***Devil in the Grass

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alligator

(photo: heymeadow, creative commons license)

By Christopher Bowron – This debut thriller is an ambitious mix of Florida politics, Satanic cults, Seminole tradition, and alligators. And a bull shark. Author Bowron is clearly familiar with the southwest Florida setting, which he describes expertly, bringing the story to vivid life.

The Florida Everglades is home to any number of dangerous predators, including humans of the sort who don’t mix well with civilization. The 9-foot tall sawgrass that gives the Everglades its nickname—River of Grass—provides Canadian author Bowron’s inspiration for the book title as well as superb cover for his characters as they ply their small boats through its waters.

The impetus for the plot is also grounded in real life: the ongoing political battle between those who want to save the Everglades as a unique and irreplaceable natural resource and the agricultural interests making vast fortunes growing sugar cane and raising cattle along its edges. In Devil in the Grass, former pro football player and half-Seminole Jackson Walker works as an intern for Republican State Senator, James Hunter, who supports Clean Water legislation. Walker, in his mid-20s, meets and falls for a woman working for the state Republican Party. She seeks him out, seduces him, and gradually exposes him to the Satanic cult called The Brotherhood of Set.

After a while, Walker does what he believes will be an innocent errand for the cult leader, and at the book’s opening we find him hiding out in Big Cypress Swamp, accused of slaying a man and woman in a Satanic ritual. Although he believes he’s being framed because of his work with the Senator, letting himself become soft and apathetic may have contributed. He regrets the demise of his football career and its heroes: “It was the fearlessness with which they marched onto the field that had mattered to him.” Inevitably, Walker will be called upon to demonstrate that same fearlessness before the book’s last page.

If the leaders of the Satanic cult weren’t creepy enough, they have for generations used a particular local family—the McFaddens—to be their clean-up crew. They are prone to torture and killing, and they let the vastness of the Everglades hide the evidence. I’m a little burned out on serial killers with chain saws, but the alligators make for heart-pounding excitement.

As the story gets rolling, not only the police, but also the Satanists and their instruments, the McFaddens, are after Walker. And don’t forget the gators.

The book clearly ends with the promise of a sequel, which I hope can make the bad guys as believable as the environment and that Bowron gets a little help with dialog. I’m not sure when this novel takes place, but if Buck Henderson’s “old Cadillac” was manufactured after 2002, it has a trunk release lever. And I ardently wish he hadn’t laid Jimmy McFadden’s psychotic behavior at the door of “severe autism.” Scientific study has failed to link the two.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

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Get Your Irish On

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Belfast, Writer's Square

Writer’s Square, Belfast (copyright, Albert Bridge; reused under creative commons license)

Ireland has produced so many familiar writers, from James Joyce and Oscar Wilde to more current classics, like Frank McCourt and Angela’s Ashes. For St. Patrick’s Day, Barnes & Noble assembled a short list of contemporary authors who keep the country’s storytelling traditions going. Here are three of theirs and two of mine:

  • Colm Tóibín – “a living link to Irish history,” from his grandfather’s arrest during the Easter Rising (its centenary is this year) to his father’s affiliation with the IRA. Best known to American audiences is his novel Brooklyn, made into a wonderful 2015 film, reviewed here.
  • Neil Jordan, novelist and screenwriter (known best for the 1992 movie, The Crying Game). “A clear, poetic style.”
  • Tana French, the award-winning “First Lady of Irish Crime” is a master of twisty plots with deep psychological resonance. I read her Broken Harbor in 2013, and especially admired her unforgettable depiction of a mentally unbalanced character.
  • Glenn Patterson, whose novel The International (review) has been called “The best book about the Troubles ever written,” and it isn’t about bloodshed and betrayal at all.
  • Adrian McKinty, who also writes about Belfast and its residents and expats, profiled here. Great humor. I’ve listened to three of them, and Gerard Doyle’s audio narration is sublime!

No blarney here!

Longwood Gardens, Spring 2016

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blue poppies, Longwood

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

The leprechauns at Longwood Gardens have worked overtime to bring early spring visitors a spectacular show sure to inspire. The gardens are located in the greening hills of southeastern Pennsylvania, within nodding distance of both the Revolutionary War’s Brandywine battlefields and the home turf of the Wyeths. Year-round, Longwood is a national treasure that feeds the soul.

At the moment, with spring bulbs still only beginning to awaken, the focus of the gardens turns inward, to its four-acre conservatory displays under glass. The current highlights are beautiful and rare Himalayan blue poppies and a spectacular orchid show.

Year-round the orchid pavilion showcases some 300 orchids in beautiful bloom. They’re from the collection begun by Mrs. Alice DuPont almost a hundred years ago. However, the orchid show doesn’t stop there. Some 2000 additional orchid plants appear in extravagant display throughout the indoor galleries. The photo below shows them trained to form lucious phalaenopsis balls.

orchids, Longwood

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

Bid the tail-end of winter good-bye and commit yourself to nurturing a green thumb with the unparalleled inspiration Longwood provides!

Expanding Your Travel Circles: If you’re visiting

  • Wilmington, Longwood is only 13 miles away.
  • Philadelphia: Longwood is 37 miles away.
  • Baltimore, Longwood is 79 miles away.
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Photographic Evidence

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Julius Caesar, bust

Julius Caesar (photo: William Warby, creative commons license)

On view in New York now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Gilman Gallery is “Crime Stories: Photography and Foul Play” for those whose interest in crime stories goes beyond the fictional to the grittily real. Since its earliest days, photography and other arts have been used to document crime and its purported perpetrators.

In this assemblage, crime-related photography from the 1850s to the present has been assembled from photojournalists, including such auteurs as Diane Arbus and Walker Evans, and a great many more dubious and less artistic sources. The resulting exhibition of some 70 works will be on display through July 31, 2016.

Among the highlights of the installation are such early examples of the genre as Alexander Gardner’s documentation of the aftermath of the assassination of President Lincoln, and rare forensic photographs by Alphonse Bertillon. In the Paris of the late 1800s, detectives throughout Europe and the United States were using Bertillon’s methods—called “bertillonage”—to identify criminals. According to the Met’s website, Bertillon’s system of criminal identification paved the way for the modern mug shot. Psychological research over the decades has failed to eradicate the “common-sense” perception that malefactors can be detected by the way they look.

In the current day, Bertillon’s methods have been displaced by much more scientific measurement and identification techniques, such as modern fingerprinting, iris scanning, and other biometric assessments.

Says the Met, in addition to the photographs on display, the exhibition will feature work by artists who have used the criminal underworld as a source of inspiration. These include Richard Avedon, Walker Evans, Andy Warhol, and Weegee. (Weegee was the pseudonym for a New York City press photographer in the 1930s and 1940s, who developed a very stark, black and white, photojournalistic style and found his subjects by trailing city emergency service workers.)

While many of the works on view may suggest an impulse for artistic debridement of the incomprehensible wounds violence inflicts, New York Times critic Ken Johnson found the exhibition “confused and confusing.” Perhaps that’s because the impulses that lead to crime and its aftermath are not necessarily coherent. They are open to interpretation.

That very confusion at the heart of the matter is part of the fascination. But, see the exhibit, and decide for yourself.

***Jump Cut

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boy, desert

(photo: Claus Rebler, creative commons license)

By Libby Fischer Hellmann – In Jump Cut, Chicago-based thriller author Hellmann brings her outspoken heroine Ellie Foreman back for another exciting adventure after a 10-year hiatus. In the new book, video producer Foreman and her team have been hired to produce a series of puff pieces about ginormous Delcroft Aviation.

Her project is going well until a client meeting to review a rough cut, when a Delcroft executive unexpectedly tears into the video, the project, and Ellie herself. Given the vehemence of this reaction, the suits around the table have no choice but to postpone further work, and in short order they cancel Ellie’s contract altogether.

Ellie struggles to figure out what caused her to lose her client and fixes on a stranger who appears in the background of the video. She’d conversed with him, finding him oddly curious about her project, and they’d exchanged business cards. In the hope he can help her understand what went wrong, he agrees to meet her, but just before their rendezvous, he is killed. Suicide, the authorities say. Ellie suspects otherwise, especially when she realizes she possesses a flash drive containing significant clues. But various people want it back and aren’t picky about how they get it.

