Bookends: The Case of the Man Who Fell to Earth September 19, 2022
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Bookends: The Case of the Man Who Fell to Earth
by Dan Davidson
April 7, 2021
– 865 words –
Raging Heat
by “Richard Castle”
narrated by Robert Petkoff
Hachette Audio
Audible Audiobook
11 hours and 12 minutes
$33.52
Titan Books Ltd
304 pages
$18.83
In the television show, Castle, the lead character was Richard Castle, a novelist who looked for inspiration by teaming up as a consultant to an initially reluctant homicide NYPD detective named Kate Beckett. She became the model for a series of books featuring two characters. Nikki Heat was patterned after her, and Castle modeled a secondary character named Jonathan Rook, an award winning journalist, after himself.
The ABC network decided to do something that had been done with the earlier series Murder She Wrote, and actually produce a series of novels based on the scenario outlined in the show. In that case “Jessica Fletcher” produced 39 novels. But then, that series ran for 12 years, and Castle only got eight, so there probably won’t be as many books. So far, there have been 10, the latest having appeared in 2019. The titles, up to the end of the series, were referenced in the shows as books Castle was writing each year.
While the series ran, between 2009 and 2016, ABC hid the name of the person actually writing the books. It turned out to be Tom Straw, better known at that time as a screen writer. He wrote the first seven books before moving on to produce his own mysteries. Someone else wrote the other three.
This one is the sixth in the series. The previous two wrapped up the printed analogs of the mystery about who killed Beckett’s mother, which ran through many seasons of the show.
Part of the trick to these books is that they offer variations on things than happened in the series. Beckett is Heat; Castle is Rook, Ryan and Esposito have their literary doubles as does the medical examiner, Lanie.
By this point in the books Heat and Rook are a couple. They don’t always get along, but they are faithful to each other. As this one begins, Rook has been away in Europe on assignment for many weeks and Heat is missing him a lot, when a brand new case falls into her lap.
Falls is exactly the word. The body came out of the air and made terminal velocity before crashing through a fancy glass ceiling at a New York planetarium. It doesn’t take all that long to determine that it must have fallen from an aircraft, but they can’t find out just how.
Heat pursues the case with her usual tenacity, but when investigative reporter Rook, who has just returned, comes up with a different conclusion, and says she’s got the wrong man, it throws a spike in the wheels of their relationship.
It turns out that Rook is correct, and that this case is far darker than anyone originally thought, involving, as it does, the clandestine plans of an ambitious politician. This, to a certain extent, mirrors the seasons where Beckett’s enemy is an ambitious senator with presidential ambitions.
Heat’s enemy is a rung or two lower on the ambition scale, but as on the series, he has the willing assistance of some well trained mercenary thugs who really put Heat in their crosshairs and make several nearly successful attempts on her life as she, and ultimately Rook, get closer to the truth of the matter.
There’s lots of action in this book, more so than in the last couple, which were more about tension building than actual gunplay.
Castle, the series, tended to focus about equally on Stana Katic’s Kate Beckett and Nathan Fillion’s Richard Castle, which is why it never made any sense when the producers decided to remove Katic and Tamala Jones (as Lanie) for their proposed season 9. The fan backlash was so swift that the show was cancelled and a quickie new ending got tacked onto to what would have been a really good cliffhanger ending to season 8. It didn’t quite spoil the conclusion but it was a weaker choice.
In the books, as Richard Castle would have intended, the focus is sharply on Nikki Heat. We see most of the action through her eyes and are privy to her thoughts. Rook is secondary. We know what he says and does, but only what he thinks if he tells us, or her.
There’s all sorts of Castle fan-service in these books, references to other shows, particularly Firefly, that Fillion has been in. In addition, as I have suggested, it seems that part of the plan for writing the books, was to take elements from the series’ plots and spin them a bit, saying “how else could this play out?”
Given that the narrative does focus on Nikki Heat, I remain surprised that the books don’t have a female reader, but I have to admit that Robert Petkoff does an excellent job, and since most of the supporting cast is male the choice of narrator makes sense.
This one took us to Whitehorse and most of the way home in early March. Good company.
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Bookends: A comical crime caper September 19, 2022
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Bookends: A comical crime caper
by Dan Davidson
May 30, 2021
– 670 words –
The Hot Rock: A Dortmunder Novel
By Donald E. Westlake
Grand Central Publishing
304 pages
Kindle Edition
The Myserious Press.com/Open Road Integrated Media
$2.14 via BookBub
When the BookBub e-book service suggested this one, I thought I’d give it a try. Stephen King has often cited Westlake as one of his major influences, though more particularly in his Richard Stark persona.
