Craig MacIntosh's Blog

Post Cold War Gem

The Other Woman by Daniel Silva, 2018, Harper Collins. Now chief of Israel’s secret intelligence service, Silva’s familiar protagonist Gabriel Allon, is involved in an important turncoat asset’s assassination in Vienna. Murdered under Allon’s eyes while trying to defect, the dead man is the possible victim of an allied intelligence mole. It’s up to Allon to uncover the double agent. Basing a key character in his latest novel on a fictional episode in the life of Kim Philby, once a trusted insider in Britain’s intelligence family, Silva weaves a layered espionage tale. Philby was actually a closeted communist dedicated to betraying the West. Along with a small fraternity of other Old School elites—the Cambridge Five—were traitors all. Russia’s SVR, before that the KGB, is up to its usual tricks. The Cold War’s legacy throws a long shadow across two continents, threatening the Anglo-American intelligence family. Silva weaves a mesmerizing story of Philby’s fathering a girl in 1963 with a fellow believer, a lover in Beirut before fleeing MI6’s clutches to Moscow where he later died. The child grows up in his malevolent likeness.
In his book, Silva pulls no punches when he writes of Russia’s current leadership: Like the tsars and commissars who came before him, Putin readily uses murder as a tool of statecraft. Putin, he says, “Is always probing with a bayonet…and when he hits steel he looks for softer spots elsewhere.
Full of his usual supporting cast of Israeli oddball spies, Silva’s latest is his signature Israeli super spy at his best.

Evil At Work

Tracking Transnational Crime syndicates is like playing a never ending game of the old state fair Whack-A-Mole. True evil never sleeps and manages to stay one step ahead of world wide law enforcement. "The Good Mothers," is a new book by Englishman Alex Perry, a foreign correspondent and TV and film writer, who investigates organized crime. His target: Italy's most secret mafia spawn: the 'Ndrangheta.
Perhaps the most powerful and far-reaching of Italy's mutant criminal states-within-a state, the mafiosos of the 150-year old 'Ndrangheta rule the foot of the Italian boot from their Calabrian stronghold. Theirs is a centuries old hold on all things criminal the length of Italy.
Controlling drugs, money-laundering, vice, kidnapping and murder. Rooted in a medieval patriarchy that practices matricide and filicide to maintain control of their families and ensure Omerta, silence, the men who rule 'Ndrangheta take the lives of those who step out of line.
Perry's shocking book pulls back the bloodied curtain and exposes this criminal gang by telling the horrific tale of Lea Garofalo, a "mafia princess" who married a brutal mafioso in her teens and bore him a daughter at seventeen. After witnessing murders, suffering beatings at her husband's hands and yearning for freedom, she fled with her daughter and turned against her family.
Talking to outsiders signed her death warrant but she persevered for her daughter's sake. Brutally murdered, her death showed the first fissures in what began an unravelling of the once secret 'Ndrangheta. Enter courageous Italian prosecutor Alessandra Cerreti, a breed of steel nerved government servants who went to war with the gangsters. Another mother, emboldened by Lea Garofalo's speaking out, turned state witness to expose the evil in Calabria. She too, died a martyr's death in the fight against the 'Ndrangheta, but the campaign kept going. Evenually, scores of mafioso went to jail. Italy continues the war against this subterranean murder cult but the opening rounds have gone to the government.
Murderous criminals, such are all those locals who support the 'Ndrangheta with their silence or complicity, met their match before female prosecutors and judges, an unheard of irony that Alex Perry's "The Good Mothers" details with thoroughness. An important book.Alex Perry

Old Habits Die Hard

Old habit—I’m back to multi-tasking when it comes to pleasure reading. Friends ask if it’s possible to keep several books separate when reading multiple authors.
It takes some mental gymnastics with two or more books. On my nightstand:
John Sandford’s latest effort—Holy Ghost, the eleventh in his Virgil Flowers series about a Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agent with ties to Sandford’s Prey character, Lucas Davenport. Set in Wheatfield, a slice of Midwest America, Flowers arrives to hunt an elusive sniper terrorizing the small town. Coincidentally, the apparition of the Virgin Mary in a dying Catholic Church draws the faithful and jump-starts the town’s moribund economy. The mysterious shooter threatens both. Things escalate with a local matron’s killing in broad daylight. As usual, the lusty Flowers has his hands full and Sandford’s tale is stocked with a carnival sideshow of colorful characters on both sides of the law.
Second in my stack is military historian Hampton Sides’s On Desperate Ground, a grim telling of the First Marine Division’s 1950 October-December invasion of Kim Il Sung’s North Korea. All had gone well in the beginning with September’s surprise amphibious landing at Inchon—a brilliant plan by General Douglas MacArthur to cut off the enemy and recapture South Korea’s capitol, Seoul. Covered with stardust, MacArthur returned to Tokyo’s spotlight after naming sycophantic general Ned Almond as X Corps commander and assuring President Truman that China would not join the fray. Off go Major General Oliver Smith’s 20,000 marines, one of three separate columns of UN forces—overwhelmingly American—that Almond orders into Nort Hampton Sidesh Korea’s forbidding mountains. Led by the increasingly wary Smith, Marines march into a Chinese ambush at the infamous Chosin Reservoir. Battling 300,000 Chinese, Americans and their allies face a horrific fate. Cut off in sub-zero weather, the Marines run a bloody gauntlet to survive. Pages filled with gunfire, heroism, and frostbite tell of brutal combat in an alien land, and Side’s description of the fighting is riveting.
Also reading Ron Chernow’s Grant and Dr. Tom Combs’s Wrongful Deaths.

