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Fiction, Reviews

‘Midnight Riot,’ by Ben Aaronovitch

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Midnight Riot

Urban fantasy is not a genre I generally favor. However, when I saw Ben Aaronovitch’s Midnight Riot, an urban fantasy involving police detective work, I thought it was worth a try. I liked what I found. It’s sort of Harry Potter goes to Scotland Yard, as you’d expect, but it has special (outstanding) qualities of its own.

London Probationary Constable Peter Grant is about to receive his first assignment. He dreams of working in CID, solving homicides. His superior, however, thinks he’d be a better fit in the Case Progression Unit, a unit devoted to paperwork. Peter sees a rather dull future ahead of him.

But one cold night he’s assigned to perimeter duty, guarding a crime scene in Covent Garden. The unfortunate victim has had his head knocked clean off. A witness appears and tells Peter how the crime was committed. But there’s a problem. The witness, dressed in Victorian clothes, is (and admits to being) a ghost. When a certain Inspector Thomas Nightingale happens by later, Peter tells him, almost as a joke, that he’s been interrogating a ghost. To his surprise, Nightingale listens to him seriously. The next day, instead of going to CPU, Peter finds himself assigned to assist Nightingale, who is the one-man staff of a special (secret) unit devoted to solving supernatural crimes.

Peter moves into the large manor which is Nightingale’s headquarters and begins his apprenticeship in wizardry. They soon find that they’re not dealing with a single crime, but a spectral serial killing spree, in which some unidentified power is possessing ordinary people, changing their appearances, and using them to kill other innocent people, somehow identified by the murderer (who is apparently quite mad) as his personal enemies.

What takes Midnight Riot above the level of most modern fantasies is the narrating voice of Peter Grant, who is at once naïve, cynical, and witty. I enjoyed the narrative, and had a good time reading a well-told story in which the stakes ratchet up rapidly and fearsomely.

Cautions for language and occult themes. Religious matters are studiously avoided, which is all to the good as far as I’m concerned. I’ll be reading more Peter Grant books, at least until the author decides to offend me (which I expect he’ll do before long).

Reviews

Netflix Review: ‘Detectorists’

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Detectorists

It was suggested to me that I might enjoy the English TV series, “Detectorists.” I think I know why the suggestion was made. In very broad terms, it’s a picture of my life. In spite of that, I found it entertaining.

The series centers on the lives of a pair of friends who belong to a metal “detectorists’” club (it’s pure coincidence that the mystery novel I reviewed last night involved the murder of a detectorist). Lance (Toby Jones) is a small, unprepossessing man who is nevertheless quite intelligent. He works as a forklift operator in a produce warehouse, but his twin passions are his ex-wife, who exploits his affections, and metal detecting in the Essex countryside. His friend Andy (Mackenzie Crook) looks and dresses like a homeless man, but actually is nearly qualified as an archaeologist when the series starts. He lives with a girlfriend, Becky (played, I was delighted to discover, by Rachael Stirling, daughter of Diana Rigg, the great crush of my youth). Andy and Becky dream of going to Africa to do excavations, but Andy drags his feet, crippled by self-doubt. He and Lance spend a lot of time together in the fields with their detectors and in pubs, even to the point of raising mild jealousy in Becky.

They are members of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club, a small, struggling group of moderately obsessed social misfits. Their mortal rivals are the “Antiquisearchers,” a less principled detecting group, suspected of “Nighthawking” (detecting at night so as to take possession of their finds without properly declaring them to the authorities). The DMDC is galvanized in the first season by the appearance of a young woman named Sophie (Amy-Ffion Edwards), who attracts Andy’s attention enough to put a strain on his relationship with Becky.

The first season centers on Lance and Andy detecting on the farm of an affably crazy farmer, who constantly calls out commands to nonexistent dogs, and is suspected of having murdered his wife and buried her somewhere on his property. In the second season, a young German man shows up and asks the group’s help locating the crash site of a plane which had carried his grandfather during World War II.

“Detectorists,” written by Mackenzie Crook himself, is a well-crafted, character-based comedy which treats its cast of characters with affection. We laugh at them but also with them, and they are portrayed with pathos and compassion. Also, the scenery shots are breathtakingly lovely.

I liked it a lot. The only thing that really annoyed me was the final episode, broadcast as a Christmas special, which involved elements of superstition. Cautions for language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Rags of Time,’ by Peter Grainger

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The Rags of Time

Desk Sergeant Charlie Hills was by nature a two-fingered typist, but sometimes, when the muse was upon him and there were words to be produced that contained a lot of a’s, e’s, and s’s, the middle finger of his left hand would join the party. He typed ‘assessment’ with some panache, therefore, but then had to stop and count the s’s, undoing any gains he had made in the time taken.

I like Peter Grainger’s D.C. Smith mysteries more with each outing, and The Rags of Time did not disappoint. I have compared Essex Detective Sergeant D.C. Smith to the American character of Columbo before, but I found myself thinking of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch this time around. Though different in their environments and methods, the two detectives have much in common. Both are aging masters, and both tend to make enemies among their colleagues because they work a little harder than everybody else. Where other cops are content to connect a few dots and make a frame, these two see more dots and sometimes come out with very different results. They never forget that it’s not enough just to make a case – they need to find the truth, to do justice as much as possible.

This time out, Sergeant Smith is contemplating retirement. He’s just returned to work from medical leave, and the department is going through changes. One of his fellow detectives, Wilson, a man who’s been a personal rival and enemy, is on the point of promotion. Smith, who has no noticeable personal vanity, actually manipulates various things to make Wilson look good, and attempts to heal their differences.

All that, however, falls to pieces when a dead body is found in a rural field. The victim, a metal “detectorist,” was killed with a blunt object of some kind. Suspicion falls on his fellow detectorists, but Smith is unsatisfied with Wilson’s rush to judgment. He has to step in to correct the man’s mistakes – multiple times. The true trail seems to him to lead to the residents of a nearby friary where, in spite of holy vows, somebody is telling lies.

D.C. Smith is a fascinating character, a mystery to his co-workers, and even a bit of a mystery to the reader. I like him immensely. I liked this book immensely. I liked the prose immensely. The language is restrained (including little profanity), but often witty, and there’s really nothing to object to. Even issues of faith are treated with respect. I highly recommend The Rags of Time and the whole series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Escape Clause,’ by John Sandford

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Escape Clause

Eleven years: Peck would give everything to have had those eleven years back. For one thing, he wouldn’t have messed around with those women in Indianapolis. If he’d gotten a regular doctor job, he’d be driving the big bucks now, fixing everything from Aarskog syndrome to Zika virus.

I’m fond of cop humor. Cop humor is black humor, often profane humor, the humor of people who’ve seen the worst things life can dish up, and have found ways of coping. John Sandford’s novels about Minnesota cops are full of cop humor, which is one of their charms. In comparison to his Prey novels, starring Lucas Davenport, his Virgil Flowers novels tend to lean more heavily toward slapstick. Escape Clause is perhaps the most comic of his novels to date, though there are several murders along the way.

In Escape Clause, we begin with the theft (kidnapping?) of two rare tigers from the Minnesota Zoo. There’s no mystery in this story – it’s a thriller. We know who the bad guys are (an eastern medicines doctor and a few thugs), and the suspense is in how fast the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, in the person of Virgil Flowers (the only guy they can spare because of security demands at the Minnesota State Fair during visits by presidential candidates) can figure out what’s going on and stop it.

Virgil is a good cop, though not a very good shot, and generally reluctant to even carry a gun. He also tends to take a lot of pratfalls in this outing. Simultaneous with this job, he gets involved with stopping some thugs, hired by a sweatshop owner to beat up his girlfriend’s sister, who’s doing sociology research on the illegal alien workers.

It’s all a lot of fun, and it’s mostly dirtbags who get killed. The climax is obvious a mile away, but no less enjoyable for that, on a visceral level.

An interesting new element in this story is the character of “Father Bill,” a Catholic priest who leads an odd life. He works as a supply pastor for the Minneapolis-St. Paul diocese nine months of the year, and is celibate then. During the summers he works at a resort and has a girlfriend. This is kind of jaw-dropping, but I suppose it’s not unthinkable in today’s church. Virgil, whose father is a Lutheran pastor, makes some small effort to talk him over to the Protestant side.

Anyway, I had a good time with Escape Clause. Cautions for lots of bad language and adult situations, also the death of an animal (almost always more traumatic than human death in a novel).

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘Dresses’ in ‘That Hideous Strength’

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That Hideous Strength

The esteemed Dr. Bruce Charlton at Tolkien’s The Notion Club Papers re-posts a review of That Hideous Strength. This post, from the Toast blog, is by a woman named Felix Kent. I found it delightful, for two reasons. First, I’ve come to assume that all modern women will hate THS (which remains one of my favorite novels). Secondly, Ms. Kent gets it precisely right.