King’s use of the Richard Bachman pseudonym was inspired by Westlake and his novel, The Dark Half, was his supernatural commentary on how hard it was to end using the Bachman name once he was outed. The evil alter-ego in that book was named Stark.
Westlake wrote over 100 books and numerous screenplays during his 35 year career, hitting most genres and including a non-fiction biography of Elizabeth Taylor. He is best known for the Parker and Dortmunder series, which are entirely different takes on a similar premise.
Both feature a professional thief as the central character. The Parker books are written in a hard-boiled “noir” style while the Dortmunder books are subtly humorous takes on the same theme. Parker is a bit of a loner who really doesn’t play well with others. Dortmunder works as the master planner for a crew of specialists.
Mystery/thriller fans may actually be more familiar with his work from the 14 or more films that have been made from his novels, including several based on the Parker character, though he refused to let producers use the Parker name while he was alive and it only turned up in the latest one, called Parker, in 2012, in which the character was played by Jason Stratham.
His output actually continued after his death in 2008, when four previously unpublished novels were released, the latest being in 2017.
The Hot Rock begins with Dortmunder leaving jail with ten dollars to his name, the clothes on his back, and no prospects. He’s apparently been a model prisoner and everyone likes him, wishing him well and telling him to avoid trouble. Fat chance.
A friend is waiting not far from the gates with the beginning of what sounds like an invitation to mastermind a simple heist. There’s a small African nation that wants to get its national treasure, a giant emerald (which becomes a diamond in the Robert Redford film that was made later), back.
Dortmunder is sceptical, but agrees to put a crew together and take a look at it. Little did he and his buddies know that this would be the beginning of a month’s long quest to get everything right.
They have to enact versions of the caper six times before they are completely successful.
First they get the emerald. Then they have to break one of their crew who got captured with the emerald out of prison (because he swallowed it and hid it later on, after …. well, you know). Then they are double-crossed by a go-between lawyer and have to kidnap him from the asylum where he is hiding. And then … well you get the idea.
Each time their plans and execution work quite well, but some unknown x-factor trips them up and they have to try again to sort it out. They are far more honourable than the people who hired them in the first place.
It’s a comedy of errors in six parts or “phases”, as the table of contents labels them.
The comedy aspect crept up on me. Phase one felt like a light “noir” crime caper, putting me in mind of the serious parts of the Pink Panther movies.
(Yes, there are: the heists are always serious. The nonsense starts when Clouseau appears.)
After that, you can feel the frustration mounting for the gang, and you just know something is going to go wrong, so part of the fun for the reader is in the anticipation of the problem.
This book was a finalist for the Edgar Award the year it appeared in 1970.
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Bookends: Surviving an Arctic Airplane Crash September 19, 2022
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Bookends: Surviving an Arctic Airplane Crash
by Dan Davidson
March 23, 2021
– 802 words –
Polar Vortex
by Matthew Mather
Self Published
366 pages
Kindle
$4.99
“’Is this Heaven?’ Lilly held out one tiny hand.
“A haze of gold and red shimmered around my daughter and me. The colors shifted to violet and then pink, enveloping us in a humid blanket. I held my hand out next to hers—our arms fading into the mist—outstretched my fingers and then wrapped them around hers.
“’It’s beautiful,’ she said.
“And it was. “
This is part of how Polar Vortex begins. Clearly the author wants to keep us in suspense about what’s going on. I’ll tell you that the first person narrator is Mitch Matthew, a not terribly successful writer, that Lily is his five-year-old daughter, and that they have been suffering through the aftermath of an airplane crash that took place above the Arctic Circle, in Canadian territory.
We move from this potentially ominous opening to the first of several audio transcripts, which open with this even more portentous beginning.
“’No physical evidence, no transponder signals.’ (investigator) Richard Marks cleared his throat and spoke louder for the audio recording. ‘No emergency locator transmitters…’
“How did a modern airliner literally vanish in one of the most heavily monitored places on Earth? Like it was swallowed by a black hole.”
Then we move to the main first person narrative, where we still spend most of our time, in which Mitch tells us how he and his daughter happen to be flying from Hong Kong to New York, leaving his wife behind with her ailing parents. They got a special deal on this posh plane because Mitch’s brother-in-law, Josh, was the pilot on this flight. It was supposed to be a special trip – and it was – just not in the way that anyone would have predicted or desired.
It eventually turned out that the plane was well off course when it went down and split in two in the middle. The agencies from many countries that were trying to find them were looking in the wrong places from the beginning. One group of searchers did know where to look, but that turns out not to be a good thing.
