Fiction, Reviews

‘The Scarlet Ruse,’ by John D. MacDonald

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She said, “It’s funny. You know? They’ve all said so many things so many ways, there’s nothing left for people to really say to each other. I mean I can say things, but behind it I can hear Cher saying it to Sonny.”

I first read John D. MacDonald’s The Scarlet Ruse back in the 1970s, when it was new. Back in those days you could look forward to a new McGee every year, and everything has gone downhill since that ended, as far as I’m concerned.

In The Scarlet Ruse, McGee, lanky, houseboat-dwelling Fort Lauderdale salvage expert, agrees to help a stamp dealer, as a favor to his economist friend, Meyer. Hersh Fedderman is an honest man with a small but lucrative business, selling stamps to collectors. But not all of his clients are necessarily honest. One in particular he suspects of being a gangster. For this man he has assembled a very valuable collection of rarities, steadily appreciating in value. He keeps the collection in a bank safe deposit box, which can only be accessed by both of them together. Yet somehow, he has discovered, the stamps have been switched out, low-value items substituted. It’s one of those impossible, locked room mysteries. Clearly someone stole the stamps, but the only people with access are the client, Hirsh himself, and his assistant Mary Alice, a long-time employee he trusts implicitly.

It’s a head-scratcher. As he ponders the problem, Trav gets close to Mary Alice, who is exactly the kind of woman he likes – big, beautiful, healthy, and cheerful. Trav is in love – but what about the crime? How was it performed?

Finding the answer to that question will nearly get him killed.

It goes without saying that I enjoyed The Scarlet Ruse. It hasn’t aged well in some ways – particularly in McGee’s musings, which are always engaging but heavily influenced here by his friend Meyer, who seems to be pretty Malthusian in his economics. (Meyer calls his houseboat the John Maynard Keynes, for heaven’s sake.) Also, Travis talks about being won over to the anti-handgun cause – even as he prepares a pistol or two of his own, which he’ll need pretty desperately before he’s done.

But you take McGee as a package, and mostly it’s a top quality package. Recommended, with cautions for violence and mature scenes and themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Washington Trail,’ by Lou Aguilar

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Lou Aguilar, like me, writes for the American Spectator (he does it at a rather higher level, though). When he mentioned in an article that he wrote detective thrillers, I thought I’d try one. (Turns out there’s only one thriller so far.) The Washington Trail was a lot of fun. Proust it ain’t, but fun it decidedly is.

Our heroes are Mark Tristan, a former Army Ranger, and Neil Cork, a former FBI analyst, now Washington DC private investigators. Cork is a family man, but Tristan is a bachelor with a pretty flippant attitude to life. He has a car, but he likes to zip around town on a bicycle. He’s a passionate fan of old Western movies, and quotes them constantly.

A beautiful young woman comes to their office and asks them to follow her artist boyfriend and find out why he dumped her. They try to put her off, but she’s insistent. When Tristan starts shadowing the young man, he quickly discovers his secret life, which will not delight their client. But hardly has he delivered the bad news than the young man gets involved in a shooting incident, and suddenly Tristan and Cork are plunged into a three-way conflict involving secretive groups they call (of course) “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”

The prose in The Washington Trail is passable, but not memorable. The plot and action are, frankly, highly implausible. It’s the characters that lift this book above the level of the herd. Tristan, in particular, is brash and funny and brave, but also relatable (he’s a male fantasy figure, as so many great characters are).

There’s a twist at the end that I saw coming, but it was only one of several.

Author Aguilar is brave, but perhaps foolhardy in making The Washington Trail blatantly political. His conservatism is quite open here – though Trump and Biden are never named as such, references to “the last president” and “the current president” are made in contexts that render it impossible not to figure it out. Most authors would try to be a little more oblique, simply for the sake of potential sales. But Aguilar flies his colors proudly.

So if you’re a liberal, you probably won’t care much for The Washington Trail. But if you’re a conservative looking for a really fun action story, you’ll probably get as big a hoot out of it as I did.

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.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture