Ross Thomas

I've posted about Ross Thomas before. Yesterday at CrimeReads appeared "Ross Thomas: A Crime Reader's Guide," a good introduction to an author who never disappointed me. The opening paragraphs:

Nobody wrote scoundrels the way Ross Thomas could. His heroes all had checkered pasts, though often with a Bogartian streak that led them to do the right thing against their own self-interest. His villains were a spectacular assortment of con men, spies, shady politicians, corrupt cops, wheelers, dealers, fixers, and schemers. His complex plots often revolved around political intrigue and backroom chicanery leading to sudden violence, and featured double-, triple-, or quadruple-crosses, so much so that it might not be until the very end that you knew exactly who had done what to whom.

All of this, in a too-brief span from 1966 to 1994, was written with keen intelligence, sharp humor, and a brilliant gift for character, description, dialogue, and intimate observation. So good was he at all of the latter that Stephen King called him “the Jane Austen of political espionage.” His worldview was jaded, but to charges that he was overly cynical, Thomas only responded, “If there is a trace of cynicism in my books, it’s only based on reality. People are always saying, ‘Things can’t be as bad as you make them,’ and I say, ‘No, they’re worse.’” .... (more, including a list of "The Essential Thomas")

Ross Thomas: A Crime Reader's Guide | CrimeReads

"To get better, it must get much worse."

Reading some more from Michael Dirda's essays for The American Scholar, I came across an account of his visit to a second-hand bookstore and his acquisitions that day. One was a book by Ross Thomas, an author who has never disappointed me. Haven't read this one for a while. Dirda:

The Fools in Town Are on Our Side, by Ross Thomas. Years ago, I traded my mint first of this crime thriller to my friend David Streitfeld—and regretted it almost immediately. In my years as a book editor, I used to call up Ross Thomas to review mysteries and spy novels, and, a consummate professional, he was always at his desk. Like his contemporary Charles McCarry, happily still with us, Thomas never quite received the acclaim he deserves, though his fans are legion. In a Times Literary Supplement survey, of 25 years ago or more, Eric Ambler chose this novel as a neglected classic of its genre. The title, by the way, comes from Huckleberry Finn. Along with Chinaman’s Chance and The Seersucker Whipsaw, which I’ve read, The Fools in Town are On Our Side is probably Thomas’s most admired novel.

From the description on the back of my paperback edition:

Lucifer Dye was born in Montana and raised in Shanghai's most distinguished bordello. Recently dismissed from Section Two, a secret American Intelligence Agency, he heads for San Francisco to be debriefed. Dye and Section Two are parting company....

Unemployed, armed only with a passport, a severance check, and his wits, Dye is approached by a man named Victor Orcutt. Orcutt's vocation is the cleaning up of corrupt cities through the application of Orcutt's First Law: "To get better, it must get much worse."

Orcutt proposes a $50,000 fee. Dye's assignment: to corrupt an entire American city. ....

The American Scholar: Wonder Books - Michael Dirda

"The Fools in Town..."

The post-war crime/detection/espionage authors I have particularly enjoyed include John D. MacDonald, Dick Francis, John le Carré, Elmore Leonard,  and Ross Thomas. I haven't read Thomas recently but have a lot of his titles, each one of which I've read and enjoyed. Most, if not all, are still in print. From his 1995 NYT obituary:

.... Mr. Thomas, who also wrote under the pseudonym Oliver Bleeck, won critical praise for his stylish, well-told suspense novels enlivened with a dash of wit. The writer Stephen King, noting Mr. Ross's gift for character and witty dialogue, once called him "the Jane Austen of the political espionage story." Other critics placed him in the hard-boiled tradition of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

Mr. Thomas reveled in bleak tales of political corruption, string-pulling and behind-the-scenes scheming. "I do use the fact that I've been in the back rooms where the deals are being cut," he once told an interviewer. "If there's a trace of cynicism in my books, it's only based on reality."....

In 1965...Mr. Thomas turned out his first novel, The Cold War Swap, which he wrote in six weeks. The novel, a tale of skulduggery by the Central Intelligence Agency, received an Edgar Award for best first novel from the Mystery Writers of America.

His many novels include Cast a Yellow Shadow (1967), The Porkchoppers (1972), The Money Harvest (1975), The Mordida Man (1981) and Out on the Rim (1987). Briarpatch won an Edgar Award as best mystery novel of 1985. His most recent novel was Ah, Treachery! (1994). ....

Mysterious Press says that he wrote a book a year for twenty-five years. I only have seventeen of them, mostly paperbacks. One of mine is The Fools in Town Are on Our Side (1970). From its cover:

Lucifer Dye was born in Montana and raised in Shanghai's most distinguished bordello. Recently dismissed from Section Two, a secret American Intelligence Agency, he heads for San Francisco to be debriefed. Dye and Section Two are parting company because of the sudden, unexpected death of a Red Chinese double agent...a death which resulted in Dye's three month billet in a Singapore dungeon.

