Fiction, Reviews

‘Enemies Among Us,’ by Jeffrey S. Stephens

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A while back I read a novel by Jeffrey S. Stephens which I found entertaining and well-written. Since then I’ve read two more of Stephens’ books to see how they’d be. Enemies Among Us is part of a series starring a continuing hero named Nick Reagan.

Nick Reagan is a high-level CIA operative. One of his old enemies is an Islamist terrorist mastermind called the Handler. In Enemies Among Us, Reagan gets a chance to capture the Handler, but is ordered by his superiors to stand down. Reagan ignores those orders and manages to catch him anyway, then delivers him up in a neat package. But the Handler himself has warned him that there are traitors in the US government, and they’ll both kill him and Reagan to keep their secrets covered. For the rest of the book, Reagan fights and strategizes to stay alive, to protect his friends, and to save the country.

Was Enemies Among Us any good? I didn’t think so.

I found the prose ponderous, and the story moved (for me) very slowly. I often complain about thrillers that never give you a chance to breathe, where the protagonist shrugs off more physical damage than real humans could survive. But in this story, I felt that the action scenes were separated by endless stretches of clumsy writing. The author told us too much, and not very artfully. (He also has a tendency to misplace modifiers.)

I’m sorry to say all that, because Enemies Among Us is very explicitly conservative and pro-American. I appreciated the intention, but I was bored.

Religion

The Kingdom and the zebras

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Photo credit: sutirta budimansutirtab. Unsplash license.

At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:1-4, ESV)

I’m still reading the next book I’ll be reviewing (it’s a little slow, but I also have other business demanding my time just now). Last night I filled the void with talk about my work. Tonight I sink even lower – I’m going to write down my thoughts, such as they are.

Jordan Peterson’s most famous animal anecdote concerns lobsters. But he also talks about zebras, and what he says of them intrigues me.

He tells of some biologists in Africa, observing herds of zebras. They found it impossible to track any single animal. The moment you blink or glance away, you lose the individual. It disappears into the herd.

So the researchers tried marking them with paint.

The marked zebras were immediately chased down and killed by lions.

Because the zebra’s safety is found in the anonymity of the herd.

People, Peterson notes, used to wonder why zebras have stripes. Evolutionists suggested the stripes helped them blend into the tall grass. But that doesn’t work. Zebras stick out like hi-viz vests against the backdrop of tall grass.

No, what zebras blend into is not the grass, but the herd. Each individual gets lost to sight among all that chaos of stripes. It’s the individuals who stand out – either due to deformity or weakness or age (old or young) who get eaten. Individuals are lost, but the herd goes on and remains strong.

Which leads me to think about The World.

Growing up in a pietist church, I had clear ideas about what the World is. Drunkenness, and gambling, and questionable entertainment. The singleminded pursuit of money. Compromising one’s values to gain power and status.

But it occurs to me that, in a real sense, the World is the Herd.

Continue reading The Kingdom and the zebras →
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Into the shallow end of the talent pool

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Photo credit, Getty Images. Unsplash license.

I’m not in a position to review a book for you tonight. Instead, I am reduced to talking about what I’ve been doing. I used to do this all the time, but personal blogging doesn’t seem to be “a thing” anymore. (And with good reason, no doubt, considering the world we live in. I’ll try to avoid specifics.)

I can announce to you that I was accepted, last Thursday (as I recall) as a book narrator on Amazon ACX. ACX is a sort of hub, where authors and narrators can find one another, make deals, and launch projects. I read a book on how to get involved with ACX, and I watched hours of videos on how to work with it. Then I jumped through some procedural hoops to finally qualify for my space in the system.

I had already poked around in ACX from the author side, looking idly to see if I could find a genuine Irishman to narrate my Erling books. One of the options for payment is percentage of royalties, and I figured if I could find one who’d take that, it might be worth doing.

That didn’t work out. Turns out (as I should have guessed) that you actually need prospects of earning some kind of decent royalties before you can ask anybody to spend hours in a sound booth in hopes of a piece of the action.

But now I’m in as a narrator. The skills I learned narrating Troll Valley can now (I hope) start paying off. (TV has, I’ll admit, certain flaws. I think I’ve learned something from my mistakes.)

There’s a database in which you can search for projects where Rights Holders (RH’s, as we professionals call them) have posted openings for auditions. You download a short printed excerpt, record your best performance of it, and upload the file for review.

I have posted 4 auditions so far. One a day, more or less. I intend to continue that strategy until somebody bites or I have a stroke.

