Jack Green, hero of Man In the Water, is a Pennsylvania salesman and spare-time conspiracy theorist. He married out of his league, and he and his beautiful wife Stacey have a five-year-old boy they adore. When Stacey gets some troubling medical news, her mother pays for them to take a Caribbean cruise, so they can have a carefree time together before facing whatever challenges will come.
It’s great until they’re attacked in their cabin one night, and Jack finds himself struggling for his life, only to return home alone and find his son missing. Realizing that the authorities are unwilling to do much about the case, Jack turns to a cop friend, who refers him to an FBI agent he knows. And suddenly all those conspiracies Jack has been talking about about take on new – and personal – meaning.
I suppose the first thing I should say about Man In the Water is that it was a page-turner. I kept with it to the end, in spite of elements I didn’t much care for. So the book succeeded in that respect.
But even as I read, I was nitpicking. The writing was pretty slapdash. Words are used imprecisely, as for instance, “qualms” where “doubts” is wanted. This is one of those stories where an ordinary guy gets thrown in among professional killers, which always raises the problem of how to get him out alive without overdoing the luck factor. In my opinion, the luck factor did get overdone here. And the action itself seemed cinematic and implausible.
Even worse, the book ends with a cliffhanger, its central plot problem unresolved. I don’t like that. Ongoing secondary plot threads are fine in a series, but you need to resolve this book’s main plot problem in this book. So that annoyed me.
I think this series is working on having a Christian theme. Jack is an agnostic, and he often spends time thinking about the God question. I would expect him to possibly come to faith further down the line.
But I won’t be reading down the line. Man In the Water wasn’t awful, and I did finish it. But I didn’t like it enough to spring for the sequel.
I’ve read and reviewed one of George Bellairs’ Inspector Littlejohn novels before. I found the book likeable but not outstanding. That’s pretty much my reaction to The Cursing Stones Murder too.
Inspector Littlejohn and his wife are planning a “holiday,” (as they say in England), but a plea from a friend persuades them to change their itinerary. Archdeacon Kinrade, a clergyman in a town on the Isle of Man, is concerned about one of his young parishioners, who has been arrested on suspicion of murder. A local womanizer’s body has been dredged up by scallop fishermen, and circumstantial evidence points to the young man. But Kinrade is certain he’s innocent. Littlejohn feels obligated to the archdeacon for past favors, and Man is a pleasant place to visit, so they change their plans.
Littlejohn has no actual authority on Man, but the local police detective seems happy to have his unofficial help. The young accused man is soon released, but the case proves to be the kind where there are too many people with motives. On top of that, people who know secrets are deliberately trying to mislead the police, in order to protect others.
The Cursing Stones Murder is a decent mystery, but written for an audience now dead (around 1950). It’s more of a cozy than a police procedural, and suffers (I would suggest) from containing too many nice characters. I like a book that keeps the violence low, but in this case I was sometimes in danger of losing interest altogether – until the end, when stuff started happening, leading to one of those classic cozy endings where the decent people who’ve made mistakes are allowed to die rather than face the law.
Inspector Littlejohn himself is not a very vivid character, and characterization isn’t author Bellairs’ forte. Mrs. Littlejohn seems to have almost no personality at all – she is endlessly supportive and never complains about the continual changes her husband makes in their plans. She’s almost the perfect pre-feminist wife, but I’m not sure such women actually ever existed.
The writing is good, and the Manx landscapes well exploited. If you’re looking for a quiet mystery without a lot of bad language or violence, The Cursing Stones Murder may be what you’re looking for.
Tonight, like last night, I’m recycling old material. DON’T JUDGE ME! I’m coming down with a cold.
No, wait. Nowadays what we say is, “I’m coming down with a cold,I hope.”
Feels like a cold, anyway. First time I’ve gotten sick in quite a while. I think I got through the whole pandemic thing without a day in bed.
