The Thing in the Snow by Sean Adams

 

Three people are employed as caretakers in a mothballed research center somewhere in the arctic. They are supplied by helicopter once a week, are cautioned against going outside, and spend their days doing make-work jobs like checking the doors to see if they work, or chairs to see if they are sittable.

Thirty-eight pages into this book, that is described as “mesmerizing” on the cover, it becomes just plain numbing.  The characters are semi-zombies, the setting is bleak, and the dialogue is stiff.  Life is too short and the number of available books too large to keep reading one that fails to interest the reader.  I found myself not really caring whether there was something in the snow or not. Now it might get better later, but I am not inclined to wait that long. If you wish to discover more about The Thing in the Snow, go for it. It is back in the library.  

Jim De Young   12/22/22

 

The De Young Family Christmas Letter

 

Volume XLIX                                                                                                 December 25, 2022

 

Christmas 2022

We begin this 49^th epistle on the surprising note that the most-read post on my blog (stirringthepudding.blogspot.com) in the last year was the one about moving to Iowa. Hardly anyone but our daughter knows us in Iowa, so the high readership must have come from folks in Illinois who were happy to learn that they had finally gotten rid of us. 😊 No, not really. That’s a joke, because the worst thing about our move to Iowa has been the severing of daily ties with the many close friends we made in Monmouth over the years. 

We remain convinced of the truth in Tom Stoppard’s admonition from his play Arcadia that “Life goes only forward, never back.” Accordingly, we now reaffirm that our journey to Grand Living at Indian Creek was the right decision at the right time for us. Beyond that there was satisfaction in the decluttering required in making the move. Only those who have accumulated stuff by living in the same large house for fifty years can know the freedom that comes with trying to adopt the philosophy of the guru of the Arts and Crafts movement William Morris who said long ago “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

This brings to mind another quote. “If you want to change the world, find someone to help you paddle.”  Now I doubt we have changed the world, but I have had a fellow paddler for 63 years of marriage. My wife Jan has been the mainstay of our family and my life. She is once again branching out to make a difference in our new community. She helps run a reading and writing group in our building and is committed to helping new residents acclimate to life here. Meanwhile, we are both helping to keep the community library in order and going outside our residence to help in our daughter’s first grade classroom. Jim will be joining the resident council here in the New Year and continues to write a family history and finish a murder mystery novel that he started twenty years ago. And, would you believe it, both of us are involved in a play to be done at our Christmas Eve celebration.

Our daughter Amy and her husband Todd continue to live in Marion, IA, about a ten-minute drive from us.

 Amy still teaches first grade at Hiawatha Elementary School in Cedar Rapids. Challenges remain in all levels of the educational system, but she has the talent, commitment and resiliency to face and conquer them in that most critical period of early schooling. Husband Todd has continued to deal with major back problems. He has had more surgery this past year and now has added water therapy to his list of remediations. Even though he is now officially disabled, it has not kept him from doing a lot of the household cooking and making deer jerky for his friends. 

Their son Mikel is now a junior at the Upper Iowa University.

We feel he has become a more committed student this year. He has narrowed his career focus down to the environmental resource area and has found some professors who are mentors. He hopes to work for the Iowa DNR again next summer.  

Taylor Brown, who in his youth was TJ Brown, continues to work for the Baytown, TX, fire department as a firefighter/paramedic. He recently attended classes to update his national paramedic credentials and we have just heard that he has received the Baytown firefighter of the year award for 2022.  This was partially for his leadership of the department’s Explorer Troop, which focuses on introducing young people to careers in firefighting and emergency medical care. What an honor!   

 Meanwhile, in far off Helsinki, Finland, our son David, his wife Lotta, and their family continue to grow.

 And when I say grow, I really mean grow as David and Lotta are expecting their 3^rd child in early January. Daughters Frida and Selma, now 10 and 7, are growing too.  They can take hikes, ride bikes, hunt mushrooms, cook, skate, ski, and play the piano. Their lives are just plain full of school and outside activities.  Covid still lingers and David continues to work from home a number of days each week. On the other hand, business travel is picking up again, and he was sent to Singapore last month, He has also completed an MFA degree in Poetry offered by New York University in Paris, which goes along I guess with his degree from Grinnell College ages ago. That does remind me of a student from long ago who said “I’m going to graduate on time no matter how long it takes.” Lotta also continues to study and does private gestalt therapy appointments. We miss all of them every day.  

And that’s the year that was. We have been blessed in our own lives this year and wish the same to you.  That doesn’t mean we have forgotten about the terrible war in the Ukraine or that our planet remains locked in a battle to salvage a livable environment. We can continue to think about the challenges ahead even as we celebrate our own good fortunes at this holiday season.      

 Jim and Jan De Young

e-mail us at dramajim@gmail.com or  janetwdeyoung@gmail.com

 

The Fleet Street Murders by Charles Finch

 

The Fleet Street Murders by Charles Finch is the ideal Victorian outing for readers who prefer their  detective novels pretty much free of gore, violence, swear words, and sexual escapades. The upper-class amateur sleuth, Charles Lenox, is a likable aristocrat who has a knack for treating people from all levels of society with respect.  He is carrying on a courtship with Lady Jane Grey that is so chaste that it would seem downright amusing if it were not taking place in Victorian London.    

