Dave's Fiction Warehouse

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 ...

T his summer I accompanied the brunette to her 50-year high school reunion. I really didn’t want to go. I mean, I skipped my own 50th reunion six years ago, and the one before that . The 10- and 20-year reunions were fun, but after a while they begin to seem as dreary as that face I see in the mirror every morning. So I told Tess no. For some reason she kept at it.  I finally relented. I’ve gotten better at discerning the things I must refuse and the things I probably shouldn’t. I bought a new shirt and a new pair of shorts and steeled myself for an introvert's nightmare: a weekend of small talk among total strangers. At least, I thought, they’d all be unaware of the countless regrets and embarrassments that define my own memories of high school.  We drove to Ellensburg, a middling college town best known for its rodeo and unceasing wind. The former classmates gathered Friday night at a dive bar on the edge of town. There was the obligatory guy in a MAGA hat and another in one...

A coastal trail near Ardmore. W e’re going to Ireland in a few days. It’ll be our third time there. Mostly we’re going because a few months ago we got a killer deal on round-trip tickets between Seattle and Dublin. How cheap? You don't want to know. Ever been? It’s a pretty easy place to be a tourist. Sunshine is rare, but the people are generally friendly and that accent makes them seem even more so. They don’t yet hate Americans. Few places in Ireland are very crowded. That has become my primary condition for traveling anywhere these days. I always feel a bit uneasy before a trip abroad. I like being in a new place, but I loathe the process of getting there when air travel is involved.  There’s a poem by Derek Walcott that I always think of the night before traveling. “Tomorrow, Tomorrow.” I’ll post it here from memory; my apologies if the wording and punctuation is not precise: I remember the cities I have never seen, exactly. Silver-veined Venice. Leningrad, with its toffee-twi...

L ike a few million others, we’ll be back on the street tomorrow. Singin’ songs and carryin’ signs. Still trying to come up with original slogans. Can’t use the ones from two weeks ago. We thought things were bad then but they’ve only gotten worse.  Now Trump and his minions are openly defying the Supreme Court and laughing about it. They’re still getting rid of people solely on the strength of the boss’s whim. Which, when you think about it, is pretty much the last stop on the train to Treblinka. I wonder if these nationwide protests are too little, too late. But this is no time to sit at home. Here in Missoula, the April 5 event didn’t feel like a protest so much as a party or a wake:  A gathering of a few thousand like-minded people aggrieved, bothered and bewildered by what appears to be the rapid disassembly of America.  It was kind of uplifting to see that our months-long sense of anger and dread was widely shared. But the protests didn’t generate enough headlines a...

The original cast of MAGA W hat happens when a rapacious, hateful and thoroughly corrupt gasbag gains complete control of a government?  Well, we’re finding out, aren’t we? But this is not specifically about Trump. It’s more about this book I just finished: “ A Fever in the Heartland .”  In it, Timothy Egan relates the sordid saga  of a Trump-like figure who managed to take over the state of Indiana in the early 1920s.  At the height of his power as Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, David C. Stephenson controlled much of the Midwest and believed he had a shot at the White House. If his depravity hadn’t escalated to an actual sex slaying, he might have. Even then it was touch and go. “Fever” is a great example of what Egan does so well: Take well-trod episodes of American history and structure them almost as novels, with villains and heroes and quite a bit of  dramatic tension.  In a lot of fiction, it’s the villain who keeps you turning the pages. You can’t...