Misalliance

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Ames Adamson, Misalliance, George Bernard Shaw

Ames Adamson as John Tarleton in Misalliance

This George Bernard Shaw play at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey (through August 30) provides some timely commentary for a work first produced 105 years ago. The feminist characters and viewpoints typical of Shaw don’t shock viewers today, as they did in an England just emerging from the Victorian era. But unexpectedly apt was Shaw’s skeptical take on the role of law enforcement. The play’s character Lord Summerhays, reflecting on his time as governor of Jenghiskahn, says:

Justice was not my business. . . . Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion . . . by force or fraud, or both. . . . It is as well that you should know this, my young friend; so that you may recognize in time that anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you.

In a talk-back after the show with STNJ artistic director Bonnie Monte and members of the cast, we learned the play was not well received in its 1910 debut and not produced again for several decades. One critic called it “a debating society of a lunatic asylum,” but it has proved more popular in recent years, perhaps because its structure seems less radical today. Audience members who’d seen other productions commented that this one is lighter and livelier. Farce isn’t the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Shaw, but this version of the play had a great many laugh lines, expertly delivered by the outstanding cast.

The story takes place over the course of a single afternoon in the country house conservatory of wealthy underwear magnate John Tarleton. His son Johnny is a bore, and his daughter Hypatia is engaged to a very unlikely fellow, son of dignified Lord Summerhays. Mrs. Tarleton seems a bit dim, but perhaps there are things she finds it more convenient not to see.

This loosely jelled assemblage is turned upside down by the sudden appearance of an airplane [!], flying low, that crashes into the family greenhouse. From the wreckage emerge the dashing pilot and his last-minute passenger, whom he assumes is another gentleman but who, when the leather cap and goggles come off, turns out to be a Polish woman, both dare-devil and fitness devotee. All relationships are up for grabs from that moment forward.

Numerous proposals of marriage (or less permanent liaisons) ensue, and some of them would rank high in misalliance potential. The pilot quotes one of his three stepfathers, an Anglican priest, with perhaps the play’s most famous line: “If marriages were made by putting all the men’s names into one sack and the women’s names into another, and having them taken out by a blind-folded child like lottery numbers, there would be just as high a percentage of happy marriages as we have now.”

Other misalliances emerge between parents and children, and about that relationship, Shaw says elsewhere, “If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson (which is not at all necessary), hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.” This is advice amply illustrated by poor Mr. Tarleton and his daughter. “Depend on it,” he tells Lord Summerhays, “in a thousand years it’ll be considered bad form to know who your father and mother are.”

As always, the cast and production values are terrific, with special mention of Ames Adamson as John Tarleton and Erika Rolfsrud as his wife. At some point, a portable Turkish bath proves it’s more than an ornament.

Kick Back TV Mysteries

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tv, television, relaxing

(photo: Caitlin Regan, creative commons license)

We may spend the week grappling with the critical affairs of the world and leaky plumbing, but come the weekend, we hope Netflix offers us something entertaining—and nothing’s better than a little crime! You know, something about people with real problems!

These five U.K. and Australian series take you out of the United States altogether, for an armchair vacation to boot. Here they are, from light to dark:

  • Mr. & Mrs. Murder – found CDs of this 13-part Australian series at the local library. It’s about a husband and wife team (Shaun Micallef and Kat Stewart) who clean up after a murder and, of course, end up solving it. The real police detective (Jonny Pasvolsky), is sweet on the Mrs. and never misses a chance to put the husband down. Not one bit serious, just fun.
  • Midsomer Murders – Based on books by Caroline Graham, this veeeeery long-running British series—it began in the late 1990s—has outlasted its original cast. More lately, John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon), the “cousin” of the long-running Tom Barnaby (John Nettles), is the lead detective. Tom should never have let wife Joyce out of the house. Whether she was at choir practice or off plein air painting, a murder inevitably ensued in these deceptively charming country villages. Lots of suspects. And, over the years, lots of entertaining sergeant side-kicks. Ever-amazed that the CME always arrives and the scene and already has some conclusions before Barnaby even gets there.
  • The Last Detective – great recommendation from a friend (thanks, B.T.!), based on novels by Leslie Thomas. In this London-base series, sweet, but hapless “Dangerous” Davies (Peter Davison) must deal with the breakup of his marriage, the couple’s shared custody of a very large dog, and the constant badgering of his doltish colleagues but always—yes!—solves the case. His boss, the self-medicating alcoholic DI Aspinwall (Rob Spendlove) is perfect. Friend and perpetual loser Mod (Irish comedian Sean Hughes) is the chief comic foil.
  • Case Histories – Several of Kate Atkinson’s excellent Edinburgh-based mysteries about protagonist Jackson Brodie (Jason Isaacs) have been made into television programs (three two-hour ones and three 90-minute ones), including One Good Turn and When Will There be Good News? Jackson is a defrocked policeman working as a P.I, who’s still called in to advise the Department’s DI Louise Munroe (Amanda Abbington) when he stumbles on a dead body or a juicy case. A little too much flashback about “why he cares,” when the fate of dead young women is involved. Why wouldn’t he? His secretary (Zawe Ashton) is priceless. Cute daughter, too.
  • Jack Irish – Three television movies (Bad Debts, Black Tide, and Dead Point)have been made from the Jack Irish mysteries by Australian writer Peter Temple, with more to come. Guy Pearce plays the eponymous character, and these are the grittiest in this list. I’ve not read Temple’s originals so don’t know whether the excessive plot complications come from the original, but the shows would be better if they were a half hour shorter and without one of two of the endless twists. Between that and the heavy accents, I’ve gone a bit past caring a time or two. Girlfriend journalist Linda Hillier (Marta Dusseldorp) is a charmer. Like the touts and horses.

McEwan & Free Speech

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freedom of thought

Benjamin Franklin, 1722 (photo: wikimedia.com)

Back in the distant epoch when I was a college student, I majored in journalism—not the sprightly “Communications” of today, but the old-fashioned stuff. One of the chief aims of my professors was to instill in us a healthy regard for the “free speech” clause of the First Amendment. Having recently read Ian McEwan’s meaty novel The Children Act, reviewed yesterday on this website, I was reminded to go back and read his commencement address to the Dickinson College Class of 2015 (complete address here), which explored some of the modern challenges to my professors and my old favorite.

In an era when the commencement speakers I usually hear about are the stars of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Comedy Central, an English novelist seemed a surprising choice. McEwan, of course, is no second-ranker. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, he won it for Amsterdam in 1998; his novels Atonement, Saturday, and On Chesil Beach have won numerous prizes. So one might assume the man had something to say. And what he wanted to say concerned free speech, which he clarified includes writing and reading, listening and, yes, thinking.

McEwan called free speech “the life blood, the essential condition of the liberal education.” It’s one almost unique to Americans, enshrined in the First Amendment not as “an empty phrase, as it is in many constitutions, but a living reality.” Enshrined, but not inevitable, and not maintained without respect for its essence, even its unpalatable manifestations. Free speech, he said, is perpetually under attack from all sides and viewpoints. “It’s never convenient, especially for entrenched power, to have a lot of free speech flying around.”

It’s more than just one of our many freedoms, it’s essential to all the others. Without it, he said, “democracy is a sham.” All our other freedoms need to be openly thought about, discussed, written into existence, and maintained through free discourse, by people of every discipline and calling.

In other countries, as news reports glaringly reveal, free expression and thought is under serious attack. That’s happening in the streets and on the Internet in the Middle East, Russia, Bangladesh, much of Africa, and the Great Firewall of China. But it cannot be taken for granted in the United States at a time of great polarization of public opinion along many social and political fault-lines, and when facing the unresolved challenges of the Internet—challenges to speech, privacy, and concentration of control in a few corporations.

McEwan suggested the graduates might reasonably conclude that “free speech is not simple,” and never an absolute. It has definable limits, but it’s also an error to reflexively label opinions one doesn’t agree with as “hate speech” or disrespectful. “Being offended is not to be confused with a state of grace; it’s the occasional price we all pay for living in an open society,” he said. And, lately, people advocating creation of “safe spaces” have become increasingly thin-skinned.

He closed with a tribute to the literary form of the novel, whose traditions, he believes, embrace pluralism, openness, and “a sympathetic desire to inhabit the minds of others.” Novels thereby build empathy with the situations and fortunes of people who may be unlike ourselves. “Take with you these celebrated words of George Washington: ‘If the freedom of speech is taken away then, dumb and silent, we may be led like sheep to the slaughter.’”

