Review: Arrow of Fortune

Arrow of Fortune by Jacquelyn Benson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The world tour continues, with our characters off to India this time, the origin of a quarter of Constance's heritage.

The improvement in mechanics continues from book to book, which is great to see. Here, the main issue I noticed was that the author puts a comma after "of course" when the sentence is simply agreeing with a previous statement, which is not usual usage (MS Word will recommend it, but, as is so often the case, MS Word is wrong). Otherwise, it's pretty clean, though I did spot a few Americanisms, anachronisms and vocabulary errors. I had a pre-release version from Netgalley for review, so these minor issues may well be fixed for publication.

Even though I'd read the other books comparatively recently, I didn't remember their plots as well as I probably needed to in order to pick up on everything that was mentioned from the previous books. The characters themselves are strongly enough drawn that I remembered them, though.

The book wears its politics openly; the late-19th-century protagonists share common early-21st-century attitudes to race, imperialism, colonialism, homosexuality, and sexuality in general, while acknowledging that this sets them against the norm of their society.

There are two strong romance subplots, different from each other, one involving a woman who is dead set against the institution of marriage but wants to be with her beloved openly, and the other involving a couple who are in the process of discovering that they want to be a couple, despite their very disparate personalities. Throughout, there's a strong theme of how important it is to accept people as they truly are without asking them to change, which I'm not sure is a great idea in its very strongest form. Part of the point of opposites attracting, for me, is that they moderate each other towards more balance by learning from each other's strengths, and I didn't see that brought out explicitly, though it might be happening implicitly.

Anyway, this manages to be inspired by thrilling pulp novels while having a 21st-century consciousness, and mostly succeeds in walking the tightrope between those two. It's a well-done series, and I look forward to the next episode, which looks like it will occur in Korea.

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Review: The Miss Silver Mysteries Volume One: Grey Mask, The Case Is Closed, and Lonesome Road

The Miss Silver Mysteries Volume One: Grey Mask, The Case Is Closed, and Lonesome Road by Patricia Wentworth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked up this book because I'd read another Wentworth, The Fire Within , which isn't a mystery novel, although initially it looks like it's going to be one. I was impressed with the author's handling of the character relationships, and thought I might get something with a bit more depth than the average pulpy mystery of the early 20th century.

Well, the first book, Grey Mask, was a disappointment to me. It's one of those books which convey the impression that London is a small village with a population of about two dozen people, based on how frequently the characters cross paths by pure random chance, and there were no fewer than three Convenient Eavesdrops, my least favourite plot device. (view spoiler)[Also, two separate characters who are believed to be dead turn out not to be. (hide spoiler)]

There is a fraught relationship between a man and a woman, who used to be engaged but now are not; this seems to be the author's speciality. But the mystery/thriller aspects appear cribbed from books in which they're done better, such as The Black Star by Johnston McCulley (criminal conspiracy, led by a masked figure, ordinary people manipulated into being part of it, known by numbers) or Edgar Wallace's The Man Who Knew (unassuming detective who can find out anything about anyone - though "sleuthess" Miss Silver doesn't have any associates that we see evidence of, so she appears, implausibly, to be doing all her own legwork).

Like the "Man who Knew," unfortunately Miss Silver doesn't actually solve the mystery, either. The villain is self-identified (when the characters get too close to the secret, so that part is not without character agency), and foiled by complete chance. It's not in any way a "fair play" mystery; two separate characters have been moving behind the scenes, and end up just giving us exposition of what we couldn't have guessed and the detective didn't work out.

It also contains one of the most maddeningly silly young women I've ever seen depicted in print, though given that I try to avoid characters like that, I've probably missed a good many. She is supposed to be maddeningly silly, though, so no demerits to the author for that. There's also a highly intelligent woman who takes important action which saves her and her love interest, so that's something. But overall, I felt it was an author writing outside her genre, not doing a great job with the genre elements, and patching the plot together with coincidences and eavesdrops.

