Marty Singer, retired cop and occasional private detective, is invited down to Virginia’s horse and wine country, along with his girlfriend Julie Atwater, by her friend Ruth Colvin, who runs a boarding stable. They’re expecting a relaxing vacation. But Ruth has a reason for asking them. Her farm is in trouble. Someone has been sabotaging her operation – knocking down fences so the horses can get loose. In the competitive world of horse people, only a little doubt about the safety of her facilities could ruin her. That’s how The Bitter Fields begins.
Then murder intervenes. One of Ruth’s employees, a charming polo player named Freddie Farrar, is shot to death. Marty can’t help but suspect there’s a connection between the crimes. Who could hate Ruth so much? There are suspects – a bigoted old lady who wants some of her land for a burial plot, a rich young woman who’d been having an affair with Freddie, and that woman’s husband – who has been arrested, but whose guilt Marty doubts.
All this is played out against the backdrop of the changing south, where history is a living presence, opinions are in transition, and people often cover up their real thoughts. One thing I liked about this book was that although it seemed at first to involve a lot of tired southern stereotypes, those characters were treated sympathetically and allowed to have their say – and to change. It all got kind of heart-warming in the end. Except for the killing, of course.
Recommended. Cautions for the usual, particularly sexual
matters, but not bad.
Dendrodating indicates that part of Urnes Stave Church, which was estimated built before 1100, was constructed using timber from 1069 and 1070. The slightly younger part of Urnes is dated to 1129-1130.
For the sake of clarity: dendrochronology can date the year a tree was felled for the stave churches. The likelihood is that the felling year was also when the construction began.
Recently I’ve given a couple lectures about the conversion of Norway to the Christian faith. In those lectures I argue for a “revisionist” view (based on the arguments of Bishop Fridtjof Birkeli) that questions the traditional narrative, which credits two violent 11th Century missionary kings with the conversion. The view I’ve adopted holds that the conversion was a gradual, centuries-long process, and mostly a peaceful one. Much of the credit for that process arguably belongs to the 10th Century king Haakon the Good, whom the sagas tend to dismiss as a missionary failure.
That view gained a little credibility recently, when results of new research on the famous Norwegian stave churches was released by the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage. New findings push the dates for some of the oldest stave churches back several decades. As stated above, wood in the Urnes stave church, previously dated to just before 1100, has now been re-dated to about 1069. That’s three years after King Harald Hardrada died – within spitting distance of the Viking era.
As you can see in the drawing above by artist I. C. Dahl, the Urnes church is far from the most beautiful of the stave churches – a fair amount of remodeling has gotten done on it over time, smoothing out some of the distinctive features. But the wall panel you can see has caused the “Urnes” name to be given to a whole era of Viking art – an elegant fusion of Norse and Celtic styles which I consider delightful.
Dendochronology has been an important and invaluable scientific tool for archaeologists for a while now. By identifying patterns in tree rings (a little like fingerprints) they’re able to date ancient wood to the exact year when the tree was cut. But to make dendochronological comparisons, you need to either be able to examine the end of the log, or to do a bore sample – and obviously nobody wants to drill a sample hole in a stave church pillar. The new technology of Photodendrometry allows scientists to examine the rings without destruction to the material – and to do it more accurately.
You can count on me to keep you updated on advances in Viking scholarship – whenever they confirm my own prejudices.
November is a juvenile delinquent, hanging out on a street corner, looking tough. Not one of those innocent, baby-faced delinquents who’ve only made a few mistakes and can still be salvaged, but a tough, street-smart young thug on his way to incarceration and/or an early death. Soon he’ll grow into December, and then he’ll be a made man.
November is, in poetic perspective, a season of death. The midlife crisis of fall is declining into a slow old age. I went to a sort of a wake tonight. There were three deaths in my life last month, and this was the only one involving a gathering I was able to attend. It wasn’t a drunken wake in the classic tradition, nor a religious wake in the Christian tradition. Just some people gathering to support a family which had lost its central heart.
Yesterday was cold and rainy. Today, bright and cool. It
kind of works out the same either way, though, because the night falls early now
and makes itself at home.
The only good thing I have to say about November is that it’s
not quite winter yet.
