If the answer is "42," what's the question?
Books
‘Chicago Lightning:’ Hard-Boiled Historical Fiction
Max Allan Collins is probably best known for having written the graphic novel on which the movie The Road To Perdition was based. His newest book is about his Jewish-Irish private eye, Nathan Heller: Chicago Lightning, a collection of short stories covering a period of about twenty years.
Collins's trick with the Heller stories is to do them as historical fiction. Each mystery is based on an actual criminal case, only minimally fictionalized, and real-life persons are depicted in the narratives. . . .
Good Cop, Bad Cop: Crime Tales of Two Eras
To be sure, Ian Rankin, the leading figure in the so-called “Tartan Noir” movement, has been a powerful force in moving British detective fiction away from its cozy, genteel, village and country house gentry stereotype, but in his own day Freeman Wills Crofts did much the same thing, albeit more gently, decades earlier. Both series are well worth reading and discussing today—the two detectives share a defining quality, one that readers will find bracing in an era seen as rife with immorality and excessive concentration of power.
Rediscovering Economics as a Social Science
There may be an inverse relationship between the health of the economy and the quality of books published about economics. In the 1980s, for example, the US economy was booming yet bestseller lists brimmed with gloomy and embarrassing tracts predicting America’s decline. Today, the country struggles through the worst recession in decades, but a significant number of serious, thoughtful books on economic issues have reached a wide audience. This could be an example of necessity being the mother of invention. Sustained economic crises should prompt new thinking, particularly when they were generally unforeseen and have failed to respond to textbook solutions. The current financial crisis has generated several excellent books examining the causes and long-term implications of our current economic environment. More fortuitously, at least two recent books have looked deeper into economic methods and explore questions that economists have largely ignored for more than a century. One of these is Bourgeois Dignity, the second in a series of six volumes by Deidre McCloskey examining the causes of the Industrial Revolution. This topic may seem quaint and of limited relevance, but it’s easy to forget how significant this epoch was. Before the Industrial Revolution, living standards for most of humanity
Flummery of a Fine Sort: The Nero Wolfe Tales of Rex Stout
The Nero Wolfe detective story series of Rex Stout (1886-1975) is, deservedly, one of the most famous American contributions to the genre. Wolfe is a classic genius detective, modelled in part, perhaps, upon Mycroft Holmes, the brilliant, corpulent elder brother of Sherlock. He is a man of strong views and has decided ideas of the sort of life he wants to live. While often an insightful observer of human beings and not exactly a misanthrope, he, unlike Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple, for example, has little natural interest in people. But what a character, and what stories! . . .
Klavan’s ‘Agnes Mallory’ Will Break Your Heart
Back in 1985, the young author author Andrew Klavan had a novel published in England which didn't find a home in the U.S. This novel is Agnes Mallory, which is now, thankfully, available in a Kindle edition from Mysterious Press.
Once Harry Bernard was a little boy who dreamed of virtue and heroism. He met a little girl named Agnes, who shaped wonderful figures out of clay. He became her friend, and then they were torn apart by forces they could not understand. And when they came together at last, years later, he was on the run from the police and she was on the brink of tragic celebrity, and their reunion was a deadly collision of hopeless yearnings and unsatisfied needs.
A Devilishly Good Mystery-Thriller
I've been pleased, especially since I got my Kindle, to discover some writers who are lifting Christian fiction to a higher level. When the Devil Whistles qualifies for that kind of praise.
Rick Acker's novel centers on a young woman, Allie Whitman, who leads a sort of secret life, taking temporary jobs at corporations that do business with the government, nosing out fraud, and then filing lawsuits against them through a company of her own called Devil to Pay.
Author Rick Acker works for the California Department of Justice, and writes knowledgeably of the world of whistle-blowing. Whitman works closely with her lawyer, Connor Norman, who does the litigation while she stays anonymous. Each of them is attracted to the other, but any romance would spoil their profitable business.
Then Allie is caught out by an employer, a deep-sea salvage company. Instead of just firing her, they blackmail her into investigating another company, a business rival.
‘Hope and Change’ Is in the Grand Tradition of . . . John Stuart Mill?
John Stuart Mill might have given ammunition to those who would overturn tradition and "fundamentally transform" society.
Hemingway in Perspective
That Hemingway could be a cruel and callous man is well-documented, while several biographical works unconvincingly veer toward hagiographic. Seldom, however, do these works pierce the veil of celebrity and downright iconography of the public persona to reveal the foibles and positive attributes of the man who possessed a plenitude of both.
“The Unquiet Bones” Provides Comfortable Medieval Entertainment
If you’re mourning the end of Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael novels, you could do a lot worse than giving a try to Mel Starr’s series of medieval mysteries featuring Hugh de Singleton, Surgeon. Especially if you’re a Christian. The Unquiet Bones begins with the discovery (in a castle waste pit) of a human skeleton. Hugh de Singleton is called by the Baron, Lord Gilbert, to examine the bones and determine if they belong to one of two castle visitors who disappeared a few months before, a nobleman and his squire. Hugh soon realizes that these bones belong to a young woman. And nobody in the neighborhood is missing a young woman. Hugh, narrating his own story, explains that he is the younger, landless son of a minor nobleman, and studied to be a surgeon at Oxford and Paris (his Oxford mentor, John Wyclif, appears in a couple scenes). His fortunes in his profession were unremarkable until he sewed up a wound for Lord Gilbert, who was impressed enough to invite him to move to his own castle to serve his household and tenants. Hugh is all the more eager to do this as he has fallen in love with Lord
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