Reviews

The Trapdoor, by Keith Peterson

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Christopher Hitchens had a great line on Hugh Hewitt’s show a few minutes ago. He said (I’m quoting from memory), regarding Barack Obama’s religion speech yesterday, “I’d often heard of a politician selling his grandmother. This was the first time I ever actually saw one do it.”



I’m re-reading some old books just now, simply because my energy’s too low to run to the used bookstore. Tonight I want to review The Trapdoor by Keith Peterson, and record a general appreciation of the entire John Wells series.

Keith Peterson, as I’ve mentioned before (but you probably forgot. Pay attention!) is a pseudonym for Andrew Klavan. I was a Keith Peterson fan before I ever was aware of Klavan. His John Wells books, written under the Peterson name, plus an excellent one-off called The Scarred Man (which I reviewed on the old site), were published in the late ’80s, and did pretty well as far as I can tell. However, Klavan chose, for some reason, to round out the John Wells series at four books. I wish it had gone further, but on the other hand the tetralogy is pretty complete in terms of its hero’s character arc. Here you see an early exercise in which Klavan allows us to see his hero grow over a series of books (as in the Weiss and Bishop novels). And that hero, in many ways, is a precursor to Steve Everett, the obsessive reporter hero of True Crime.

John Wells, the hero of The Trapdoor (and of its sequels, There Fell a Shadow, The Rain, and Rough Justice) is a crime reporter for the New York Star, a tabloid paper. He’s a reporter’s reporter. When he finds a real story he’ll work any hours and go to any lengths to get it. He has no life outside the job. His apartment, as a lady friend comments, looks like a place where nobody lives.

What he won’t write is fluff. This puts him in conflict with his managing editor, in the first three books. The managing editor was hired by the owners to give the paper what he calls “relatability.” This means sex and sleeze. John ignores the managing editor, not because of his high moral standards, but because fluff demeans his profession, and his profession is all he has. He’s able to get away with this (most of the time) because he’s the best crime reporter in the city.

The managing editor gets petty revenge one day by assigning Wells to cover a series of teenage suicides in a town upstate.

This assignment shocks even Wells’ most cynical colleagues. Because everyone knows the reason why he’s cut himself off from life. Five years ago, his own teenaged daughter hanged herself.

Wells accepts the assignment, though. He won’t be intimidated.

It’s not easy, but he’s a pro. He does the job. He interviews the grieving families and writes a sensitive series on the tragedies. Then he faxes the stories back to the paper.

And the hot-shot managing editor re-writes the stories (still under Wells’ name) to make them “relatable.”

Suddenly John Wells is the most hated man in the town.

And that’s not good, because Wells needs to go back there. He’s starting to suspect that at least some of the suicides were murders.

I loved the John Wells series because Peterson/Klavan focused it on a complex, deeply sympathetic main character, and surrounded him with an equally believable supporting cast.

The world-weary, cynical detective is a staple of hard-boiled crime fiction. Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade weren’t stereotypes in their own time, but they’ve become stereotypes. We take them for granted, and rarely ask ourselves what made them the loners they are.

John Wells’ alienation is the central problem of the series. He’s been hurt so badly in the past, first by the failure of his marriage, then by the suicide of his daughter, that he’s walled himself off from humanity. Most of his co-workers like him, but he keeps his distance. His protégé, a beautiful young reporter named Lansing, is crazy in love with him, but he treats her like a kid sister—not really because of the age difference, but because she’s alive, and he doesn’t dare get too close to life. In The Trapdoor, he does get involved with a woman, a suicide counselor (remarkably, one of the few instances I’ve ever seen in a detective novel where the hero connects with a woman specifically described as not beautiful), but they’re both so damaged that they know nothing can come of it.

As each book in the series progresses, however, Wells is forced to deal with one of his personal devils, to break down another of his psychological walls. The last book, Rough Justice, has the earmarks of an attempt to re-launch the series on a new level. But it also serves as a satisfactory climax. John Wells at the end of Rough Justice is a very different man from the John Wells we started out with in The Trapdoor.

This is early, pre-Christian Klavan, but many of the themes that inform his later work are already there. The books are out of print, but you can get them second hand. I recommend them highly.

Authors, Non-fiction

Comparing Generations: Edwards vs. Jukes

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Jared posted a couple myth busters a few days ago (link defunct). The word sincere, he explains, did not come from the marketing language of Roman potters, as you may have been told, and Jesus actually talked about heaven more than hell, though he talked about hell a good bit.

Along that lines, I have a good source on an illustration I’ve read a few times and appears to have grown into a fish story. Jonathan Edwards, one of America’s best theologians, had many godly or otherwise productive children, grandchildren, and so on. Comparing his family to that of another man who lived at the same time is meant to illustrate the fruit of a godly life. Here’s the account from an article by Leonard Ravenhill:

A thin crust, a very thin crust of morality, it seems to me, keeps America from complete collapse. In this perilous hour we need a whole generation of preachers like Edwards.

“O Lord of hosts, turn us again; cause Thy face to shine upon us, and we shall be saved.”

Contrast this great man of God with his contemporary. I quote from Al Sanders in Crisis in Morality!

Max Jukes, the atheist, lived a godless life. He married an ungodly girl, and from the union there were 310 who died as paupers, 150 were criminals, 7 were murderers, 100 were drunkards, and more than half of the women were prostitutes. His 540 descendants cost the State one and a quarter million dollars.

But, praise the Lord, it works both ways! There is a record of a great American man of God, Jonathan Edwards. He lived at the same time as Max Jukes, but he married a godly girl. An investigation was made of 1,394 known descendants of Jonathan Edwards of which 13 became college presidents, 65 college professors, 3 United States senators, 30 judges, 100 lawyers, 60 physicians, 75 army and navy officers, 100 preachers and missionaries, 60 authors of prominence, one a vice-president of the United States, 80 became public officials in other capacities, 295 college graduates, among whom were governors of states and ministers to foreign countries. His descendants did not cost the state a single penny. ‘The memory of the just is blessed’ (Prov. 10:7).

To us this is the conclusion of the whole matter.

This is a better account than the one I’ve seen more often, but the details are not as accurate as they should be. According to the March 8, 1902, issue of The School Journal, the numbers vary a bit.

Suffice it to say, “The almost universal traits of the ‘Jukes’ were idleness, ignorance, and vulgarity. These characteristics led to disease and disgrace, to pauperism and crime. They were a disgustingly diseased family as a whole. There were many imbeciles and many insane.”

There’s much more to say about the Jukes and Edwards families and what they may teach us about discipleship or public education.

In the version of the story I have, Jukes’ name is claimed as the origin of the word juke, meaning “to fake or deceive.” No, it wasn’t. It’s from a word meaning “wicked, disorderly” in a Southern English creole.

This is not so much a busted myth as a clarification. I hope I have edified you.

Authors

Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008

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The significant science fiction author, Arthur C. Clarke, has died. In a 2001 Reader’s Digress–I mean, Digest–article, Clarke listed several predictions for future developments. Several he hoped would not occur, but these perhaps he did hope for.

In 2012, he suggested “Aerospace-planes [would] enter commercial service.” Prince Harry would be the first of Britain’s royalty to fly in space the following year, and in 2014, “Construction of Hilton Orbiter Hotel [would] begin by converting the giant shuttle tanks previously allowed to fall back to Earth.”

All of that would lead to this prediction for 2017: “On his hundred birthday, December 16, Sir Arthur C. Clarke is one of the first guests in the Hilton Orbiter.”

Reviews

Malice, by Robert K. Tanenbaum

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I write this review in deep sorrow. I’ve been a fan and booster of Robert K. Tanenbaum for some years now. But that’s all done, now that I’ve read Malice. Tanenbaum has lost my imprimatur. He’s become an author I can no longer support.

What hurts most is that I’m certain it’s my own fault.

If you’re an old timer here, you may recall my history with Tanenbaum. I discovered his Butch Karp/Marlene Ciampi books back in the ’80s, and enjoyed them for their vivid characters and Rabelaisian humor. But then I felt his books were getting a little raunchy for my taste, especially in terms of language, and I dropped him.

In the late ’90s I picked him up again, and it seemed to me he’d grown a great deal as an author and thinker. By this time Butch and Marlene (he’s a New York District Attorney; she’s a former lawyer, later a personal security specialist, now an independently wealthy hobby artist and dog breeder) had gotten married and were raising a family. Of particular interest was their daughter Lucie, who was both a language prodigy and a devout, practicing Catholic. Tanenbaum (like Butch Karp) is clearly Jewish himself, but he showed unusual sensitivity to Christianity in his portrayal of Lucie.

I was especially impressed with the novel True Justice, in which Karp dealt with the issues of abortion and infanticide. Although it understandably attempted to square the circle and present all sides, it depicted (through Lucie) an understanding of the pro-life position, without caricature, hard to find in contemporary literature. I was so pleased that I wrote a fan letter to Tanenbaum, telling him how much I valued his effort.

This, I’m confident, spoiled everything.

Tanenbaum, no doubt, checked out my web page, discovered what sort of a right-wing yahoo I am, and vowed on the spot to drive me, and everyone like me, away.

Not immediately. Not right off. But gradually. By stages.

First of all, he gave Lucie a boyfriend, an Arizona cowboy. And sent her happily to bed with him, without benefit of clergy. Without even any Catholic guilt.

Secondly, he introduced the character of John Jojola, a Taos Navajo reservation policeman and Native American shaman. He has led Lucie into a “deeper” spiritual understanding through his Ancient Wisdom.

And now, for the coup de grace, the first time we see Lucie in Malice, she’s taking a trip on peyote, under John Jojola’s supervision.

OK, Mr. Tanenbaum. I get the message.

The plot of this book centers on a sort of busman’s holiday for Butch Karp. On medical leave from the DA’s office (he got shot at the end of the last book), Butch is asked to help out the brother of an old teammate from his basketball playing days, a college baseball coach who’s been wrongly suspended by his college and the league.

But that’s tied to the action back in New York, where Butch’s colleagues and friends are discovering evidence of massive, world-wide criminal conspiracy. An Ancient Secret Society, a Shadow Government, an Unseen Hand behind world events.

A rip-off of The DaVinci Code, to be honest. Tanenbaum has apparently figured out that paranoia fiction is where the money is these days. Gone are the days when Butch Karp hunted down ordinary criminals and corrupt politicians. Now he’s pulling back the veil that covers the True, Occult History of the World.

You think our biggest danger today is Islamic terrorism? Ha! You’re a dupe!

The real danger is… wait for it… MANXMEN! That is, guys from the Isle of Man. (Because, I suppose, God forbid there should be any evil in the world that doesn’t spring from white males.) Islamic terrorism is just a sideshow that the Manxmen have orchestrated, to allow their puppets in the government to trample on our civil rights through the Patriot Act. (There are many references to “the loss of our civil rights” under the Patriot Act. Oddly, what rights we’ve lost is never explained.)

In other words, Tanenbaum has completely buckled to contemporary liberal dogma. Oh, he concedes, in a talky and poorly written epilogue, that the war on terror is a serious matter, but the plot as a whole gives no support to that view.

I’d probably be willing to forgive all that, because it’s still a Tanenbaum book and therefore a lot of fun.

But putting peyote into Our Lucie’s mouth?

That, sir, I cannot forgive.

Writing

Genuinely Christian

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Tony Woodlief is writing on Christian writing again.

There is not redemption . . . without a fall, nor grace without sin. For O’Connor and other serious Christian writers, this reality led them to write books that would never be allowed on the shelves of a typical Christian bookstore.

This leads to an interesting possibility: that our local public library has more genuinely Christian literature — which is to say books that tell a truer story of the fall of man and his redemption by Christ — than most Christian booksellers.

In his follow-up post, he writes:

[B]ad Christian art cripples our compassionate imagination. When the bad guys practically have signs in a novel or movie labeling them as such, and the soon-to-be saved characters are similarly cordoned off, we lose sight of the wickedness that inhabits saints, and the despair that inhabits the hearts of the lost. Instead, we have our natural tribal mentality bolstered, that pernicious instinct that prompts us to think in terms of God’s saints on the one hand, and hell-bound heathens on the other, which is always accompanied by the delusion that we can spot them easily.

This second point is dead-on to use a cliché. But how does a writer or editor get away from this critique, especially as our world’s culture is being pornographified every year? Writers like Tony could be read as arguing for more vice in otherwise moral stories, even though he isn’t, but the preception and the reaction to it is the reason we have the art and stories we have today–mostly shallow and either sanitized or unsanitized.

What does the good stuff look like? It can’t be only literary or of high culture.

Reviews

Old movie review: “Algiers”

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Watched a few more of my renter’s crime movies this weekend, and I want to comment briefly on a couple of them.

