Fiction, Reviews

‘In Plain Sight,’ by Dan Willis

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I’m not a big fan of modern wizard books (you may have noticed I failed to succumb to the charm of Jim Butcher’s Dresden novels) generally, but someone suggested I check out Dan Willis’s Alex Lockerby novels. I read the first, In Plain Sight, and found a lot to like.

Alex Lockerby is a private eye/rune writer in 1930s New York City, but in an alternate universe. In this universe, magic substitutes for science. Pretty much everything runs on electricity, and the electricity is provided by a small number of great sorcerers, who are the plutocrats of the day (Rockefeller is one of them). Rune writers like Alex are far more common, doing smaller-scale magic at various levels of expertise.

One day a beautiful young woman comes into Alex’s office to ask him to locate her brother, who has disappeared. He was a rune writer too, and she fears he might have gotten into magical trouble he couldn’t handle. Alex takes the job, and falls for the girl.

Meanwhile, a personal tragedy strikes, in the form of the mysterious deaths of a number of people in a church homeless mission, including the priest. That priest was the man who raised Alex, and the police (reluctantly) allow him to consult on the case. He lends his expertise to the hunt for a secret journal belonging to Leonardo Da Vinci, rumored to contain a few complex runes that would give their owner almost unlimited power – power for which certain foreign agents are hunting.

I liked In Plain Sight much more than I expected. It transposed a lot of good old hard-boiled tropes, and there was a pretty neat surprise at the end, involving a major character. The tension with Christian theology that tends to go with books about magic is softened here by the fact that Alex is close to a Catholic priest who has no objections. Apparently the rules are different in this universe. Here magic is like science, and spiritual beings don’t seem to come into it.

If you like urban fantasy and hard-boiled mysteries, In Plain Sight is a pretty fun way to spend your reading time. Recommended.

Music

Is St. Patrick’s Day Irish or Scottish? What’s the difference?

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The yellow pool has overflowed high up on Clooth-na-Bare,
For the wet winds are blowing out of the clinging air

W. B. Yeats, “Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland”

We have storms in our region today. It’s been raining somewhat since Monday, gushing rain now. It will be flooding somewhere nearby. I’m thankful to have always lived on a hill.

I learned today that St. Patrick’s Day is not the unique in American holidays. We also have National Tartan’s Day on April 6. Maybe folks who attend Highland games knew that. I’ve only thought about attending those games, when I occasionally hear of them, so I didn’t know about Tartan’s Day.

I think most Americans couldn’t tell the difference between Irish and Scottish or Celtic and Gaelic cultural things unless clearly marked. As a trivial example, here’s my favorite Scottish reel, “The J.B. Reel,” arranged with a jig called “The Shepherdess.”

Note the stark contrast of this piece with the first of the Irish reels performed in this recording of Brendan P. Lynch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W_feaIdTEA

That’s how you tell the difference, friends. Happy St. McPaddy’s Day.

Poetry, Writing

Snow and poetry

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Photo credit: Andrew Small @ andsmall. From Unsplash.

Remember that snow I said we’d probably still get, because you can’t get out of March in Minnesota without an encore or two? It came last night. A couple inches, and it’s already starting to melt. I guess some’s coming tomorrow too. But Spring has the big momentum now. Even if the snow keeps coming back, it’ll be in short, vicious snaps, like a rat dying in a trap.

Here’s something I don’t think I’ve written about before here. Poetic prose. I am, as I’ve often said, a poor poet, even when I bother. (I was fairly well on in years before I even started to figure out what poetry is.) But over the years I’ve picked up some ideas about adding poetic touches to my prose. Father Ailill in the Erling books, stage Irishman that he is, is particularly prone to poetic flights, which is one of the things that makes him fun to write. And with St. Patrick’s Day coming up, this might be a good winter’s day to discuss the subject.

A while back I was in a gathering where someone mentioned, cautiously, that they’d been writing poetry, and what did we think of it? And they read some of it. I think that person was hoping I’d say it was great, but I said nothing. Because it wasn’t very good. I wished I had the opportunity to talk to them about it one-on-one, but I didn’t get that.