We are mainly involved with the story of how the people on the two parts of the plane try to survive. Josh had managed to land the plane as best as he could, but it was still a crash – and someone had killed –shot – two of the other people in the cockpit, neither of whom seemed to be regular airline employees.
They are fortunate to have gone down during what amounts to a spell of mild weather. On the other hand, that means that the two adjacent ice pans they are on get to shift and drift from each other as the days pass.
There are a number of strange people on the flight. There’s a manic-depressive software geek who isn’t always on his meds, but does provide some valuable information about their location. There’s the in-charge military type who seems to be an air marshall. There’s the withdrawn man with the precious piece of carry-on baggage he won’t let anyone touch. There’s the very wise young oriental boy and his travelling companion/guardian. There’s the Russian oligarch fleeing from his country.
After some days they determine that they might be within reach of the Canadian base at Alert. The opportunity to try to make it there arrives with a bogus rescue party crewed by people who claim to be Swedish but aren’t. A small group of the survivors manages to swipe one of the zodiac rafts and make off in the general direction that Mitch and the geek have determined they need to go.
The raft gets them most of the distance but the rest is an exhausting slog through deteriorating Arctic conditions only made possible by the survival suits they got from the bogus rescue team before they were exposed as dangerous fakes.
Before they can get to Alert they have to deal with the weather, pursuit by the fake rescuers, and a polar bear. Even after some of them succeed, they can’t get a break, and some unsuspected things go wrong just when they think they are safe.
There are some time lapses towards the end of the story – as much as three years – and it’s a while before we find out what happened to several of the major characters, including Mitch, Oh, and there’s a twist to the ending that I should have seen coming, but didn’t.
Matthew Mather started out his career working at the McGill Centre for Intelligent Machines. He worked in a number IT companies prior to beginning to produce novels, which number nearly a dozen since 2013.
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Bookends: Where Midsomer Murders began September 19, 2022
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Bookends: Where Midsomer Murders began
by Dan Davidson
March 16, 2021
– 793 words –
The Killings at Badger’s Drift
by Caroline Graham
Kindle edition
265 pages in print edition
$8.95
The Killings at Badger’s Drift is the first of a series of seven novels in what author Graham referred to as the Inspector Barnaby Mysteries, written between 1987 and 2004.
The characters and the settings would be better known to mystery fans as shown on ITV’s Midsomer Murders series, which is currently in its 21st season of production since 1997. It has offered up 21 episodes (about three per season) , which air as 90 minute mini-movies on the Knowledge Network or currently as two part episodes on PBS in the USA.
There isn’t much about this first book that would let you know about the existence of Midsomer County, the home of all the quaint small towns and villages that are a feature of the show. This one is firmly located in Badger’s Drift.
We open with a retired elderly school teacher, 80 year old Emily Simpson, out looking for the first orchid of the season, a competition she has with her best friend, Lucy Bellringer, each spring. Quite by accident, she happens upon a couple “frolicking” in the bushes near her find. She is quite shocked and makes a serious attempt to sneak away without them knowing. She is not successful.
Worse for her, it appears that she didn’t actually see who they were out there in the woods, so she is easy prey later on when one of them murders her by giving her a hemlock laced drink at her home in the village.
Lucy Bellringer finds her the next day and is not satisfied with the cursory diagnosis given by a lazy local doctor, who puts it down to a heart attack. She goes to see Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby and persuades him to look into it, based on her knowledge of how her dear friend would have behaved and certain anomalies in the house. A more thorough examination reveals the poison and sets the case in motion.
This Barnaby is somewhat like the fellow portrayed by John Nettles during the first 13 seasons of the ITV show, and he is accompanied by Sergeant Troy, who is the first of several aids over the 21 seasons. Their relationship is much more caustic than I recall from the many early episodes I have seen, Troy’s thoughts providing a sort of anxious counterpoint to those of his boss. Barnaby can be somewhat harsh in his treatment of his underlings, but his occasional temper spasms seem to be warranted.
There are notable secondary characters with whom we spend quite a bit of time, some of it for the purpose of dragging red herrings across the trail.
It emerges that there is at least one other illicit assignation going on in the community; that there is a fairly wide ranging local blackmail plot; and that there was an earlier death. That has been recorded as accidental, but the more Barnaby digs into the current murder, the more he begins to suspect a connection, even though the two cases are not at all similar in method of execution.
When there is a third murder, a totally bloody mess quite unlike the “accidental” shooting or the poisoning, he becomes even more convinced of the link, but can’t manage to pull the pieces together.
There are some nice character touches in this book. There’s the eccentric, brilliant young artist and his beautiful sister, who is engaged to an older, crippled rich man. There’s the odious mother and son blackmail team. There’s the sexy, social climbing wife of the lazy, sex-deprived doctor. There’s Lucy Bellringer, who seems almost a nod to Miss Marple.
