I have a lot of respect for Tony Woodlief, so I’m going to share his book promo video with no more knowledge of the book than what you see here. It’s probably a darn good book.
‘Auld Lang Syne’
It’s almost New Year’s Eve, and I think I’ll alter my usual habit of posting holiday stuff on the holiday itself (which means most readers don’t find it until too late). Instead I’ll post this New Year’s song today. It’s Sissel Kyrkjebø, Charles Aznavour, and Placido Domingo doing Auld Lang Syne. Not as much Sissel as I might wish, but the other version I considered was in Norwegian. I figured you’d understand this one better.
“Auld Lang Syne” means “old long since,” or “old times.” If you’re a close reader, you may have noticed that I tend to use “long since” instead of “long ago” in my Erling books. It’s one of the archaisms I employ (lightly, I hope) to add a feeling of the past to the prose.
I bear an irrational grudge against Robert Burns, as you may recall. But according to Wikipedia, he seems to have adapted Auld Lang Syne from an old Scottish folk song. The melody is beautiful too.
A happy and blessed New Year to you, from the worldwide empire of Brandywine Books. I have some hopes for 2022. A book to release, a long trip I just might take, “tomorrow when the world is free,” as another old song goes.
I picked up a shovel in my garage today. Used it to clear some snow from in front of the door. I looked at the thing, an old sand shovel, and remembered how it had been around forever on the farm where I grew up. My dad gave it to me once, long ago, for my first car. “You should always carry a shovel in your car in the winter,” he said. Which is prudent advice in Minnesota. (Especially when you drive a Gremlin, which was what I did at the time.) I got to thinking how old that shovel is. I know it goes back to my dad’s time. Very likely my grandfather’s. Possibly even my great-grandfather’s. The rusty old thing is likely over a hundred years old.
Time passes, but we survive, so long as the Lord wills.
The Saga of Ola, not my ancestor
So Christmas is done, and winter, as it always does, snuck in while we were distracted. Winter is no less annoying before Christmas day, but it always seems like part of the festival. As if God is setting up His holiday department store window display. But then the holiday ends (I know it goes on till Epiphany, and I electrify my tree accordingly. But you know what I mean) and winter remains, like Styrofoam peanuts from the box Christmas came in. We didn’t get a white covering until Dec. 26, but the snow is here to stay now (I believe) and I have the snow shoveling muscle aches to prove it.
I was able to gather with family (not the whole family, but some, which beats last year), and we had a low-key but pleasant holiday. As part of my duties as Weird Old Uncle at the celebration, I shared a story I’d gotten in a letter from a distant cousin in Norway. He’s been doing some research on family history, and he found a story worthy of Hollywood. I paraphrase it for you below:
On a warm summer day around the year 1800, a young man named Ola was watching his father’s cows on a hillside with a good view of the sea near Ogna, in southern Rogaland. He noticed a square-rigged ship becalmed offshore. On a whim, he left the cows behind, walked to shore, appropriated a boat, and rowed out to the ship. He then signed on to the crew. He left his lunch bag hanging from one of the cows’ horns, so his family would know he’d left voluntarily. (They also noticed a boat was missing.) He later wrote his parents from Amsterdam. As a merchant sailor, he sailed with his ship to the Mediterranean, where they were attacked and captured by Libyan pirates. They were taken to Tripoli as slaves. One dark night, along with a French boy, he escaped. They swam in the sea for a while, then went ashore, walking and running the 2,200 kilometer distance (something under 1,400 miles) to Alexandria, Egypt, eating whatever they could scrounge. They stowed away (I think that’s the meaning) on a ship to Istanbul. From there it was an 1,800 kilometer (a little over a thousand miles) walk back to Amsterdam. Ola went into the shipping transport business. When Napoleon blockaded European ports to British shipping, rates for cross-channel commerce skyrocketed, and Ola made a fortune in that business (smuggling, I guess you’d call it). He married a British woman and settled down in Bergen as the owner of a shipping company once the war was over. Around 1830 he went home to Ogna to visit his family. He gave his siblings, two sisters and a brother, what amounted to a small fortune at the time, enough to build a nice little house.
