Eve Tushnet writes, “Kristin Lavransdatter is an epic tale of fourteenth-century Norway, a saga of marriage and motherhood, sin and penitence, suffering and acceptance. I read it for the first time at age thirty four, and that’s a good age to meet it. But I wish I’d read it earlier. I wish I’d devoured it as a teen, let its view of life sink into me and change me long before I could really understand it. I suspect this would be a good book to grow up with.”
“What Child is This?”
It’s Sissel. It’s “What Child is This?” She does the words right. Merry Christmas.
‘Whispering Smith,’ by Frank H. Spearman
I grew curious about the character of Whispering Smith years back. I was reading a book about the Wild West, and the author mentioned, in an aside, that Smith was based – in part – on the real life lawman Joe Lefors. Lefors is best remembered nowadays as the faceless posseman in a straw boater who so spooks Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the movie. In real life, alas, Joe Lefors was less of… well, of a force. He didn’t catch Butch and Sundance, after all, and his greatest achievement was extracting the confession that sent Tom Horn to the gallows for murder in 1903. Historians ever since have disputed the validity of that confession.
The same writer mentioned that the vicious killer Harvey DuSang in the novel is based on another Wild Bunch member, Harvey Logan (Kid Curry).
I first heard of Whispering Smith in a short-lived 1961 TV series that starred Audie Murphy. That series is notorious for being cited in a Senate Juvenile Delinquency Committee hearing as an egregious example of TV violence. The series actually bore almost no resemblance to the book, retaining the hero’s name and pretty much nothing else.
The series was loosely based on a 1948 movie (actually the last of several film adaptations) that starred Alan Ladd and Robert Preston. That movie was based on the book, though they moved it back in time (the novel is set around 1900, and everybody has telephones), and omitted a rather charming romantic subplot.
Having established that, let’s talk about the actual book, Whispering Smith, by Frank H. Spearman. It’s free for Kindle, so I thought that after all these years I’d find out what it was about. I had a pleasant surprise in store.
The story starts with a railroad foreman, Murray Sinclair, arriving at a wreck site to clear the track. He’s a well-paid and competent employee of the company, popular and efficient. But, we also learn, he’s pretty much a man without a conscience. We’d call him a sociopath today. He considers it one of his perks to plunder the wrecks. He’s caught at it by a railroad supervisor, and fired on the spot.
Sinclair withdraws along with his work crew, and becomes an outlaw, dynamiting and wrecking the trains he used to salvage. This causes the railroad president to call in his best detective, Gordon “Whispering” Smith.
Smith has been keeping away from that particular area for some time, out of consideration for a resident of the town. Marion Sinclair is Smith’s old flame, but she married his childhood friend Murray Sinclair. She’s learned Murray’s true character by now and has separated from him, but (in one of those plot points that would be incomprehensible to today’s reader) they both respect the sanctity of marriage and wouldn’t dream of committing adultery together.
But Sinclair is too proud to run, and Smith has principles about doing his job, so their final showdown is inevitable.
When I started reading Whispering Smith, it seemed to me a pretty standard old-fashioned novel. The prose was a little more florid than what we prefer today, and the dialogue doubtlessly bowdlerized. But the more I read, the more I got caught up in the story. The characters are exceedingly well done, especially that of Smith himself. He’s one of those seemingly ordinary men who reveals increasingly intriguing depths.
Everything surprised Whispering Smith, even his salary; but an important consequence was that nothing excited him.
I truly enjoyed Whispering Smith, and I recommend it heartily.
Sharing Your Remarkable Story
You have a story of faith and God’s work in your life. “And if people don’t take us seriously,” says Aaron Armstrong, “that’s still good news worth sharing.” He briefly describes the struggle his wife has experienced and links to a couple versions of her remarkable story.
“For years, whenever she or both of us have told the story of how we came to faith, we’ve seen people stop speaking to us, back away slowly as if we were whacked, or (in one instance) convert to an entirely different religion.”
‘Calendar of Crime,’ by Ellery Queen
Miss Ypson had not always been dead; au contraire. She had lived for seventy-eight years, for most of them breathing hard. As her father used to remark, “She was a very active little verb.” Miss Ypson’s father was a professor of Greek at a small Midwestern university. He had conjugated his daughter with the rather bewildered assistance of one of his brawnier students, an Iowa poultry heiress.
I think I’ve intimated before that I’m adopting a policy of withdrawing – a bit – from contemporary fiction. We find ourselves in a new Victorian era, where quite a lot of things that are true can’t be said in polite company, and where every story is expected to genuflect, at least for a moment, toward the altar of the accepted pieties. It’s all very boring and annoying, and I need to stretch my legs on older, more gracious paths from time to time.
So I’m going to be checking out some literature of the past. As my tastes run to mysteries, that necessarily involves what’s called the stories of the Golden Age. Which will involve acquiring some new tastes. Golden Age mysteries are primarily puzzle stories, and that approach doesn’t excite me much. I like my stories character driven.