There are two plots and both, thankfully, can easily be kept track of. Mr. Lenox is running for a seat in parliament in Stirrington, a fictional location well to the north of London. This gives you the added opportunity to soak up details of how by-elections were run in those days. Meanwhile a mystifying double murder of two newspaper men in London keeps drawing Lenox back to town to grapple with a villain who he has wanted to pin multiple crimes on for years.  

Finch gives you the just right amount of local atmosphere to make his country settings come alive and they are populated with the kind of wonderfully quixotic characters that always seem to inhabit them. On the city side, anyone who has read London history or visited the city, will revel in Lenox’s visits to Berry and Rudd, Wine merchants and the famous Cheshire Cheese public house just off Fleet Street.

This is the third Lenox mystery and like a cup of warm cocoa before bedtime, it will bring a sense of cozy satisfaction.  I am going to search out the first two.  

Jim De Young    12/11/22

Miracle of the Music Man

Mark Cabaniss’s Miracle of the Music Man does a fine job of stitching interviews and research into the  story of Meredith Willson’s life and career on the Broadway stage. There is no doubt that Willson (with two L's) has become--America’s classic Music Man, but Cabaniss admits in the last pages of the book that his career “started at the top and went progressively downhill.” Unfortunately, this makes for a book that follows the same pattern.  

The material on the making of the iconic musical is filled with drama and inside bits about the struggle to get the show mounted. Right off the bat we learn that one big turning point was when the title was changed from Music Man to The Music Man.  We also learn a lot about Mason City, Iowa, Willson’s family and musical training, his radio career, his stint with the John Philip Sousa band, and finally about performing in the NBC orchestra of Arturo Toscanini.

Like most musicals, The Music Man went through years of re-writes and multiple producers before achieving even the status of a potential Broadway Show. Especially interesting to me was the evolution of the character of Winthrop from a character in a wheelchair to a boy with a lisp, and the story of how Robert Preston got the part of Harold Hill.  Preston is quoted as saying until he got the part, he had been playing “the lead in all the B pictures and the villain in all the epics.”  The story of how the barbershop quartette, The Buffalo Bills, got the job is another intriguing inside bit.  

I must admit to never hearing or seeing the term “gypsy run-through” before. It is apparently the name given to the final run-through of a show in front of an invited audience before it goes on the road to try out before hopefully returning to New York and opening on Broadway. I also learned that composers have songs in what is called their “trunk.”  They have been written and not used or have been discarded from a show and await repurposing. Willson admits taking two or three from the trunk to use in the score for The Music Man. Till There Was You” was from the trunk, as were many versions of what turned out that most compelling rhythmic talk song “Ya Got Trouble”.

As implied from my comment in the first paragraph, the reader in a hurry can probably stop two-thirds of the way through the book and not miss much other than the reasonably successful run of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, the disappointing Here’s Love, and the failure of 1491, which closed before ever reaching Broadway. However, if you have a soft spot in your heart for River City, you can certainly take a quick dip into this readable biography of a man and a musical that continues to hold thousands of theatre goers in its grip through its professional revivals and amateur productions around the globe. Three and a half stars.

 

 

THE SWEET REMNANTS OF SUMMER by Alexander McCall Smith

Mr. McCall Smith has written over 70 books. “His No 1 Ladies Detective Agency” series runs to 22 entries and his “Isabel Dalhousie” Series runs a close second with 14 books.  The most recent Dalhousie novel is titled The Sweet Remnants of Summer and it is a pleasant read.    

The heroine, Isabel Dalhousie, lives in Edinburgh with her husband, Jamie, a musician, and their two young sons. Isabel is a philosopher by trade and edits a publication called “The Journal of Applied Ethics.” She has often tried to make up for being independently wealthy by being a helper. As such, she has attracted a reputation for solving other people’s personal problems, but that does not keep her  bassoon playing husband from believing that she may be a bit too aggressive in her willingness to “get involved” in the lives of others.

If you are getting tired of books about serial killers or politicians who insist that all of their opponents are evil, lying, monsters who eat babies in their spare time, a McCall Smith book is an answer to your prayers. It comes with the fresh breeze of a Scottish summer and a love for the sights, sounds, and architecture of Edinburgh. The book is short enough to not demand a commitment of six weeks of hard labor to finish.  It also brings a gentleness, a sense of humor, and an approach to life that fills each of his characters with a sense of what might be if we all could just get along better with each other.

Ms. Dalhousie is the very model of a modern major woman, and as a philosopher, she sees moral dilemmas everywhere. Jamie, her husband, thinks she should stay out of helping people with family disruptions. This occurs even though, at the same time,  he would like to do something about the fact that he believes the conductor of his orchestra will be appointing an unqualified person to a position of importance. A third plot line begins with Isabel’s son’s teacher reporting that her son has bitten a classmate.  All three of the threads combine to make for philosophical considerations of motive, guilt, lying, and penchants toward solving problems with violence or revenge.   

I like these characters. I like this kind of story and I like the thought that we need poetry, kindness, and love to guide our lives. With the winter’s snow descending, we need more of all of those virtues, while we await the coming of spring.

Jim De Young  11/15/2022

 

 

 

 

THE SACRED BRIDGE by Anne Hillerman

 

Given my love affair with Arizona, it is not surprising that I jumped like a desert jack rabbit to read Anne Hillerman’s seventh Joe Leaphorn Jim Chee Bernadette Manuelito novel titled The Sacred Bridge.  If you are counting, there are twenty-five books in the series when you consider the eighteen written by her father Tony that started this long run. Several of the earlier ones were adapted for public television some years back.

