Occasionally I run across a book that reminds me what non-Christians must experience when they attempt to read a conventional Christian Booksellers’ Association novel. That was my response, at least, to The Detective Wakes, by Jim McGhee. It’s the start of a series, but I’m not taking it further. I did, however, finish it. I wanted to know whether it would surprise me. No such luck.
Barney Mains is an Edinburgh police detective with a moribund career. He isn’t sure why he’s never gotten on with the department. Then (for some reason) he’s assigned to nursemaid a young female detective, Ffiona (two f’s) McLusky, whose star is rising in the department. Their assignment is assumed to be routine – go to the French Riviera to check on an expatriate Scot – Dot-com billionaire Shona Gladstone, who has been reported missing by her assistant. Everyone assumes the woman has just taken an impromptu holiday. But soon they know it’s kidnapping, and the race begins to figure out why she was taken, and to get her back.
The plot sketch above is in fact misleading. This is actually a political drama, about a plan by young international billionaires to change the world through getting all the governments to adopt social democracy – guaranteed minimum income, wealth tax, green policies – to save civilization in the wake of the Covid epidemic. There are few nuances here – the good guys wear white hats, the bad guys are either corrupt or fascists. No real consideration is given to the possibility that the plan might be counterproductive, as so many socialist schemes have proven in the past. The good guys don’t always use legal means, but hey, everything’s cool when you’re fighting fascism, right?
There were moments of comedy, but they were mostly unintentional – as when the author assures us that the media are almost totally controlled by the right wing.
“Fierce Raged the Tempest,” sung by the Lloyd Family
I can’t recall ever singing today’s hymn, but its tone and message would fit my congregational singing habits. “Fierce Raged the Tempest” was written by Englishman Godfrey Thring (1823-1903) and appears to be found in only a handful of hymnals.
1. Fierce raged the tempest o’er the deep, Watch did Thine anxious servants keep But Thou wast wrapped in guileless sleep, Calm and still.
2. Save, Lord, we perish, was their cry, O save us in our agony! Thy word above the storm rose high, Peace, be still.
3. The wild winds hushed; the angry deep Sank, like a little child, to sleep; The sullen billows ceased to leap, At Thy will.
4. So, when our life is clouded o’er, And storm winds drift us from the shore, Say, lest we sink to rise no more, Peace, be still.
I didn’t mention the death of art and theater critic Terry Teachout on January 13, because I didn’t feel I had anything to add. I interacted with him as a minor player in the early blogosphere, and I enjoyed seeing his enthusiasm over his one-man play, Satchmo at the Waldorf. Richard Brookhiser summarizes him in National Review this way:
He specialized in omniscience. There was a bit of boy-from-Sikeston-keeping-up-with-the-city-slickers in that. But the main source of his appetite to taste, learn, and enjoy was his love of all the arts, and of the wonderful sparks cast off by human minds generally.
(via Prufrock)
Ted Gioia tells a heart-warming story of being a recipient of Teachout’s “generous spirit.” “The last time I saw him was in Santa Fe, where the opera he wrote with composer Paul Moravec made its debut. His career seemed to know no limits—which was fitting, because that was true of Terry himself.”
Let me share a few other things with you. Let me know if you’ve heard these before.
America: Chinese-born Aaron Tao writes of American greatness and his appreciation for his parents immigrating to Ohio. “As I grew up, my parents gradually revealed more details of their former destitute life in Maoist China, which made me grateful that I never had any experience remotely comparable here in the United States.”
In New York, an immigrant from Hong Kong is now rallying people against Democratic policies. “The atmosphere at schools here is more and more like China’s cultural revolution that encourages students to cancel teachers and parents, all in the name of equality,” he said. This is only one example of Asian Americans vocally supporting better communities.
Strangers: The world is ever changing. J.A. Medders, recently the author of Humble Calvinism, shares this about his first book.
