Music, Religion, Uncategorized

‘God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,’ and Gary too

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I seem to be thinking of old carols this Advent season, so today I figured I’d look at a genuinely old carol (as opposed to that counterfeit antique, Wenceslas, that I covered a few days ago). I’m thinking here of God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen. According to Wikipedia, we know of an early version of this carol from the 17th Century, though the version we sing today comes from an 1833 collection produced in England by William Sandys.

Now right off, I find myself on the wrong foot about some of the words. I’ve always sung it as “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” (more about the comma placement below). But according to the Wikipedia article, “In fact, ye would never have been correct, because ye is a subjective (nominative) pronoun only, never an objective (accusative) pronoun.” I, with my rough-and-ready workman’s grasp of English grammar, had no clue about this. (Oddly, the title on the YouTube clip above has it wrong, but the sing-along lyrics get it right.)

The most common misunderstanding about the song has to do with the meaning of the words, “God rest you merry, gentlemen.” Modern people assume the comma should go after you – “God rest you, merry gentlemen,” with “merry” describing “gentlemen.” But that’s because we’ve forgotten the idiomatic phrase, “rest you merry.” Shakespeare uses it in a couple of his plays, “As You Like It,” and “Romeo and Juliet.” It originally meant “God rest you [grant you to be] merry [peaceful and happy].”

Personally, I’ve been needing a little comfort and joy lately. One week ago tonight (Friday), my friend Gary Anderson passed away after a long illness. Gary was a founder and longtime central figure in my Viking reenactment group (that’s him on the right with me in the photo above). He was sort of a walking photo opportunity, an artist’s dream of a Viking, our most public face and voice.

He was a wounded and decorated Vietnam combat veteran. He was a professional Santa Claus in season, for many years. He was a dyslexic who taught himself to read. He came on strong, rather frightening me when I first met him, but he proved to be a stalwart and faithful friend. Another friend and I visited him a couple times during his last months, the final time about three weeks ago. Death is Grendel, a mighty foe, but it had to beat him to the ground before it took him. He never gave up. He went out as befits a Christian Viking.

Creative Writing

The Wife Killer

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Catherine plummeting twelve stories from their balcony meant Edward had committed three untraceable uxoricides, each at Christmastime. He didn’t hate women per se; dead wives were just thrillingly profitable.

He stepped inside to call the police and found his phone dead. Hers was on the kitchen counter, ringing. Caller ID: “Catherine.”

He answered. “Who is this?”

“Does uxoricide help you sleep, Edward?”

He returned to the balcony rail and looked. Far below, her crushed body faced him, wild eyes catching him like hands, pitching him into the air between them.

She whimpered, “I’ve never killed a husband. What’s it like?”

This original flash fiction is part of Loren Eaton’s 2025 Advent Ghost Storytelling Fest. Read other entries posted or linked on his blog, and let me know what you think of this one. You can find more 100-word stories like this by searching the tag “Advent Ghost Stories” or “Flash fiction.”

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Fragile Coast,’ by Scott Hunter

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I gave a mixed review to The Fragile Cage, the first volume in Scott Hunter’s Cameron Kyle series, about an English ex-police detective living with a bullet fragment in his brain that could kill him at any moment. I liked the energy of the story, comparing it to the James Bond books, though I didn’t think the plot made a lot of sense.

In the second book, The Fragile Coast, the author seems almost to have been reading my review. Because now we’re taken straight into MI6 territory. A spymaster offers Kyle an assignment – to go to Spain and help look for a lost American atomic bomb. The agent they had in place has been kidnapped, and it happens to be a woman of whom Kyle is fond – Jude Bates, a former policewoman he’s worked with before.

But he hasn’t even gotten unpacked before he discovers he’s been lied to. Which sets the tone for the rest of the story. Every chapter seems to feature a twist, where something Kyle has learned turns out to be false, and somebody he trusted turns out to be an enemy. At least until the next plot twist.

Twists are good plot devices, but in my opinion they can be overdone. There’s such a thing as just jerking your reader around, and in my opinion The Fragile Coast committed that sin. The plot (yet again) seemed contrived.

Also, the book ended in a cliff-hanger. I hate those.

The Cameron Kyle series showed some promise, but I’m done with it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Damnation Street,’ by Andrew Klavan

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Bishop looked the man over. He was a big, evil chuckle-head. A white guy approximately the size of Denver. He had short blond hair and stupid eyes and a vague pharmaceutical smile. He had a voice so deep it sounded like an earth tremor.

Andrew Klavan’s Weiss-Bishop trilogy comes to a thundering conclusion in Damnation Street. I’m pretty good with words, but I struggle to express how much I enjoyed it. And I’ve read it before.

Quick background: Big, sad, middle-aged San Francisco private eye Scott Weiss has fallen in love with a woman he’s never even met – a prostitute who calls herself Julie Wyant. He also knows that she’s living on the run, in fear of the Shadow-man, a legendary professional assassin. The Shadow-man has a chameleon-like gift for disguise, and is an utter sadist. His dream for Julie is to catch her and torture her to death. That’s his idea of love.

This dynamic has formed a subplot in the first two books, but it takes center stage in Damnation Street, as very different obsessions draw these two men into a final showdown. In some ways they are mirror images of one another – so which force will prevail? Empathy or diabolic hate?

Weiss could use his partner, Jim Bishop, at a time like this, but Bishop failed him badly in Shotgun Alley. Bishop has always been the kind of man who lives on the edge, and he may have fallen beyond redemption now.

There is one more character in play, though. One I didn’t mention in the previous review.

The narrator of the trilogy is actually one of its most interesting characters. He’s clearly a fictionalized portrait of the author himself in his post-college days. He tells us he took a job with Weiss and Bishop because he’d always loved detective fiction, and wanted to learn about it first-hand, so he could write hard-boiled books himself.

In Dynamite Road, the narrator met Emma McNair, the girl of his dreams. But he was prevented from calling her because – with all the idiocy of young, horny men – he stumbled that very night into a sexual relationship with an older woman, and has been too cowardly to break it off since. In Damnation Street, he encounters Emma once again, and she gives him an ultimatum – “I want a man I can look up to and admire. Don’t come back until you are one.”

Which is how he comes to find himself in a fistfight outside of a brothel, giving Weiss the best backup he’s capable of.

But it all finally culminates in a showdown in a lonely house, where Weiss entices the Shadow-man. Author Klavan sets the scene like Hitchcock, letting us know everything there is to know about the Shadow-man’s plans, dangers Weiss can’t know. Time slows down, and the dramatic tension is exquisite, even after multiple readings.

These books can be taken on several levels. On the surface, they’re well-crafted hard-boiled mysteries. On a deeper level, they’re chivalric romances, transposed into a modern key. And – perhaps – on the deepest level, they’re meditations on that mystery of love and idealism that motivates all of Klavan’s work.

The publishers made a serious error in the Kindle edition, by placing their “Thank you for reading” message after the last numbered chapter, but before the Epilogue. Don’t miss the Epilogue, though. It’s important.

The Weiss-Bishop books are, I contend, an apotheosis of the hard-boiled genre. I recommend them, and even urge them upon you. But cautions are in order for violence, sexual situations, and very rough language.

Music, Religion

Sissel sings ‘Glade Jul’

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Tonight, because it’s not Christmas without a few hymns from Sissel, we have Glade Jul, the Norwegian version of “Silent Night.”

The Norwegian translation does an interesting thing with the lyrics. It pulls the whole story into the present – or pulls us into the past, back to the first Christmas. The Norwegian lines of the first verse go (more or less, my translation):

Happy Christmas, Holy Christmas. 
Angels descend unseen. 
Hither they fly, with leaves of Paradise, 
Where they behold what God has accomplished. 
Secretly they walk among us; 
Secretly they walk among us.
Fiction, Reviews

‘Dynamite Road,’ and ‘Shotgun Alley,’ by Andrew Klavan

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“She changed things,” Whip Pomeroy went on in that same overly sweet, overly elevated tone. “She changed… everything. Everyone. She was like…oh—oh, an unreal creature. Like paintings you see. Or daydreams you have. She was the way people never are. You know? You can’t know.”

The time comes, periodically, when I know I need to re-read Andrew Klavan’s Weiss and Bishop trilogy again.

I think we’re all feeling a little out of sorts lately. The news has been pretty awful. Whatever way one feels the world ought to be going, it doesn’t seem to be going that way at all.

I get the feeling Andrew Klavan has been feeling like that too. I like to watch his podcasts – delayed, of course, on YouTube, because I’m too cheap to spring for a Daily Wire subscription. But Klavan seems a little tetchy lately. I get the feeling he’s getting fed up with the community he joined when he chose, some years back, to be baptized. Tired of e-mails from earnest souls asking how he can call himself a Christian when he writes about such awful topics, using such dirty language. I hope we don’t lose him over that, because we need him badly.

So I’ll supplement my previous reviews of the Weiss-Bishop books on this blog, and the one I wrote years back for The American Spectator, by again reviewing the two books I’ve read so far this time around – Dynamite Road and Shotgun Alley.

The heroes of these books are a pair of San Francisco private detectives – Scott Weiss and Jim Bishop. The names themselves are suggestive – “Weiss” means white, suggesting the proverbial White Knight. And if Weiss takes that role, then Bishop suggests another chess man, the oblique piece that never moves in a straight line.

Scott Weiss is a former cop, big, sad-faced, overweight, and middle aged. He foreshadows Klavan’s current character Cameron Winter in being an intuitive detective. He has a knack for getting into people’s heads, for discerning their motivations and fears, predicting their next moves. His ability to track down fugitives is legendary.

Jim Bishop is younger, a handsome, buff risk-taker, a natural outlaw. He treats women like disposable objects, and they love him for it. (Weiss envies him this talent, with guilt.) Weiss pulled him out of the gutter and gave him a second chance. Saw potential in him. He’s a valuable operative, but it’s largely due to his willingness to break the rules, while Weiss looks the other way.

In Dynamite Road, Bishop is sent to a small town aviation company, where one of the owners suspects his partner is using their planes for illegal activities. Bishop, an expert combat pilot, goes to work for them, with a plan to replace the pilot the criminals have selected for their coming operation, incidentally seducing his wife so he can pump her for information.

Meanwhile, Weiss has fallen in love. A woman shows up in an associated investigation – a prostitute with the face of an angel. He grows obsessed with this woman, Julie Wyant. (Her name is reminiscent of Clyde Wynant, the subject of the manhunt in Dashiel Hammet’s The Thin Man.) He gradually becomes aware that he’s not the only man hunting this woman. The other is a mysterious, legendary killer known as The Shadowman, perhaps the most dangerous – and relentless – criminal in the world. (Continued on next page.)

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Music, Religion

‘Good King Wenceslas’

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Tonight’s Christmas carol ushers us into a historical period in which I’m more or less at home (the early 10th Century, in which my current Work In Progress is set), though not so much as far as the turf is concerned. I’ve always assumed that Good King Wenceslas was a medieval English Christmas song, passed down through generations.

And that’s just what its author intended. The lyrics were in fact written in 1853 by an Englishman named John Mason Neale. This insidious semi-papist was a member of the Oxford Group, that Victorian and Edwardian movement that sought to turn the Anglican Church away from Pietism, back to its Roman Catholic roots. He set out to write a song that would honor a saint, sound medieval, and sing well. The tune he chose was “Tempus adest floridum,” (The Blooming Time Is Here), a 13th Century Latin hymn to spring. It worked brilliantly, and became a classic. I’m fond of it.

So what about the real King Wenceslas (full disclosure – I’m getting all this from Wikipedia. You could do as well yourself, but I’m putting it all in one place for you)? Well, first of all, Duke Wenceslas I of Bohemia (ca. 907-935) was not a king in his lifetime, though the title was bestowed on him posthumously by the Holy Roman Emperor. In spite of all the illustrations you’ve seen showing him as an old man with a white beard, he in fact died very young – before he was thirty, as you’ll see from his biography dates.

Wenceslas’ grandparents were the first Christian rulers of Bohemia. His mother, Drahomira, accepted baptism to marry his father, but apparently her heart wasn’t in it. After his father’s death, his grandmother Ludmila served as regent – until she was murdered by Drahomira, who then went on to persecute Christians. Wenceslas was brought to power in a coup against her.

He spent his short reign struggling against various enemies. The Magyars attacked from the east, and on the West, the Franks, the Saxons, and the Bavarians gave him trouble. He made it a policy to ally his Bohemian church more with Rome than Constantinople.

In September 935, Wenceslas was treacherously murdered by assassins paid by his brother Boleslav “the Cruel,” who had invited him to a feast. Boleslav is said to have delivered the killing blow himself. After Wenceslas’ death, legends of his sanctity spread, and he became patron saint of the Bohemians and Czechs, as he is today. (Saint Olaf of Norway would later follow a similar script.)

One of the Wenceslas legends says that it was his practice to leave the palace every night, accompanied by just one of his chamberlains, and go out, barefoot, to distribute charity to the poor. The carol immortalizes a variation of that story in which they set out on the feast of St. Stephen (Dec. 26) in heavy snow. The chamberlain (“page” in the song) complains that he hasn’t the strength to plow through the drifts any longer (I don’t know if he was allowed to wear shoes on these errands or not), and Wenceslas tells him to just walk in his tracks – and behold, it’s warm enough in those spots to melt the snow, enabling him to proceed in comfort.

“Wherefore, Christian men, be sure – wealth or rank possessing – ye who now will bless the poor  Shall yourselves find blessing!”

Which, when delivered by a Christmas caroler, was an obvious hint that it’s cold out here and some hot food – or, even better a hot drink – would be welcomed and pleasing to God.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dark Fantastic,’ by Stanley Ellin

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I very much enjoyed Stanley Ellin’s Star Light, Star Bright, which I reviewed the other day. I liked the hero/narrator, John Milano. I compared him to Travis McGee, an easy-going, very masculine, independent-minded detective. The second (and last) book in the John Milano series is The Dark Fantastic. He’s less McGee-esque this time out.

For one thing, the first-person narration is gone. The Dark Fantastic employs two points of view, dividing the time between John Milano and our villain. There’s never any question who the villain is, or what evil he intends. The drama here centers on whether John will figure out the truth and be on hand in time to prevent disaster.

Like Travis McGee, New York investigator John Milano is an untethered male, a boy who never grew up. The difference is that McGee lives that way by choice, taking his retirement in installments because he doesn’t expect to ever grow old. John Milano is merely stuck in adolescence. Unlike the independent McGee, John Milano works for a man he despises, just because the money’s good.

John’s expertise is in the recovery of stolen art, and in The Dark Fantastic his job is to try to locate a couple valuable pre-Impressionist works stolen from a California collection. His suspicions lead him to a shady art gallery in Greenwich Village. Needing an inside source, John approaches Christy Bailey, the beautiful, black receptionist there. She agrees to spy on her boss (this requires a little lying on John’s part), but she wants something in return – an investigation of her own. Her little sister has started spending a lot of money she can’t account for. Christy wants to know what kind of trouble she’s in.

John looks into it, and in the course of his investigation grows increasingly closer to Christie. They come from very different worlds, but the attraction is immediate and powerful.

