Paul H. Raymer's Blog, page 2

Still Life - Louise Penny

I wonder how anyone can be an unbiased, professional critic. Each of us has a style or genre that pleases us and it is sometimes hard to get beyond that. I do like detective stories. And that’s what this is: a modern day detective story set in Canada. It introduces Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his team of investigators. The Canadian setting is interesting itself. So many detective stories are set in England, Ireland, the United States. For a country that is so close, they have their own issues. French Canadians are almost a different country themselves and that brings another layer of issues into this story.

Louise Penny is an excellent writer. She has the ability to carefully craft scenes and characters that are worthy of mentorship. There are passages in this book that I will go back to to study how to do it.

She has chosen a unique murder weapon—a bow and arrow. In most towns, that would severely limit the number of suspects, but in the town of Three Pines, it appears many inhabitants are proficient with archery and the town is close to the Quebec woods, where hunting is common. There is a town fascination with both archery and art.

And there are a lot of odd people in the town as well, which complicates discerning the motive.

Although I didn’t map it out, I think she lost track of the passage of time. The detective was supposed to go away for a week and a memorial service was to be held a week out, and yet the murder only happened a week ago. I find it particularly irritating in TV shows when stars seem to travel places at the speed of light for international investigations. Maybe I was wrong and I should go back and reread the time frame.

She also introduced and developed a police character with seemingly no purpose other than to provide a reflection on the character of the chief inspector. That character’s story was developed and then abruptly dropped. Maybe she brings this character back in future books, but shouldn’t a book stand on its own - unless it is obviously part of a series?

But the other issue I had with this book is the uncontrolled fluttering of the point of view. I understand the omniscient third person, but I don’t believe I have read a book where the point of view shifts in single paragraphs. It makes me uncomfortable not know whose head I am in from sentence to sentence.

But there you go. It’s a matter of opinion and obviously many people like Louise Penny’s storytelling just the way it is.

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The Enchanter's Counsel - Thalib Razi

I feel out of my element writing this review. I rarely read fantasy stories except from JRR Tolkien, Cindy Young-Turner, J. K. Rowling, or C. S. Lewis. I am also not Muslim and only have the passing familiarity that I gained from my comparative religion classes in college many years ago.

I do know something about good writing, strong plot and character development, climate change, world conflict, and fun. This novel has all of those. Mr. Razi has created a complicated and detailed world that manifests itself as a flat coin rather than a sphere. The protagonist, Mizan al-Wasati, is an olive-green skinned goblin with large ears. At the beginning of the novel, Mizan has just completed his higher education and is beginning his journey back home on his flying carpet, which is not functioning properly. Mizan is going home with an education but not a job, so his future starts out working in his family’s diner, which is not where his education should have placed him. But it sounds pretty normal even among humans.

History is extremely important in Mizan’s world and the inhabitants appear to live with all of it almost all the way back to the earliest days. And there are conflicts among the various races—elves and goblins and dwarfs. And there are conflicts about where they live and why they live where they do. All of those issues compel life on the Coin to continue on as it is, even if it means destroying it.

This is a complex novel. It is not a Harry Potter mood, but subjects that are pertinent to today’s world of humans. There are many levels conjured from Mr. Razi’s mind and experience of Muslim, Sri Lankan American, son, husband, father, engineer, singer-songwriter, fantasy novelist. I occasionally got lost, but it was a story I didn’t mind getting lost in.

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Motive - Jonathan Kellerman

Jonathan Kellerman has written a lot of books. And that’s a good thing because he writes very well. There are many writers who write a lot of books and probably shouldn’t. I confess that this is the only book of his that I have read and centers around two characters that he uses a lot. But this book stands on its own.

The story is interesting, with layer upon layer of plot with a series of seemingly senseless murders. And there seems to be a pile of motives, but all the murders are tied together by the sex of the victim accompanied by a table for two with untouched food.

The structure is intriguing. The book is written from the viewpoint of Alex Delaware who is a psychologist advising a homicide lieutenant in the guise of Milo Sturgis whom Kellerman describes as, “wearing a dust-colored windbreaker and brown poly pants from another era, his olive vinyl attache dangling from one massive paw. Pale, pockmarked, paunchy, black hair limp and in need of trimming, he sagged like a rhino who’d lost out to the alpha male.” Kellerman’s descriptions are outstanding throughout the book, created with the ease of a master. His dialog tags are flawless with just enough information for the reader to keep on track but not so much as to interrupt the flow with unnecessary descriptive words.

