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. Go Find Daddy can be found here on Amazon.

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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.

The Lost Van Gogh can be found here on Amazon.

Stephen Dobyns on intuition

 Stephen Dobyns is an American novelist and poet--at least, he's billed as a poet, but think of his poems more as short, exquisitely crafted stories. He also moonlights as a detective novelist.

“Hesitancy is the surest destroyer of talent. One cannot be timorous and reticent, one must be original and loud. New metaphors, new rhythms, new expressions of emotion can only spring from unhindered gall. Nothing should interfere with that intuition--not the fear of appearing stupid, nor of offending somebody, nor jeopardizing publication, nor being trivial. The intuition must be as unhindered as a karate chop.”

Favorite books

Cold Dog Soup

The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini

Common Carnage

Bonus Quote

Writing is a job, a craft, and you learn it by trying to write every day and by facing the page with humility and gall. And you have to love to read books, all kinds of books, good books. You are not looking for anything in particular; you are just letting stuff seep in.

Profile in Trivia

     I was talking to a friend one day (actually, my best friend, herein referred to as the Rainbow Trout) and he asked me what was the deal in San Juan Hell with all the fershlugginer verbiage underneath my profile picture on my blog. Well, no one's ever asked me that before--I suspect no one's ever noticed it before-- but I suppose I should explain for his benefit, by way of an introduction to this site, for the idly curious, and for anyone else too shy to point out out that my new clothes look a lot like my birthday suit. I actually put a lot of time and thought into this seeming scattershot collection of nounage.

Novelist

Well, that's an easy one. Novel-writing is what you do when you hang up your apron after twenty-five years tending bar. I’ve had three novels published, two in the bullpen, and another in the works.

Kibbitzer

You may be familiar with this one. Let's say you're playing a fame of chess, or poker, or Monopoly, or really any game that's more complicated than Candy Land. There is inevitably a guy standing behind you who is not in the game, looking over your shoulder munching noisily on his Cheetos, and giving you horrendously bad advice on your next move. That, my friend, is a kibbitzer. I’d like to pretend I’m a sage counselor, but the orange accumulation on my fingertips always gives me away.

Raconteur

French for a story-teller, especially one particularly witty or amusing. From this you may gather that French is the last refuge of the pretentious egotist. I’d say that’s the mot juste, n’est ce pas? Je suis le chapeau. The real storytellers were my mother and oldest brother and sister. I learned to dart in comments during their infrequent pauses in conversation. It’s still my style of talking.

Sesquipedilian

I just threw this one in because I love to use big words. It means a person who loves to use big words. My high school English teacher, Miz Ely, used to say to me “You’re so erudite” with that special blend of fondness and contempt that only she, with her fine-tuned East Texas twang, could muster.

Homo Ludens

A term coined by Dutch theorist Johan Huizenga, in his book of the same name, used to delve deep into the play element in culture. The literal meaning is Man Playing. This is my species. I hope it’s yours too. Huizenga says “You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.” This is my cultural stance.

Sans-culotte

Also French, and I wanted to include the words flaneur and croque-monsieur as well, but I ran out of space. Sans-culotte literally means pantless, but before you get the idea that I'm hanging out in the altogether (I might be and I might not), a bit of further explanation. The sans-culottes were the lumpenproletariat* at the heart of the French Revolution, the ones Marie Antoinette wanted to see eat cake and die. They were radical democrats, sort of like Bernie Sanders with the mittens off. They did wear trousers--they just didn't sport the fashionable silk knee-pants of the aristos. This is my political stance.

Tralfamadorian

If you know you Vonnegut, you know the Tralfamadorians, little aliens who look like plumber's friends, with hands where their heads should be, in which is set a single eye. They also live in four dimensions, which means that they can see all of time laid out before them--and choose, quite sensibly, to live in the good times and avoid the bad. This is my philosophical stance.

Lumpenproletariat

I came across this one for the first time when reading Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Did you know there was a class lower than the lower class? Lumpen literally means “ragged.”Marx calls them the dangerous ones, the “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society.” I immediately identified with them. He really meant the bohemians, vagrants, the artists, the theatre people, the barkeeps and cocktail waitrons, the ones told to “move along”, the ones who never bow to a clock, the free people. We made even Marx nervous. This is my social class.

Dylan Thomist

This is my own coinage, taken from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, especially in homage to his great poem The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower (written when he was only nineteen) that expresses an intense identification with all of creation, the wood wide web. The universe is numinous. This is my religious stance.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

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There it is. If you’ve read this far and swallowed the hook with the bait, you’ll likely say I’m a self-contradictory sonuvabitch. Like you, I suspect, like you. I hope that clears things up for the Rainbow Trout. And for you.