Here's an anecdote for how much our slice of evangelicalism has changed:
My first book, Gospel Formed, was endorsed by:
– Doug Wilson – Owen Strachan – Russell Moore – Jared C. Wilson (wrote the foreword)
In the replies to this tweet, people mention Dangerous Calling by Paul David Tripp, whose endorsements are far more troubling. But faith is a living habit, not a single accomplishment, and some will enter heaven with clothing caked with the mud of the world.
Dalfonzo: I’ve seen some vigorous pushback against your book’s title on social media, much of it from Christians—even though it’s taken from a Bible verse (which, as you note, was later incorporated into the Heidelberg Catechism). Where do you think some of these visceral reactions are coming from? Why have so many Christians bought into the idea that we actually are our own?
Noble: Some pushback to the idea of belonging to God comes out of a deep belief in self-ownership and self-sufficiency. But my impression is that most Christians who struggle with this concept have experienced abuse. Sometimes abusive people and institutions have used the idea of belonging to God to control and harm people.
Soft Porn: Francine River’s early book Redeeming Love has been made into a movie. People I know have praised it. My wife is not one of them, and because of her comments, I’ve thought about reviewing it here, expecting to rip it apart. But this book is not burdened with a lack of reviews, and do I really want to put myself through it when I’m not doing all kinds of useful things. World reviews the movie, saying fans of the book will probably enjoy it, but there’s a lot of vice, pushing the limit of its PG-13 rating.
Have there already been 18 Inspector Skelgill books, set in English Cumbria? I must be enjoying them, because I keep coming back. Inspector Daniel Skelgill is definitely an example of the “curmudgeonly detective” trope, but he manages to remain a sympathetic character. In some ways he seems barely human – especially in relation to women, he seems entirely impassive. Some fun is had with that character trait in this book, Murder Unsolved.
Skelgill’s parents came from rather different families. He seems to favor his father’s side, hard-working, disciplined, stoic. But he’s a Graham on his mother’s side, and they are a different matter. The Grahams are a marginal clan in Cumbria (I remember them being mentioned in accounts of the days of the Border Reivers). They party hard and are inclined to cut corners with the law. But Skelgill has recently had some positive contact with some of his Graham cousins, and one of them, a young woman, asks for his help.
She has a friend, Jade, a beautiful young woman whose old boyfriend, Dale Spooner, a petty criminal, is serving time for a murder three years ago. Two local gangsters were found dead in a burned-out car, and forensic evidence put Dale at the scene. But Jade says Dale has an alibi, which he won’t talk about.
Skeptical at first, Skelgill and his team, DS Jones (female) and DS Leyton (male) look into the evidence (off the record) and find that the case was very shoddily investigated. The case was covered by a team led by Inspector Smart, a smarmy and sly detective none of them respect. They soon realize that a lot of criminal activity has been going on in this apparently quiet country area, and there are people with much greater motives for the murders than Dale Spooner had. And those people will not hesitate to eliminate nosey coppers.
Murder Unsolved was as enjoyable as the previous books in the series. One of the great strengths of author Bruce Beckham’s writing is his wonderful descriptions of the fell country. My only disappointment was that he confused “flout” with “flaunt” on two occasions.
The Skelgill books contain no profanity; sometimes the author openly explains that he’s employed a circumlocution.
Photo credit: New York Public Library. Via Unsplash.
Here’s what came up in my personal devotions this morning. I was reading in Romans 13:
For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed. (v. 6-7, ESV)
This may offend some of my friends, but there’s zero biblical grounds for saying taxation is theft. The passage above clearly states that we have an obligation before God to pay our taxes (note, Paul’s talking about the Romans here. Nero is the emperor). Government, Paul says, is ordained by God and He expects us to bear our share of the costs.
A particular tax may be unjust. It may be disproportionately levied. It may be too high. We have every right to dispute wrong taxes, and to minimize our own payments the best we can within the law. Tax reform is great. Particular taxes should in many cases be abolished.
But a Christian has no business saying “Taxation is theft” as a general principle. I overlook it when my agnostic or atheist Ayn Rand-following friends say that. But Christians should not.
After all the fights we’ve had about abortion and homosexual marriage, it bothers me to see conservative Christians spouting plainly unbiblical slogans.