With its up-to-the-minute subject matter involving sophisticated surveillance, secret drone projects, quasi-political assassination, and international intrigue, Jump Cut is a timely, fast-paced read. The plot relies on a couple of shaky coincidences, especially finding the flash drive in the first place. And it includes the typical device of not spilling to the authorities when every bone of the reader’s body is screaming “Tell them! Now!”

Ellie’s close and believable relationships with boyfriend Luke, daughter Rachel, and dad Jake provide a warm counterpoint to the terrifying situation in which she finds herself. Hellmann writes in a breezy, easy-to-read style, but ultimately, the writing style is a jarring contrast to the book’s bleak take on the modern zeitgeist, in which the killing of innocent people is seen “as not just an acceptable but an inevitable part of war. Collateral damage.” That point is underscored a bit heavily by a prologue that recounts the death of a nine-year-old boy in a dusty desert on the far side of the world. We don’t hear another word about him until the epilogue, as a mother laments the loss of her children. Not until then do we know who he and his sister were and what their deaths have been: collateral damage.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

Remembrance Day

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poppy poppies Beefeater London

A small section of the 2014 London installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies, each representing a member of the British military who died in World War I (photo: Shawn Spencer-Smith, creative commons license)

The ushers give you a red paper poppy along with your program for this production of “Remembrance Day,” the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when the English—Americans, too—remember their war dead. We call it Veterans Day, emphasizing the identity of the dead, rather than the obligations of the living.

Eighty-year-old war bride Nancy Ballinger has returned to England for a visit, carrying a memorial wreath, and she names two men in her prayer “oh, and even my husband.” We don’t know who the men are, but in the course of this one-hour, one-woman production, we find out. And a lot more besides.

Remembrance Day was written and performed by June Ballinger, Nancy’s daughter, now Passage Theatre’s artistic director. Nancy tells us how much June has pestered her for the secrets of her past, pre-America life, especially the war work she did at Bletchley Park, Mr. Churchill’s treasure-house of secrets. While we may not learn in great detail what she did, we find out much about who she was.

Ballinger, the actor, moves convincingly at all the ages she portrays, and her director keeps her moving. One hour, no intermission, and interest never flags. Her mother’s character wonders how she will be remembered, when so much essential to herself she felt required to keep to herself. This play, her “remembrance day,” is full of compassion, understanding, and abundant love.

Remembrance Day is one of six one-actor plays being performed at Trenton’s Passage Theatre through March 20 in its “Solo Flights Festival.” It will be repeated Sunday, March 20, 3 pm. I’ve heard rave reviews about two of the others: Manchild in the Promised Land and Panther Hollow. Check Passage’s website for the schedule

On Your Reading Radar: Best Books of Spring

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chairs

(photo: Andy Atzert, creative commons license)

Already reading as fast as I can, I stumbled onto Google’s enticing menu of the 30 Best Books of Spring. The “delightfully unhinged” stories in Helen Ellis’s The American Housewife sound like fun, as does Dexter Palmer’s Version Control about a possible near-future involving a woman who works in customer support for an internet dating site and her scientist husband is trying, it seems, to develop a time machine.

Jo Nesbo is always a winner in the crime/fiction genre (new book: Midnight Sun, whose protagonist is a runaway hitman), though I’m still trying to steel myself to read his reportedly most chilling book, 2012’s The Snowman.

Two more that sound intriguing are: Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night (an opera singer combs her colorful past for clues about who has betrayed her) and Jung Yun’s Shelter (a financially struggling couple must take in his parents. Tensions mount.). Finally, I cannot resist a book whose title is The Little Red Chairs (Edna O’Brien), set in Ireland, about a war criminal in hiding.

Frankly, having read so, so, so many book blurbs, they all start to sound cheesy. I tried to get past that in reviewing the Google list. You might pick out others. But wait, there’s more.

Publisher’s Weekly’s list of “Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2016,” plays it safe by emphasizing well-known authors. Its list is “culled from the 14,000+ titles” known to be forthcoming soon [!]. With that tsunami of prose, who can blame the editors for defaulting to the reliable?

In that rundown are a couple of debuts, but also:

  • Louise Erdrich’s LaRose (an ill-fated hunting trip, North Dakota, 1999)
  • Martin Seay’s Venice trifecta The Mirror Thief (16th c. Venice, Venice Beach in the 50s, and Las Vegas’s Venice casino today)
  • Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (late 17th c., New France. “10 years in the writing,” 800 pages) and
  • Stephen King’s End of Watch, the conclusion of the crime trilogy begun with the Edgar award-winning but overly formulaic Mercedes.