Barnaby is deeply in love with his wife, but suffers from the fact that she can’t cook well at all – could probably manage to burn water – and makes it worse by trying exotic recipes.
Troy means well, and would like to impress his boss, but he does have an eye for the ladies and is prone to jumping to conclusions rather than getting there by the exercise of reason. He can been dismissive of things that later prove important, and is initially sceptical of Lucy Bellringer and the case itself when Barnaby decides to spend a little time on it.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the episode of the series that this was adapted into, but it was a long time ago. This popped up as one of the $1.99 ($2.14 with GST) offerings in the BookBub service to which I subscribe, and since I’d never read any of the original novels, I thought it would be worth a try. It was.
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Bookends: Introducing Sherlock Holmes’ Younger Sister September 19, 2022
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Bookends: Introducing Sherlock Holmes’ Younger Sister
By Dan Davidson
March 10, 2021
– 810 words –
The Case of the Missing Marquess
by Nancy Springer
Puffin Books
215 pages
$10.00
At the tender age of 14, on the day of her birthday, Enola Holmes’ mother, Eudoria, vanishes, leaving behind her youngest child and only daughter. Enola (which is “alone: spelled backwards) arrived on the scene close to two decades after her older brothers, Mycroft and Sherlock. They arrive, make all kinds of disparaging remarks about their liberal minded mother, and propose to send their sibling, for whom they show little regard or sympathy, off to a strict private school to be properly “finished”, as they feel a girl ought to be.
In the week of so before she has to face that fate, Enola realizes that the birthday gift her mother left her is filled with coded clues she needs to unravel and act on. This seems a fitting act for a woman who gave her daughter a coded name. Enola finds lots of coded clues, and a great deal of hidden cash, in her mother’s rooms, plans her escape, and with the clever use of both a bustle and “breast enhancers” gets away on her bicycle, headed for London, which is where she thinks Eudoria must have gone.
Switching from bicycle to train, and changing her outfit, she continues on to London, learning from a newspaper that the young Viscount Tewkesbury seems to have been kidnapped. Seeing from the photo that the teenager seems to have been trapped into living his life as an incarnation of Little Lord Fauntleroy, which she imagines he might hat as much as she hates being forced to be a proper young lady, she surmises that he may have run away. Later, she has the opportunity to rest that theory, discovers she is correct, and reports her findings to the bereft mother, while in disguise as a consulting agent’s wife.
Attempting to track down the lad, she is taken by the same crew that have him, and realizes that the only way they could have tracked him down was by following the clues she had provided to his mother. That lady had shared them with the fake spiritualist who had been engaged by the family to find the boy, and that could only mean that the lead kidnapper and the medium were one and the same. She proves this to herself by means of her talent at drawing. Her two portraits are clearly of the same person, but in one case he is disguised as a woman.
She and the boy manage to escape the gang and make their way to a police station, where she is surprised to find Sherlock in conference with Inspector Lestrade, whom she had already met in one of her other disguises while at the Tewkesbury’s estate. She needs to escape before Sherlock can see her, but she leaves the drawings behind. Between those and the boy’s testimony, that’s enough to put the bad guys away.
The story is told mainly in the first person, by Enola, though there are a couple of third person sections used to tease a reader and to sum things up. By the end of the book she has set herself up as a consulting perditorian (one who divines that which is lost) by day, while at night she roams the mean streets disguised as nun, helping the needy with blankets socks and other useful things.
If you like ciphers, which I don’t much, there are number of them in the story. Enola uses them to communicate with her mother and explains them all as the story continues.
This first book in the series of six has been made into an enjoyable Netflix original movie starring Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill, and Helena Bonham Carter. There are a number of alterations from the text. Cavill plays a more humane and sympathetic Sherlock; Sam Clafin is not nearly fat enough to be Mycroft; Brown’s age has been adjusted to 16; Enola actually finds her mother in person in the film, whereas she just corresponds by means of coded newspaper ads in the book.
All that said, I found the film quite enjoyable and really can’t understand, given the number of Holmes’ permutations out there , why the Conan Doyle estate attempted to block its release with a lawsuit. After Michael Kane played Holmes as a posturing actor playing a front man for the real detective, Dr. Watson, I think the worst has been done. I enjoyed that movie, too, I admit. If Laurie King can give Holmes a wife in the Mary Russell books, Springer can give him a sister.
Puffin Books is Penguin’s imprint for kids and young adults, so that’s the target audience, that and everyone who enjoys the Holmes canon.
