Today started out kind of gray, but it gradually grew brighter and warmer. Right now it’s just about a perfect spring evening.
Got an amusing letter, from a friend. I’d give his name, but maybe one shouldn’t throw names around on the internet. Though one feels one ought to cite one’s sources.
Anyway, the letter came as a surprise. It was a one-page, photocopied missive, telling about what he’s been reading, and about being on vacation in Oregon. He said he found himself near the town of Merlin, Oregon. And he had a bunch of USPS dragon stamps.
He couldn’t resist sending a letter with a dragon stamp and the postmark, “MERLIN.”
Number 5 in W. Glenn Duncan’s amusing Rafferty series is Cannon’s Mouth. Hard-boiled detection on the lighter side of the scale (though plenty of dark stuff happens).
Rafferty, as you may recall, is a Dallas private eye. He’s surveilling a delivery man suspected of pilferage on a hot Dallas day, when he steps into a little park to spy from the shade. A small, pudgy man comes up to him and starts talking as if he knows him. Talks about murdering his business partner, who is ruining the business. Rafferty is so hot and impatient that he barely pays attention to the man. But afterwards he does his civic duty by alerting his friends on the police force, providing all the details he can remember. They’re not much impressed.
Until the named target shows up dead, the night before the “contract” had specified. Worse than that, Rafferty is the one who finds the body. Now he needs to do some quick dancing with suspicious cops, including the leader of a drug task force who’s taken an unexplained interest in the proceedings.
Even when he’s released, Rafferty’s problems aren’t over. Somebody is calling him to demand the money they “earned.” And they’re not above throwing a bomb or two to show they’re serious.
Cannon’s Mouth leans a little too heavily on coincidence in its plotting to please me. And, as always, Rafferty isn’t as funny as he thinks he is. Still, the book was likeable and diverting, and I can recommend it as light reading – the kind of book you’d enjoy taking to the beach this summer. Plus, it’s a couple decades old, so it doesn’t preach at you.
I meant for this to be a more cheerful post. I’ve been feeling pretty good of late, and wanted to talk about it, once I’d caught up with book reviews. Today I’m caught up, but…
I’ve noticed I’ve been feeling unusually cheerful for some time now. I won’t say happy because, as I see it, real happiness involves good relationships. And I don’t really have much in that department, nor am I likely to.
But I’m used to being chronically depressed. It’s how I’ve always defined myself – I am a depressive person. Melancholic. I take pride in handling a chronic condition that some less fortunate folks don’t survive.
But – and it seems to go back to when I got booted from my job and started freelancing – I’ve been feeling pretty good for a while. To top if off, lately, in preparation for the Great Norway Trip, I’ve been seriously dieting. I’d dropped 15 pounds last time I checked. Also I’ve been exercising regularly at the gym. The other day I had to do some walking, and I found it was much easier than it had been some months ago. That’s a pleasant sensation, especially for an old man.
Yesterday was another good day. I had to take Mrs. Ingebretsen, my PT Cruiser, into the shop because the Check Engine light had come on. But they told me the problem wasn’t serious, and could easily be put off. On top of that, the light went off again today.
Even better, recently I’d been trying a new mental trick. It was based on an article I read in Reader’s Digest many, many years ago. I mean, before I graduated high school, I think.
The article, as I recall it (probably wrong), was written by a guy promoting an idea he’d gotten from a rabbi in his youth. The rabbi told him, when he had an embarrassing experience, not to beat himself up. Instead, say “Next time.” “Next time I’ll know to do it better.” “Next time I won’t make that same mistake.” Turning personal errors into learning experiences, rather than occasions for self-loathing.
For some reason, that article had stuck in my mind, even though I made no attempt whatever to put it into practice. But now I thought, what can it hurt to try? The next time a shameful memory popped up, I tried using the “next time” technique. And what do you know? It seemed to help. It’s early days in the experiment, but it looked good.
But that was before this morning. This morning I picked up my cell phone to check the usual suspects. I got a nice message from a nice person who’ll be hosting me in Norway. They’d bought me a ticket for something I’d enjoy doing. And I had to tell them I was already booked for that time slot. This was almost physically painful. I hate turning a kindness down. Kindness should be encouraged. There’s little enough of it in the world.
