Review: Sweet Danger

Sweet Danger by Margery Allingham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

More of a thriller than a mystery. (My working definition: in a mystery, the protagonists are trying to solve a crime that's already happened, while in a thriller, they're trying to prevent a crime from happening or otherwise battling criminal opposition.) In this case, it's a treasure hunt, racing against a powerful and unscrupulous enemy. The complicated and somewhat unlikely backstory is that there's a very small Balkan country that was granted to an English earl in the Middle Ages, and then bought by one of his descendants from Metternich when the map of Europe was being redrawn after the Napoleonic Wars, and now an earthquake has opened it up to the sea and also revealed that there is oil there - meaning it could become a refueling point for the British Navy. But the line of earls has died out - or has it? There's a family that claims to be the legitimate descendants of the last earl, but they can't prove that their ancestress was married to him, and they also need to find three items to make their claim - a crown, the medieval grant, and the Metternich receipt - which have been hidden for decades, nobody knows where.

It's packed full of eccentric English characters, from the pub owner who keeps telling everyone that he's honest and the wacky local doctor to, of course, Campion himself and his manservant Lugg. The family with the claim to the earldom and its associated tiny kingdom features a gamine young woman (not quite 18) who is running the local mill, but makes most of her income from running a dynamo to charge the batteries for people's wireless sets. It's a backwater rural village with no phone and no mains power.

On the other hand, there are some bland characters too, notably Campion's three assistants, barely distinguishable upper-class chaps who could step straight into the Drones Club and no questions asked. The miller's older sister is also quite bland and generic, and while her younger brother, the putative earl, does have some distinguishing characteristics, he isn't one of the great eccentrics either.

Campion shines throughout, manipulating events, anticipating problems, hatching complicated schemes and pulling off daring feats when things go wrong. His pose of upper-class near-idiocy fools almost nobody. The villain is appropriately sinister, an unscrupulous businessman who's used to having his own way, with plenty of loyal minions to do his bidding. The plot zips along, and the action is, as always from this author, well described and original. It's a fun ride, and I was happy to ignore the unlikely elements and be carried along by the excellent writing.

The Vintage Digital ebook edition is not the worst edition I've seen of a classic novel, but it does have a good few scan errors that have gone uncorrected, including a lot of commas missing or inserted and several misreadings, and I don't recommend it.

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Review: Big Foot

Big Foot by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not one of the great Wallace books in the end, because of a couple of cheats, but enjoyable for most of its length.

One of the big cheats/coincidences is the astonishingly mobile tramp with mental issues who manages to move by unexplained means, and for largely unexplained reasons, between the three main locations (central London, a coastal town, and a rural suburb of London), apparently solely so that he can play a key role in the plot. He also has a coincidental connection to another character.

There's a massive red herring which had me completely fooled, not least because there's at least one scene where someone tells someone else something that, given the final resolution, they ought not to have told him. (view spoiler)[The police sergeant lies to his boss about another character's alibi, which is in accordance with the red herring (that the sergeant appears to be the villain) but not the resolution (that the boss was running him the whole time to fool the criminals into thinking the sergeant was bent). (hide spoiler)]

There's the usual side romance, between a lawyer and the secretary of the man who has the neighbouring office; it's nothing special.

Still, Superintendent Minter (known to everyone as "Sooper") is a fun character, with his pose of anti-intellectualism covering a clever and insightful mind - a bit like Colombo in a way, pretending to be "just a plain man" while outmaneuvering someone who thinks they're his social and intellectual superior. His disreputable motorcycle is also a bit like Colombo's car, and like his later American counterpart he dresses like a scarecrow. He appeared in at least one other Wallace book, but unfortunately my library doesn't have it and it isn't on Project Gutenberg either.

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Review: The Early Worm

The Early Worm by Robert Benchley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Absurdist humour, which I found oddly readable for no reason I could put my finger on. Very much embedded in its time (1927), with a lot of references to contemporary people who I had to look up on Wikipedia, because in the ensuing 100 years they've dropped out of the popular consciousness.

