Fiction, Reviews

‘The Clockmaker’s Secret,’ by Jack Benton

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In theory, this was almost an ideal book for me. It’s fairly low on violence (how did I become the kind of reader who relishes a lack of violence in a book?), but it’s too dark to be called a Cozy. The Clockmaker’s Secret by Jack Benton is very British, I dare say, in the sense that eccentricity is often considered a British trait.

This is the second book in a series, and having finished it I see that I reviewed its prequel, The Man by the Sea. I did not like that book at all. I found the characters improbable and the action implausible. I liked The Clockmaker’s Secret a little better, but not enough to endorse it with a full heart.

Our hero is Slim Hardy, a former British commando and current recovering alcoholic, who has decided to become a private eye (without great success) and is spending a holiday in Cornwall to clear his mind.

One day while hiking on Bodmin Moor, he stumbles over an object wrapped in plastic, protruding from the heather. He digs it up and discovers that it’s an unfinished cuckoo clock. He takes it back to the guest house where he’s staying and asks around. It turns out to be the work of Amos Birch, a renowned local craftsman who disappeared more than 20 years ago, leaving behind a crippled wife and a bereaved daughter.

For his own reasons, Slim becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of Amos’ disappearance. He encounters the mulish secrecy of suspicious locals, and meets Amos’ attractive daughter, who seems to know more than she’s saying.

But in the end all Slim’s suppositions will be proved wrong. And he’ll fall off the wagon too.

The Clockmaker’s Secret was one of those books (for this reader) that ends with no clear sense of accomplishment. Some secrets were dug up, but nothing really changed. The characters acted a little more sensibly here than they did in the previous book, but I wasn’t really caught up in the thing. And I don’t like Slim a whole lot.

I don’t generally award stars, but if I did, I guess I’d give The Clockmaker’s Secret three out of five.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Lavender Look,’ by John D. MacDonald

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Making someone dead is a game for the unimaginative, for someone who cannot ever really believe they, too, can die. The curse of empathy is to see yourself in every death, and to see the child hidden in the body of every corpse.

It was around 45 years ago, in Missouri, that I picked up my first Travis McGee novel, The Long Lavender Look, from a rack in a grocery store or a drug store or something. The story proved to be quite a sordid tale of theft and prostitution and murder in a small town. It was the way it was told that grabbed me.

Travis McGee, freelance “salvage specialist,” is barreling south one night on a rural Florida road in Miss Agnes, his blue Rolls Royce pickup conversion, his friend, the economist Meyer, beside him. They’re headed home from a wedding celebration. Suddenly a near-naked girl runs across the  road in front of them, close enough to make McGee hit the brakes, putting Miss Agnes in a skid that lands them in a canal. Meyer pulls Travis from the water, saving his life, but a few minutes later Travis returns the favor when a passing motorist stops and shoots at them, shouting a message that makes no sense to them.

Finally they reach a small town by foot, but they’re soon arrested by sheriff’s deputies. Apparently the guy who shot at them was tortured to death that same night, and Travis and Meyer look like the most likely suspects. Under questioning, one of the deputies brutalizes Meyer, giving him injuries requiring hospitalization. Travis contacts a lawyer who gets them released, but not before warning the sheriff that he’s going to ruin him.

But that’s just the beginning. It gets a lot more complicated than that. As it turns out, the sheriff is a decent cop – though not without blind spots. Travis will stay around to get his own questions answered, and the death count will not be small.

The Long Lavender Look is a tough story, with a lot of collateral damage involved. But the author’s humane and poignant narration makes it all touching and memorable in the end. This is one of my favorite McGee books, and not just because it was my first.

Not politically correct (though there’s plenty of environmental concern), but that’s all to the good as far as I’m concerned.

Music

Sunday Singing: From Depths of Woe I Raise to Thee

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“From Depths of Woe I Raise to Thee” sung by Kayla and Naomi of Trinity Reformed Church of Martinsburg, WV

For the next four weeks preceding Palm Sunday and Easter, I want to feature hymns related to salvation. “From Depths of Woe I Raise to Thee” is an English translation by Richard Massie of Martin Luther’s German hymn based on Psalm 130. Massie’s first translation was published in Martin Luther’s Spiritual Songs in 1854. I believe the text was altered last century, as hymn publishers will do, but the tune sung above is Luther’s 1524 original.

1 From depths of woe I raise to thee
the voice of lamentation;
Lord, turn a gracious ear to me
and hear my supplication:
if thou iniquities dost mark,
our secret sins and misdeeds dark,
O who shall stand before thee?