In this book we are once again in the heart of Navajo country and we continue to get a full measure of rich history combined with the incredible natural beauty of Lake Powell and the entire south-west. You can open the volume to almost any page and find descriptions like this.

“The desert light and colors fed his spirit; the contrast between the azure sky, the deep, deep blue water shimmering in the sun, the startling white of three small clouds that drifted overhead forming shadows on the lake, the sandstone’s warm brown, vibrant red-orange, and black desert varnish.” 

My own enjoyment was enriched by having visited Lake Powell, Rainbow Bridge, Antelope Canyon, Shiprock, and Page. They all figure prominently in the book’s intricate double plot. The first thread finds Officer Jim Chee on a holiday in the Lake Powell area looking to find a cave mentioned by his mentor Joe Leaphorn while also trying to decide whether he wishes to pursue new life directions. On a trail near the Rainbow Bridge, he looks down into the lake and sees a body.  Atop a cliff he also finds an empty tent and a cache of ancient artifacts. Although not on duty, he must report it. That in short order involves him in the investigation of what looks increasingly like murder.

Meanwhile, back at Shiprock, the second plot begins with Ms. Manuelito also finding trouble when she witnesses a fatal hit and run accident. The victim has no id on him, but does deposit some drugs in Bernadette’s car just before he is run down. Her attempts to identify him and the driver of the deadly car lead her into a dangerous undercover assignment on a medical marihuana farm that has been started on the reservation.

The book moves seamlessly between the two cases with two unifying factors. Bernadette is also deliberating a major career change and both of them find themselves in life threatening situations. The wrap-ups afford a plentiful galaxy of twists and you end with new knowledge about the duo and plenty of hints that could lead to further adventures for both of them. I loved this book and give it ***** five stars.  

A Study in Treason

 

A STUDY IN TREASON

A Study in Treason by Leonard Goldberg is another of the long list of attempted Sherlock Holmes knockoffs. In this effort, Joanna, the daughter of Holmes, is married to John Watson Jr and they along with the senior Watson, who is recovering from a stroke, are set to the task of discovering who took an important treaty while it was being copied at an English Country House.

The theft is complicated by two murders and the presence of a mysterious guest at a local inn.  The eager authorities, headed by Inspector Lestrade (the son of the original Lestrade), run away with wild accusations while the Sherlockians use deductive observations to zero in on the perpetrator.

I found the constant referral back to earlier Holmes investigations to be tiresome and awkward even though there was a claim that the author was trying to imitate the style of the original. I must also admit I found the novel pretty slow going. I think Nicolas Meyer’s of The 7% Solution series or the Laurie King novels featuring Mary Russell as the deductive heir to Holmes are more successful in capturing and continuing the Arthur Conan Doyle legacy.  I give Goldberg’s effort two stars at best. **   

 

Jim De Young 10/19/2022

 

 

THE GOLDENACRE by Philip Miller.  Mr. Miller is a resident of Edinburgh and has long been a newspaperman specializing in the arts. Both backgrounds are brought to play in his fine crime novel about an art deception that leads to a host of vicious murders. This Edinburgh is not the sentimental one conjured up by Andrew McCall Smith’s work.  It is gritty, full of imperfect characters, and a fair amount of suffering.  Specifically, we have an already troubled art expert named Thomas Tallis who has to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to explain that he has no relation to the far more famous medieval composer. He comes to town to help authenticate a famous painting and runs into a shadowy conspiracy to bilk Scotland out of 12 million pounds. The fair city of Edinburgh (that is sometimes called “the Athens of the North”) is nicely evoked from the broad expanses of Princes Street to the bleak coastline.  Just when the game is winding up, there are some closing plot twists that put this outing solidly into a genre I would label Scottish Noir.  I give it four stars. ****  

Thinking of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II

 Thinking of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II

She was not my queen, but I often felt she was in spite of that revolution against the monarchy that created our country.  I watched her coronation on black and white television.  When my wife and I made our first visit to Great Britain in the summer of 1963, London was entering the “swinging sixties” of Carnaby Street and the Beatles.  It was the real beginning of our love affair with Britain. While on that first visit we saw many plays. According to my still saved journal, we saw Lionel Bart’s Blitz about the second world war, Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War,  a production of The Tempest at Stratford Upon Avon that I called “the best play production I had ever seen, John Gieldud in The Ides of March at the Haymarket Theatre (where you could have tea brought to your seat at the interval and they still played God Save the Queen at the end of the performance with a live orchestra), a performance of Noel Coward’s Private Lives, an RSC production of John Gay’s The Beggars Opera and the straight from the Edinburgh Festival of ­Beyond the Fringe. This was a show that Kenneth Tynan, a budding theatre critic at that time, helped bring to the attention of London audiences. It was my first exposure to Mr. Tynan, whose rise to the pinnacle of the critic world was to become the subject of my doctoral dissertation.

That 1963 visit was followed by thirteen more visits to London. One was for a full year (1972-73) as director of the ACM Arts of London program.  A second long term was in the 1980’s and again for the ACM London program. The other visits were for sabbaticals, escorting London tours for Monmouth College with students, faculty, and townspeople, and taking our daughter’s grandchildren there to introduce them to our love of London and of travel.  

