francisco. Just two words – “Help me.” Cam called back immediately, but got no reply.
Later he learns that the young man threw himself off the roof of his apartment building shortly after sending the text. Cam is troubled and looks into it. The young man had left school under a cloud, and his subsequent history said little for his character. A drug dealer. A girlfriend abuser. Really, he was no loss to the world.
But Cam can’t let it go, for some reason. He has, as he tells his counselor, “a strange habit of mind,” a gift that was useful to him in his work for the Division. When he ponders an event, his mind unconsciously reorganizes data, enabling him often to discern underlying crimes. And as he looks into the student’s world, he finds that the girlfriend he beat up just happens to be a sister to Molly Byrne, “the Cinderella girl,” the woman who married Gerald Byrne, the richest, most powerful man in the world. (Think Jeff Zuckerberg, but crazier and with more power.)
That leads him into Byrne’s personal history, and a pattern begins to emerge. People who hurt people Byrne cares about tend to have bad accidents. Not only that, but people who oppose Byrne’s social and political causes tend to suffer similar fates.
And something else is plain to Cam. These are exactly the kind of “accidents” he and his colleagues in the Division used to orchestrate. And now, with a few more strategic deaths, nothing will stand in the way of Byrne fundamentally transforming the global order.
So the showdown is inevitable – Cameron Winter vs. the Most Powerful Man in the World.
There wasn’t a moment of slack in this plot. I was riveted from the first page to the last. Not only that, but the bare act of reading was a pleasure, because the prose was so perfect, so evocative and satisfying, like a delicious meal. I may read it again soon, just to savor it.
I recommend A Strange Habit of Mind as highly as is humanly possible. Thanks, Andrew Klavan.
My relationship with the Nordic Noir genre, as you may recall, is troubled. Though I’m generally a Scandinavian booster, I have my pet hatreds (Ibsen and Stieg Larsson, to name a couple), and I’m cold to Nordic mysteries overall (except for Jørn Lier Horst’s Wisting, probably because I worked on two seasons of the TV miniseries). I’ve read one of Kjell Ola Dahl’s Oslo Detectives books before, and didn’t care for it a lot. I found it depressing and distasteful. But I bought Little Drummer on a whim (it was on sale), and I liked this one a little better.
Lise Fagernes is an Oslo newspaper reporter. She finds herself, to her shock, part of a news story herself when she discovers a woman’s body in a car in a parking garage. The police consider the death an accidental overdose, as the fatal needle is right there. But one of the brass, on a hostile whim, assigns the case to his enemy, Inspector Gunnarstranda. And Gunnarstranda, on a hunch, asks for a toxicology test. Turns out it wasn’t an accidental overdose after all. The woman was chloroformed before being injected.
Together with his partner, Frank Frøhlich, Gunnarstranda starts looking into the woman’s background. Turns out she was friends with a student from Kenya who has just been reported missing. When he proves to have fled the country, Frøhlich will have to travel to Africa. There he encounters Lise, who’s still on the story. They circle each other warily before forming a temporary alliance – both in business and personal terms.
The case will lead to international medical conglomerates, African relief, and the general fecklessness and corruption of Western aid to the Third World.
About the highest praise I can give to a Nordic Noir novel is that it didn’t make me want to kill myself. Little Drummer was better than most in that regard. But it was hardly cheery, and I suspect the political underpinnings are anti-capitalist.
Still, not bad, and the translation is good. Cautions for the usual.