2 To wash away the crimson stain,
grace, grace alone, availeth;
our works, alas! are all in vain;
in much the best life faileth:
no man can glory in thy sight,
all must alike confess thy might,
and live alone by mercy.

3 Therefore my trust is in the Lord,
and not in mine own merit;
on him my soul shall rest, his Word
upholds my fainting spirit:
his promised mercy is my fort,
my comfort, and my sweet support;
I wait for it with patience.

4 What though I wait the live-long night,
and ’til the dawn appeareth,
my heart still trusteth in his might;
it doubteth not nor feareth:
do thus, O ye of Israel’s seed,
ye of the Spirit born indeed;
and wait ’til God appeareth.

5 Though great our sins and sore our woes,
his grace much more aboundeth;
his helping love no limit knows,
our utmost need it soundeth.
Our Shepherd good and true is he,
who will at last his Israel free
from all their sin and sorrow.

As a bonus, let me share Michael O’Brien’s arrangement with you as well.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction

Life Builds Its Own Fences, and Fond Memories of Louis Armstrong

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A few months ago, I watched August Wilson’s Fences on Amazon. The play was first produced in 1985 and won a Pulitzer and a Tony in 1987. When the play returned in 2010, it won another Tony along with awards for the main actors. I watched the 2016 movie adaptation, directed by and starring Denzel Washington along with Viola Davis and Stephen McKinley Henderson. They were compelling and marvelous.

It’s a moving drama about a man, Troy, who was something of a star in baseball’s negro leagues and now works in Pittsburgh as a garbage man. His wife, Rose, asks him to put up a fence around their back lot, and he is a common-sense man who will do a job right, if he doesn’t talk it to death first. The story spans a couple decades, I think, and the fence is incomplete for the majority. It’s a metaphor for the boundaries Rose wants to protect their family and the boundaries Troy wants to exceed as a man who has done something with his life.

I don’t know what viewers of the trailer think of these lines, but coming as they do with the full weight of the story, they had me bawling.

Troy: It’s not easy for me to admit that I’ve been standing in the same place for eighteen years!

Rose: Well, I’ve been standing with you! I gave eighteen years of my life to stand in the same spot as you!

Troy had chosen his ego over his wife. He framed his choices as his ambition struggling against life and society. She framed them as betrayal. Many men take the same stand while making the different choices. That’s what mid-life crises are about. It’s a story that resonates.

Banned Books: It doesn’t resonate with everyone equally, though. In 2020, a mother had good reasons for complaining about her 14-year-old-son being required to read Fences in class as the only black student in eighth grade. She got a little too upset about it, but I think school officials proved to be the thin-skinned ones. They expelled him.

Thriller Writing: Here’s a cool discussion from 1958 between authors Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler to honor the latter’s 70th birthday. Near the beginning, Fleming notes that he writes thrillers and Chandler does not.

Fleming: I don’t call yours thrillers. Yours are novels.
Chandler: A lot of people call them thrillers.
Fleming: I know. I think it’s wrong.

Memories: What brought life back to tired guitarist Doc Watson? The memory of a tube radio and listening to Louis Armstrong.

New from Bill Watterson: In case you missed the news two weeks ago, the beloved cartoonist Bill Watterson is releasing a new book — The Mysteries, a vibrantly illustrated “fable for grown-ups.”

“From Bill Watterson, bestselling creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and John Kascht, one of America’s most renowned caricaturists, comes a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding.”

Photo: Paul’s Market, Franklin, New York. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Secret Weapon,’ by Bradley Wright

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Maybe it started with Jason Bourne – I mean the movie Jason Bourne, not the one in the novel, which is much more cerebral than the film(s). There’s the can’t-miss formula – create a bigger-than-life main character, give him near superhuman fighting skills, put him in impossible situations, and keep the car chases, gun fights, and explosions coming. If the plot’s tissue thin, never mind. The audience didn’t come for plot anyway.

Alexander King, the hero of The Secret Weapon, first book in a series, is a former CIA agent. His status now is equivocal. Officially, he’s dead. Only the CIA director and couple of his trusted friends know he’s still alive. Currently he’s living secretly in London.

One day he looks out his apartment window and observes the attempted murder of a young woman. King rushes to her rescue, and soon finds himself on the run with her. Then he learns that she is being hunted by a family of terrorists headquartered in Greece. King does his best to get her safe, but when she disappears, that’s only the first of many surprises.

I didn’t hate The Secret Weapon. It delivered everything the blurb promised – the plot is fast and full of twists, and the characters have something approaching personalities. Plausibility is far back in the rear-view window, but nobody came for that.