And then somebody commented on one of my posts on Facebook, and what they said really kicked me in a sensitive place. I don’t know if they meant it to hurt like that, but it did hurt. Still does.
And the day was rainy and gray and cold. And there’s that terrible news from Texas. I got nothing productive done, beyond my visit to the gym. Haven’t had a bad day like this for some time.
Her brown hair was slicked back into a bun above a face of sculpted symmetrical beauty. She wore a matching symmetrical smile that exuded all the warmth of a protractor.
I’d been following Matt Coyle’s Rick Cahill series of private eye novels, but somehow I’d missed the latest, Last Redemption, which came out in 2021. I missed a lot, as it turned out.
Rick Cahill is a San Diego PI, formerly a cop and a bartender. He struggles with guilt over past mistakes, and has been somewhat self-destructive in the past. But now his life has changed. He’s engaged to a woman he loves, Leah, and she’s pregnant. They plan to marry before the baby is born.
What he’s not telling Leah is that he’s been diagnosed with CRT, a brain damage condition common to pro football players. Repeated head traumas over the years are beginning to take their toll (I’ve always felt fictional private eyes get knocked out too often, without realistic effect). He occasionally suffers mental fugues, forgetting who he is and what he’s doing. And the doctor tells him his life expectancy is reduced. He’s going to tell Leah soon, but hasn’t made up his mind to it yet. Still, he’s changed his life. He’s not taking the hard-boiled jobs anymore. He’s doing security checks for companies. Simple office work, on his computer. Boring, but the income is good and he wants to be a family man now. To be around for them.
Then he hears from Moira, a fellow private eye who’s saved his life in the past. She’s worried about her son Luke, who’s a computer whiz. Luke had been working for a company that audits computer programs, and was checking out a medical technology startup that’s on the brink of a breakthrough in cancer treatment. But Luke has broken up with his girlfriend, who put a restraining order on him. And now he’s disappeared. And he’s suspected in a murder.
Well, how dangerous can this job be? Quick in, quick out, no hassle, right?
There will be hassle.
Last Redemption was well-written, gripping, and suspenseful. I enjoyed it immensely, and recommend it highly, along with the whole series. But this one was the best of the lot.
There can never be too many British police procedurals, in my opinion – even though I only really like a few of them. Graham H. Miller’s The List is the first in a series starring Jonah Greene, a detective in South Wales (not New South Wales in Australia, but the original place).
Jonah has just returned from an enforced break from the job, during which he’s been seeing a counselor. He “froze” during a police raid, resulting in injury to another officer. He thinks he’s ready to go to work again, but he’s not welcome with the other detectives. His boss assigns him to a job in the coroner’s office. Basically it’s desk work – he’s just supposed to see that the forms are filled out and the proper people notified.
But the very first corpse he deals with challenges him. It’s a homeless man who froze to death. There are suspicious details – why was the body found in an area where the homeless rarely go? What happened to the warm coat and sleeping bag he was known to have? And how did he come by two bottles of expensive whisky?
Another homeless man comes to see Jonah. He hands him a list of names the dead man left with him, saying the dead man told him that if anything happened to him, he should get that list to the police. They’d know what to do with it.
Jonah has no idea what to do with it.
But Jonah is a little OCD (one of his problems). Although he’s ordered to move on to the next case, he insists on asking questions on his own time. Which alarms certain influential people…
The List wasn’t bad as a novel. I had some trouble reading it, but I have a feeling that’s because it was a little close to home for me. Some of Jonah’s psychological problems are similar to mine; it was uncomfortable.
But my main problem with the story was that (this isn’t a spoiler; it’s fairly obvious early on in the story) it centered on an elaborate conspiracy lasting over many years. I am very suspicious of conspiracy stories. A secret is hard to keep in this world. And this conspiracy seemed to me improbable on the face of it.
Still, the book wasn’t bad. You might like it better than I did.
“Holy God, We Praise Thy Name,” performed by Stephen Tharp
Today hymn is believed to have been originally written by Ignaz Franz (1719-1790), chaplain at Gross-Glogau and vicar of Glogau in Silesia, Poland, during the 1740s. Clarence A. Walworth (1820-1900) translated it from German.
