Book Review: Red Snow in Winter

 

I’m going to set aside my own giant ego today to shine the light on another writer more than worthy of your attention: Max Eastern.

Max and his wife Nancy Bilyeau are both historical novelists (and friends of mine) in New York. The exciting news is that they’ve started their own publishing company, Admiral Road, and the even more exciting news is that they launch their first novel today, Red Snow in Winter. This means you’re in at the beginning. (The beginning is always the finest place to be, because you hold every strand of possibility in your hand, before the Fates start to prune them.)

And yet more exciting is that I got to read it early, and can recommend it to you with bells on.

Max is a lawyer who’s written about history for several magazines, with subjects ranging from Ulysses Grant and Benedict Arnold to Attila the Hun. But the ace up his sleeve for this World War II spy thriller is that his dad was actually an intelligence officer in the war, and passed along his stories. So, although the book is fiction, it has the ring of authenticity.

Without further ado, my review:

Julius Orlinsky thought his war was over, stuck behind a desk at the Pentagon, near the end of of World War II and on the cusp of the Cold War. He’s dead wrong. On his way home from a party, someone takes a shot at him, and suddenly he’s an intelligence man in the dark—and on the run, but whether it’s from Nazis, Reds, Uncle Sam, or a secret society that holds the secrets of all three, he can’t tell, and he’s running out of time to put the pieces of the puzzle together. His war is far from over.

D.C. is a small town getting smaller every moment. Every shadow holds a threat or revelation, but the wartime past is a vast world of lies, half-truths, and misunderstandings in every shade. That’s the world he’ll be forced to revisit if he’s going to survive.

Max Eastern attacks his story with dry aplomb and a stripped-down journalistic surety, yet it’s got more switchbacks than San Francisco’s Lombard Street, and every curve is taken with his foot on the gas. There’s a certain Hitchcockian lunacy to all the twists and turns in this one. It’ll keep you guessing till the last page.

D.C. had to grow up fast during the war years

But don’t take it from me, take it from these fine folks:

“This is a fast-moving, page-turning espionage thriller set just before the end of the war. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to be kept up at night!”

--Deborah Swift, author of The Shadow Network

“Red Snow is a well-paced thriller capturing the paranoia and moral complexity of WWII’s twilight hours. This is spy fiction that respects its readers’ intelligence, offering a nuanced exploration of loyalty, betrayal, and a little romance.”

--Emilya Naymark, author of ‘Behind the Lie’

“I found a great new-to-me author in Max Eastern. I love how he brought his characters to life and made the situations in this novel seem as though they were happening in front of me.”
— Terrie Farley Moran, national bestselling co-author of the Jessica Fletcher ‘Murder She Wrote’ mystery series.

Trust no one

This is one is for lovers of historical novels, thrillers, spy tales, and, yes, romance. It covers all the bases and stuffs all the stockings. You can find it here.

You’re still here? Go buy the book.

Don't Have a Cow

 How do we define story?

Some people (too many people) define a story as anything with a beginning, middle, and end. Therefore I declare this cow is a story.

                                           Butchery for Dummies

Maybe that definition is a wee bit simplistic. After all, any phenomenon that is neither a single point nor infinite, that has terminal duration in space or time, can be divided into beginning, middle and end. So you when you’ve said that achingly obvious truism, you’ve said nothing.

Another hoary chestnut is that all art is self-expression. But this is small potatoes for an artist’s goal. A month-old baby can express itself perfectly well in order to have all its needs supplied, both material and emotional. As Teddy, the preternaturally enlightened little boy in Salinger’s eponymous story, says:

“Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.”

He goes on to illustrate how emotions are unnecessary, even in poetry:

“‘Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die,’ “ Teddy said suddenly. “’Along this road goes no one, this autumn eve….Those are two Japanese poems. They’re not full of a lot of emotional stuff.”’

Art is not about feeling; it’s about seeing. Specifically, it’s about allowing the viewer to see the world through the artist’s eyes, from the artist’s vantage point.

So how to define story?

Pastiches

 

I'm going to share a secret with you: I don’t read Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Or at least, very few. And the better they promise to be, the leerier I am of them. Not that I’m saying you shouldn’t read pastiches. What do you, think I’m crazy? No, remember I’m a writer, not a reader. Not that writers shouldn’t read pastiches. Far from it. I’m pointing the finger squarely at myself. You see, I’m a sponge. I’m a mimic. I’m very strongly affected by the last thing I’ve read. If I had been reading Dylan Thomas while I was writing The Strange Curse of Eliza Doolittle, I’d have had to name it Eliza’s Christmas in Wales. 