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Bookends: The Case of the Mysterious Killer September 19, 2022
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Bookends: The Case of the Mysterious Killer
by Dan Davidson
March 3, 2021
– 743 words –
The Goldfish Bowl
by Laurence Gough
Kindle edition
$1.99 through BookBub
McClelland & Stewart
216 pages
$9.99
There’s no way you can figure out just who the Sniper is in this mystery, which was the first of 12 Willows and Parker novels. This one appeared in 1988 and walked off with the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel from the Crime Writers of Canada.
From the beginning, we see a story that is rich in descriptions and plot, but thinner on character than Gough’s later books would be. I’ve read a couple of those, but I’d not seen this one before.
“The Sniper lived in a corner apartment on the twelfth floor of an anonymous grey highrise in the middle of the city’s West End. From the balcony it was possible to glimpse a narrow wedge of the dark, choppy waters of English Bay, the lights of the downtown core, and, almost directly below, the gaudy stained-glass figures in the windows of St Paul’s.”
That’s the set up for the first murder. There will be three more like that, plus another different one, and each gives us a taste of the victim’s lives before ending them.
Of the Sniper, we know only that he does his killing with a Winchester 460 Magnum rifle while disguised as a woman. Though J.K. Rowling was recently pilloried for having one of the two killers in her latest Cormoran Strike & Robin Ellacott mystery disguise himself this way, no one seemed to worry about that a generation ago.
Willows and Parker are introduced to us and to each other in this book. Jack Willows is that cliché, a cop with a broken marriage and a bit of an attitude, who would really rather be working with his regular partner, Norm Burroughs. That guy is in the hospital suffering from cancer, and may never be anywhere but riding a desk in his future with the Vancouver Police, if he has any future, so Jack is assigned a new partner. That he doesn’t want one is just made worse by the fact that it’s a woman.
Claire Parker is relatively new at the job and nervous about working with the attitudinally challenged Willows, but she’s determined to pull her weight, learn, and contribute.
We were some time learning much more about the new team and the first part of the book shows us a lot about a different pair, David Ulysses Atkinson and George Franklin. We’re with them enough to thoroughly dislike the former and feel sympathy for the latter, who appears to be devastated when his partner is apparently killed by the Sniper while they are investigating the apartment of the Sniper’s second victim. After that, Franklin seems to deflate before everyone’s eyes, becoming nearly useless as he struggles with the PTSD of having seen his partner die.
Atkinson’s death seems to break the pattern of the other deaths. Willows and Parker eventually discover that there is something, a club, that links the other victims, but they’re still a long way from figuring out what that means. In particular, how does the killer know just when and where his targets are going to be vulnerable.
The other person we spend some time with is Inspector Homer Bradley, who has to deal with what he sees as a gaggle of misfit detectives. Atkinson had been intellectually lazy and Franklin physically handicapped due to his weight. Willows has an attitude and Parker is new. Something very odd and dreadful is going on and the situation is even more serious now that Atkinson has been killed.
The ultimate solution to the serial killings did take me by surprise. I feel one vital clue that would have made the difference to me was withheld until very near the end, but I found that I wasn’t annoyed by that. The book was solidly told and left me turning pages.
There’s not much information about the author. Gough wrote 12 of these and some unrelated solo projects. He won at least one other Ellis Award and another Author Award for the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters for the thriller novel, Sandstorm. His last new book seems to have been a Willows & Parker called A Cloud of Suspects in 2003.
A bio on his publisher’s page says he lives with his wife and two children in Vancouver.
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Bookends: There are many paths to the Crow Road September 19, 2022
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Bookends: There are many paths to the Crow Road
by Dan Davidson
February 24, 2021
– 865 words –
The Crow Road
by Iain Banks
iBooks edition
$2.99
Abacus paperback
516 pages
$15.83
This book has what must be the most evocative and ironic opening sentence I have read in some time. Ready?
“It was the day my grandmother exploded.”
The explanation follows fairly quickly. Grandmother has died and is being cremated. It is remembered, too late, that she had had a pacemaker installed some years ago. Odd that the mortician didn’t notice the scar, but then this is just one of a good many odd things about this story.
“The crow road” means death in Scottish country parlance, and “he’s away the crow road” means that someone has died, so a story that begins with a funeral is probably going to deal with death in various ways, and several people do take the crow road in the course of the book.
One of the deaths – the grandmother’s – is natural enough. A second could almost be seen as funnily ironic, if we didn’t have some empathy for the fellow by the time it happens.
A third which actually occurs first, is a murder, and the fourth is a consequence of that murder. So, the book is to some extent a murder mystery, but it wanders all over the place in time and space before that becomes absolutely clear.