Anyway, I know I’ve posted this before – sometime. But this is Sissel Kyrkjebø just as she was becoming a celebrity in Norway. About the time she released her Christmas album, also called “Glade Jul,” (the Norwegian version of “Silent Night”). Pretty much everybody in the country bought a copy. Plus at least one lovestruck American guy living in Florida at the time.
I’ve been writing for this blog so long that I think I can probably reanimate some of my old post topics. A search of our archives shows that it was in 2010 that I last wrote about the Christmas hymn, “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” I’m not going to denounce it. In fact, I kind of love it. But it’s not really a Christmas hymn. It’s more of a Christmas song, like “The Christmas Song” (the Chestnuts one, you know) or “Silver Bells.” Because it’s not about Jesus, and was never intended to be.
The putative hymn was written by Edmund H. Sears, a sensitive-minded Unitarian minister who worked in Toledo for a while, before suffering a breakdown (perfectly understandable, under the circumstances). In time he ended up serving a church in Wayland, Massachusetts. He wrote “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” in 1849, and it was published with a tune by Richard Storrs Willis in 1850. His motivation seems to have been his depression over the Mexican War, which raised considerable opposition in the country (Lincoln famously voted against the war, and lost his seat in Congress because of it).
The hymn goes:
It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold;
"Peace on the earth, good will to men
From heaven's all-gracious King" –
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing.
Still through the cloven skies they come
With peaceful wings unfurled,
And still their heavenly music floats
O'er all the weary world;
Above its sad and lowly plains
They bend on hovering wing,
And ever o'er its Babel-sounds
The blessed angels sing.
But with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring; –
Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing!
And ye, beneath life's crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow,
Look now! for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing; –
Oh, rest beside the weary road
And hear the angels sing!
For lo! the days are hastening on
By prophet bards foretold,
When with the ever circling years
Comes round the age of gold;
When Peace shall over all the earth
Its ancient splendors fling,
And the whole world give back the song
Which now the angels sing.
Do you notice something missing in this so-called “Christmas Hymn?” It says nothing about Jesus. Not a word. You’ve got angels and peace, which hearken back to Luke’s account of the Nativity (verses 8-14):
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
So you’ve got the angels and you’ve got the peace, demonstrating that the poet had Christ’s birth in mind. So why didn’t he mention Christ Himself?
Because he was a Universalist. He didn’t really think Jesus was that important. He believed Jesus simply represented a universal principle of peace and love, which gives us hope for a coming time (“the age of gold”) when Mankind will have evolved to the point of outgrowing war.
In many more orthodox hymnbooks, the words have been altered a little. The changed lyrics substitute “the time foretold” for “the age of gold.” And they say “the new Heaven and earth shall own the Prince of Peace their King,” instead of “when Peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling.” I don’t generally care for meddling with original texts, but I like those changes just fine.
Still, the hymn still leaves me a little melancholy.
Beautiful, though.
I looked for a good video of the hymn/song to embed above. But everybody had to get cute with it one way or another (worst are the English, who use the wrong tune!). So I had to settle (yet again) for the Heretic Tabernacle Choir. Which is kind of appropriate, I guess.
The year’s almost over, so I think I can safely say that, in all likelihood, M. A. Rothman’s The Inside Man boasts the weirdest scenario I’ve come across in a novel all year. It’s effectively written and entertaining, but bizarre.
Levi Yoder, our hero, is a young man who was originally Amish. Somehow (I guess it’s explained in the first novel in the series – this is the second) he got involved with the New York Mafia, which became a second family to him. He was even declared a “made man,” an “honor” usually restricted to Italians. Then he got cancer, but had an unexplained remission. After that, he grew stronger, faster, and was endowed with certain extra talents, like eidetic memory. He continues to work with the Mafia, but he’s allowed to do only jobs he wants to do. He has a sideline in rescuing young girls from human traffickers.