So I didn’t. I stuck to a steady diet of John Watson, M.D., with Pygmalion for dessert. A little taste: 

    Toby, of course, had long since joined his lop-eared dewlapped ancestors in the next life. Rather amazingly, Mr. Sherman, Toby’s owner, was still rattling along this mortal coil, still stuffing animals, still manning the shop in Pinchin Lane. We hung on his bell till we heard the window on the second floor being wrenched open above us. 

“Stand back, Watson,” said Holmes, pulling me aside. Glad I was that he did so; the first thing that came out of the window was a bucket of dirty water, which splashed to the pavement at our feet. The second thing was Sherman’s head in a nightcap. 

“Go away!” he yelled. “I’ll have the law on you!”

 Well, you say, everybody strives to sound like John Watson. And to that I say, some do, and some don’t. It’s not a matter of good or bad writing, it’s largely a matter of intention. For me, the music is of paramount importance. 

And then there’s the matter of edges. The territory a pastiche inhabits is the edges of the Canon. Luckily, Doyle left wide edges to work in. The stories are chock-full of detailed facts, but those facts are always about the case, and almost never about Holmes—or Watson. It’s all those details that a pastiche fills in. For instance, I know that Holmes kicked his

cocaine addiction with the help of Sigmund Freud, because long ago I read the Seven-Per -Cent Solution, by Nicholas Meyers. This was long before I had any intention of writing a Holmes pastiche, before I even heard the word pastiche; as a matter of fact, it was my original inspiration (I’m probably not alone in that). 

But the point is, I can’t have that idea, because someone already had it, and executed it brilliantly. The more pastiches, especially good pastiches I read, the narrower the edges become. 

So, enjoy the pastiches. Hell, enjoy my pastiches. And I promise, when I move on from writing Sherlock Holmes stories, I’ll catch up on my reading.

Quiet Riot

San Francisco-- Americans were stunned by another act of senseless brutality this week when a San Francisco street performer went on a terrifying spree. Randy Heppelwhite, a San Francisco mime, was arrested by police yesterday after perpetrating what one onlooker called "one of the most hideously ambiguous performances I've ever seen." 

Union Square in the aftermath of the horror

"He jumped right out in front of a group of tourists, and without saying a word, he seemed to pull out a large caliber weapon of some sort," said Lars Chiswick, a manager at Banana Republic. "Some people were saying it was a revolver, some said a bazooka, but from the way he handled it, I'd say it was an automatic weapon, an Uzi or a Glock, maybe, the way he seemed to be spraying the whole square with hot lead. I saw people sitting down everywhere, walking away in panic. Very few people were tipping him, no large bills. One woman even hyperventilated. Then he tried to make his getaway on a unicycle, or it might have been a stegosaurus."

Breaking theme

As you're aware, I’m a novelist. Published. Traditionally. Three Sherlock Holmes adventures. But I’m not here to hawk them (not today). I just wanted to get that out of the way, because this post is about my fourth novel, which I’ve just finished, having finally discovered something crucial—my theme. I discovered it after adding one word to the text:

Pinocchio

(We’ll get back to that.)

You might think I’d have figured out theme before setting down word one. Or you might think the exact opposite, that theme is just a word cooked up by college professors to make reading a chore. Don’t hit me with them theme waves, man.

Don’t hit me with them negative waves.

Arthur Phillips on fiction

 

Arthur Phillips is one of my favorite writers working today. Perhaps his background as a jazz saxophonists or his record as a five-time Jeopardy champion informs his work, since he has six novels under his belt, and no two are alike in genre, style, or subject matter. He's an inspiration to any writer hoping to break out of the single-genre ghetto.

 

"Fiction is able to do one thing better than any other art form: it is able to convey a convincing sense of what is going on in someone else's head. To me, that is the great mystery of life: what is everyone else thinking?" 

Favorite works

The Egyptologist

Prague

Angelica

My Musical Miseducation

 

I missed the boat on music, and it still rankles. Let me say up front that, had things gone differently, I would not have become a musical prodigy, a rock star, or even a lounge singer with a baby blue tuxedo and a coke habit. There’s not a music molecule hiding anywhere in my DNA. But I might have at least been musically literate. Or what’s audio equivalent of literacy?

Grand Theft Voice

 Let’s try an experiment. Read the following quote by Morgan Freeman.

When you read it, did you hear Morgan Freeman’s distinctive baritone? Likely. There are memes all over the internet that ask you that very same question. It’s the natural outcome of having such a well-known voice and style.

But, as you may have guessed, that’s not actually a Morgan Freeman quote. It’s from Malcolm X. (And if you try to say it now in Malcolm X’s voice, you may find yourself actually borrowing Denzel Washington's voice in playing Malcolm X. “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock: Plymouth Rock landed on us.”

