Review: The Law of Falling Bodies

 The Law of Falling Bodies is like cooking a souffle while doing a high wire act.
There’s no way it’s going to work. But what if it does? I’m almost tempted to leave my review it at that, but I’ll go further, at the risk of a few mini-spoilers. It does something I normally despise: it turns a murder story into an espionage story. With Nazis.

But: the author pulls it off, largely through the agency of his main character, a thoroughly grounded, down-to-earth, self-deprecating, modest graduate student in physics who is the only person who could ever solve the many mysteries presented to him, in part because he and his antagonist go together like yin and yang.

It’s a spy novel which may also qualify as a cozy mystery. It includes an alluring local cop and an asshole FBI agent who may be allies or enemies. Through it all, it’s strangely believable. This is an overlooked gem. Pick it up now.

Review: Go Find Daddy

Modern society is a minefield, and was even before Covid-19. But there was a lot of discussion at the height of the pandemic as to how writers should handle such an event. Ignore it?—or plunge into it? Steve Goble elects to skip it, but in doing so he (intentionally) shines a light on the aftermath, and what it means to us going forward. The waning of trust—in institutions, in each other seems to have accelerated to dangerous new levels. A lot of readers were waiting to see how writers would handle Covid and the post-Covid arena. If Go Find Daddy, Steve Goble’s third in his Ed Runyon series is any example, I would say—honestly, straightforwardly, levelly. Which happens to describe his hero, Ed.

Ed has left the force, gotten over (largely) his anger issues, and is trying to make it work as a private detective in small-town Ohio. He’s a no-nonsense kind of guy. As he says, “accountants get head-aches from staring at a screen store clerks get head-aches from dealing with assholes all day, I get shot at. No big deal.”

     But he’s about to go down the rabbit hole. A cop’s been killed. The main suspect—the only suspect as far as the police are concerned—is a right-wing podcaster who’s made his hatred for cops his brand (thus helping to diminish further our faith in authority), and who’s vanished without leaving a clue, even to his wife and child.  Every cop in three states is out for his blood. And now a pro-cop entity online has offered a million dollars for him—dead. No one knows whether the offer is real, whether the organization is real, or a hoax—but it’s drawn every bounty-hunter to the chase.

     All of which would have nothing to do with Ed—until he takes on a mission for the fugitive’s wife—to get a vital message to him. If you know Ed, you’ll know why it’s a job he can’t refuse (involving the fugitive’s little daughter) even though he’s going up against the fugitive’s friends and enemies both, all of whom are trigger-happy, none of whom trust each other or can be trusted. Yes. Ed Runyon gets shot at—a lot.

      But Ed is a person who can be trusted, a person who holds his integrity dear, a person who can be believed, a doggedly decent man—and that’s the key to the job he’s taken on, and it’s what makes him a hero for this post-Covid age. 

      This is the third book in the Ed Runyon series. Jump on the bandwagon.

Review: The Lost Van Gogh

 The Lost Van Gogh is a combination art history lesson and roller coaster. It’s not aspoiler to tell you that it’s about a lost van Gogh that’s found and then lost again and everyone in this tale is trying to find it, each with their own agenda. Nobody is who they pretend to be, and everyone has enough secret baggage to send a 747 plunging to its watery grave. The effect steers awfully close to the comic, but luckily we’re in the hands of a skilled driver.

     A New York girl buys an old painting in a second-hand store upstate. Her boyfriend, an up-and-coming young painter, discovers there’s more to this painting than meets the eye. They make a big mistake: they tell somebody. Just a handful of people, really. But every single person they tell, they shouldn’t have.

     This story is marinated in the New York art world, seasoned with Amsterdam, and served up fittingly enough, in the little French village of Auvers-sur-Oise, where van Gogh drew his last breath—and he’s not the only one to die there for his art.

       Jonathan Santlofer is a rare bird, an author who’s also a painter in his own right, which makes him eminently qualified to pen this tale. (As the author of a mystery title involving van Gogh myself), I was impressed. You will be, too.

All fiction is historical

 

I have slowly come to the understanding that all fiction is historical fiction in that each character must be placed within their own historical context which, unless all the characters are the same age as the writer, means that every character must come equipped with his own set of historical markers, which may influence his outlook and behavior.

 For instance, in my work in progress, my antagonist is 52, my protagonist 36, and my second lead 28. If my story take place in 2023, that means they were born in 1970, 1986, and 1994 respectively. For each of them, any date before those are closed books, experientially speaking. They have no memories of anything that came before. 

Of course they have access to a wealth of historical information that they can draw on all the way back to the big bang, but they weren’t there at the big bang, and that makes a huge difference. I am 65 in 2023, which gives me a frame of reference which extends back further than my youngest character by nearly 40 years. When seeing the world through her eyes I must see it with one eye closed, so to speak.

And of course their years of birth are hopeless when imaging their frames. What do you remember from the year of your birth? Probably nothing. My first memory is from the age of 3, and a very imperfect memory it is. If we take an arbitrary age of say, ten, we are just beginning to come to grips with the world beyond the schoolyard gate. 

So none of my characters are likely to remember a president before Reagan or a time before personal computers. My youngest character’s earliest memory is Y2k. She won’t really recall a time before Facebook. The U.S. will have been at war in Afghanistan most of her life. My protagonist would have had the word “Whitewater” burned into his brain at an impressionable age. He would never hear Carl Sagan or Tiny Tim—especially not on Johnny Carson. 

 None of them would know the USSR, Nixon, the Vietnam War, or the Beatles on a first-hand basis. All of them would have known Queen Elizabeth II and Cookie Monster.

 It’s like Steely Dan’s complaint in the song “Hey, Nineteen,” in which an aging hipster laments of his teen-age date:

Hey, nineteen,

That's 'Retha Franklin,

She don't remember the Queen of Soul.

                                           (You do remember Steely Dan, don't you?)

We’re each speaking a different language, based on experience. Of course, this could be carried further, since no two people, even identical twins, have exactly the same set of experiences, or the same reactions to them. And we can define our characters as precisely (or as generally) as we think necessary. But each of us is caged, to some extent, by the frameset of our lives. That’s a good place for a writer to begin understanding his characters.