Books in Progress

I know nothing about that but I wouldn't be surprised.

The Yard turned out to be a bust…at least for me. It became a horror novel rather than a gritty detective thriller. But what really turned me off was one plot point that I found so offensively dumb that I just had to put the book down. It was very amateurish writing and pure plot manipulation.

One hopes to read a book where one doesn’t precisely know where it’s going. But this one had become predictable and stilted. That’s too bad because it started out well.

While political correctness/diversity has damaged law-enforcement, its greatest damage is that it has lowered the level of competency in all areas of endeavor. Being black, transgender and wheelchair bound does not necessarily make one a better elevator inspector.

Many people do not seem to understand the fundamental foundation upon which a society rests is trust. This trust is something that is built up over a long period of time through trial and error to a point where the populace gains a substantial amount of confidence in the system. I am beginning to see this competence being degraded and am slowly losing some of my confidence in the system. One encounters incompetents on a regular basis these days.

And I am not referring to only the political system.

Luckily, I don’t think Godzilla hanging over the railing could tip over a Washington State Ferry. They look like they have a very low center of gravity. And although there can be up two two rows of cars parked on each side, they are balanced, and no cars are put there before the middle is filled up.

But, yeah, on some boats I guess everyone getting to one side could be a problem.

Mr. Kung, you are getting that picture posting down to an art.

Here's the part that always surprised me about this sort of stuff: Very few want to take the time to figure anything out. As simple as StubbornThings was organized, I was often astounded to get questions such as "Where is so-and-so?" But all one ever needed to do was to take even the most cursory look and that feature would have been found.

As much as we criticize the Left for being Snowflakes, my eyes were opened in this regard about the right as well. I mean, geez, we're supposed to be the inventive and industrious ones. But push comes to shove, people are lazy and entitlement-minded. They want somebody else to do things for them.

This is why I give "kudos" for you taking the time to do this. Whether or not you needed help or not is immaterial. We all need help with this stuff. No one is born with this knowledge.

Thoreau once said, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.” As one of his contemporaries retorted "One 'simplicity' is enough." Or something like that.

I recently finished “The Gate Keeper" by Charles Todd. This is the third book by him that I’ve read…plus one that got so bad I just couldn’t finish it, so make that 3-and-a-half.

I really want to like this guy. The stories tend to start out well but the writer is very mediocre when it comes to plotting. And he hasn’t even the basic idea for how to have a riveting finish.

And although this book is called “The Gate Keeper,” that aspect is so tangential and late-coming that it feels like false advertising.

The plot itself is about a man driving a car who is stopped by a stranger who is standing in the middle of the road. He stops his car, finds out what the stranger want, and is shot.

And I don’t mind at all giving this plot away because you’ve got a hole in your head if you want to read this book. I may be a glutton for punishment, but even I have finally had enough of Charles Todd.

Anyway, long story short, this all involves a stupid book that some chick sold that someone else (her brother-in-law) had sewn proof of her marriage to his older brother into a restored binding. She is the rightful heir to the family estate but has no proof that she actually married the older brother. But the younger brother found proof of the marriage and had it hidden in the binding of a book that he then gave her as a gift. It was his way of, I guess, relieving some guilt for stealing her inheritance because he had, after all, given her the document she needed.

Strapped for money, the woman sells the valuable book at one point. The wife of the younger brother hears about the book and then goes to track it down, killing three people who were connected with the sale. Why she killed the people with the book is anyone’s guess. No one would have known the document was hidden in the binding. There is some weak (very weak) plot reasoning by the author that maybe someone would have bought the book and used it for the valuable illustrations in it, to mount them separately. Thus the secret document would have been found.

This is a stretch. No only is the a stretch but it’s a completely added on plot element. Nothing in the first 3/4 of the book (or so) point to this as a solution. Three people, seemingly not connected, are shot expertly through the heart at point-blank range, the killer always getting away but (if you can believe this) leaving some carvings that her dead brother-in-law had made. This somehow was to confuse the police. Yes, use a carving made by the elder brother (who is known for his carvings) of the man you are married to (who stole the estate from the rightful heir….his wife has a son) as a way to turn the police away.

I’m honestly not sure if Charles Todd reads his own books. The plot was intriguing for a while. But once you complete the book, it is a completely nonsensical and unsatisfactory ending. Too bad, because there are qualities to his books that are good. Being able to flesh out a plot isn’t one of them.

And no loose ends are wrapped up. We get no completion to the parents of one of the murdered men (the first one) who so despised their son....out of all reason, by the way. Another silly and amateurish plot point. Why do I (did I) persist? I don't know.

As I confessed, I really want to like this author. He’s much better at setting up the story than he is concluding it. Also, the parts in the middle tend to just be circular, doing the same stuff over and over. It feels like filler.

