All posts by Lars Walker

Authors, The Press

J. K. Rowling and the prisoner of conscience

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First of all, I’m not a fan of J. K. Rowling. This view does not rise from my having read her works and finding them wanting. I’ve never read them at all (saw one Harry Potter movie). I have been advised by some that I ought to read them simply to make myself familiar with a major creator in our (sort of) shared genre. And I admit that’s fair enough.

My problem is that the biblical prohibition against witchcraft is ingrained deeply in my… my blood, or bones, or DNA or something. I’ve always been against witches, even when I portrayed them sympathetically (as I did in Wolf Time). That’s just one of those places where I Do Not Go. Some readers tell me the HP books have Christian themes. It may be true. But I can’t bring myself to check it out.

More than that, Ms. Rowling has more than once expressed opinions on various topics that I disagreed with. If she is a Christian, as the claim is, she’s a rather different kind than I am.

Nonetheless, right now she’s one of my heroes (you’re not supposed to say heroine anymore, are you?). She has done the right thing – the hard thing – at just the moment when it needs doing.

This from the BBC:

JK Rowling has challenged Scotland’s new hate crime law in a series of social media posts – inviting police to arrest her if they believe she has committed an offence.

The Harry Potter author, who lives in Edinburgh, described several transgender women as men, including convicted prisoners, trans activists and other public figures.

She said “freedom of speech and belief” was at an end if accurate description of biological sex was outlawed.

Earlier, Scotland’s first minister Humza Yousaf said the new law would deal with a “rising tide of hatred”.

The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 creates a new crime of “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex.

Her own response was exemplary, and will resound to her honor in future ages:

Ms Rowling said: “I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.”

That’s precisely right.

The issue is not whether an opinion is correct or not. It’s not whether it’s sensitive or not. It’s not whether the person speaking is one you like or not.

J.K. Rowling holds opinions I disagree with. I would not have her muzzled by the law for that. I wouldn’t have the law muzzle Susan Sarandon, or Joy Behar, or Greta Thunberg or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Shoot, I wouldn’t muzzle Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas, as long as he wasn’t actually organizing violence. That’s our system. Everybody gets to talk. Even the crazies.

I read a book about Thomas Jefferson when I was a kid. It explained his conviction that if everybody gets to talk, the people will be able to pass judgment on their arguments. I thought that was pretty cool.

It may be that we haven’t got the common sense to make that kind of judgment anymore. But we won’t re-learn it by being protected from “hurtful” ideas.

Music, Religion, Writing

‘Now the Green Blade Riseth’, and a ‘writing’ update

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Above, the King’s College Choir with what I must confess is the only Easter hymn I really like. And it’s not one that’s commonly sung in the churches of my own religious body.

And even this one, lovely as it (it shares a melody with the Christmas hymn, “Sing We Now of Christmas”), doesn’t entirely satisfy me. What Easter merits is a good, rousing, triumphal hymn, something on the lines of “A Mighty Fortress” or “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!” We do have triumphal Easter hymns – there’s “Up From the Grave He Arose!” and “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today!” But personally I find them kind of clunky. They don’t sing well, to my mind. I want one I can throw my head back and bellow, as I used to do at Christmas, before my singing voice gave out.

I should probably write a text myself, and see if somebody can come up with a melody.

Better yet would be if somebody wrote a rousing melody and I could put words to it.

It’s been 2,000 years. Somebody should have taken care of this by now.

Want a writing update? I’m not writing at all right now, in the strictest sense of the term. I’ve got my beta readers reading The Baldur Game, and I’m using the time for the necessary procedural stage of forgetting everything about it. So I can come back to it with my mental palate cleansed.

Therefore, I have turned to the business of book narration. Some generous friends have given me a decent microphone and other equipment, and I’ve carved out a makeshift studio space in my bedroom. I’m playing with the system – especially the Audacity recording software. I have a certain level of technophobia, not unusual, I suppose, in people of a certain age. Right now I’m just doing drills. Self-assigned exercises. The plan is that, once I’ve got The Baldur Game published, I can devote a chunk of time to getting The Year of the Warrior recorded, so I can release it on Audible. I was always considered a good copy reader when I was in radio. Maybe audio books will be my ticket to the big time.

It could happen.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Farewell,’ by Michael Innes

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I knew of Michael Innes (real name J. I. M. Stewart), one of the foremost classic English mystery novelists. I’ve probably read one or two of his stories before, though I don’t remember them. A deal on The Long Farewell persuaded me to buy it. It wasn’t bad, but it shows its age (the book was published in 1958. I suppose I have to agree that that’s a long time ago, though I remember the year well).