The second book in this collection, The Case is Closed, also relies on coincidence to a degree. I give an exemption for inciting incidents being coincidental, but the inciting incident is not the last time the heroine, Hilary (who has busted up with her fiancé, just like the heroine in the first book), has a chance meeting with the servant couple whose testimony clinched the conviction of her cousin's husband for murdering his uncle. It's like there's a gravitational well pulling them together in random places. Hilary is in those places investigating, but coincidence still plays a big role.

Hilary's definitely-no-longer-fiancé, Henry, is the one who engages Miss Silver, and keeps asking her to investigate further even though all his internal arguments are against doing so. The suspicion is that the servant couple was lying in their testimony, and that the imprisoned man's cousin, who inherited under a new will executed on the day of the uncle's death, somehow is involved, although he has an apparently rock-solid alibi four hundred miles from the murder.

It's a promising setup, and soon we have real danger for Hilary, and stronger grounds for suspicion, and Hilary and Henry are clearly back together even if she won't admit it. They have a kind of war-of-the-sexes thing going on, where each one thinks that if they don't stand strong, the other one will walk all over them, because he/she doesn't listen, and if they don't win, they'll lose. Pro tip from someone who's been married going on 27 years: this is a terrible way to run a relationship. Very much how a lot of relationships were conducted at the time, though, with New Women starting to challenge masculine dominance. Unfortunately, it's never truly resolved, though there are hints by the end that they may have both learned something.

The denouement is thrilling and suspenseful, and even though Henry does (as I predicted) burst in and save Hilary at the psychological moment, she does something brave and effective first, so I didn't mind so much. I'd worked out how the crime was done some considerable time before it was laid out by Miss Silver, but the process of getting to the resolution was still enjoyable.

With the third book, Lonesome Road, the author finally seems to have got a sense of Miss Silver. In the first two books, she's a dowdy-looking middle-aged spinster who knits (typically for her stereotype), writes things down carefully in exercise books, and implausibly knows things about people by no clearly articulated mechanism. She's an archetype combined with a plot device. In this book, she suddenly develops a personality, rather a tart-but-kindly one, and we get to see inside her head, not least by seeing what it is she's writing in those books.

A wealthy woman with a large collection of family hangers-on (cousins and the like, mostly), who stand to inherit money from her, is receiving death threats and murder attempts, and asks Miss Silver to come and investigate, so we get to see her on site and active rather than largely in her consulting room. Things quickly become suspenseful, and everyone's a potential suspect, and there's a young woman also (one of the cousins) who seems to be in trouble and foolishly won't confide in Miss Silver.

It's an unusual detective story in that it's not solving a murder, but an attempted murder, and trying to prevent an actual murder (or, as it turns out, two murders), and the police never become involved, because Miss Silver's client won't set them on her relatives, no matter how awful those relatives may be. Also, (view spoiler)[there's a Disney Villain Fall of sorts that makes it unnecessary to bring the murder attempts to the attention of the authorities. (hide spoiler)] I didn't spot the would-be murderer at all, though Miss Silver's explanation makes total sense of why she did.

There's a small thread of continuity running through the three books, in that in both books 2 and 3, the person seeking Miss Silver's help has heard about her through the main character in the previous book. I wonder how far into the 32-book series this was sustained? I will probably find out, because after an unpromising start, this turned into a series I definitely want to continue with. It's a fortunate chance that I picked up the three-in-one from my library, because if I'd only read the first one, I might not have continued. The second was much better, and the third really good. Averaging them out, I'm putting this whole collection in the Silver tier of my annual best-of list, though the first would have been Bronze at best, and the third is knocking on the door of Gold.

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Review: The Porcelain Mask: a detective story

The Porcelain Mask: a detective story by John Jay Chichester
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one's built from the ground up for melodrama, and there is plenty of that. Everyone runs around very dramatically regretting their life choices, and then a woman is shot.

Extensive plot summary coming; some of it could be considered spoilers, because it's not known right at the start, but I'll stop at the point of the murder, so that you have the setup for it.

A blended family. The father died some years previously, leaving his widow, Mrs. Gilmore; her daughter from a previous marriage, Joan Sheridan; and Kirklan Gilmore, his son from a previous marriage. They have a nice place in the country outside New York, but are not wealthy, just comfortably off.