Here’s what I wanted to say to them:

You think you’re writing poetry here, but what you’re actually doing is just writing prose, the way you’d write prose any time, and then breaking the lines up. Poetry is more than just the way you lay your words out on the page. It’s about using words, and loving words, and manipulating words, marshaling the power of words to say more than bald prose can.

When I think of good poetry, one line comes to mind – my favorite line of poetry in the world. I’m not generally much interested in Dylan Thomas, but his poem, “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower,” amazes me. Just the first line (which is also the title), actually. I think it’s almost perfect.

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
“Drives my green age…”

Look what Thomas does with that first line.

Eleven syllables. Of those syllables, each is single word, except for the last one.

Such a sequence constructs a picture in the listener’s mind:

Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-double.

Which translates, semi-visually, to:

Stem-stem-stem-stem-stem-stem-stem-stem-stem-FLOWER.

It’s a picture of a flower.

But then the poet takes that picture of a flower and manipulates it. The stem becomes a “fuse.” “Fuse” is obviously a loaded word. Slightly sinister. Suddenly, instead of a mental picture of a flower, the picture is of a fuse burning down toward a dynamite charge. And when the fuse gets to the end, the charge explodes, and that explosion is a flower.

Suddenly we see the flower in a whole new way. It’s not just a pretty (kind of effete) plant sitting in the ground, looking decorative. It’s a little explosion, driven by some kind of a “force.” The rest of the poem expands on that idea of a life force. This is not one of Wordsworth’s daffodils. This is a dangerous flower, a flower from a rough neighborhood.

That’s what poetry is. It exploits the sounds of the words, the rhythm of the words, the associations of the words, and even the way the words look on paper, to turn ideas into little explosions in your head. You think in a new way, and you see in a new way.

It’s like a workout for your brain. And your spirit. It makes the muscles stronger, capable of doing things you never knew they could do.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Crypt Thief,’ by Mark Pryor

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The second offering in Mark Pryor’s Hugo Marston series, about a US embassy security head in Paris, is The Crypt Thief. I liked it, but not as much as the first book.

On summer night in the famous Pére Lachaise cemetery, near the grave of Jim Morrison, a young couple is shot to death. One of them is an American man from a prominent family; the woman is a dancer who turns out to have connections to a suspected terrorist. It is also discovered that a grave has been robbed – part of the skeleton of a famous Paris dancer has been taken. Where others see a terrorist act, Hugo Marston, whose background is in criminal profiling, sees the grave desecration as the central point. He suspects – and fears – that this may be the beginning of a string of serial killings. Since he’s the hero, we know he’s going to be right.

Once again Hugo is joined by his CIA friend Tom (who is showing troubling signs of a serious drinking problem) and his girlfriend Claudia, a plucky reporter with (as is common in fictional females) no rational sense of danger whatever.

This story didn’t work for me as well as The Bookseller. I thought it fell into a lot of common thriller tropes. The serial killer was certainly an original type, but extreme; I had trouble believing in him. And I’m a little weary of stories where the hero is sure he has to rush into danger personally, because the police don’t understand the truth the way he does.

But it wasn’t bad. I’ll still continue reading the series. Cautions for very disturbing subject matter.

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

Discussing the History of Coffee

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Melvyn Bragg has a very pleasant conversation with professors Judith Hawley, Markman Ellis, and Jonathan Morris on the history of coffee. They discuss how early medicinal reports seem to be just marketing, and how coffeehouses formed around the drink and business needs of customers as well as the side benefit of coffee being non-alcoholic.

Uncategorized

Translating Journal: A good day

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Big day. Put my clothes in the wash. Went to the gym. And when I got back from my grueling workout, I found translating work waiting for me. A nice large job, too. Better still, it’s a project about something that interests me – can’t tell you what, of course. Still, that means all my big plans for a wild Friday night on the town had to be put on hold. But my immunization will mature on Monday, and then all this pent-up social energy will burst forth upon the world. Look out, Robbinsdale.

