Tag Archives: mystery thriller

Answers to the Big Questions – Thinking About Thinking #53

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The investigator in my mystery series, Evan Wycliff, is a young Baptist minister who is beset with doubt. When he was in college, he gave up his studies in the seminary because what he learned of Christian history was far too grim. Then he took up astrophysics and found more troubling questions than answers.

Like the rest of us when we bother to fret about the state of the world, Evan wants to know:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Why is there evil in the world?

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe: Greene, Brian: 9780593171721: Amazon.com: Books

I don’t have any satisfying solutions to those riddles, but I have recently read two books that offer some explanations. The first is Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by physicist Brian Greene. Here’s a more lucid presentation of astrophysics and cosmology than I’ve yet encountered. Unfortunately from the standpoint of traditional religious teaching, Greene seems to side with the “godless universe” theorists, who hold that the dual processes of entropy and evolution, over 14 billion years of chaotic interaction, are sufficient to explain the complexity of our physical world and its dazzling life forms. Greene does stop short of attempting to explain how consciousness arises. He’s as stumped as anyone about whether a computer will ever be able to know it exists. (I’ve written more about Greene’s book here.)

The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex , Morowitz, Harold J. - Amazon.com

The most intriguing and persuasive scientific world view I’ve found so far is in Harold J. Morowitz‘s 20-year-old text The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex. Like Greene, Morowitz is a hard-headed physicist, but he seems to think there is more to the purpose of evolution than random outcomes, however complex or sophisticated. He’s in sympathy with the Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who theorized that all evolution tends toward the Omega Point, the pinnacle of creation decreed by its Creator. The breadth of Morowitz’s analysis is amazing – he begins with quantum particles and concludes with complex brain structure – hinting that the next step in evolution is into the spiritual realm, although he offers no opinions about what intelligent beings can find there.

If you are tempted to dive into Morowitz – and if you’re curious, I encourage you to take the plunge – feel free to skim the chapters on organic molecular chemistry. That’s the author’s specialty, and there’s way too much information here for anyone without an advanced degree in his field. Nevertheless, I promise that making your way through this ambitious book will be a rewarding experience.

Book Review: Silverview by John le Carré

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Silverview is the last novel John le Carré (David Cornwell) completed before his death in December of 2020. It was just released in the US by Viking Penguin. The hardcover edition includes an Afterword by the author’s son Nick Cornwell, who is a writer himself using the name Nick Harkaway.

Silverview, the last spy novel by John Le Carré (Viking Penguin)

As my friends and fans know, I’m a longtime admirer of le Carré, and I believe that, to rate him as “The premier spy novelist of our time. Perhaps of all time” (Time), is an underestimation. In his novels, the spy story is a metaphor and a model for not only the geopolitical strife between nations but also the loyalties and betrayals between human beings – in their most intimate and personal transactions. I’d say William Boyd’s comment in The New Statesman comes closer: “We should see him as our contemporary Dickens.”

Two recurring themes in le Carré are that humans almost always betray their loved ones, and skilled spies (like readers) must be obsessively attentive close observers. By strewing hints, clues, and foreshadowing in narratives rich in dazzling but often extraneous detail, he teaches you not only how spies think but also how to read with critical intelligence, especially between the lines.

I’ll risk asserting that fans of le Carré will find nothing new in Silverview. But consider this a feature and not a flaw. If you’ve read and paid close attention to his other novels, you will be quick to recognize the suspicious cover stories, the simple and seemingly innocent methods of exchanging word codes and documents, and – at the core of all of it – the ways double agents double back on their professed loyalties, at the same time serving and betraying their countries, while twisting their personal lives and loves inside out.

As I say, recognizing these plot elements on first appearance may give you the satisfaction that you’ve aced the course at Sarratt, the Circus spy academy. Perhaps then you are ready to recognize, face up to, and deal with the loyalties and betrayals in your own life. I guarantee you will pay closer attention to what other authors are trying to express.

All this said, it will come as no surprise that I respectfully disagree with Nick Cornwell’s assessment of this book:

“… Silverview does something that no other le Carré novel ever has. It shows a service fragmented: filled with its own political factions, not always kind to those it should cherish, not always very effective or alert, and ultimately not sure, any more, that it can justify itself.”

I beg to differ. The close observer knows that John le Carré has been saying this all along.