Kirklan is a novelist, who has had some success with his first novel, in part thanks to Joan, who has given him some of his best material. In gratitude, he sends her on a trip for a month, and while she is away, meets and, an ill-considered week later, marries a woman named Helen, about whom he knows very little. Joan comes back to find that her stepbrother (who she's in love with) is married to someone she's never met, and that this interloper has insisted on moving into Joan's bedroom, the best room in the house. Joan is, understandably, furious.

Kirklan goes into New York to see his publisher, and the publisher, who used to employ Helen (which is how the couple met), swears he sees her going into a disreputable lodging-house. Kirklan dismisses this, but when he talks to her at home, she asks him for a lot of money and is evasive about why. What we know and he doesn't is that she had gone to see her no-good husband - to whom she is still legally married - because he's blackmailing her by threatening to reveal her bigamy. He's a criminal and a drunkard, and she wishes she'd never married him, but she did. She's not in love with Kirklan, but sees him as a safe haven - a haven that's now threatened.

By one of those coincidences that authors of this period used so freely, the illustrator for Kirklan's next book, a man he knows and considers a friend, comes to stay at the house so they can work together, and recognizes Helen as the woman responsible for his brother's death (we don't know how yet). Kirklan, already suspicious because of the earlier lies, notices their reaction to each other when they meet. When his friend won't tell him the story, Kirklan flies off the handle and attacks him.

The artist fights him off, and Kirklan goes off for a walk to calm down. He stumbles in after midnight, wakes the butler to let him in, and is with him having a drink when they hear a scream and then a shot upstairs. They run up to find Helen shot dead. Various clues point to murder, and it looks as if it could only be one of three people: harmless Mrs. Gilmore senior, Joan (who we know hates Helen, and who is found sobbing in her room, and whose scream the butler initially thought it was that he and Kirkland heard), and the artist (who we know, and the investigators soon find out, has reason to take revenge on Helen). What they don't know but we do is that Helen's no-good husband has located her, on the run from the police, and forced her to hide him upstairs. The gun is one he took from a police detective he assaulted in order to escape arrest, but it was in Helen's possession, not his, prior to the shooting.

So, at this point we have three equally plausible suspects. Let the investigation commence!

There are two investigators. One, the official police, is the sergeant whose gun was taken after he was hit over the head by Helen's not-legally-ex. His turning up is not a coincidence; he's pursuing a lead, and the fugitive, who has been traced to the area. He quickly becomes involved in the investigation, because the local constable is out of his depth, being more used to catching speeders than murderers.

The unofficial investigator is a reporter known as "Wiggly" Price, because his ears wiggle when he's in the grip of strong emotion. This is almost his only distinguishing feature, but it gets a lot of mentions. He isn't convinced by the most obvious initial explanation, nor by the next most obvious explanation, and keeps prying and pressing until he finally solves the case.

What he doesn't appear in any hurry to do, and what we in fact never see him do, is file a story, which is what he's supposedly there for. His status as a newspaper reporter is what gets him involved, but after that, he barely acts like one, instead acting like a detective. That (along with the overly heightened emotional drama) was almost enough to bring the rating down for me, but it's a twisty, clever plot with more red herrings than a Soviet trawler, so I'll leave it in the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list.

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Review: Falling Through Space: A Novella

Falling Through Space: A Novella by Michael L. Stevens
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Novellas fall into three categories. There are over-padded short stories, underdeveloped novels, and the occasional rare story that is best told at novella length. I think, on the whole, this is an underdeveloped novel.

Perhaps this is why I couldn't figure out, in at least one scene, what was actually going on, and why I felt that the characters didn't behave like real people on occasion. An alien ship turns up randomly in the solar system, set up for habitation by humans (or, at least, human-sized beings who thrive in an Earth-like atmosphere), staffed by sentient robots, capable of bending the laws of physics to teleport itself and other things/people and decide where it "falls" towards, meaning that it operates without fuel. A bunch of scientists come on board, excited to study... the solar system? Not the ship, its origins, its history, its physics, its robots - about the workings of all of which they show remarkably little curiosity?