Unemployed, armed only with a passport, a severance check, and his wits, Dye is approached by a man named Victor Orcutt. Orcutt's vocation is the cleaning up of corrupt cities through the application of Orcutt's First Law: "To get better, it must get much worse."

Orcutt proposes a $50,000 fee. Dye's assignment: to corrupt an entire American city. ....

20th century mysteries

The fiction I read for pleasure is almost entirely in the mystery/thriller genre. The Independent Mystery Booksellers Association has compiled a list of their "100 Favorite Mysteries of the 20th Century" and, although I fall far short of having read all of them, I very much agree with them about those I have read. A few of their selections that I know and heartily recommend:

• Margery Allingham, The Tiger in the Smoke
• Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Dimitrios
• John Buchan, The 39 Steps
• Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
• Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
• Michael Connelly, The Concrete Blonde
• Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop
• Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
• Dick Francis, Whip Hand
• Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
• Tony Hillerman, A Thief of Time
• P.D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
• Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty
• John D. MacDonald, The Deep Blue Good-by
• Philip MacDonald, The List of Adrian Messenger
• Ngaio Marsh, Death of a Peer
• Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many
• Ellery Queen, Cat of Many Tails
• Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise
• Ross Thomas, Chinaman's Chance

When I find an author I like I tend to read everything he wrote that I can find. Each of those above have authored other mysteries — in some cases many others — and I have enjoyed all that I have read.

20th Century Favorites - (IMBA)

“Credential worship”

Kenneth Woodward, longtime religion editor for Newsweek, considers whether Ross Douthat is qualified to write about Catholicism, his right to do so having been questioned by a growing list of Catholic academicians who have attached their names to an open letter to The New York Times.

Part one reads: “Aside from the fact that Mr. Douthat has no professional qualifications for writing on the subject…” What exactly is the subject he is not qualified to write about? He has has already published a very substantive journalistic book on Catholicism that has been generally well received by Catholics of various stripes. If the subject is Catholic sacramental marriage, he is a husband and a father, an experiential credential that some of his academic critics, being priests, do not. If nothing else, it gives him a personal stake in the outcome of the church’s deliberations.

It is hard not to conclude from the way this sentence begins that what the offended scholars mean by “professional qualifications” is a doctorate in theology or in some degree kindred to “the sacred sciences.” But neither did G.K. Chesterton, or C.S. Lewis, or Thomas Merton, I believe. What they did is read widely and write well. A doctorate is the one credential Douthat’s critics own that he does not. This smacks of the academic virus that Frank O’Malley, my old English professor at Notre Dame, identified as “PhDeism”—i.e. credential worship. It is the virus that, in another context, Christopher Lasch lamented as inciting “the tyranny of experts” and is akin to what led Kierkegaard to observe that “a roomful of experts is only a crowd.” ....

Is Ross Douthat Qualified to Write About Religion? | Kenneth L. Woodward | First Things

Is Pascal's Wager a good bet?

Ross Douthat is a New York Times opinion columnist. He is also a Christian, author of the soon-to-be published Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. A recent column was titled "My Favorite Argument for the Existence of God." From that:

...I think that the most compelling case for being religious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doctrines, that the universe was made for a reason and we’re part of that reason — is found at the convergence of multiple different lines of argument, the analysis of multiple different aspects of the existence in which we find ourselves.

Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions.

Each of these realities alone offers good reasons to take religious arguments seriously. Indeed, I think each on its own should be enough to impel someone toward at least a version of Pascal’s Wager. ....

[An] underrated argument I’d be inclined to emphasize is what you might call the argument from intelligibility, which sits at the intersection of two lines described above — the line of evidence from the fine-tuning of the universe and the line of evidence from the strange capacities of human consciousness.

The fine-tuning argument, to oversimplify, rests on the startling fact that parameters of the cosmos have been apparently set, tuned very finely, if you will, in an extremely narrow range — with odds on the order of one in a bazillion (that’s a technical number, don’t question it), not one in a hundred — that allows for the emergence of basic order and eventually stars, planets and complex life. To quote Bentham’s Bulldog, this would seem like a pretty strong prima facie case for some originating intelligence: “If there is no God, then the constants, laws and initial conditions could be anything, so it’s absurdly unlikely that they’d fall in the ridiculously narrow range needed to sustain life.” ....