My main complaint was the writing, as in the use of words. I’d guess the first draft of the book was dictated; it has that feel. The author doesn’t know when to use “as” instead of “like.” As in, “…especially when such a high-value target like Husaam Hammoud was taken out….” There are lots of awkward line constructions like, “The fire was on its last legs.” Or, “He stared at the stubble on his iron jaw.” (An iron jaw refers to resistance to impact, not appearance).

Also, the hero’s relationship with his best friend, a beautiful, butt-kicking female agent older than he is, seemed odd to me. It’s described as brother-sister, but didn’t feel right.

However, if popcorn reading is what you’re after, The Secret Weapon isn’t bad. Patriotism is treated positively here, which isn’t always the case these days.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Religion

The conservative resistance to Hitler

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My friend Gene Edward Veith has a review up at the Acton Institute. He reports on the book, White Knights in the Black Orchestra, by Tom Dunkel. Although the book is not primarily an examination of conservatives in wartime Germany, it does make it plain that the conservative conspiracy to kill Hitler was much bigger than Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his circle, and that German conservatives constituted a major, and serious, challenge to the Third Reich. He writes.

My impression had always been that Bonhoeffer was caught up in a quixotic and poorly planned attempt by a small group of German aristocrats and military officers at the very end of the war, and that his role was minimal, basically that of a courier. But Dunkel shows that the Black Orchestra conspiracy began in the earliest days of Hitler’s regime, that it penetrated to the highest levels of the German war machine, and that it carried out many anti-Nazi missions, some of which had an impact on the outcome of the war…..

Meanwhile, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was battling the so-called German Christians, who wished to Nazify the Protestant state church by turning Christianity into a cultural religion (as liberal theologians were already doing) and expunging its “Jewish elements” to the point of removing the Old Testament from the Bible altogether. (This, too, was made feasible by piggybacking on the work of generations of liberal Bible scholars who had succeeded in undermining biblical authority within the state church.)….

That National Socialism is thought of today as an extreme kind of conservatism is one of the biggest victories of Marxist propaganda. This book shows that Hitler and his followers were radical revolutionaries, who sought to liquidate—not conserve—the traditional Western values of faith, morality, and freedom.

Dunkel does not play up the conservative and Christian angle as such, beyond saying that the conspirators “tended to be politically conservative to the bone” and describing the key figures as devout Christians.

Read the whole thing here.
Fiction, Reviews

‘Defending Innocence,’ by Peter Kirkland

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Occasionally a publisher will get the idea to package a series of novels. Apparently that’s what Relay Publishing did in putting a couple ghost writers together, naming their collaboration “Peter Kirkland,” and setting them to writing a series of legal thrillers called “Small Town Lawyer.” The real writers, whoever they are, are clearly competent.

The hero of Defending Innocence is Leland Monroe, who used to be a big city prosecuting attorney. But he destroyed his career when he covered up the missteps of his wife, who was an alcoholic. That lost him his job; he lost his wife to an auto accident. Now he’s moved back to his home town, Basking Rock. He’s trying to establish himself as a personal lawyer, but finding it hard to build a practice. He’s also trying to reestablish his relationship with his teenaged son, crippled in the accident that killed his mother.

Then the son’s best friend is arrested for murdering his abusive father. And Leland can’t resist volunteering to defend the boy (though he can’t afford the pro bono), both for his son’s sake and because the boy’s mother was his high school girlfriend. As in any crime story set in a small town, it soon becomes apparent that there’s considerable corruption under public façades of respectability.

I must say, although there were few surprises here, that the small town hypocrites were a little more nuanced than the usual run of such characters in novels. I thought the writing in Defending Innocence pretty good, and the characters well-developed. Opportunities to lampoon small-town Christians were not exploited much.

I did think, though, that the final showdown was kind of abrupt and too quickly resolved.

However, all in all, Defending Innocence was a decent novel.

Religion

The Jesus Revolution, a veteran’s memoir

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The Jesus Generation, by Billy Graham

A friend invited me to go with a group to see the Jesus Revolution movie. I told him sorry, I was busy translating, and then I had to go out of town.

To be honest, I was glad to avoid it. I’m not against the movie, I wish it well and am delighted that an actor of Kelsey Grammar’s stature is involved. But for me, the whole Jesus Movement is a sensitive subject.

Not long ago, one of my old friends posted a picture of our musical group from back around 1975. One of the iterations of the group, that is to say, as our personnel changed a little through the years, anchored by a fairly stable core of four or five guys.

I looked at our young faces in black and white. Long hair. Bell-bottomed jeans. Some (like me) trying to look cool, others being pretty cool in actuality. It was, all things considered, probably the happiest time of my life. These guys were my spiritual brothers, closer to me than anyone has ever been – or is likely to be again – in my life.

Which makes it all the more painful to remember.

Because 90% of that group – I won’t detail how I break that down – and indeed of all the Christian friends I made back in those days – walked away from the faith we shared. Walked away from believing in the inerrancy of Scripture. Walked away from “One Way.” Followed their church body (or bodies) in sliding toward total cultural assimilation.

It makes it more poignant that – at least as I remember it – the more impressive I found any person as a believer, the more likely they were to apostatize. The ones who seemed really spiritual, the ones who seemed to know their Bibles best, the boldest witnesses, the ones with the most impressive testimonies – the day came almost inevitably when they told me (or more likely I heard second-hand) that they “weren’t into that stuff anymore.”

Which colors my perception of the whole Jesus Movement phenomenon. I haven’t observed that it really left much of a positive impact on our society. America became less Christian in the wake of the movement. My perception (or judgment, perhaps a Pharisaical one) is that people who became Jesus Freaks tended to grow more emotion-based, more subjective in their religion. They slid on into liberalism, and transcendental meditation, and New Age, and whatever else pleased them emotionally. They were converted to “my Jesus,” not the Jesus of Scripture.

I hope other people’s experience was better. I hope the Jesus Revolution movie brings many people to faith. I hope the Asbury Revival proves the spark for a new and better Great Awakening.

How lovely it would be to be wrong in the end.

Authors, Uncategorized

To Bemidji and back

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Your humble servant, humbly lecturing.

Ah, the high adventure of the author/translator/lecturer’s life! I’m back from my travels, none the worse for wear in spite of age, infirmities, and my well-attested general incompetence.

I set out on Sunday morning, which was clear and cold. It’s about 3 and a half hours to Bemidji, a world-famous northern Minnesota center for winter sports and summer fishing. I arrived in plenty of time to get lunch at a restaurant – something I’ve done rarely of late, due to tight money. But I had prospects of income, and I counted my chickens before they hatched, eating some of them in the form of a turkey dinner. Even went crazy and had pie for desert, which is probably imprudent when you’re about to speak publicly. Living dangerously, however, has always been my style.

Trudy and me and Brad. Do I look like a statue in a wax museum to you? The thought crossed my mind…

I arrived at the church where the Sons of Norway meeting would be held, and met Brad and Trudy, my hosts, who’d thoughtfully dressed as Vikings to help me feel at home. (Actually, they’ve decided to push Viking themes in an effort to stir up interest in their lodge after the setbacks of the Covid lockdowns). They were very helpful and competent, and – to my amazement – my laptop hooked up seamlessly with the projector. I’ve learned to be highly pessimistic about such hookups based on my recent experiences, but this went like clockwork. Which filled me with a different foreboding. This foreboding, fortunately, proved unfounded.

At the appointed time I delivered my tried and true lecture on the book Viking Legacy (which, in case I haven’t mentioned it in the last few minutes, I translated). There were a couple glitches in my PowerPoint presentation, but those were due to human error (mine). By and large the lecture went extremely well. The Sons of Norway people had promoted the event extensively, and they were pleased with the turnout. I was pleased with the audience response, and (especially) by book sales.

After everything was over and we’d swept and garnished the room, Dan and Trudy took me to their home, where we’d agreed I’d spent the night. They gave me a lovely supper, and we talked till after 9:00 p.m., which was staying up pretty late for me that particular night (Brad is himself the author of a book, A Conversaunt Existence, on the existence of God). We were concerned about weather forecasts predicting dangerous driving conditions in the morning.

In the morning there was in fact a light mist falling, which froze on all surfaces. But when Brad left for a meeting, he called back to say the roads seemed all right. So I set out for home, driving a little under the speed limit until I got to the four-lane highway, where everything seemed clean and dry. I arrived at my destination safely, and my GPS will vouch for it.

Now I’m in pretty good spirits, but bone-weary in that way that only an introvert feels when he’s been through an explosion of socialization. I have, nonetheless, the satisfaction of coming home with a lighter load than I took out, as cash weighs a whole lot less than books.

The only way I can imagine in which the expedition could have gone better would have been if I’d found true love.

But I expect true love is heavier than either cash or books.

Writing

Gioia: What I Didn’t Learn in College English

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Ted Gioia writes about the types of papers college professors want to see and what a writer must do to actually write well. It’s a good overview of part of his college career and the aftermath in the workplace.

“A writer must be curious, because the readers are. A writer must seek inspiration and mind-expanding experiences, because the readers do. A writer must try to find wisdom, because that’s what readers are after.”

Book Reviews, Creative Culture