Some years later, his nephew Helge received a letter from him marked, “Do not open until my death.” After a few more years another letter arrived without any instructions outside. This document itemized his property. Ola had no children of his own, and he was concerned that his wife might conceal some of it when the estate was divided. Finally, in 1843, a letter came announcing Ola’s death. Helge the nephew then opened the first letter. It said that he and his sister had each been left $100,000. But they had to do a sort of treasure hunt to collect the money. The letter said the money was buried in two small pots concealed under flat stones beneath the kitchen floor of Ola’s house in Bergen. Being honest people, they went first to the Bergen police for permission, and then dug the floor up, found the flat stones, and discovered the pots, each with the amount of money promised. Helge also hired a lawyer in Bergen, to look after their interests until Ola’s widow died. In the end they got half the estate, worth about $600,000 in modern money.
I was quite excited to read this story, and wrote back to my cousin to ask if this adventure came from my side of the family. Sadly, no. All he could find about my side was that one of my ancestors was involved with the Moravian religious movement even before the Haugean revivals (which I’ve written about here often ), and that another was the last person to die of leprosy in Randaberg parish (near Stavanger).
My family history, so far as I’ve been able to learn it, has been relentlessly unromantic. But I still reckon I’m descended from Erling Skjalgsson. Prove me wrong.
‘Thousand Cranes’ by Yasunari Kawabata
Had I opened Kawabata’s novel, Thousand Cranes, with the knowledge that the Japanese use a thousand cranes as a symbol for happiness or good fortune, I would have seen a moment sooner the disaster that was coming.
Kikuji Minari is a wealthy young man who lost both his parents four years ago. He responds to an invitation to attend a tea ceremony, something his father did for many years, because the invitation suggests he will be introduced to a woman. He notices her on his way in; she has a pink kerchief with a thousand cranes pattern on it. Plus, she’s attractive, graceful, and is willing to marry him with as little investment as a couple meetings. Smart money says he should receive her and make a good life with her.
But, no, he dwells on sordid details of two other women with whom his father had committed adultery years ago. Like an idiot.
Perhaps the natural outrage one feels as Kikuji indulges himself here and refuses someone there is what drives this story. He loves the wrong person effortlessly and constantly returns to the ugly when he has opportunity to hope. His father’s sins have bound him, and he doesn’t see it.
How much does the guilt of our parents’ sins define us? If it’s entirely their own, we can put it behind us when they pass away. If it clings to us and becomes part of our own guilt, what can we do to be free of it? Kawabata asks these questions but gives no answer to them in this work, no answer except perhaps the ruin Kikuji makes of his own life.
‘A Viking’s Shadow,’ by H. L. Marsay
I read and reviewed A Long Shadow, the first in H. L. Marsay’s Inspector Shadow mystery series. I felt that Shadow was slightly derivative of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse, but the writing wasn’t bad, and I like York as a setting. And I could hardly resist a second volume entitled A Viking’s Shadow.
York’s annual Viking festival actually exists, though I suspect its organization is rather different from what we see in this story. Inspector John Shadow, a solitary and somewhat misanthropic man, relishes eating in the city’s restaurants (Italian and Chinese preferred). So he hates the festival, which crowds the streets with tourists and makes his favorite tables hard to get. But it’s even more inconvenient when, on the first night of this year’s celebration, the “king” of the festival, a businessman named Alfred Campbell who styles himself “Ragnar,” is found murdered in his Viking tent, a replica sword in his chest. Then, on the same night, a beautiful fortune teller who was involved with Campbell is found strangled.
Shadow, assisted by his annoyingly enthusiastic sergeant, Jimmy Chan, is on the case. Lots of people hated Arthur Campbell, for both business and personal reasons. Shadow approaches the case in his old school manner, but has to admit that Jimmy, with his modern technology, has something to offer. And in the end the true culprit – a fairly unexpected one – is brought to light.
I thought the plot of A Viking’s Shadow was well worked out, and I like the characters. Most of the time, when authors try to work Viking themes into mysteries, they make major mistakes, but author Marsay has clearly done her research, and I have no serious complaints. An interesting aspect of the stories is that Shadow (like Morse) is a crossword puzzle fiend. But Marsay does Colin Dexter one better by beginning each chapter with a puzzle clue, which applies to an actual puzzle at the back of the book. I’m not very good at serious crosswords, but I did get one (just one) clue in this book – only because I know Viking stuff.
Pretty good book. I don’t recall any objectionable content.