Along the years we got glimpses of the Queen in person. We made the trek to the Mall to join the crowds when she rode out to Parliament or to review the Guards. I got a glimpse of her through a veil of bushes when she visited Holland Park to make an award to children. We saw the coronation coach at the London Museum and toured Buckingham Palace when it was opened to the public. Our visits to London in essence changed or made our career paths. It opened my wife’s eyes to the challenges and excitement of good primary education. It resulted in the major achievement of my academic career as it resulted in the publication with my good English friend John Miller of our book London Theatre Walks. It went through two editions in 1998 and 2002.  So you see the reign of this Queen accompanied most of our lives and the England she ruled was in our blood for 59 of the 70 years she was on the throne.    

I think also of her important chosen title. Elizabeth II. She took the namesake of a great Queen who had an age named after her “The Elizabethan Age (1558-1603)”. Arguably we may see that we have just experienced the second great Elizabethan Age. One fascinating note mentioned on TV, I think by Katty Kay, was she bought her wedding dress in 1952 with ration coupons, but was known along with her quiet imperial presence and her political acumen, as the wearer of magnificently colored outfits and hats. It was also brought out by Michael Beschloss that Elizabeth was an accidental Queen in the sense that she was not in the line of succession until Edward VIII resigned the throne and turned It over to her father in 1936.  

I have only vague memories of Harry Truman though I heard a lot about FDR from my parents in later years, and voted for the first time for Dwight Eisenhower in his second term.  I met (obviously quite briefly) two of the 13 US presidents the Queen met. I shook hands with Ronald Reagan when he visited Monmouth when he was running to become a candidate, and Bush Senior when he appeared at the college to get an honorary degree long after his presidential turn. I saw President Obama when he spoke in the Monmouth Auditorium while he was running for the nomination, but never got close enough to shake his hand.

I cannot leave my memories of the Queen without mentioning a text from my son who now lives in Finland with his wife and our two precious granddaughters.  David reported that his youngest daughter six year old Selma said at bedtime, “It’s the saddest thing that’s happened in my whole life.”   

I think also of Charles III. The first Charles was beheaded in London in 1649 and the 2^nd Charles, known as the “Merry Monarch,” brought the monarchy back from a long period of war and had a mountain of repairs--politically, socially, and artistically facing him. Charles III probably will not be known as “merry” but he will have as many problems facing him as did the second.  And I probably won’t come close to thinking of him as my sovereign. Yet I do wish for him success and the chance to earn his own place in history. God rest the soul of a great Queen and

GOD SAVE THE KING!       Jim De Young 9/8/22

LESSONS by Ian McEwan--Book review

 

LESSONS by Ian McEwan

Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan’s 18^th novel, Lessons , is long (over 450 pages), and like many of his other works begins simply and grows more complex as it develops. The opening makes the novel look like a reverse Lolita in which an adult woman is obsessed by her 11 year old boy piano student (and he by her). Their sexual relation lasts for five years and only breaks up when he becomes 16 and she wants to spirit him off to Scotland to marry him. To some extent the lesson of that early experience is still hanging around at the finish, but it is only a fragment of the sad life of Roland Baines, whose given name might encourage some to remember the great French epic by that name.  

This Roland is a man who never seems to put sufficient postage on the letter of life. After he is abused by his piano teacher, we meander through sixty years of lost promise. A gifted classical pianist as a youth, Roland winds up as a tea-time piano player at a London Hotel. He yearns for an artistic life yet finds only idle travel, political futility, and failed liaisons. His other temporary jobs range from tennis coach to writer of incidental puff pieces for small magazines.  All of this is played out against the end of WWII and the historic changes brought about by Thatcher, Reagan, Gorbachev, Suez, Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Covid, and even January 6^th. 

Finally, like Shakespeare’s Prospero, Roland Baines burns his books and settles into an old age fueled by something called The Multiple Worlds Theory.  This concept promotes the idea that “The world divides at every conceivable moment into an infinitude of invisible possibilities.”  Your fate may have been controlled by unconscious choices and it lowers your chance of having any real impact on the affairs of the world at large. You are also left in suspense as to what will come next.  It is better, as you reach your “hinge of life,” to settle back and leave the future to your grandchildren.   

The early publicity for the book asks this question. “How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past? ”  If you want a profound illustration of these topics, this may be the book for you. If not, McEwen may not be your cup of tea. 

Jim De Young  8-28-22 

London Bridge is Falling Down by Christopher Fowler

 

“London bridge was made for wise men to go over and fools to go under." An old proverb

This is the 18^th book featuring the exploits of two geriatric detectives named Arthur Bryant and John May.  I have read and enjoyed a number of them. John May goes a bit more by the book and dresses stylishly.  Bryant is the perfect foil as he does almost nothing by the book and is an archetypal curmudgeon who dresses like a walking Salvation Army Store. He wears an old overcoat, a rumpled hat, and wraps himself in a variety of moth- eaten long scarves.  His pockets are full of candy wrappers, paper scraps, fruit drops, and pipe tobacco. The pair are the chief investigators in what is called the Peculiar Crimes Unit and they have a covey of assistants who are also the kind of folks who would not fit easily into a regular Scotland Yard unit.

Let me note first that if complicated plots, a certain amount of looniness, and some degree of  acquaintance with London and its history don’t intrigue you, I would recommend a pass on Fowler. Second, if does intrigue you, I would recommend getting started with a few of his earlier offerings. That way you can get some familiarity with the characters and their bizarre investigations before you approach number 18, which starts out at least as a kind of swan song for the series.  

If you remain committed to start with London Bridge is Falling Down, you will still get enough basic information to enter Bryant and May’s world. You will find that the Peculiar Crimes Unit is finally being closed down after many previous unsuccessful efforts to eliminate it. Arthur Bryant tries one final ploy to keep everyone’s jobs. He finds a cold case and then convinces the upper echelons that there is new information that must be investigated.  Ultimately, the case proves to be not so cold. It turns out to be the tiny tip of a multi-year plot. The strange death of an old woman who once worked with the Bletchley codebreakers explodes into multiple murders and the involvement of the current CIA and MI 5. The key to the mystery resides in the ability to decipher clues which deal with the romantic and real history of London Bridge and a cadre of the offbeat denizens of London.  

London Bridge is Falling is Falling Down will have you laughing out loud at the quirky characters. Witness when someone says to Arthur Bryant “your eyes are red” and asks if he has had enough sleep. Arthur replies, “You should see them from my side.” There will be gems of wisdom along the way like “The older you get the less noticed you become.” You will also be delighted by the descriptions of everything from old churches to the changing aspects of London weather.  You may even be shedding a tear or two when you arrive at the beautifully crafted finish.  I am an Anglophile and love Mr. Fowler's books. I am counting on the fact that you will too, no matter where in the series you start.

Review: The Dictionary of Lost Words

 

Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words  2020

This fascinating book by the Australian novelist, Pip Williams, is a tour de force in the sense that she has managed to write an entire book about creating a dictionary without once becoming a pedantic bore.  It is a feminist tract without question. On the other hand, it is surrounded by a compelling and imaginative story of a woman who has become conscious in the late 19^th century that dictionaries have always been written by men and as a result many of the words used by or about women have been relegated to the dustbin or given negative meanings.

Esme, the heroine, has grown up in the Scriptorium, a drafty potting shed,  where a corps of scholars are assembling  The OED or (The Oxford Dictionary of the English Language.)  Initially, she is a child whose mother has died, crawling about beneath a sorting table and beginning to collect stray slips carrying words or definitions that have been discarded or carelessly dropped. As she matures, she becomes one of the few female employees working on the dictionary and a conscious collector of words dealing with women. Her maturation then encapsulates the thematic issues by integrating her story into the decline of the servant class and the rise of suffrage in England. 

Esme literally worship words-- their meanings, their derivations, and discussions of why certain words survive in print and others do not. She says: “Words are our tools of resurrections.”  It’s how you bring things back.   We won’t stop speaking them if they aren’t in the dictionary.”

The deep hurt and longing experienced by women of all classes is one of the stronger features of the book and it is nowhere communicated  so poignantly as when Esme’s life-long servant, Lizzie, says:  “I guess I like to keep my hands busy. . . . it proves I exist. . . .” I clean, I help with the cooking, I set the fires. Everything I do gets eaten or dirtied or burned—at the end of the day there’s no proof I’ve been here at all.”

Esme and Lizzie are afforded plenty of pragmatic experiences that highlight the task before them. Some of them are triumphant and some sad, but in total it makes one last quote from the book stand out to me. “We can’t always make the choices we’d like, but we can try to make the best of what we must settle for.”

Read this for its message, its inventive story, for the people it brings alive, or for your love of language, but do put it on your reading list.   

Jim De Young,  July, 2022

 

 

A Banquet of Consequences

 

A Banquet of Consequences by Elizabeth George  

 

Ms. George,  in this once again far too long novel, sets up a tragic family situation in which a young man’s suicide triggers a series of sordid, unimaginable horrors from the past. One problem is that the characters in this family from hell seem so perverted, twisted, unsavory, and sex driven that I could not help thinking that the world would be a better place if they were all eliminated instead of just one of them.

Even though this is billed as a Lynley novel, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley is stuck  with doing minor London legwork and dealing with the always impatient upper echelon as represented by Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery.  The real main characters are DS Barbara Havers and DS Winston Ngata who move and shake the plot  in the Dorset countryside where most of the real action occurs. Both of them are as different from Lynley as night and day, but his absence as a driving force may disappoint some readers.

The plot is, as usual in detective novels, complex, is full of twists right down to the last pages. Ms. George has done her research on poison and Agatha Christie would be proud of her. What excites me less is that there are a few too many coincidences driving the story. This starts with Barbara Havers accidental contact in London with the murder victim and her entourage and then the assignment of the case to Lynley's team. The discovery of records hidden in the boot of the murdered woman’s car, that surely would have been searched long before Barbara finds them, is another example.  She also finds them because of some strange procedural decisions.  Why are Barbara and Winston staying in the murder victim's home for instance?  And how could it be reasonable for Barbara to use the victim’s car to go to an interview?  To top it off she then finds a valuable document trove in the boot when the car has a convenient flat tire.  In another lucky discovery, she finds a third tract on a tape recorder by accidently pressing a button rather than through knowledgeable detection.  

Although by the ending all the characters appear to have reaped their full “Banquet of Consequences,”  there is a kind of sordidness about the whole affair.  “You’re only as sick as your secrets,” says one character and this family is clearly right at death’s door.  

Jim De Young  7/9/22

Wildlife Out In Force This AM

A pleasant sunny morning was amenable to see one of our deer and the big old turkey from our balcony at Grant Living at Indian Creek. 

 

Globe Theatre Burns Down on June 29, 1613

 

In honor of Garrison Keillor and the Writer’s Almanac, I post this quote from one of his column reruns that are now appearing daily. As a theatre historian and play director in a previous working life, I was privileged to have directed five of Shakespeare’s marvelous plays and have published a book titled London Theatre Walks, which features some material on the reconstruction of the building.  