Several of the pieces form a series, originally published in Life magazine, in which a fictionalised version of the author leads an expedition, supposedly sponsored by Life, to the North Pole by bicycle. This was the time of Byrd and Peary, and the North Pole was topical. They end up making it as far as upstate New York.

A surprisingly pleasant distraction for a quiet afternoon, but no classic.

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Review: Cream of the Jug: An Anthology of Humorous Stories

Cream of the Jug: An Anthology of Humorous Stories by Grant Martin Overton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As even the editor admits in his introduction, this is a mixed bag. Some stories are by well-known authors still known today like P.G. Wodehouse or F. Scott Fitzgerald, others by authors well known at the time but now obscure, and a couple by authors who weren't even that well known when the book came out. As in any anthology, I enjoyed some more than others.

The Wodehouse I'd read in another collection somewhere. It's the Earl of Emsworth competing against Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe in the agricultural show, this time with a giant pumpkin - before the days of the pig Empress of Blandings, and indeed before Parsloe lived at Matchingham Hall. There's not a lot of protagonism on display from Lord Emsworth, who's the recipient of a good amount of luck in order for everything to work out for him, and it's not a top-flight Blandings story; nobody even goes to Blandings under a false name.

A lot of the stories have soft endings, and several of them rely on dialect (black dialect in one, Jewish dialect in another) for some, although by no means all, of their humour. The "negro" story is, at least, about a black film company from the US South shooting in Algeria, so it's not a stereotypical situation, and would still work if you took the dialect out or, for that matter, if you told it about white people. There's a third dialect story, too, told by a New York blue-collar boxer. That was one of the ways humour was done 100 years ago (think about Damon Runyon). But in all three cases, the situations provide a lot of the humour as well, and the dialect is just spice.

Overall, it's the definition of three stars for me: good enough to recommend, with some caveats.

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Review: The Feywild Job

The Feywild Job by C.L. Polk
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This isn't just better than most licensed fiction; it's better than most fiction I come across.

The thing with licensed fiction is that it's often just officially sanctioned fanfic, and while there is some excellent fanfic here and there, it's not common. Usually, you're going to see a better result from an author who has come up with an original world, situation, and characters, because if they can do that, they're probably talented enough to also tell a good story. (Lots of exceptions in all directions, of course, but that's the way to bet.)

But the thing with D&D licensed fiction is that, while the author is handed a detailed and complex world, they do generally come up with an original situation and characters, and that's what this book is.

A further advantage is that modern D&D is built for creating storytelling potential. Take the idea of a warlock. Here's someone who has made a deal with a powerful otherworldly being in order to get power for themselves. That's just bristling with possible stories. Firstly, it's a relationship that involves a power differential, so you know there's going to be some exploitation happening. Secondly, the warlock has to have had a reason they wanted that power and were prepared to trade for it; what part of them is broken that caused that to be true, and how will that continue to play out? And thirdly, they're now more powerful than the ordinary people around them; how are they going to abuse that?

The central character of this novel (and it deserves to be called a novel) is a warlock, Saeldian, who serves an archfey patron and has made a career out of con games. When Saeldian's old partner, the bard Kell, is forced into doing another job with Saeldian - who left Kell after their last big score in circumstances that looked like a horrible betrayal - we have motivated protagonists in a dynamic situation, and that's always an excellent story engine.

Alongside Saeldian and Kell we have the rogue Jubilee, who's Saeldian's new partner, and the druid Lorzok, who's Kell's new partner. Jubilee needs money to help her parents, former adventurers who have been "gifted" a dilapidated manor; Lorzok is seeking a place where he belongs. They're tasked with a heist, and told that the job is reclaiming a stolen gem with minor magical powers from someone who has bought it from a thief without knowing its provenance, and returning it to its rightful owner in the Feywild without them finding out.

The heist is tricky, but not, perhaps, as tricky as it ought to be; they're given no time to prepare, yet manage to pull off something that ought to be impossible. This eventually turns out to be down to complex machinations.