“Don’t read That Hideous Strength,” my mother said. My mother is a great C.S. Lewis fan, also a believer, in the religious sense. One of my best sources for what to read. And a woman who grew up in the Fifties and became an academic. Became, like Ransom, the trilogy’s main character, a philologist.

“Why not?” I said.

I don’t think my mother used the word “yucky” in her reply, but that was more or less what she meant. I went ahead and read the book anyway.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Scoop,’ by Evelyn Waugh

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Scoop

It was a morning of ethereal splendor – such a morning as Noah knew as he gazed from his pitchy bulwarks over limitless, sunlit waters while the dove circled and mounted and became lost in the shining heavens; such a morning as only the angels saw on the first day of that rash cosmic experiment that had resulted, at the moment, in landing Corker and Pigge here in the mud, stiff and unshaven and disconsolate.

I mentioned Evelyn Waugh on Facebook, and in the ensuing discussion was forced to admit the shameful fact that I hadn’t actually ever read any of his novels. Someone suggested Scoop, his treatment of foreign newspaper correspondence. Thus this review.

William Boot is a member of a large but declining “country” family in England. He writes a column on rural nature for a London paper, The Daily Beast. Due to a series of misunderstandings on the part of Lord Copper, owner of the paper, and his editors and sub-editors, William finds himself dispatched, much against his inclination, to report on a civil war in Ishmaelia, an African republic.

Along the way he gets acquainted with members of the real foreign press corps, all serious drinkers and savage exploiters of expense accounts, who vie with one another (mostly within the confines of the hotel bar) to discover the merest hint of news of the war (which does not exist; it was all a misunderstanding from the start) and then build those hints into fanciful news stories which they all crib from one another and send back to London by radiogram. He has to deal with the cheerfully venal family that runs the country, he rubs shoulders with foreign agents, and he gets romantically involved with a semi-German gold-digger.

The whole story is a ridiculous construction of misinformation, misperception, prejudice, lazy thinking, and cutthroat but genial competition. It could have been called “Much Ado About Nothing.” There are some elements reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse here (there’s even passing mention of a fellow named Bertie Wodehouse-Bonner), but the humor is more acerbic than “Plum’s.” It might be judged closer to Saki’s humor – but I think Saki would have taken the opportunity of a story like this to kill off a lot of people.

Scoop is a highly amusing novel that will give you a whole new (and lower) view of journalism. No problems with language or subject matter here, except for dated racial slurs. There are contemporary 1930s references that will confuse a lot of modern readers (including me sometimes).

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Wrong Side of Goodbye,’ by Michael Connelly

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The Wrong Side of Goodbye

Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch cop novels are a long-running series. They’re bestsellers for good reason. Connelly writes tight, well-crafted novels with engaging characters. The Wrong Side of Goodbye is a sterling entry in a saga that shows no sign of flagging.

Aging detective Harry Bosch is no longer with the Los Angeles Police Department. He was terminated at the end of the last book (he’s suing them for it). But he’s got a private investigator’s license. He’s also working part-time, on a volunteer basis, for the financially strapped police department of the suburb of San Fernando.

For the San Fernando job, he’s working on a series of rapes by a creep who cuts through screen windows in women’s homes. A recent victim got away from him, coming away with fresh clues Harry and the other detectives can use to get closer to a solution. Their main handicap is simply lack of manpower, something that will put a member of the team in genuine peril.

Meanwhile, in a scene right out of Raymond Chandler, Harry (wearing his private eye hat) is called to the home of a steel and aeronautics magnate. The old man is dying, and he knows it. He has no heir. But long ago he fathered a child with a Mexican girlfriend. He wants Harry to find out if his child is alive – if he or she is, they’re in a position to inherit billions.

It’s a pleasure to follow Harry as he does his job. Connelly is especially good at layered characters – people who turn out to be more (or less) than they appear on first glance. There are lots of surprises here, and a plot that snaps together cleanly in the end.

Author Connelly’s politics would appear to be liberal, but his views on various issues are incorporated seamlessly into the story, without hammering the points home (though Harry seems to have had more lesbian partners than statistically likely). But if I disagreed with some passing political riffs, I appreciated the respect with which Vietnam veterans were treated.

Highly recommended. Cautions for language and adult themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Critic,’ by Peter May

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The Critic

This the second book in the Peter May mystery series starring Enzo MacLeod, who debuted as a character in Extraordinary People, which I reviewed earlier. I don’t think I like this series as much as I like May’s Hebrides novels, but he’s a good storyteller, and there’s plenty to enjoy in The Critic.

The critic of the title is Gil Petty, a prestigious American wine critic who disappeared on a working trip to the vineyards of the Gaillac region in France. His fate was unknown for a couple years, until one day his body appeared staked up like a scarecrow in a vineyard at harvest time. It had clearly been preserved in wine since his death.

Our hero, Enzo MacLeod, makes Gil Petty the next challenge in his missing persons bet. A friend has written a book about unsolved disappearances in France, and Enzo has made a bet with him that he can solve several of them. Enzo is a half-Italian Scotsman, but has lived in France for years, teaching his specialty, forensic science.

Enzo moves into a small cottage near a chalet, and in semi-comic fashion nearly his whole circle of amateur assistants gather around him uninvited – his daughter and her body-builder boyfriend, his young, sexy assistant, and his on-and-off girlfriend. Another drop-in is the estranged, beautiful daughter of the late Mr. Petty, from America.

Enzo is hampered by the suspicion of some of the growers, and by constant sexual tension with almost every female (except his daughter) with whom he comes into contact. Enzo’s attractiveness to women is played mostly for laughs, and it causes him more problems than any satisfaction he gets.

But the mystery is serious, and Gil Petty is not the last victim of a ruthless serial killer.

Like all Peter May mysteries, The Critic is pretty good entertainment. Cautions for language and adult situations. There are some hints of political views, but only in passing.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Wicked Kind,’ by John Turner

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The Wicked Kind

My feelings are mixed about The Wicked Kind, a first novel by one John Turner. I think some narrative mistakes were made, but the author shows promise.

The narrator/main character is Mason Tanner, who owns a California construction company and is an alcoholic maintaining sobriety. Years ago, when he was a young ski bum, his best friend Sam disappeared in a Rocky mountain resort. Mason is convinced his friend was killed by a strange man called “Gary” who chatted them up in a bar and tried several times to get Sam to come stay with him to avoid a coming storm. But Sam and Gary vanished as if into the air, and the police were baffled.

Now Mason’s girlfriend, who was Sam’s girlfriend at the time of the disappearance, uncovers some new evidence. She has identified a series of similar disappearances all along a line on the map. They head for a mountain town where the trouble they stir up brings a lot more push-back than they ever expected.

Author Turner has a lot of talent. His prose is generally good, and his dialogue and characterizations are excellent, in my view.

I thought the plotting kind of weak, though. Mason struggles to figure out things that seemed to me nose-on-face obvious. I kept waiting for plot twists, but there really were none. The criminal is pretty obvious from the start.

And the ending… I don’t know. I understand what the author is doing. He’s establishing Mason Tanner as a detective character for a coming series. But a story of this kind, it seems to me, would serve better as background exposition in a better-conceived full-out detective story, rather than standing alone. There just wasn’t enough pay-off here.

And he needs to learn how to surprise the reader.

Nevertheless, I moderately recommend The Wicked Kind. It’s worth reading. Cautions for language.

Fiction, Reviews

Aborted review: ‘Wall of Storms,’ by Ken Liu

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Wall of Storms

I call this an “aborted” review because I didn’t finish the book. That shouldn’t be taken as a criticism of the quality of the writing. I set the book aside unfinished because of my principles (or, if you prefer, my prejudices).

I’ve already reviewed The Grace of Kings, the first book in Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty series of fantasy novels. Think Game of Thrones but in a sort of Chinese setting, and somewhat less nihilistic. I enjoyed that book immensely, and gave it a glowing review.

Wall of Storms is also a brilliant piece of world-building and storytelling. The world of the book is wonderfully imagined, intriguingly detailed, and multifaceted. Author Liu is a fine prose stylist. His writing is evocative, his characters complex and layered, and his dialogue sparkling and nuanced.

What I didn’t like was the political correctness. Early on we are confronted with not one, but two homosexual relationships, treated as normal in the culture. Later on, an important (and highly sympathetic) character argues for sexual egalitarianism.

I suppose I lack imagination, but I think fantasy ought to hew close to actual human nature, however much it may play with the cultural furniture. No human society has ever normalized homosexual marriage before ours did it (artificially, through legal maneuvering), and no human society has ever treated men and women interchangeably. This element of the story was plainly adopted by the author to ingratiate himself to right-thinking readers. So I don’t imagine he’ll miss my readership.

I’ll be seeing more and more of this sort of thing as time goes on, I’m sure. But (at least for now) nobody can force me to finish a book that’s obviously trying to correct my thinking.

Otherwise, it’s a really good book. You may love it.