‘Missing pieces,’ by Peter Grainger
The morning was as glorious a one as on Waters’ previous visit, and who would disagree that sunshine in the middle of June shows off the English countryside to its greatest advantage? The dappled light beneath those immemorial elms lit up the mosses and lichens on the gravestones they passed, nature’s own script in memoriam, written by the slow hand of time, and above their heads a party of screaming Swifts circled the church tower in an ecstasy of the old excitement.
The Kings Lake Investigations books by Peter Grainger continue the police procedural series that started with the D. C. Smith mysteries. Missing Pieces is the latest. I still miss Smith, who is reported to be off sailing somewhere now, and makes no appearance in this book. But I have to admit that the new books are still pretty good. And this one impressed me especially.
Inspector Smith’s old investigative team has now been incorporated into a new homicide squad. Kings Lake, however, is not Midsomer; they don’t have murders popping up on a weekly basis. So, with the one-year anniversary of their squad approaching, and desiring to justify their continued existence as a unit, they are ordered to look into some cold cases. They soon settle on a puzzler from the 1980s – a young woman was found strangled in a woodland clearing. She had no identification and lies now in an anonymous grave in a local churchyard.
As we follow the investigation, mostly from the viewpoint of Detective Christopher Waters, we see them drawing a connection between the murder and a Woodstock-like music festival held on the same property the same week. It proves surprisingly difficult to locate the people who owned the property at the time, and when they do, the owner is suspiciously reluctant to cooperate – even after being arrested.
The remainder of the story is a journey of curiosity, not suspense. There are no car chases, no gunfights, no sinister criminal masterminds. Just a journey into the Heart of Darkness, though it happens in a bucolic setting.
This is my favorite kind of mystery, and it was immensely satisfying. What made it even better was the excellent prose (note the excerpt above) and a well-integrated religious sub-theme. I have no idea what author Grainger believes, but he asks the right questions. All the police characters seem fairly clueless on religion but, faced with the possibility of New Age/Pagan human sacrifice as opposed to orthodox Christianity, Christianity comes out looking pretty good (though Pentecostals come in for a bit of a drubbing). I might almost describe Missing Pieces as a Christian novel, with the message very obliquely delivered.
But I don’t insist on that.
I do, however, recommend the book highly.
‘Luke’s Christmas Tag’
(I wrote the following meditation for my church body’s magazine this year. I was assigned to write on Luke 1:1-4. I was a little concerned at first — a prologue seems an unpromising subject. However, in meditating on it, I came up with the following, which I think is not bad at all. I share it as my Christmas greeting to you and yours.)
Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught. (Luke 1:1-4, ESV)
There’s a tradition about how Luke came to write his gospel. I like it, and it seems to me to fit the Bible narrative. The tradition says that Luke did a lot of research while staying in Caesarea, during the two years the apostle Paul was under house arrest there, awaiting trial.
That must have been a frustrating period for the missionaries. They found work to do while they waited, but they must have thought again and again, “This wasn’t what I was called to do!”
But Luke (according to this tradition) made the most of it. One thing he seems to have done then was to write the book of Acts, which can be seen as a kind of “legal deposition” for Paul’s trial in Rome (the account starts in Acts 23).
But there were also many people available in that area who’d been eyewitnesses to the life and work of our Lord Jesus. Chief among them was Mary, the Lord’s mother. That would explain the details of the Savior’s birth, seen from Mary’s point of view, that we find only in Luke’s gospel. How eager she must have been to share her stories, and how eagerly Luke must have written them down!
It’s been called – with good reason – the greatest story ever told. But Luke, a physician, a man of science in his time, knew the principle that “if it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably not.”
So he adds this preface to his book. Essentially, he’s saying, “Look, Theophilus (the name means ‘Beloved of God’). You’re about to read about some amazing things. Wonderful things. Things so astounding you’ll find them hard to believe.
“But I fact-checked it. This isn’t some myth about the gods on Olympus. It’s not an ancient tale about a legendary golden age. This is an account of things that happened in our lifetimes, and there are multiple witnesses still around to testify to them. I talked to those people.
“The world isn’t what you think it is. Life isn’t what you think it is. Something amazing is happening all around us, and you can be part of it. I’m going to tell you about these astounding things. Angels. Miracles. Sicknesses healed. The dead raised. Hope for everyone who’s abused or oppressed or suffering.