A request comes to his bosses from the Japanese Yakuza. One of their leaders has an American granddaughter, a little girl. She has been kidnapped. The grandfather has heard of Levi’s skills, and will be very generous if he can find and rescue the girl. Levi is happy to take on the job.
But then there’s an interruption. Levi is arrested and interrogated by the FBI. He’s rescued by a shadowy figure who says he works for an independent, non-government agency that fights human trafficking by any means necessary. They’ll help Levi if he’ll help them.
He also meets – and cooperates with – a Chinese double agent, a beautiful woman with a penchant for nudity and a phobia about being touched.
I think this is what’s known as a “high concept” story. It takes place in the real world, but has over-the-top elements. The plot rolls right along, dispensing lots of action and suspense, but for this reader it had a kind of a Hollywood, CGI feel. I should probably have approached it more as fantasy than as an ordinary mystery/thriller.
I also have to admit I have trouble with the depiction of Mafiosi as decent, honorable fellas. I believe that tradition is long past, and was grossly exaggerated even in the old days.
You may like the book, though. It certainly was entertaining. The Inside Man earns full marks as a page-turner.
Music asked nothing, required nothing, needed nothing, betrayed nothing. It appeared instantly when called, even in memory. It was made of the ineffable magic in the empty spaces between – and the relation of – its otherwise unremarkable components.
“Wow,” I thought. “There’s a Mark Helprin novel I haven’t read yet.” A bargain deal had appeared, and I checked on Amazon and found I hadn’t bought it. So I did. Only then did I discover that I’d read Paris In the Present Tense before. I must have gotten a free review copy or something. However, I was only briefly discomfited by this. A Helprin novel always bears – and rewards – re-reading.
Jules Lacour is a septuagenarian Jewish music instructor in Paris. He is neither rich nor famous, though he is one of the geniuses of his generation – because this generation cares nothing for genius. But Jules has lived content with his art, except for missing his late wife.
But now his grandson has leukemia, and Jules wishes he had money to get him treatment. An offer from an American insurance conglomerate, to write them a signature tune, gives him brief hope, which they then dash callously.
So when Jules discovers that he has a previously undiagnosed brain aneurism that could kill him at any moment, he concocts a plan to make the company pay, and thereby to give his grandson a chance at life.
My big problem with Paris In the Present Time, you’ve probably guessed, is that our hero is an unapologetic fraudster. I don’t approve of fraud, no matter how bloated and greedy the target. However, that’s a question the book scarcely considers. The story is about love – Jules’ love for his parents, murdered by Nazis. His love for his wife, who died too soon. For his daughter and his grandchild. For a beautiful young student who is transparently smitten with him, and for a woman of more appropriate age whom he meets too late. But equally it’s about his love for Paris, and especially his love for music. The book is lush with gorgeous description and meditations on the meaning of it all. This is a book for reading slowly and savoring. It sweeps the reader into realms of transcendence.
Also, it meshed with – and helped to feed – my recent delusions of glimpsing some kind of Unified Theory of Existence. Helprin seems to have had some of the same thoughts I’ve had – maybe I stole some of them from him.
Insurance fraud aside, Paris In the Present Tense is a wonderful book. You ought to read it.
I may be achieving a breakthrough. Or possibly I’m losing my mind. Or it could be the new medication I just started taking…
I got up this morning to put in my two hours of writing (okay, it’s more like an hour and a half when I deduct bathroom and tea-making time). Then I went to the gym, as usual. And while I was driving there, I had this epiphany. It rose, I’m pretty sure, partly from the lingering effects of reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. And from Mark Helprin’s Paris In the Present Tense, which I’m re-reading. It’s a novel about a musician, with all kinds of metaphysical implications.
Anyway, it occurred to me that (as best I understand physics, which is probably not as well as I think) the universe is made up of atoms, which are made up of particles and charges and empty space and stuff. Every solid thing is actually just energy in motion. What makes things exist is movement and attraction and repulsion and waves and so on.
In other words, the universe is music.