His descriptive skill is enough to put this book on my keeper/reference shelf, books I use when I’m trying to study how it should be done. It joins Walker Percy, Ken Follett, Tana French, and Herman Hesse. I can clearly envision the character that Kellerman describes this way: “He had a soft voice designed for apology, bloodshot brown eyes, a face blanketed with two days of spotty gray beard and some sort of accent, probably Northern European. His left arm was ink from knuckles to above his biceps. The right one was clear. Plenty of pinholes in both ears, but no jewelry in evidence.” His writing makes descriptions like this seem easy.

This is one of those times when coming in in the middle of the series is an advantage. I have read other reviews of this book that claim that the characters are tired and overused. Maybe that is a flaw, but to me, as a rookie reader of Alex Delaware stories, the characters were shiny and new. People are people. They grow and they change, but inherently they are the same familiar souls. In some series - particularly on television - the writers use the characters’ personal lives to freshen up their stories. I like my friends the way they are and respect them for what they know and do. I don’t want them to be different, but perhaps characters in thrillers need to be regularly thrilling.

So if you enjoy good writing and a good tale, give Kellerman a read. I don’t know if all his Alex Delaware books are this good, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

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Deadly Deeds - Neal Sanders

I can't blame you for thinking that I enjoy reading books by Neal Sanders, because I do. I enjoy his writing, and I enjoy his stories. And if I had an estate that was worth worrying about, I think I would hire him to organize it. This is one of those books where the plots pile on top of other plots and you have to wonder how the author is going to untangle them and bring the story back together. That's the thing about life: it's not just one simple plot like they write for TV scripts where the entire case has been researched, brought to trial, and adjudicated in forty-five minutes or less. Life is a complicated but integrated system, no matter how much we try to screw it up.

Deadly Deeds is part of Sanders' Garden Club Gang series. One of the members dies in a very expensive nursing home/retirement community under, what appears to be, natural circumstances. But the Gang has its doubts.

This investigation is layered on top of a previous investigation involving the gang bringing down a crooked car dealer.

And that, in turn, is remotely entangled with an investigation at a fairground.

Since the retirement community houses very wealthy clients, those clients tend to have valuable possessions, including valuable paintings. When they die, the families believe that the sale of those paintings will generate a substantial financial return and are shocked when the painting turns out to be false. Although this element of the story is certainly feasible, the speed and the skill of the forger is a bit of a stretch.

In some serial stories, one has to have read the previous books to understand what is going on, but Sanders does a masterful job of providing enough backstory information to provide depth to the characters while allowing the present story to carry its own narrative.

As I said before, I enjoy reading Neal Sanders' books.

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Best You - Keith Yocum

Keith Yocum is a fellow Cape Codder, and I have had the pleasure to read a number of his books. This one clearly parallels his opening sentence: “Many strange things in life cannot be explained.” This is a kind and gentle book and quite different from his others. For example, what appears to be a dead body in this story, is not dead.

Phillip Preston is a 36-year-old assistant bank manager who lives in a small seaside town and owns a boat. His wife has left him for his best friend. Until the opening event of this story, he is living a well-ordered, predictable, unimaginative life. He doesn’t have ambitions for major improvements in his future - perhaps just something akin to annual cost of living increases if he keeps his head down and does his job faithfully.

His personality is similar to that of William Wilmer in Robert Lawson’s Mr. Wilmer and Anthony Burgess’s (author of A Clockwork Orange) Ambrose in The Eve of Saint Venus, two of my best-book-shelf books. Mr. Wilmer is a mild mannered twenty-nine year old who learns on his twenty-ninth birthday that he can talk to animals.

Ambrose, in Burgess’s book, is a young mechanical engineer who is so nervous about getting married that he practices by putting the ring on the finger of the statue of Venus and the statue promptly closes her hand, making it impossible to remove the ring. Ambrose has effectively married the statue.

In Best You, what happens to Phillip Preston is as unreal as talking to animals or marrying a statue. Perhaps the protagonists in these tales need to be simple, decent people so that what happens to them is a sharp contrast to their every day lives. Perhaps the character has to be simple in order to accept the “willing suspension of disbelief” and to allow that to transfer to the reader.

