“They [the previous generations in the region] had edges and angles, rough sides. You could get hold of them, you could tell what they were. And they weren’t always on the make; they already were something. They weren’t just getting to be something else all the time. They were already human beings.”

“You make them sound pretty ideal,” Magruder said without irony.

“It’s the truth.” She lifted the glass uncertainly to her mouth, she was a little tight. “If it isn’t, it ought to be. It’s what I remember.”

“Really, though, weren’t they pretty ignorant and backward – insulated?”

“All right if they were,” she said. “It’s not any better now; everybody’s insulated now – from everybody else. And still ignorant too; it’s just different, it’s all inside. And everybody’s hiding it; that’s why they look so slick. Do you know what we are? Scared; everybody is.”

America does have fine Christian writers in its recent history, beyond Flannery O’Conner and Walker Percy. It’s just that nobody knows about them. The works of Madison Jones were recommended to me, and I sent away for A Buried Land. It’s a very dense book – written with tremendous craftsmanship, with layers and layers of meaning and symbolism down to the bedrock, which is pretty far down.

Percy Youngblood is a smart young man in a small Tennessee town. When we meet him it’s before World War II, and he and his friend Jesse are working for the Tennessee Valley Authority, helping to build a dam that will flood Percy’s family farm and many others. Percy’s at odds with his father, who can’t see the point of destroying a way of life he likes just fine, in order to create a world he doesn’t want in the first place. Percy takes up with a local girl cast off by his friend Jesse, with unplanned consequences that leave him and Jesse carrying a shared, guilty secret.

After a hiatus in which Percy serves in the war, he returns home to take a job in a local law firm. As he tries to fit in with the town’s progressive set, he’s haunted by his guilt, and terrified because a certain person has come back to town – someone who may or may not suspect him and Jesse’s crime. As in every tragedy, the very actions he takes to protect himself work to his destruction.

A Buried Land is a true work of art as literature, and a harrowing Purgatorio of guilt and sin. It’s a hard read though, because there’s no whimsy here; no moment of relief. The downhill road is a long and oppressive one. Also, I fear that today’s readers will miss the point. Instead of locating the sin in Percy’s heart and actions, they will blame the Puritanism of the times, the laws of the times, and sexist oppression. Which is too bad, because there’s much to learn from this book.

Recommended, if you have the stamina for it. Adult themes, but no major language or explicit scenes to complain of.

It was disastrously easy to make bad horseracing pictures and only possible to do it at bankable level, in my view, if racing became the framing background to human drama.

Although the sentiments above, expressed by Tom Lyon, narrator of Wild Horses, refer to the movie business, they clearly express author Dick Francis’ own approach to writing mysteries. Racing is always the background, but the heart of the story is… well, the human heart.

Thomas Lyon, film director, is a native of Newmarket, Suffolk, England, and he has chosen to come home from California to do his latest film, based on a successful novel inspired by an actual murder that occurred during Tom’s childhood. A horse trainer’s wife was found hanged in a stable, and whether it was homicide or suicide remains a mystery.

The story starts with Tom at the death bed of an old friend, a farrier, who is dying of bone cancer. His friend’s mind is confused, and he makes a confused confession to Tom, thinking him a priest. Throughout the story that follows, Tom feels a strange kind of obligation, as if he were in fact a priest with a duty to God.

Although it’s been decades since the murder the movie is based on happened, it turns out that someone doesn’t want old stones overturned. Tom receives death threats, the film’s star is attacked with a knife, an old lady is wounded, and then there is a murder. And step by step Tom comes to the realization that his friend’s dying confession has a direct bearing on the mystery.

This is Dick Francis at his best. Tom Lyon is a very satisfying hero, ethical, brave, and not overconfident. A particular pleasure of the story is the joke Francis tells on himself (since he’d seen several of his own stories adapted, at least for TV), in making the script writer, also the author of the novel it’s based on, an arrogant, inflexible prima donna who is not as smart as he thinks he is and does nothing but make difficulties.

Only mild cautions for language and subject matter. Highly recommended. Good holiday reading, for instance.