(David Freed, Voodoo Ridge, The Permanent Press, 2014, 978-1-57962-355-5)

This novel is not your classic mystery.  The days of Conan Doyle and Christie are long past.  The modern reader of mysteries expects more grit, suspense, and thrills mixed in with the classic elements of who-done-its or police procedurals—discovering the perp through possibly multiple crimes and many misdirects.  Author Freed has delivered, and it’s a fun read.

Yet the main character, Cordell Logan, an ex-special ops fellow, is more introspective and restrained here, in spite of his action-packed past.  His mellowing is helped along by first forgiving an ex-wife, falling in love with her again, and then desiring to remarry in order to participate in his unborn offspring’s future life.  That perhaps sounds more like a romantic mystery, but a trip to Lake Tahoe to marry takes a turn for the worse.  As the mystery unfolds, Logan is caught between his dark desires for revenge and the precepts of his new Buddhist religion.

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Volodya has a deranged, nostalgic view of past Russian might.  He yearns for a return to “the good old days” and seems hell bent on trying to recreate them.  While the rest of the world knows Communism with a capital C, aka the Kremlin mafia, failed completely and put the Russian bear on a stringent diet of becoming just another poor Third World oil country, this old KGB psychotic murderer lives in the past.  Only there can he flee from his own mortality; only there can he delude himself into thinking that Russia can return to greatness.

The irony is that Putin lives in the past but ignores any obligations Russia incurred there.  If I remember correctly, the Ukraine turned over all the nukes found within the borders of the new country to Russia and allowed the latter country to maintain its bases there on the condition that Russia would always respect Ukrainian independence.  I guess Volodya figures he didn’t sign that agreement, so he doesn’t have to adhere to it.  He pretty much does what he wants to do—he’s used to getting his own way as Grand Poobah of the Shirtless Universe.  Moreover, he’s as slippery as the oil and perspiration on those abs, and also the Russian chessmaster of doublespeak.  He lives so much in the past he thinks 2014 is 1984, although he probably never read the book—he had all the ideas he needed from the KGB.

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#354: Aristocrats and Assassins.  The release is a wee bit delayed, but it will happen real soon now.  Someone said that good things are worth waiting for.  As I age, I have more problems with that adage—my patience threshold is worse than before.  But I’ve always been impatient.  I had my entire undergraduate study planned halfway through high school.  The summer I turned thirteen, I wrote my first novel, but I figured even then I would starve as a writer, so I became a scientist, and, PATIENTLY, postponed my writing career.  So, have patience with me, dear reader—your ebook tour of Western Europe with Detectives Chen and Castilblanco will soon be available!

#355: A thorough rewrite.  My next release will probably be the complete rewrite of Solders of God.  It’s only in pbook format right now, my only novel not in ebook format.  The rewrite will be a second edition.  You will recall that it’s a bridge between “The Clones and Mutants Series” and “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” so it plays an important role in my opus.

#356: Other ebooks in the works.  After Soldiers of God, there are several other novels on my to-do list for this year.  I have two stand-alones in progress (i.e. not part of the timeline of my usual fictional universe) and another Chen and Castilblanco mystery (see the excerpt at the end of Aristocrats and Assassins).  Phew!  It’s going to be a busy year.  No guarantees on release dates.  (Yes, I often have parallel projects going on.  I learned to do this as a scientist.  I’ve found it keeps the mind agile, the writing fresh, and facilitates content editing.)

#357: Donating ebooks to libraries.  I’ve been trying to do it for a while.  Joe Konrath is starting up something that looks like a good idea where a library can pay for one ebook and then lend it out multiple times without further charges to them or their borrowers.  Sounds like a way to donate if there’s a mechanism so I can pay for Joe’s one-time charge.  They’re still working out details, though, so stay tuned.  [Apparently, they’re not answering queries, by the way—maybe because I’m not a library?  You’d think they’s want to get both libraries and ebook authors on board…sigh….]

