Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder in the Wind,’ by John D. MacDonald

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He wore round glasses with steel rims and the glasses were always slipping down his blunt nose and Johnny Flagan would look over his glasses at you and grin wryly about his morning hangover and you would never notice that the grin did nothing to change the eyes. The eyes were small and brown and watchful and they could have been the noses of two bullets dimly seen in the cylinder when you look toward the muzzle of a gun.

The idea of a story in which travelers in a random group are thrown together and react to each other like chemicals in a laboratory is an old one. It certainly goes back to Chaucer, and probably further, though author John D. MacDonald uses the setup for a different purpose in his 1956 novel, Murder in the Wind (also published as Hurricane).

Along Highway 19 in west Florida, several vehicles are traveling north. There’s a hurricane blowing in the Gulf, but it’s forecast to move west and north. Nobody knows it’s going to turn east, block a couple bridges, and strand these particular people in a derelict house, hoping to ride the storm out.

There’s the defeated young businessman, headed back north with his wife and two kids, all their possessions packed into their station wagon. The hotshot property developer sharing his ride with a subordinate he’s planning to humiliate. The tennis bum with his new bride, a plain heiress he married for her money – and she knows it. The young widow, carrying the ashes of her suicide husband home with her. The stolen van with three juvenile delinquents in it. And the federal agent between assignments.

Over the course of the next day some will live and some will die. Some of the least likely characters will display courage and honor, as others will turn out to be cowards, sometimes to their own surprise.

Murder in the Wind caught me up completely. MacDonald ushers us deep into the heart of each one of them, telling their stories, bringing them vividly to life. It’s a masterful tale, carried along in increasing dramatic tension as the barometer steadily drops.

An amusing typo gave the federal agent character the name “Steve Maiden” at the beginning, before a proofreader seems to have caught the OCR error and corrected it to Steve Malden.

The book contains a slur against homosexuals which went over fine back when the book was published, but is offensive today – even to puritans like me.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Last Dark Place,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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“Don’t try to understand them,” said Lieberman. “Just rope those cows and brand them.”

“Wisdom according to Rawhide reruns,” said Bill with a smile.

“Don’t knock it,” said Lieberman. “One can learn much from the Scriptures and reruns in the middle of the night. The gift of insomniacs. God keeps up awake when we want to sleep so we can glean knowledge from the secret messages sung by Frankie Laine.”

I don’t know why I’m not more fascinated by the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Lieberman novels. They’re fairly easygoing mysteries, heavy on character. Not more violent than necessary.

Yet they’re deceptive. There’s a lot of realism here – a profoundly Jewish understanding of the world as a dangerous, corrupt place where one needs to try to get along as peacefully and mercifully as possible.

In The Last Dark Place, Inspector Abe Lieberman of the Chicago police is boarding a plane in Yuma, Arizona, escorting a hit man who’s handcuffed to him. Suddenly an airport custodian pulls a pistol and shoots the prisoner dead. The custodian in turn is shot and arrested, but he can’t provide much information about who hired him to carry out the hit. Finding the answer to that question will be Lieberman’s next job.

Along with preventing a gang war between Chinese and Hispanic gangs.

And, perhaps most difficult of all, organizing and paying for his grandson’s bar mitzvah.

The Lieberman books are deceptive. They seem mostly quiet, even cozy. But they are mercilessly realistic, and Lieberman is an ancient kind of law enforcer – almost like the Judges of the Old Testament. As often as not he brokers street justice, even setting up the odd extrajudicial execution. For Lieberman it’s about people and community most of all, and sometimes the law just doesn’t understand.

The Last Dark Place is really a fine police story, for those of us who like our mysteries quiet.

Music

Sunday Singing: I’ll Fly Away

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A gospel song that has captured the imagination of many Americans is the 1932 piece written by Oklahoma native Albert E. Brumley called, “I’ll Fly Away.” Brumley wrote over 800 songs and is honored in the Country Song Writers Hall of Fame. The lyric is still under copyright, so I won’t copy it here, but maybe you know half of the words already.

“The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away” (Ps 90:10 ESV).

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Empty Copper Sea,’ by John D. MacDonald

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Meyer can suffer bores without pain. He finds them interesting. He says the knack of being able to bore almost anybody is a great art. He says he studies it.

Among all the riches of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, The Empty Copper Sea holds a place all its own. Aside from being an artifact of MacDonald’s strongest period, it’s also the book where we get to see our hero most emphatically and ecstatically in love. Even willing to (drum roll, wait for it) commit.

McGee, semi-legal “salvage specialist,” is not at his best as the story begins. He’s just gotten home from a grueling voyage, undertaken as a favor for a friend. He just wants to relax a while. He’s tired; he’s feeling old. The world seems dull and full of irritations.

