Bellwether by Connie Willis

Published in 1996

Bellwether is less a science fiction novel than a novelization of Office Space. Not that it matters, because anything Connie Willis writes is worth reading. She uses a light touch to illuminate human nature. The results are not always pretty but they are always funny.

Sandra Foster works for one of those think tanks that suck up as much grant money as they can while urging scientists to develop anything that might turn a profit. Sandra is a "soft" scientist, a statistician who researches fads. Her value to her employer, of course, is that predicting a fad before it becomes a fad is a key to vast wealth. Who wouldn't have wanted to be in on the ground floor of the hula hoop?

Sandra becomes stuck as she ponders the origins of the bob, a hairstyle that was fashionable during the early 1920s. She decides to help another scientist who would like to be studying chaos theory but, in the absence of grant money, is studying information diffusion. He eventually does that by trying to teach the leader of a flock of sheep (known as the bellwether) a simple task to see how that knowledge is transferred to the other sheep. The project is complicated by the fact that sheep are too stupid to learn anything.

The story has a bit of romance and a lot of humor, most of it focused on Flip, a whiny office assistant who is about on the same intellectual level as the sheep. Bellwether does, however, make two serious points. The first comes from Willis' exploration of fads. Every chapter is introduced with a fad, ranging from fashionable colors to dance crazes to chain letters to coonskin caps. The sheep become a metaphor for human behavior, as people follow a fad until it loses it trendiness and then give their loyalty to the next fad that comes along. The serious point, of course, is that independent thinking is a valuable but scarce commodity.

When Bellwether is not discussing fads, it explores the nature of scientific discovery, which leads to the second serious point. Happenstance figures prominently in "eureka" moments (a spore drifted through a window and contaminated a culture, leading to Fleming's discovery of penicillin), although a variety of unexpected factors have contributed to scientific breakthroughs. Science is about hard work but inspiration is not so easy to explain. Willis attempts an explanation in Bellwether, and her thoughts (which partially derive from chaos theory) may have some merit.

Serious thinking aside, it would be difficult to read Bellwether without smiling, so you may need to take some breaks to give your smile muscles a rest. This isn't by any means Willis' best novel, but her second-string novels are better than the best efforts of most writers.

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The Hell Bent Kid by Charles O. Locke

First published in 1957; published digitally by Open Road Media on July 7, 2015

The Western Writers of America put The Hell Bent Kid on its list of the 25 best westerns ever written. I’m not sure whether I’ve read 25 westerns in my entire life, so I’m in no position to judge. The Ox-Bow Incident and Pale Horse, Pale Rider remain my favorites, but The Hell Bent Kid is a worthy addition to that list. It is a story of what passes for justice in the Old West, but it focuses upon the changes a young man undergoes as he encounters unremitting violence. I suppose it is a kind of coming of age story, but the young man seems destined to see very little of his adulthood.

Tot Lohman, only 18, is released from custody to work on a ranch. Lohman killed Shorty Boyd in self-defense, but he expects the Boyds to seek revenge and he wants to get it over with so he gets the rancher’s permission to leave. He plans to find his father, a former lawman who is now cooking for some cattle rustlers, but encounters obstacles during that quest, most of them involving the Boyds. From conversations Lohman has along the way, we learn quite a bit about his family, although few of his kin are still alive. It is a harsh land Lohman roams.

Lohman isn’t a typical western hero. His mother was a Quaker and Lohman has inherited her nonviolent nature. Still, he lives in a violent world, he has great skill with a rifle, and he isn’t unwilling to defend himself. He is a simple man doing his best to understand a complex life. What he comes to understand haunts him. Lohman is “pulled this way and that” as he comes to terms with his destiny.

Much of the story is told in Lohman’s sparse voice. Some of the story is revealed in letters or statements composed by other characters. The landscape and the hardscrabble lives of the people who populate it are vividly drawn. Horses have more value than people, reputation is more important than reality. Dialog and strong characterizations, like the setting, are the novel’s strengths. The change in Lohman’s personality -- he is more confident but less innocent in the novel’s final chapters -- is convincing.

Westerns are often tales of morality. Justice is usually the dominant theme. The characters in The Hell Bent Kid debate law-and-order, some believing that justice (in the form of vengeance) should be meted out by those who are wronged, others advocating the more civilized belief that nothing is less just than inflicting punishment without a trial. “But it’s a tough country, big and tough” one of the characters observes, and toughness is not the best environment for nurturing morality.

Still, there are good and decent people in the novel, the kind who understand the true meaning of law-and-order, the kind who strive to bring moral order to a big and tough country. Unfortunately, the good and decent are always at risk; the powerful too often prevail. All of those realities of life are encapsulated in this brief, stirring novel.

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The Hot Countries by Timothy Hallinan

Published by Soho Crime on October 6, 2015

“We all need friends at times. Doesn’t much matter who they are.” That’s just one of the truths spoken in The Hot Countries, the latest and best of the Poke Rafferty novels. Poke’s friends -- people he might have identified as acquaintances rather than friends before this novel -- are the key to this novel’s success.

Timothy Hallinan writes circles around a number of more popular thriller writers who are just phoning it in. I have never been disappointed by a Hallinan novel. Hallinan’s Junior Bender series is fun, but his Poke Rafferty series probes the human character in greater depth.

In The Hot Countries, Hallinan focuses on aging collateral characters who no longer have a purpose in life and seem incapable of searching for one. Hallinan is a master at writing about people living in emotional pain, people in a state of decline, people who have lost themselves. Fortunately, he balances the darkness with humor and with glimpses of human decency.