Which works just fine with my theology. The Bible says that God said, “Let there be light.” The light – energy – was spoken by God. Light is energy in a pattern. That’s pretty much like music.
It’s been a few years, I think, since I’ve mentioned the Sankta Lucia celebration. “Sankta Lucia” is Saint Lucy of Syracuse, a virgin martyr of the early church. A Sicilian legend says that once when there was famine, ships appeared in the Syracuse harbor on St. Lucia’s Day, loaded with grain. Thus there came to be a tradition of eating whole grains on December 13. Somehow this tradition evolved in Scandinavia (especially in Sweden) into eating a particular kind of bun on that day. The girls of a household would rise early, prepare the buns, and then march in procession, led by one girl portraying Lucia, wearing a crown of candles (Lucia means light, after all), and wearing a red sash to symbolize martyrdom. They would sing a version of the Italian Santa Lucia song (as above) and serve the buns for breakfast, to general celebration.
It’s a lovely tradition (I’ve observed recreations a few times) and seems to be gaining in popularity even in these secular times.
One thing I love about it is the fact that it’s a revival of tradition. In spite of the growing hostility to Christianity in our culture, genuine beauty still appeals. That’s worth remembering, even if we Protestants are forced to do some borrowing from the Catholics (that’s less a problem for me as a Lutheran than for some). But maybe we need to question the emphasis on stark simplicity in our worship. We seem to have won the argument over pomp and ceremony so well that many churches have proceeded to embrace pure ugliness. And ugliness ages poorly.
I’ve been thinking about art recently, for reasons I won’t go into here. It seems to me that – though there are many ways to divide up the world – one way we can categorize people today is by whether they are pro-beauty or anti-beauty. As far as I can observe, the Progressive movement has turned aggressively anti-beauty. Our side isn’t necessarily pro-beauty, but I think we ought to make that an issue.
Like every child of the 50s, I know Perry Mason in the form of Raymond Burr on TV. (I hated the show when my mother watched it, but now I find it quite delightful in reruns.) And I’ve read a couple of PM short stories over the years. But I’d never read a Perry Mason novel before. Critics indicate that Erle Stanley Gardner, the author, was not big on characterization, which usually means a book won’t be my kind of thing.
But I got a deal on The Case of the Terrified Typist and I tried it anyway. And you know what? I now know why the Perry Mason series was so popular. Gardner knew how to spin a tale.
Trial attorney Perry Mason has a big document that needs retyping, and his secretary Della Street is having trouble finding a competent typist. She calls an agency, but they can’t promise much. Then a woman shows up in their office and, asked if she’s the typist, she says yes. She turns out to be a whiz at it, and gets a lot of work done very quickly, very accurately. Then she disappears as mysteriously as she appeared.
When Perry and Della learn that the police are in the building, looking for a woman who robbed a diamond import business, they do a search and find a clump of chewing gun attached to the bottom of the typist’s desk. Inside that clump are valuable diamonds.
That’s the neat hook that opens The Case of the Terrified Typist. As the story proceeds, Perry will be hired to represent one of the diamond company’s employees against charges of murdering a diamond smuggler. Surprisingly, Hamilton Burger, the district attorney, chooses to bring murder charges without a body being found.
The whole story was complex, but it was also lively and suspenseful. I had a good time reading it. It made few demands and entertained me thoroughly. I just might read more Perry Mason.
Here’s the scenario: Jim, an Australian man, purchases a very old house in an out-of-the-way corner of Sidney. While doing renovations, he notices a basement concealed and sealed off beneath the floor of one room. He assumes this feature might have historical significance, so he notifies the government, which sends an assessor, a young woman, to look at it. To his astonishment, Jim discovers that this woman is his long-lost daughter, with whom his wife ran off long ago. Though he searched for them, he never found them, until now.
On top of that, they soon realize that the house he has purchased was built by an ancestor neither of them ever guessed they had.
