On Monday, May 17th (at 9:30pm EST), T. M. Moore and Jimmy Davis will interview Dr. Larry Crabb live on the Worldview Network internet radio program.
Always Say Goodbye, and Bright Futures, by Stuart M. Kaminsky
In March of 2009, mystery author Stuart M. Kaminsky moved with his wife from his Sarasota home to St. Louis, Missouri, in order to wait for a liver transplant (he’d contracted hepatitis during service as a military medic in France in the late 1950s). Two days later he suffered a stroke, making him ineligible for the surgery, and he passed away the following October.
The online accounts of his death I’ve read give no hint how (or whether) Kaminsky’s health affected his writing plans. But these last two novels in his Lew Fonesca series (my favorite of his four detective series) possess an elegiac quality, as if the author was tying up loose ends.
I’ve told you about Lew Fonesca before. He’s a bald, skinny process server in Sarasota, Florida. During most of the series, he lives in the back room of his tiny office, next to a Dairy Queen. He gets around chiefly by bicycle. He doesn’t want to own anything, and he doesn’t want people in his life. He’s chronically depressed, overcome by the death of his wife, in a hit-and-run accident in Chicago a few years back. He drove south until his car broke down in Sarasota, and settled where he stopped.
And yet he doesn’t stay alone. Over the course of the books he acquires a staunch friend in the old cowboy Ames McKinney, who backs him up in tight spots. An old woman he once helped took in an unwed mother he rescued, and now he’s sort of an unofficial godfather to the baby. He has a girlfriend. There’s a “little brother” (who likes going around with him because shots tend to get fired). A therapist. And (in the final book) a Chinese man who sleeps on his floor, for reasons you’ll have to read the novels to learn.
You might think these books would be depressing. They’re not. In fact—it occurred to me while reading Bright Futures—they’re actually rather funny. Lew Fonesca, like some farcical Job, is the butt of a cosmic joke. The God in whom he claims not to believe (he’s a lapsed Episcopalian) seems to be playing games with him. Continue reading Always Say Goodbye, and Bright Futures, by Stuart M. Kaminsky
What the Source?
Ask not what you believe to be, but only what if. Tim Challies has a humorous list of quotes, asking us to decide whether they came from fortune cookies or Joel Osteen, the beloved author of Your Best Life Now and It’s Your Time For example, where does this statement come from: “Do all you can to make your dreams come true”?
Five Responses to Fairy Tales
Travis Prinzi writes about Tolkien making the reader his fairy tale in The Hobbit. “At this point,” Prinzi says, “about 2/3 of the way into the book, Tolkien makes a very deliberate story transition: ‘…we are now drawing near the end of the eastward journey and coming to the last and greatest adventure, so we must hurry on’ (end of chapter 9, ‘Barrels out of Bond’).” What happens next is curious.
Idolators
“Don’t trust or admire a man who’s passionate in his convictions about culture but passive in his convictions about Scripture.” – A Jared Wilson Tweet (via SD Smith)
ESV Now Online
The English Standard Version of the Holy Bible is now fully online.
Free access to the ESV Online is now available by signing up at www.esvonline.org. Users are able to customize their own interface, highlight and mark verse numbers, add bookmark ribbons, search the ESV text, and manage personal notes. The free version also includes a variety of daily reading plans and devotional calendars.
P.D. James on Detective Fiction
Author P.D. James has a book about detective fiction with an excerpt here. She writes:
And why murder? The central mystery of a detective story need not indeed involve a violent death, but murder remains the unique crime and it carries an atavistic weight of repugnance, fascination and fear. Readers are likely to remain more interested in which of Aunt Ellie’s heirs laced her nightly cocoa with arsenic than in who stole her diamond necklace while she was safely holidaying in Bournemouth. Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night doesn’t contain a murder, although there is an attempt at one, and the death at the heart of Frances Fyfield’s Blood from Stone is a spectacular and mysterious suicide. But, except in those novels of espionage which are primarily concerned with treachery, it remains rare for the central crime in an orthodox mystery to be other than the ultimate crime for which no human reparation can ever be made.
One size does not fit all
Had a thought today, about something I discussed the other day, in my post on “How monsters are made.”
In that post I pondered a story of child abuse on the foreign mission field, and wondered how people who serve Christ sacrificially, far from home and comforts, could be so totally self-absorbed as to abuse children (child abusers, in my opinion and experience, are by definition people whose hearts are centered on their own needs and desires. They are profoundly selfish people).
I’ve figured out a way to think about it now.
I hasten to add that this is just my own way of wrapping my brain around the problem, and probably tells you more about the workings of my mind than anything in the real world.
But here’s my hypothesis. It starts with a story. Continue reading One size does not fit all
To make a long story short, takes work
Loren Eaton at I Saw Lightning Fall links to an interesting piece by jazz musician Eric Felton over at the Wall Street Journal. I don’t think Felton will make a whole lot of enemies with his complaint about the unnecessary length of much current entertainment, such as movies, music and books.
It will be objected that any number of canonic masterpieces are gargantuan. Yes, of course. But even many of those could stand a trim. Did “Moby Dick” really need the chapter called “Cetology,” Melville’s rambling effort to prove that whales weren’t mammals?
One of the constant occasions for worry in my novel-writing career has been that, once I write the story I want to tell, I generally find it’s only about 60- to 80,000 words long. Jim Baen liked novels to come in around 100,000 words. I believe he felt (and many publishers today are of the same view) that when a consumer plunks down $7.99 for a paperback novel, he wants to feel he can take a short vacation in that book’s world.
The idea of publishing shorter books, and charging less, is not up for discussion, it would appear. Continue reading To make a long story short, takes work
Meeting Creatives and Wangerin in Nashville
The Rabbit Room artists are holding a creativity conference in August. They are calling it Hutchmoot, and Walter Wangerin, Jr. is coming. Wow. I need to pray about attending this.