And in at least one of the books I’ve read, his psychological-trauma friend-inside-his-head, Hamish, makes some sense. But now I don’t know why he’s even there. And he’s turning from a sort of guilty conscience to an omniscient being who can see and hear things that Inspector Rutledge can’t.

I’ll admit I could do no better writing a book. He also relies way too much on speculative chatter rather than moving things along more kinetically. Entire sections are filled with supposing what a whole host of subjects must be thinking, doing, how they could be guilty or innocent, and on and on. Frankly, I lose track of who is who there is so much of this. I realize a bit of circumspection comes with being a good detective. But there’s just too much of it.

And, like Agatha Christie, he has the temptation to super-size his murders. It’s that old truism: One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. If Charles Todd has stopped at the one death (which was interesting in what was known about it), it would have meant something. But instead of weaving a deeper tapestry, it just felt like he got bored with the one death and moved to the next. And the next death (and the one after) offered nothing new. I do think the author ran out of having something to say.

We’re all guilty of that far too often. I’m probably doing that right now. Yet the main character, Inspector Rutledge, has much to commend him. He’s honest, hard-working, diligent, courageous, intelligent, and can suffer various local constables and other fools of Scotland Yard gladly. And then he’s got Hamish inside his head which sometimes works. At the very least, it’s something novel.

But the novels themselves (none that I’ve read, anyway) have not held together even so far as three-fifths of the book. But by the time one has gotten that far, one might as well finish it. I couldn’t it one case. It was so ponderous.

Right now I’ve switched to a non-fiction book: The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945

I’m 13% into this and am finding it to be very interesting. I like to think of it in terms of “What’s the one thing I’ve learned that is a fascinating fact that I did not know before?” One of those might be the horrendous accident on one of the Hawaiin islands when they were practicing use of landing craft. Another might be an expert summation of what the war in the Pacific was all about.

Author James D. Hornfischer focus on what he says are the three main people:



It’s interesting that back in the late 1800’s, there was fully-developed military doctrine about fighting a war in the Pacific that included the need to re-take the Philippines. Plans were obviously revised as technology and the enemies became more realized. It was assumed early on, for instance, that the Allies would bomb Japan from airstrips in China.

This was eventually deemed unsuitable for various reasons. Another thing I didn’t know was how fast-tracked the B-29 project was. It was extremely rushed. And its capabilities meant a totally different direction for military planners. And this, of course, then brought the Marianas (Saipan, Tinian, Guam, etc.) into the central scheme of things.

The author notes that the realities of airplanes and airports in the Pacific mean that any runway must be aligned with the east-northeasterly trade winds. And these islands, in the words of Rear Admiral Harry W. Hill, “could almost be counted on the fingers of two hands. These, naturally, the Japs had developed as bases, and there were no more! So when we moved across the Pacific, and needed an air base, there was no alternative. We simply had to take on away from the Japs. It’s just that simple, and so badly misunderstood by so many historians.”

So off across the Pacific we go, the sphere of influence switching from MacArthur’s to the Fifth Fleet. And early in the book we get an amazing example of what this new luxury meant for Spruance. The plans was to take the Marianas whose runways would put mainland Japan into reach of the B-29s. But in order to do so, they would first have to neutralize the Truk Islands which is an amazing natural archipelago fortress.

Invasion of Truk was considered too difficult so they decided to neutralize its planes. Truk was the greatest Japanese base in the Central Pacific and we knew very little about. The first task was photo aerial reconnaissance. The author writes:



Spruance’s idea was to take a fast carrier group to Truk and neutralize its airplanes as a threat. This section of the book is described in interesting detail, including Spruance going off on a sort of joyride with some big ships to hunt down some escaping Japanese ships. Planes that could have taken out the ships were ordered back to leave the prey to Spruance.

What I also found interesting was that the flyovers of the area by American aerial reconnaissance had made the Japanese believe that Truk would be a target. And what they did was to removed any and all capital ships of the Japanese Navy. The author doesn’t mention this, but it seems by February 16-17, 1944, the Japanese pretty much knew they were quite vulnerable.

So when Truk was assaulted by Spruance’s fast carrier group, they found very few ships of any size or value. Even so, they sank a whole lot of medium-sized ones, including destroying several hundred planes. Truk would received sporadic treatment going forth from air assault, but otherwise would be bypassed and left to starve.

This was no longer Midway where the Americans had to be very clever — even lucky — to face the Japanese Navy and score a victory, or just a strategic draw. Spruance’s forces overwhelmed the Japanese forces at Truk. And although the Kamikazes would be in their future, Spruance’s carriers also displayed the ability (along with radar-guided fighters) to repel Japanese planes via massed and coordinated defensive strategies.

Helping the Allies was apparently what the author called “the unending dysfunctional feud between the army and navy.” And why didn’t the Japanese build more carriers. This article has some interesting data:



The attacking planes that Spruance’s carriers faced were showing clear signs that they were not meeting the “A-Team” in terms of pilots.