Our hero, Sir John Appleby, Commissioner of Scotland Yard, visits his friend Lewis Packford, an amateur scholar of Renaissance literature, while they are both on holiday in Italy. Lewis appears distracted, and makes several references to amazing possible discoveries of literary documents, and also to forgery.

On his return to England, Sir John is shocked to learn that his friend Lewis has shot himself to death at his family estate. He had recently made a sensational announcement about purchasing an old Italian book of stories – with notes in Shakespeare’s own hand in the margins of the Othello story. As if that wasn’t enough, Lewis has been discovered, posthumously, to be a bigamist.

Sir John is suspicious, and heads out to the Packford estate. He finds that Lewis’ brother has kept all the people who were present at the time of the death on site as guests, so Sir John is able to re-interview them all. Slowly he pieces the wicked plot together.

The mystery in The Long Farewell was all right. The characters were all right too. It was the presentation that slowed it down. Author Innes clung to Victorian – or at least Edwardian – literary conventions. The language is flowery, and the characters tend to express themselves in the style of literary essays. The book was a slow read.

There’s nothing really wrong with The Long Farewell, if you like this sort of thing. But if you’re looking for pulse-pounding entertainment, I’d advise you to go elsewhere.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars,’ by Anthony Boucher

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I was familiar with Anthony Boucher (real name William Anthony Parker Wright), mainly because he wrote the scripts for the old Sherlock Holmes radio program. He was a prominent writer, editor, and critic in his heyday, working both in mystery and science fiction. Among his mystery heroes was a detective named Fergus O’Breen. But Fergus doesn’t appear in The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars; his sister does.

If you’re a fan (like me) of Sherlock Holmes, you’re probably familiar with two different groups known as the Baker Street Irregulars. The original group showed up occasionally in the Holmes stories, a ragtag gang of London street urchins who ran errands and served as informants for the Great Detective. The second group is an organization of Sherlock Holmes fans, originally organized in 1934 by Christopher Morley. It might be (I’m not sure) the first Fandom group. I’ve occasionally considered joining our local affiliate, which was called (last I heard ) The Norwegian Explorers.

Anthony Boucher was himself a member of the Irregulars, and paid his BSI friends the compliment of making them look like complete horses’ rear ends in his novel, The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars.

This is the scenario – the president of Metropolitan Studios in Hollywood is planning to make a movie based on the Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” But he made the mistake of hiring Stephen Worth, a drunken, opinionated hard-boiled mystery writer, to do the script. Worth, however, actually hates the Holmes stories, and has been very public about it. The members of the BSI, of course, are outraged – and some of them are quite prominent and influential (membership has included, over the years, Alexander Woollcott, Isaac Asimov, and Franklin Roosevelt). So the studio head invites a group of BSI members to come to Hollywood at his expense and serve as technical advisors. He puts them all up in a large Hollywood house, and the very first night Stephen Worth shows up drunk and unleashes a tirade on them all. Later that night, he is shot to death in his room. Then his body disappears.

What follows is a very strange sequence in which each BSI member has a bizarre, improbable adventure which oddly echoes various elements from Sherlock Holmes stories. They report on these adventures to a gathering of the whole group, in monologues modeled after the ones you find so often in the Doyle stories (and I’ve always found those monologues the most tedious parts. They are no more riveting here). In the end they all gather once more to try to determine the real murderer.

There’s a lot of clever plotting in The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars. But it’s too complicated, too implausible, and too clever by half. Toward the end I stopped caring, but I did finish the book. (I might mention that Boucher was a leftie, and his political sympathies come through here and there.)

The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars is worth reading for its historical significance, but it’s not a great mystery novel. I found myself sympathizing a little with the murdered, hard-boiled Stephen Worth.

Religion

The olive press

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Maundy Thursday – that’s the ancient name the church has given to the Thursday before Good Friday. “Maundy” comes from the Latin word “mandatum,” meaning “command.” That’s a reference to Jesus’ words from John 13:34, during the Last Supper: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” He’d already given the Golden Rule, to treat others the way we’d like them to treat us. This was a “new,” further commandment – to go beyond that rule (which is difficult enough) and love one another (I assume He means primarily other believers, though I’m sure it’s not limited to them), in the way that He has loved us – that is, all the way through suffering and death.

After the Last Supper, they went out to the Mount of Olives, a regular retreat of theirs, where Jesus prayed among the olive trees. The video above, from Our Daily Bread Ministries, explains some of the significance of that location, in relation to the events.

I knew a pastor once who insisted that when Jesus prayed that “this cup” might pass Him by, what He actually meant was that He was afraid His physical body would give out before He’d completed the work of suffering. That He was praying to stay alive until the job was done. The pastor didn’t like the idea, apparently, that Jesus could be afraid of mere physical pain.