This would have been a great topic for Banned Books Week, but, alas, I’ve had a long, sad year with a variety of responsibilities I haven’t wanted to work through. But now is as good a time as any to talk about the extent of free speech and the free press, isn’t it?
A 1983 book called Hit Man by Rex Feral purports to be a manual for contract killers with practical instructions on how to eliminate your targets without getting caught. The author says it is for entertainment purposes only, and you can see from GoodReads many contemporary readers think the book is too simple, dated, and even silly.
But things have changed a bit over 35 years.
In 1993 James Perry snuck into a Maryland home and murdered a disabled eight-year-old, his nurse, and his mother, following many of the details recommended in this book. A podcast from iHeart Radio and Hit Home Media, also called Hit Man, opens with an exploration of this murder and the man who hired Perry to carry it out. Later the families of the victims filed a lawsuit against the publisher, claiming the book was intended to be real-world advice that could be acted upon by anyone wanting to murder someone for a fee, and in doing so the publisher aided and abetted in murder.
The publisher argued that it did not intend for anyone to murder or be murdered based on what they read and that it has the freedom to publish whatever it wants.
In a style that may be a bit over-earnest, Hit Man the podcast tells the stories of the murder, this lawsuit, other crimes connected to the book, the identity of the pseudonymous author, and the possible inspiration for the book.
Should our country allow a book like this (and others like it which are still in print)? Is this the kind of abhorrent speech we say we would argue against but fight for the rights of others to use? You would need to know what’s in the book to make that decision; the podcast offers some details, and you can read the whole book by searching for the text file. It’s possible it doesn’t say anymore about pulling off contract killing than many other books, fiction and non.
The bulk of the legal argument against it was about intent. Is the book what it claims to be, “a technical manual for independent contractors,” or is it an imaginative book on crime? I think there should be a line that we don’t cross, but ours is a society originally suited for a religious people who actively submit to the governor of the universe, so that line will have to be a moral one. If we live with a morality that is only defined by the law, then we will not live happily for long.
Hit Man is a real banned book, by the way, so I hope it makes the big list one of these years.
After borrowing this book from the public library, I found that I’d already read and reviewed an earlier novel in the Jonathan Stride mystery series. I said I found it well written, but I didn’t love it. That’s pretty much my reaction to Alter Ego, Brian Freeman’s ninth in the series. But I read it free, so why complain?
Jonathan Stride is a police detective in Duluth, Minnesota. His two chief subordinates are an Asian-American woman and his wife. Both, needless to say, are gorgeous. As is also his teenaged adopted daughter, a former prostitute whom he and his wife more or less rescued, and who is beginning to reintegrate her life.
It’s big news when a Hollywood film company comes to Duluth
to make a movie. Jonathan is less happy than most of the locals, because it’s a
fictionalized dramatization of one of his own cases. He is being played by Dean
Casperson, one of Hollywood’s major players, but the whole business makes him
uncomfortable.
Then a man dies in a freak collision with a deer on a
snow-covered highway. His ID turns out to be bogus, and a gun is found in the
car. Shortly after that, a local college girl who hung around with the movie
people is reported missing. Putting two and two together, the police start
searching the area near the auto accident, and sure enough – the young woman’s
body is found in the snow, a bullet in her head.
And then she turns out to have been using an assumed
identity too.
It’s all confusing, and it’s not about to get simpler. On
top of the murder mystery, there are questions about certain behaviors on the
movie set, behaviors no one will talk to the police about. Stride and his
co-workers (along with author Freeman’s other series character, Florida PI Cab
Bolton, who shows up for his own reasons) will have to move fast and smart to
prevent very ugly history from repeating itself, not on film but in real life.
As stipulated above, I find Brian Freeman a good writer, and I can find no fault with his storytelling. I’m not sure why his books leave me kind of cold, except for a certain political correctness I sense in their construction. Most of the cops in this story are women, and they’re all beautiful. I don’t know for sure, but I’d wager that is not a statistically accurate portrayal of the Duluth police department.
Ah, but I’m probably just jaundiced. I note that my review
of the previous Jonathan Stride book complained about excessively explicit sex
scenes. I’m happy to report he seems to have toned that down.
I might even read another book in the series – if I can
borrow it from the library.
Above is a traditional Scandinavian hymn by the Danish hymnwriter Hans Adolf Brorson. The music was arranged, I believe, by Edvard Grieg. If you’re patient, you’ll hear the English words.