I watched “They Made Me a Criminal,” with John Garfield. I had the idea this was considered some kind of classic, and maybe it is. But it did not impress me.

The acting was consistently over the top. The character arcs (Busby Berkeley directed it, and it bears all the psychological insight of his average musical) follow plot points, but don’t seem to proceed from any actual change in the characters. In other words, the characters change their behavior because “it’s time for them to change,” but it’s hard to say why they do that from their own perspective. Also present are The Dead End Kids, who fill the sort of place in the film that a rap artist would fill in a movie today (and about as effectively), and even Claude Raines, as the Inspector Jauvert-like detective, nearly mugs his teeth out.

I hated it.

Raines gave a much more subdued, and effective, performance in his most famous role, that of Capt. Renault in “Casablanca.” We all know “Casablanca.” A perfect, small, jewel of a film that tells a tight, heartfelt story that somehow seems inevitable, inescapable, unforgettable. It sits in your memory and colors all your experience forever after.

But are you familiar with the film that inspired the makers of “Casablanca?” A film that also inspired a thousand bad French dialect imitations, chief among which was “Pepe le Pew” in the Warner Brothers cartoons?

That movie was “Algiers,” with Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamar. I’d seen it in bits and pieces on TV years ago, but this was the first time I watched it from beginning to end, and I was completely enthralled.

Charles Boyer plays Pepe le Moko, a Parisian gangster who has fled to Algiers and is hiding in the native quarter called the Casbah, where the police dare not follow. He has made himself, for all practical purposes, king of the Casbah. He controls crime there, deals out justice, and enjoys the favors of a beautiful mistress (who seems to be a gypsy or something, though she was played by Sigrid Gurie, a Norwegian).

The French authorities are frustrated by their inability to lay hands on Pepe. Only Inspector Slimane (wonderfully played by Joseph Calleia), apparently a despised “half-caste,” understands Pepe’s essential weakness. Slimane is a patient man, and knows that he will catch Pepe, and even how he will do it.

Because he understands that Pepe cannot stay forever in the Casbah. That tortuous tangle of streets and stairways, where even the roads have walls, is in itself a kind of prison. Pepe’s confinement there is slowly, insidiously, driving him out of his mind. Driving him to forget his own safety. He looks out over the sea and dreams of Paris.

And it all comes to a head when he meets Gaby (Hedy Lamar), a gorgeous young woman from home who has come on holiday with her fiancé, a fat, unpleasant, but rich man whom she is marrying purely for his money. Pepe and Gaby see in each other the fulfillment of their mutual forbidden dreams.

There’s a scene at the end, when Pepe looks through a barred gate in the harbor and gets just a glimpse of Gaby on the ship’s deck, sailing away to her loveless marriage, and you see her through his eyes and it goes through your heart like a knife.

Old movies and old movie techniques can be ridiculous and dated, or sublime and timeless, depending on the skill and vision of the moviemakers. “Algiers” is a classic by any definition.

And no, he never says, “Come with me to the Casbah!”



Addendum: Here’s a bit of trivia. Sigrid Gurie (refenced above), who played Pepe’s mistress, was the twin sister of Knut Haukelid, one of the leaders of the Norwegian resistance group that blew up the German heavy water operation at Vermork, Norway, thus denying important nuclear technology to the Nazis. Richard Harris’ character in the movie “Heroes of Telemark,” seems to have been based in part on Knut Haukelid.

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

On the Table Tonight

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We’re having Toads in the Hole for supper tonight. It’s not an Irish dish, but it’s different than our usual fare, and I don’t like corned beef and cabbage. We bought some more or less traditional Irish soda bread over the weekend. That’s good stuff. I could eat that more often.

The last few years on St. Patrick’s Day, I’ve tried to talk myself into having a beer for the first time. This year, I won’t do that, but I did have my first beer back in January when I went to The Fresh Market, revealed my ID, and brought home a single can of Guinness Stout. I followed the directions by pouring it, chilled, into a cold glass. “A tiny plastic widget jets a stream of bubbles into the GUINNESS® beer when the can is opened. The result is black, white and beautiful,” according to the fans.

My experience varied.

