Doctor Syn: A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh, by Russell Thorndike

The theme song above will be familiar to many Americans of my generation. I was in junior high in 1963 when it first appeared on Walt Disney’s TV show, and it left a vivid impression. The Scarecrow of that series was a hero and a benefactor, a quiet vicar in a village church in coastal Kent who helped his parishioners earn a decent living through smuggling, while striking a blow against high tariffs (hurrah for free trade!).

The hero of Doctor Syn: A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh (the last book chronologically in the series, though first written – author Russell Thorndike had not intended to create a series character) is no particular hero. He seems to be a complete hypocrite in his Anglican ministry, as he is perfectly capable of casually ordering an innocent man murdered for “knowing too much.” He has certain positive traits too, but all in all he’s a particularly devilish example of what used to be known as a “picaroon” in fiction – an unapologetic rogue.

His Scarecrow costume serves a purpose – he rides with his cohorts in frightening disguises in order to scare people off the marsh on the nights when his pack trains are carrying contraband to and from the beaches. He is little concerned by the arrival of a naval ship to investigate smuggling in the parish, but a particular member of the crew – a mute mulatto with his ears cut off – sets fear in his heart. For Doctor Syn has a dark secret, and the mulatto knows it.

A particular weakness of this book is that author Thorndike seems to want to be Dickens. He loads his story with comical “characters” who slow the story down considerably with their long stories and speeches. Another problem (which I noticed years ago when I read the next book, Doctor Syn on the High Seas), is fairly vicious racial attitudes (though this was softened when I realized that the vicar was not intended to be a role model). This racism seems to be mostly directed at black people, as Imogene, the female ingenue of the story, is said to be half Incan Indian, and gets no less respect for that.

I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed in Doctor Syn, but I still plan to buy and read the rest of the series. Maybe Thorndike will develop his character into something a little more like the one Patrick McGoohan played back in the ʼ60s.

On diversity

Something from my devotions today: 1 Corinthinas 12: 4-6: “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men.”

The devotional I was reading from used the old King James terminology – “diversities of gifts, diversities of working,” etc.

And I got to thinking about word “diversity.”

If there’s any word that’s been abused in our time (and there are plenty) it’s “diversity.” Whenever a contemporary American hears the word diversity, he tenses up, figuring some bureaucrat is about to impose another form of uniformity on him. We’ve made diversity about race, and that’s just stupid.

Snatch up a dozen people from random spots around the world, and set them down together in a room. It’s my certain conviction that the least important thing about any person in that group will be his or her race (their views on race may have significance, though). Gender will matter. Politics and religion will matter, as will cultural tradition. I don’t know for a fact whether general racial traits actually exist in people (apart from physical appearance), but if there are such traits they will have little or no significance, except in terms of how people respond to them.

And yet we talk as if diversity were just about race. A university proudly points to its multi-racial faculty, calling it diverse, even though every single member of that faculty holds ideas and beliefs almost indistinguishable from any of the others.

All this is not what St. Paul is talking about here. The big racial divide in the early church was between Jews and Gentiles, and I’m quite sure the presence of both wasn’t what he meant by diversity.

What he meant was a wonderful truth, a truth Christianity has given as a gift to the world, which the world now takes for granted and thinks it came up with itself.

Paul declared that every human being – however weak, poor, and thickheaded – had a special, precious gift to give the Church, the Body of Christ. However little some individual seemed to have to offer, he did have a gift to share, according to Paul. All members of the Church were like organs in a body. The kidneys might be a little ashamed of their humble function, and the other organs might make jokes about them, but take the kidneys away – put their owner on a transplant waiting list – and it suddenly becomes clear how much those kidneys matter. Everybody matters in the Church.

This truth – in spite of centuries of officious attempts to make the Church an aristocracy where only the elite organs counted – could not be forgotten, and kept (and keeps) pushing through. Everybody matters. The one lost sheep counts. The widow’s mite counts more than the rich man’s endowment.

That’s what diversity actually means.

Nursing a grudge



If only the TV series could have been authentic, like this.



I’m going to grouse about the History Channel Vikings series one more time. Because it’s still on my mind. I’m still working on my piece about it for the American Spectator, too, which helps explain my obsession.

The responses I’ve gotten on Facebook have been interesting. Some people have been as negative as I am, or more – which may have had the effect of egging me on. Others have said, “Hey, it’s an interesting story, well acted, and it may interest people in the Vikings, so count your blessings.”

I think my reaction is partly self-centered. What I’m really thinking, deep in my lizard brain, is “I’ve been toiling most of my life accumulating sufficient information on the Viking Age to enable me to write believable novels – and I still get stuff wrong sometimes. So how come these Hollywood punks get to scribble a couple of facts on sticky notes and insert them into an otherwise fantasy script, call it a story about Vikings, and get paid enough money for me to retire on?”

I suspect that what these people really want to do is “A Game of Thrones.” And they can’t tell the difference.

TV review: "Vikings"





Ten inches of snow or so
(I suspect it was a little less right here, but what we got was plenty). Fortunately I recently got my snow blower fixed, and it handled the stuff better than I’d remembered it was able to. But I hope we get a March melt now, because I’m running out of places to put the snow.

Since I don’t have cable, I figured I’d be excused from discussing the new History Channel series, Vikings. But people kept asking me about it, and I discovered I could view episodes at the show’s site. So I’ll tell you what I think.