It reminded me of Gene Wolfe, which is not a compliment coming from me - not because it had finely-worked prose, because it didn't, but for the reasons I just gave: I sometimes couldn't understand what was going on, or why people were acting the way they were.

The dialog was stiff at times, and overly simplistic. In terms of copy editing, the main fault (in the pre-publication version I had from Netgalley, so it may get fixed before publication) was the frequent occurrence of "let's eat Grandma" - missing comma before a term of address. This is despite the author having a degree in English literature, though in my experience people with English degrees often have much worse mechanics than this. The basic rules of prose writing are not something that's usually taught in English classes at universities, sadly.

What I really disliked, though, is a spoiler. (view spoiler)[The earth is destroyed at the end. (hide spoiler)] There was no signal that it was that kind of book, and if I'd known that it was, I wouldn't have picked it up.

Not a success for me.

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Review: The Luck of the Bodkins

The Luck of the Bodkins by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's hard not to be put into a good mood when reading about the small (but, to them, vital) vicissitudes of Wodehouse's characters. This is classic Wodehouse: multiple couples, who want to marry but can't, for the usual three reasons: 1. Money; 2. Parental disapproval; 3. Misunderstandings between them which mean It's All Off.

Honestly, if I was Monty Bodkin and engaged to the jealous, suspicious, lacking-in-understanding, easily-offended Gertrude Butterwick, and she broke it off (as she does multiple times), I'd consider myself to have had a lucky escape. But he has his heart set on this tough, sturdy hockey-playing beasel, and is willing to go to great lengths, including splashing considerable cash from his fortunately vast stores, to have her end up as his wife.

As soon as we meet Ivor Llewellyn, the motion-picture magnate (older, richer, not particularly sympathetic), we experienced Wodehouse readers know that this is the poor sap who will end up funding the down-on-their-luck young fellows - in this case, the Tennyson brothers, Ambrose and Ronnie - to marry their chosen mates. We also suspect that the resolution will have a great deal to do with his wife's requirement that he smuggle her new pearl necklace through US Customs without paying duty on it, something that would be cheaper than what he eventually ends up doing rather than defy his wife.

A brown plush Mickey Mouse plays the role of Maguffin, there's a random pet alligator belonging to a film star (whose publicist came up with the idea to get her more press coverage), and a talkative cabin steward on the transatlantic liner where most of the book's action takes place is constantly sticking his oar in and providing everything from the equivalent of Shakespeare's "rude mechanicals" scenes to further complications in an already complicated plot, often simultaneously.

The hero, Monty, remarks several times that there are wheels within wheels, and while this is a biblical expression from the prophet Ezekiel, it's also a good description of the book if you think of the plot as being like a highly sophisticated watch with a lot of moving parts that all fit together closely and drive each other. It's a kind of plotting Wodehouse excelled at, all lubricated by a wonderful sense of absurdity and sparkling dialog and descriptions, often drawn from classic English literature.

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Review: The Brick Moon and Other Stories

The Brick Moon and Other Stories by Edward Everett Hale
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A collection of interesting and unusual short works.

The title story, "The Brick Moon", from 1869, is the first appearance in fiction of the idea of an artificial satellite, in this case for ships to use as a navigation reference. I'm reasonably sure the proposal, even if the launch had gone as planned, would not have worked, because the satellites wouldn't remain on the north-south line that they were launched on; the earth would turn underneath them, and so, given that the proposal is to launch multiple satellites so that there's always one visible (as is done today with GPS), sailors would have needed a way to distinguish which brick moon they were looking at if they wanted to work out their longitude.

But the story isn't really about that. It's about, first, the coming together of the plan by a group of old college chums with various abilities to contribute, including the one who can persuade audiences without seeming to be eloquent, who helps them raise the necessary funds. Secondly, it's about the building of the first moon - out of brick, as the title suggests - and the flywheels to launch it. And finally, it's about what happens when it's launched accidentally with people in it, since a number of the members of the group and their families are living there temporarily because the brick spheres that make up the larger sphere are quite comfortable. They get flung into space, improbably not turned into jam by the sudden acceleration (which doesn't even wake them up, even more improbably, let alone fling disconnected bricks over a wide area, which is what would probably happen in reality), improbably manage to hold onto their atmosphere through the gravity of their tiny moon, improbably discover that their corn and chickens are evolving into other useful crops and livestock for an unspecified reason - though the several children later born there seem to be normal, as far as is mentioned - and, perhaps most improbably of all, form a utopian society and don't wish to return. It's a historical curiosity rather than a credible piece of science fiction, in other words, but it's pleasantly told for all that.