Frankly, I didn’t want to like the book because I didn’t like the title. It’s simple. It’s not witty, ironic, or clever. I shouldn’t admit that because, as they say, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (or its title). But when I got to the end of the book, the title made sense and it fits.

Often a clever and simple premise is difficult to pull off. Difficulties arise that are unexplainable when referencing real life. People can’t actually talk to animals. Statues don’t actually move. And Phillip Preston in Best You can’t relate to what he experiences any more than the reader can. It is a challenge for the author to pull it off without sounding silly or ‘unrealistic’.

Yocum gets close to losing it at times, but is skillfully able to pull it back on track. This is a book worth reading.

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East of Eden - John Steinbeck

I don’t need to say it, but John Steinbeck’s writing is masterful. It’s like engaging in a master class in writing. He does break all the rules, and I’m only saying this because it’s how it feels: this book was written by the seat of his pants. It seems to be the work of a pantser from a construction point of view. I didn’t get the sense that there was a great deal of planning in the structure. One idea flows into another and then loops back and weaves together.

Woven throughout are what appear to be autobiographical references. Right from the opening paragraphs he writes in the first person. And then in the fifth chapter he writes about “Olive, my mother.” I have not done the research to know whether or not he actually was writing about his family or if it was just another author’s conceit of bringing reality to the fiction. So the words wander from fiction to apparent reality.

I wanted to read a tale of a truly evil person, but I got the sense that Steinbeck might have been a bit afraid of Cathy Ames. To achieve the true nature of a character, the author has to bring the persona into themselves. Cathy is evil. She starts killing with her parents in childhood and she kills a number of other people throughout the novel, but it seemed to me that Steinbeck didn’t like writing about her. She is a necessary component to the plot, but Lee, Adam Trask’s servant/companion is more developed, substantive, and powerful.

Steinbeck provides a masterful appreciation of the the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants embodied in Lee’s character - right from his shifting Pidgin/English form of speech to the shaving of his pigtail to the remarkable wisdom of his philosophy of life.

Looking for the traditional protagonist/antagonist conflict is a challenge in this book. Once again, Steinbeck breaks the rules. Who is the protagonist in this story? Adam Trask seems to shoulder the role, carrying through from beginning to end. But I can also say that Adam or his soul is the antagonist as well, the element that he is fighting against.

There are a myriad of sub-scenes and character portrayals that paint the colors around the story but do not always impact the movement of the plot.

Steinbeck’s dialog structure is also unique. It is abrupt with few tags to smooth out the changes and it occasionally seems almost innocent or childish in structure which gives it unusual immediacy.

East of Eden is obviously a classic and one that will move to my ‘best books’ shelf as soon as I buy a paper copy.

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Write Away - Elizabeth George

Learning to write is an extended process. At one point, early in the process, you recognize that you can put symbols (letters) on paper that reflect what you are thinking or saying. What seems to be very simple now, was difficult at the beginning.

And that’s just the start. When we get past the, “See Jane run” lines, we get into much more complex things. At some point the beauty of the words working together creates an image that you can finally say, “That’s pretty good!” I remember an old Peanuts cartoon when Snoopy has a dictionary, and he says, “Now I have all the words. I just have to put them together.”

Elizabeth George is an excellent writer of fiction, and like many excellent writers she tries to pass her knowledge of the craft along to others. That’s what she did in Write Away. By the time I found this book I had already self-published a novel, Recalculating Truth. I thought it was pretty good, but I knew I had more to learn.

Like all writers, George has a specific process that works for her. (She has written 21 Inspector Lynley novels now.) Her stories are set in England but she lives in Seattle, Washington. She spends a great deal of time surveying the sites of each book, and she describes and illustrates that process in Write Away. In fact, she moves through the entire process of book creation from the Overview, through the Basics, the Technique, the Process, and finally examples.

The primary idea that I extracted from this is right from the title of her first chapter: Story is Character. That’s the kind of book I want to write. People have characters and those characters interact to make the story. In Chapter 19 she includes a Character Prompt Sheet that I have pulled into the writing software I use, Scrivener, which helps me to define the characters in the story. This includes their age, height, weight, build, but also enemies, best friend, ambition in life, political leaning, and hobbies. It also includes a pathological maneuver - what would the character do under stress? When the character is at the moment of stress they perform some sort of personal ritual like tucking hair behind an ear, straightening out their glasses, twisting their body away.

I found this book very helpful in fundamental ways of helping me to develop my own process. George includes excerpts from her “Journal of a Novel” that reflects her nervousness and fear in the process. I found this book more useful than her second book on writing, Mastering the Process, which seemed padded with her book excerpts and more personally related information.

I would definitely recommend Write Away, however, as a great starting point.

The Old Cape Blood Ruby - Barbara Eppich Struna

Truly a story that travels from sea to shining sea and spans the years from earliest beginnings of the United States to today. It is part memoir, part mystery, and part historical fiction. Parts of the story are written in the first person and parts from the third person points of view. There are a lot of threads to weave together into a coherent and entertaining tale.

The “pigeon’s blood” ruby is a set in a mysterious ring that appears on the finger in the portrait of a historic lady that hangs over the fireplace of Neil Hallett. The ring is allegedly from the treasure of the pirate, Sam Bellamy, captain of the notorious Wydah—another neat loop in Struna’s tale. Hallett, the thief, is descended from a thief. New England, and Cape Cod in particular, is filled with family history. The graveyards are filled with Bangs, Swetts, Allens, and Brewsters. They were settlers, fishermen, and ministers. The fictional Walter Ellis of this story was a fisherman, whose livelihood was cut short by the destruction of his ship in the Portland Gale of 1898. Leaving his family, he sets off to find gold in Alaska.

By a twist of fate, he is set upon by thugs on the streets of Seattle, and misses his passage to Alaska and separated from his friends. When he recovers, he signs on to another ship owned by a millionaire named E.H. Harriman, a railroad tycoon. In 1899, Harriman sponsored and accompanied a scientific expedition to catalog the flora and fauna of the Alaska coastline. Many prominent scientists and naturalists went on the expedition, aboard the luxuriously refitted 250-foot steamer, SS George W. Elder. Struna’s fictional Walter Ellis signed aboard to complete his journey to Juneau. Another twist of fate, burns and disfigures Ellis, and causes him to lose the sight of one eye and putting him into the hospital in Juneau where he is cared for by an attractive Indigenous nurse.

These aspects of history are interwoven with present day Nancy Caldwell, history detective. She is the link that connects Provincetown to Juneau and the past to the present. Nancy has a son who happens to be living in Alaska near where Walter Ellis ended up. During a familial visit she acquires the remnants of a letter and a wallet discovered by a young girl in a cleft in a rock.

Nancy is an antiques sleuth, and when she returns to Cape Cod she is invited to survey the contents of an old house in Provincetown. Neil Hallett is also interested in the contents of the house, and Struna begins to weave the stories into an interesting tapestry. Will Walter abandon hopes of returning to his family and marry the beautiful nurse? Will the Tlingit tribe accept him? Will his wife remarry, declaring Walter dead? Will Neil Hallett find the ruby before Nancy Caldwell does?

This is a complicated story with Struna juggling all the different elements. As a reader, I could feel her joy at bringing the past to life. An old house is full of memories from all the lives that have passed through it. This is a well researched, well founded, and interesting tale that satisfies an interest in history, twisted into a gentle and loving mystery. It is respectful of Indigenous Alaskan people as well as the present day residents of Cape Cod while honoring the use of the reader’s time.

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Killer Houses

I have been working with houses professionally for over forty years. They intrigue me. They talk to me. I feel their pain when they are neglected or badly constructed or torn down and thrown in the dump like a pile of discarded bones. When bad things happen to the occupants, it’s not the house’s fault.

A house is an assemblage of wood, stone, metal, glass, pipes, wires, and mechanical equipment—just like Frankenstein was an assemblage of body parts. His evil qualities were imbued by those that didn’t understand him. The framing of the house is the skeleton. The wires are the nerves. The pipes and the ducts are the veins and the lungs. The boiler or furnace is the heart.

There is no question that houses play major roles—often title roles—in many novels. They become part of the story in a variety of ways just as the other characters do. Wuthering Heights begins, “I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with.” Susan Howatch, the author of Penmarric, introduces the house as soon as she introduces the protagonist. Shirley Jackson, the author of The Haunting of Hill House, wastes no time, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed by some to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.”

