Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Breakdown,’ by Jonathan Kellerman

Leave a comment

The big problem with a successful, ongoing fiction series is self-repetition. The template for Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware novels is pretty well established. Dr. Delaware, successful child psychologist, gets a call from his police detective buddy Milo Sturgis (overweight, conservative, and “gay”), who asks him to advise him on some case in progress. Alex happily cooperates, and together they uncover motive, means, and opportunity. (In real life, of course, Alex would never be allowed to meddle in police work that way, and defense lawyers would have a heyday with his involvement. But in the real world both Alex and Milo would be long retired by now, so why mess with success?).

In Breakdown, the latest in the series, author Kellerman jiggers the template a little. This time it’s Alex who asks for Milo’s help in a case of his own. Some years ago, he was called in to consult on the welfare of a child at risk. The little boy’s mother was an actress on a TV sitcom. She had personality disorders, but seemed to be functioning all right as a mother, and Alex found her son highly intelligent but otherwise normal.

Now he gets a call from a mental health worker. The actress, long out of work, has been found living on the streets, psychotic. Her primary psychologist is dead, so Alex is now the health care professional of record on the file. Alex talks to the former actress, being held in a ridiculous government-funded facility (which gives the author a chance to make some pointed comments on our current mental health system). She’s almost completely psychotic now. There seems to be no record that she ever had a child, and Alex, driven by concern and guilt, enlists Milo in trying to uncover the actress’s past, to see what happened to the boy.

What they uncover is a dark family secret and a string of unsolved murders going back decades.

I always enjoy the Alex Delaware books, and this one pleased me particularly. I love cold case stories, and Breakdown was a fascinating one.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Black Gang,’ by H. C. McNeile

1 Comment

I invested in a complete set of Bulldog Drummond books for Kindle. So I’ll review the second book, though there’s little to say about its virtues or failings beyond what I said in my review of the first book, Bulldog Drummond.

The Black Gang is the title of this outing, and the fact that the title refers to the hero and his friends rather than the villains indicates the ambivalent character of the book for the modern reader.

At the very beginning, the Black Gang capture a criminal villain and take him into their own custody, to be sent to a secret prison of their own. The police are aware of their activities, but not too concerned, as the “right sort of people” are disappearing.

The modern reader has a hard time with this sort of thing – though heaven knows we may be quickly moving into a state of nature where every man will again have to do what seems best in his own eyes.

Anyway, Bulldog Drummond, our intrepid hero, sets his sights on closing down the operation of the greatest criminal mastermind in the world (a Communist, which pleased me), and there are attacks back and forth, and kidnappings, and Drummond triumphs in the end.

Nothing very challenging. Nothing very plausible. There are some ethnic slurs (especially of Jews), but we’ve come to expect that sort of thing, haven’t we?

Mindless entertainment from a more innocent era. Cautions for racist elements.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Persons of Interest,’ and ‘In This Bright Future,’ by Peter Grainger

Leave a comment

A while ago I reviewed the first three D.C. Smith novels by Peter Grainger. I was happy to discover recently that there are now two more. I read them with pleasure and review them here.

The continuing hero, D.C. Smith, is an aging police detective in the fictional city of King’s Lake in England. He is utterly uninterested in career advancement, and has no personal life to speak of. For him it’s all about the work – our friend Gene Edward Veith might say he’s a man of his vocation, perhaps to excess.

One of D.C. Smith’s great strengths is the low profile he keeps. He’s physically unimpressive, and he purposely presents himself as less intelligent than he really is. His very nickname, “D.C.,” is a police rank (Detective Constable), but his actual title is Detective Sergeant. Thus from the very beginning he keeps the people he meets at a disadvantage, something he enjoys and exploits.

In Persons of Interest, a low-level convicted felon is murdered in prison, and Smith’s phone number is found among his effects. This is puzzling, as Smith has never met the man. Then a couple teenagers disappear, and it all comes together in an investigation that takes on ruthless and powerful gangsters.

In In This Bright Future Smith takes an excursion into his own past, or at least the ruins of that past. In his youth he served as a British spy in Belfast, North Ireland. There he failed to complete his mission and nearly got killed. Only now, while resting up from a leg injury, Smith receives a summons from the son of an old friend there, learning that a young man he’d liked, one who’d been promising and non-political, had disappeared the same night he fled the city. Smith goes back, impelled by a sense of obligation, once again adopts a false identity, and begins investigating what happened to the young man.

I like each D.C. Smith book better than the last. I’m particularly impressed to learn that author Grainger began in self-publishing – few writers in that field (and I include myself among them) rise to this high level of craftsmanship. Also the language is mild and though there’s much violence in the air, little actual violence happens on stage, largely because Smith is too smart to let it happen.

Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Boat Man,’ by Dustin Stevens

1 Comment

“The Boat Man” is the titular murderer’s own name for himself. He and another were the victims of a horrible crime some years ago, and now he’s back, having mastered patience and the use of a sword, to make the perpetrators understand exactly what they have put others through. And then die.