I downloaded Ellery Queen’s Calendar of Crime. Published in 1952, it’s not strictly a Golden Age book, but the approach is pretty much the same. It’s not a novel but a short story collection. The “calendar” of the title means that each of the twelve stories is set, chronologically and thematically, in a particular month of the year. The January story involves a New Year’s Eve party; the February story involves a legend about George Washington, etc. The main character, of course, is Ellery Queen, a sophisticated New York amateur detective whose father happens to be a police inspector.
It’s a good collection. The puzzles are clever, and the writing (by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, who wrote under the Ellery Queen name) can be quite elegant, as witness the excerpt at the top of this review. These are puzzle stories, not character stories, but within the bounds of the form the authors did a good job of making them relatively plausible.
I’ll say this, though. Never hire Ellery Queen to protect either your life or your property. He will always fail, because if he succeeded there’d be no mystery for him to solve.
No cautions whatever are necessary for questionable content. As some mystery fan once said, “I like a good murder, without any immorality in it.”
Shirley Jackson’s Last Haunting Novel
Shirley Jackson, whose short story “The Lottery” has been retold too many times, left us a last, remarkable story in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and David Barnett loves it. “There isn’t a shred of the supernatural in Castle, though it feels like there is.” It feels like it because when one character goes to town, she’s greeted like this:
Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!
He Sees You When You’re Sleeping
The bundle bounces against Hayk’s back as he dashes behind houses. Barely a mark on the shadows, he slips in through crack and out by door with another name scratched off his list. But what did he care for a list? He’d take anyone.
Whimpering cries tumble from his sack as he hurtles a fence.
“Back to Hayk’s mine!”
Crash!
He breaks against a snarling mastiff with dawn in his eyes, who grabs his leg and flings him into the trees, scattering children across the yard.
With guttural barks, the dog drives them, bruised and wailing, back to their homes.
(This is one of many 100-word stories offered for I Saw Lightening Fall’s Advent Ghosts 2015. Many more stories through the link, including Lars’ story earlier this month, and my past contributions can be found under the content tag “flash fiction.”)
Jesus, Were You Anxious?
I’m encouraged to see two of my Advent-themed posts go up recently on For The Church.
- The first asks whether Jesus was chomping at the bit to start his earthly ministry. “I don’t think the Lord has the same concept of time I do. Just look at the incarnation. Christ Jesus did not appear to us like Melchizedek in Genesis, an established priest and king of the city of peace. He didn’t walk out of the desert and begin casting out demons like a fabled dragon slayer. He came to us as an infant. He spent years growing into adulthood, asking questions of his parents, learning his father’s trade skills, and studying at the synagogue.”
- The second reflects on a great hymn of the season. “Save us, Lord, and all the nations. By your authority, we live. The doors you open, no one can shut, and the doors you shut, no one can open. Lead us through that door to heaven and bring with us the rebels, strangers, hypocrites, and refugees who have exchanged their lives for yours. Lock up the door to misery, for your name’s sake, so that we may rejoice.”
Despising Victorian Culture
Michael Lewis writes about “the irrational hatred of the Victorian era” prevalent not long ago.
To understand how Sargent, one of the most brilliant painters in American history, was once derided as a mere facile courtier now requires an act of historical imagination. For it has been forgotten just how thoroughly Victorian painting had been once banished from the cultural conversation. And not merely painting, but architecture, sculpture, and the decorative arts; all of Victorian culture, in fact. This state of affairs lasted through the heyday of the modern movement, from the end of World War I into the 1960s, and it would not end until a rising generation became curious about Victorian art precisely because it was despised and forbidden…
‘All Lies,’ by Andrew Cunningham
I don’t have a sophisticated grading system for novels, like five stars or three thumbs (or noses) up. I should probably develop one. I generally just group them loosely into three categories: “I hated it and didn’t finish it,” “I liked it enough to finish it, but probably won’t look for another book by the same author,” and “I loved it.”
All Lies sits solidly in the middle category. I was interested enough to finish it, but I wasn’t much impressed with the writing. Author Cunningham has good instincts, I think, but he needs to work on his craftsmanship.
The story is told by the main character, Del Hunnicutt. Del’s first words quote his father’s dying declaration: “I come from a long line of idiots…”
Through the course of the story, Del learns things he never knew about his grandfather, who was idiot enough to get involved in an art heist, and then died in a bomber during World War II. He goes out on a date arranged through a computer matching service, and his match turns out to be a descendent of one of his grandfather’s criminal associates. She manipulated their meeting in order to find out what he knew about the “treasure” the gang was supposed to have left behind, a treasure Del has never heard of.
The next day his date is murdered, but he is soon approached by the woman’s sister, Sabrina, a much more appealing and (seemingly) trustworthy person. Together they set out to get ahold of a lost painting, said to contain the secret to finding the treasure. It turns out they’re not the only people looking for that painting, and things get messy.
As I said, the story was interesting enough to keep me reading, though I thought the writing unpolished. The characters’ actions don’t always seem logical in terms of their personalities. And sometimes the prose was very amateurish: “It was going to be a while before we would be able to accurately describe the uniqueness of what we had just experienced.” Nor did the logic of the story always work, as when we’re told that criminals couldn’t sell certain precious objects they had stolen because nobody had any money in the Great Depression.
But I did finish the book, which is better than a lot of self-published novels do with me. So I give it a moderate recommendation. There weren’t any overly objectionable adult themes.