That never made sense to me. I believe in the Incarnation – Jesus was true God and true Man. If He didn’t instinctively recoil from the prospect of excruciating suffering, it seems to me He wouldn’t be fully Man – which our creeds affirm that He was. We’re told He was subject to all kinds of temptations just as we are. I assume that one of those temptations must be the temptation to take the easy way out.

Have a blessed Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.

Uncategorized, Writing

Superfluous is suspicious

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Raymond Burr as Perry Mason, and Barbara Hale as Della Street, in Perry Mason.

Just yesterday I was talking to someone about recent reports that the most popular content on video streaming services is old, not new entertainment. This article from Screenrant lists 7 suggested reasons for this phenomenon. All of them may have validity, but I wonder if there might be one more – the fact that the older the show, the less woke it’s likely to be. The less likely it will be to try to stuff some fashionable new moral imperative down the viewer’s throat.

In my own case, I’ve been spending my evenings of late with Amazon Prime, working my way through the Perry Mason series (1957-1966). There’s some irony in this – next to Lawrence Welk, there was no show I hated more than Perry Mason when I was a kid. I found it dull – few fisticuffs or gunfights, and half the show was people blabbing in a courtroom. But my mother loved it. Today, there’s almost nothing on television I enjoy watching more than Perry Mason. I guess that means that – despite all appearances – I may have matured a little.

Something else that’s changed about me is that I’ve become a writer. Therefore, I watch for plot mechanisms. And I’ve noticed something – something that’s probably been obvious to more perceptive viewers for a long time.

I’ve figured out how to guess whodunnit in a lot of the episodes – not all of them, but many.

Watch for the superfluous character.

The thing to bear in mind is that – especially in television – especially in the old days – budgets were tight. The revision process in script development often involved finding ways to cut locations (if you can find a way to repeat shooting locations and sets you can save a lot of money) and cut characters (speaking actors are an expense. Make two characters into one whenever you can.)

So if you’re watching an episode of an old series like Perry Mason (or Murder She Wrote, or Columbo, etc.), and you notice a character who has lines (not a non-speaking extra) but seems to be there for no other reason than to make conversation, they’re not there by accident. If you can think of no other reason for the producers to pay them, they’re probably the murderer.

This goes double if the superfluous character is a familiar actor whom you’re used to seeing in bigger roles.

Written fiction is easier. You can deploy a cast of thousands at no additional cost.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The First Death of Winter,’ by Kevin Wignall

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The Senior Year Hiking Club of the exclusive Altdorf residential high school in Switzerland is on a mountain trek when a blizzard blows up. The teacher in charge makes the calculated decision –the right one, as it turns out – to return to the hotel at the cable car station rather than proceeding to their planned base camp. When they get back to the hotel, all the other tourists on the mountain have departed, and the weather makes it impossible to send another car down. But the night caretaker, a young American named Matty Burkhalter, opens the hotel for them so they can wait the storm out.

But that night, one of the students, a young woman, is stabbed to death. It’s The First Death of Winter. Matty Burkhalter finds himself responsible for preserving the evidence and (on the telephoned instructions of the police) interviewing the surviving students, now all suspects. Everybody has secrets, but Matty has a secret of his own – he’s wanted for murder in the US, and the less attention he gets from the police, the happier he’ll be.

Kevin Wignall is a reliable writer. Thrillers are his usual genre, but this one is more of a mystery, with echoes of Agatha Christie. He’s not the fanciest prose stylist out there, but his work is professional. The First Death of Winter was a low-key, satisfying mystery story. There’s a Christian character featured, who’s a little weird but sympathetic overall.

Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Long Time Dead,’ by J. M. Dalgliesh

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The other day I reviewed a book by William MacIlvanney, considered a founder of the Scottish “Tartan Noir” school of detective fiction. I disagreed with some of the attitudes he expressed, but was highly impressed with his writing. Now I’ve read a book by one of MacIlvanney’s successors, J. M. Dalgliesh – A Long Time Dead. The writing was good in general (though a misplaced modifier sneaked past the editors), but the world view here was even less to my taste.

Duncan McAdam grew up on the Isle of Skye, but fled family tensions as soon as he could. Now he’s a police detective in Glasgow, but he’s unpopular both with his colleagues and his bosses. When they get a call that a young woman’s body has been found on Skye, buried and preserved in peat, they send Duncan off to investigate. He has no wish to go – his mother has dementia and is confined to a home there, and he doesn’t get along well with his sister. But go he must.