If the occupants care, battle nature, and maintain the paint, roof, windows, and conditioning systems, the house can last a very long time. There is a wooden house in the Faroe Islands that is presently occupied by the seventeenth generation of a family who have lived in the house for almost five hundred years.

The houses that have been in a family for generations are replete with all the family’s own ghosts and skeletons in the closets. But another theme of nasty house related stories involves houses that are new to the subjects of the novel, families moving into them to escape memories of some tragedy or other. The death of a child seems to be common one. It becomes abundantly clear in these escape stories that the memories move along with the souvenirs of Niagra Falls and Disney Land. The family is attempting to start a new life and leave the old memories behind, but they are often about to inherit someone else’s family horrors.

Many of the old family houses are grand mansions, meant to impress, with hundreds of rooms. (Some mysteriously have more space inside than outside.) Some of them are as simple as a London flat as in Jemma Wayne’s To Dare or the cottage in Billy O’Callaghan’s The Dead House. In Noel Vindry’s locked room novel, The House that Kills, the stone house is definitely an innocent bystander that gets attacked by investigators with picks and shovels seeking a secret passage. I found it particularly telling that the investigators in this 1932 novel used a perfume as a tracer gas to find air currents.

In 17 Church Row, James Carol takes evil spirits connected to a house to a whole new level. The evil persona in this novel was created by man but takes on a life of its own. This persona is the disembodied soul of the house. A nice young family, suffering from the tragic loss of a child think they can escape their memories by moving to a brand new, state-of-the-art house with no door knobs.

The virtual assistant in this book has been taught to think, reason, and feel at least to the level of a six-year-old’s consciousness with almost infinite access to the world’s knowledge base, connected by wires, fiber optics, and satellites. ‘She’ does open doors and drawers and make coffee on command, but ‘she’ is a character. There is an immediate connection in the opening sentence: “Father attempted to murder me once.”

Houses are shelters. Not killers. They carve out a safe place to protect us from wind, rain, and snow. There are indeed mysterious places in houses—under the stairs, under the eaves, down in the basement, in the back corner of the attic where no one ever goes. But it is the ghosts in the occupants’ imaginations and the guilt in their memories that are the real killers.

There will be a podcast episode about this on February 11, 2022 on https://www.buildingHVACScience.com Give it a listen.

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Clever Cozies

What is a COZY Mystery? A cozy mystery has been described as a “fun read that engages the mind”. They are commonly a series of books with an amateur sleuth that is tied to a fictional community such as Jessica Fletcher’s Cabot Cove in the Murder She Wrote series. These books are usually written from the first person or close 3rd person point of view. They commonly have side-kicks—sometimes pets as side-kicks. They come in a series because cozy readers like to keep coming back to the same characters. There is a victim and usually three or four plausible suspects.

As a cozy writer, you can’t kill someone in a real place or town, and you can’t kill pets or children. There is minimal violence, sex, or obscenities. Harvard University can’t be used for anything for some reason. And justice prevails in the end.

The plot is basically a puzzle that comes together piece by piece. The protagonist guides or pushes the action and, although level headed is not fantastically brilliant.

It always amazes me how many people can be murdered in small quiet towns like Cabot Cove or the English counties of Midsomer or South Devon where the Coroner TV series is set.

These books are often derogatorily referred to as “pot-boilers” or “penny-dreadfuls”. Series are commonly themed around food, clothing, holidays, or clubs. Although many of the titles are “cute”, like Brewed Awakening from Cleo Coyle, Absence of Mallets from Kate Carlisle, or To Helvetica and Back from Paige Shelton, there are a surprising number of writers like Agatha Christie, Elizabeth George, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers who are included in the lists of cozy authors. Authors like Maddie Day produce a first draft in six weeks, and publish three or more books a year.

Can a Cozy Mystery be considered a serious novel? I dislike the slots and genres that writers are dropped into. Amazon classifies a novel like The Overstory by Richard Powers as “Genre Fiction” to avoid the classification conundrum. I suppose it makes it easier for marketing, and cozy mysteries are solid sellers.

Let me know if you read cozies and who you like and what you like about them. I would appreciate the input.

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