In structure, this is Prentice McHoan’s story and he narrates a good deal of it, slipping from the present moment to past memory without much warning. You have to keep on your toes to realize that he’s dropped back ten years every so often.
This is the type of novel known as a Bildungsroman, which is defined as “a novel dealing with one person’s formative years or spiritual education”.
Prentice is a likeable enough lad, but hasn’t got much gumption or focus to his life. His preoccupations are drink, cars, girls and history, though we could add some drugs to the mix. He spends much of his teenage years, from about 12 or 14 on, besotted with puppy love for Verity, who is pretty much linked to his brother, while being totally unable to see the young woman who is his perfect match growing up in the same circle with the other young people nearby.
He has a troubled relationship with his father, Kenneth, whom he loves dearly but disagrees with as to matters of religion and whether there is anything awaiting us beyond this realm. As a result of this, he’s spent the last few years, beginning with his first unsuccessful run at university, trying to live without the financial assistance that would be supplied if he would only accept it.
His other preoccupation is the disappearance, in his mid teens, about eight years before this story opens, of his favourite uncle, Rory. That worthy had an early success as a travel writer, and has managed a few publications since then, but seems to have run into a block while working on a novel with the working title The Crow Road. We meet Rory in some of Prentice’s flashbacks, and, as with some of the other characters, in third person narratives of their own. We learn more about Kenneth in much the same way.
We also get glimpses of what I take to be first draft extracts of Rory’s novel in progress, passages presented in italic print, and from a different view point than we read elsewhere.
The young adult Prentice returns to his hometown of Gallanach from Glasgow, where he has mostly been since the blow-up with his father. He is not satisfied with himself or his circumstances and just doesn’t know how to get his act together. It takes his grandmother’s passing to bring him back home. Being there is, I suppose, what triggers the memories that give us much of the background we need to understand him.
This is confusing at first, but I found that eventually I picked up the timeslips without too much trouble and did always come away from them with an increasing comprehension of both Prentice and his family.
Banks was actually recommended to me as a science fiction writer, and I didn’t realize this was what he wrote in his other persona until I was into it. I will be looking into the works of Iain M. Banks, which is how he signed his 15 SF books, which is about the same as the number of mainstream books that he wrote.
This one was adapted as a four-part mini-series by the BBC back in 1996.
His last two novels before his passing in 2013 were one of each type. Aside from which there is a Scottish travel book and, posthumously, a book of poems. His work is highly rated – two books, including his last one, having been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize – and he was once nominated for the best SF novel Hugo award. There are about 25 awards listed in his bio. I know I’m going to have to pick up one of the SF books to see how they work.
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Bookends: There are many paths to the Crow Road July 10, 2022
Posted by klondykewriter in Uncategorized.add a comment
Bookends: There are many paths to the Crow Road
by Dan Davidson
February 24, 2021
– 865 words –
The Crow Road
by Iain Banks
iBooks edition
$2.99
Abacus paperback
516 pages
$15.83
This book has what must be the most evocative and ironic opening sentence I have read in some time. Ready?
“It was the day my grandmother exploded.”
The explanation follows fairly quickly. Grandmother has died and is being cremated. It is remembered, too late, that she had had a pacemaker installed some years ago. Odd that the mortician didn’t notice the scar, but then this is just one of a good many odd things about this story.
“The crow road” means death in Scottish country parlance, and “he’s away the crow road” means that someone has died, so a story that begins with a funeral is probably going to deal with death in various ways, and several people do take the crow road in the course of the book.
One of the deaths – the grandmother’s – is natural enough. A second could almost be seen as funnily ironic, if we didn’t have some empathy for the fellow by the time it happens.
A third which actually occurs first, is a murder, and the fourth is a consequence of that murder. So, the book is to some extent a murder mystery, but it wanders all over the place in time and space before that becomes absolutely clear.
In structure, this is Prentice McHoan’s story and he narrates a good deal of it, slipping from the present moment to past memory without much warning. You have to keep on your toes to realize that he’s dropped back ten years every so often.
This is the type of novel known as a Bildungsroman, which is defined as “a novel dealing with one person’s formative years or spiritual education”.
Prentice is a likeable enough lad, but hasn’t got much gumption or focus to his life. His preoccupations are drink, cars, girls and history, though we could add some drugs to the mix. He spends much of his teenage years, from about 12 or 14 on, besotted with puppy love for Verity, who is pretty much linked to his brother, while being totally unable to see the young woman who is his perfect match growing up in the same circle with the other young people nearby.
