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Fossils congregate

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This actually looks a little like Cahill’s. But it’s a photo by Pablo Merchan Montes. Unsplash license.

Somebody at the table brought up the subject of libraries, and I, of course, had a thing to say about that.

“The day is coming,” I opined, “when parents will be telling their kids, ‘You know, once upon a time libraries were places where people went to borrow books, not homeless shelters and day care centers.’”

I don’t know how impressed my friends were by this insight-slash-prophecy. How many things are there around us that started out as one thing and ended up as something else entirely? The theater began with morality plays during church festivals. Nascar began (I am informed) with bootleggers racing revenuers during Prohibition. Nokia started out as a wood pulp processing company in Finland.

There’s a group of my high school classmates – those who still live in the area, and who still live at all – who get together for lunch someplace every few months. This last Wednesday we went to the “new” restaurant in Kenyon, our home town – new in terms of management, though two previous owners have occupied the same commercial space. I might as well plug them – the manager was nice enough to send one of his staff up on a ladder to hang a shade to block the too-bright sunshine coming in through the south-facing windows. The place is called “Cahill’s,” which strikes me as an odd name for a Mexican fusion restaurant. But they were able to provide the stodgy anglo hamburger I required (really quite good). Also they had cloth napkins on the tables – I wonder how long it’s been since any eatery in Kenyon has boasted cloth napkins.

The conversation ran along customary retirees’ lines – where people take their vacations, how their kids and grandkids are doing (I had nothing to offer on that score), and our aches, pains, and medical procedures; I thought I had the prize for the most recent surgery, with my detached retina, but one of the “girls” had shoulder surgery just about simultaneously.

Afterward I filled up my gas tank (I like to support the local economy) at the Co-op gas station where my dad was a member, and headed back, past buildings that used to be something else, or the ghosts of buildings no longer standing. I had realized shortly after setting out that morning that I probably shouldn’t have gone at all – my left eye is still fuzzy; reading signs was a challenge, though I pretty much know the way without sign-reading. And the ride back was better; the sun was brighter and I remembered that I can see more clearly if I just close that bad eye.

Arrived home utterly exhausted from the rigorous exertion of ordinary human interaction; I was played out for the rest of the day.

Fiction

‘Gallows End,’ by Giles Ekins

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I was rather taken with Gallows Walk, the previous, first volume of Giles Ekins’ Inspector Yarrow series. The book showed signs of authorly inexperience, but it drew me in. There we met Inspector Christopher Yarrow of West Garside in Yorkshire, a former British pilot who lost the sight in one eye during the Battle of Britain. He’s intelligent and empathetic. In that story he hunted down and arrested a robber who had killed a payroll courier and (by vehicular accident) a little girl.

The main action of Gallows End, book two, takes a while getting going, as we begin by following the tragic aftermath of a secondary plot from the last book. But in time we join a group of golfers who discover the nude, strangled body of a young woman in the rough on the links. It takes some time to learn her identity, but she turns out to have been a young woman who was studying fashion design and working occasionally as a model. Her choices of work had not always been wise, but she was apparently liked by everyone who knew her.

The police procedural plot works itself out as Inspector Yarrow gradually sorts through a matrix of personal and professional resentments among a group of locals, until the true murderer is unmasked.

Author Ekins seems to like cliffhangers, and there’s a shocking one here. Cliffhangers are something I generally dislike, but in these cases the main mystery of the current novel is always cleared up first, so it’s all right.

The grammar and punctuation are better in this book than in the last one. Quotation marks, a problem before, have been fixed. There are also fewer confusions of tense. The text isn’t immaculate, but it’s much better.

If you like quiet, character-centered mysteries, I do recommend Gallows End. Mild cautions for disturbing situations and language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dame,’ by Richard Stark

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Richard Stark, as is well known, was just one of the pseudonyms employed by the prolific author Donald E. Westlake. Stark was his most famous and frequently-employed nom de plume; generally he wrote his humorous books under his own name, and his cold, hard-boiled ones as Stark.

The Dame is one of the Stark books, an offshoot of his Parker series. The hero here is Alan Grofield, right-hand-man to the larcenous Parker and a sometime actor. Westlake/Stark gave Grofield four books of his own, of which this is the second.