The dead girl has been easily identified – she is Isla Matheson, who vanished about twenty years ago and was assumed to have been a runaway. Her body shows no sign of violence. And she seems to have been a popular girl – no motive for her murder is apparent. Duncan’s investigation will delve deeply into the dark side of island life, uncovering secrets  that, like the body, have been long concealed.

J. M. Dalgliesh is a good writer. He paints his characters well and crafts effective dialogue. I quite enjoyed reading A Long Time Dead – right up until the solution appeared.

Discussing that solution involves dropping a spoiler into this review – I’ll try to conceal it, but it won’t be hard to guess. The murderer’s identity and the motive hinge, as in so many modern stories, on the guilt of the one subculture in our society that it’s still OK to stigmatize. Crazy nonconformists who haven’t evolved with the times, who don’t even merit sympathy. Know what I mean?

Anyway, A Long Time Dead was a pretty good mystery, but I’m done with J. M. Dalgliesh.

Uncategorized, Writing

King Knut and the tide

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I wracked the aging remnants of my brain tonight to think of something to post. Oh, how I’d like to be one of those writers who can turn up topics to riff off at the shortest notice. James Lileks writes 5 blog posts a week, plus several columns, at the least. I can only gape like the village idiot.

Anyway, I finally found the little clip above. It comes from the BBC, and a documentary done by the Icelandic/British scholar Magnus Magnusson in 1980. It’s about the famous story of King Canute (or Cnut, or Knut) and the tides. It’s often been remembered as an example of royal hubris, but Magnusson explains the context. In the original story, it was Canute’s (or Cnut’s, or Knut’s) purpose to teach humility to his courtiers, who’d been flattering him excessively.

I personally doubt the whole story, especially the part at the end where Canute (or Cnut, or… oh, forget it) gives up wearing a crown.

Canute plays a significant role in The Baldur Game, my work in progress, and the picture I get of him from the sagas doesn’t at all comport with a story like that. I actually tried to like Canute, since he was one of the most successful Vikings ever, and ruled England quite effectively by all accounts.

But the man was treacherous. Not somebody to turn your back on.

I hope that’s not too much of a spoiler for the book.

Have a good weekend, and leave the tides alone, unless you’re surfing.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Strange Loyalties,’ by William McIlvanney

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While we waited for Jan, Brian asked me about Ena and the children. I had seen them the day before; Sunday: the day of the child, the new agnostic sabbath when all over the western world diffident fathers turned up to catch a glimpse of the only things they still believed in from their marriage. They brought gifts of ill-fitting clothes and books that would never be read and membership-cards for leisure centres.

Usually, when a writer is expressly liberal in his opinions, I’ll drop him quietly, because we’re just not compatible. But I enjoyed William McIlvanney’s Strange Loyalties too much to do that. I may even spring for the previous two books in this series. This novel was written back in the 1970s, and the liberalism expressed is similar to the naïve kind I myself espoused back in those days. McIlvanney is remembered as a founding father of the “Tartan Noir” school of detective writing, but I doubt very much that any of his successors ever surpassed him. This is a bona fide work of literature, genre or not.

Jack Laidlaw is a Glasgow detective. In the honorable tradition of hard-boiled policemen’s lives, his is going to pieces. He’s divorced, and his relationship with his new girlfriend is on the rocks. When his brother Scott is hit by a car and killed in their home town, Jack is gripped by an existential compulsion – he needs to know why. The death isn’t legally suspicious – the driver was with his family, and Scott was unquestionably drunk. But why had Scott’s life gone awry in the first place? Once he was a talented artist with a bright future, but somehow he’d lost his reason for living.

The investigation will lead to Scott’s ex-wife and her social circle, and to his old friends. Jack will uncover corruption, which will tie in with a case his partners are working on back in Glasgow. And he will learn, in the end, his brother’s dark secret.

First of all, I have to say that the prose in Strange Loyalties was as good as I’ve ever read. Anywhere. McIlvanney was a brilliant stylist. Great lines abound: “A kitchen in the morning: it can be a garden of the senses. The sunlight is shafting in through the window, as if William Blake had been given the commission today and is announcing the sacredness of everyday.” “There are few sounds more forlorn than the phone of someone you love ringing out with no one to answer.”

Also (and maybe this is a function of the cultural period), even though there’s plenty of darkness and cynicism in this book, it wasn’t nihilistic. There were hopeful moments. There was even an obscure biblical reference, a mention of the “Rechabites.” (But that was also the name of a temperance society, so maybe it was they the author had in mind.)

I relished Strange Loyalties. It was as smooth as top-shelf, single malt whisky (not that I’ve ever tasted that). Highly recommended.