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[I wrote this quite awhile ago.  It made the rounds on other blogs, but I thought it would be a good intro to a series of posts on writing, a sequence that will end with Tom Pope and my Socratic to-and-fro about writing the thriller that’s in prep—see yesterday’s interview with Professor Tom.  On Tuesday, I’ll follow this with a new post, “Writing Secrets,” which might repeat some of the same material: give advice often enough and some might sink in.  Or not, especially if you disagree!  If you disagree, let me know.  That’s what blog comments are for.]

The media has become fixated on spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Higgs boson (the so-called “God particle,” a name that would surely make Mr. Higgs cringe).  The Higgs mechanism (i.e. the spontaneous symmetry breaking) is necessary to give mass to some of the vector bosons in the electroweak or weak and electromagnetic interaction theory.  Forgotten in all this media hoopla is the theory that led to the idea of quarks and gluons, the Eightfold Way of symmetries popularized by Mr. Gell-Mann.  (Note that I refrain from using the term “discovered.”  In theoretical physics, the math is “out there.”  You just have to figure out what math matches up to the experimental data.  Experimental physics is where “discoveries” are made.)

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[Tom Pope is a fellow reviewer for Book Pleasures.  He also has an alter ego as a writing teacher. He works with private clients and tutoring services and conducts fiction workshops for nonprofits such as the Langston Hughes Cultural Center. I thought it would be interesting to interview him about his work with aspiring writers.  It’s a changing world in writing, and he’s seen it all.]

Steve: Describe your background, Tom, and what you’re doing now.  In particular, why are you doing it, and do you find it rewarding?

Tom: I have a background in Political Science, which led to journalism that covered business trends in healthcare and the nonprofit world.  My skills in writing transitioned to tutoring students in writing about history and literature.  Those elements positioned me for seeing characters in a complex world structure of factions and forces. For example, when physicians wanted to create physician-hospital organizations, I immediately saw that one faction of doctors was forming to counter another faction of administrators. Viewing those elements allowed me to teach writing to authors about how their WIPs could be enhanced with background for the characters and pacing for the conflicts. Factions always design ideologies that try to determine whose social norms or forces strike a person.

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[Today’s blog post is a four-peat of one about Irish writers—celebrating St. Paddy’s Day, of course!  Somehow, I missed this last year.  Irish men and women have migrated to the far corners of the Earth.  Some have migrated back.  Some stayed home.  They have suffered the boom and bust of late 20^th and early 21^st century economics.  Their Church scandals involving priests and choirboys, and unwed mothers and evil nuns, have made ours in the U.S. seem minor, yet Ireland is still the most Catholic country in Europe.  The Irish, above all, are resilient.  Their writers reflect this resiliency.]

St. Patrick’s Day is March 17.  There’s controversy in NYC because the new mayor won’t march along with the anti-gay Hibernian hoofers—he’ll march in an “alternative parade.”  Of course, I’ll remind the loyal Hibernians that one of their greatest writers, Oscar Wilde, was gay and persecuted by the English, no less, and an apt hero for all Irish—at least, Irish writers.  The whole thing is a storm in a teacup and shows how uptight and immature America is—in Dublin, no one worries about who marches in the parade.  So, before I forget, I thought today was a perfect day to set the record straight: many great writers in the English language that you may have heard about are not English but Irish.  And I should add, hailing from old Eire too, just like Wilde.

The title quote is by George Bernard Shaw—an acerbic, old curmudgeon who successfully rankled British aristocracy.  His plays and other writings poked fun at the English establishment, a commendable thing to do even today—if you can get away with it.  His biting wit transferred easily into words on the page and probably embarrassed everyone from royalty on down.  On the other hand, the endurance of his work over the years is proof of its quality—it’s classic literature in the English language written by an Irishman.

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I’ve heard that phrase from various media pundits.  It’s comical.  Resurgence is what Godfather Putin would like Sochi to signify, but the only thing resurging in Russia is this narcissist strongman’s egotistical delusion.  Russia is spiraling down to insignificance.  For nearly a century, it has been ruled by mafiosos whose only interest is to ensure that Russian workers make them rich.  In the Soviet era, they hid all this under the cloak of ideology.  Now it’s clear that the only ideology is greed and exploitation.