If all this sounds a little far-fetched, I entirely agree. But it’s a tribute to the storytelling skills of Graham Wilson, author of The Mysteries, that I was entirely swept up in the book and overlooked its gross improbabilities.
We learn about Jim’s life and his struggles to rise from poverty. We learn of his ancestor Michael, who built the house – how he was transported as a convict from Ireland, served his time at hard labor, and built a semi-legal fortune along with his stone house. As his descendants discover his story, the reader learns it too.
I thought the story slowed somewhat toward the end, and perhaps too many details about Michael’s life come to light. But I read The Mysteries all the way through, and quite enjoyed it.
There were orthographic errors – word confusions, and sometimes quotation marks missing at the start of a paragraph. But I’ve seen far worse.
Sexual morality here is conventional contemporary, and attitudes toward Christianity tend to be critical, though few in number. Still, the storytelling was top-notch, and the book had undeniable charm. I do recommend it.
Websites store cookies to enhance functionality and personalise your experience. You can manage your preferences, but blocking some cookies may impact site performance and services.
Essential cookies enable basic functions and are necessary for the proper function of the website.
Name
Description
Duration
Cookie Preferences
This cookie is used to store the user's cookie consent preferences.
30 days
These cookies are needed for adding comments on this website.
Name
Description
Duration
comment_author
Used to track the user across multiple sessions.
Session
comment_author_email
Used to track the user across multiple sessions.
Session
comment_author_url
Used to track the user across multiple sessions.
Session
These cookies are used for managing login functionality on this website.
Name
Description
Duration
wordpress_logged_in
Used to store logged-in users.
Persistent
wordpress_sec
Used to track the user across multiple sessions.
15 days
wordpress_test_cookie
Used to determine if cookies are enabled.
Session
Statistics cookies collect information anonymously. This information helps us understand how visitors use our website.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that tracks and analyzes website traffic for informed marketing decisions.
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests
10 minutes
__utmb
Used to distinguish new sessions and visits. This cookie is set when the GA.js javascript library is loaded and there is no existing __utmb cookie. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
30 minutes after last activity
__utmc
Used only with old Urchin versions of Google Analytics and not with GA.js. Was used to distinguish between new sessions and visits at the end of a session.
End of session (browser)
__utmz
Contains information about the traffic source or campaign that directed user to the website. The cookie is set when the GA.js javascript is loaded and updated when data is sent to the Google Anaytics server
6 months after last activity
__utmv
Contains custom information set by the web developer via the _setCustomVar method in Google Analytics. This cookie is updated every time new data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
2 years after last activity
__utmx
Used to determine whether a user is included in an A / B or Multivariate test.
18 months
_ga
ID used to identify users
2 years
_gali
Used by Google Analytics to determine which links on a page are being clicked
30 seconds
_ga_
ID used to identify users
2 years
_gid
ID used to identify users for 24 hours after last activity
24 hours
_gat
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests when using Google Tag Manager
1 minute
_gac_
Contains information related to marketing campaigns of the user. These are shared with Google AdWords / Google Ads when the Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts are linked together.
90 days
Marketing cookies are used to follow visitors to websites. The intention is to show ads that are relevant and engaging to the individual user.
A video-sharing platform for users to upload, view, and share videos across various genres and topics.
Registers a unique ID on mobile devices to enable tracking based on geographical GPS location.
1 day
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE
Tries to estimate the users' bandwidth on pages with integrated YouTube videos. Also used for marketing
179 days
PREF
This cookie stores your preferences and other information, in particular preferred language, how many search results you wish to be shown on your page, and whether or not you wish to have Google’s SafeSearch filter turned on.
10 years from set/ update
YSC
Registers a unique ID to keep statistics of what videos from YouTube the user has seen.
Session
DEVICE_INFO
Used to detect if the visitor has accepted the marketing category in the cookie banner. This cookie is necessary for GDPR-compliance of the website.
179 days
LOGIN_INFO
This cookie is used to play YouTube videos embedded on the website.