Along the way, though, the true story unfolds: the relationship between Kell and Saeldian. Is it retrievable? Can they ever be honest with one another? What really caused Saeldian to leave ten years ago? And this is where the book really shines. There's a gradual but completely believable unfolding of the truth and progression of the relationship, and it flows naturally out of the specifics of how the world works, which I always appreciate in a speculative fiction work.

The rich culture of the Forgotten Realms forms a great backdrop to the early part of the book, and the wonderful and terrifying, ever-shifting Feywild is an equally effective setting for the later part. The author does an excellent job of evoking these settings without ever making them the focus; that stays firmly on the characters and their relationships, plus the twisty and surprising plot. Also, you don't need to be familiar with these settings, or with D&D in general, in order to understand what's going on.

I knew C.L. Polk was a good writer, because I'd read The Midnight Bargain and rated it five stars. This book only confirms my opinion. Personally, I would use the past perfect tense more often than it's used here (that's a general trend I've noticed in the books I read), but otherwise I have little to complain of in the copy editing either.

Strongly recommended.

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Review: Entwined Dimensions A Metaphysical Cozy Portal Fantasy with Kiwi Humor: Book 1 of the Eura Trilogy

Entwined Dimensions A Metaphysical Cozy Portal Fantasy with Kiwi Humor: Book 1 of the Eura Trilogy by Ariel Grace
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The point of this book (I think) is that love is more important than tidiness, which I agree with, incidentally. It certainly backs up this content with its form.

If ADHD was a book, this would be that book. The prose is all over the place, rich with imagery that frequently doesn't make much, or any, sense ("a belch of fire blurred up like an alibi"), or even says the opposite of what it is trying to say. ("Zipping along like rush hour traffic on an Auckland motorway" - so, extremely slowly?) It's more often correctly punctuated than not, but the punctuation (and grammar) can also get a bit random at times, and someone needs at absolute minimum to run a spell check before publication. (I had a pre-release copy for review via Netgalley.)

It's set in New Zealand, but frequently says things that are true in the USA but not really in New Zealand (like healthcare being primarily about profit), or that are otherwise coded American (an apartment on 3rd Street - in a town, Kaitaia, which has no 3rd/Third Street). The NZ geography feels a little off all over. It's several times implied that Kaitaia is closer to the sea than is in fact the case (it's several km away). The trip from Kaitaia to Wellington, nearly 1000km, takes place in the break between two paragraphs. Two characters walk (even though they're capable of flying) from the ferry terminal at Blenheim to Motueka, a distance of over 160km/100 miles in a direct line, entirely through forest - which would require you to walk not in a direct line - in what seems to be a few hours.

There is some dimension-hopping going on, so perhaps that's part of the explanation. But things being in a different dimension or timeline doesn't seem to prevent them being findable or usable, nor does it interfere with cell service.

There are multiple first-person viewpoint characters, and since their names are not given at the chapter headers, it sometimes takes a few paragraphs to figure out whose head we're in. Sometimes, when we're in the POV of the guy from the fae realm, he uses expressions and imagery that comes from the human world. (Though there is some kind of connection he has to the human world, I honestly lost track of what it was exactly.) Several characters, from the human and fae worlds, speak in NZ slang, but that also sometimes feels slightly off, like it's being used by someone who's heard it but doesn't speak it, and there are Americanisms like "elementary school" instead of "primary school" that make me suspect the author is a transplanted American. There's a mention of one NZ bird and a couple of NZ trees, but the most frequently mentioned birds are hummingbirds (which supposedly can carry you across to the fae realm if you're small enough) and crows (which can talk, and are convenient helpers a couple of times), and neither of those are found in NZ.