Actually, I’m planning to take a two-pronged approach. Here at Brandywine Books I’ll discuss technical authenticity. But I’m also planning an article for The American Spectator (which pays money) to talk about the political and philosophical implications (trust me, there are some).

So as a Viking reenactor, what do I think of the Vikings series?

Frankly, not much.

Where shall I begin? Perhaps with the fundamental falsehood that forms the basis for the whole drama – the laughable contention that Scandinavians knew nothing of the British Isles before the time of the hero of this series, the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok. Continue reading TV review: "Vikings"

All For One, by Ryne Douglas Pearson

Dooley Ashe is a former Seattle police detective who has taken early retirement. His nickname is “the kiddie catcher,” because he once talked a confession out of a little boy who had committed a cruel murder. Now he’s gotten a call from the police in the town of Bartlett, where another murder involving children has taken place. A vicious bully has been killed with a baseball bat, and the fingerprints of six children – all of them victims of his harassment – were found on bat. The kids aren’t talking. Can Dooley come and look into it?

In Bartlett, Dooley meets Mary Austin, the students’ teacher. She’s the kind of teacher every parent wants for their child – someone who loves children deeply and is capable of inspiring underachievers to focus and discover their gifts. She’s also very attractive, and Dooley is drawn to her, knowing he shouldn’t be.

All the elements of a very good thriller are here in All For One, and yet… it doesn’t quite work. Author Ryne Douglas Pearson states in his introduction that this was a book he wrote early in his career and set aside, and he offers it now without a re-write.

He should have done the re-write. He’s a successful thriller and motion picture writer now, and I’m sure he could have turned this story into an effective narrative. But as it is, it’s just… too much. Too many characters, too much information about them. He takes us into the stream of consciousness of almost every important character, and that just slows the story down. There are other ways to provide insight into characters – word choices, telling gestures and habitual movements, things said and not said. All For One is just too much book for the amount of story here. Too much soap opera passion, and a contrived climax. Also, I figured out whodunit about half way through.

Not top notch, but I got it free for Kindle, and I did finish it. Cautions for the usual stuff.

Open Season, by Archer Mayor


My office was directly opposite. It was a cubicle really, eight feet by eight, with a ten-foot ceiling that always made me want to tip the room over so I’d have more room and more heat.

Set in Vermont in the winter, Open Season is the first in a series of police novels starring Joe Gunther, a detective in the town of Brattleboro. This book goes back to the ʼ90s (Joe is a Korean war veteran; you don’t run into many of those in stories anymore), and I have some reason to believe that author Archer Mayor has moved it in a politically correct direction since then. So I may be unhappy with later books, but I’m likely to give the series another chance, because I enjoyed this one quite a lot.

As the story begins, Joe is called to a sort of a murder scene – a local man, known to be very kind and tenderhearted, has broken into an old woman’s house and been killed by her with a shotgun. Soon other local people become the victims of attacks, and it’s discovered that they all have something in common. They were all on the jury that convicted a black man of killing a white woman in a famous local murder case. Joe has no choice but to re-open that case, quickly learning that it was shoddily investigated. So it becomes a double investigation, trying to find the real murderer while trying to stop an avenger who is no sweetheart himself.

One thing I particularly liked about Joe Gunther was an element of realism that rarely appears in fictional detectives. Having been injured in an accident, Joe is told by a doctor to stay in bed for a couple days – and he actually stays in bed! How many times have you seen that happen in a mystery?

Mild cautions for language and adult themes. Recommended.

Popular Free eBooks

ManyBooks.net offers 29,000 ebooks for multiple devices for free. Their most popular downloads are The Art of War by Sun Tzu, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a English grammar book from 1851, Lovecraft, Hugo, Shakespeare, Twain, and of course, Kama Sutra (how nice–blah). You’ll find new releases here.

Slumgullion 2/28/13

To celebrate this not being a leap year, a variety of things for you today.

First of all, by way of Pastor Paul McCain of Cyberbrethren, a short but oddly fascinating film about calligraphy.

Pastor McCain says, “Type designer, illustrator and artist Seb Lester will revive the BlackLetter script that has been out of use for more than three hundred years. He will document his efforts on video, a gorgeous tribute to handwritten letters.” Link to original here.

From Mitch Berg at Shot In the Dark, a celebration of the brave men who sabotaged the Nazi atomic effort in Norway in 1943. I’m a day late with the anniversary, but I had to share it.

I’ll cop to it; after the 2009 “Nobel Peace Prize” award to a president who, as of the award deadline, had done nothing to warrant it, and has done even less since, my self-esteem-respect as an American of Norwegian anscestry has taken a bit of a beating.

But it’s on days like today – the 70th anniversary of the Norwegian raid on the Vemork heavy-water plant at Ryukan, Norway – that I get a bit of that old Norse møjø back.

Finally, a great little lesson in communication, from David All.

Sacramone sighting

I know what you really come here for. Book reviews and theological meditations are all well and good, but what you’re really looking for is information on the present whereabouts of Anthony Sacramone, who used to blog at Luther At the Movies, and still blogs at Strange Herring when he feels like it.

Through my extensive network of spies and informants, I have received information that Anthony is now the Managing Editor of The Intercollegiate Review…



And Modern Age

Both are publications of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

On my promise of total secrecy (which of course is worthless) he sent me a free copy of each publication. As you can guess from the covers, Modern Age (which goes back a long way and was once edited by Russell Kirk) is a scholarly journal, while the Intercollegiate Review is a lighter, slick magazine with more of an entertainment slant.

Subscriptions are available from ISI here.