Dave's Fiction Warehouse

T oday was supposed to be the Rapture. Again. I haven’t kept meticulous records on these predictions, but I’m pretty sure at least 165 Rapture dates have come and gone since I was first made aware of the phenomenon around 1970. That’s based on a conservative assumption of three end-of-time dates per year. Spoiler alert: Every one of them was 100 percent wrong. We’re all still here, righteous and sinners alike. Well, except for the billions who have sadly expired of non-theological causes over the past five-plus decades. I’m this close to concluding that all Rapture predictions are utter bullshit. Speaking of percentages, the author of this latest forecast, South African pastor Joshua Mhlakela , said a couple of weeks ago that he’s “a billion percent sure” this time is the charm. I would like to remind Pastor Josh, and a certain American president , that percentages don’t become more dramatic with the addition of random zeroes beyond 100. Anyway, if you and yours do experience the Rap...

R obert Redford was probably a better director than an actor, mostly because he was too damned good-looking to be fully believable in any of his best-known roles. But it’s hard now to imagine anyone else playing them.  I’m thinking mostly of “The Sting” and “Three Days of the Condor” and of course “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” For those of us who were young men in the early 70s, this is the way we covertly longed to look and be. Not that we ever could. We lacked the wardrobe. And the smile. And the tousled hair. And yeah, the easy charm and the good looks and the journeyman acting talent.  Check out the opening scene in “The Way We Were”: Redford standing at the bar, ostensibly passed out on his feet, resplendent in his Navy dress whites. There were and are better actors, but none of them – even Paul Newman – ever looked that cool. I’m guessing that the look in Barbra Streisand’s eyes during that scene didn’t require a whole lot of method acting. She was genuinely smit...

T he other day I was briefly gladdened by the internet rumor that Donald J. Trump had finally shuffled off to Buffalo — or wherever a guy like that goes when his time is up. Probably not Buffalo. It was false, of course. Everything is false on the internet, without exception. But my reaction prompted a bit of soul-searching. First, I wondered: Have I ever in my lifetime been cheered by the idea of someone else’s demise? Nope. Well, Ted Bundy maybe, but I can’t think of anyone else offhand. Takes a special kind of person to convince me that their absence would make the world a better place.   Second: Would it though? Trump has already poisoned America to the extent that it seems unlikely to recover any time soon. He’s gutting every public good, destroying trust in elections and governance, putting troops on the street and enlisting tens of thousands more masked, steroidal thugs to enforce his personal whims. Whatever happens to Trump in the years to come — and I hope it’s somet...

I t’s been a slow year (not counting the endless carousel of Trumpian atrocities) so maybe it’s time once again to go to the mailbag. Remember mailbags? How they used to bulge? They were fun. Dear Dave : So what have you been reading lately? That is, assuming you are not yet too old to decipher printed material beyond, say, a third-grade level? – Made-Up in Montreal. A: Thank you, although I would point out that we live in a country where a third-grade reading level is considered overkill.  Anyway, I just finished “ Fingersmith ,” by Sarah Waters. It’s set in Victorian England and involves a 17-year-old thief sent to pose as a maid for a 17-year-old heiress. The thief’s mentor, a charming villain known as Gentleman (think Fagin, only better looking), intends to seduce the heiress, marry her, and then ship her off to one of England’s excellent madhouses. He promises the young thief, Sue, a share of the proceeds. Twists ensue – so many that this gentle reader had to stop once in a w...

M artin Cruz Smith died last month, but I didn’t really mark his passing until last week. That’s when I finished his last book, “ Hotel Ukraine .” Smith was a great story teller, and his character Arkady Renko is the most memorable of the hundreds of fictional detectives I have known. I’ll miss them both. “Hotel Ukraine” is set immediately before and after Putin’s invasion of the country in 2022. Like nearly all of the 11 Renko novels, this one has him investigating an individual murder amid the vast corruption of the modern Russian state. This time it’s a diplomat, beaten to death in the titular hotel in Kyiv. As we all know by now, when high-profile figures die anywhere near Putin, there’s not a lot of pressure from the top to crack the case. Far from it. If the plot feels sort of familiar, the story is well-told and timely. We get a glimpse of the Bucha massacre and a fascist paramilitary that closely resembles the Wagner group. (You’ll recall that Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin ...