Recently, a friend reminded me of my review, some years ago, of A Mighty Fortress, the first book in the Milo Porter mystery series by S. D. Thames. I had lost track of this author, so I checked to see if there were more books. And there is one. Nothing But the Blood was published in 2017. I note that there have been no further Milo Porter books. I hope the author hasn’t given up, because he writes my kind of story.
Milo Porter is a Gulf War veteran who now lives in Tampa and works as a private investigator and process server. He suffers from PTSD, which expresses itself in bad dreams, (possible) hallucinations, and risk taking. He’s a Christian, as are most of his friends, who are also (including his girlfriend) mostly weight lifters. Milo is a pretty good lifter himself, and has just set a record. During the big lift, he sees a vision of blood and of his personal guardian angel.
That vision motivates him to take a job he’s offered the same day. A representative of a major league football team hires him to watch a young player whom they plan to select in the upcoming draft. Milo encounters surprising hostility from the player and his entourage. But then the player dies in a highly suspicious weight lifting accident, and Milo finds a new client and a new challenge – to unravel a complicated, ruthless conspiracy of fraud.
I enjoyed Nothing But the Blood a little less than A Mighty Fortress, probably because the pro football world doesn’t interest me a lot. But I was again impressed with the author’s professional prose, good characterization and plotting, and skillful manner of incorporating Christian faith into a (mostly) realistic story. I recommend Nothing But the Blood, with the caution that this isn’t a Frank Peretti book. Which, from my point of view, is a good thing.
Dame Diana Rigg (1938-2020) died today in London. An accomplished actress whose intelligence always shone through the camera lens, she first became famous playing Emma Peel in the classic English TV series, “The Avengers” (not to be confused with the Marvel franchise; see the intro and outro credits above). She had a long and successful career, playing the only Bond girl to actually marry the spy in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” and most recently carrying a role on “Game of Thrones.”
I was desperately in love with her in her “Avengers” days. According to my reading, she was a practicing member of the Anglican Church.
I sometimes joke about the infinite number of fictional detectives today who live on a Florida beach, in emulation of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee. And yet they never do seem to run out. My latest discovery is the Lucky John series by Mark Stone, of which the first installment is Lucky Break. “Lucky John” is actually (if improbably) named John Lucky. A former soldier and over the road truck driver, he rescued a girl in a truck stop from a robber one night. In gratitude, she made out a lottery ticket for him using her phone number. The number was drawn, and John Lucky suddenly had more money than he’ll ever spend. (He did give the girl a piece of the prize.)
Having no real roots or family of his own, John decides to move to the place he liked best of all the places he’s ever visited – Florida. He buys a house in Bonita Springs, with his amiable buddy Davey, who seems to have been born to be a sidekick. Before long they’ve found a new favorite bar together, and shortly thereafter John defends the attractive bartender from her angry ex-husband. This leads to a complicated (and implausible) adventure in which John finds himself suspected of murder before uncovering and thwarting a diabolical revenge plot.
Believability isn’t a big consideration in Lucky Break. Details are contradictory, and extreme, movie-style dangers come at our hero rapid-fire. There is little time for meditation on life. The book is a fast read that probably didn’t take long to write.
But I kind of enjoyed it. Lucky John is a likeable hero, and the general mood is sunny, which is nice for a change. I bought the second book.
A little sleep, a little slumber, A little folding of the hands to sleep— So shall your poverty come on you like a prowler, And your need like an armed man. (Proverbs 6:10-11)
Yesterday, I talked about what conspiracies are in light of the World cover story on QAnon claims taking hold within the church. Why people believe unproven and often outlandish theories about select people or the world at large is hard to pin down.
One idea is that the theory of evil conspirators pressing toward world government flattens all the bad news into a single problem, drawing a battle line between the light and the night. One cultural commentator said the QAnon theories resemble the rumors of Satanic rituals circulating among believers in the 80s. In a way this makes sense. Who is the biggest corrupter of our world, if not Satan himself?
But if you’re inclined to agree with that, think about why creation is under a curse to begin with. In Adam’s fall sinned we all. Sure, the devil fed us a line, but we bought it and rejected what our Lord told us. It wasn’t his rebellion that brought down the curse; we earned that ourselves.
