Theory of a Dead Man

The Bat (Harry Hole #1) (1997/ Engish translation 2015) by Jo Nesbo, translated into English by Don Bartlett: The first of Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole series about a Norwegian police detective wasn't released in English until after several other Hole mysteries were.  That's probably because this mystery/thriller occurs in Australia, where Hole has been sent to liase with Sydney police as they investigate the murder of a young Norwegian woman.

The great thing about the early goings-on in The Bat involve the revelation of the pronunciation of Harry's last name. Thank god for Australia, I say! It's supposed to be pronounced 'Hoo-lay' but the Australians keep calling him Harry Holy, both of which are preferable (to Harry and to me) to how his last name looks like it should be pronounced.

There's a pretty good whodunnit-and-why in The Bat, occasionally drowned out by Nesbo's attempts to hit every quadrant (or whatever) of commercial appeal, including a climactic scene that seems to be aimed straight at movie adaptation. And that scene is completely ridiculous. So, too, a plan put in place to catch the killer by Harry and the Australian police that's unforgivably stupid and stupidly implemented. I didn't believe it for a second, and neither should you.

We also get a lot of back-story for Harry and his alcoholic ways, a tour through some interesting Australian locales, a bit too much mystical-native stuff that verges at points on turning into a version of America's much-maligned 'Magical Negro' trope, and a not-entirely-believable serial killer. It's a fast-paced, enjoyable read, but one will pine for the Fjords by the time the climax arrives. Are there fjords in Norway? Well, whatever. Harry Hole is a cold-weather animal. Lightly recommended.

Foundation (1942-1951/Collected 1951) by Isaac Asimov: The first Foundation novel (it's really a paste-up of novellas and novelettes) was written by Isaac Asimov between the ages of 22 and 24, with the exception of the opening story, written specifically for Foundation's first book publication in 1951. It holds up beautifully today as a tale of the far future modeled explicitly by Asimov on the Roman Empire as imagined in Edward Gibbons' late-18th-century historical work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 

What Asimov helped to give to science fiction in the original Foundation trilogy was space opera without the opera. Instead, Asimov re-imagined all the space empires and clashing worlds that had been a fixture of science fiction from the late 1920's onwards in American pulp magazines. The precocious Asimov instead made his space opera into a Novel of Ideas.

Asimov also gave the world Psychohistory, the backbone of the Foundation series. Perfected by super-historian Hari Seldon, Psychohistory allowed Seldon to plot the future dynamic of the dying Galactic Empire so as to allow members of the two Foundation institutes to shorten the post-Imperial galactic Dark Age from tens of thousands of years to only a thousand. 

So the Foundation series generally works with a group hero, embodied in one or a handful of people in each section, as it jumps decades or even hundreds of years forward in each section. Sometimes the recorded hologram of Seldon shows up at various crisis points to offer suggestions to the Foundation members. Sometimes they figure out the crisis point themselves.

It's all handled with a minimum of violence, bloodshed, and Star Wars stuff. Most of the Foundation series involves dialogue and historical theorizing. Asimov and American science fiction were both young, which leads to the occasional exclamation of "Great galloping galaxies!". But the overall approach is cerebral and humanistic. 

Along the way, Asimov also gives us entries from his Encyclopedia Galactica, forebear of so many similar volumes in science fiction. And there's religion as an intentional instrument of state control, an idea that several of the writers who published in editor John W. Campbell's Astounding Magazine in the 1940's would tackle, writers that included Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Fritz Leiber, and A.E. Van Vogt.

Star Wars certainly borrows much of Asimov's set dressing (and more than one name) for its own Galactic Empire, framing them in a world mostly devoid of ideas, much less Ideas. This is the real deal, one that's sparked so many other writers to imagine their own galactic empires and their own millennia-long view of human history. Highly recommended.

Northern Frights 3 (1995): edited by Don Hutchison; contains the following stories:

Wild Things Live There by Michael Rowe
Silver Rings by Rick Hautala
A Debt Unpaid by Tanya Huff 
Imposter by Peter Sellers 
Exodus 22:18 by Nancy Baker 
The Suction Method by Rudy Kremberg 
Sasquatch by Mel D. Ames 
Grist for the Mills of Christmas by James Powell 
Tamar's Leather Pouch by David Shtogryn 
Snow Angel by Nancy Kilpatrick 
The Perseids by Robert Charles Wilson 
Widow's Walk by Carolyn Clink 
If You Know Where to Look by Chris Wiggins 
The Bleeding Tree by Sean Doolittle 
The Dead Go Shopping by Stephanie Bedwell-Grime 
Family Ties by Edo van Belkom 
The Pines by Tia V. Travis
The Summer Worms by David Nickle 


Solid third volume in Canada's Northern Frights series of mostly original anthologies has one moment of editorial fright early on -- not only is the Table of Contents regrettably centre-justified, but it lacks page numbers for the stories. What the H?