It’s a hymn about the blessed saints in Heaven, based on a passage from Revelation. It’s particularly suited to All Saints Day, which is today. It was also a favorite of my father’s. Gene Edward Veith, at his Cranach blog, laments how this festival day, devoted to eternal life, has come to be overshadowed by celebrations of death and horror.
After a month which (for me) has been full of genuine death, it’s good to contemplate our eternal hope.
“The Word of God is like a lion. You don’t have to defend a lion. All you have to do is let the lion loose, and the lion will defend itself.”
Many places attribute this quotation to C. H. Spurgeon, and the great preacher did say something like it, but not this exactly. The Spurgeon Center has this and five other quotations in a post on things Spurgeon did not say. What he said was that we might imagine a caged lion and soldiers who have gathered to defend him. Why are they fighting for this powerful cat when the best approach is to let him out of his cage? “And the best ‘apology’ for the gospel is to let the gospel out.”
Also, “A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes.” That’s something Spurgeon said in an 1855 sermon, describing it as an old proverb. Other men, including Jonathan Swift, said it first, and it could have been a common saying when Spurgeon got around to it.
Did he say, “I have learned to kiss the wave that throws me against the Rock of Ages”? Did he say, “I take my text and make a beeline to the cross”? Take a look.
Syrian travel has its interesting features, like travel in any other part of the world, and yet to break your leg or have the cholera adds a welcome variety to it.
The organizers of the “Great Pleasure Excursion,” which sailed from New York on the steamer Quaker City in 1867, must have come to regret their decision. I mean their decision to include in their party the journalist Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), who was traveling on assignment for a San Francisco newspaper. This was (I believe) one of the earliest international pleasure cruises in history – made possible by the capacity of a steam ship to travel on a more predictable schedule than a sailing ship. The notes Twain kept on that voyage would emerge as The Innocents Abroad, his most popular book during in his lifetime.
Although described as a pleasure excursion, the main purpose of the voyage was a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, then under Ottoman rule. Along the way, however, they would take in parts of North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, and Constantinople (still called by that name). On the way home they would see the sights of Egypt. It was quite a journey, and physically demanding by the standards of travel in our own day.
Mark Twain, only then becoming a celebrity, was prepared to
subject everything he beheld to a typically American scrutiny. It seemed to him
that in a lot of cases, when his fellow travelers exclaimed over the beauty or
wonder of some piece of art or scenic vista, they were only parroting the
responses their guide books had provided them. When Twain found something a
disappointment or a humbug he said so – and seems to have delighted in shocking
his fellow travelers. Which is not to say he lacked appreciation. When something
impresses him, he says it. At some points he grows almost reverent.
Twain divides his fellow travelers into two parties – the “sinners”
and the “pilgrims.” That doesn’t mean they broke up into cliques. He has a
group of friends he keeps company with, and some of them are pilgrims. He
confesses to admiring them in some respects. But when they appear hypocritical
to him (as when they lengthen their overland journeys on a couple of days in
order avoid traveling on the Sabbath, in spite of inconvenience to fellow
travelers and cruelty to their horses), he seems to take satisfaction in pointing
it out. The man is clearly keeping score. (He is also frustrated – rightly – by
members of the party who insist of chipping pieces off monuments as souvenirs.)
The Catholic Church comes in for a great deal of criticism – he is appalled by the display of wealth in cathedrals, contrasted with the miserable poverty he saw in European streets. However, when he observes real virtue displayed by churchmen, such as the Dominican monks who cared for the sick during a cholera epidemic, or the desert monks who gave his party hospitality in the Palestinian desert, he does it justice. It seems to me (and this is my take on him in general, though I’m not an expert) that he was a man who wrestled with God. He could not be an atheist (in part because he’d have no God to be angry at), but he considered himself too smart to be taken in by any revealed religion. A very American attitude, that, and one that would grow influential.
The humor of The Innocents Abroad arises partly from Twain’s characteristic style – flowery Victorian prose constantly stumbling into premeditated bathos – and his Missourian “show me” attitude. He is not much impressed, for instance, with the artistic works of the Old Masters, but grants that he may have simply been overwhelmed by the numbers of them in places like Rome and Florence. He loves to describe the filth of European cities and is positively scandalized by the tiny size of the Holy Land.