One of the characters is ostensibly a scientist as her day job, but we never see her actually working at this job, and she doesn't seem to need to tell anyone there that she's going to disappear from it indefinitely to deal with the plot - something I call a "superhero job". Her being a scientist is presumably how she manages to invent a badly-sciencebabbled device which is supposed to make her capable of getting to the fae realm, but actually does something completely different that kicks off the whole plot, though it's really more of a series of episodes than a plot. This is almost the last proactive thing she does, certainly the last thing she does without a whole lot of help, but she's apparently the Chosen One and keeps getting commended for doing so well, even though, every time she faces the slightest difficulty, a new character will turn up suddenly (the word "suddenly" appears 20 times) to help or rescue her, or to tell her the power was in her all along, or she'll remember a completely unforeshadowed useful thing she has or knows about that solves the problem.

That was one of my biggest problems with the book: it has almost no conflict that lasts for more than a single scene, and solving cosmic problems that have been in existence for an inconsistent number of years is always super easy, barely an inconvenience. The antagonists are intergalactic bureaucrats that don't trust people to love and think that rules are more important, and when they were referred to as "auditors" at one point I immediately thought of Terry Pratchett's Auditors, those faceless, nameless, unindividualized figures that think life is a mistake. These bureaucrats are not as scary as that, though.

The other big problem I had is that the problem and its solutions are so abstractly described with such a wealth of paradoxical imagery that I found it extremely difficult to follow what was going on, not helped by the bouncing around between characters. It also doesn't help that concrete things are seldom described much, including the NZ landscape, which I think was a missed opportunity. And the word "somehow" is doing some heavy lifting at a couple of points.

It's extremely messy, very metaphysical, cozy only if by cozy you mean "almost everyone is nice," a portal fantasy for sure, and with a small amount of Kiwiness that feels a bit off-brand and some extremely mild humour. I finished it largely because I wanted to see whether the author pulled it all together in some way towards the end, but for me, that didn't really happen.

I've started being harsher with my star ratings this year, so this one gets two stars, meaning that while it has some strengths and isn't a complete disaster, it has enough issues (from my perspective) that it doesn't get onto my annual recommendation list. I don't think I was the right audience for it, and if you are, you should ignore my opinion and go ahead and enjoy it.

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Review: The Daughter of Time

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Definitely unusual. Tey's detective, laid up in hospital after being injured in pursuit of a suspect, gets interested in history, and applies his police methods to the (then) 400-year-old mystery of what happened to the Princes in the Tower, the two young sons of Edward IV. Did their uncle Richard III have them murdered, as the Tudors and their sponsored authors claimed and as history books have taught ever since, or was that a complete frame-up?

The case comes across as compelling, though apparently Tey left a few things out, and it's not as cut-and-dried as she paints it. Historians certainly object to her approach, perhaps partly because she has some harsh words for historians who draw conclusions completely at odds with the facts they present. She touches on other historical rewrites along the way, again not always completely accurately. For example, she mentions the riots at Tonypandy in Wales in 1910, and the detective and his historical researcher adopt "Tonypandy" as a shorthand for an exaggerated story that's widely believed - in this case, that troops fired on the rioters; but she elides a few of the details, including the fact that one person did die in the riots (though whether as a result of police action or not has never been definitively settled).

Still, while it's possible to quibble over details, this book takes the detective story to a new and unusual place, and manages to make an interesting novel out of a man in a hospital bed reading books and talking to a young researcher about events of four centuries previously, which itself is no mean feat. I found it very educational about a time in English history I was only passingly familiar with, the end and aftermath of the Wars of the Roses, and it also has some things to say about how history is written by the victors and/or the popular imagination, and the difference between what people say happened and what the day-to-day records of ordinary actions show.

Setting aside whether or not its conclusions are as justified as they're made to seem, or whether Tey herself is committing Tonypandy, it's a masterful piece of writing that deserves five stars just for the degree of difficulty, and I also found it entertaining.

Sadly, the HarperCollins ebook edition belies its own claim that they "uphold the highest standards of ebook production" with numerous missing punctuation marks, the obvious result of their usual lack of attention to detail and lack of editorial effort. This book deserves better.

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