Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder at the Flood,’ by Bruce Beckham

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I’ve lost all the sequence in the Inspector Skelgill series of novels, having jumped forward at some point and now needing to fill in the books I missed (I think I’ve caught up now). It doesn’t really matter, though, the basic formula doesn’t change – Inspector Skelgill, the crusty, misanthropic Cumbria policeman whose two passions are crime solving and fishing, supported by the attractive female DS Jones and transplanted cockney DS Leyton. In the background is always the unspoken attraction between him and Jones, which he’s too obtuse to follow up. But then women are always throwing themselves at him, and he generally doesn’t bother his head about them either.

In Murder at the Flood he has more than his share. Roger Alcock, a local kayaking outfitter with a reputation as a lady’s man, disappears during a freak flood. When his body is found a couple days later, it looks like he hit his head and drowned, but the pathologist says no. It was murder. Roger Alcock’s widow is an obvious suspect, but Skelgill is reluctant to believe it of her. He knew her as a girl, when he dated her older sister – who has now returned from Australia and taken direct sexual aim at Skelgill. There’s also a female TV reporter who’s willing to scratch his back if he’ll scratch hers – probably in more senses than one.

Skelgill will sort it all out in the end, as he always does.

Good entertainment in a good series. The disturbing stuff happens offstage, and the author happily admits that he edits out the worst language. Recommended, as is the whole series.

Authors, Non-fiction

“As Individuals, We Can Never Be Happy”

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To label [novelist Marilynne] Robinson a postmodern conservative or a conservative postmodernist seems to invite boundary policing and accusations of claiming the novelist for a political agenda she does not share. Perhaps a turn away from the language of modern politics can allow us to state what Robinson and [Peter Augustine] Lawler hold in common. Their respective postmodernisms represent, above all, returns to humanism. Specifically, the recognition of the human as a created being is found both in Robinson’s “radical anthropocentricity” and in Lawler’s “whole human being.” The intellectual terrain they share might be called a postmodern humanism (or a humanist postmodernism), joined in the understanding, in Lawler’s words, that “to the extent we understand ourselves as individuals we can never be happy.”

J. L. Wall writes about the big ideas behind Robinson’s stories and essays and how she and Lawler both believe we have lost the language to communicate our deepest longings. We can still ask the right questions, but our attempts at answers fall short.

Also on this subject: “So why are humans in the secular age so unhappy? Calasso says it is because they find something ominous in the insubstantiality they feel both within themselves and in the world around them.” From a review of The Unnamable Present by Roberto Calasso.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Bespoke Murder,’ by Edward Marston

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A historical mystery set in an intriguing time and place. I figured I’d take a chance on A Bespoke Murder, by Edward Marston.

It’s 1915, and England is at war. In the wake of the sinking of the Lusitania, anti-German sentiment is boiling over in England. Even in London’s posh West End, Jacob Stein’s fashionable tailor shop is smashed up by a mob, and set on fire. Mr. Stein himself is left dead. And his daughter is raped.

But Stein’s death was not random violence. Someone stabbed him, and made away with the contents of his safe. That makes it look like premeditated murder. Particularly since Stein was not merely German, but Jewish.

Inspector Harvey Marmion and his assistant Sergeant Joe Keedy are assigned to investigate. From the beginning, their work is hindered by the meddling of Stein’s blustering brother, and by the fears of the traumatized daughter. They will have to descend into the dark world of antisemitic political groups to unmask the true villain.

In spite of an interesting mystery and an interesting setting, I found A Bespoke Murder a disappointment, for several reasons. First of all, the characters weren’t very vivid. The good characters acted and spoke very much as people do today – even sometimes using neologisms like “hassling” for “bothering.” A fair amount of research must have been done on this book – why not throw in some contemporary idioms in the dialogue? Not a lot, but a sprinkling would have added verisimilitude. And the “good people” were just so pleasant. Very little friction or conflict between them, and few attitudes expressed that would make 21st Century people uncomfortable. The book seemed to me overwritten, and aimed at an unsophisticated audience.

I finished the book to find out whodunnit, but although there are several sequels, I’m not interested enough in these characters to read them.

Non-fiction, Writing

Willing to Fail: Adorning the Dark

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Author and musician Andrew Peterson has written a book on artistic creativity for everyone, called Adorning the Dark. It will be released in four days. (Already Amazon’s #1 seller in Music Encyclopedias. What?)

On his promotional site (from which I pulled this graphic above), Peterson describes the book.

This isn’t a technical “this is how you write a song” kind of book. There are plenty of those, and I don’t happen to think they do much good. I wanted to write something that would be helpful to all manner of disciplines: songwriters, novelists, poets, painters and pastors—but also parents and teachers and accountants and carpenters. One of my soapboxes in the book is that everyone’s creative. Everyone. And my hope is that the principles I cover in “Adorning the Dark” can be helpful no matter what field you’re in.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Turpitude,’ by Pete Brassett

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I’m always pleased by the appearance of a new Inspector Munro novel by Pete Brassett. The latest installment in the series, set in Ayrshire, Scotland, is Turpitude, and it was as enjoyable as its predecessors.

Inspector Munro is no longer a working police detective. He’s overage and recovering from a heart attack. But he can’t keep away from the office, and frankly his old team, led by female detective Charlie West, is happy to have him on this one.

First of all, a couple garbage workers find three severed fingers in a tin of dog food. Oddly, nobody seems to have been treated for the injury in a hospital, and when they find the victim he’s not much interested in preferring charges.

Then a man walks into a jewelry store and bashes the owner over the head with a hammer. CCTV and witness statements provide few clues to the police.

It’s only Munro’s experience and intelligence that gently lead the detectives down the right paths to finally identify the culprits, uncovering an improbable conspiracy with bizarre motives.

As I said already, any time spent with Munro & Co. is time well spent. I recommend Turpitude, in spite of a measure of political correctness.

Non-fiction, Reading

We Can Read Anything, But Do We Read Well?

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Imagine there’re no novels
No books for us to buy
No bargain basement deals
Just notes to apply
Imagine no one reading more than daily tweets

Sings the would-be profound poet in the corner coffeeshop.

Has the virtually infinite access to written resources improved or inhibited our reading? To put it another way, are we wiser as a society for having so much more information? Author Sven Birkerts doesn’t think we are, and he’s written a book that celebrates reading and warns us against forgetting how much fun it is.

We know countless more “bits” of information, both important and trivial, than our ancestors. . . . [But] inundated by perspectives, by lateral vistas of information that stretch endlessly in every direction, we no longer accept the possibility of assembling a complete picture. Instead of carrying on the ancient project of philosophy—attempting to discover the “truth” of things—we direct our energies to managing information. . . .

Access may not be the undiluted blessing we can easily perceive it to be. Rather, we might gain wisdom more readily not simply by owning fewer books, but by focusing on fewer, and knowing those few better.

from The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

Photo by Perfecto Capucine from Pexels

Fiction, Reviews

‘Moorings,’ by David Blake

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When a decorated World War II hero is found drowned in his bath – not by accident, according to the coroner – Detective Inspector John Tanner and his partner (both personal and professional) Jenny Evans are pulled from missing persons duty to look into it. There are two surviving sons, and a pair of adult twin grandchildren. None of them seems to need money enough to kill the old man for the value of the decaying boatyard he owns. That’s the premise of David Blake’s novel Moorings, third in his Norfolk Broads police procedural series.

People kill for motives other than money, however. The suspect pool gradually shrinks as one by one the heirs are murdered, and in the end Tanner and Jenny will face the irrational fury of someone who has suffered an old, unpunished crime.

Moorings was an enjoyable, fast-paced mystery with appealing characters. I thought the plot had some weaknesses – there are a whole lot of coincidences, and the police procedures seemed kind of loosely observed to me (though perhaps their rules of evidence are different from the American). Also, Tanner and Jenny witness a particularly harrowing death that seems (to me) to affect them rather less than it should.

As in all the books, there’s a Bible passage at the beginning. And we are told that Tanner is weakening in his agnosticism. Which is always nice.

Recommended, for entertainment purposes. Mild cautions for the usual stuff.

Non-fiction

Brief Review of History Books

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SOME TRADITIONAL Christian publishers don’t do much in history. After years of reading overstatements from both left and right concerning America’s founding, I enjoyed the calm and thorough analysis of Mark David Hall’s Did America Have a Christian Founding? (Thomas Nelson, 2019). Those who read minds and extrapolate diaries may still fight over questions of sincerity and personal faithfulness, but Hall clearly shows what’s most important: that Christian ideas profoundly influenced the Founders, and through them all of us.

World Editor in Chief Marvin Olasky offers many quick evaluations of new history books in this week’s issue, pointing out trends from select publishers like the above. He notes Mary Grabar’s Debunking Howard Zinn, which we highlighted earlier this year.

Fiction, Reviews

‘St. Benet’s,’ by David Blake

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Book 2 in David Blake’s Norfolk Broads police procedural series is St. Benet’s. As you might guess, this novel takes its name from a church, and the issue of religion gets touched on.

Detective John Tanner is now cohabiting, at least much of the time, with his partner, attractive DC Jenny Evans. This is against regulations, but nobody’s called them on it yet.

Jenny in particular is appalled when they’re called to the ruined abbey adjoining the Catholic church to which she (technically) belongs, though her practice has lapsed. A man has been found on the site of the old altar, his head nearly severed and a knife in his hand. It looks like suicide, but if so it’s an extreme one, and John isn’t certain about it. The dead man was the former priest of the parish. Years ago he was accused of the rape and murder of a teenaged girl. He was acquitted, but excommunicated. After that he became the head of his own Satanic cult, and wrote a bestselling book. In that book, he suggested that he might be able to kill himself and rise from the dead, through diabolical power.

And then his tomb is struck by lightning, and another young girl is murdered on the site. And the priest’s corpse disappears.

Tanner’s and Jenny’s working relationship is strained when he makes some disparaging remarks about religion, which offend her. But they have to keep their eyes on the puzzle, because more murders are coming, and they are very cruel murders. Of course they can’t have been committed by the dead priest… can they?

St. Benet’s was a fairly engaging mystery in which religious questions were handled more or less even-handedly (though some very poor theology gets expressed, but that may just be the individual characters’ voices). My biggest problem with the book was that I figured out the murderer fairly early on.

Still, it was entertaining.

Poetry

Walking Back, Never to Return

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Poet Jessica Hornik says she remembers January in her poem “Recuerdo, January,” but they sound like October words nonetheless.

Walking back to the ferry in the evening chill,

they knew they’d never have reason enough
to return to this place, which made the leaving
as sad as a paradise gained and lost

in the space of two hours.

This year has been one to remember. No paradise gained, only loss. I feel I’m reluctantly slipping into the autumn of my life; I don’t know if I can turn around somewhere.

Photo by Jairph on Unsplash

Book Reviews, Creative Culture