Wyatt Earp and friends in Dodge City in 1883. Wyatt is 2nd from left in the front row. Bat Masterson is 2nd from the right in the back row. The rest of these guys you’ve probably never heard of. But there are several pristine Boss of the Plains Stetsons here.
Today I got more translation work, so that’s what I’ve been doing, pretty much. This puts us all at the mercy of my wandering brain, which alights on random topics in idle moments.
I don’t think I’ve ever talked about cowboy hats on this blog. I mean, what could be more appropriate for a book blog? (Hey, there are lots of books about cowboys. Some of them are even good. A few are excellent. As with every other subject.)
Most of us are well acquainted with cowboy hats – we think. But in fact, the cowboy hat as we think of it today is not one the old-time cowboys would have recognized.
The original cowboy hat, of course, was designed by John B. Stetson (1830-1906), a hat maker from New Jersey. He went west for his health (consumption), and used the skills he’d learned in his father’s hattery to make a wide-brimmed hat to wear under the western sun. Originally it was a joke, but he found it useful and comfortable, and later a cowboy bought it off him for five bucks. Eventually Stetson went to Philadelphia (the western climate had cleared up his tuberculosis) and started making hats for the cowboy trade. The rest is history.
Here’s an interesting detail – John B. Stetson was a devout Baptist. The profits that came from selling hats to all those wild and wooly western characters – cowboys and rustlers and gamblers and saloonkeepers – went largely toward his charitable interests, to build the Kingdom of God.
That original cowboy hat style was called “The Boss of the Plains.” It had a relatively tall, rounded crown and a relatively wide brim (though not as tall or wide as the one Kurt Russell wears so well in “Tombstone”). There was no idea, originally, of curling the brim or denting the crown. Those things happened, of course, when a fellow was working a ranch, but were considered slightly disreputable. A respectable man, like the Earps aspired to be, took pride in keeping theirs nice and flat and uniform.
I realized recently that I’ve carried quite a stupid idée fixe in my head all my life, about Wyatt Earp’s hat. I watched the old Wyatt Earp show starring Hugh O’Brien back when I was a kid. One of his trademarks was a flat-brimmed hat, sort of a Spanish hat really, which stood in for a Boss of the Plains on the show. When I first saw the photo above, where Wyatt (second from the left, front) wears a genuine BOTP, I associated that hat (often reproduced in images cropped to make the crown look higher than it is) with him. And whenever I’ve seen a Wyatt Earp movie since, I’ve compared the actor’s hat to that one. (There’s another picture of Wyatt in the same, or a similar, hat – a group photo in front of the fire department in Tombstone. Wyatt is pretty small in that one, but it’s recognizably the same style.)
What I realized recently, though, is that almost everybody wore a BOTP in those days. If I’m going to obsess about Wyatt’s hat, I should obsess about all the others. Wyatt’s hat was in no way unique. Relax, I tell myself. It’s just a movie.
By the way, you know where those turned-up sides on cowboy hats came from (“four in a pickup hats,” I’ve heard them called)? Not from the cowboys themselves, but from movies. In the early days of movie making, lighting was primitive. Scenes were shot out of doors or in open-roofed studios, in natural light. Nobody had figured out you could illuminate a person’s face from below, with reflectors. So when they shot Westerns, the hats were a problem. They shaded the actors’ faces – a real obstacle in a silent film where facial expressions are everything.
So the lighting people went around and turned the hats up on the sides, to let some light in. Then, in a weird twist, the real cowboys saw hats shaped like that in movies, and turned their own up on the sides to look cool.
Every year creative works slip into the public domain for use in Geico ads and local craft fairs. This year, the first story by A.A. Milne of his delightful bear in the Hundred Acre Wood has become public domain.
“Milne actually wrote four books based on the character and books 2-4 have not lapsed into the public domain. This means that many of the characters from the series, most notably Tigger, have not lapsed and will not for a few more years. In fact, the image of Pooh wearing a red shirt was not published until 1932.”