The author's narrative style is capable of pulling off some unpromising subjects, in fact, and making them engaging. The next story is "Crusoe in New York"; a young carpenter named Robinson Crusoe, asked to fence in a vacant lot, figures out that he could hide a cottage there for himself and his mother, and builds one, proceeding to squat there for 12 years. It brings in a number of elements of the original Crusoe story, but transformed: a footprint in the dirt, "savages" (rough men of New York), and a young Swedish woman named Frida instead of Friday were the ones I spotted, but I'm sure if I had read the original book and not just absorbed bits of it by cultural osmosis I'd have seen some more. The author's note indicates that whole passages are lifted verbatim from Defoe. It's odd that a man so opposed to slavery apparently loved Robinson Crusoe, but people are complicated.

"Bread on the Waters" is a Christmas story, and so of course sentimental, but in a way I personally found moving. An honest and blameless civil servant has to prove that he didn't embezzle some money he disbursed during the Civil War, but the receipts have gone missing, and his family and friends search for them frantically. As the title implies, an old kindness eventually comes back to him.

"The Lost Palace" is a tall tale of sorts, about a group of railwaymen who calculate that they can jump a gorge instead of going the long way round. The "palace" of the title is a Pullman "palace car" or luxury sleeper carriage.

"99 Linwood Street" is another Christmas story, in which multiple kind people come together to help a young Irish immigrant find her brother at the address of the title, which is harder than it sounds when there are multiple Linwood Streets and nearly 100 people with the same name as him. I was moved by this one also.

"Ideals" reuses some characters from "The Brick Moon" and refers briefly to it, but is mainly about four couples, close friends, who get fed up with the weather and the political situation where they live in the US and decide to try living in Mexico. There's a gentle twist at the end.

"One Cent" confused me a bit. The main character drops the change out of his pocket in the dark and a one-cent piece rolls under a table, unbeknown to him. He later gets roughly ejected from a streetcar as a bum because he's a cent short of the fare. While this is happening, letters are on the way to him honouring him for his contributions to his field (ceramics manufacture) and offering him large sums of money. He seems to think that there's a lesson there somewhere, but I couldn't find it; the two things had no causal connection. Perhaps the lesson is that you can't judge someone because they don't happen to have money at the time? It's told in an odd mix of narrative and play format.

"Thanksgiving at the Polls" is the story of a newspaper reporter who decides to save money, and time walking to work, by temporarily living in a street polling booth put up for upcoming elections. He takes in some Jewish refugees from Russia to live there with him (the tone is the opposite of antisemitic, which is a nice change from a lot of older books), and through various charitable institutions and gifts from employers they end up with more food than they need for the Thanksgiving holiday and go looking for people to share it with. There's a theme of "we could look after the poor better, all year round" running through the whole story.

"The Survivor's Story" is clearly inspired by Chaucer; four couples (this seems to be a thing with Hale, and I assume reflects his actual friend circle) come together at Christmas away from home and tell each other stories. There's an odd ending, which suggests he didn't know how to end it properly, and is out of keeping with the general tone.

In what is, strictly speaking, original research, Hale's Wikipedia article notes (at time of review) "Hale was active in raising the tone of American life for half a century." I can well believe it. His stories are humane, kindly and warm - although people do die in them for no particular reason sometimes - and their manner is more important than their matter. They remind me of Mark Twain in their style, although without Twain's occasional cynicism and misanthropy.

Recommended, and I would read more Hale.