He has a troubled relationship with his father, Kenneth, whom he loves dearly but disagrees with as to matters of religion and whether there is anything awaiting us beyond this realm. As a result of this, he’s spent the last few years, beginning with his first unsuccessful run at university, trying to live without the financial assistance that would be supplied if he would only accept it.
His other preoccupation is the disappearance, in his mid teens, about eight years before this story opens, of his favourite uncle, Rory. That worthy had an early success as a travel writer, and has managed a few publications since then, but seems to have run into a block while working on a novel with the working title The Crow Road. We meet Rory in some of Prentice’s flashbacks, and, as with some of the other characters, in third person narratives of their own. We learn more about Kenneth in much the same way.
We also get glimpses of what I take to be first draft extracts of Rory’s novel in progress, passages presented in italic print, and from a different view point than we read elsewhere.
The young adult Prentice returns to his hometown of Gallanach from Glasgow, where he has mostly been since the blow-up with his father. He is not satisfied with himself or his circumstances and just doesn’t know how to get his act together. It takes his grandmother’s passing to bring him back home. Being there is, I suppose, what triggers the memories that give us much of the background we need to understand him.
This is confusing at first, but I found that eventually I picked up the timeslips without too much trouble and did always come away from them with an increasing comprehension of both Prentice and his family.
Banks was actually recommended to me as a science fiction writer, and I didn’t realize this was what he wrote in his other persona until I was into it. I will be looking into the works of Iain M. Banks, which is how he signed his 15 SF books, which is about the same as the number of mainstream books that he wrote.
This one was adapted as a four-part mini-series by the BBC back in 1996.
His last two novels before his passing in 2013 were one of each type. Aside from which there is a Scottish travel book and, posthumously, a book of poems. His work is highly rated – two books, including his last one, having been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize – and he was once nominated for the best SF novel Hugo award. There are about 25 awards listed in his bio. I know I’m going to have to pick up one of the SF books to see how they work.
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Bookends: Sailing Ships take to the air on a perilous quest July 10, 2022
Posted by klondykewriter in Uncategorized.add a comment
Bookends: Sailing Ships take to the air on a perilous quest
by Dan Davidson
February 16, 2021
– 696 words –
The Voyage of The Jerle Shannara: Ilse Witch
by Terry Brooks
Del Rey
Paperback : 464 pages
$11.90
Kindle Omnibus Edition
$10.00
Back in 1977, when there wasn’t a lot of Tolkien style fantasy to be had, a young lawyer named Terry Brooks wrote some fan fiction which was almost a plot point copy of the Lord of the Rings, managing to condense it down to one volume. Illustrated by the Brothers Hildebrandt, it was a huge success, and led to a series that is still running to this day, as well as to a full time career as an author.
Eventually, Brooks broadened the original concept and, instead of setting the scenes in the remote mystical past, moved the whole thing into a magically altered future, something was made really obvious in the recent two seasons of a TV series (The Shannara Chronicles) based on the books.
Rather that doing a chronological series (like those of George R.R. Martin, or Robert Jordan) Brooks has bounced about in time, writing a series of trilogies, including three prequel books set in our time that show how the transition from our world to that one took place. Each portion of the trilogy is more manageble than the doorstop weight volumes produced by the authors I just mentioned.
I’ve read about ten of these books over the years, usually as e-books going back to the days when I was reading them on a Palm Pilot. When a discount e-book seller offered an omnibus edition of The High Druid of Shannara trilogy, a few books (and four centuries) past the last one I had read, I picked it up, thinking to reacquaint myself with the series.
One chapter in I realized that several centuries of Shannara time had passed, and, worse, the central protagonist of this book was a reformed incarnation of a character who had clearly been a villain in the previous trilogy, set two decades earlier.
To understand Grianne Ohmsford, I was going to have to read about who she had been when she was known as the Ilse Witch, as well as find how she changed, and that meant picking up the trilogy called The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara, the first volume of which is called Ilse Witch.
It is the seventeenth book in the series, which eventually stretched to 32 volumes.
One thing has remained fairly constant in Brooks’ Shannara books; they all involve quests. This one is begun when a half-drowned elf is found floating in the seas of the Blue Divide (these books all have maps) and is discovered to be the three decades lost bother of the current elf-king who had, himself, set out on a quest from which no other member of the company was ever seen again.
The mysterious map the elf is clutching is taken to Walker Boh, the last of the Druids, who is able to decipher enough of it to persuade the elf-king, Allardon Elessedil, to finance and equip an expedition to find some magical elements which may include the lost Elfstones, that will help the several races of Shannara ward off the evil forces which launch periodic attacks on the Four Lands.