*****The Children Act

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justice

(photo: Mike Gifford, creative commons license)

By Ian McEwan -There may be a reason justice is blind, and, in this novel, a woman. Fiona Maye is a British High Court family division judge who must decide, Solomon-like, some of the more wrenching issues of our time. How to proceed when an Englishwoman fears her five-year-old daughter will be spirited away to Morocco by her strict Muslim father, then is? What to do when a pair of conjoined twins must be separated or both will die, but if they are separated, one will surely die? The hospital urgently wants to separate them, but the devoutly Catholic parents refuse to sanction murder. Everyone in reach of the news media has an opinion about these cases, but only Fiona’s counts. She must be blind to distractions, keeping uppermost The Children Act of 1989, “which declares in its opening lines for the primacy of the child’s welfare.”

The Lord Chief Justice describes her as a woman with “Godly distance, devilish understanding, and still beautiful.” But that’s insufficient on the home front. Fiona’s husband has announced his desire to have an affair with a much-younger woman and doesn’t see why that should disrupt their marriage. Fiona’s legendary dispassionate judgment counts for nothing in this situation and is replaced by pure emotion. She throws him out and changes the locks—even though she knows the law wouldn’t back her up in this.

Into her roiling personal situation comes a new case, a 17-year-old son of Jehovah’s Witnesses has contracted a severe leukemia that will kill him unless he has a blood transfusion, which his religion disallows. His parents refuse. He refuses, too, though he’s not quite yet at the age of majority, so within Fiona’s purview. The hospital says it can save him. To establish whether the teenager’s views are what has been purported or whether he has been unduly influenced by his parents and church elders, she visits him in his sick-bed, and from there the pavers from Good Intentions Roadworks take over.

The Children Act is relatively short for a novel today, about two-thirds the typical length—“a svelte novel as crisp and spotless as a priest’s collar” says Washington Post reviewer Ron Charles. He also seems to believe it’s about Jehovah’s Witnesses, but it’s larger than that. Its subject is intractable dilemmas, hierarchies of belief, and unintended consequences. It is the unnavigable intersection between law and blind faith. So there we have it: faith and justice, each blind to the other, fighting primacy, blood everywhere on the ground.

McEwan is a beautiful writer, with a compelling yet accessible style, even for the weighty issues explored here. This is a portion of his simple, vivid description of Adam Henry, the boy needing the transfusion: “It was a long thin face, ghoulishly pale, but beautiful, with crescents of bruised purple fading delicately to white under the eyes, and full lips that appeared purplish too in the intense light. The eyes themselves looked violet and were huge.”

McEwan gives us realistic characters grappling with significant problems that require them to probe every inch of their humanity and interrogate every motivation. Something to both think about and feel. And when I reached the end, I had to wonder whether he meant the last word of the book’s title as a noun, or in Adam Henry’s case, is it a verb?

Separating the Wheat

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chalk outline, body

(image: pixabay, creative commons license)

With more than a million new books a year being published in the United States, readers have to look harder than ever to find the book perfect for them. Book reviews work, if they’ve found a reviewer whose opinions they trust; best-seller lists reveal what other people are buying (or do they?); and online consumer recommendations can help, too. Even in my mystery/thriller niche, the number of new books is overwhelming. I need help!

Blogger Sandra Parshall recently reported on an excellent panel discussion involving three top book reviewers. The reviewers and samples of their reviews in the mystery genre are:

  • Maureen Corrigan, who reviews for NPR’s Fresh Air and is a contributor to Mystery and Suspense Writers; she recently reviewed Vu Tran’s Dragonfish, a crime drama she calls a noir vision of an “American gone rancid”
  • Dennis Drabelle, crime fiction editor at The Washington Post, who recently reviewed the “mesmerizing” Malcolm Mackay thriller trilogy featuring freelance Glasgow hit man Calum MacLean and
  • Bethanne Patrick, creator of twitter’s popular #FridayReads hashtag, who reviews for multiple venues. She recently reviewed Mary Kubica’s psychological thriller Pretty Baby for NPR.

Every week, these reviewers wade through hundreds of advance review copies of new books in search of gems, including those in the crime/mystery/thriller genre. They have a few groundrules that make it easier: no self-published books; look at those by well-known authors while keeping an eye out for new talent, such as Vu Tran, mentioned above, or “something unusual”; and look at the books from publishers with a good track record. Ultimately, it’s the quality of the writing that makes a book stand out, they said. (My decision rules for book reviews are described here and here.)

Parshall quoted Corrigan’s distaste for market-driven gimmicks—no “vampires living in Downton Abbey with dogs.” I’m guessing she didn’t review any of the vampire versions of Pride and Prejudice. Zombie ones, either.