The story begins with Grofield arriving at the airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He has been summoned here by way of a mysterious message, relayed by a corrupt general he knows. Someone wants to talk to him, and pays the way. Mostly out of curiosity, Grofield follows instructions, arriving at last at a remote jungle estate, where he meets the wife of a criminal boss along with her house guests. She wants Grofield to be her bodyguard. But he has taken an immediate dislike to her and turns the job down.

That night there is a murder. Soon the mob boss shows up with the announced purpose of identifying the murderer and administering some swift private justice. His chief suspect is Grofield. Grofield will have to come up with some fast moves and fast arguments to identify the true killer and save his own neck.

I can’t fault The Dame in terms of writing. Westlake/Stark was a pro, and he knew his business. The story offers plenty of danger and plenty of suspense, along with a certain mordant humor.

If I say I didn’t like it much, that’s simply personal taste. I tried reading Westlake some years back, reading a few of his much-admired Dortmunder books. But I could never get into them. Basically, I think I’ve never been able to sympathize much with criminals. Call it a prejudice.

I also noted some sophomoric Freudianism in play here, taking it for granted that chastity is just an expression of repression and neurosis.

So, my bottom line is that I recognize the quality of the product, but it wasn’t to my taste. Most readers seem to disagree.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dreadful Lemon Sky,’ by John D. MacDonald

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A fellow who was pretty handy with a boat once said that anything you feel good after is moral. But that implies that the deed is unchanging and the doer is unchanging. What you feel good after one time, you feel rotten after the next. And it is difficult to know in advance. And morality shouldn’t be experimental, I don’t think.

Another deal on a Travis McGee e-book means another Travis McGee review, to the joy of all. Author John D. MacDonald was at the peak of his powers back in the 1970s when The Dreadful Lemon Sky came out; the result is a neat, tight, engaging mystery.

Our hero Travis McGee, Fort Lauderdale boat dweller and beach bum, is not technically a private eye. He basically does favors for friends and friends referred by friends, mostly recovering stolen property, retaining a large percentage of the value as his fee. The Dreadful Lemon Sky begins with something less than a “salvage” job. Carrie Milligan, an old friend, asks him to hold a large amount of cash for her for one month. If she doesn’t come to claim it by then, he should get it to her sister in New Jersey.

But it doesn’t take that long. A few days later, there’s a news item – Carrie Milligan was killed by a truck while crossing a highway near her home in Bay City (which appeared to me to resemble very much the city of Palm Bay, where I once lived). McGee and his economist friend Meyer sail north in McGee’s houseboat for the funeral. There he meets the sister along with Carrie’s circle of friends. And at that point McGee starts getting suspicious. Something is going on under the surface here – he will discover drug smuggling, political corruption, sexual kink and betrayal. The solution will prove to be a complex one, and cruel.

Every McGee novel includes scenes that stick in my mind, even after decades. This one includes a great moment where McGee rescues Carrie’s sister from being fleeced by a funeral director, and McGee’s meditation on the corrosive nature of corporate takeovers of smaller brands. Also, he rents a yellow AMC Gremlin in Bay City, which happened to be exactly the car I was driving back when I first read the book. We Gremlin drivers needed all the support we could get.

Great story. Great reading experience. Cautions for violence, drug use and a pretty lyrical sex scene.

Music

Sunday Singing: Deep River

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Today’s hymn is of traditional origin. Deep River is a song about longing for heaven, written over 150 years ago. The earliest printed evidence is from 1867. It’s performed above by Wilford Kelly.

” Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.” (John 5:24 ESV)

Deep river, my home is over Jordan,
Deep river, Lord,
I want to cross over into campground.
Oh, don’t you want to go to that gospel feast,
That promised land where all is peace?
Oh, deep river, Lord,
I want to cross over into campground.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Hidden Realms: Scandinavian Folktales,” by G. K. Lund

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Once, the Lord wanted to test if all people could agree on something, like wishing for rainy weather. For three years, there was no rain on Earth, causing great distress. He thought that now everyone was in agreement to wish for rain, and it came. But on the same day, a woman had hung her clothes out to dry, and she was not happy at all. “That’s typical,” she complained. “If it’s been dry for three years, it certainly could have lasted one more day.”

I’ve long had a minor interest in folk beliefs and superstitions, for incorporating in my stories if for no other reason. The folk beliefs of Scandinavia interest me most, of course, but if you read accounts from further abroad, you tend to see great commonality. Everybody seems to have believed in “little people” who lived at the margins of society, and their tales of human interaction with such folk tend to exhibit very similar motifs.