“On this day (June 29^th) in 1613, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre burned to the ground. The thatched roof caught on fire after a theatrical cannon misfired during a production of Henry VIII. Only one man was hurt; his breeches caught on fire, but the quick-thinking fellow put them out with a bottle of ale.

The Globe had been the home of Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, since 1599; previously, his plays had been performed in a house known simply as The Theatre, but their lease expired in 1598. The troupe found a loophole: the lease was for the land only, and the company owned the building, so the Lord Chamberlain’s Men dismantled the old theater while the landlord was away for Christmas and brought it with them across the Thames from Shoreditch to Southwark. They used its timbers to build the framework of the Globe, which was also unique in being the first theater built to house a specific theatrical company, and to be paid for by the company itself.

After the fire, the Globe was rebuilt in 1614, and it was in use until 1642, when the Puritans closed all the theaters in London. The building was pulled down two years later to make room for tenements. It was rebuilt in the 1990s, and except for concessions made for fire safety, it is as close to the original Globe as scholars and architects were able to make it.”

The Globe was re-constructed on the banks of the Thames in London not far from its original site and I took this photo from the Tate Modern Art Gallery some years ago

                                                    

                                                

You can still subscribe to the Writer’s Almanac re-runs at thewritersalmanac@substack.com

 

 

A GREAT DELIVERANCE by Elizabeth George

 

Having recently read and reviewed Elizabeth George’s latest book (SOMETHING TO HIDE) and finding it wanting in clarity and far too long, I thought a trip to the past was called for. I was lucky to find a copy of A GREAT DELIVERANCE in our Grand Living Library. This was Ms. George’s breakthrough first Lynley novel and was published in 1988. You will be pleased to note that it is everything the most recent outing is not.  

The title comes from the story of Joseph in the Old Testament. He says to his brothers that he is not there to punish them for selling him, but to “save your lives by a great deliverance.” It is half the length, tightly plotted, and full of spot-on description. We meet the upper-crust Lynley for the first time and he finds that he has been assigned to mentor a struggling working class Sergeant Barbara Havers. She had been demoted to street cop and is now given a final chance to keep her detective’s stripes. As you might expect, Linley and Havers mix as well as oil and water, and this sets up a relationship that will continue to provide contrast for the next thirty years.  As the pair investigate an ax murder in the bucolic Yorkshire countryside, we get a full treatment of Lynley’s previous love affairs and Haver’s own dark family past. The breathtaking climax makes the history behind the brutal killing even more terrible than the crime itself while taking both detectives to the edge of despair.

The descriptions in the early book are tight, colorful, tactile, and often extended by literary references. Take this phrase, “This was no grappling in an Elsinore grave” or this view of Linley. “He examined himself in the mirror at her words, his cigarette dangling from his lips, his eyes narrowed against the smoke, part Sam Spade part Algernon Moncrieff.” 

A humorous touch is added with the introduction of the funniest “Ugly American” you may ever see.  Hank Watson, an American dentist and his wife are visiting Britain for a tax write-off dental convention. They clash resoundingly with English society when, at a formal dinner, Hank tries to explain the “queers” in Laguna Beach to Mr. St. James--Linley’s good friend. And witness this description.  Hank’s hand was “fat, slightly sweaty” and “like shaking hands with a warm, uncooked fish.”  You might also appreciate the picture of Barbara Haver’s frumpiness when she puts on a dress. According to George, she resembled a white garbed barrel with legs.”

All in all, if you love Ms. George’s books as much as I do, you might better re-read some of the earlier ones while you await her discovery that bigger is not necessarily better.  

 

 

My major takeaway from last night's Jan. 6 tv presentation

 My biggest takeaway from last night. The cool and careful laying out of the timeline proved this was not a protest that got out of hand and turned into a riot and finally into an insurrection. It was fueled by organized groups who took up their positions even before the big enchilada started to address the crowd. The plan all along was to be ready to go as soon as the unwitting pawns started to reach the Capitol with their anger stoked by the speakers and T-man himself. Had the plan to delay the election certification not failed, I do not even wish to think of where we might be today.

Book Review: Something to Hide by Elisabeth George

 

Elizabeth George’s Something to Hide comes in at almost 700 pages and literally weighs over two pounds. (I put it on a scale.)  

She takes a full 100 pages to lay out four apparently separate background threads. There is a shadowy female health clinic that may or may not be involved with participating in female genital mutilation or fighting against it. There is another family with sexual and relationship issues that spring from their valiant efforts to minister to the needs of their severely handicapped daughter. There is a Nigerian family with a creepy violence prone bigamous father, a sneaky mother, an eight year old daughter, who for somewhat different reasons the parents would like to have “cut” in order to insure that she will make a good wife, and a modern son with a modern girl friend who are having none of any of it. Around the edges also is a police investigation targeting the shadowy clinic.  

Finally, a black female detective who is connected to that clinic, goes into a coma and dies. The autopsy reveals that she has been a murder victim and only then do we get a sense that this is a "Lynley" novel.  Acting Inspector Lynley, Barbara Havers, and Winston Ncata enter the story as the investigating officers. For the next six hundred pages you creep through the investigation with them and, as is normal in this kind of novel, while they find the linkages that draw the complicated plot together.  More disconcerting is that the already multi-layered story is not helped by the side trips into Lynley’s own new love interest and Barbara Havers lack of any love interest.