A Look Back at 2017

Turning back pages from a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Normandy and beyond with my son this year. I finally visited the ground of my first novel, "The Fortunate Orphans." Got to tour storied battlefields, towns and cemetery settings. Every inch of ground was bought with a price. Can almost smell the smoke; hear the artillery, tank treads and small arms fire. Will post more sketches made on site before the year is out. Flew to Paris and traded the capital's trash, graffiti, and ugliness of its industrial underbelly for the pastoral countryside en route to the Norman coast. I'm more a southeast Asia man but this part of Europe was an eye-opener. We started with the beaches of Omaha and Utah and continued on to Juno, Gold and Sword. Reverent is the byword on these hallowed grounds. Not to be missed...though I had stayed away for seventy-plus years. Will continue to post more sketches and notes in the days ahead. The drawings, one of Omaha Beach, the other of a German machine gun bunker at Juno Beach and a Canadian flag, were done hastily in the field, because I did not want to be left behind by my fellow visitors. To get an authoritative feel for Europe's battlefields such as the Normandy landings read the well-researched "The Guns At Last Light." Rick Atkinson

Shoreline Retreat

Odd how it sometime takes "getting away" from routine in order to accomplish something. How does that work? Case in point: Wanted to do some serious writing, work through some key scenes in an upcoming book, and move the plot forward. Got away to one of my favorite spots...Lake Superior. Settled in for three nights in a two-person cabin built like a Scandinavian retreat. Surrounded by towering pines, birch and wildlife, writing takes on a new focus. I have my laptop, my only concession to technology, and my watercolors and pens. The waves remind me of the ocean. Hypnotizing and constantly changing direction, the swells wash a rocky shore. Perfect! Can't wait to get back to the place that restores my soul.

Gold Miner

I stumbled on AMC’s cable series “Better Call Saul” at the behest of my editor. Thanks to her suggestion, I discovered a vein of gold. The acting is superb, but the writing carries the show. There is such a potpourri of excellent scripts on cable. Surely, this has to be a golden age of sorts for cable television. Put aside the dross of phony “reality” TV shows available on network and cable alike and think about top-notch scripts written for viewers who like to think about what they’re watching. The icing is the fact that you can’t find better acting than what happens on shows like “Better Call Saul.” Having originally skipped seeing “Breaking Bad” (more about that in another posting) my curiosity got the better of me and I sampled “Saul” (a prequel involving two of the main characters from the “Breaking” saga). My guess is that Vince Gilligan, major creative force of both shows, liked what he saw in actor Bob Odenkirk’s portrayal of flawed lawyer Jimmy McGill/aka/Saul Goldman, and decided to give him his own backstory. Glad he did. Everything clicks: the titles, the music, the photography, the acting and writing. Not to take anything away from the cast but the show belongs to actress Rhea Seehorn, who plays conflicted lawyer Kim Wexler. In turns a brilliant legal mind, faithful forgiving lover, caretaker and independent woman in the profession’s “Take no prisoners” arena, Seehorn manages to be witty, sexy and strategic…save when “Saul/McGill” is involved. As an actress Seehorn has her character’s facial “tells” down perfectly. She deserves to mine gold in a series of her own. Are you listening, Vince Gilligan?