G. K. Lund’s Hidden Realms: Scandinavian Folktales presents a selection of her own translations of folk stories (called sagn, which is pronounced very much like “song”). These are not fairy tales as such – as she takes pains to explain – they aren’t fully formed fantastic tales. They’re more like anecdotes. Some of them are only one or two lines long.

The greater part of the stories involve what were known as Vættir, a broad classification that includes all the Scandinavian fantastic beings. Mostly these are elves, dwarfs, trolls and what the Norwegians call nisser – like a brownie or a gnome. There is no exact taxonomy, of course; the creatures often mix and match traits and can be hard to distinguish from one another.

There are rules for dealing with them, of course, but the rules can vary from one story to another. It’s generally agreed that it’s not a good idea to follow them “into the hill” where they live, or to eat their food, but both those taboos are sometimes broken without harm. Sometimes humans can fool them and profit thereby, and at other times they pay a high price. Sometimes an act of kindness to them brings rich reward, and but at other times it can be a mistake, as when a kind farm wife sews a new suit of clothes for the “barn nisse” only to have him stop helping with the farm work because he doesn’t want to get them dirty.

Such stories fascinate me; I’ve always wanted to write a story about them that captured their alien logic. I’m not sure I’ve ever come close.

G. K. Lund’s translations in Hidden Realms are generally quite good, though I nitpicked from time to time, as one does. The book features very handsome illustrations – somewhat reminiscent of Theodor Kittelsen (see last night’s post) though a little smooth for my taste.

Very enjoyable, if you’re into this stuff.

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Theodor Kittelsen

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Tonight, I had Norwegian folklore on my mind, and I found this amusing video on YouTube. It concerns the Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen (1857-1914), one of my favorites. He was an imaginative illustrator, and sometimes — in my opinion — he was ahead of his time, employing stylistic techniques that would become popular later on.

I came on an anecdote involving Kittlesen in my reading recently. The author Sigrid Undset, when she was a girl, went with her mother and sisters to spend a summer holiday at the seaside. They were very poor after the death of her father, but the cottage was available cheap. To her astonishment, little Sigrid found that their closest neighbor was the artist Theodor Kittlesen and his family. She made friends with Kittelsen’s daughter, and was introduced to the great artist, whom she greatly admired. At that point in her life she was contemplating becoming an artist herself. After a while she worked up the courage to show Kittlesen some of her own drawings.

“You have talent enough, poor thing,” Kittlesen sighed. He went on to warn her that art was no easy career.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Gallows Walk,’ by Giles Ekins

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Lately I’ve been spending too much time scrolling through those short videos you find on Facebook and YouTube (I believe many of them originate with Tiktok, but I’ve never dared cross that threshold). I had conceived a fear that, like so many people nowadays, I was losing my ability to concentrate. Perhaps my impatience with the novels I’ve been reading lately arose from losing my capacity to persevere through a book.

Gallows Walk by Giles Ekins relieved my mind greatly. The book has many flaws, but it engaged my interest and kept me reading.

Gallows Walk is the first volume in a series set in the town of West Garside, near the city of Sheffield in Yorkshire, during the early 1950s. Our hero is Detective Inspector Christopher Yarrow. He was a flyer in World War II, but lost an eye, rendering him unfit for duty. He is mourning the early death of his wife. He is an intelligent and sympathetic policeman, annoyed by the laziness and bullying tactics employed by some of the older detectives.

The story involves many subplots, but the main narrative concerns a robbery that goes badly wrong. A career criminal attempts to grab a bag of payroll money being carried by a messenger, but meeting resistance, ends up killing a man with a shotgun and, in his escape, hitting a little girl with his car, causing her death. The criminal goes into hiding, and we follow the manhunt as Inspector Yarrow follows up every clue with frustratingly slow progress, and the criminal discovers how hard it is to keep a low profile in a country howling for your blood.

Author Ekins has an unusual style. He tells the story in an episodic way, pausing now and then to provide historical information that’s not strictly necessary to the story – the sort of thing some authors would put in footnotes. The story moves at a leisurely pace, which readers could find boring. But it all worked quite well for me. I liked the depth of the characters – good and bad – and Yarrow’s sympathetic nature. Some digs are taken at the traditional sexual roles of the time, and I confess I sympathized a good deal with the old guard. Still, by and large I found the book very congenial.

The author has some bad habits. The grammar isn’t always correct, and he has a bad habit of forgetting the initial quotation marks in subsequent paragraphs of an extended speech. He also sometimes forgets which tense he’s writing in.

Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed Gallows Walk, and have bought the sequel.

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Freezin’ season

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Photo credit: Juha Lakaniemi, planetlb. Unsplash license.

I suppose we should all take a second to revel in this rare moment of national unity. By which I mean, of course, the cold weather. All across America, from capital A to shining small a, citizens are sharing the Minnesota Experience. We used to say the winter weather keeps the riffraff out, but it doesn’t seem to be working very well.

Anyway, it’s cold. On Sunday morning I got up for church, put on my suit and trench coat and hat (I’m the only guy at my church who dresses that way for services, but somebody’s got to show the flag), and went out to the garage and got in my car.

And I couldn’t get the door to latch. I slammed it a few times. It caught at last.

And then I checked to see if I could open it again, and I couldn’t.

I hit the buttons on the remote. I hit the buttons on the door. Nothing.

Now I could, in theory, have driven to church and crawled out the passenger side. But after trying it in the garage, I found it was a lot of effort for an old fat man in a long coat. So I gave up on church.

I am, indeed, a fair weather disciple.

My primary theory was that some water had gotten into the door when I washed the car last week, and had frozen, and that was the problem.

Yesterday, I squirted WD-40 into the keyhole. Tried to turn the key, and it still wouldn’t unlock. I gave it overnight to marinate.

Today it was still frozen. I used a hair dryer to warm the lock up. A sleeveless and bootless task, as the English used to say. (I think.)

Tomorrow will be a little warmer. If I still can’t get the thing open, I’ll assume the problem is not ice but mechanics, and try to get an appointment at my garage.

Why you should care about this I have no idea. I’m still at post-translation loose ends. I did nothing today, writing-wise, except to start getting my figures into a spreadsheet for my tax preparer.

As I’ve said too many times, my taxes are way too complicated for my low income. You could say, as far as that goes, that it’s a good thing my script translation gig has gone the way of the floppy disc. At least I don’t have to fill out forms for foreign income. H. & R. Block charges for every form.

But does that make up for losing the right to honestly tell chicks I’m “in the movie business”?

I might be able to tell you if I’d ever tried it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Hunted,’ by James Phelan

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I bought this book previous to my recent resolution (dropped a few posts ago) to ease back on buying thrillers. Just as I grow older and more mellow in my tastes, the thriller genre is on an increasing trajectory of ever-more-implausible cinematic violence and suspense too intense for my old heart.

James Phelan’s The Hunted isn’t actually all that extreme in those regards, but I had trouble getting into it nonetheless.

As you probably don’t recall, I liked Lee Childs’ Jack Reacher books, but swore off when he made it obvious how much he despises Christian Evangelicals. James Phelan’s Jed Walker is advertised as in the Reacher vein, and his last name’s Walker, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Jed Walker, former Air Force commando (apparently such creatures exist), former CIA covert operative, is similar to Jack Reacher in size, strength, and fighting skills. Otherwise, he lacks Reacher’s intriguing Zen simplicity. Jed is basically a fairly normal guy, with relationships and everything. A couple years ago he was forced to fake his death and stay dead for a year – during which time his wife grieved and then remarried. He still loves her.

He also has a father, another covert operations type. Jed is searching for him, but not because of filial piety. His father is somehow involved with a project called Zodiac, a planned sequence of terrorist attacks, each to be the trigger for the next.

In his investigations, Jed learns that several members of the strike team that killed Osama Bin Laden have been murdered, all in a short period of time. He believes this is connected to Zodiac in some way. He heads to the Ozarks to locate the one survivor – a wilderness-wise Marine who lives in a remote compound, guarding his family. Jed races with a team of assassins to reach the man first.

On the way he teams up with the man’s cousin – who is, of course, a young, pretty woman who does her best to seduce him (but Jed is admirably resistant – he still loves his wife).

There was nothing particularly wrong with The Hunted. It kept the action going through many very short chapters. The characters were varied and individual, though they never really grabbed me. I thought the villains’ motives were a little muddled, and the climax confused me – though that may have been my fault for not paying close enough attention.

The author has an unfortunate tendency to repeat observational passages, and could have used better editing. He is apparently English, as he occasionally falls into Britishisms, such as “crisps” and “boot” (for a car trunk).

The Hunted was okay. You might like it. I found it a little thin.