Fiction, Reviews

‘He’d Rather Be Dead,’ by George Bellairs

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Faded image of seaside village postcard with novel title "He'd Rather Be Dead"

Viewed through the golden glass of the vestibule where we first meet him, wondering where he’s left his ticket of invitation and fuming inwardly because he can’t enter without it, he looks like a dogfish in aspic.

George Bellairs is a classic English mystery writer. I wasn’t familiar with his work before I bought He’d Rather Be Dead, first published in 1945. The book has much to commend it.

Sir Gideon Ware is the newly-elected mayor of the English seaside resort town of Westcome. He is a ruthless property developer who built the town into its present prosperity through hard work, loud promotion, flexible ethics and corner-cutting. At a dinner given to celebrate his victory, he falls under the table during his speech, and dies. Cause of death: strychnine poisoning.

Police Superintendent Boumphrey of the Westcome police is very good at keeping tabs on the citizens’ comings and goings, and even at keeping files on them, but feels this case to be above his pay grade. So he applies to Scotland Yard to send one of their detectives (this happens all the time in novels, but I’ve read the Yard never actually does this) to investigate. They send Inspector Littlejohn (he has a first name, but I can’t recall it), who proceeds in a quiet and matter-of-fact manner, working steadily to uncover the secrets of Sir Gideon’s past, and the force from that past that has now struck him down .

What I liked best about He’d Rather Be Dead was the prose. Author Bellairs had the gift of turning out a very apt sentence, like the one at the head of this review, or this one:

Mr Brown’s smiling lips parted to disclose two copious sets of teeth crowding upon one another like passengers for the last bus.

Not quite Wodehousian, but excellent in its own way.

The mystery itself involved a systematic progression through suspects and evidence, without a lot of fireworks. Characterization was not memorable, and even Littlejohn himself doesn’t leap off the page – almost all we learn of him is that he’s in a happy marriage. He isn’t even physically described until almost the end of the book – which loses him points with this reader.

But I must admit that I didn’t guess the murderer, though I thought I did.

I might possibly read another Inspector Littlejohn book, but He’d Rather Be Dead didn’t grab me a lot. The prose was excellent, but the key was pretty low for my debased modern reading tastes. I don’t recommend against the book. There’s much to be said for it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Sexton Blake and the Great War’

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Silhouette of WWI British soldier with map and biplanes behind him

In the course of my reading, I’ve occasionally run across references to Sexton Blake, an English detective/spy hero whose popularity flourished from the 1890s up to the late 1960s. The character’s longevity can be attributed to the fact that, after his creator (Hal Meredith writing as Harry Blyth) stepped aside, other writers took up the pen. He was featured in a number of magazines over the years, always in the medium of pulp stories aimed at boys. For much of his career, Sexton Blake was a more energetic version of Sherlock Holmes (kind of like the Guy Ritchie movies).

I thought it would be amusing to try some Sexton Blake stories, and the collection Sexton Blake and the Great War was cheap, so I bought it for my Kindle.

Alas, immature as I admittedly am, I’m not immature enough for this stuff. I got through the first short novel, The Case of the Naval Manoeuvres, written in 1908 by Norman Goddard, and that was all I could handle.

In this story, our intrepid hero is sent by the Prime Minister to the Shetland Islands, where he’s standing on the shore one night with his two sidekicks and his faithful dog Pedro, when a dangling rope just happens to hit him in the face. Blake, of course, grabs onto it, and is carried out over the sea. He climbs the rope and discovers it’s attached to a huge German airship. Scrambling up into the cabin, he finds that the ship is under the command of no less a personage than Kaiser Wilhelm II himself, to whom Blake has been of personal service once or twice in the past. This saves his life, but he is taken prisoner nonetheless. Predictably, he manages to escape, but clings onto the vessel’s framework and tracks the crew to their secret lair, where they have prepared a mechanism to guide their fleet in an attack on Great Britain. It doesn’t take long for Blake to disguise himself perfectly as a German officer, sabotage their machine, and kidnap the Kaiser. The Kaiser, in turn, will escape from Blake… and so it goes. Plausibility has no place in this scenario.

Our hero, of course (much like the heroes of our current CGI action flicks), can absorb any amount of physical punishment with barely a wince. He can be lifted high into the sky under a balloon, and plunge 80 feet into the ocean, without noticing the cold or needing any more care than a fresh suit of clothes. Interestingly, he also fights hand-to-hand with the Kaiser – which is less impressive than it sounds when you remember that Wilhelm was born with a crippled left arm (either the author did not know this, or he ignored it).