Winston's War

In the best tradition of popular historians like Doris Kearns-Goodwin, David McCullough and Barbara Tuchman, comes Candice Millard’s latest book: “Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill.”
Millard, a young scholar with an eye for detail and phrasing, writes accessible history that reads like the best of contemporary well-crafted novels. If high school civics teachers and college professors alike could make history come alive the way she does on paper, there would be no dozing in class or cribbed essays. History is not dull. And in hands like Candice Millard’s the long-dead people she brings to life fairly leap from the pages. Her latest subject—young Winston Churchill at war with South Africa’s Boers, though officially a correspondent—is at once, imperious, egregiously egocentric, undeniably brave, and foolhardy to a fault. She captures his arrogance intact and presents the reader with a thrilling tale of Churchill’s brief time as a prisoner of war, a demeaning position for an aristocrat like him. Using generous quotes from Churchill and those who served with this staunch imperialist, Millard paints a complete portrait of self-anointed “Great Man” in training. Like her books on Presidents Garfield “Destiny of the Republic,” and Teddy Roosevelt “The River of Doubt,” Millard focuses on one particular chapter in each of their lives and delivers captivating—sorry, Winston—stories of each man. William Manchester’s three-volume biography of Churchill was a massive tome but also a popular work. By opting not to repeat the grand Churchill story, Candice Millard has spotlighted a particular chapter in the British statesman’s life and her audience is richer for her effort.

Learn From Others

When I grow up I want to be as well read (by those who buy books) as author John le Carré. Popular writer John Grisham is an avid fan. . .of le Carré's. He's been quoted as saying; The Little Drummer Girl is one of his favorite novels, and John le Carré his favorite writer. Grisham says he reads The Little Drummer Girl every four or five years—inspired to emulate le Carré plots, descriptions of people, and dialogue. High praise from one of America's masters of the best seller lists. Even if the books you're fond of are not classics of literature but rather, ones that inspired you to write, keep them close by. It's always wise to give them a second, third, or fourth reading to see if they still captivate you with plotting, dialog, characters, and descriptions. If you belong to a book club, as I do, you'll be introduced to books normally outside of your reading tastes. You'll be challenged by your fellow members to stretch yourself. You might read stories by authors you have never heard of, and in doing so, possibly discover a gem. The bonus for authors who attend book clubs or participate in writing groups is the exposure to other writers' styles. It will rub off eventually, making one a better writer. I'm not talking about the dark side—plagiarism—I'm referring to the appreciation one develops for the intricacies of a plot, unique descriptions, and memorable exchanges of dialog. I'm fond of Mark Twain's oft-quoted rule about “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” A good author appreciates Twain's words. And it might be worth one's time to check out John le Carré's writing—it comes highly recommended.

Find A Book Club Today!

Belonging to a book club is a good thing to do...and not just for passing those dark winter nights when your usual social networks are hibernating. I’ve read books I would never have considered prior to joining. We mostly read fiction with the occasional non-fiction, such as Laura Hillenbrand’s “Unbroken” or others like it, and we are democratic when selecting a reading list. Someone in our group once suggested 1920’s “Main Street” by Sinclair Lewis. I had evaded this gem during high school and college. The fact that a jealous Ernest Hemingway raged against his fellow author’s 1930 Nobel Prize for literature made it all the more delicious a read. Lewis penned remarkable descriptive prose, which still holds up. But it’s like that. We meet to trade impressions of the author’s skills with language, intentions, and their success or near-miss—always a lively exchange. As an author, one of the bonuses of belonging to a book club is to help me focus on my storytelling efforts when it comes to questions about clarity and word choice. Our last book was Minnesota author Leif Enger’s “Peace Like A River” (2001, Grove Press). Here’s an excerpt showcasing his skill. Writing in the first-person, he describes an incident during a road trip.
“…but getting closer we saw it was a crow after all, and dead. Struck by a car it lay all mashed to the road but for one free wing, which rose and fell by the gusts. It was a much more grievous sight than you’d think, a dead crow laying in the road out in the heart of noplace, and just before we reached it the wind brought up that wing again so it looked like a thing asking for mercy.”
Now, go forth and find a book club near you.
Peace Like a River

Flotsam

I also received a copy of "Dead Wake" over Christmas and devoured it in three days. Larson is a terrific storyteller and has a detective's eye for detail that fleshes out his book's characters. Though I knew the outcome I was completely drawn in as the tragedy unfolded hour by hour.
If all our history books read like Larson's works there would be no blank stares when our fellow citizens are asked to about this era, or that particular event, or what happened when...
At 2:30 in the morning, as I sat by the fire finishing the book, I felt it might be prudent to go to my bedroom and put on my lifejacket as the end neared for the Lusitania. Fascinating... like all his books, Larson's narrative non-fiction captures the reader. The weaving into the story of parallel events helps set the scene. Larson is a treat to read...and it doesn't hurt to learn more than you ever knew about U-boats, Cunard's liners, and the fumbling about by Britain's Admiralty.
Erik Larson