Another gorgeous day, it was. Not as warm as some days we’ve had, but it was nice – the little time I spent outside. On the way home from the gym, I actually had the presence of mind to stop at the drug store and pick up the prescription that’s been waiting a couple days. At my age, that’s what they call, “He’s having one of his good days.”

I had a plan to call a guy to inquire about printing up a paper version of The Year of the Warrior (I have the rights for that), but I’ve been too busy translating to look into the details. I’ll keep you posted if it happens.

Have a good weekend.

Fiction, Reviews

Reading Dune for the First Time

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You’ve likely seen other bloggers writing about the first time they read Lord of the Rings. It seems appropriate to treat Dune the same way. With a new movie adaptation coming up (though I usually don’t see movies until months after they release, if then), I wanted to read the book that’s been sitting on my shelf a while.

I didn’t know anything about the world of Arrakis beyond a few images from the 1984 movie. Having reviewed a bit of the trailer from that movie, I don’t think I’ll spend any more time on it. I watched Zardoz as an impressionable youth. I don’t need anymore rank garbage like that.

I’ve just learned there are 19 books in the series and apparently more on the way, but only six of them are by original author Frank Herbert, so I doubt I’ll make it through even that many.

What I’ve read so far is book one of three in the original book. It’s a great part one, ending on a cliffhanger after all the foreshadowed conflict has crashed on the beach, leaving readers to wonder what happens next.

That foreshadowing though. Granny telling Little Red Riding Hood not to stray from the path easily sets up the idea that she will at least be tempted to stray. But Herbert doesn’t foreshadow as much as foretell. The narrative doesn’t stick to a single point of view but flits between characters, sometimes only for a moment, revealing their hidden motives. I thought I would hate it after a while, but I didn’t. Herbert’s style carries the story pretty well, but I have to wonder why he felt the need to quickly reveal this or that betrayal, when half the time it could have remained unsaid or supposed by one of the two especially perceptive characters.

“He nodded. ‘Of course.’ And he thought: If only there were some way not to do this thing that I must do.“

Well, for starters, you could consider avoiding loud whispering that everyone can hear.

That doesn’t touch on the quotations from backstory books that begin each chapter, saying one character is super, super bad or another one is going to die later on. No spoiler alert labels either. The main thing these quotations communicate is that Herbert is working on something of epic length. This won’t wrap up soon, gentle reader; note the gravitas of Princess Irulan’s history.

Despite this, I found book one to be compelling. The gifted, young Paul Atteides, only son of Duke Leto and his mistress Jessica, is remarkably perceptive, asking serious questions an adult should ask. His father works hard to gain and sustain loyal for his royal family, and he has a measure of success, but it becomes plain (that foretelling again) that the deck is stacked against him. A gifted observer or historian may be able to critic the Duke’s decisions and point to critical weaknesses or failures, but the story reveals a man who is trying to do his level best.

While reading, I thought I would see far more similarity to Star Wars, but so far the two stories are not alike. Paul is not some untrained kid hoping to get off his desert planet, and while the Empire is in the background and doesn’t look too good, it isn’t hunting down rebels. The story pits two ruling families against each other with a third, not-entirely-neutral party, a labor union that’s so large it could be an empire of its own. Add to this the free tribes of Arrakis, whom the Empire calls Sand Pirates (not at all like Sand People or Jawas).

I look forward to the rest of it and maybe even a sequel.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Harry Starke,’ by Blair Howard

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Harry Starke is a high-end private eye working in Chattanooga. (No doubt Phil Wade has run into him). Son of a successful personal injury lawyer, he works out of a nice office and owns a beautiful home. He’s dating a woman police detective. As Harry Starke, the first book in this series begins, he watches a beautiful young woman flee a couple of tough guys in a seedy bar, tries to rescue her as she flees over a bridge on the Tennessee River, and watches helplessly as she plunges to her death.