Most of what’s below can be skipped without any loss to the diverse richness of your life. It’s just the account of my day, offered here for your perusal because I can’t think of anything actually interesting.
No, wait, I do have one interesting fact. Norway has opened its borders again. The requirement that people traveling from countries outside a certain short list must go through a quarantine period before entering has been lifted. You still need to show proof of vaccination, but this is a big relaxation. A step back toward normal life, one fervently hopes.
“Following a recommendation from the National Institute of Public Health, the government is abolishing the requirement for entry quarantine because it is no longer considered necessary for infection control,” the Norwegian Ministry of Health stated.
You may recall that I predicted something like this just a few days ago, based on the amount of translation work I’ve been getting – which would seem to indicate a belief inside the film industry that freer association and travel are coming. I didn’t expect it to happen this fast, though. No doubt the movie moguls I serve in my small way have friends in high places, who tipped them the high sign.
Today was my first day without translation work since… I don’t recall. Probably less time than I think. But it’s been a string of days. I’d marked today out, whatever my work situation, for shopping and errands. (Note: it’s in times like these that I contemplate finding a wife. Only I know she’d retaliate with a Honeydo list.) The coldest day of the week isn’t prime time for such activity, but there are moments when you just need to go to the store, or else you’ll run out of some staple, like chocolate or beef jerky or pigs’ feet.
As I planned my day, I realized a lot of stuff had piled up on my list. It called for careful trip planning and logistics. Aside from the gym in the morning, which was a separate excursion, I must:
Go to the post office. Take my suit to the cleaners. Run my car through the car wash (not optimal on a day with a high around zero, but on the other hand there wasn’t much of a waiting line). Go to Wal Mart for a new computer monitor (because I knocked the old one over and broke the screen. Nothing to do with old age and clumsiness, of course – I was just as clumsy at twenty. And the piece of junk was always unstable. Which should teach me to buy computer components at Wal Mart). Get groceries. Stop at the drug store for immune system supplement. Then get the new monitor working, which is always more complicated than you expect, if you’re over ten years old.
I’m planning to work on the novel tonight. If God gives me strength. And the monitor doesn’t fall over again.
Inspector John Shadow of York, hero of H. L. Marsay’s police procedural series, is annoyed by many things. Crowds for one, which is unfortunate for a man living in a tourist city. Festivals. Geese. Modern music. Social interactions. At the beginning of A Ghostly Shadow, he’s annoyed, as Guy Fawke’s Day approaches, by the costumed tour guides leading “ghost walks” through the city. York is renowned for several ghosts, most prominently Guy Fawkes of the Gunpowder Plot and Dick Turpin the highwayman. Currently, a couple new guides from Oxford have established themselves in the city and are dressing as Fawkes and Turpin, taking business away from local ghost impersonators. Also, somebody has been stealing tour brochures from kiosks.
Then the new Dick Turpin is found hanging from a tree, near the very spot where the original Dick swung for his crimes. Shadow’s team must investigate the murder, under pressure from the city, as usual, to wrap things up before it affects business. Inspector Shadow’s attitude is not improved when he sprains his ankle and has to depend on other people’s help.
I suspect my affection for this series springs from my identification with Shadow himself, as a fellow misanthrope (though I think he’s ruder than I am, yet people seem to like him for some reason I can’t divine). But the writing isn’t top drawer (author Marsay is prone to clichés like “pale and drawn”). Nevertheless, the book was fun to read, and there wasn’t much to offend me. Recommended for light reading.
I’m sure you’re familiar with Augustus Toplady’s hymn “Rock of Ages,” written in 1776. I don’t know how many believers are singing this hymn with James Ward’s arrangement, written in 1985. Ward lives in Chattanooga and served for many years as the music director at a church in my denomination. This arrangement is printed on the page opposite of the traditional Toplady tune in the Trinity hymnal, which is the hymnal PCA congregation use.
If this is a new tune for you, I hope you enjoy it.
Rock of Ages, cleft for me let me hide myself in thee; let the water and the blood, from thy riven side which flowed, be of sin the double cure, cleanse me from its guilt and pow’r.