But all the while, we’re watching the villain planning his atrocity. He’s on a schedule, and time is running out.

I didn’t enjoy The Dark Fantastic as much as Star Light, Star Bright. The story was darker and more gritty this time out, and John Milano seemed to possess less agency. Also, he and Christy spend a lot of time talking about race issues. This book was written in the early 1980s, and – in my opinion – American race narratives don’t age well. What seemed like a reasonable accommodation in the eighties is considered condescending and suspect today. The goalposts are forever moving.

So I don’t think The Dark Fantastic is entirely successful. But it is gripping and moves pretty fast. Cautions for ugly racism and the sexual abuse of a minor.

Music, Religion

‘Away in a Manger’

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Tonight, “Away in a Manger.” It’s a Christmas hymn I tend to overlook – because it’s expressly for children and not very sophisticated. In my own personal history, it was the first Christmas carol I ever memorized. I remember (probably erroneously) singing it to my grandmother and an aunt or two (using the melody in the clip above) while riding in a car at night at Christmastime. But I moved on to songs that had more going on under the surface.

When I was a kid, I often heard “Away in a Manger” referred to as “Luther’s Cradle Hymn.” Everybody knew it was a translation from Luther. Turns out it wasn’t, though. Luther did write a Christmas hymn for his children, but it’s called “From Heaven Above To Earth I Come,” and can be found in any Lutheran hymnal. Nothing in his works resembles “AIAM” at all. It is, as someone has pointed out, not his kind of thing. If he’d written it, he’d have thrown in more theology. He was not a man to let a chance to catechize people go to waste. Sentimental he was not.

The origins of “AIAM” are in fact quite mysterious. According to Wikipedia, its earliest known appearance was on March 2, 1882 in the “Children’s Corner” of an anti-Masonic paper called The Christian Cynosure. Within a few months it had appeared in a couple other publications, always identified as “Luther’s Cradle Song.” This is rather perplexing. Somebody actually wrote the thing, but they gave credit to the Reformer. Why?

It’s been suggested (again, I get this from Wikipedia) that it may have originated in a forgotten children’s Christmas play, in which Luther sings the song for his children. Maybe somebody took the script literally, and reprinted it cutting the play’s author out. Nobody seems to have sued for copyright infringement, in any case.

The immortal author Lars Walker refers to “AIAM” in his novel Troll Valley, complaining that, because the song describes “the little Lord Jesus asleep in the hay,” many people draw the erroneous conclusion that hay is stuff for animals to sleep on. This is wrong, because a manger is a feed trough, and hay is for eating and belongs there. What animals sleep on is straw, another agricultural product altogether.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Star Light, Star Bright,’ by Stanley Ellin

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Private investigator John Milano, hero and narrator of Star Light, Star Bright, works for a large New York agency. When his boss gets a special request from a multi-millionaire for his services in protecting a man at his own estate near Miami, John is less than enthusiastic. Because that multimillionaire is married to Sharon Bauer, gorgeous movie queen. John was involved with Sharon a couple years ago, and she in fact left him for the rich guy. But the money’s so good he can’t refuse.

Down in Florida, he finds himself tasked with protecting a man who calls himself Kalos, leader of a trendy cult (whom John knows from his past as a con man astrologer). Sharon is a member of the cult, as are several other movie people who are resident at the estate. Typewritten threats to Kalos’s life have been showing up – reinforced by the killing of the family dog. It’s John’s job, not only to protect Kalos, but to figure out who has a motive for killing him. Also to fend off the advances of Sharon, who’s suddenly interested in him again, while trying to get close to her husband’s secretary, who’s standoffish.

I quite enjoyed Star Light, Star Bright. John Milano is a strong, masculine hero, somewhat in the Travis McGee category, though less laid back. The characters were vivid, and the puzzle genuinely puzzling – blindsided me completely. There are a couple sequel books, and I plan to read them.

Recommended.