Fiction – Page 3 – Ash Clifton, Writer

What I’m Reading: Middlemarch

As some dedicated readers of this blog might know, my friend Margaret Luongo and I posted a pair of videos discussing George Eliot’s classic novel Middlemarch to our “Read A Classic Novel…Together!” channel on YouTube. Ever since then, I’ve been meaning to take the time to write a post about it, mainly because it had such a big impact on me. I mean, lots of books have achieved the classic moniker and yet don’t hold up to modern scrutiny. But Middlemarch does. In fact, it’s one of those titanic works of literature that you almost can’t get your head around. It has so many sides and so many aspects, such that it attains a kind of sublime quality. Like Shakespeare’s works, Middlemarch is a different experience for everyone who reads it.

When I say titanic, I mean it literally. Middlemarch is a big book–eight hundred pages in most editions–following the lives of six major and at least a dozen minor characters in the fictional, provincial town called Middlemarch. The story is set in the 1830s, but Eliot wrote the book in the 1870s, when the world had already been vastly changed by the industrial revolution in England. And so, the book has a little bit of a “lost world” feel to it. One can sense that Eliot (whose real name was Mary Ann Evans) is writing about the social and economic environment that is already a thing of the past. However, absolutely nothing about the book feels the least bit sentimental or nostalgic. Quite the contrary. Eliot was a great writer whose blazing intelligence seems to illuminate every page of this very long book. And everything she describes feels as true and relevant today as when she wrote it.

My Interview on The Writer’s Dossier Podcast

Recently I chatted with my friend Jeff Circle on his excellent “The Writer’s Dossier” podcast. We discussed topics ranging from growing up in Gainesville to 80s music to crime fiction. I had a great time, even though I was slow to grasp the concept of “rapid-fire responses.” Oh, well. I’m getting old.

Check it out…

Edgar Award Symposium Video

I had a lot of fun being on the “Do You Remember the First Time?” panel at the Edgar Awards Symposium last week. Panel chair Terry Shames did a great job, and I got to meet some hitherto online-only friends like Audrey Lee. I also made some new ones.

I was pretty nervous and I think it shows, but oh, well. Check it out if you’re interested.

Great Mystery Novels: “The Doorbell Rang”

Frequent readers of this blog might remember a post a did some years ago called “My Rex Stout Shout-Out,” and will therefore already know of my long and abiding admiration for Rex Stout. Specifically, for his Nero Wolfe novels, the best of which is perhaps The Doorbell Rang.

It’s one of Stout’s later novels, published in 1960, and it was also the most controversial, involving as its central, unseen villain no other than J. Edgar Hoover himself. And, yeah, that’s one reason I like it. Stout’s detestation of the American right-wing’s tendency toward fascist behavior reached a fever-pitch level, which I share. But the main reason I like the book is for its story, which is actually two interlocking plot lines, each of which complements the other in inventive and surprising ways. The central line involves a very rich widow, Rachel Bruner, who suspects that the FBI is tapping her phones and generally harassing her. She wants Wolfe—the most brilliant man in New York City—to figure out a way to stop them. (Fun fact: this is an example of a little-known sub-sub-sub-genre of detective fiction in which the P.I. serves as a kind of fixer for some rich person’s critical problem.)

Through the intervention of NYPD Inspector Cramer (a highly intelligent but belligerent recurring character, who serves as a frequent foil for Wolfe throughout the series), Wolfe learns that FBI agents are suspects in the murder investigation of a journalist. Thus, Wolfe (and Stout) sees an opportunity to connect these two lines of inquiry. That is, by solving the mystery of the murdered journalist, Wolfe might be able to get some leverage on the FBI, and thus stop its harassment of Mrs. Bruner.

It’s a devilishly clever story, and made even more entertaining by the ways in which Wolfe and his loyal “leg-man,” Archie Goodwin (the narrator of all the Wolfe novels), contrive to outwit the dunder-headed FBI agents. This involves hiring actors to copy the dress and mannerisms of both Archie and Wolfe, so that the actors can impersonate both men and lure the agents into a trap.

Every good story is, in my opinion, a kind of whodunit, if only in a psychological or philosophical sense. Every successful novel asks a question, which the reader must keep reading to discover. With actual mystery novels, this question is explicit—who did the murder and how will the P.I. catch them—but that’s the only real difference. What always amazes me about Rex Stout is how good he is at asking this essential question. In fact, in The Doorbell Rang, he essentially poses it in the opening lines of the book…

Since it was the deciding factor, I might as well begin by describing it. It was a pink slip of paper three inches wide and seven inches long, and it told the First National City Bank to pay to the order of Nero Wolfe one hundred thousand and 00/100 dollars. Signed, Rachel Bruner. It was there on Wolfe’s desk, where Mrs. Bruner had put it. After doing so, she had returned to the red leather chair.

Already, the reader is sucked in. We have to find out what’s the deal with that check, which leads us to the crux of the entire mystery.