That’s the premise behind The Boat Man, written by Dustin Stevens, who is pretty good at thrillers if this book is any indication.

The hero of the story is Columbus, Ohio Detective Reed Mattox, who has suffered from PTSD since the death of his (female) partner. Since then he has withdrawn from human society generally. He manages to remain a cop through taking a K-9 partner (Billie, a Belgian Malinois) and working the night shift.

When the Boat Man murders begin, however, his superiors are forced by a manpower shortage to move him to the day shift and put his team in charge of the investigation. And gradually Reed begins to uncover a terrible injustice and a shameful cover-up.

Author Stevens creates good characters and believable situations. The writing is generally of pretty high quality, though some typos managed to survive into the final text. I liked the book a lot and recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Missing or Murdered,’ by Robin Forsythe

5 Comments

My ongoing attempt to shift my recreational reading to older novels is not, I must admit, going as well as I hoped. I’ve discovered some gems, it’s true – Frank H. Spearman’s westerns, E. Phillips Oppenheim’s spy stories. But my attempts to acquire a taste for Golden Age mysteries seems fruitless. Aside from Dorothy Sayers, I honestly can’t think of a Golden Age mystery novelist I care much for. Robin Forsythe did not change that judgment.

Robin Forsythe was an English civil servant who went to prison for a while for fraud, and came out determined to make his living writing mysteries. He did all right too, for the remainder of his short life.

His fictional detective was Tony “Algernon” Vereker (I never did figure out quite how to pronounce that last name). Vereker is a London artist of independent means. In Missing or Murdered, the first novel in the series, his old friend, Lord Bygrave, a government minister, disappears. Vereker attaches himself to the investigation (the Scotland Yard detective in charge is oddly untroubled by the intrusion). He follows the detective around and compares notes with him frequently. They make the investigation a sort of competition. Eventually the work out what happened to Lord Bygrave and who is responsible.

I suppose my tastes have been corrupted by postmodern culture, but I had trouble enjoying Missing or Murdered. Both Dorothy Sayers and Charles Williams liked Forsythe’s work, but for my money they both leave him in the dust. There’s lots of talking in the book, with some rather forced wit, and everything is leisured and decent, and it bored me silly. Couldn’t wait for the thing to be done with.

But it’s fine if you like this sort of thing.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Someone to Save You,’ by Paul Pilkington

Leave a comment

Sam Becker, the main character of Someone to Save You, is a London pediatric heart surgeon, who met his wife on a relief mission in Africa. He’s good at his job and rising in his profession.

He’s haunted by a tragedy in his past. His sister was raped and murdered, and his then best friend was convicted of the crime. Sam’s passion for saving lives, perhaps, rises from his perceived failure to protect his sibling.

Driving home from a commemoration of what would have been the sister’s thirtieth birthday, his car is flagged down by a young girl in the road. She frantically directs him down a slope to a railroad track, where the girl’s mother has stopped her car, intending to kill herself and her children. Sam gets the remaining children out of the car in time to save them, but the mother dies.

Sam is a hero to the press, but he hates it and feels like a failure. However, something worse than that is happening. There are threatening phone calls, and attempts to sabotage his career, and hints that his sister’s true killer walked free. And then someone is kidnapped.

The whole story is very complex and tightly plotted. Author Paul Pilkington is very good at his craft. He creates interesting characters and cranks up the drama inexorably (most of his books, oddly, seem to have female protagonists. This one is an exception).

Not much objectionable material here, either. There’s one conversation about religion, which is fairly noncommittal, but not anti-God.

I happily recommend Someone to Save You.

Non-fiction, Reviews, Writing

‘Less Than Words Can Say,’ by Richard Mitchell

Leave a comment

Children are much smarter than we think. They know when they are being deceived and defrauded. Unless they can utter what they know, however, they know it only in part and imperfectly. If we do not give them the language and thought in which they might genuinely clarify some values, they will do their clarifying with sledgehammers. None of the lofty goals named above can be approached without the skillful practice of language and thought, and to “emphasize” those “areas” in the absence of that practice is to promulgate thought control rather than the control of thought.

Richard Mitchell (1929-2002), was a professor of English and classics who published, as a sort of hobby, a newsletter called “The Underground Grammarian.” His great crusade was opposition to the ways children are educated today, especially in such programs as what is called “values clarification.” In his view, writing and thought are the same thing. If you never learn to write clearly, you will never learn to think. And when the majority of the population in a republic is no longer capable of thinking, it must fall.

I find that hard to argue with.

Less Than Words Can Say was, I believe, his first book. In delightful and often very funny prose, Mitchell skewers various examples of inflated and meaningless writing, especially (but not entirely) from sources in government and education. He disembowels selected passages out of real documents, exposing the emptiness at their hearts and mocking it. For the lover of language, his book is a very amusing read. For anyone who lacks a traditional education in English literature (including the Bible), many of the best jokes will sail overhead.