Finally, they said best-seller lists are not a reliable guide to finding quality books. Marketing expert Tim Grahl, posting on Hugh Howey’s blog The Wayfinder last year, would agree. Grahl says, “I’ve become incredulous at the complete disaster that is the major best seller lists.” And he feelingly describes how the two biggest-impact lists—those of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—are created. Not how you think they are.

George Orwell was a frequent, but cranky, book reviewer, saying it was like “pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time.” Now, new legions of book reviewers are rising up to cope with the massive numbers. They’re the “consumers” whose reviews and recommendations we can read on Amazon and other book-buying sites, the social networks Goodreads and Library Thing, and others. While many consumer comments don’t rise above a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down, some are thorough and thoughtful. They’re updating the most popular strategy people use for selecting a particular book, the recommendation of a friend.

In addition, aggregator sites like Crime Fiction Lover, for which I am one of a dozen reviewers, have appeared. Similar specialty shops for reviews of romance, science fiction/fantasy, and other genres exist. And hundreds of websites like this one, that regularly review books of all types.

What are You reading?

Ricki and the Flash

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Meryl Streep, Ricki and the FlashShe was Julia Child. She was Margaret Thatcher. She was Mamma Mia. And now Meryl Streep is Ricki Rendazzo, aging, nearly bankrupt rock singer living uneasily with a big consequential choice she made along the way—career over family (trailer). Her band, The Flash, plays the modest Salt Well bar in Tarzana, California, but they rock it. We already knew Streep could sing, and for this film she spent six months learning how to play guitar, coached by Neil Young (video). Ricki’s lead guitarist Greg is played by Rick Springfield, and you can feel his longing to be more to her, if she’d let him.

Back home in Indiana, her ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline) is dealing with their daughter Julie, abandoned by her two-timing husband, now depressed, and suicidal. He calls Linda—Ricki is her stage name—to let her know, and she scrapes together enough money to fly back to see what she can do. Precious little, it appears—a classic case of too little, many years too late. Mother and daughter struggle to reconnect, and it isn’t easy or even certain. Julie is played beautifully by Streep’s real-life daughter, Mamie Gummer. (In profile, the two have exactly the same nose.)

Some excruciatingly wonderful scenes, including a fancy-restaurant “family dinner” with all three of Ricki’s kids, where accusations are the main course. Julie’s seething glare could burn holes in a flimsier construction than Ricki. The pain and even humor of the situation are so sharp, you know no matter who gets the check, they’ve already paid.

And, here’s something unexpected. The parents act like grown-ups. Pete, his second wife Maureen (Audra McDonald), even Ricki and Greg—show business types of whom not much is expected, perhaps—show what they’re made of when it really matters.

Director Jonathan Demme keeps the film moving with no unnecessary drag and made the great choice of putting lifelong musicians in the band, including Funkadelic keyboarder Bernie Worrell, bassist Rick Rosas, and drummer Joe Vitale. They performed all the movie’s songs live and with no overdubs—Springfield calls this brave of Streep, especially. Academy Award-winner Diablo Cody wrote the script.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 62%, audiences 55%. I thought audiences would be kinder to it than the critics. The big complaint seems to be the script is predictable, but since there are only what, six plots . . .? it may in retrospect be predictable, but I didn’t especially feel that while I was watching, and it was never that corollary of predictable, boring! As Glenn Kenny says in his mostly positive review (didn’t like the ending) for RogerEbert.com, “One of the nicer things about the movie is how it avoids overt clichés while still partaking of convention.”

****The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

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graduate

Rob Peace, Yale Graduation

By Jeff Hobbs, read by George Newbern
– This biography, which signals its key irony by the subtitle A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League, is an honest and heartfelt tribute to a dear friend. Rob’s many gifts—a brilliant mind, athletic talent, easy social skills, and powerful loyalty to his parents, family, and friends—cry out for a different life path, while the forecast conclusion hangs over the book like a shroud. Nearing the end, the reader wants to go more and more slowly to delay it. Forecast, but foreordained? Hobbs wrestles with this question throughout.