1 Holy God, we praise thy name. God of all, we bow before thee. All on earth your scepter claim; all in heav’n above adore thee. Infinite thy vast domain, everlasting is thy reign.
2 Hark, the loud celestial hymn, angel choirs above are raising. Cherubim and seraphim, in unceasing chorus praising, fill the heav’ns with sweet accord: Holy, holy, holy Lord.
3 Lo! the apostolic train join thy sacred name to hallow. Prophets swell the glad refrain, and the blessed martyrs follow, and, from morn till set of sun, through the church the song goes on.
4 Holy Author, Holy Word, Holy Spirit, three we name thee; still, one holy voice is heard: undivided God, we claim thee, and adoring bend the knee, while we own the mystery.
I’ve been doing these Saturday blogroll posts for a while now, and I’m always happy to see a kind of theme emerge from the articles to which I link. This post will be more random. Sorry.
What do Red Letter Christians who disparage Paul’s words in favor of Jesus’s quotations do with the fact that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the gospels, not Jesus himself? Jesus didn’t write anything. If you say the biblical authors may have gotten their letters wrong, it applies throughout. Or are we saying that only the parts I dislike and challenge my modern sensibilities are the parts that probably are not inspired Scripture?
Music: “There are all these different metal bands out there from Scandinavia who incorporate Viking and pagan culture into their art. I always wondered why no one that I knew of had done that with Native American culture.” Album Offers Today’s Hits — Sung in Cherokee (nextcity.org)
We who belong to the church, who have cognitively accepted the Unseen Reality, as Evelyn Underhill described it, also suffer from constricted imaginations. The disenchantment we have all undergone as products of the modern world has critically stunted our spiritual development, our knowledge of ourselves, our hopes and dreams for God in the world.
Photo: I-84 near Hammett, Idaho. 2004. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Until this week, I knew next to nothing about Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series. I knew it was very long and that some people loved it. I did not know that Jordan was rewriting The Lord of the Rings and that the first of fourteen novels, The Eye of the World, was meant to be his version of The Fellowship of the Ring.
One Goodreads reviewer writes of the first book, “It is difficult to comprehend how an author could take such a simple, familiar story and stretch it out over so many pages.
The hero is an orphan who looks different, he gets his father’s magic sword, he goes on a quest with an old, wily mentor, gets attacked by evil (dark-skinned) mongoloids from the mysterious East, meets the princess by accident, becomes embroiled in an ancient prophecy, discovers a magic ‘force’ which controls fate (and the plot), &c., &c.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Of the second book, another reviewer praises the overall story but recommends reading with friends to help get through the boring parts. “Jordan’s prose was super wordy and descriptive, there’s no way around it. Two books (570k words in total so far) into the series and when it comes to the actual story progression, not too much have actually progressed.”
A reviewer of eighth book notes he would have included a plot summary, but the book has no plot or development at all.
Because many TV producers want to create the next Game of Thrones, Amazon released last year an eight-episode series based on The Eye of the World, and it appears that they have done a terrible job.
Man Carrying Things reviews it in about an hour, noting some strong weaknesses in the scriptwriting such as frequent deaths that are undone a minute later. Another reviewer appeals to the book lore to say this is supposed to be a very bad move done only by evil magicians, but there’s no indication this show has that in mind. In fact, the show seems to have cliched TV formulas most in mind. It lacks continuity within single episodes. It spends too much time on exposition that doesn’t develop anything.
One major change from the source material is questioning who the chosen one–the Dragon Reborn–is among the main characters. The book tells us upfront, but the show says it could be anyone, and as a result, doesn’t explain what being the Dragon Reborn would mean. It’s apparently an open question whether this is good or bad. Maybe the writers couldn’t pull themselves away from a desire to drive the story toward a character saying, “Maybe the real Dragon Reborn were the friends we made along the way.”
Being an old writer, I had the privilege, at the very beginning of my novel-writing career, of getting my manuscript vetted by a genuine, old-school editor/publisher, Jim Baen. When I read books written by today’s crop of self-published novices, I am continually reminded to thank God for that privilege.
Who’s Killing All My Old Girlfriends? by Jon Spoelstra is one of those books that screams for an editor. The author shows signs of talent, but his poorer instincts need restraining.