If you’re interested in pure, unadulterated Ripping Yarns stuff, this is the real goods. I think it would be fun to be able to appreciate stories like this… but I can’t.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Limelight,’ by Dan Willis

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Book Number 5 in Dan Willis’s “Arcane” series about runewright/private eye Alex Lockerby is Limelight. This book takes the series to a new thematic level, and I enjoyed it.

Alex has come up in the world from his humble roots. He’s getting better-paying cases these days, and hobnobbing with the very powerful, among them the Lightning Lord, the sorcerer who provides electrical power to this magic-dominated 1930s New York City. Another is Sorsha Kincaid, the Ice Queen, who provides its refrigeration and air conditioning. She and Alex are carrying on a wary flirtation, but in Limelight they don’t have much time for anything but crime solving and disaster aversion.

First of all, a famous woman mystery writer has been murdered, to the grief of Alex’s mentor, Izzy. Izzy asks him to investigate the case, and it soon becomes clear that someone wanted to stop her writing a novel based on the unsolved murder of a Broadway actress several years back.

But the police are more concerned with a more spectacular crime, one involving magic. A bank’s wall has been breached by an explosion that appears to have been set off by a rune – only everyone knows that there are no exploding runes. Alex sees evidence here of a level of runecraft he has never seen before – oddly initiated by runes that are themselves quite crudely drawn.

Limelight was not crudely drawn. It was tightly plotted, complex, and highly dramatic. It was fun to read, and I look forward to the next installment.

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The king’s back-story

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King Haakon VII and Crown Prince Olav shelter from a German air raid in 1940. Photo credit: Per Bratland (1907-1988). From Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

I was busy translating yesterday (got some work done on the novel too; it was a good day). So I don’t have anything to review tonight. Of what shall I write? Well, there’s a miniseries running on PBS, to which I have a personal connection. I’m sure you’re following this excellent production closely. I’ll share some of my vast personal store of knowledge to give you some background information, illuminating and enriching your viewing experience.

You may recall a scene where King Haakon and Crown Prince Olav discuss whether to remain in the country, risking capture and capitulation, or to flee to England, which could be construed as abdicating. “This could mean the end of the monarchy,” one of them says. (Maybe not in those very words; I translated it but I don’t have eidetic memory.)

Their concern here is greater than it would be for ordinary monarchs. The Norwegian monarchy was actually still experimental, and a little shaky. Haakon and Olav had spent their entire lives inventing and sustaining a modern Norwegian royal tradition.

Norway, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, lost its independence for a period of about 500 years – from the mid-14th Century to 1905. Roughly 400 of those years were spent in union with Denmark, and then it was transferred to Sweden by the Congress of Vienna in 1814.

With independence coming, the question was, what form of government would Norway have? A lot of Norwegians admired France and the US, and favored a republic. But republicanism was unpopular among the European elite. Republics were notoriously unstable; France was suffering a string of government turnovers.

When the Norwegians voted to become independent, Sweden was uncertain whether to oppose the move or not. Military action was not off the table. They let it be known that they were more favorable to having a monarchy next door than a republic. So when Norwegians (the explorer/diplomat Fridtjof Nansen among them) went to speak to their favored royal candidate, Prince Carl of Denmark, they explained that if he agreed to become king, he might very well secure Norwegian independence and prevent war.

Prince Carl had his reservations. The brother of the king of Denmark, he had a perfectly fine career as a naval officer, and had never meddled much in politics. Accepting would involve radical lifestyle changes and new responsibilities for his wife Maude (daughter of Edward VII of England and not an outgoing person) and his young son Alexander.

But they were won over. They began with a brilliant public relations move. Knowing that the last two kings of Norway had been named Haakon VI and Olav IV (Olav had died young of a congenital condition, ending the independent Norwegian dynasty), Carl changed his own name to Haakon, and his son Alexander’s to Olav. So they became Haakon VII and Olav V. Symbolically, they were picking up the dynasty precisely where it had left off half a millennium ago.

The Norwegian constitution granted the king a fair amount of power. Haakon deliberately refused to exercise it, keeping himself to ceremonial and non-political activities. Even when the Labor Party (Arbeiderparti), dominated by Communists and inclined against monarchy, took power in 1927, Haakon insisted on working with them.