Rob graduated from Yale with a degree in the intellectually rigorous fields of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, and Jeff Hobbs was his roommate there for four years. But in addition to studying and working in a cancer research lab, Rob dealt marijuana. He did it mainly, it seems, to relieve his single mother—a nursing home food service employee—of some of her financial burdens. After graduation, he taught for a while, then lapsed into work as a baggage handler at Newark Airport because that job allowed him to fly free all over the world. He fell in love with Rio, visited Seoul, and kept up with a water polo teammate in Croatia. Now in his mid-20s, he continued to deal marijuana, even though the gang-infused streets of East Orange and Newark had become many times more dangerous than in the past.

Although Hobbs recorded the thoughts of so many friends and acquaintances Peace had during his post-college years, he cannot definitively answer the urgent question that so many of them asked Rob repeatedly and urgently, “What are you doing?” A question that is as much unanswered as, perhaps, unanswerable. They saw the growing danger and weren’t satisfied with his typical answer: “It’s all good.”

But it was not. When Rob was a boy his father went to prison for a pair of murders he most likely didn’t commit, and Rob took on the job of looking after his hard-working mother. She sacrificed mightily to keep him into private school, to see her dreams flower with his Yale education then burst when he just somehow couldn’t grab onto a life that would keep him moving forward.

Rob was the son of two entirely separate worlds—a New Jersey ghetto and a privileged Ivy League university. “That one man can contain such contradictions makes for an astonishing, tragic story,” said New York Times reviewer Anand Giridharadas, “but it becomes something more: an interrogation of our national creed of self-invention.” Try as we might, “there are origins in this country of ours that cannot be escaped,” he says, believing the most significant of which may be lack of an intact family.

Hobbs’s prose is unadorned. He’s writing about a friend, after all, and actor Newbern’s narration fits the text well. The clichés Giridharadas objected to in his review are probably not as glaring in the audio version as they would be on the page and, while the writing isn’t lyrical, it gets the job done, building an indelible portrait of so much good forever lost.

Deadly Ink: “Get Your Facts Straight”

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crime-scene-30112_640A panel at last weekend’s Deadly Ink 2015 conference represented a spectrum of views about the research lengths mystery writers go to. At the “as factual as possible” end of the spectrum was K.B. Inglee, a writer of historical mysteries who is also a history museum docent and reenactor (talk about living your research!), closely followed by Kim Kash, who seeks a realistic recreation of Ocean City, Maryland, where her fictitious characters and stories play and play out. Setting her mysteries there began when she wrote a tour guide for the city, a compilation of facts and contacts that has since served her well.

Tim Hall, who writes cozy-ish mysteries set on Long Island said his kind of story is so character-driven that what’s needed is enough research to make sure they remain internally consistent. No blue eyes on page 30 and brown eyes 100 pages later. Similarly, S.A. Solomon does enough research to ensure plausibility. A big gaffe makes readers start to doubt the whole story—a disaster for mystery.

Surprisingly, the one author of “alternative universe” mysteries, Roberta Rogow, said the science fiction audience is one of the most demanding. Any would-be sci-fi authors who hope they can “just make it up” soon learn otherwise. That pleasure is reserved for another genre: fantasy. And even there, devoted readers patrol for consistency.

A key benefit of research the panelists agreed is that it helps the writer avoid stereotypes, generalities, and clichés in their characters, places, and actions. When you know the exact particulars of something, you can describe it with greater exactitude. “I took the bus” becomes “I caught the packed bus from the Weekly Breeze office uptown near the Delaware border, down to DaVinci’s around Fourteenth Street. There was only standing room on the bus, it being dinner hour with everybody heading out for crabs, fries on the boardwalk, and happy-hour drinks.” (from Kim Kash’s Ocean City Cover-up).

Although Wikipedia can provide a quick overview of a topic for writers, it’s more useful in terms of pointing them in the right direction for further research. Hyperlocal resources are readily available online, though there’s no substitute for visiting the place being written about. Several panelists are devotees of “just talking to people.” While people’s time is valuable, especially that of professionals (cops, investigators, medical examiner staff), these writers have found that all kinds of people—most of whom seem to be would-be novelists themselves!—are delighted to share their knowledge.