.... We aren’t just in a universe that we can observe; we’re in a universe that’s deeply intelligible to us, a cosmos whose rules and systems we can penetrate, whose invisible architecture we can map and plumb, whose biological codes we can decipher and rewrite and whose fundamental physical building blocks we can isolate and, with Promethean power, break apart.

This capacity of human reason is mysterious, on one level, in the same way that consciousness itself is mysterious: As the philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it in his critique of materialism, “Mind and Cosmos,” it is “not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and discover what is objectively the case” that presents a problem for a hard materialism, since under materialist premises our thoughts are ultimately determined by physical causation, raising questions about how they could possibly achieve objectivity at all. ....

“Is it credible,” Nagel asks, “that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time?” Evolution’s pressures on our capacities are for prehistoric survival, not discovering calculus or E=mc². So why should capacities that evolved because we needed to hunt gazelles and light fires also turn out, mirabile dictu, to be capacities that enable us to understand the deepest laws of physics and of chemistry, to achieve manned spaceflight, to condense all of human knowledge onto a tiny piece of silicon? ....

As the previous line suggests, the intelligibility of the cosmos is perhaps not exclusively an argument for the existence of God. Rather it’s more of an argument for a position that some people who concede divine possibilities are still inclined to doubt — not only that God exists in some distant, unfathomable form, but also that his infinite mind and our finite minds have some important connection, that we actually matter in the scheme of things and that in fact our own godlike powers are proof of something that was claimed by the old religions at the start: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”

Douthat's column is behind a subscription wall. I read it by getting a free, limited, subscription.

Ross Douthat, "My Favorite Argument for the Existence of God," New York Times, Feb. 7, 2025.

"To do my duty to God and my country"

Kathleen Arnn compares the original Boy Scout Handbook to the current one in "Scouts' Honor." Today's isn't bad but it would be much better, she thinks, if it retained the original's emphasis on good character:

The Boy Scouts of America celebrated their hundredth anniversary last year, and this year is the centennial of The Handbook for Boys, their first official manual. Comparing it with the current edition of the handbook—the 12th, published in 2009—shows that the small outpost of civilization manned by the Scouts holds on bravely in America. But decades of aggressive political correctness have had their effect, and the Scouts have lost some of the confident American boyishness that loves heroes and makes for heroes. This is too bad for the more than 3 million boys enrolled in the Scouts today, and for the society in which they will grow up to become men. ....

In the original handbook, Scouts' honor is explicitly traced back to the chivalry of the ancient knights. The Pilgrims and the American pioneers carried this knightly virtue to America, and the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) have taken up their standard. Honor, as the handbook explains, is sacred to a Scout: It "will not permit of anything but the highest and the best and the manliest." "A good Scout must be chivalrous," it tells us:

[H]e should be as manly as the knights or pioneers of old. He should be unselfish. He should show courage. He must do his duty. He should show benevolence and thrift. He should be loyal to his country. He should be obedient to his parents, and show respect to those who are his superiors. He should be very courteous to women. One of his obligations is to do a good turn every day to some one.

The handbook doesn't shrink from invoking shame to motivate Scouts. For example, under Courage: "It is horrible to be a coward. It is weak to yield to fear and heroic to face danger without flinching." There are examples, like the dying Indian who "faced death with a grim smile upon his lips and sang his own death song" and the cowardly knight who fled the battle of Agincourt, much to the disappointment of his lady at home. The original handbook teaches through heroes, providing Scouts with a host of manly examples to emulate. Above all, it cultivates spiritedness, teaching Scouts to defend their honor, their friends, and their country like the great men of the past who "were accustomed to take chances with death" for the sake of the things they loved. ....

We learn about America's great moments through the heroes who lived them: George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Betsy Ross, Johnny Appleseed, and most of all, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln is a hero among heroes, a central figure in the handbook's discussions of patriotism and of virtue. He is "in heart, brain, and character, not only one of our greatest Americans, but one of the world's greatest men." The manual relays the whole story of his life, from his lowly beginnings that taught him the value of hard work, to his education, and to his presidency and untimely death ("the emancipator of the slave, the friend of the whole people and the savior of our country died, a martyr to the cause of freedom.") This discussion ends with the closing paragraph of the Second Inaugural, "words with which every boy should be familiar, voicing as they do the exalted spirit of a great and good man." ....

Almost all of that, she writes, is missing from the current Handbook.

Robert Mazzuca, the Chief Scout Executive of the BSA, has been quoted as saying that the organization is suffering from "a little arthritis" but is making efforts to modernize. If this means using Gore-tex boots on hikes and ripstop nylon tents instead of canvas, the Boy Scouts may be all right. If it means teaching leadership rather than moral virtue, and timidity rather than manliness, that's another story entirely—one of obtuseness, trendiness, and decline. .... [more]

The Claremont Institute - Scouts' Honor