This passage also illustrates another great strength of the Nero Wolfe novels—and it ain’t Nero Wolfe. Rather, it’s Archie. Archie’s voice. Smart. Sharp. Sardonic. But a bit noble, too. Take this example from a few paragraphs, later:

After she was in the red leather chair I put her coat, which was at least a match for a sable number for which a friend of mine had paid eighteen grand, on the couch, sat at my desk, and took her in. She was a little too short and too much filled out to be rated elegant, even if her tan woolen dress was a Dior, and her face was too round, but there was nothing wrong with the brown-black eyes she aimed at Wolfe as she asked him if she needed to tell him who she was.

I love that bit about Brunner’s eyes. Archie is, of course, an avowed heterosexual, with some kind of romantic exploit in every book. Yet here he finds himself taken with a woman (an older woman, at that) not for her looks but for her obvious intelligence and determination. It’s a great detail, of the sort Stout always delivers.

It’s also a great example of how vividly drawn Stout’s characters are, especially the recurring characters. The snarky and slightly amoral newspaper editor Lon Cohen. The fastidious and unflappable chef, Fritz Brenner. The cool and precise leg-man Saul Panzer. All of them become as familiar to us over the course of the series, like old friends.

Naturally, Wolfe and Archie manage to pull off the caper, trap the FBI agents, and solve the murder, all simultaneously. I won’t spoil it by giving away the climax of the novel, but trust me…it’s a dozy.

Check it out…

Edgar Awards De-Brief

Well, the 2025 Edgar Awards Ceremony is over. I didn’t win my category (that honor went to Henry Wise for his excellent novel Holy City, but I still had a blast. I met a lot of cool people, including my new editor at Crooked Lane, Sara Henry, CLB founder Matt Martz, and others. Best of all, I made some new friends in writers Kerri Hakoda, Audree Lee, and Carol Floriani.

And, for a bonus, Cathy and I got to spend some time in the greatest city in the world, Manhattan. (I am writing this post from inside a Starbucks on 7th Ave.) I used to come here pretty often in the early 2000s, when I was working for software consulting company on Prince Street, and I always loved it. I was last here for fun in 2017 with my son Connor, doing the tourist thing. The city hasn’t changed that much as far as I can tell. It’s still a rambling, teeming, kinetic barrage of sights, sounds, and languages. Manhattan is one of the few places on earth where you can step into a crowded elevator and hear Spanish, French, German, Russian, Hausa, and several others being spoken.

It’s also got the best museum in the world, the Met, which Cathy and I visited, of course. We got to see the John Singer Sargent exhibit, with Sargent’s masterpiece Portrait of Madame X on prominent display. I first learned about this amazing picture (and the scandal it caused) from David McCollough’s excellent history The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, in which Sargent is one of the Paris-bound artists discussed. (Sargent painted Madame X in Paris with a well-known socialite as his subject; hence the scandal.)

So, all in all, a damn fine trip so far. I don’t know if I will ever get another Edgar nom, but if I do, you can bet I will be back.

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “The War Against the Rull”

This entry in my on-going Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers series is both old and new. That is, it’s a modern touch-up of the cover from the October 1949 edition of Astounding Science Fiction painted by Hubert Rogers. That issue included a work by A.E. van Vogt, but not the one we are interested in here. This modern version is from a 1999 edition of van Vogt’s classic sci-fi novel, The War Against the Rull, which I distinctly remember devouring in two days when I was in eighth-grade.

I like this cover a lot. It’s not just a classic. It’s an archetype. Specifically, the archetype of the heroic (America) scientist, a buff intellectual and polymath whose ilk could be found in countless works of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Roger Zelazny, and on an on. In The War Against the Rull, the man is Dr. Trevor Jamieson, a brilliant scientist who is also a fierce warrior and survival-expert. He’s stranded on an alien planet with a huge, six-legged, intelligent creature called an ezwal who wants to kill him. But when both Jamieson and the ezwal encounter a mutual enemy—a race of aggressive, centipede-like aliens called the Rull—they decide to work together to survive.

It’s a great story, like so many from the sci-fi’s Golden Age. I’ve written before about why sci-fi novels from that era are so much more enjoyable (to me, at least) than most of those written in the last ten years or so. I think it has to do with the gritty humanity of such stories. Yeah, Jamieson is essentially a comic-book character (think Doctor Quest and Race Bannon rolled into one), but van Vogt does a great job of making you believe he’s in real trouble. The ezwal, too—he’s a compelling character in his own right. You get involved in the desperate nature of their situation, and you keep reading to see how they will get out of it.

Anyway, check it out if you can…

Cover from the 1970 edition that I read as a kid (by artist John Schoenherr)

Another version of the Scientist Hero Archetype (by artist James Bama)

Perfect Films: “Us”

** SPOILERS BELOW **

The better part of a decade has passed since Jordan Peele’s landmark horror film Get Out was released, marking Peele’s transformation from famed comedy writer and sketch artist to one of the most important filmmakers of our time. Peele has since added two more films to his horror oeuvre—2019’s Us and 2022’s Nope.

All three are great, but my favorite is Us. For me, it hits on the deepest and most disturbing level, and it has the richest palette in terms of effects. It’s also the hardest to figure out in terms of plot. With Nope and Get Out, the viewer has a vague sense of what’s going on, even early in the film (although the details turn out to be more shocking and terrifying than anyone suspected). But while watching Us, I was totally mystified. I knew it had something to do with evil twins—true doppelgängers in both the literal and the psychological sense—but I had no real idea of what the actual plot would turn out to reveal. And what a reveal it is!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Part of Us’s appeal lies in its slow-burn first act. (This is true of Get Out and Nope, too, but Us takes it to the next level.) The movie starts with a flashback to 1986, when a little girl, Adelaide, breaks away from her bickering parents at a beach boardwalk and finds a strange funhouse. It’s a simple premise, yet so much disturbing stuff going on in this segment that it’s almost impossible to describe. We have the tension between the parents, raising the specter of divorce (the thing most kids fear more than anything else except death). Then we have the separation of the child from the parents (another primal fear). And, finally, we have the freakish funhouse, which, though apparently deserted, is still lit with eerie neon light.

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “This Immortal”

My privious entry in this continuing “Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers” series was also devoted to Roger Zelazny, so please forgive me for double-dipping into the Zelazny well. But I couldn’t resist talking about one of Zelazny’s other great novels, …And Call Me Conrad—published in 1966 as This Immortal. Most people have never heard of it, but it’s an interesting book for several reasons.

For one, it was Zelazny’s first novel, and it has many of his signature obsessions (e.g, ancient mythology mixed with science fiction; a wise-cracking anti-hero who is also an Übermensch; epic fight scenes; etc.). For another, it actually won a Hugo Award, tying in 1966 with a slightly better-known book…Frank Herbert’s Dune. And finally, it’s just a hell of an entertaining adventure tale.

I chose this cover (by fantasy artist Rowena Morrill) because it really captures the sense of the book’s main character, Conrad Nomikos, a world-weary man-of-mystery who might be immortal. (The text suggests that he is at least a century old, and hints that he might be several thousand years older still.) He works as director of a government agency tasked with protecting and preserving the surviving relics of a destroyed earth. A nuclear war referred to by the characters as “The Three Days” has occurred many decades before, leaving most of the planet uninhabitable. The survivors, which include a wide variety of mutants both human and animal, live mainly on islands like Greece, Conrad’s home.

And that’s not even the main subject this wild, wild little book. Conrad is assigned the duty of escorting a group of VIP tourists—including Cort Myshtigo, an alien from the Vega star system whose race has purchased earth as a kind of vast museum—as they tour the planets once great sites (now ruins). Conrad soon realizes that another of the tourists, an Egyptian assassin named Hassan with whom Conrad has befriended in the past, is secretly on a mission to kill the Vegan. Hassan, it seems, has been hired for this task by an obscure, underground political group who want to reclaim earth for humanity. So, Conrad finds himself not only being a tour-guide but also an unpaid protector of Myshtigo—who he hates.

It’s a crazy book, and the cover conveys this craziness well. Though the edition is from 1980, the cover really feels like a 1970s cover, with its vaguely photorealistic painting of a ruggedly handsome dude with great hair (think Roger Staubach in his prime). I also like how Morrill works in the other tropes of the book—its setting among Greek ruins, as well as the presence of some mythological creatures in the background (which, the reader eventually learns, are actually just animals that have been mutated by radioactive fall-out).

It’s a very dated cover, but still a really cool one. Classic, one might say…

Synchronicity for Bookworms: Martin Caidin

Some years ago, my son Connor and I were watching the movie Dunkirk on DVD. It’s a very good movie, telling the story of that fateful week from multiple points-of-view. Of course, the most compelling thread of the narrative is that of the lone RAF pilot (played by Tom Hardy) doing his heroic best to protect the stranded British troops.

These scenes inevitably led to a geek-worthy discussion between Connor and me about the relative merits of the RAF’s Spitfire versus the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitt 109. Believe it or not, such discussions are becoming more common between fathers and sons (and mothers and daughters, for all I know), mainly because of online games like War Thunder, whose popularity has breathed new life into the study of military history by the Millennial generation.

Anyway…. At some point during the discussion, I offhandedly commented that I had once flown in Adolf Hitler’s airplane.

Great Mystery Novels: “The Hound of the Baskervilles”

*** SPOILERS BELOW ***

It feels a little silly, writing SPOILERS BELOW considering I am discussing a novel that came out 123 years ago. Is it possible that any reader of this blog—or, for that matter, any book nerd over the age of thirty—is not already familiar with the plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles? Even those who haven’t read the book have probably seen the movie in one of its many incarnations over the decades. I first saw the Basil Rathbone version from 1939 (which is free on Youtube) when I was about ten years old. This was about the same time my mom gave me a faux-leather bound edition of the complete Sherlock Holmes collection, which I read and re-read many, many times. And the work I re-read the most was The Hound of the Baskervilles (henceforth, HOTB).

Which might lead one to ask: Why would anybody re-read a mystery? After all, the whole point of a mystery is to figure whodunnit, right?

For the average mystery, this is largely true. But the great mysteries—like great books of any kind—operate on many levels and hold different kinds of appeal. For me, the very best mystery novels are character-driven, with a vivid setting and a lot of drama that stands above mere plot mechanics. HOTB is such a novel.