Recent books by these Deadly Ink panelists:

  • K.B. Inglee – Her story “The Devil’s Quote” leads off a 2015 story collection And All Our Yesterdays—mystery and crime through the ages
  • Kim Kash – Her other Ocean City mystery is Ocean City Lowdown, and the book that started it all: Ocean City: A Guide to Maryland’s Seaside Resort
  • Tim Hall – He grew up in the Long Island area he writes about, but still has to keep up with the changes! Dead Stock was his first book
  • S.A. Solomon – Read her fine story “Live for Today,” published in New Jersey Noir, published by Akashic Books
  • Roberta Rogow – Her most recent series involves an alternative history of the Island of Manatas (Manhattan), volume 3 of which is Mischief in Manatas

*****Ghost Fleet

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navy ships, ghost fleet

America’s “ghost fleet” (photo: Ingrid Taylar, creative commons license)

By P. W. Singer and August Cole – This gripping thriller about what the next world war might look like has captured the attention of Washington policymakers and defense industry insiders alike. Singer is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank, and Cole is a former defense industry reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Unlike so many other speculative fiction outings, this one is based on technologies already plausibly “in the works,” and the authors provide 374 endnotes to backstop the action and interfere with readers’ ability to sleep peacefully at night. Ghost Fleet is a novel of the post-Snowden world, in which the techniques the U.S. National Security Agency used on others are turned back against the Americans.

The story begins at the International Space Station. Russia and China have declared war against the United States, and a U.S. Air Force Colonel, on a disastrously timed space-walk, becomes the unwitting point of the spear. Oblivious to the political developments taking place on the blue globe spinning below, he finds the ISS reentry hatches sealed against him. “Goodbye, my friend. I am truly sorry. It is orders,” says his Russian cosmonaut colleague.

It’s the initial action in a war fought not solely, but significantly, in cyberspace. Takeover of the ISS enables the analogous Chinese space station, Tiangong-3, to systematically knock out every communications satellite that U.S. armed forces depend on. It soon becomes apparent that not only the satellites are down, all local-area communications networks are compromised, because military suppliers have been using low-cost Chinese-made computer chips in their planes, ships, and communications equipment by the unidentifiable thousands, and these chips are insecure, tiny moles. Only the mothballed planes and ships destined for the scrapyard–the Ghost Fleet–are now safe: “The 707 passenger-jet derivatives did not have a modern chip anywhere, unlike the new KC-46s, which had turned out to be missile magnets like all the other Chinese-chipped gear.” This new top-to-bottom vulnerability of the military, which has become overly confident in the security of its communications systems, shows in brilliant and devastating relief.

This is a multiple point-of-view novel, with short scenes from many locations involving numerous protagonists, though most of the action takes place in the Pacific, San Francisco, and Hawaii, where “The Directorate”—comprising Chinese military, along with Russian elements under their command—has established an important outpost. At the story’s heart are the trials of the USS Zumwalt, an oddly designed, mothballed ship recalled into action after much of the modern U.S. fleet is destroyed—again at Pearl Harbor. The Zumwalt’s newly appointed captain, Jamie Simmons, is challenged militarily and by relations with his estranged father, retired chief petty officer Mike Simmons. Like the vintage tin cans—seagoing and aerial—rescued for the U.S. counterattack, retired military personnel are called back into service, and by some inevitable cosmic sense of humor or irony, Mike is assigned to the Zumwalt.

Other principal characters include: a Hawaiian woman working as a freelance assassin who is tracked by the omnipresent surveillance drones and a live Russian operative; a small team of surviving Marine insurgents harassing the Chinese forces on Oahu; a Russian who attempts to aid the Americans and ends up in a neuroscience laboratory nightmare; Sun-Tzu-spouting Admiral Wang, captain of the Chinese battleship Admiral Zheng He; and a wealthy Brit-turned-space-privateer. Other non-state players also emerge, providing a level of DIY unpredictability.

The epigrams for the several parts of the book come from Sun-Tzu’s advice to warriors, and the one for Part 3 is “All warfare is based on deception.” The levels of deception between the Chinese and Russian “allies,” between the antagonists, and arising from the inability to rely on secure communications is paranoia-inducing. Meanwhile, the roles of drones and robots escalate, which is great when they’re yours.

If you are a fan of techno-thrillers, like I am, this novel is the ultimate: fast-paced, high stakes, well-grounded, and, one may hope, consequential. International readers may be disappointed that the book is so US-centric—a casualty of “write what you know” or a realization that there’s already so much going on, we have to stop somewhere?! The book doesn’t come to a too-tidy conclusion, either, and that is also sadly realistic. The authors use it to explore in a vivid way what might happen and what we should be thinking about before it comes to pass.

Deadly Ink: Pros vs. Amateurs

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scissors, blood, editing

(photo: Guzmán Lozano, creative commons license)

The annual Deadly Ink mystery writers’ conference last weekend included an array of “howdunit” panels for authors to discuss their craft. The “pros versus amateurs” panel had a lively discussion of the choice of protagonist and the flaws their creators give them.