The decision to evacuate and form a government in exile lost them a measure of support. Some Norwegians who joined the Nazis actually blamed the king and the crown prince for abandoning them.

But they persevered, and when they finally returned victorious in 1945, they were more popular than ever. Olav in his turn was highly regarded (and accessible. Have I mentioned I saw him in person once?).

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Man Who Wasn’t All There,’ by David Handler

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There’s a precious handful of writers whom I reread every few years just to remind myself what great writing is. Hemingway isn’t one of them.

Several recent releases from my favorite authors have recently been released, but I haven’t bought them because they’re kind of pricey, and things are a little tight just now. But I couldn’t resist David Handler’s latest Stewart Hoag book, The Man Who Wasn’t All There.

As with all the recent books in the series, this one isn’t contemporary, but is shoehorned into Stewart’s past. The Man Who Wasn’t All There is set in the 1990s. Hoagy has finally overcome the writer’s block that metastasized into drugs, divorce and destitution for him, and is clean again, working at last on his next novel. Even better, he has reconciled with his ex-wife, actress Merilee Nash. He’s been living in her New York apartment, but he’s just moved out to her Connecticut farm to winterize the house when he isn’t creating, while she’s in Budapest shooting a movie with Mel Gibson.

It’s great until he’s approached one day by a tubby little man with serious BO, who’s cobbled together something resembling a state trooper’s uniform, and carries a pistol. This delusional man is looking for Merilee and tries to push Hoagy around. Hoagy and his faithful basset hound, Lulu, run him off.

Hoagy then calls the police, and soon a fleet of official vehicles show up. Turns out the weird little man is Austin Talmadge, the second richest man in Connecticut. He’s delusional, and sometimes goes off his medications and harasses people. This is of concern to his brother Michael, the richest man in Connecticut, a recluse who’s close to the governor. The police are soon headed out to bring Austin in again, but it goes wrong, and Hoagy (along with Lulu) gets kidnapped by the loony billionaire. Much violence and mystery follows, until Hoagy figures it all out.

The Man Who Wasn’t All There went down very smoothly. The Stewart Hoag books are consistently fun to read. Hoagy is a bit of a snob and a dilettante, but possesses just enough humor and self-awareness to make his company amusing. Occasionally he hints at opinions I don’t care for, but (as you see above) he sometimes gets it right. He disses Hemingway in this one, and that always pleases me.

Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bring Her Home,’ by C. E. Nelson

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I’ve gotten some pleasure from C. E. Nelson’s Trask Brothers novels, of which Bring Her Home is the third. The author seems to be trying to fill the gap left by John Sandford when he moved his Lucas Davenport character to a wider canvas than Minnesota. And he succeeds to some extent, especially in terms of cop banter (I love cop banter). The Trask Brothers, our heroes, are identical twins, one a county sheriff in northern Minnesota, the other an officer with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension based in Minneapolis. This adds the element of sibling rivalry to their banter, and that’s fun.

In Bring Her Home, the brothers have taken a week of common vacation leave for fishing, their favorite pastime. But it’s been raining all the time, and finally boredom drives them to the local police department to inquire about a missing person’s poster they’ve seen. The local chief is happy to have them review his files on the disappearance of a young woman three years ago. They don’t come up with any new ideas, but when a similar-looking young woman disappears up north, they start to suspect the two abductions might be connected. Don, the BCA brother, assigns a female officer to go north to look into things. After a while she becomes suspicious of a security officer at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.

Having given the Trask Brothers three books to win my favor, I have to say the weaknesses in the stories outweigh the virtues for me. The author isn’t a particularly good wordsmith, and makes a fair number of word mistakes – using “lead” for “led” and “dived” for “dove,” for instance. Also, there’s too much dependence on sheer good luck and coincidence to get main characters out of deadly danger – characters have a right to some luck, but you shouldn’t go to that well too often. I was slightly annoyed that a lot of the actual investigation in this book was delegated to a brand-new character – an improbably attractive female BCA agent whose presence I can only attribute to creative affirmative action. Also, I was supposed to believe that some highly placed people were covering up actual serial killings to avoid bad publicity. Few people have less respect for high officials in Minnesota than I do, but that strained my credibility. Also, the violence in this book was of a particularly distressing kind.

Some amusing banter doesn’t make up for all these weaknesses. I think I’m done with the Trask Brothers. Regretfully.