My subtle strategy is to start at the bottom. Low paying, short books, so I can get my feet wet. Dull topics that nobody else wants. My concern at this point is not to get rich, but to get started, and to supplement my retirement income. I don’t need a lot. I didn’t make a lot doing translations, but it made all the difference in my income.

(Political note: The state of Minnesota is now extracting a larger deduction from my miniscule [well south of $500] monthly IRA distribution. Way to go, stickin’ it to the rich, Governor Tim!)

Most of the projects I’ve auditioned for have been sitting open for weeks or months. I suspect most of the RH’s have lost interest altogether, and I’m shouting into the wind. But you’ve got to start somewhere.

And that’s where I am.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dark Fairytale,’ by Alan Lee

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Beaches feel lonely when it’s cold. The ocean is too icy to enjoy, and the breeze makes the loveliness of nature remote and hard. Beautiful but sad, like missing someone you loved.

You probably know by now that I’m in the tank for Alan Lee. His Mackenzie August and Manny Ramirez books are great fun, and what I’ve called Christian-adjacent.

Dark Fairytale, book 16 of the Mackenzie August series, springs from an earlier installment, in which Mack,  a private eye in Roanoke, Virginia, was coerced into participating in a secret, to-the-death mixed martial arts tournament in Italy (he won, of course, because he’s still alive). In the course of that adventure, his fiancée Veronica (“Ronnie”) killed a very evil woman, in Mack’s defense. Still, she’s not a killer type. It still bothers her, years later. She asks Mack to locate that woman’s family and see if there’s some way she can make amends by helping them.

Mack is happy to do it, of course, but it proves a difficult job. The woman and her husband led secretive lives and have left few traces behind. When Mack starts asking questions, he gets pushback and a gang of furries (I kid you not) try to kill him and Manny. That doesn’t stop him, of course. When he and Ronnie finally go on the road to find the family, the trail takes them to Amish country in Ohio, and on to northern Virginia. They encounter a desperately dysfunctional family, and are faced with a Solomonic choice as to whether they should help them, and how. I thought I figured out the trick author Lee had up his sleeve, but I was delighted to find that a couple deeper tricks were concealed inside it.

The prose and dialogue in the Mack August books are excellent, but I think it’s the characterization that’s best. You’ll really love this cast of characters. Mack and Manny are a hoot to spend time with, as they motivate each other through mock-macho cross-talk. There’s real (fictional) love here, and real community and real eternal values.

Dark Fairytale is highly recommended. Cautions for adult situations and rough language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Lady in the Lake,’ by Raymond Chandler

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The Gillerlain Company’s reception room looked even emptier than the day before. The same fluffy little blonde was tucked in behind the PBX in the corner. She gave me a quick smile and I gave her the gunman’s salute, a stiff forefinger pointing at her, the three lower fingers tucked back under it, and the thumb wiggling up and down like a western gun fighter fanning his hammer. She laughed heartily, without making a sound. This was more fun than she had had in a week.

I think most mystery fans wish Raymond Chandler had written more Philip Marlowe books. He burned hot, like the alcohol that consumed him, but pretty briefly as an artist. The Lady in the Lake is considered neither his best nor his worst novel. It also suffers from the movie they made out of it, starring and directed by Robert Montgomery (Elizabeth’s father). Montgomery chose to go all artsy with it, shooting the whole thing from Marlowe’s point of view, so that we only saw his face occasionally in a mirror. It’s awkward, and it doesn’t work very well. The novel deserves better than that.

Marlowe is hired by a businessman who wants him to find his wife, who has disappeared. She apparently went to their mountain lake cabin, and then traveled with a lover to Mexico, then back to Los Angeles. Then nothing. He knows she doesn’t want to be married to him anymore, but he’s concerned about her anyway.

Marlowe travels up to the mountain cabin, where he happens to witness the recovery of the body of another woman, the wife of a local, who drowned in the lake. Then the missing woman’s lover is murdered. And Marlowe realizes somebody has been lying to him.

The Lady in the Lake’s plot is a little complex (though not as confusing as some of Chandler’s other scenarios), and I thought it ended somewhat abruptly. But the prose is classic Chandler:

This is the ultimate end of the fog belt, and the beginning of that semi-desert region where the sun is as light and dry as old sherry in the morning, as hot as a blast furnace at noon, and drops like an angry brick at nightfall.

The book also features one of my favorite Marlowe side characters, the laconic Constable Jim Patton.

The Lady in the Lake is not the best Chandler, but definitely entertaining.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Be Still My Soul,’ by S.D. Thames

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First things first: WHAT HAPPENED TO S. D. THAMES?

This Christian author produces a string of extremely good mystery novels, and then he just disappears. Sometime around 2018, as far as I can judge. Maybe he was a victim of Covid. Maybe he decided novel writing was too time-consuming a hobby. Maybe he’s left his legal career and become a missionary. All I know is that a web search tells me he doesn’t seem to have died.

It’s kind of like a mystery story where a detective is trying to locate a missing person, goes to his home town, and everybody denies ever knowing him.

But that’s not important to this review (except to warn you that another installment in this very good series doesn’t look to be forthcoming).

Okay, now that that’s off my chest, I’ll review Be Still My Soul, a prequel novella to the Milo Porter mysteries. It tells how our hero first got into the private eye business.

Milo is a veteran of the War on Terror, in which he enlisted to avenge his father, a victim of 9/11. He came home suffering from PTSD. He’s seeing a counselor and taking medications, but sometimes he still has hallucinations. He’s gotten a job as a process server, which brings him to a rundown, stinking house in rural Florida, where an old woman knocks him unconscious with a frying pan.

His situation gets worse when people who should know inform him that the woman who hit him does not even exist, and he must have hallucinated her. On the other hand, he meets a girl and falls in love at first sight.

The story only gets weirder after that.

I greatly enjoyed Be Still My Soul, and wish it had been a full novel. I wish there were more Milo Porter books too, or just anything from S. D. Thames.

Non-fiction, Reading, The Press

Five books on the Vikings, from Neil Price

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The ever-vigilant Dave Lull, good friend of this blog, sent me the following article from the Wall Street Journal: Five Best Books on the Vikings, by Neil Price. Aside from the obvious defect of overlooking my own work, it’s an interesting list from a man who is no mean author himself.

Just to divert the income stream to our blog, I’ll list the list here:

The Viking Achievement, by Foote and Wilson

Valkyrie, by Friðriksdóttir

The Poetic Edda, translated by Larrington

The Road to Hel, by Ellis

Egil’s Saga, translated by Scudder

“But what do you think of the list?” you must surely be wondering.

Well, it’s not bad. The Viking Achievement is a book I’ve treasured for many years. It’s quite an old work now, and when I first read it long ago (while I was writing The Year of the Warrior), I assumed it would be just another historical/cultural guide. I found an excellently researched book, full of stuff I didn’t know already. We’ve had a lot of new discoveries since it was written, of course, and a new book along its lines is badly needed. In fact, I was pretty sure I found one a few years back and reviewed it here, but I can’t find it in our archives.

Valkyrie is a book I do not know. It may be very good. But I’ll tell you the truth – I avoid the whole topic of Viking women nowadays, since feminist scholars have gone all agog over the discovery of a couple women’s graves containing armor. I don’t think anyone can discuss women’s role in Viking society rationally at this point in history. (Myself included.)

I’ve read a couple translations of The Poetic Edda, but I don’t think Larrington’s is one of them. Anyone interested in the Vikings should certainly read one.

I haven’t read The Road to Hel, either. Hilda Ellis (also known as Hilda Ellis Davidson) was a foremost Viking scholar, so I really ought to correct this omission. However, the book appears to be out of print, and used copies are expensive.

Egil’s Saga, of course, I’ve read numerous times and in various translations, including this one. I’ve even read it in the scholarly Complete Sagas of Icelanders, but Scudder is, imho, more readable for the non-specialist

Bottom line: Neil Price knows his business, and this is a worthwhile list. I should probably compile one of my own, though my library is in such disarray right now that it would probably involve a lot of work.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Illusions of Trust,’ by Jeffrey S. Stephens

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I read a book by Jeffrey S. Stephens and was impressed enough go on to try Illusions of Trust, a book that reads like part of a series, but doesn’t seem to be, as far as I can tell from Stephens’s author page.

There seem to be echoes of both Perry Mason and Nero Wolfe at work here, though the characters are entirely original as they operate. Russell Palmer is a young New York attorney who has lucked into a dream situation. Thanks to an anonymous patron, he’s able to take only the cases he wants, cases where a real injustice needs to be set right. He has a partner named Robbie Wyghte, a smart, retired cop.

When Christina Franco, a wealthy and beautiful socialite, comes into his office insisting he represent her in divorcing her husband, he sees no reason why he should. She has the resources to hire the best divorce lawyers in the business. But she says she needs him because her husband has threatened her life. When she mentions the name of a particular criminal Palmer has tangled with before, a man he hates and wants to bring down, he’s motivated to take her case.

Soon after, a prominent corporate lawyer who has worked with Christina’s senator father commits apparent suicide. Threats begin coming in. Palmer himself is physically attacked. And Christina’s mother asks him to prove that the late lawyer, who had been her friend, did not kill himself.

The whole thing resolved itself in a way that pleased me, with minimal fights and fireworks. I liked the ending. The rest of the book I found just a little low-key. Palmer seemed a fairly dull sort of hero – we’re told he has OCD, but his symptoms are minimal and don’t interfere with him much.

Nevertheless, it was a good story. Good prose, good dialogue, good characters. Worth reading. Some homosexuals show up early on, and the author takes pains to show his acceptance of them, but it’s not a big part of the story.

Reviews

Final review: The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin

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I’m going to do another post about the Daily Wire’s miniseries, The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin, now available on Amazon Prime. I finished watching it on Sunday, and just want to give it another boost.

My opinion has not changed – this is very, very good epic television. The premise, if you haven’t read the books, is that the Faery Folk of Avalon, so prominent in Arthurian legend, were actually refugees from Atlantis, a long-lived race with certain mystical powers. Taliessin, a great British bard with mysterious origins of his own, marries Charis, a princess of Avalon, and Myrddin (Merlin) is their son, whose otherworldly vision sometimes threatens his sanity. His great challenge (accepted only with reluctance) is to unite all the Britons under Prince Aurelius in order to resist the Saxon (Saecson) invaders.

There were a couple of matters I thought I should address. I understand they’ve raised some controversy among Christians. You should be aware that this series is mature material, and probably is not suitable for younger viewers. The series is grittier than the Lord of the Rings movies. The controversial matters I refer to are the traditional ones – sex and violence.

There is sex here – but no nudity or explicit content. We are presented with couples who fall in love and clearly desire each other very much (though Taliessin tells Charis he prefers to wait for marriage “as the Christians do,” which is the rule throughout). We follow them to the bedchamber and see her drop her gown (above the waist, from behind), and then the shot fades in classic Hollywood fashion. It’s very sexy, but chaste, in the precise meaning of that word.

The Atlantean women also dress pretty lightly – though not as lightly as the Minoans their culture is based on.

There is violence here. I have long criticized Stephen Lawhead for being shy about ending his epic stories with good, rousing battles. But that (I think) is the later Lawhead. This series ends with an extended battle, in which there’s plenty of gore. These scenes, in particular, should probably not be viewed by children.

Which leads to my conclusion. The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin is Christian art for grownups, handling life issues more realistically than the Christian films you’re probably used to. I approve of this, but some Christians will surely take offense. And it’s not for me to judge them. They must guard their own hearts, and they may be very wise.

For all that, I recommend the series. For those who can appreciate it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Key West Dead,’ by Mark Nolan

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The other day, in discussing author Stephen Lawhead, I referred (jokingly) to my seething envy of his success in a field where I also write.

Yet I am indeed capable of resenting other author’s success. Specifically, when I see that they’re “Amazon bestselling authors,” and observe, in reading their work, that they can’t, in fact, write.

Key West Dead, by Mark Nolan, is part of a series of novels starring Jake Wolfe, a California private eye. A veteran and a PTSD sufferer, he works with his dog Casey, who both calms him and, thanks to his experience as a bomb dog, alerts him to guns and explosives – which turns out to be valuable in this story.

Jake and Casey are in Key West for a wedding when they witness the explosion of a yacht causing the murder of two innocent people, by means of an IED. Infuriated by the crime, Jake, with the support of his partner Terrell and his girlfriend Sarah, embarks on a personal game of wits with the obsessive bomber, whose original purpose was to extort money from the island government but is now at war with Jake and Casey as well.

What did I dislike about Key West Dead? First of all, the author doesn’t know how to write dialogue. His characters all speak the same way, in stilted, lecturing fashion, delivering information dumps in classic “as you know” form. The narrative passages are no better – descriptions and events are described in the most rote and pedestrian ways. For instance:

As Jake listened to Bart’s cultured voice and his articulate, well-spoken reasoning, he was reminded that the man had graduated from Harvard Law School.

This is first-draft writing, with zero effort exerted for vivid impression or original observation. However, people seem to buy these books and to rate them highly, so maybe I’m the fool for trying to be a wordsmith in my own work. There is plenty of action here; often implausible – again and again we see danger approaching, but Jake – warned in time by Casey’s priceless nose – always draws on his resourcefulness to prevent (or minimize) loss of life.

The dog may be the key. Casey is nice dog. Even I liked him.

But I don’t recommend Key West Dead. Unless you’re looking for a beach read that makes no demands whatever on your thinking brain.

I should probably mention that there are a couple positive references to the Second Amendment. So there’s that.