And along comes Van Harder, an old boating acquaintance. Van is a former drunk who’s now a born-again Christian, punctiliously maintaining his sobriety and rebuilding his life. He had been captaining a boat for a rich man up in the town of Timber Bay, when he suddenly got sick and lost consciousness. When he was awakened (by a kick from the sheriff’s boot) his boss had disappeared and he was being blamed for the disaster. The sheriff believes he had fallen off the wagon. Now no one will hire him.

Van says he knows that Trav recovers things for people, in return for half the value. He estimates the value of his personal reputation, he says, at twenty-thousand dollars. So he’ll pay Trav ten-thousand dollars to go up to Timber Bay and prove his innocence. To either find the boss’s body, or locate him wherever he’s run off to.

Trav and his economist friend Meyer travel to Timber Bay, to find that there’s a lot of speculation about the missing boss. The body was never recovered, and an increasing number of indications suggest he has absconded to Mexico with his Scandinavian mistress.

They encounter and interview a series of characters – all of them well-rounded and interesting. But Trav’s heart isn’t in it – he’s flirting with too many women and getting into too many bar fights.

Until he meets Gretel Tuckerman. Gretel is tall and healthy and beautiful, sister to the missing boss’s right-hand man, for whom she is caring, as he has suffered a brain injury. Some of John D. MacDonald’s most lyrical prose follows, as we watch Travis blissfully in love.

It’s doomed, of course, but that’s for another book (The Green Ripper).

Highly recommended, it goes without saying.

Music, Religion

‘O Love That Will Not Let Me Go’

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I’m not much good tonight, I fear. Got into a spot of pother over on Basefook, and it’s interfering with my concentration. I’ll tell you more later … or maybe not.

Anyway, here’s one of my favorite hymns — “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go,” by the blind pastor George Matheson, who has to be my favorite hymn writer (terrible admission for a Lutheran), because he has only 2 famous hymns, and both are at or near the top of my list.

Have a good evening, and pray for me if it crosses your mind.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Pain in the Belly: the Haugean Witness in American Lutheranism,’ by Thomas E. Jacobson

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This was quite a long book, but I read it pretty quickly. Because it fascinated me. I suspect it won’t be as fascinating to you (well-written though it is), because it’s about matters near to my own heart and history.

When the old Hauge’s Synod, a small Norwegian-Lutheran church group, entered into a merger with other Lutheran groups in 1917, someone expressed satisfaction that they’d be able to “gobble up” the Haugeans now through sheer weight of numbers. Someone replied that that might be so, but it was likely to give them pains in the belly. That’s the inspiration for the title of Pain in the Belly: The Haugean Witness in American Lutheranism, by Thomas E. Jacobson.

The Haugeans are my people, and I’ve written about them often here, so I won’t give a lot of background. The Haugeans were a movement of lay evangelism and pietism originating in Norway around the turn of the 19th Century. They never left the state church, but operated as an independent movement within it. When Norwegians began immigrating to America in the mid-1800s, the Haugeans, having no state church to react against, eventually organized themselves into a loosely organized church body of their own (the first Norwegian Lutheran church in America), which survived (with some splits) up until 1917, when they entered a merger with other Norwegian American Lutheran groups, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.

Author Jacobson spends about half his book explaining this story to the reader. The information is available elsewhere, but is necessary to set the stage. The other half of the book involves more original scholarship, as Jacobson has gone through (sometimes meager) records to provide an account of how the Haugeans returned, in a sense, to their original position, operating as an independent force within a larger church – preaching, teaching, doing good works, and agitating for a more devoted Christian life.

I read with great interest, as almost every page mentioned places I know and institutions I’m familiar with. Also people whose children I’ve met (or heard preaching); some of them I met personally over the years. (I myself am cited as a source, by virtue of a booklet I wrote for the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations.)

First of all, I want to say that the book is very well written. Thomas E. Jacobson has a clear, lively style, most welcome in a historian. He is also admirably even-handed in dealing with controversies, in spite of a tendency to refer to any preaching involving law and morality as “dark and legalistic.”

Pain in the Belly, alas, is probably unlikely to attract a large audience. Students of American church history will be interested, as well as anyone involved in the burgeoning field of Lars Walker studies.

Reading, Religion

Black-suited Pietist

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Photo credit: Yunus Tug for Unsplash+. Unsplash license.

Today, after much soul-searching and delay, I made up my mind to go to a certain well-known men’s clothier and buy a suit. More than that, I allowed myself to be talked into ordering what’s known as a “bespoke” suit – cut to my size and tailored for my peculiar personal form. The waiting time will be more than a month.

You see, I’ve got a little money coming in, and I’ve frequently felt the incongruity of the fact that, for all my talk about men dressing decently, my own (only) suit is rather shabby. It’s a point of traditional wisdom that a “decent” suit is not an extravagance. A man ought to be prepared to present himself respectably when it’s called for.

My suit will be a rich, elegant black, so that I can wear it with my customary black Victorian vests.

Black is the traditional color associated with Pietism and Puritanism (though the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, generally depicted in illustrations in severe black suits, actually liked bright colors. And their hats were not tall and stiff, but soft).

I’ve been reading about my own Pietist roots, in Thomas E. Jacobson’s recent book, Pain In the Belly. It’s about the Norwegian pietist Haugean movement, especially its history in the United States. I’ll be reviewing it once I finish it, but one thing strikes me already:

Author Jacobson (who happens to be a friend of mine) likes to describe the conservatives, the party who wanted to follow the patterns of the old Norwegian state church, as “objective,” since they emphasized the efficacy of the sacraments, in which God does all the work and we are mere recipients of His grace.

My people, the pietist Haugeans, he describes as “subjective,” since we emphasized the necessity of a personal experience with Christ. We were suspicious of anyone who said their relationship with God was confined to receiving the sacraments. If faith is real, we argued, the individual will be transformed, and there will necessarily be an emotional component.

I’m not accustomed to thinking of us Haugeans as subjectivists. I’ve been a strong opponent of subjectivism in the church since college.

And yet the description is perfectly fair. I’m used to thinking of the subjective as just mushy emotionalism, but it doesn’t have to be. Real life is, in fact, a combination of the objective and the subjective, just as it involves the combination of the physical and the spiritual.

But this led to a further puzzling thought.

We Haugeans are often accused of Pharisaism, but Pharisaism is a defect of objective theology. The Pharisee makes a list of his duties, checks each item off the list, and considers himself square with God.

Haugeans are the opposite. We emphasize the passion of faith, total submission in all areas of life.

And yet, it’s not unfair to compare us to Pharisees. We do tend to get obsessed with lists of rules, as means of demonstrating our inner piety. I comment extensively on this characteristic in my novel, Troll Valley.

Perhaps the bottom line is that nothing human is entirely one thing or another.

Music

The Limeliters

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I understand the old folk music craze is the subject of some current interest, on account of the new Bob Dylan movie. I hear it’s good, and have no plans to see it (despite Dylan/Zimmerman’s Minnesota roots), because Dylan has never done anything for me, personally. (I speak of entertainment, not failed attempts to borrow money. So don’t believe the rumors.)

The focus of the film, I understand, is Dylan’s break from the folk movement when he insisted on using electric guitars, to the horror of Pete Seeger, who operated as a sort of surrogate father and commissar for the Folkies. He was (as the movie does not make clear, I’m told) a fervent Communist and Stalinist. Many conservatives see Dylan’s adoption of electric music as some kind of affirmation of capitalism. Perhaps there’s something in it, though I never quite understood the rationale – you can be sure Dylan will never explain it.

I have always hoped – perhaps naively – that the really big, commercial folk groups of the day operated to some degree outside Seeger’s sphere of influence. Such groups as the Chad Mitchell Trio, the New Christy Minstrels, and the Limeliters.

The Limeliters were my favorite.

What set them apart was the vibrant edge Glenn Yarbrough’s tenor voice brought. After he left the group he had quite a successful solo career, and I was always a fan, though he was never a top seller.

Anyway, I remember the period well, and still like the music better than I like Dylan’s. Above, the Limeliters, in an uncharacteristically Christian moment, do “What Wondrous Love Is This?” and “Old Time Religion.”

Music

Sunday Singing: Keep Your Lamps!

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Today’s hymn continues our trend of traditional songs. “Keep Your Lamps!” is attributed to Blind Willie Johnson (1897–1945), an American gospel blues singer and guitarist, who was the first to record it in 1928. The performance above is by the choirs of Florida State University conducted by the composition’s arranger, André Thomas (1952- )

“Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” (Mt 25:13 ESV)

1 Keep your lamps trimmed and burning, (3x)
the day is drawing nigh.

Refrain:
Children, don’t get weary, (3x)
till your work is done.

2 Darker midnight lies before us, (3x)
the day is drawing nigh. [Refrain]

3 For the morning soon is breaking, (3x)
the day is drawing nigh. [Refrain]

4 Christian journey soon be over, (3x)
the day is drawing nigh. [Refrain]

Publishing

Call for consumer input

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Photo credit: Jonathan Farber. Unsplash license.

This extra Friday post is for the purpose of picking your collective brains, O Esteemed Readership.

I’m looking at the prospect of producing audiobooks of my novels.

Generous friends provided me with equipment, and I think I’m near the point where I can make good enough quality recordings to satisfy ACX, the Amazon audiobook publishing arm.

My plan has been to start with the Erling books, but now I’m uncertain.

So I ask you – if you bought an audiobook where the narrator is declared to be an Irishman, would it bother you if the book was read in a Midwestern US accent?

I contemplated trying to master an Irish accent, but I’m pretty sure it would never be really right. I could probably carry the accent for a few paragraphs, but over many hours of reading, the illusion would wear off. I’d slip too often into flat Minnesota tones.

So now I’m considering hiring an Irishman to do the Erling books (if I can find one; you can hire narrators on a percentage-of-royalties basis) and just doing my Epsom books myself.

What do you think? Would it disappoint you if I had somebody else play Father Ailill?