Evan Wycliff mystery-thrillers have won five awards including both Gold and Silver in the NYC Big Book awards. The audiobook for the first in the series is available from Audible, iTunes, Google Play, and other distributors worldwide.

Thinking About Thinking #29 – The Art Thief – Stealing art from the rich – victimless?

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In novels and movies about jewel thieves, the burglar is a lovable rogue.

Noah Charney is a professor of art history and an expert in fine art forgery and theft. And in this novel he proves himself to be a sly spinner of detective yarn. The Art Thief is a tale of brain-teasing complexity involving multiple, interconnected forgeries and thefts of historic paintings from several institutions. And its resolution necessarily involves multiple detectives and forensic experts, each as colorful and eccentric in his own way as Inspector Clouseau. The victims – museum curators and aristo collectors – are a classier bunch who tend to both snobbery and hypocrisy – not the most admirable human beings. Classiest of all are the scheming thieves and forgers. You see, in today’s genre fiction, perpetrators of  these presumably victimless crimes against the upper class have the cachet of winners at Wimbledon. Well played, chaps! In a previous generation, this place of honor was held by jewel thieves who connived to execute intricately plotted heists. Remember Cary Grant – never more dashing than in his role as John Robie in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief? Or Melina Mercouri and her artful crew in Topkapi?

Along the way, Prof. Charney is going to teach you a lot about art history and criticism. And that’s even if you consider yourself well versed. He’s never happier or more entertaining than when his donnish characters tear off on rants to their dunderhead students about how to study paintings.
Here’s an example. His Professor Barrow pontificates: “I speak of observation, looking in order to gather information, rather than merely looking. Look deeper. Observation followed by logical deduction leads to solution. You shall see.”

And isn’t this just what the reader of a detective story must learn to do? Observe and deduce?

The Art Thief is great fun, but my advice would be to keep a scratchpad handy. The plots, the players, the crosses and the double-crosses are so intertwined you’ll want to make a diagram to keep track.

  A century-old scandal locked in a painting. This edition of the novel includes the author’s research whitepaper published in The Journal of Art Crime.   Intrigue on the white sands of the Indian Ocean. A lonely widower makes the difficult transition from passive-observer tourist to committed resident.

Storytelling and the Subconscious

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Author Gerald Everett Jones

I recently finished the manuscript of Preacher Fakes a Miracle. I’m amazed once again at the role of my subconscious in the writing process. I had no idea how the story would play out when I started writing.

And if I don’t know where it’s going from one page to the next, how can you? Oh, you might have a good guess – several guesses, even. But I’m beginning to think this is a good way to write a suspenseful story that keeps curiosity fully engaged – to the last page.

When I used to write business and technical books, it was all laid out in advance, outlined to the last chapter, peppered with bullet points. The publisher’s editor would track my progress diligently, requiring me to submit one or two chapters a week for ten weeks or more of daily, diligent effort. And I either sketched illustrations for the artist or provided photos I’d taken myself. Then they usually made me build the index (no fun).

But after ten novels now, I can honestly say that for most of them I had little notion of where they would end up, almost from the first page. The exceptions were the three books I adapted from unsold screenplays – the rom-com My Inflatable Friend, the huckster madcap misadventure Mr. Ballpoint, and the family melodrama Christmas Karma. Even then, the writing was beset by inventive surprises. I had to learn the lesson, for example, that the novelist must paint what the camera sees. Duh. Writing between the lines of the script, you could call it. (When it’s in dialogue, those clever actors call it subtext.)

But the joy and the agony and the thrill of making it up as you go along in fiction are bound up in trusting where it’s all going. I’d put in a quirk or a character detail and then forget about it. Fifty or a hundred pages later, that info-morsel would figure into some plot twist – proving to be a significant clue or motivation.

And that surprise is my delight, frankly. I boasted to some of the beta readers of Preacher Finds a Corpse that I didn’t really know how the plot would ultimately get resolved until I wrote the last page. And a couple of them concurred with me that they were also guessing until the very end.

And the experience of finishing Preacher Fakes a Miracle has been much the same. I wrote the last sentence of the last chapter and thought, Wow, that’s what I was going for! That ties it up! And then I realized the next day that there remained an unanswered question (what Dan Brown calls a promise to the reader). So, remembering I had a Prologue (one bookend), I realized that neat construction and a stable bookcase, as well as paying off that debt, required an Epilogue.

Another delicious surprise!