“I’m going to start with the stories of a couple of babies…”
I’m sure there are wonderful customs among the many cultures who celebrate Christmas in warm southern climates (Christ wasn’t exactly born in Norway, after all). But I’ve always been grateful personally to know Christmas as a time of light in darkness, a celebration carried on bravely just at that time of year when the darkness seems most powerful. Christmas is, and always should be, a kind of surprise.
G. K. Chesterton wrote it this way in his poem, “The House of Christmas:”
This world is wild as an old wives’ tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.
“Gospel,” as I’m sure you know, means “good news.” Like so many things about our faith, we need to look at it a second time. This isn’t just any good news – it’s the best news. The best news possible. We are not alone. We are not forgotten. We are loved in a greater and stranger way than we ever imagined. Death has been conquered. The future will be incredible. Everything you’ve suffered will be worth it. Whatever you’ve dreamed of, whatever you’ve fantasized about – it will be better than that.
Luke 1:1-4 is like a gift tag on a Christmas present. On the tag is written, “You’re about to open a gift so wonderful you’ll have a hard time believing it’s for you. Trust me, it is. Open it now. Merry Christmas, Beloved of God.”
A Christmas Truce of 1914
Not long after WWI began, there was Christmas. Military units ran out of munitions and soldiers, and perhaps the will to fight over the holidays wasn’t quite there.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
‘In the Bleak Midwinter’
Not a bad lillejulaften (little Christmas Eve, as they call it in Norway). No great accomplishments chalked up, but I got a couple things done that I’d been putting off. Faced a minor appliance crisis – I learned it was a false alarm, though the diagnosis cost me a little. Still, I was expecting much worse. And I got paid for some translation, which always brightens a day.
“In the Bleak Midwinter” came to mind for a song tonight. Sissel sings, of course. Based on a poem by Christina Rossetti, it’s bald-faced anglicization of the Christmas story. Whether Jesus was born on December 25 or not (I like to think He was, just to annoy people) it certainly wasn’t in a snow-covered landscape. But our Christmas celebration isn’t only about the first Christmas (though it must be about that primarily). It’s also about the long tradition of commemoration we enjoy in the Christian tradition. Legends included. And in a tertiary way, about the traditions of our own tribes, whatever they may be. My tribe is Scandinavian, and we make kind of a big thing out of Christmas (for reasons I discuss in my novel Troll Valley).
Tomorrow I’ll bake pumpkin pies. No holiday is guaranteed, but this Christmas looks to beat last year’s all hollow, at least for this jolly old elf.
Hope it’s the same for you.
‘The First Shot,’ by E. H. Reinhard
Tampa police detective Carl Kane is called to an abandoned industrial building to view a crime scene. There are two middle-aged women dead behind the factory, killed execution-style. Inside are the bodies of several men, also shot to death. It’s hard to work out a scenario for the crime, which seems brutal beyond necessity. Shortly after that, there’s another mass killing, after hours in a strip club. Again, the crime looks as if somebody has been killing more people than they need to, in a simple robbery.
That’s how The First Shot, by E. H. Reinhard, starts. We follow the investigation as it progresses, until Kane finally finds himself face to face with an incredibly murderous psychopath.
“Incredibly” is the operative word here. The First Shot is an example of the sociopath story so popular in crime fiction today (I first encountered it in John D. MacDonald’s books. He did it better). The problem with the villain here is that he’s plain, flat evil. No motivations, no personal history, no redeeming qualities at all. Someone created for you to hate, and for no other purpose. Although I believe evil exists, I don’t believe anyone is solid, homogenized evil through and through. Tragedy, as Aristotle (I think it was Aristotle) told us, should evoke pity and terror. This guy evokes only terror. Which means he’s paradoxically both dull and evil.
I also don’t enjoy watching the innocent murdered. That happens again and again in this book.
The hero, Carl Kane, isn’t much better. We learn a couple things about his personal life – he transferred from Milwaukee after a bad divorce. He’s gun-shy in regard to relationships. And that about covers his character development. Other than that, he’s indistinguishable from the rest of the cops (I did have trouble telling them apart).
On top of that, the author tends to over-write. A lot of his verbiage could be cut by a good editor.
So all in all I wasn’t much impressed with The First Shot, and won’t be following this series.