I’m not sure what I expected, perhaps something that tasted more like barley and less like the spine-shuttering liquid in my chilly glass. I couldn’t drink more than half. Perhaps I should try Harp or even one of those sissy fruit beer I hear some men like, but I don’t plan to burn a path anywhere to find one. After all, what would St. Patrick do?

Uncategorized

Six: The meme of the beastie

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I’m back. Somewhat. To an extent.

I actually went back in to work Friday, for about six hours. But when I dragged myself home, I was too beat to post. Today I managed to stick it out for the whole eight hours, and I’m going to try to do a couple posts here, tired or not, because I’ve been piling up stuff I want to post about for the past week, and I’m going to explode if I don’t get some of it off my chest. And exploding will do my health no good.

To start with, Will at View From the Foothills has tagged Phil and me with a meme. Although telling you unimportant things about myself is hardly a departure in this space, I’ll go ahead and do it. The rules are as follows:

1. Link to the person that tagged you.

2. Post the rules on your blog.

3. Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.

4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.

5. Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I’ll start out my list on an Irish note, and let it blow where it lists from there.

1. Green is my least favorite color. Oh, I love the green of springtime, which can’t come soon enough for me, but when I contemplate the visual spectrum objectively, I pass over green. I don’t think I own any green clothing (lucky for me I’m not Irish). I think the reason comes from candy. In the Rules of Candy, at least from when I was a kid, green meant lime. And I hate lime. Red, on the other hand, could mean either strawberry or cherry, either of which pleases me. Nowadays you sometimes get green candy that’s apple flavored, but that’s a postmodern aberration. Apple candy ought to be colored yellow, like it says in the Bible.

2. I always resented the Irish as a boy. Partly because I hated green (see above). Partly because I couldn’t understand why the Irish deserved all this attention and Norwegians didn’t (you can say that there are a lot more Irish than Norwegians in this country, but you didn’t grow up in Kenyon, Minnesota). But when I grew to maturity, I discovered Irish music and was completely won over, to the extent of developing an Irish alter ego to narrate The Year of the Warrior. Since I got into Father Ailill’s skin, I’ve found myself occasionally thinking I am Irish, and having to remind myself I’m not.

3. In my opinion, the most beautiful woman to show up on the scene in my lifetime was the tragic Swedish-American actress Inger Stevens. She had all the standard attributes of the ice princess, the untouchable blonde Hitchcock heroine, but she also had big blue eyes and dimples. I never watch “Hang ‘Em High” (because the gallows scenes are too harrowing for me) but when I watch “Five Card Stud,” it ain’t for Dean Martin.

4. I used to be able to recite Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven” from memory. I still remember most of it, but there are gaps.

5. I’ve never met anyone famous, that I’m aware of. I’ve had contact with a few people of some note by e-mail.

6. I was co-winner of the New York C. S. Lewis Society’s Screwtape competition back around 1975. The challenge was to write a new Screwtape letter. I shared the prize (which consisted of publication in the newsletter, nothing more) with Jennifer Swift, who is, I believe, like me a minor Fantasy writer now. My letter was better than hers.

As is my wont, I shall not tag anyone else with this meme. If you want to carry it on on your own blog, be my guest.

Authors, Fiction

Person’s a Person or Something Like That

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Last weekend, the movie adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who opened. It looks like a fun my girls will enjoy.

You might think the essence of the story affirms life at all stages, but I’ve read that Dr. Seuss and his widow always disapproved of the signature phrase, “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” being used as a pro-life message. A few years ago, a biographer discussed the matter on a book show in Australia:

Amanda Smith (of Book Talk): And then, also, the anti-abortion lobby in the United States has used a line from Horton Hears a Who, the line that says, ‘A person’s a person, no matter how small.’ Would that have been in accord with Seuss’s intended meaning?

Philip Nel (author of Dr Seuss – American Icon): Absolutely not. In fact, during his lifetime Seuss threatened to sue an anti-abortion group unless they took that off their stationery and they did take it off their stationery but it’s still used. I’ve still seen propaganda in recent years from pro-life groups that have adopted Horton’s line, ‘A person’s a person, no matter how small.’ It’s one of the ways in which Seuss has been misappropriated. He would not agree with that.

I don’t remember the book clearly, but I wonder if this story is larger or beyond Dr. Seuss’ intentions. Once a story is published, it’s out of the author’s hands, is it not? An author may have written something with themes he doesn’t fully agree with, stumbling on truths he does not recognize.