The Ilse Witch and her mentor-partner, the Morgawr, want the talismans for their own ends, and so attempt, first, to stop the quest by assassinating Allardon, and second, by mounting a counter expedition to thwart Walker’s group.
As might be expected there are long journeys in flying sailing ships (the title contains the name of their craft), perilous traps to be overcome along the way, secrets revealed to a number of unsuspecting characters, and a list of interesting people to meet and follow on both sides of the story.
I’m happy to be roaming about in this land again, but must warn you that volume one of this set ends on a terrific cliff-hanger. The exigencies of reading ahead for this column mean that I’ll need to wait awhile before I can continue the story myself, but I’m looking forward to it.
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Bookends: When Nero Wolfe Came out of his Retirement July 10, 2022
Posted by klondykewriter in Uncategorized.add a comment
Bookends: When Nero Wolfe Came out of his Retirement
by Dan Davidson
February 10, 2021
– 794 words –
Murder in E Minor
by Robert Goldsborough
MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
250 pages
iBooks edition
$7.19
Rex Stout produced 33 novels and 39 novellas in the Nero Wolfe series between 1934 and 1975, ending not long before he died with A Family Affair , in which one of Wolfe’s trusted agents turned out to have been a serial killer for many years, and committed suicide after Wolfe and his aide, Archie Goodwin, tracked him down.
Hugely embarrassed, Wolfe retired from detective work and stuck to raising orchids for two years.
During that time, in the real world, journalist Robert Goldsborough wrote a piece of fan faction for his mother, who greatly missed her favourite mysteries. Then he ran it past the Wolfe estate and was approved for publication, leading to a run of 15 novels, beginning in 1986, the most recent of which came in 2020. Since Goldsborough himself is now 83, I imagine there won’t be too many more.
Interestingly, this first book was given a prestigious Nero Award by the members of the Rex Stout fan group, known as the Wolfe Pack, when it appeared. The award, presented in honour of Stout, as been given out since 1979, and winners have included Lawrence Block, Tony Hillerman, Laurie King, Lee Child, Dana Stabenow, David Baldacci, and Louise Penny, just to mention authors I have read.
The Nero Wolfe novels are an interesting blend of Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett in style. Wolfe, weighing in at “a seventh of a ton,” is the eccentric brains of the operation, who seldom leaves his New York brownstone, which is where the Christie-like solutions to each case are finally revealed.
Archie is no slouch in the brains department, but he is Wolfe’s eyes and ears, able to recite entire conversations verbatim, and capable of being quite physical when it is called for. He narrates the stories in something of a Philip Marlowe tone, so we know what he knows, but we only learn what Wolfe knows when the big man choses to reveal it.
Something has to happen to draw Wolfe from his seclusion, and it comes in the shape of the attractive ward of the conductor of the New York Symphony, a man Wolfe had known many years ago in his native Montenegro, when they were both resistance fighters. He has been receiving threatening letters and his adopted niece, Maria Radovich, thinks he ought to take them seriously. It turns out that she is right, and that she has been a bit too late turning to Wolfe.
Just days later, Milan Stevans (his name now anglicized from Milos Stefanović) is found murdered in his apartment, and it appears that the obvious suspect is Gerald (Jerry) Milner, the young man who, much to Stevan’ s displeasure, wants to marry Maria.
Stevans saved Wolfe’s life many years ago and, in spite of the fact that they later clashed over a woman they both desired, with Stevans winning, Wolfe feels he is honour bound first, to help Maria and, second, to solve his old rival’s murder.
There are many possible suspects in this case, since Stevans has been a hard taskmaster as conductor and, despite being championed by the head of the symphony board, is disliked and resented by many members of the orchestra.
Sadly for Milner, he is the only person to have been seen anywhere near the apartment on the night of the murder. It’s impossible for him to prove that Stevans was already dead when he got there.
Wolfe and Archie, with the aid of Fred Durkin and Saul Panzer, have to tease out the clues that point to some of the other suspects and figure out a timeline for the murder that rules out Jerry.
It’s been many years now since I last read any of the 16 Stout books on our mystery shelves, but less long since I enjoyed the CBC’s rendition of the series with Timothy Hutton as Archie and Maury Chaykin as Wolfe.
Goldsborough captured the tone of the series beautifully and kept me turning pages – well, okay, flipping screens. The interaction between Goodwin and Wolfe has always been at the heart of the books and he has that well in hand.
The good news for people who might balk at paying the full price for an e-book, people who remember when paperbacks used to cost 75 cents, is that these books are old enough to turn up as items on such discount e-book sellers as the Fussy Librarian and BookBub, and they are usually available in any of the three major platforms – Kindle, Kobo, or iBook – generally for about $1.99 plus GST.
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