I had gotten a little behind in my reading of Bruce Beckham’s Inspector Skelgill mysteries, set in Cumberland, which is why I’m reviewing another so soon after reviewing the previous installment. This new one, Murder, Mere Murder, is one of the best of the series, I think.
Buttermere is the lake near which Inspector Skelgill grew up, but he doesn’t get up there much anymore. It’s out of the way, and has no good boat access for fishing – beside which, the fishing isn’t very good anyway.
But one day a couple hobby divers discover a woman’s body, wrapped in plastic, at the bottom of the mere. Immediately Skelgill heads for the area, along with his subordinates, Sergeants Jones and Leyton, to find out whether anybody’s missing. Initially, clues are few. Yet there is no lack of shady citizens who seem to have one or two secrets. A couple local men were having affairs with mysterious women who might conceivably have been the deceased. And there’s a strange lesbian couple, one of them a famous mystery writer, who both show an unexpected sexual interest in Skelgill. Meanwhile, an ambitious police rival is jockeying to grab the case for himself.
There’s a lot of subtle humor here as Skelgill deals with the predatory lesbians, but there’s also well-crafted rising tension and a climax worthy of a movie.
My only quibbles are (as usual) the present tense narrative (though it doesn’t really bother me; I only object on principle), and the fact that the author misuses the phrase, “begs the question.” He should know better.
We make the Puritans picturesque in a way they would violently repudiate, in novels and plays they would have publicly burnt. We are interested in everything about them, except the only thing in which they were interested at all…. About the Puritans we can find no great legend. We must put up as best we can with great literature.
Anyone approaching G.K. Chesterton’s A Short History of England in the hope of learning many facts is likely to be sadly disappointed. I expect Chesterton himself would have been astonished at the very expectation – in his day, anyone who bought a Chesterton book knew he’d be getting a polemic. A witty polemic that might be very illuminating – even if one disagrees with the premises – but the author assumes a fair knowledge of the dates and facts from the outset. What Chesterton offers is a fresh perspective.
In this relatively short, very superficial overview of English history, the author has two advantages in creating his provocations – first of all, he’s G.K. Chesterton, a man who forever looked at the world as if in a fun house mirror or a photographic negative; and secondly that he’s a Catholic, a perpetual outsider in a land of lapsed Protestants.
Sometimes he can be surprising – he seems to anticipate interpretations of events that were unusual at the time, but are commonplace today – such as that the Saxon invaders in Arthur’s time may have only been an aristocratic minority.
As Chesterton sees it, England went wrong at two major junctures (aside from the Reformation, something he thinks self-evident) – when Richard II lost his bid to reform the government, and when, more recently, England began to ally itself with the Germans. He is writing, of course, as World War I rages, and is comforted by the fact that England is once again allied with France, which he considers a much more fitting combination.
I do recommend A Short History of England, but only if you already know a good deal of English history. (I’ll admit a lot of the names were unfamiliar to me, too.)
What Marilyn could not see was that Bobby, like Jack before him, was less interested in strengthening her than annealing her; heating her up like white gold, then leaving her alone to cool down, making her more pliable, bendable, easier to manipulate. Wearing down her strength.
I remember sitting at the kitchen table for lunch with my family one day back in the early 1960s. The news was on the radio, and the announcer mentioned that the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, had suffered another miscarriage. There was, the report said, great grief in the family.
My grandfather, who was at the table with us, said drily, “All that money Joe Kennedy made running bootleg whisky during Prohibition sure didn’t bring their family much joy.”
Talk of the Kennedy curse was common back then, and continues today. But Maureen Callahan’s book Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed offers a more prosaic explanation – Jack was carrying asymptomatic chlamydia, and had infected Jackie.
That’s essentially the tone of this book – there’s a lot of legend and romanticism in the Kennedy story, but it all boils down to some pretty sordid facts about a truly degenerate political dynasty.
The book is told from the viewpoints of a series of women (there are many, and more could have been listed) whose lives were ruined – and sometimes ended – because they flew too close to the Kennedy flame. Some had their reputations ruined, a couple died (at least one murdered), and one was crippled for life. What they got from the Kennedy men was a brief encounter (none of them seem to have been very good lovers) and all the bad consequences, because no Kennedy male ever took responsibility.
The stories are told out of sequence, which can be confusing to the reader. Also, because viewpoints change, characters often surprisingly change… character. Someone who was kind in one story is vicious in another. As in the play, Rashomon, it all depends on the point of view. There’s little sisterly solidarity here – the women tend to rip each other up when wounded.
I was often annoyed by the author’s point of view. She seems to be an orthodox neo-feminist. For her the real problem with all these women was that they’d been expected to marry and have children. If they’d just devoted their lives to career and money, I suppose, they’d have found happiness and fulfillment.
Frequent jabs are taken at the Roman Catholic Church, which admittedly does not cover itself in glory in this narrative. However, more recent Kennedys, like Jack Jr. and Bobby Jr., affirm(ed) feminism, and there’s no implication that their hypocrisy was feminism’s fault.
Even when I was a Democrat, I was never a Kennedy fan. So I wasn’t shocked by these revelations, and had no illusions to be dissed. But the coming new administration, which I support, includes one of the characters described in this book, and not one of the least reprehensible. He must be watched – no journalistic firewall will protect him this time out.
My conclusion is that Ask Not is an important book, clearing out a lot of mythical cobwebs in an era of American history. It is not a salacious book, and not particularly sexy to read. It’s dismal. A dismal, bleak story about a dysfunctional family with abysmal values that held too much power too long.
A skeleton crew (from 1778 military usage) is a term meaning the smallest team needed to do a job or keep the ship running. That and the pirate-vibe skeletons have may be the reason the new Disney+ series has its title. Maybe the four kids teamed with a pirate and pirate-themed droid will accomplish a big job for their civilization; hopefully, the final episode won’t have someone saying, “Look what they accomplished — and with a skeleton crew no less.” Or worse: “We’re a real team now. The galaxy will feel the power of …”
So far, four episodes have been released, and the show isn’t bad. The main actors, who are 13-14 years old, are stretching their skills and performing well. The fast-talking biker girl and the reckless boy who seems to forget their clear and present danger in seconds do get tiring, but unlike many other series, the show has only touched those tropes lightly.
Watch the trailer to see exactly the tone and direction of this show. There’s a moment I enjoyed from the second ep (not in the trailer, but close) where they ask their droid to take them home. The droid doesn’t know of their planet, so he points out the capsule window at thousands of stars and says, “Okay, which one is it?”
At the end of that episode, the kids have been locked up with none of their goods confiscated. They meet Jude Law, the pirate, and he helps them escape. They get through a crowded space port with people who probably would have recognized them from the scuffle that happened an hour or so ago, but hey, are you checking a list of details? Let this one slide. In episode three, they go to a new planet, learn something, and get into a slight scrape with professional space pilots. In episode four, they go to another planet, get into a much bigger scrape, and learn something else. It’s not a bad pattern, but thinking of the sci-fi TV shows of yesteryear, the pattern could be cleaner.
It’s a good show. So far, nothing has been wasted. I haven’t noticed any turn of events that negates or undermines everything that comes before it. The main question many people have asked it whether it’s a Star Wars story, and I wouldn’t say it is. It’s a fun, side story that doesn’t clash with the Star Wars saga as I know it, except maybe in its use of alien lifeforms. Whenever I see a Hammerhead type walking around like an average citizen, I think that kind of alien should probably be reserved as one of the bad guys. There are many like that. But if Star Wars is essentially about rebels fighting the Galactic Empire or Jedis resisting the Sith, Skeleton Crew isn’t one of those stories. It’s an adventure with kids in space.
[Since I know you’ve been waiting for news, I’ll just interject a short status report on my surgery, and then move on. I’m always willing to hear about people’s ills, but I’d rather not know the details.
My surgery went by the numbers. Everything seems to be on track. (Special thanks to my friend Mark, who drove me there and back.) The first 24 hours involved certain restrictions on my movements that were annoying, but that has passed. I have blurred vision in one eye and some minor irritation. But I seem on track for a complete recovery – though not a full and useful life – it’s a little late for that.]
I shall review yet another mystery novel here – The Vanishing Kin, by Thomas Fincham. I am given to understand it’s part of an ongoing series about a detective named Lee Callaway. In this story Callaway is contacted by an old man whose son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren disappeared suddenly about 15 years ago. No trace of them has ever been found.
There’s a parallel plot about a female police officer investigating the death of a video blogger who posted short films about living in a van on the road, who has been discovered beaten to death near her van.
I am a longsuffering man. Sometimes I pick up a story that could be better written, but the author seems to be able to tell a good story at a basic level, even if they lack style. I am almost never happy I did that. I wasn’t this time either.
Years ago I took some kind of correspondence writing course where one of our exercises was to cut a long passage down to a short passage. It’s amazing how much any piece of writing can be compressed if you search out shorter words and phrases, more active verbs, fewer descriptors. This author should have taken that course. He’s always piling the information on, to try to make sure we understand his points:
Callaway wasn’t going to tell Joely what he thought. That’s not what a friend would do at a time like this. They wouldn’t try to put salt on an open wound. That would only make the matter worse. And plus, it wouldn’t bring either Rosie or the money back.
Look at that paragraph. Now cut out all but the first two sentences. Would the reader lose anything?
The Vanishing Kin is not a very good job of writing, and I can’t account for all the positive reviews it has gotten on Amazon.
It happens occasionally that I discover that a movie I worked on as a script translator is now available in this country. In the case of Gold Run, the movie has in fact been out for a couple years and I hadn’t noticed it. So I watched it over the weekend.
I think what I did on this one was actually an editing job. If I remember right, the script had been translated by AI, but back then the production people were still willing to run it past actual human beings, to avoid major incoherence. I think I worked the whole script, and I thought it was a pretty good one.
Viewing it did not disappoint. This is a solid, exciting film.
Movie fans interested in the subject have been able, in the past few years, to get a pretty good education about the Norwegian response to the German invasion in 1940 . The King’s Choice (which I didn’t work on) and Atlantic Crossing (which I did) told the story of the royal family, on the crown prince’s and crown princess’ sides respectively. Narvik (which I also worked on) told the story of the doomed military defense. And now Gold Run follows another important facet of the story – the (genuinely) amazing story of how the Norwegian government managed to get its entire gold reserve to the coast and off to England, with the Germans on their heels.
The unlikely hero of the story is Fredrik Haslund (Jon Øigarden), a financial secretary for the Norwegian Labor Party. As the bigwigs (Labor is in power) rush to get out of Oslo, they dump the job of evacuating the gold onto Fredrik’s narrow shoulders. Somehow, with the help of an exasperated army officer and his troops, he manages to get the boxes of gold onto trucks to transport to Lillehammer, where they think it will be safe. But the Germans keep coming, so it all has to be put on a train for transportation to the coast. Fredrik is an OCD type, and there’s dark humor in the way he insists on checking every box off his inventory before it can be transferred (multiple times) from one place to another – even with German fighter planes overhead.
For a more assertive – if secondary – protagonist, we also have Fredrik’s sister Nini, who is, we are told, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and whom I suspect to be entirely fictional, added solely for purposes of inclusivity. Also there’s the poet Nordahl Grieg, who did exist (though he didn’t look like this). His Wikipedia page says he was on the gold ship, though I don’t know if he was actually as much involved in the gold run as this movie makes him. Grieg was a committed Communist and a stalwart supporter of Stalin, by the way.
There’s also a nice subplot about a nerdy bank teller and a rugged truck driver thrown together by chance or fate, who learn to respect each other through shared dangers.
And dangers there are. The closer they get to the coast, the closer the German planes are, until we see Fredrik and Nini breaking into a bank in Ålesund with a battering ram as the city burns around them.
This is the first time I’ve seen a film I’ve translated that was exactly like the script I worked on. And it’s quite a good script. This is a very solid, exciting war movie.
My only disappointment was a personal issue I’d forgotten. At the end, Nordahl Grieg reads one of his own poems, about the feeling of being conquered, and vowing to come back again someday. When I translated the script, I composed a lyrical translation of that poem which I thought was quite good. I had the whisper of a dream that when the film was made, somebody would notice how good my translation was and use my words in the subtitles.
Alas, as I pretty much expected, it was not to be. The lyrics they use are a literal translation (and flat wrong in one line).
Ah well.
I do recommend Gold Run. I saw it on Amazon Prime, where I had to pay a rental fee.
I think I’ve reached an age where I’m just going to start avoiding thrillers, unless they’re particularly recommended by some dear and trusted friend. Because it seems there’s a kind of arms race going on among thriller writers, to see how implausibly horrible they can make their heroes’ (and heroines’) plights as they weave their ever-tightening plot nooses. How much punishment can the human body – and mind – suffer without actually killing your hero or wearing out your readers?
Rutherford Barnes, the hero of Adam Lyndon’s The Chalk Man does not actually rip an IV needle from his arm and walk out of an emergency ward with bullet wounds and a concussion (my personal most hated thriller trope), but he and his friends certainly endure a lot more than I found plausible.
Detective Barnes is a policeman in Eastbourne, on the Sussex coast of England. In previous books in this series he apparently suffered the loss of his wife in an auto accident, which he is convinced was caused by a particular crime boss. He managed to get that crime boss sent to prison, and during that incarceration the criminal’s family was killed. He blames Barnes personally and has vowed revenge when he gets out.
When a deadly gas is released in downtown Eastbourne during the height of the Christmas shopping season, it brings all personnel out on full alert. Which means there’s nobody paying much attention when Barnes reports his eight-year-old stepdaughter missing. He certainly gets no help from his supervisor, who hates his guts. So Barnes is on the case alone, his only helpers an Inspector friend (who tends to go missing unexpectedly) and a sympathetic civilian data analyst. And that’s only the beginning of an orchestrated plot that will have Barnes fighting to save his new family and his own life, and to prevent an act of terrorism.
For this reader, it was all a bit much. There was nothing really wrong with The Chalk Man. The writing was good, the dialogue believable, the characters adequate – except for their superhuman resilience. Especially in the case of the two main female characters, who were (as one would expect) spunky and absolutely not to be intimidated. Like all the others nowadays.
Anyway, the book was fine, and may be just what you want for an exciting read. It made me tired.
Always reliable. That’s the great thing about Bruce Beckham’s Inspector Skelgill novels, set in England’s lake district, not far from the Scottish border. The setting is as is expected – the fell country where Skelgill loves to fish and run. Dan Skelgill is a police detective, assisted by his (also reliable) sergeants – transplanted Londoner Sgt. Leyton, and attractive local Sgt. Emma Jones.
One of the great traditions in their neighborhood is the Bob Graham Round, a grueling fell running race. Skelgill has come up with an idea for a new variation, one that takes the same route but incorporates lake fishing. He’s taking some vacation time to test the concept out when he learns of the death of a local runner, killed by a hit and run driver, with no witnesses. Although he can’t take an active part in the investigation because he’s on holiday, he keeps in touch with Leyton and Jones as they investigate. That’s the premise of Murder in the Round.
Skelgill is (I think I’ve said this before) almost the opposite of Sherlock Holmes. Logical deduction is not his forte. He’s more like a hominid from the hunter-gatherer period, operating mostly by his senses, getting messages from the scents in the air and the tracks on the ground.
I used to wonder how long his low-key flirtation with Sgt. Jones would go on, but I’ve come to accept that Dan Skelgill lives in one of those fictional universes where no one ever grows older. They’ll both be young and smoldering as long as author Beckham goes on writing.
Surely she had never asked God for anything except that He should let her have her will. And every time she had been granted what she asked for—for the most part. Now here she sat with a contrite heart—not because she had sinned against God but because she was unhappy that she had been allowed to follow her will to the road’s end.
So it is done at last. I have completed yet another reading of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter – volume 3, The Cross. Tiina Nunnaly’s translation this time.
It’s a little like completing a long mountain hike, I guess. There’s more than one point where you pause along the path and think about how far you have to go, and sometimes you do get tired. Yet that’s just part of the experience, what you go through to enjoy the clear air and the spectacular views.
In case you’re not familiar with the story, the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy begins with our young heroine, the beautiful daughter of doting parents in 14th Century Norway, rejecting the dull young man they betrothed her to, and running off with a handsome, dashing knight.
In the following two books, she has to live with the consequences. Erlend, her husband, is not a prudent man. He leaves the management of their farm to others (often to Kristin herself) to involve himself in political intrigues, which in the end lose him his ancestral estate. In this book, they have retired to Kristin’s home farm, where Erlend is resented by the neighbors. Sigrid’s chief concern is transferred to their seven sons, and she learns the torments that accompany parenthood. Meanwhile, the Hound of Heaven is always pursuing her.
There’s exquisite irony in watching Sigrid, as she passes through the stages of life, first inspired by romantic ballads, then compared to a ballad, and finally seeing her son inspire a ballad of his own through his misguided actions.
Read Kristin Lavransdatter, and you’ll come to know Kristin better than you know a lot of your friends and family. In a sense, the trilogy is a soap opera – but it’s what soap operas aspire to be; a deep, unwavering examination of the human soul in its glory and its weakness. The scenery descriptions are vivid and immersive. It’s also a paeon to the grace of God.
Sheila had written the shortest letter, asking plainly for Scrabble, providing no alternative. They decided on a spinning globe of the world for Grace, who wasn’t sure what she wanted but had written out a long list. Loretta was not in two minds: if Santa would please bring Enid Blyton’s Five Go Down to the Sea or Five Run Away Together or both, she was going to leave a big slice of cake out for him and hide another behind the television.
Claire Keegan’s 2021 novella, Small Things Like These, is a story about Bill Furlong, a hard-working father of five girls. He’s the man who keeps his 1980s Irish town, New Ross, warm, selling timber, coal, anthracite, and slack. It’s honest work that puts a roof over your head, though the windows may be drafty. He regularly remembers his childhood as the son of a single woman who worked for a kindly widow. Surely, he thinks, someone in town knows who his father is, if by nothing else than a strong resemblance. But no one has even suggested a possibility.
With the Christmas holidays coming and typical last-minute fuel orders to fulfill, Furlong makes a delivery that raises significant questions about his role as a man and member of the community.
I don’t know why I love Irish things. I think half of my family hails from Ulster, which probably means they were Scottish, but something provoked me as a teenager to define myself as being half-Irish (in the loose way many Americans talk about their heritage). All that to say, Keegan’s novella had cozy moments in both the Christmas atmosphere and the Irish dialogue. I found those pages nostalgic somehow. I bought the book wondering if the whole story would be that way.
No, this is a sparing, literary work that captures a few days of Bill Furlong’s life. He’s a man of few words, so a brief story like this fits him, leaving us with a good impression of him and perhaps the same questions he has. I don’t want to spoil the book by articulating those questions, but I will say they are relatively timeless and fit with the Christmas story, just as the title echoes the primary theme: “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me” (Mt 25:40 NKJV).