From the perspective of several decades past the publication of Less Than Words Can Say, it seems to me that things have turned out both better than he predicted, and just as bad. In terms of prose writing, at least in the academic sphere, I don’t think things have deteriorated as much as Mitchell thought they would. I’ve spent the last two years and change in graduate study, and have rarely encountered really bad prose there. Perhaps the level of literacy is higher in Library and Information Science than in other fields.

But in terms of the decay of the capacity for thought, it looks to me, on the basis of current events, that everything he feared is coming true.

Mitchell chose, before his death, to make his books available free of charge to all. You can download a .pdf of Less Than Words Can Say here.

Authors, Non-fiction, Reviews

‘A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War,’ by Joseph Loconte

Leave a comment

I’m not sure C. S. Lewis would have approved of this book. He maintained, on numerous occasions, that an author’s biography should be of no interest to the reader. Studying the lives of Milton or of Spenser, he insisted, would provide no insight into the meanings of their works beyond what an intelligent reader can gather from reading the plain texts.

Still, I think Joseph Loconte’s A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War serves a useful purpose. Amidst the tremendous popularity of the works of Tolkien and Lewis all these decades after their deaths, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about their artistic motivations (particularly in Tolkien’s case. I’m pretty sure a lot of fans of the movies think the books are about environmentalism). Loconte follows the two men’s lives, concentrating especially on their experiences in the First World War, and explains how the experience of battle (Lewis remembered thinking, “This is war. This is what Homer wrote about”) impressed itself on their memories and their imaginations. In the midst of the great disillusionment that swept Europe after the armistice, Tolkien kept his bearings, because he’d never fallen for over-optimistic enthusiasms like eugenics but had put his faith in eternal things. And in time he was able to help his friend Jack Lewis to understand as well.

For fans unfamiliar with the lives and the thought behind the books of these two men, A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War may be very illuminating. It’s well written and well researched. I recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Sin Walks into the Desert,’ by Mat Ingwalson

Leave a comment

I’m not entirely sure what to say about Sin Walks into the Desert by Matt Ingwalson. The book’s concept was interesting enough to persuade me to download it, and I read it to the end (something I’m less and less willing to do with sub-par books). So this is a well-crafted and interesting novel. Very noir, in a modern vein, which is to say, kind of goth.

Sin (short for Anderson, his first name) is a… well it’s hard to figure what he is. He’s a loner. He looks and dresses and has tattoos like any ordinary punk, and he’s fairly neurotic. But he has special skills. As a boy (not that long ago) he was on the verge of murdering someone when his uncle (an FBI agent) summoned just in time by his worried parents, swept him up, took him home with him, and began training him to turn his natural gift for violence to useful purposes. But Sin never joined the FBI, or even the military. It isn’t made clear how he makes his living, unless I missed it.

Anyway, his uncle, whom he calls el Viejo, has disappeared, and friends fear something bad has happened to him. So Sin sets out to track the captors, employing the formidable skills he learned from the old man. This leads to a pretty shattering revelation, when all is said and done and a few people are dead.

If you like your books dark, you’ll like this one. I found Sin himself hard to like, but the writing and characterization are good, laid down in spare, downbeat prose.

Cautions for the usual. Moderately recommended, only because of my ambivalence about the main character.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Three Hostages,’ by John Buchan

Leave a comment

It was around 1980 that I caught a production of John Buchan’s The Three Hostages on PBS. The dramatization was a one-off; I don’t think that particular actor ever played Richard Hannay again. But it intrigued me enough to motivate me to read The 39 Steps, the first novel in the series. That made me a lifelong Buchan fan, but oddly enough I never read The Three Hostages until just now.

It’s good. I’d say it’s one of the stronger entries in a classic series.

In The Three Hostages, World War I is recently over. Richard Hannay, British intelligence agent extraordinaire, has settled down on a farm in Oxfordshire with his wife Mary (also a retired agent), and their small son. He looks forward (or thinks he does) to living the quiet life of a country squire. But then he receives an appeal for help. Three people, one of them a small boy, have been taken hostage. There is no clue as to the perpetrator. Reluctantly, Hannay agrees to look into it. Gradually he begins to suspect the last person anyone would suspect – a rising young politician who has endeared himself to nearly every influential person in London. A hopeless-seeming but successful investigation (hypnotism features strongly) is capped by a deadly man-to-man showdown in the Scottish highlands.

I was surprised – once again – by what a fine author John Buchan was. Among all the writers of the English “bulldog” school, nobody came near him when it came to writing readable prose. Richard Hannay is a vivid and likeable character, and all his friends are just as believable (his enemies, perhaps, a little less). He especially distinguishes himself in his descriptive passages, which are wonderfully done (this pleased me especially in the short section set in Norway).

Modern readers will be put off by racial and ethnic slurs which were a normal part of English life at the time. For some reason Hannay makes much of the villain having a round head, which he sees as un-English and sinister. On the other hand, those same readers will appreciate the active part Mary Hannay takes in the action.

If you’re open-minded enough to tolerate temporal diversity, The Three Hostages is great fun.