Almost any subject is interesting when described by an interesting man. An expedition like this one, full of material fascinating in itself, can hardly fail to engage the reader when a man like Mark Twain chronicles it. And that’s what we get with The Innocents Abroad.
I read The Innocents Abroad in the linked Kindle edition, which is not a particularly good one. Although it’s described as illustrated, the illustrations in this version are not the ones that properly go with the book. They are images of 19th Century paintings with no particular connection to the text, and even those only show up in the first section. Also there are no proper paragraph breaks.
[Sorry I didn’t post last night. I did a lecture, and when I came home I found this site unresponsive. Short report: I spoke to a Cub Scout pack, and they were a good audience.]
I am wondering how much my perceptions of the world are influenced by the aphorisms I’ve learned, more than actual experience.
This is what I mean: Some time ago, one of my brothers said, referring to a couple deaths in the autumn, “Well, Dad always used to say, ‘It’s fall – harvest time.’”
I actually have no memory of Dad ever saying this (not that I doubt my brother’s word – lots of things go over my head). But ever since then, when someone dies in the fall, I think about it, and respond (on some barely conscious level), “There it is. Fall, harvest time.”
Except I know it isn’t true. People die all year round. Dying in fall is just thematically harmonious.
That said, there’s been a lot of harvesting this fall, in my
world.
The first death was particularly sad. A lovely Christian couple I know, who live in another state, had a little son who suffered severe disability from birth. For the years of his short life they’ve done everything possible to care for him and cherish him. Love being true riches, that boy was richer than a king. But his small body finally wore out not long ago. I mourned with them in spirit.
Some weeks ago, I’ve just learned, my uncle died. We weren’t informed for a while because his widow (a lovely woman) has been too overwhelmed to handle the notifications. I don’t begrudge it. We all have to deal with these things the best we can.
He was the last survivor of my dad’s siblings, and one of my favorite relatives. He was the brother who made good – went to work for IBM and rose to an upper management position on the Saturn Project at Cape Canaveral.
And a friend’s mother died the other day. He’s not a close
friend, except in proximity. But his family has had a sad time watching their
parent fail for some time now. Ironically, this is the only memorial service of
the three I’ll be able to attend.
I reviewed the first book in Jason Richards’ Drew Patrick mystery series the other day. I told you I thought the book not well written, but that I appreciated the spirit of the thing. I liked the hero and his supporting cast, and the positive atmosphere.
So I invested in Shattered, the second book in the series. I hoped author Richards might have learned a little with the passage of time, or perhaps got an editor to help him.
Alas, there’s been no improvement on the writing front.
I like it that Drew has a traditional PI’s office above a Cambridge, Mass. city street. Such offices in hard-boiled mysteries always give me a warm, homey feeling – and it’s nice having Drew’s beagle mix, Dash, there to keep us company.
A couple named Jeffrey and Cynthia Holland are the clients
who come to the office this time out. Their daughter Ashley has disappeared,
and they’re concerned. They don’t want to go to the police, because they fear
publicity.
Alas, Ashley is dead already. Her murder seems to be tied to
the deaths of some other attractive young women – young women who, it turns
out, had been working for a high class escort service, and had been involved
with the same man – a high-powered Hollywood studio owner.
There’s not much mystery in this one; author Richards identifies
the guilty party early on, making the plot a race against the clock to prevent
the next murder.
It seemed to me a lot of opportunities to raise the dramatic tension were lost here. The guilty party could have been concealed, for one thing. And instead of the cops loving Drew and being happy to have him pitch in, they could have resented him and blocked his efforts, in the more plausible tradition of cops in the hard-boiled genre. There could have been conflict between Drew and his girlfriend Jessica.
Also, dramatic opportunities were lost. The character of
Cynthia Holland, Ashley’s mother, is intriguing, but we don’t get to know her very
well.
And there were lots of writing problems. Mistaken use of
homonyms. Spelling errors. Overwriting – Drew tells us more than we need to
know, and explains himself too much. A good editor would have cut this
manuscript down by thousands of words.
So my verdict remains the same. I salute and appreciate the
author’s effort. But he’s not writing very good books at this point. I hope he
ups his game.
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