Charlie North, the hero of WKAMOG?, is, according to his own account, a successful blogger in Portland who makes a decent retirement income off posting once a week (he’s a little vague on what his winning formula is. It certainly isn’t the quality of his prose). He’s a widower whose beloved wife died of cancer not long ago. One day while talking with his ex-cop friend Bert, he comes up with the idea of going to see the three women he dated seriously before getting married. To see if he could have been happy with any of them, or something.
He goes to Los Angeles to see the first. She dumps a bowl of yogurt on his head. Then, shortly after they part, he learns she’s been murdered with a blunt instrument. Charlie is a Person of Interest in the case.
Saddened but undeterred, he goes to Chicago to visit the second. He doesn’t speak to her, but observes her in a restaurant with her husband. They seem prosperous and happy. Soon after, she is killed with a blunt instrument, too.
Finally, he goes to see the third, in Miami. He has a pleasant dinner with her and her husband, but while she’s in the ladies’ room, the husband (who is apparently a mobster) quietly threatens to kill him if he blogs anything further about them.
And shortly after, she is killed with a blunt instrument.
Now Charlie is a Person of Interest for the police in three cities. Fortunately, he has his ex-cop friend, who calls in other ex-cop friends to help, and Charlie concocts a plan to discover the real killer. Or killers. And clear his name.
If all this seems far-fetched, it seemed that way to me, too. The book started out lightly and likeably, but kept getting darker and darker, though the tone never got serious enough to match the body count. And when the final showdown produces a pile of bodies like the last scene of Hamlet, all plausibility flew out the window.
Each chapter opens, for some reason, with stale “old people jokes” – the ones you see posted on Facebook, over and over. The author admits he borrowed them. I have no idea why he thinks they enhance the reader experience.
Also, the writing is just bad in a lot of places. Author Spoelstra offers lines like, “bleeding like a sliced carotid artery in the neck” (where else are you likely to find a carotid artery?). Or “The end of my Lost Loves Saga hadn’t played out yet, of which it might never play out.”
I stuck with it to the end, partly because of conservative opinions expressed or implied. But I don’t really recommend this book.
She paused. “I know what you’re thinking—that anybody with proper sensitive feeling would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don’t see why proper feeling should prevent me from doing my proper job.”
I have reached the penultimate installment in Dorothy L. Sayers’ immortal Lord Peter Wimsey series. Gaudy Night is probably not Miss Sayers’ best mystery novel, nor by any means her most popular. But it carries the satisfaction of finally bringing the Harriet Vane cycle to its proper culmination (though she’s in the final book too, and rightly so).
Harriet Vane is a popular mystery novelist who once stood in the dock on trial for her life. Lord Peter Wimsey saved her from the gallows, and ever since he has been courting her in a low-key manner, aware that she has a low opinion of herself and is chary about new relationships.
In this book, Harriet goes back to her college (the fictional Shrewsbury – a sly choice of name – a women’s college at Oxford University) for a Gaudy Night – a school reunion. She’s nervous about her reception, but it goes surprisingly well. The only real blot on her experience is a nasty note someone tucked into the sleeve of her academic gown – but she shrugs that off.
Soon after, she gets a letter from the Dean, inviting her to the opening of the new library. She also wants Harriet’s advice on a problem they’re having. Crude notes like the one she received are showing up more and more frequently, and there’s been minor vandalism. Harriet is a mystery writer – maybe she can ferret out the culprit – discreetly, of course.
Harriet is delighted to go, and plunges into the scholarly life. She even takes up research with an idea to earning her Master’s degree. But the poison pen writer is getting more and more aggressive – even to the point where lives are put in danger. In the end, it will take Lord Peter to come in and, with an objective eye, resolve the mystery.
The theme of the book is Dorothy Sayers’ recurring theme in all her work – vocation. She believed strongly that there was a moral obligation for a person to work at whatever God has best equipped them to do, rather than what society says they should do. (She and C. S. Lewis differed on that subject, and lived the consequences out in their personal lives.)
As one who knows the British university system only second-hand, I found some matters confusing. And I also had trouble keeping the scholarly characters straight. Nevertheless, I enjoyed watching Harriet’s journey to greater insight. This book is mostly Harriet’s, after all. Lord Peter only comes in at the end.