Authors

25 Minutes on C.S. Lewis on BBC Four

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Here’s a segment on BBC Four’s Great Lives program on C.S. Lewis. Suzannah Lipscomb, a historian, says she has not heard Lewis’s voice prior to this, calling it more “plumby” than she had imagined. She talks with Matthew Parris and Malcolm Guite about his faith, books, appearance, his marriage, and how he very much valued his privacy. (via Twitter)

Music, Religion

Sissel sings ‘Amazing Grace’

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The tale of my day is short and sweet. Quick translation job, under a deadline. Dedicated labor. Then a revision. Also, in the vacant spots, I did the laundry.

Here’s Sissel with something approaching the best arrangement of “Amazing Grace” ever recorded. I think it’s slightly different from a version, quite similar, which she recorded at a later date (arranged by Andre Crouch). Unless I’m mistaken.

Have a good weekend.

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‘Atlantic Crossing,’ translator’s reaction

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Although I’d already seen the first two episodes of “Atlantic Crossing,” I wasn’t about to miss the big premiere on PBS Sunday night. I found a friend who was willing to have me over to watch with his girlfriend on his big TV (I even got a free meal out of it).

As I told you before, it was as good as I remembered. Well acted (I’m highly impressed with Kyle Maclachlan’s performance as FDR. He really nails the character), nail-bitingly dramatic, and beautiful to watch. Just a class production all the way.

I know this script intimately. Not as a writer would – as I keep telling people, I had zero creative input – but as someone who helped translate through multiple revisions. I know where certain minor cuts were made to tighten things up. I remember how I imagined the scenes when I worked on them, and in every case they’re more spacious on film (or on tape, or however it’s done nowadays). And I had the opportunity to lecture my fellow viewers about Norwegian history, and the unspoken dynamics behind the historical events.

Based on the reactions I’ve seen on Facebook, American readers liked the show very much indeed. I will say nothing about historical authenticity here, or anywhere. That’s not for me to discuss. I’ll only say that this is a miniseries, and that dramatic form involves certain iron demands. You’ve got to have a full dramatic arc for each of the eight episodes, and that involves massaging actual events to some extent. I think “Atlantic Crossing” ought to be evaluated as a work of art. And on that level it succeeds brilliantly. There ought to be awards.

If you missed Episode One, you should be able to stream it here.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Dune: Atreides Triumphant

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{Reading Dune for the first time] Update 5: Dune ends in a sudden halt. I suppose everything is wrapped up neatly enough, but there’s no page or two about everyone settling into a new life or looking forward to a new day. Nothing about drawing Rose closer, setting Elanor on your lap, and saying, “Well, I’m back.” It ends with Paul lowering the boom on his enemies, making demands, and done. Maybe the next book picks up immediately, but that brings me to main thing I intend to say in this post–pacing.

(By the way, how do you pronounce Harkonnen? I know how the 1984 movie says it, but I’m more comfortable putting the emphasis on the first syllable. Emphasizing the second syllable strikes me as thoughtlessly American. Herbert frequently agreed with me when he said the name, so I’ve read, but he may have said it the other way too.)

Book 1: Dune builds at an appropriately slow pace to strong climax. Book 2: Maud’Dib felt slow as I read the first few pages, but I may have been projecting. After Paul and Jessica collect themselves on the heels of the main event in book 1, the story kicks back into gear. This section has the one chapter I was tempted to skip. It focuses primarily on the death of an important figure, so it’s good to give such an event proper weight. But it’s also like reading appendix 1 on planet ecology and the visionary who intended to change Arrakis. Too much lecturing. Book 3: The Prophet picks up a few years after the end of the previous section and tells a quick story of longer period of time.

Dune has a lot of fighting, but Herbert doesn’t focus on it. The fights we see are the personal ones. He skips over taking village strongholds, defending hideouts from imperial soldiers, and knocking patrol ships out of the sky. Instead we get an explanation of how the tough, imperial troops are losing 3-1 against rebels, who are supposed to be scattered ruffians, to the disgusting Baron Harkonnen, who had assumed any fighting had already been handled. That’s just one example of how the story tells us where the conflict lies ahead in one chapter and how it’s behind them in the next.

Herbert writes well. He doesn’t try to make irrelevant scenes appealing. He’s willing to wrap them up off camera. I do wish he would have refrained from constantly referring to training. The reader has plenty of time to understand the deep, lengthy training Paul and Jessica have endured. Do we have to mention it every time they try not to blow a gasket?

Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash