Elizabeth Harwell says Wendell Berry wounded her be reminding her how often she has moved around. She feels temporary, and that’s not how she grew up.
Because when memory calls me back to my childhood, I know that land. I can feel that grass under my feet. I know its broad green blades: fat-bottomed and rising to a rounded point. In my mind, I can split the blades into two pieces and I can remember the way the hanging fibers felt on my lips. I know the yellow dandelion blooms—and not only as a whole, but also, more clearly even, in its parts. I know the feel of the dandelion’s soft petals on the tip of my nose and the mustard-yellow streaks it would leave when I rubbed it across my palm. I can see its hosts of aphids working their way up the stems in crowded lines.
In truth, we do not have homes here; Christ has gone to make a home for us somewhere else, but he has left a well-stocked table for us here to remember him and all of the church.
“Our place is coming,” she says, “our people are here.”
At first, virtually all the Cherokee sided with the Confederacy, identifying with the Southern plantation owners, and proud of the black slaves they themselves had bought to pick their cotton. And, complicit with the state of Georgia, the Union had been responsible for the land theft that had cost them their ancestral territory and packed them west in the forced migration known as the Trail of Tears three decades before.
But why did the Cherokee not stay united against a common enemy? How could they have divided against themselves? To answer this, we need go back three decades to the terrible winter of 1838 and the issue that would never go away. Removal—the cruel shorthand for the Trail of Tears—was to the Cherokee Nation what slavery was to America, an issue so profound as to be bottomless and unending.
“…In this world of computers, satellite tracking, and so many other government surveillance tools, all of them accessible to hackers outside the government, the truth can be found with enough effort. If sometimes local law enforcement doesn’t want to find it or if the courts don’t want to hear it, or if those who expose it might be ruined or killed for their efforts . . . Well, it’s now possible for justice to be delivered nonetheless.” (In the Heart of the Fire)
The man called Nameless characteristically arrives in a community to find preparations made. There’s a vehicle waiting for him, with a suitcase inside. There’s a large amount of money and necessary equipment, plus a gun. If he requires helpers, they’re waiting. He listens to a digital recording explaining his assignment. It’s always a case of some person or persons doing evil beyond the reach of the law – a serial killer, a serial rapist, an entitled psychopath. Nameless takes them down, protecting the innocent, avenging the dead.
Nameless has no memory of his past up to a couple years ago. He suspects this amnesia has been induced, and that he volunteered for it. He comes in like a classic avenging angel, then proceeds to the next assignment. That is his life. He doesn’t know who he works for, whether it’s an individual or a group or some kind of artificial intelligence.
In his previous series of novels, the Jane Hawk books, author Dean Koontz imagined a high tech dystopia, something like Skynet, where surveillance satellites and cameras were linked to super-computers to buttress the greatest tyranny the world ever knew.
In the six novellas of this new Nobody series, he turns that idea on its head. What if unlimited surveillance and data processing power were turned to the purposes of good? That strikes this reader as hubristic on a cosmic scale, but here it’s just a backdrop for the action and the mystery. Our focus is not on the shot-caller, but on the hero, a driven man haunted by premonitions and – perhaps – by inchoate memories. The reader’s questions on that subject will be answered – in a satisfying way – in the final book.
The first novella in the Nobody series is In the Heart of the Fire. I’m not going to link to the rest of the series, because you’ll want to read them in order, but here are the titles: #2: Photographing the Dead; #3: The Praying Mantis Bride; #4: Red Rain; #5: The Mercy of Snakes; and #6: Memories of Tomorrow.
Each volume is cheap, although when you buy them all (and I suspect you will), you’ll end up paying about what you’d pay for a full novel by Koontz. I found the Nobody series extremely satisfying, though the basic concept did bother me. Recommended.
Reynard had hired some old white-haired shill to stand out front of the bar in a tuxedo and drag in the out-of-town pigeons. He thought it gave the place some class, the same way some people try to dress up toilet lids with fuzzy covers.
New Orleans jazz cornet player and occasional detective Pat Gallegher rides again in Wet Debt (which is, I think, the last of the series). Wet Debt delves into one of my favorite sub-genres – the very cold case, resurfacing from long ago.
The bar where Pat plays and lives takes up half of a
building. His boss, Shorty, is having the other half renovated. But work stops
when workmen discover a desiccated mummy buried in the concrete floor. It’s a
man, and judging by the clothing he’s been there since the 1930s. Those were
the days of Prohibition and gangsters, high times for New Orleans’s bottom
dwellers.
Shorty’s in a hurry to get the property ready for a new tenant, but the police are in no hurry to close such an old mystery. Could Pat do him a favor, and look into it? Pat agrees.
His investigation leads him to a place where the city’s
upper crust and its dregs once crossed paths, in the speakeasies of old. An old
newspaper photograph displays two criminals in the company of two beautiful
young society girls. Pat knows one of the criminals, a recently deceased gang
lord with whom he had an uneasy relationship. Now he’ll learn how that man came
to New Orleans in the first place, and what he did to earn his power. The dead
man in the concrete was never greatly missed, and nobody alive could possibly
worry about his murderer being unmasked… Or could they?
Not quite as suspenseful as the previous books in the series (though not without suspense), Wet Debt is an enjoyable and atmospheric cold case story. Cautions for the usual. I’m going to miss Pat Gallegher.
“People see too many movies. They expect the bad guy to be some kind of evil genius. You and I, though, we know better. Most of the bad guys we run across have all the brains of wallpaper paste. The blinder the violence, the more likely it’s some kind of stimulus-response event that, given the opportunity, the perp would refer to down the line as just one of those things. You take some of the most prolific killers of the last twenty years, and toss them in a room, and it would look like just a bunch of dumb losers in a room.”
And the saga of Pat Gallegher, New Orleans jazz cornetist and avocational detective, continues with Juicy Watusi, in which author Richard Helms, himself a forensic psychologist, tackles a subject he knows pretty well – serial killers.
Pat’s bar-owner boss gets a new girlfriend – a stripper. Pat
withholds judgment and wishes them well. But it turns out even worse than you’d
expect – the girlfriend is found murdered in an alley behind the club where she
works. And she’s not the only one. Somebody’s carving up strippers all over the
city.
The local police request that the FBI send in a profiler to
help them, but none is available just now. However, a noted profiler happens to
live right there in New Orleans, teaching at Tulane. The trouble is, he’s burned
out – he refuses to do that work anymore.
The police offer a compromise – the profiler can work with them incognito, and another local man with profiling experience can operate as a “beard” – pretending to be the profiler in front of the news cameras.
That other profiler is Pat Gallegher. He too quit the job,
years back, when it started messing with his head. He doesn’t like the deal,
but it seems a small price to pay for stopping this guy.
It gets tougher, though, when Pat’s girlfriend is kidnapped
by the killer. Now he’s on a deadline, and faced by an impossible moral choice.
Juicy Watusi is another cool hard-boiled from a solid writer who knows his stuff. I figured out the big plot twist ahead of time, but I enjoyed it anyway, and recommend it, with the usual cautions.
“It’s like this,” I said. “I’m not mad at the world. I just see things that stink, and I feel like hitting them with a little air freshener. Most poor suckers have too much to lose, or a lot more of them would do what I do…. The average guy on the street has a family or a mortgage, or he’s six months from a peachy promotion he doesn’t want to risk, so he sees a punk muscling some old lady and he turns his head. I guess I just don’t have that much to lose. I see that punk, and I don’t mind jamming him up a little.”
Pat Gallegher, hero of these novels by Richard Helms I’m following right now, is (as I mentioned yesterday) a former Catholic seminarian who lost his faith. But that doesn’t mean he’s abandoned Catholicism. He still goes to mass occasionally, and makes confession to his friend, Father “Dag” D’Agostino. He and Father Dag understand each other – Pat’s a recovering gambling addict, Dag a recovering alcoholic. It seems to me that Pat’s struggles with God allow him to talk more about faith than a Christian character could get away with.
Though his main spiritual belief seems to be in karma.
Voodoo turns up in this one too.
In Voodoo That You Do, the second book in the series, Pat is strolling down a New Orleans alley with a friend, an old mobster named Hotshot Spano, when Hotshot is murdered by Haitian gang members. Pat feels an inarticulate obligation to do something about it. He learns that the hit was ordered by a Vietnamese gangster who controls a number of Haitian gangs.
Meanwhile Pat discovers a little girl rummaging in the
dumpster behind the bar where he lives and plays jazz cornet. Patiently he
gains her trust with gifts of food – like a wild animal – until he’s able to
take her to a shelter recommended by Father Dag. There he meets a lovely social
worker with whom he begins a flirtation.
Turns out that the little girl, Louise, is not just any
little girl. She’s connected to the very gangs Pat’s trying to bring to
justice. And if he isn’t very careful, Louise may suffer for his windmill-tilting.
Fascinating, masterfully written, atmospheric and intense, Voodoo That You Do is a cracker jack mystery in the old hard-boiled style. Highly recommended, with the usual cautions, plus an extra for questionable metaphysics.
Greensleeves was all my joy, Greensleeves was my delight, Greensleeves was my heart of gold, and who but Lady Greensleeves
“Greensleeves” is a 400-year-old tune you may know as “What Child Is This?” Ralph Vaughan Williams composed his “Fantasia on Greensleeves,” a marvelous piece made all the more so by starting with this melody.
Many people tell fanciful stories about the origin of this song. Was it written by Henry VIII for Anne Boleyn, who “cast [him] off discourteously” without losing her head for the moment? Was it an old Irish song, as we all know every good song is? Was it first sung by dog-headed men surrounded by rats? The rumors abound. The Early Music Muse drills into this musical history and reveals the truth, as is so often the case, rather boring. In short, a musician wrote a hit tune that many people used for their own songs, and everyone loved it–they still do. It’s the feature song in the K-drama I just blogged about, Mr. Sunshine. While Savina & Drones have a good composition based on Greensleeves, what Vaughan Williams did with it can’t be outdone for sublimity.
We recently finished a 24-episode historical drama created for South Korean television in 2018 and distributed this year through Netflix. Set at the end of the Joseon kingdom, while Korea tried to move into the 20th century as subjects of a king, Mr. Sunshine is essentially a fiercely patriotic story. It begins with loyalists attempting to defend their peninsula from colonialists, despite obviously being outgunned. It ends with rebels raging against the rising tide of Japanese occupation.
We first see Choi Yoo-jin (Lee Byung-hun) as the son of slaves, who runs to avoid being killed and makes it to New York City. He grows up to become U.S. Marine Captain Eugene Choi, deployed to the American embassy in Joseon. He’s an American soldier with Korean skin; most people don’t know what to make of him. But he’s glad to be back in Joseon so he can find the people who murdered his parents and take his revenge.
On a risky American assignment, he encounters the beautiful Lady Go Ae-shin (Kim Tae-ri) doing something distinctly unladylike. He won’t know about her family until long after his interest in her has grown. But two other men are interested in her too: a Korean samurai, who is thought to have sold his soul to Japan, and the son of the second richest family in the country, who happens to be Lady Go’s fiancé. The three men are drawn together by their proximity and held by various mutual interests.
It’s a beautifully filmed drama told reservedly and works as a personal story of love and duty as well as a historical tribute to Korean independence. Americans will find many things to love about it.
If you know a bit of the history of Korea, you’ll be able to guess the story doesn’t have that happy of an ending; if you don’t know the history, you’ll be able to guess the tenor of the end by the prominent place of “Greensleeves” or by the first English words Lady Go learns: gun, glory, sad ending.
Sam Spade, Mike Hammer, and Philip Marlowe notwithstanding, you don’t ship one off to that undiscovered land from whose bourne no traveler returns without paying the freight in sleepless nights.
Pat Gallegher is a big Irishman who plays jazz cornet in a seedy New Orleans bar. Once, long ago, he studied for the priesthood, until he lost his faith. Then he got his doctorate in psychology and became a forensic psychologist and then a college professor. Those jobs didn’t work out for him. Eventually he floated into the Big Easy and gave free exercise to his gambling addiction, until he joined Gamblers Anonymous. But a local loan shark still holds his note. To pay it off (which isn’t likely to happen in this lifetime) the shark sends him out now and then as a collector.
Pat doesn’t like being a collector, and so he does the
occasional “favor” for friends. These favors generally involve recovering lost
property or scaring off dangerous people. Pat feels these actions help balance
out his karma.
All the above is not the plot of Richard Helms’s Joker Poker, just the back story. We’re talking dense back story here. Which all adds to a solid quality I appreciated in this book.
Doing a favor is how Pat’s lawyer comes to bring Clancey
Vancouer, a wealthy society lady, to see him. Clancey has been having an
affair, and her lover has disappeared. She wants to know that he’s alive and
all right. Pat warns her that the guy was probably just a gigolo, but she doesn’t
care.
Pat agrees to look into it, but has trouble seeing the point. His interest acquires fresh urgency, however, when he is set up for a murder, and has to figure out who among a large group of suspects (including a leggy redhead, a friend of Clancey’s, with whom he has an affair) is the real culprit. The climax will be explosive, shattering for some, and deadly for others.
I loved this book. I read it with a sense of homecoming, of
old comforts. It occurred to me that this book (first published just before the
turn of the millennium) represents a lost style of writing. In today’s books,
even in the hard-boiled genre, political correctness has infected everything. The
characters in Joker Poker use offensive language. There isn’t a kick-butt
female sidekick in sight. And men are permitted to protect women.
Lots of cautions are in order for language and disturbing material, but I highly recommend Joker Poker to fans of the genre. I can’t understand why this series isn’t famous, and author Helms isn’t better known. The prose is vivid and original. The ambience is thick as New Orleans humidity. There are whiffs of all the old great hard-boiled writers in evidence, but I was particularly reminded of John D. MacDonald.
Allen Eskens is a mystery writer (and a Minnesota writer at that) with whom I hadn’t been familiar. But based on my reading of The Deep Dark Descending, I’m impressed with his work.
Max Rupert is a Minneapolis police detective, still mourning the death of his wife Jenni, who was killed by a car in a parking garage a few years ago. His sorrow has colored his life through the previous books in this series, but now it all comes to a head. He learns, in the course of one of his investigations, that Jenni’s death was a targeted hit. He’d always assumed she’d been collateral damage from one of his own cases, killed by some vengeful criminal to hurt him. But in fact someone very powerful and ruthless killed her for the sake of something she’d learned in her job as a social worker.
The book opens on a winter day in the Minnesota Boundary Waters, on the Canadian border. Max captures a man and ties him up, then forces him out onto a frozen lake. Methodically he begins boring with an auger, with the purpose of creating a hole large enough to drown a man.
In counterpoint with the scenes on the lake, we follow in flashbacks the course of Max’s investigation, as he follows information learned in a human trafficking case, slowly realizing that the man he’s chasing is the man who also killed his wife. All his life he’s been a man of the law, but the law can’t touch this killer. Could he live with himself if he were to take the law into his own hands? Could he live with himself if he didn’t?
That question is ever present in The Deep Dark Descending, and it will keep the reader riveted from start to finish, as it did for me. I’m not sure what I think about the final resolution, but there’s no question it was dramatic.
The writing was good – not outstanding, but very good. I
might just read the earlier books in this series, based on this memorable
novel. Cautions for the usual.
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