In the tradition of fictional private eyes, he immediately vows to find out who’s responsible for her death. The girl turns out to be the daughter of a prominent surgeon, who immediately hires him to investigate. With the help of his highly competent staff (though he does the dangerous stuff alone, of course), and in cooperation with Kate, his police squeeze, he follows the clues to the offices of a local drug dealer, who appears suddenly more prosperous than he should be, and a corrupt local politician. With occasional stops to investigate a secret sex club.

Harry Starke kept me reading to the end, but I didn’t really like it a lot. It seemed superficial to me, assembled from shiny parts like a TV series pilot, with nothing behind the facades on the set. I especially thought Harry’s relationship with Kate, the cop, was implausible. Would any real-life police department allow a private operator whom a detective was dating to consult on a case and run around with her, chasing suspects?

The language, I should note, was fairly clean for this kind of novel. There were several sexual encounters, but they weren’t described explicitly. However, there was one sexual moment that was just creepy for this reader. It was that creepy moment, though not that moment alone, that decided me that I probably won’t be investing in any more Harry Starke books.

Uncategorized, Writing

Writing Journal: Rainy day

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Today was a rainy day. Not snowy, rainy. This is not unheard-of in March in Minnesota, but it’s far from the norm. My front yard is entirely free of snow – there’s a little left in back, where the stuff gets piled up at the northeast corner of the house, but even that may be gone now. I haven’t looked out there in a few hours.

The rain has been slow, drippy stuff through most of the day, but I’m hearing thunder now.

A wild surmise begins to burgeon in my heart – we may have seen the last of this winter. The forecast doesn’t show any cold weather or snow for a couple weeks. Of course, we can still get snow even in April, and often do. But the sunshine seems to have gained the upper hand at this point. If we get any more snow, it’s unlikely to establish a beachhead.

Work goes slowly on the new Erling book, but it does go. I’m mostly adding stuff at this point. I’ve got the armature of a book, but it needs fleshing out.

Just wrote a scene (meant to be funny) about haggis, because Macbeth is in the story. This sort of thing is a tad self-indulgent, and if I were a purer artist, I’d probably consider it beneath me. But in my experience, very little is beneath me.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Bookseller,’ by Mark Pryor

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Outside the car’s window Paris flashed by, the sluggish river Seine appearing and disappearing beside them, seeming to slow their progress with her magnetic pull, a seductress winking through the plane trees, teasing them with glimpses of her silvery skirts, and with the threat of more death, more bodies hidden within their deadly folds.

Along the river Seine in Paris, there is a class of booksellers known as bouquinistes, occupants of much-coveted stalls. Hugo Marston, head of security for the US embassy, is fond of browsing their offerings, and has made particular friends with an old man named Max. As The Bookseller opens, Hugo asks Max for something special, out of his private stock – a conciliatory gift for his girlfriend, who recently abandoned him and returned to the US. Max offers two rare books – an Agatha Christie first edition, and a rare copy of the poet Rimbaud. Before he leaves, Hugo witnesses Max being bullied by a thug, who forces him down to the river bank. Max is shoved onto a boat, and Hugo is unable to do anything to prevent it. When he reports the abduction to the police, they seem uninterested – and quickly drop the investigation.

Meanwhile, Hugo discovers that the Rimbaud book is an extremely rare signed copy, worth hundreds of thousands of euros. Why did he sell it to Hugo for less than a thousand? Was he trying to send a message, leave some kind of clue behind? When Hugo learns that Max was once a Nazi hunter, and when other bouquinistes start turning up dead in the river, Hugo begins his own independent investigation. His friend Tom, a CIA operative, comes along to watch his back and help out with the rough stuff. And Hugo meets a charming female journalist with a shocking secret.

The Bookseller was a first novel for author Mark Pryor, and for my money it was a home run. (Our commenter Paul alerted me to it.) The writing was superior, and I liked the characters very much. Hugo and Tom have great rapport, and they’re fun to watch in action. I look forward to reading the next books in the series.

The usual cautions for language are in order. Some time is spent on Hugo’s agnosticism, but he himself is forced to admit occasionally that it’s inconsistent with his actual life experience.