Russian people are worn out and angry, except for those who participate in the corruption, of course.  A recent Sixty Minutes episode showed how extensive and lethal this can be, and that’s probably only the tip of the iceberg.  Persecution of singing groups and other protestors make the news here, but you can be sure that what goes on behind the scenes is worse.  Journalists, industrialists, and opposition leaders who don’t play by Putin’s rules are jailed on trumped-up charges, or simply killed.  A Russian gangster, a confident of Putin, bribes and threatens to bring the Olympics to Sochi and then scams the Russian people.

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#346: Aristocrats and Assassins.  This fourth novel in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” is in final edit and will soon be ready for my illustrious formatting and cover team of Donna Carrick (of Carrick Publishing) and Sara Carrick (graphics artist).  I hope to release it by the end of this month—if not, in early March.  (In this blog, I put out a pre-release excerpt some weeks ago.)  I was tempted to call this tale Castilblanco’s European Vacation, but that can imply comedy.  This thriller is definitely not a comedy.  It hops around Europe as my detective duo thwarts the plot of a terrorist who is kidnapping members of European royal families—not your Daddy’s Frommer’s, to say the least.  Like all novels in this series, you can read it independently of the previous ones, but they’re loads of fun too!

#347: The missing links.  An FYI for my readers: in case you didn’t realize it, The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan and Soldiers of God are two important links between three of my series.  The first connects the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” to the “Clones and Mutants Series”; the second connects the “Clones and Mutants Series” to “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.”  You have an ebook version of The Golden Years (now back on Smashwords for those with non-Kindle ereaders, although that free Kindle app allows you to read .mobi files on most any device).  I’m working on an ebook version of Soldiers—it will be a second edition.

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I’ve written about Putin before.  This narcissistic dictator trying to keep Russian in line thinks Sochi will bring him good PR.  I don’t get it.  The tyrants from the three Stans—the Three Musketeers of Thugdom—are featured guests at his Olympic extravaganza.  I’d guess they don’t have to stay in half-finished hotels, drinking brown water and being revolted by half-naked pictures of the great leader showing off his abs.  Rumor has it that bribes from a Russian Mafioso working for dear fearless leader Vladimir paved the way of obtaining the Olympics for Sochi.  Dunno.  It wouldn’t surprise me.

There’s the terrorist threat, of course.  Those antiaircraft installations above Sochi?  They’re ready to bring down any plane, commercial or otherwise, that even gives the hint of threatening the Olympic village.  I can’t see that they will be much use for stopping the famous Black Widow bombers—if Putin et al killed my husband, I’d probably be pissed too.  Maybe that famous ring will stop them, but watching the Russian police hasn’t given me a great deal of confidence.  And I’d bet they’d take a bribe in a minute—maybe a pair of blue jeans and some vodka?

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Perhaps you’re familiar with the Western song with a similar name, made popular by Marty Robbins, for example?  While the song is about demons and salvation, I intend no demonizing here…well, maybe a bit for people who use ghostwriters and never acknowledge them.  Writers trying to scratch out a living will do most anything from greeting card verses to entire books for big name celebrities who couldn’t write a complete sentence even if they tried.  These are unsung heroes because they receive no accolades.  Your marketers and editors are at least acknowledged in the writing business, but ghostwriters are like true phantoms.

We just learned, in fact, that ghost writing is not exclusive to the writing business.  Japan, where personal honor is a national prerequisite and dishonor is historically often dealt with in violent fashion, just learned that their most famous classical composer, Mamoru Samuragochi, is a complete fake (I’m referring to a NY Times article).  Not only did he pretend to be deaf—they called him the Japanese Beethoven—he paid Takashi Niigaki to write his music.  What Mr. Samuragochi will do as a consequence is an open question, but I suspect that the Japanese response will be one of national shame.  We Americans have something to learn from that culture.

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