A professional (police detective, private investigator, FBI agent, Harry Bosch) can do many things and get information that an amateur (a victim’s family member, the nosy neighbor, Miss Marple) cannot—and vice-versa. News reporters are in a somewhat intermediary position; they can get more information and have access to more sources than an amateur, but they still don’t have access to everything and may have to rely on the good will of the professionals to feed them vital clues. In general, non-professional investigators are much more likely to break the law in obtaining information than police detectives, who are thinking ahead to building a prosecutable case. They don’t want their evidence thrown out of court because their methods were improper. Private investigators who stray from the law risk having their license yanked. Of course, it’s when they do stray that things get interesting!

The idea of the lone investigator is strong in fiction, if not in real life, but amateurs often need to cajole the help of someone “on the inside.” If that amateur is a woman, when the case comes down to a confrontation with the baddies, “she has to end up doing the heavy lifting,” said panel moderator Jane Cleland.

The five panelists well illustrated the potential range of mystery-solving sleuths. Cleland’s New Hampshire protagonist is antiques appraiser Josie Prescott, whose profession (in nine books so far) brings her into contact with some pretty high-priced goods—the series has been called “the Antiques Roadshow for mystery fans.” I picked up her Blood Rubies about a fake—or is it?—Faberge egg.

When the authors were asked for a single word to describe their protagonists, what resulted was an impressive number of synonyms for “stubborn.” Here’s what else they had to say about their principals.

R.G. Belsky – Belsky is a former managing editor of the New York Daily News and metropolitan editor of the New York Post. It’s a natural that his series—three books so far—features prickly, big-mouthed reporter Gil Malloy, whose overriding motive in any situation is to get the story. Belsky says what was important to him was to have a character who operates out of a strong moral base. The most recent book in this series—“a personal ride through the investigative process of journalism” is Shooting for the Stars, probing the cracks in the closed-case murder of a Hollywood actress.

Sheila York writes historical mysteries set in Hollywood’s post-World War II Golden Age, and her protagonist is screenwriter, now reduced to script-doctor Lauren Atwill. Researching her scripts has given Atwill a plausible opportunity to acquire specialized knowledge—lockpicking, for example—which, well, why have a skill if you don’t use it? In a city where gossip reigns, poor Lauren is acquiring a reputation for having bodies turn up wherever she goes. In No Broken Hearts, fourth in the series, events soon make her wonder if these rumors about her are true.

Tim Hall writes “new adult” fiction (no hard-core violence), humor-filled mysteries set on Long Island and featuring Bert Shambles, whose name, Hall explains, “says it all.” He has a past brush with the law that requires him to stay employed, but he’s a bit of a ditz, a laid-back twenty-three-year-old thrift shop employee whose motto might be “If at first you don’t succeed, why bother?” Unfortunately, in addition to his brilliant career, Shambles also has a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hall has two mysteries in this series. The most recent is Tie Died.

Annette Dashofy writes traditional mysteries whose main character, Zoe Chambers, is a female paramedic and deputy coroner in a rural Pennsylvania township where the main coroner takes the juicy cases and she deals with the leftovers. And yet . . . She teams up with the police chief when she needs a professional hand, but she’ll need a different kind of help to get over her biggest obstacle to advancement in her field: autopsies make her ill. The first in the series, Circle of Influence, was an Agatha Award nominee for Best First Novel; third and most recent is Bridges Burned, in which Zoe takes in the victims of an accidental fire as suspicions of murder flare up.

Kathryn Johnson is the author of two current series, including the contemporary romantic-

suspense series “Affairs of State,” whose third title, No Mercy, is coming soon. Her historical thrillers each feature one of Queen Victoria’s five daughters. The most recent is The Shadow Princess, about the oldest, Vicky. When her husband, briefly the emperor of Germany, dies, the novel has Vicky returning to London just as the Jack the Ripper terror grips the city. Crown Prince Eddy is a suspect, and she is determined to clear his name. The “princess” books are written under the pen name Mary Hart Perry. As protagonists, Victoria’s daughters can command quite a bit of assistance and are used to getting what they ask for; at the same time, their work is more difficult because they are so famous. (Writers also may be interested in Johnson’s latest book: The Extreme Novelist: The No-Time-To-Write Method for Drafting Your Novel in 8 Weeks.)