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Review: No Stress Space Express: A Cozy, Low-Stakes, Slice-of-Life Adventure

No Stress Space Express: A Cozy, Low-Stakes, Slice-of-Life Adventure by Jack Bodett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This isn't really SF. It's a gentle comedy with some SF set dressing for atmosphere. Kind of what you'd get if Douglas Adams had grown up in the southern US instead of England, only less so. Like its main character, it's kind of dumb, but so amiable that you don't care too much.

Two truckers break down by the side of the highway, and get accidentally abducted by aliens, who have ordered the load of whoopee cushions they are hauling in order to use them in a religious ceremony. On the alien ship, they meet a hot green Martian woman who was the victim of a similar misunderstanding, and ally with her to start a repair business for alien tech, which somehow they're able to figure out. Later on, another Martian woman joins the group.

The worldbuilding is often rudimentary; space is like the 21st-century USA a lot of the time, except when it's conforming to a well-worn sci-fi trope. Many people speak a language that's independently evolved on multiple planets that's almost indistinguishable from contemporary English except for a couple of amusing quirks, there's coffee, and it's served at a diner, where the robot waitress is very much like a stereotypical southern US diner waitress. Spaceship engines are also almost indistinguishable from truck engines; they have liquid fuel in lines which can be bled without special precautions, you can idle them, and they roar. There's a bit at the beginning where the alien written language (or, at least, an alien written language) is incomprehensible, but later on, the alphabets for the English-equivalent languages have apparently evolved to be the same as ours as well, because Rusty, the narrator, has no issues reading a manual for a spaceship engine. (view spoiler)[The wedding conforms absolutely 100% to what a contemporary US wedding would be like, and the Martian women expect it to be exactly that way, never inserting any specifically Martian customs, until near the end the author seems to finally remember there should be some cultural differences and has three Earth wedding customs be unfamiliar to the aliens. (hide spoiler)]

Funnily enough, I recently read an early work of SF ( A Honeymoon in Space by George Chetwynd Griffith) in which there was also a Martian who spoke a language that had evolved to be exactly like English, only Griffith, being Griffith, managed to make it racist, or at least chauvinist; English, being the best language (as proved by how many people on Earth had adopted it), would naturally be the language that a hyperrational and optimised society would evolve, he says.

Having studied the process by which English came into being, I can tell you that it couldn't happen twice - once was unlikely enough (and if a hyperrational society evolved an optimised language, English would definitely not be it). But in this book, it's just a workaround to remove issues of communication between the characters, and it's in the context of a humourous setting that doesn't take its worldbuilding remotely seriously, so I'll let it slide with just a healthy dose of side-eye. To be fair, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, everyone in space speaks English and nobody even remarks on it.

The editing is surprisingly good for this kind of book. Yes, there are too many hyphens (between an adjective and its noun sometimes, and in numbers that aren't between 21 and 99), and sometimes missing hyphens where only the first two words of a three-word adjectival phrase are hyphenated. Yes, there are a few too many commas between adjectives, but there are very few authors, even good ones, who don't make that mistake. It needs another scan for missing punctuation, like closing quotation marks. Otherwise, it's much cleaner than I'm used to. By sticking to his own vocabulary, the author has managed not to commit any vocab errors, for example, apart from "hear, hear" being spelled "here, here."

Apart from the almost aggressively undercooked worldbuilding, its big fault, from my point of view, is that it has no chapters - or rather, it has just one long chapter which rolls on from incident to incident without pausing. This isn't ideal when you don't have time to read it all in one sitting. It does finish up with some significant events that change the situation of the characters, ready for the next book in the series, so it isn't one of those serial stories that just arbitrarily stops at a word count.

The humour lies mostly in folksy imagery ("tugged in more directions than a dog walker at a squirrel convention") and good-natured banter. It manages to be funny without trying too hard, which is always a risk in humourous writing. All the aliens the characters meet are nice and helpful and generous, and it's exactly what the subtitle says it is: a cozy, low-stakes slice-of-life adventure (the subtitle also has a comma it doesn't require). It's a pleasant read, and I wouldn't mind reading more in the series, though it has enough faults that I wouldn't pay full price for them. It's pleasant, but the building of the world is so low-effort that it reduces my desire to spend time there.

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