In the last few decades the field of art thievery had developed well beyond the crude old days when paintings had usually been stolen and then held for ransom. Now, with the prodigious rewards offered by insurance companies, nasty ransom demands had become unnecessary. You could be more decorous. You merely stole the piece of art, waited awhile, and then turned it in for the insurance reward. All you had to do was come up with some reproachless way of “finding” the object in question and getting the word to the insurance company.
I have read at least one novel by Aaron Elkins before, and I reviewed it favorably. Nevertheless, his name is one of those that remains vaguely familiar in my mind, but I can’t quite place it. Maybe A Glancing Light will help me remember in the future.
The hero of A Glancing Light (this is the second book in a series) is Chris Norgren (extra points for the Scandinavian name!) a curator for a Seattle art museum. Chris is preparing for a trip to Bologna, Italy to arrange for an upcoming exhibition. He gets a request to evaluate a couple paintings that showed up unexpectedly in a shipment for a low-rent art importer. One of the paintings he dismisses as a fake. The other turns out to be one of a group of paintings stolen in a recent major art heist.
Arriving in Italy, Chris is treated to a welcome dinner by a group of friends. Afterward, he sees one of them being attacked by thugs. Chris rushes to help him. He escapes serious injury himself, but his friend is permanently crippled. Chris is certain this has something to do with the aforementioned art heist, but when he goes to see Bologna’s chief artistic crime cop, he’s not impressed with the man – and the feeling is mutual. The information he has to share is dismissed, and he is ordered to stay out of the whole business.
As you can guess, he will not follow that advice. Before he’s done, he’ll have cause to regret the.
The tone of A Glancing Light is (appropriately) fairly light. Chris is not one of those omnipotent amateur detectives who’s always one step ahead of the police, which makes him all the more believable. And the book is educational too.
“At the Name of Jesus” sung by the congregation of First Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska
Today’s hymn a regal song of praise that ends with the promise of his soon return. “At the Name of Jesus” was written by English writer Caroline Marie Noel (1817-1877). She spend many years in sickness and took up writing devotional poetry for herself and other invalids she could send them to. This song was one of those published in 1861 in a book called, The Name of Jesus and Other Verses for the Sick and Lonely. The majestic tune was written for these verses by the great Ralph Vaughan Williams.
“. . . at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:10-11 ESV).
1 At the name of Jesus ev’ry knee shall bow, ev’ry tongue confess him King of Glory now. ‘Tis the Father’s pleasure we should call him Lord, who from the beginning was the mighty Word.
2 At his voice creation sprang at once to sight, all the angel faces, all the hosts of light, thrones and dominations, stars upon their way, all the heav’nly orders in their great array.
3 Humbled for a season to receive a name from the lips of sinners unto whom he came, faithfully he bore it spotless to the last, brought it back victorious, when from death he passed.
4 In your hearts enthrone him; there let him subdue all that is not holy, all that is not true: crown him as your Captain in temptation’s hour: let his will enfold you in its light and pow’r.
5 Brothers, this Lord Jesus shall return again, with his Father’s glory, with his angel train; for all wreaths of empire meet upon his brow, and our hearts confess him King of glory now.
A ship with a creative crew would trade in Newport and ports new their haphazard wares, their slapdash and spares, for the loan on their ship had come due.
Live within your means, readers, and stay ahead of any judicious loans you take out. And now, on with the links.
2023 Books: Bookseller and podcaster David Kern offers “eight novels published in 2023 that I’ve been handing to people because they remind me why I love novels in the first place.”
And more recommendations, this time of the spy-thriller nature from John Wilson—”more than enough regional and global conflicts to keep spies and spymasters busy and readers turning the pages.”
This is my favorite arrangement of John Newton’s “Amazing Grace.” The singer, of course, is Sissel. There are several videos of her doing this hymn on YouTube, but none of them have exactly this arrangement (Andrae Crouch wrote it, I believe), and not exactly in this quality.
I wish I’d started getting up early to write years ago. This discipline, which I adopted last year, has borne genuine fruit in steady, consistent progress on the book I’m working on, to be called The Baldur Game. This, in case you’re new here, will be the seventh and final (in six volumes) entry of my Saga of Erling Skjalgsson.
Of course, up until a few years ago, I got up at about that same time (6:30 a.m., if you must know) to get ready for my paying job. So I’d have had to rise around 4:00 a.m. to write in the early mornings, and I’m bloody well not going to do that.
So never mind.
I’ve said this before, but I really like this book. If it’s my nunc dimittis, my Simeon song, the final work of my life, I’d be just fine with that. Looking ahead, I have no idea what I’ll write next. I took a cooling off break from revising a few weeks back, and tinkered with a book I started long ago, and got stuck on. I still made no progress at all. I’ve got a character I like and a setting that intrigues me. But I can’t think of a problem to set for the guy. I just seem to send in one rabbit after another, to see if he’ll chase one, but he’s not interested. Raymond Chandler had a formula from which I’ve profited many times – “When in doubt, send in a couple guys with guns.” But in this story I’ll soon have a room full of (metaphorical) guys with guns, and none of them seems to have any idea what to do with them. I think some of them might be ATF.
But I’m happy with The Baldur Game. Last year, when I was lecturing to a group, somebody asked if I could bring back a character they liked from an earlier book. I had assumed that character dead, but on examination of the story I discovered that no body was ever actually found (you think I remember everything I ever wrote? At my age?). So I did bring that character back, and they turned out to serve an excellent purpose in the plot.
I also decided to do something I’d vowed not to do from the beginning, because it just rounds the saga out, and I figured a way to use it thematically, and I just think I owe it to my fans.
Am I teasing you now? Trying to raise expectations?
I’d been away long enough that I struggled to connect the word home with this landscape. My body still felt it. My heart did, too, but that organ was buried in so much scar tissue it was hard to get a solid reading from it.
Sometimes a novel will astonish you with its high quality. Such is the case with Three Minute Hero by Craig Terlson, who – so far as I can tell – is an author who should have written a lot more novels, and ought to be much more famous than he is.
Luke Fischer, our hero and narrator, is a native of the Manitoba plains. But he fled the small town where he grew up, finally drifting to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he works now in an informal way – favor for favor – for Benno, a crime boss. Now Benno wants him to drive a car up to Canada, to look for a fellow employee Luke calls “Mostly Harold.” Mostly Harold is a professional hit man, a huge guy who wears cowboy boots and is devoted to the music of Burt Bacharach. He set out for Canada himself recently, in pursuit of a girlfriend who dumped him. And Benno suspects she had something to do with the recent murder of his own nephew.
Luke hasn’t been back to the Canadian plains for a long time, and he doesn’t find the folks especially friendly. Particularly as he’s following a string of dead and wounded tough guys, left behind by Mostly Harold’s juggernaut. But he’ll still find some time to confront his own past along the way.
The most obvious quality of Three Minute Hero, for the fan of hard-boiled detective fiction, is the obvious inspiration of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, another mystery centering on a big thug in search of a dangerous dame. But (with all due respect to Chandler) Mostly Harold is a far more complex and interesting character than Moose Malloy.
The prose is also very much in Chandler’s league. I don’t think I’ve read such a well-written hard-boiled story in a long time. Finely-crafted lines abound, like, “Worn-out tables were filled with circle fossils as memories of beers gone past.”
Some of Chandler’s weaknesses are also emulated. The plot is extremely complex and confusing. It was hard to keep track of the players. And there are some rookie factual errors, probably derived from TV and movies – pistols seem to have infinite ammunition supplies, a bullet wound to the shoulder is dismissed as minor, and automobiles get undue credit for their bullet-stopping properties.
Three Minute Hero is clearly set sometime before the turn of the 21st Century – there are no cell phones or internet. I don’t know when the book was actually written – the data on Amazon.com gives no clue. The author, Craig Terlson, is apparently a successful graphic artist as well as a novelist. I wish he’d written more than he has. This is good stuff.
Cautions for language and lots of violence. Highly recommended for hard-boiled fans.
The air is still and smells of mulch and fungal spores, and woodland sounds resonate – the harsh porcine screeching of jays and the fine ticking of robins.
The snippet above is just a sample of the deft natural descriptions that give Bruce Beckham’s Inspector Skelgill novels their unique tactile qualities. I’m not a great fan of outdoor stories, and I prefer my detectives more cerebral than instinctive. Which makes these novels entirely wrong for me, but I like them very much anyway.
In Murder at Home, book 22 in the series, our hero is out fishing on Bassenthwaite Lake, his favorite haunt, when he notices an old man on the shore in a wheelchair. The old man greets him as if he knows him, and talks to him about fishing. When a nurse comes to collect the old man, she tells Skelgill that he’s an indigent, dumped in a hospital and on the minimal welfare plan. They call him William, but aren’t sure that’s his name. He suffers from dementia.
Skelgill feels an affinity with the old man and decides to look more closely into the situation. This is not entirely outside his duties, as he and the attractive Detective Sergeant Jones are investigating welfare fraud.
Their other cohort, DS Leyton, is working undercover as a welfare worker. A flirtatious co-worker gives him a tip that the scam he ought to be looking at is one where people create false identities and then “double-dip” under their own and their assumed names. That will lead to a mother and son who are living the high life, not only on double benefits, but on murder.
I was a little ambivalent about Murder at Home at the beginning, purely for emotional reasons. But it grew on me, and having finished it I consider it one of the best entries in a stellar series. Highly recommended. The mature material is subdued enough to qualify the book as a Cozy, but the tone is a little tougher than a Cozy.
Oh, I might mention that all these books are written in the present tense. I object to that on principle, but in actual practice I always grow inured a few pages in.
Tonight, it is your very great misfortune to be subjected to my reminiscences on one of the plays I did, back in my theater days. I found the movie version on Tubi last night, and watched it out of curiosity. As it has some historical/literary significance, I think I can be excused for rambling about it here, comparing it to my own experience.
“The Admirable Crichton” is a play first produced in 1902, by J. M. Barrie, who also wrote “Peter Pan” (like that play, it indulges his fetish for girls in boys’ clothing). The main character is the eponymous Crichton, a paragon among butlers, unquestionably the literary father to both Jeeves and Mervyn Bunter (“mere” valets though they were). He manages the stately home of his master, Lord Loam, with supreme exactitude. His master, a liberal, has vague ideas about social equality, of which Crichton strenuously disapproves. (“If my master were to be equal to me,” he explains at one point, “then I would be equal to the footman.” Or words to that effect.)
Then the family (Lord Loam and his three daughters, plus two suitors, a young gentleman and a clergyman included purely to keep things respectable), decide to take a cruise in the South Seas. Crichton, condescending to serve for the duration as Lord Loam’s valet, accompanies them, along with “Tweenie,” a housemaid.
When their ship is wrecked on a desert island, Nature begins asserting herself. It soon becomes plain that, as far as survival is concerned, Crichton is the only one among them qualified to either do practical things or to exercise leadership. Before long the social order is inverted. Crichton becomes the “Guv’nor,” and Lord Loam is his devoted personal servant. Crichton is a benign dictator to them all, admired and beloved. All the ladies long to be chosen as his wife. (The gentlemen, on the other hand, are vying for Tweenie’s attention.)
At last, after two years, Crichton realizes they’re not likely either to escape or be rescued. He announces that he will marry Lady Mary, the eldest daughter, who has become a sort of Diana, a wild huntress.
Then (spoiler alert), a ship appears on the horizon. Crichton, due to his profound sense of honor, lights the signal fire himself, summoning a boat to their rescue. He makes the decision to return to his servant’s status. Back in England, when he realizes his presence is an embarrassment to the family, he retires to run a pub, taking Tweenie as his wife. Lady Mary, who still loves him, is heartbroken.
Surely one of the finest productions ever done of Crichton must have been the one staged in March, 1993 by the Melbourne Civic Theater in Melbourne, Florida. (The fact that I played the lead role is purely coincidental to my mentioning it, of course. The local critic praised my performance: “It is said that acting is a series of choices, and Walker proves this saying with elegance.”) Having done several performances, I think I remember the play pretty well, and I was interested to watch the 1957 production, starring Gerald More (who was good, but no Walker).
The movie follows the play’s plot quite faithfully, but the dialogue is greatly altered. I guess this should be no surprise, as more than fifty years had passed since the play’s first opening. Times had changed. Still, I was surprised that Crichton’s initial moment of supreme self-abnegation, when he condescends to step down from the heights of butlerhood to serve as a mere valet (if only temporarily), was reduced to a couple lines and no serious struggle . And the play’s biggest boffo moment – a sight gag that always had the theater audience roaring with laughter (it involves a bucket), was completely omitted. There was also the business of a characteristic hand-washing gesture Crichton always performs as butler. He drops it entirely once he’s the Guv’nor, and the moment when he resumes servant status is marked by a resumption of the handwashing. This is also missing from the movie.
Nonetheless, the film worked pretty well on its own terms. Barrie was playing with some fairly radical social ideas here. The play could have been revolutionary (he pondered allowing Crichton to marry Lady Mary). But in the end he chose to give his audience an ending that preserved the status quo in action, while leaving them with a certain uneasiness of conscience. A sound business decision, no doubt.
After all these years, “The Admirable Crichton” remains an intriguing story, one that can be taken in more than one way.
The extent of mafia money and influence within the corridors of American power in the middle of the past century is a familiar story, told in fictional form in iconic movies like The Godfather. Given the extent of these connections, it wouldn’t be surprising if the shadowy realms of the government now known to have been involved in illegal covert activities—such as COINTELPRO and the CIA’s Operation CHAOS—turned to the mafia to handle certain jobs; for one thing, they could offer the services of experienced hit men sworn to omertà. For his part, Hoover famously denied for decades that the mafia existed, whether because he owed any mob bosses favors—or simply because he preferred to stay focused on political subversives like King.
Today’s hymn was written by the great John Milton (1608-1684). He wrote several paraphrases of select Psalms haven’t gained the favor of hymnal editors. The tune sung above by the congregation of Cathedral Church of Christ in Marina, Lagos, Nigeria is “St. Stephen” by William Jones, rector of the church in Hollingbourne, Kent.
“Let me hear what God the LORD will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his saints; but let them not turn back to folly. Surely his salvation is near to those who fear him, that glory may dwell in our land.” (Ps 85:8-9 ESV)
1 The Lord will come and not be slow, his footsteps cannot err; before him righteousness shall go, his royal harbinger.
2 Truth from the earth, like to a flow’r, shall bud and blossom then, and justice, from her heav’nly bow’r, look down on mortal men.
3 Rise, God, and judge the earth in might, this wicked earth redress; for you are he who shall by right the nations all possess.
4 For great you are, and wonders great by your strong hand are done: you, in your everlasting seat, remain the Lord alone.