This is the big reason world conspiracies fall short. Humanity isn’t a flock of sheep, many of whom falling victim to a few evil goats who are themselves being manipulated by the devil. A strain of evil runs through every one of us.
“For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Rom 7:19).
It is Christ’s work in us that keeps us from grassroots sin: pride, selfishness, and seeking our own interests. It is Christ’s work in the world that keeps unrepentant sinners from ruining themselves and those around them. We don’t need a secret society to pressure us into sin. We do it willing, even as we tell ourselves to stop.
Many great evils occur throughout the world as a result of normal people making choices. The explosion of 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate last month in Beirut, killing over 200 people, ruining a vital port that will harm countless civilians for months, and shutting down the government completely, was the result of neglectful politicians who saw no reason to clean up a mess. What harm was it doing to anyone two months ago?
A scientist who was nearby said, “I heard a terrible wheeze, a sinister noise. I saw a huge cloud flashing in my direction. I lived through the civil war in Lebanon, but this was the moment I was sure I was going to die.”
Unintended consequences and unforeseen events have caused wide ranging damage from ruined birthday parties to ruined lives. A famished president ate a pile of fresh fruit that killed him with cholera. Poorly designed o-rings allowed a spaceship to explode. And that thing you said to your friend at work? That’s why you’re meeting with the boss in the morning. We don’t often go looking for harm; we just run into it along the way.
Neglect is only one form of grassroots sin. We’ll talk about another form in another post.
In the second book of the J. R. Mathis’s Father Tom mysteries, The Framed Father, our hero is called back to the town of Myerton, Pennsylvania, where he recently solved the cold case murder of the woman he was married to before he became a priest. He left the parish in the hands of Father McCoy, a callow young priest who seemed the most innocent and inoffensive of men. But accusations have reached the archbishop that Father McCoy has been carrying on with his attractive administrative assistant. So Father McCoy is sent off into retreat, and Father Tom must take over at St. Clare’s once again. But when scandal turns to murder, Father Tom will again team up with Helen, his ex-fiancee, now a police detective (who is improbably open to amateur help) to try to save the young priest’s name and liberty.
I reviewed the previous book in the series, The Penitent Priest, as morally upright and well-composed, but weakly and improbably plotted. I thought The Framed Father somewhat better. There are still too many coincidences, but I didn’t guess the solution this time.
No bad language, heavy violence, or sex scenes to caution you about. Matters of the Catholic faith are treated seriously, and there are good depictions of crises of faith. Father Tom is a little too much the intuitive detective for my personal taste, but the book wasn’t bad.
I’ve heard a little about QAnon in the wild, primarily that one of my congressional candidates has favorable views on it. World’s current cover story reports the rising concerns among Christians over friends and family members who profess to believe in the QAnon conspiracy. As I understand it, they believe an secret society of Satanists is running the world or pushing toward an evil one world government and Donald Trump is the chosen one to defeat them. I’ve read that he has already defeated many of them in secret ways the public may never know.
“In the pandemic lockdown, QAnon accounts exploded in popularity as people spent more time online,” Emly Belz writes. “Many Christians have sunk so deeply into Q that it fills a lot of their conversations and most of their time online.”
The theories spun are the sticky, tangled kind. I don’t want to try to refute specific claims here, but I do want to talk about conspiracy theories in general, their uselessness, and how they run contrary to what we know of human nature. First, let’s look at what conspiracies actually are.
You could easily come to think a conspiracy theory is just wild hare, an elaborate explanation for a particular disaster with an unsatisfactory explanation or a series of unthinkable events. The Kennedy assassination, the Zodiac killer, and why Firefly was cancelled are prime subjects for theories like this. The official explanations are either incomplete or unsatisfactory, so some people construct better theories.
Conspiracy theories argue that the powerful have fed us these incomplete explanations because the lie is better than the truth at maintaining the status quo. They remain theories because investigators cannot unearth enough facts to prove them; if the claims were to be revealed as true, we would call start called the theories “history.”