The stand-outs include "Wild Things Live There" by Michael Rowe, a dandy bit of horror that anticipates some of the horrors of Laird Barron's terrific series of stories about the Children of Old Leech while remaining steadfastly Canadian -- the story even involves a migration from Ontario to British Columbia by, well, some things. Oh, Canada!

Another fine story is "The Perseids" by Robert Charles Wilson. Wilson is known as a highly regarded Canadian writer of fairly 'hard' science fiction. Here, some of that scientific and astronomical 'hardness' is present in what is otherwise a subtle, unnerving piece of cosmic horror. Or at least cosmic weirdness.

"If You Know Where to Look" by Chris Wiggins is also a nice piece of dread set in the Maritimes and involving a Scottish legend that seems to have migrated to Nova Scotia along with the Scots. And yes, he's that Chris Wiggins, Canadian actor. And he really shows an ear for believable dialogue and dialect in this story.

None of the stories are duds, though there are a few bits of whimsy that don't work as horror, weird, or whimsy. Editor Don Hutchison does his normal good work, even without page numbers on that Table of Contents. Recommended.

Grand Pulp Railroad

The Great Pulp Heroes by Don Hutchison (1996): Canada's own long-time genre historian, editor, and writer Don Hutchison gives us a book on the two decades or so in which single-character pulp-hero magazines flourished in America. It's a fun, breezy, and informative read. For some reason, ChaptersIndigo once had about a million copies of these things in stock at $2 a pop. So, they're out there.

American pulp(-wood, for their cheap, acid-heavy paper) magazines followed a peculiarly evolutionary path. They started off in the first decade-and-a-half of the 20th century as generalists. Magazines that included Argosy and All-Story published stories from every genre (including the first serialized Tarzan and Mars novels from Edgar Rice Burroughs).

Then the magazines specialized in terms of genre (fantasy, science fiction, mystery, Western, et al.) and then sub-genre (flying adventure stories, 'spicy' detective stories). Finally came the magazines devoted to individual heroes. The Shadow, simultaneously a radio hero, was the first hero to get his own magazine. The sales success of the Weird Avenger of Crime swiftly led to imitators (Phantom Detective, The Spider) and slightly different types of heroes from the same company, Street & Smith (Doc Savage, The Skipper, The Avenger).

This was a world in which sound movies had just appeared, and in which radio and the pulp magazines dominated the day-to-day entertainment business. There was no television, much less the Internet or computer gaming. Even electricity had not yet been supplied to all Americans. Or indoor plumbing. And the problems of the Great Depression seemed to fuel a desire in a lot of readers to see heroes who took up arms against gangsters, murderers, evil rich people, and crazy dictators.

Of course, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a recurring character in The Spider and the Operator 5 series), most heroes were rich people who fought for the common good. That trope, which predated the hero pulps, still persists in such comic-book superheroes as Batman and Green Arrow today, in whatever media in which they appear.

The pulp adventure heroes had a time of about 22 years from the first appearance of The Shadow in magazine form to the last issue of the last surviving hero-magazines in 1953. Subsequent decades would see reprints and revivals, though only The Shadow and Doc Savage have proved to have any staying power in the popular imagination.

While it lasted, though, the adventures -- especially in the 1930's -- ran wild and wooly. The Spider and Operator 5 probably had the most apocalyptically destructive adventures, with whole cities and indeed countries (including all of Canada in the case of Operator 5) being wiped out in every issue. Doc Savage and The Shadow did a better job of keeping most of New York standing, which may be why they were the gold standard for heroism.

The pulps in their entirety even managed to arouse censorship flaps from time to time. New York's Mayor LaGuardia threatened all the pulp publishers based in New York (which is to say, all of them) with expulsion if they didn't clean up their act. Pulp magazines were blamed for youth crime. Of course they were.

Hutchison's book performs its most valuable service in giving plot synopses of many of the most outlandish adventures of these heroes. The Spider, Operator 5, and G-8 stories often seem like fever dreams of ultraviolence and desperate heroism. Even the failed magazines deliver some truly bizarre moments, none moreso than the single issue of a magazine devoted to a super-villain rather than a superhero, The Octopus. That guy was bananas.

So if you can track this down, go forth and do so. Only some glaring typos and a lack of colour illustrations disappoint, though the B&W cover reproductions are still swell. Highly recommended.