I wish I could recommend this book, because the central theme of the heinous practice of genital mutilation of young girls begs for more attention. Unfortunately, the slow start hangs on into the rest of the book.  It just seems to move at a glacial pace. I sometimes wonder why perfectly good successful writers feel the need to enter the “Who can write the longest book?” competition against heavyweights like Melville and Dostoyevsky. Ms. George tries, but she loses this time. 

 

Singing a Sad Song Sort Of

Singing a Sad Song Sort Of

I'm not sure what to call our last six months, but it has been a major departure from our previous life.  Embarking on a new adventure seems a touch too romantic and the end of the line seems too  pessimistic, so let's settle on the more neutral it was time for a change. Change, of course, is the norm for all of us even if we are making a home in one place for over fifty years. Proof of this begins with the blog you are reading this on. It has asserted from the beginning that life goes only forward, never back. You cannot un-stir a pudding once you have stirred  the raspberry jam of living into it.

My recent review of Jacqueline Winspear's A Sunlit Weapon looked at change particularly as it impacts place.  Winspear cites Masie Dobbs' old teacher who said, “Place is a crucial factor in our work—and places leave their mark in the same way that a human being can touch us. We have to make our peace with place, with the locations where we have spent time.  We must consider how we’ve been affected by being present in a certain spot—and how the place itself is changed by what has come to pass.”  

Oh so true! As the Covid shut-down proceeded in the last two years, it became more evident that my wife and I were fighting that eternal battle with age. We had to quit tending our small garden and hire out the mowing of the lawn. The stairs to the second floor in the house seemed to be getting steeper and higher. Never mind the extra flight to the attic.  And the  work PLACES my wife and I had inhabited were increasingly populated with new faces that we had never worked with and did not know. Even though both of us had survived some major medical issues in the past, we were having to make more appointments with more doctors than before. Finally, a number of our long time friends began to move from their places in our town to places closer to their children. 

Was there a single straw that broke the camel's back?  No.  It was just was the load on the aging  camel's back was getting harder to carry. With that in mind I think we made our own change of place at the most opportune time for us. We were not forced into a series of quick decisions by any kind of family crisis or health emergency. We were not being pressured by our children to move someplace where our diminished capacities could be better serviced. We were both still generally mentally competent and had passed driver's license exams recently.     

Even accepting all of that,  we still tried to hedge our bets. We committed to renting an apartment in a senior community on a monthly no lease arrangement.  As we worked on downsizing the material acquisitions that cluttered our old home, we began to spend more time in the new place. If things did not work out, we could return to our previous surroundings without too much emotional or financial strain.  

Happily, I think enough time has passed to report that things have worked out quite well. We are nine  months into a series of changes that are fast becoming our new permanence.  Our move has taken us into a far more urban area than before and closer to our daughter, who is a teacher like her parents and lives only ten minutes away now. 

In trying to keep my own sights on how the "sense" of place is important, I began to think about some of the items that symbolized change in lives.  For instance, one of our very first acts was to visit the post office and file a change of address form. We had filed temporary changes or holds many times over the  years as we wintered in Arizona or took extended trips abroad.  But this was the first time since 1963 that our address change was permanent.  This was a real new place.  It led us to make a list of all the entities who needed to know we were moving. This first list contained our kids, our close friends, our bank, and of course the service areas of natural gas, electricity, and the water, sewer, recycling, and garbage pickup operations. Along the way we also noted people and organizations that we had no interest in informing of our departure. I trust you are pleased to note that if you are reading this, you are safely on the first list.  

We were quite surprised that many of the second list members easily and quickly re-found our new place almost before we had moved. Political groups, charities, and people selling everything from miracle cures to ways to make a million dollars by buying crypto currency seem to be impressively efficient at finding us anew. Their missives poured in at our new abode and often included little stickies  imprinted with our new address.  "Use these to make it easier to send us more money faster" was their theme song. How they found us so soon again, I know not. 

Other changes symbolizing our new location began to accumulate. We had to get right with the government and the medical establishment. Social security and Medicare were like climbing Mount Everest without oxygen. Days would go by as phone calls were deferred by the bureaucratic equivalent of Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death--"All our operators are busy. Your call is important so stay on the line while we play you the worst possible version of canned music we could find."  Several hours later, long after every operator has certainly called it a day and gone home, we would hang up in despair and decide to try again tomorrow. Dogged diligence with the government is absolutely necessary whenever you decide to move.  

We are thankful that the offices of Iowa's state government were more amenable. I think that is because you are going to give them money rather than trying to get them to continue sending you money that you had earned over the years. In quite short order we got new Iowa plates for our car and received our new Iowa driver's licenses. These acts seem small, but they put an observable visual stamp on our  move.  

That is beside the fact that in the first week after getting our new license plates, we almost lost our car a couple of times because we were looking for a white vehicle with Illinois plates on it. Do you know how many white cars there are in every parking lot in Iowa?  

Then there is my new driver's license. It stares at me every time I open my wallet. A fresh horrible photo looks back at me and under it is that strange new address. An even more powerful reminder of change was that my new license no longer carried a "Glasses Required" notation.  Eye surgery has given me a 20/20 view of the world without the necessity of the lenses I had worn for the last seventy years. That, I tell you, was a real change. I am still waking up in the morning and reaching for the non-existent specs that were always just within reach on the bedside table.   

Another important change for our intellectual and mental health was the acquisition of a new library card. I am pleased to report that libraries are still truly client centered operations. You just show them a piece or two of first class mail addressed to you at your new address and a library card is issued zip zip with no muss, no fuss, and no bother. Free access to thousands of books, magazines, and videos are opened to you in a flash. What a splendid welcome to a new city. The federal government might take some lessons here.   