The world’s most famous actual conspiracy led to the death of Christ. Temple leaders, including the high priest, wanted Jesus of Nazareth dead for political, and ultimately spiritual, reasons. They were powerful men, but they didn’t have that kind of power. If Herod or Pilate or Caesar Tiberius had wanted him dead, they could have given the order, but the high priest didn’t have the power to execute people. Plus he didn’t have the backing of all of the temple leaders. Plus the optics weren’t right; too many people loved this wandering rabbi. So a few of them conspired behind the backs of other temple leaders to conduct a mock trial, get him before Pilate, lobby for his execution, and have him dead before Monday. That’s a conspiracy.
The Gunpowder Plot that launched the face of a thousand Guy Fawkes was an attempt to blow up the House of Lords with the king and many supporters with it. They had to plot in secret because they didn’t have any real power to direct or overthrow their own government. They had to try unexpected brute force. What they should have tried was some explosive ideas, but with all of this gunpower lying around, why let it go waste?
This is how conspiracies actually work (or don’t). These secret cabals didn’t have the power to accomplish their goals outright, so they did what they could in the shadows. Compare that to modern day China murdering and abusing the Uighurs for the last few years. They aren’t conspiring against them; they are directly abusing them and lying to the world about it. The only secret is what the outside world knows about it. This is not like the QAnon claims of the powerful directing our society through shadow strings, celebrity endorsements, and trafficking networks. We’ll get to a better explanation in another post.
As Abe Lincoln’s first VP, Hannibal Hamlin, famously said, “Once the twenty-four news gets ahold of this, there’ll be a conspirator in every pew. Verily.”
I probably wouldn’t have purchased J. R. Mathis’s mystery novel The Penitent Priest if I’d noticed that its tagline said “A Clean Murder Mystery.” (Puts me in mind of the old joke about “a nice old-fashioned murder with no immorality in it.”) When the first recommendation a book offers is its lack of dirty words and sex scenes, it’s not usually a guarantee of literary quality. But The Penitent Priest turned out better than I would have expected.
Father Tom Greer came to the priesthood late in life, after the murder of his beloved wife. So he’s somewhat nervous when the archbishop assigns him to temporarily replace the parish priest at St. Clare’s in Myerton, Pennsylvania. Myerton is where he lived as a married man and buried his wife, and where he abruptly left a number of old friends when he dropped out of sight afterwards. So he has some personal fences to mend.
But when an unseen stranger tells him secrets no innocent person should know in the confessional, Father Tom knows he has the opportunity to finally identify his wife’s killer. But he’ll also have to face his own fears and guilt.
I was impressed with the writing in The Penitent Priest. You rarely run into a novelist these days who can parse a decent English sentence and spell words right. The plotting, unfortunately, was less wonderful. As is not uncommon among starting authors, author Mathis has laid on too many coincidences. Why should the archbishop assign Father Tom to precisely this parish, considering his personal history and the fact that he’s still a person of interest in his wife’ murder? And is it really likely that the woman to whom Tom was engaged before he met his wife should show up as a police detective here?
Also, the big surprise at the end of the story might as well have been printed on the title page in big red letters.
But because I liked the writing, and because Father Tom is a good character, I bought the sequel.
Having at last finished Neal Price’s very long – and enjoyable – survey, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Viking Age, I find my feelings definitely mixed. There is much in this book that I admire and value. I learned from it. But I found what seem to me certain debilitating flaws in it.
I might mention, first of all, that (although he does not cite Viking Legacy, the great book to which I am immortally linked as translator) author Price takes the same line on the historical validity of the sagas – that they are not straight history and cannot be treated as such, but that they do contain useful information for the historian who employs them with care:
Even the most sceptical of literary researchers, those who generally reject the Old Norse texts as viable sources (however remote) for the actual Viking Age, do not always go on to confront the question this viewpoint requires: why, in that case, would medieval Icelanders have created—over several centuries—the most remarkably detailed, comprehensive, and consistent corpus of historical fiction in the world?
Author Price is an accomplished archaeologist, who has spent decades studying the Viking Age. His research is extensive, and he writes with the authority of long familiarity. His purpose in this book is more than to tell the story of the Viking Age. It is to draw on his learning and experience to try to convey to the modern reader the essence of the Vikings – how they saw the world, how they felt. I think he succeeds to a commendable degree.
Most big books on any subject try to offer a new theory or insight, and Children of Ash and Elm does this through a couple (relatively) new ideas – that the Viking Age began earlier and lingered longer than is generally assumed, and that the two Viking enterprises, the “west Viking” and “east Viking” currents, were in fact one and the same, with no real separation.
Hidebound non-specialist that I am, I must admit I’m not convinced by these arguments. Inception and terminus dates are notoriously hard to nail down, but Price points especially to a mass ship grave containing Swedish skeletons, found in Estonia and dated around 750 AD (he always uses CE dating, of course). I don’t entirely buy this argument. It’s hard to identify a “Viking raid” on the basis of a single burial, however impressive.
As for the unity of east and west, I have long held, and continue to hold, that the location and power of Denmark is a central issue in understanding the Viking Age. The simple fact that passing into or out of the Baltic required paying tolls to the king of Denmark tended to send Norwegians west and Swedes east, just to avoid his domains. The compartments weren’t watertight, but I think they existed.
I noted what seemed to me a telling omission in the book’s account of Viking slaving activities. Price makes no secret (quite rightly) of the fact that the Vikings routinely took and trafficked in slaves, and profited greatly from the trade. He speaks movingly of the suffering of those in bondage. But he seems to minimize the role of the Muslim world in it. He does mention the Arab markets, but only more or less in passing. Reading this book, you’d think most Viking slaves ended up toiling on Scandinavian farms. In fact, the great majority were headed into the insatiable maw of the Islamic slave markets.
The book was also marred, for me, also by occasional genuflections toward political correctness. Here and there, author Price finds it necessary to apply concepts like “privilege,” “intersectionality,” and “gendering” to the Vikings. I don’t think this is useful or illuminating in historical context.
Nevertheless, I found Children of Ash and Elm fascinating and informational. It’s written (and well-written) with a clear passion for the subject and a practiced critical eye. I recommend it, with cautions.
Once, in the Russian urban centre of Novgorod, where the waterlogged soil preserves such things well, I breathed in the scent of fresh pine a thousand years old, the whole site just saturated in the fragrance from all the woodworking waste lying where the Viking-Age carpenters had left it.
What we have above is a genuine treasure of Sherlock Holmes lore. The original popular image of Sherlock Holmes came from Sidney Paget’s illustrations for the Strand Magazine in London (bald, long nose). But in American magazines, the foremost illustrator was Frederick Dorr Steele, who based his image on the handsome actor William Gillette, who played Holmes more than 1,300 times on stage in a play he wrote himself. Steele’s Holmes largely superseded Paget’s as the popular image of the great detective.
In 1916, Essanay Studios of Chicago filmed the play (with additions), and Gillette played the role yet again. This historic film was long believed lost, but in 2014 a print was discovered in France. This version had been released as a serial for the French audience, and included extra material not found in the American version. This French version has been splendidly restored, and the dialogue cards have been recreated using Gillette’s script. The orange and blue tinting is original.
Artist Paget bestowed Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker cap on him, but it was Gillette who gave him the curved calabash pipe, which did not wiggle so much when the actor talked. I hadn’t heard about the re-discovery of this film, and am still astonished I can see Gillette himself in the role.
Like many an aging actor before and since, he’s playing younger than his actual age, with a love interest about old enough to be his daughter.
Douglas Gresham has begun talking about his difficulty experiences as a child with his brother, David, and how Lewis and Uncle Warnie did all they could to care for this dangerously schizophrenic boy.
“When I was a small child,” Gresham told Jonathon Van Maren, “he was continually trying to get rid of me. This went on into our teen years.” He said he remembers “running like crazy or defending myself from my rather insane brother. . . I would never have said anything to harm him or upset him while he was alive, because oddly enough I still loved him as a brother. In fact, I wept when he died.”
“Jack went out of his way to do everything he possibly could for that lad, and none of it was accepted.” (via Prufrock News)