Arthur Varney shows up in Bangkok looking for Poke Rafferty. Varney wants something from Poke, maybe a couple of things, both relating to people and events found in The Fear Artist and For the Dead. Like all Poke Rafferty novels, however, The Hot Countries can easily be read as a stand-alone.

One of the strongest characters in The Hot Countries (other than Poke) is an old veteran named Wallace who has been destroyed by love more than war. Seeing Varney takes Wallace into his tortured past, giving Hallinan a chance to tell the veteran’s story. A couple of other strong characters are children, particularly Treasure, a girl who has suffered a violent life, some of which was detailed in earlier novels. She’s a kid who is dedicated to survival, but during the course of the novel, circumstances cause Poke to wonder whether he has misjudged her.

Hallinan has a gift for describing Bangkok, from the fat raindrops to the grim tourists and grizzled expats who choke its streets. He also has a strong grasp of Thai people and culture, of bar girls and the foreign customers who never bother to probe beneath the smiling fantasies that occupy a week or two of their lives. Hallinan’s prose is descriptive, fresh, and engaging, but it’s also honest. He describes Poke (a travel writer) as staring at his laptop “as he tried to find his way to a sentence he believed.” I love Hallinan’s novels because, unlike so many current crime writers, Hallinan always writes sentences I can believe.

Astute observations of human nature combine with escalating tension in a novel that is alternately chilling and moving. The ending couldn’t be better. The Hot Countries is exactly what a thriller should be -- a novel about the triumph of the human spirit that features ordinary people in threatening situations who reveal their strengths and flaws as they strive to overcome adversity. It is the best novel I’ve read by Hallinan. He is now permanently enshrined as one of my favorite contemporary crime writers.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Mulberry Bush by Charles McCarry

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on October 27, 2015

The early chapters of The Mulberry Bush are the story of an estranged father and son, told from the son’s perspective. The father was at one time a capable spy who angered (or embarrassed) the wrong people at Headquarters. When father and son reunite, the aftermath of their meeting gives the son a new purpose in life -- vengeance.

So begins the unnamed protagonist’s life as a spy, a career that he fashions on his own terms. Eventually he falls in love with Luz Aguilar, whose revolutionary/terrorist parents were killed by the police in Argentina. The protagonist believes that Luz can lead him to the Russians who control the Argentinians, but he also wants her help to pursue an agenda of his own.

The protagonist jets from Buenos Aires to Bogotá to Bucharest, playing the espionage game in his own way and aggravating his masters in the best tradition of spy fiction. Key characters include the protagonist’s stuffy superiors at Headquarters, a couple of Russians who may or may not want to betray their country’s secrets, a priest who once lived in Russia, and a surgeon who was close to Luz’ father and who is now Luz’ friend/protector. All of these characters have secrets that the protagonist must ferret out if he is to survive.

Many of the usual espionage plot threads are present in The Mulberry Bush. Are the apparent traitors really traitors or are they double agents? Are agents accused of being traitors because they really are or because the other side wants to destroy them with the weapon of suspicion? Is there a mole at Headquarters? Was Luz’ father working for the Russians, for Headquarters, or only for himself? The reader’s challenge is to work out what’s going on with the Russians, the Argentinians, and the Americans while getting a handle on just where the protagonist is headed.

Tension builds slowly and steadily as the story nears its climax. Charles McCarry isn’t a writer who needs to use artificial means (like the single-sentence paragraphs and two page chapters favored by many modern thriller writers) to move the story at a good pace. He writes vivid prose and creates complex, convincing, multifaceted characters. My only two complaints are that (1) the protagonist’s initial goal is clear but his plan for achieving it is ill-defined, leaving me wondering what he really hoped to achieve, and (2) the two Russians each disappear from the story in a way that left me unsatisfied. In the end, those qualms are minor. There was more than enough intrigue in The Mulberry Bush to ensure my rapt attention, and the plot twists kept me off-balance, as a spy novel should.

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Andersonville by Edward M. Erdelac

Published by Random House/Hydra on August 18, 2015

The first quarter of Andersonville is extraordinary. After that, the novel drifts into the conventions of horror fiction. Although the novel as a whole does not live up to the promise of its beginning, it remains a well-told tale.

A black man named Barclay Lourdes sneaks onto a train and assumes the identity of a captured Union soldier. Confederate soldiers take Barclay and their other prisoners to Camp Sumter in Andersonville, Georgia. It is a brutal place. Edward M. Erdelac describes the stench, disease, starvation, and cruelty that pervade the prison camp in vivid language. It is a place more suited to lice, maggots, and vermin than the prisoners who inhabit it.

The premise of Erdelac’s novel is that Andersonville (an actual prison camp during the Civil War) was intentionally made into a place of depravity so that demons would have an earthly environment in which they could thrive. Barclay, a practitioner of hoodoo and voudon, has been asked to investigate the camp by Quitman Day, whose western magic (the kind that involves pentangles) is ineffective inside the camp. The fact that Barclay and Day support opposites of the war provides a source of tension despite their childhood friendship. The fact that Barclay blames Day for his sister’s death creates more than tension.

Like many novels that rely upon magic and the supernatural to fuel the plot, I think Andersonville might have been a better book without the magic. The dramatic setting and Barclay’s multifaceted personality lend themselves to a more serious work of fiction. Still, the story is fun. It goes the way a horror fan would expect it to go. That might disappoint readers who are looking for surprises, but strong characters and fast action overcome the story’s weaknesses.

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