The  greatest change of all has to be the selling of our family home and the leaving of our many friends and neighbors. We bought our house in 1975. It sat on a tree surrounded corner lot on a street that reminded me daily that I, a theatre guy, was living on Broadway. The house had a two car garage, a nice kitchen, a formal dining room, a large living room with a fireplace and built in bookcases at one end. 

To get to the second floor you used a magnificent solid oak stairway that remains something to kill for. 

                                                    

On the second floor there were three bedrooms, a sewing room, and another bedroom that we soon converted into to a full scale study complete with bookcases and old fashioned office desk. 

The house also had a full attic, which became ever fuller as the years went by. That space kindly accepted all the assorted detritus that had worn out its welcome on the floors below. Plus, there was room for the remnants of several past places long left. There was the mirror from my parent's living room as well as the baby book my mother faithfully compiled on me. There were cartons of crystal and dishes from my wife's mother and grandmother, as well as my wife's mother's dressing table and mirror. And there were toys ranging from my old standup slate and stamp collection to my wife's storybook dolls and our own children's matchbook cars and dolls.  Although most of the children's books had been passed on or given away, there were tons of photos--some in albums and some in antique frames. Many of them were unlabeled and are of places and people who lost the battle of identity to the passage of time. All in all our attic, and I suspect yours if you have one,  was a large dusty museum of other places in other times.    

Let's return to the lower regions now. We raised our children in the rooms of this house and lived on in it long after the kids had left the nest. More unusual, in the current world of constant movement, is that my wife and I owned only one home. The buying of it was a singular place event in our life and the selling of it became another. Here it is around the time of purchase in 1975.  It was built in 1906 and through the years we resisted the covering of its grand old Queen Anne exterior with aluminum. The 2 1/2 inch cedar siding allowed for a rich softness of appearance and a graceful bump out that helped separate the first and second floor by creating a nice horizontal dividing point for a tall house. The soffit overhang and its decorations put in another line to separate the second floor from the attic and roof. We retained all of this because covering a house with metal generally tends to erase such distinguishing features. 

                                

The big trees that surrounded the house when we bought it are all gone now--victims of disease and ferocious midwestern storms. The scrubby pine you can see in in front of the porch is now taller than the house and threatens to take over the entire front yard.  As you can see the house was a dreary white when we moved in. I personally painted it a mellow sea breeze blue around 1977 and that has been its color ever since.  By the time the fifth re-painting rolled around (I only did the personal painting twice.) we had long ago renamed the home our "old blue monster."  Below are two current views. The first was taken this spring and the other a few winter's ago.  I hope you will agree that it presents a noble presence. 

  

            

The interior, where most of the memories reside, has evolved a good deal over time. Old furniture was replaced with new, the kitchen was modernized, walls were re-papered to change figures of children's toys to more staid patterns, the bathroom now claims a walk in shower, etc. We did not take a great deal of our old furniture with us to our new apartment. We bought a new bedroom set and a smart TV to replace our stupid one with the tiny screen. We retained some familiarity by putting some of our precious pictures back up on the new walls and displaying some of our favorite pottery. As you can see my Wisconsin roots are now celebrated on the big screen. "Go Pack!"  

                                        

Even though we moved into our new digs last fall, we did feel that moving physically was enough trauma for both of us. Thus we made the conscious decision to wait for spring before putting our house up for sale. I suspect now that this was just another sign of hedging our bets. All through the winter we still were holding out for the possibility of going home again if we had to. When the big decision to sell was reached this spring, it happened fast and furious. We had a whiz of a realtor and she helped us complete the sale quickly at what we felt was a fair price in the current market.  An internet auctioneer was hired to remove and sell all the remaining household goods.   

My large collection of theatre books and plays mostly went off to the college library and to former colleagues, but  "Empty rooms Empty tables" from the musical "Les Misérables" kept playing in my head as the auctioneer emptied the place to take to his warehouse and showroom.  

                                    

At the end only the memories remained. Past sorrows mixed with joys, and periods of sickness morphed into long stretches of health. The strongest feelings were of the thousands of daily departures and and returns that house had seen. The  "Byes" and "Hi, I'm home's" that came from all the residents as they left or returned from work or school, or outings or play rehearsals, or events or travels seemed to float about in the now empty rooms. The globe keeps turning and the places abroad from England to Finland, Japan, and Egypt added their special sights and sounds to our home in that small town on the prairie. 

As the closing approached the house seemed to slide slowly toward the same ambiance it had when we had moved into it some fifty years ago. Our memories would now be replaced by the lives of the new owners.    

 The rooms became almost barren.

And then totally empty.

                                        

The living room was poised to await the sounds of new music and new conversations. 

Just prior to the closing we placed the house keys and garage door openers in a manila envelope that would be turned over as soon as the final documents were signed.  When that was accomplished, all that remained as we drove out of town, was this final exclamation point. I do not mind admitting that I shed a tear. 

Hey! Hey!  What can I say? 

The tears are away,  

And it's a new day. 

Grand Living awaits. 

With our name on the wall.

And a new set of keys to open a new door. 

An empty space would soon be filled.

A magic wand was waved and presto------

I am now sitting in my new study in the swivel chair you see below.

                                            

I am writing a new chapter in the book of life. Join in if you can. Visitors are welcome.