So we could say I borrowed Morgan Freeman’s voice for this little thought experiment. Or nearer the mark would be to say I appropriated it. But to be truthful, I stole it. I stole Freeman’s likability, his air of authority, professionalism, and integrity. With Morgan Freeman, such antics are usually in the name of fun, but reassigning attribution of quotes to someone with more authority or a wider audience is endemic on the internet. Figures from Thomas Jefferson to Kurt Vonnegut have been misappropriated in this fashion. There have been a rash of pronouncements supposedly by the new pope that never passed his lips. I’m probably not telling you anything new here.

But now here’s an honest-god-quote from The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma, a recent book by AI pioneer Mustafa Suleyman:

Mutants

 

Maybe it's time we talked about mutants. No, not cool mutants with cool powers. I'm talking about the ever-growing minority who seem to have been born without the gene for empathy. Call them homo miserabilis. How long have they been among us? Are they here to stay? Does their mutation give them an advantage over homo sapiens that will eventually write our demise as a species? Is there some sort of treatment we can administer? Can we co-exist with them? I would have preferred mutations like eye-blasts and teleportation, and would have gotten along fine with our blue furry cousins. But evolution is an asshole.

Okay, maybe these narcissists—let’s call them what they are— aren’t mutants, but I became curious about the seeming decline of empathy, which a lot of people seem to have noticed and become alarmed by. Is all the evidence simply anecdotal? Turns out not. Here are two developments:

James Stephens on books

James Stephens, an Irish contemporary of James Joyce, largely forgotten today, wrote one of my three favorite books, The Crock of Gold -- a tale like no other I've ever read: by turns humorous, philosophical and poetic, whose premise is what happens when the leprechauns of Gort na Cloca Mora exact revenge for having their pot of gold stolen. 

So it seems incumbent upon me to share a couple of quotes from the man.

“He saw a square room furnished as a library. The entire section of the walls which he could spy was covered from floor to ceiling with books. There were volumes of every size, every shape, every colour. There were long, narrow books that held themselves like grenadiers at stiff attention. There were short, fat books that stood solidly like aldermen who were going to make speeches and were ashamed but not frightened. 

There were mediocre books bearing themselves with the carelessness of folk who are never looked at and have consequently no shyness. There were solemn books that seemed to be feeling for their spectacles; and there were tattered, important books that had got dirty because they took snuff, and were tattered because they had been crossed in love and had never married afterwards. There were prim, ancient tomes that were certainly ashamed of their heroines and utterly unable to obtain a divorce from the hussies; and there were lean, rakish volumes that leaned carelessly, or perhaps it was with studied elegance, against their neighbours, murmuring in affected tones, "All heroines are charming to us.

--The Demi-Gods

Review: Dinner with King Tut

 

Dinner with King Tut is a strange sort of beast: let’s call it an anti-sphinx. Like the sphinx it’s composed of three dissimilar parts—not the face of a woman, the wings of a bird and the haunches of a lion, but science, fiction (but not science fiction) and DIY—where DIY involves the author learning how to knap stones, how to tattoo himself, to style hair like an ancient Roman matron, bake bread for Egyptian pyramid builders, and operate a trebuchet, among other skills once necessary for a precarious survival in different eras at different points on the globe. Also: tanning and trepanning.

And this sphinx not only poses riddles it tries its best to answer them, through the discipline of experimental archaeology. Which, if you (like me) have never heard of this field, you’re in for a series of fascinating discoveries, from a Turkish city where one’s relatives where buried beneath one’s bed to the unusual height of Chinese eunuchs.

Ozempic and the Seven Deady Sins

 This will not be an ad for Ozempic. Nor will it be a jeremiad against the drug. My cardiologist told me a story about GLP-1 and the gila monster. (Yes at a certain age, you suddenly have a "my cardiologist.” Mine is a grandfatherly story-spinner.) Three to four extensive meals in spring are claimed to supply a gila monster with enough energy for a whole season. Scientists wondered why, which is what scientists do. What they also do is investigate.

.What they found was a hormone in the venom of that gila monster that stimulates the production of insulin—similar to a hormone naturally produced by humans, with the jaw-breaking name of glucagon-like peptide-1, which is sensibly abbreviated to GLP-1, (and I’ll leave to you to wonder whether there’s such a thing as GLP-2 or GLP-3). At any rate, other scientists were able to synthesize this hormone and patent it, and then marketers were able to come up with ten thousand names for this wonder drug. I personally am prescribed with Monjauro, which I’m constantly confusing with a local Italian restaurant named Monjuni’s.