Finally, if I can get these read, I can be ready for the November publication of Moonglow, by one of my favorite writers, Michael Chabon, which explores a family’s hidden past and, says GoodReads, “the destructive impact—and the creative power—of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies.”

*****Black Wings Has My Angel

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cigarette

(photo: pixelblume, creative commons license)

By Elliott Chaze – A 2016 reissue, this noir crime novel by a Mississippi newspaperman, originally published in 1954, is a roller-coaster of a read—lightning fast and a lot of fun. At the outset, an escaped prisoner using the name Tim Sunblade has just finished a stint working on an oil drilling rig.

To rid himself of four months of grime, he takes a nice long bath at a cheap hotel. The comforts of the bath put him in mind of having a little female companionship, and with the bellman’s aid he meets Virginia. They turn out to be quite a team. His plan is to head west (isn’t that the classic American criminal’s destination—the wide open spaces?). Virginia’s look and demeanor suggest she’s not just a hotel tramp, and eventually he learns she’s on the lam herself, fleeing the New York City cops.

The book is full of sly dialog. When Tim discovers her call-girl past, Virginia tells him she used to “go with” various Army officers, who were always talking about “the big picture.” “Do I make it clear, Tim? About what is the big picture?” she asks. “You make it clear that your wartime activities were not on the enlisted level.”

Virginia is accustomed to rolling in dough, literally, and more than a bit money-mad, so she encourages Tim’s plan to rob an armored car in Denver and dispose of it in an abandoned mine shaft they’ve found in the Rockies. Flush with their cash, they hit the road again until a drive through a small town turns out to be a big mistake.

It’s a first-person narrative, and Chaze has captured the voice of Sunblade terrifically well. A bit bemused by life’s twists and turns, but resigned to them. Loving and hating Virginia in fairly equal amounts and never quite trusting her. Too much whiskey and too many cigarettes.

In the introduction to this reissue. Barry Gifford calls Black Wings a gem that still sparkles, and though author Chaze wrote several other novels, none of them stack up to it. A New Orleans native, Chaze worked for the Associated Press, served in the Second World War, then settled in Mississippi. He lived a time in Denver as well, which is perhaps why the book’s locations are so well drawn.

He working in various capacities for The Hattiesburg American, for a decade as its city editor. His newspaper training shows in the economy and precision of his prose, and even when events are dire, the narrator’s detached view allows his wry humor to surface. Though Sunblade doesn’t often dwell on Life’s Larger Questions, I was struck by this observation: “Life is a rental proposition with no lease.” That’s exactly the kind of thing Tim Sunblade would say.

I don’t give very many books five stars, but in this one, every word is perfect. A longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website.

Landfill Harmonic

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music, instrumentIn the early 20th Century, Marcel Duchamp transformed everyday objects into art he called “ready-mades.” The documentary Landfill Harmonic (trailer) shows how garbage from a Paraguayan landfill can be made into musical instruments.

The full-length film focuses on the residents of Cateura, near Asunción, Paraguay’s capital. They live next to a large landfill, where workers scavenge and sell recyclable detritus to make a living. Despite the dispiriting surroundings—ramshackle houses, dismal landscape—the people have a burgeoning enthusiasm for students’ music education. But they are too poor to buy enough instruments.

Musical director Favio Chávez turns to a garbage picker, Nicolás (Colá) Goméz, who begins to fashion instruments from curated debris—flutes made from water pipes, oil and paint cans for violins and cellos, and discarded X-rays for drum skins.

“The world sends us garbage…we send back music,” says Chávez.

Slowly, the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura hones its skills and sound. Then, a random social media connection catapults them into world view. The students pose with the Paraguayan flag decorated with the logo of the heavy metal group Megadeth, whose music they discovered on old cassettes found in the landfill. A Megadeth member sees the post and decides to visit the students. In 2014, he invites the Recycled Orchestra to join the band members on tour in Denver and accompany them on a song. This event propels more media coverage (Wired, Mother Jones, NPR, 60 Minutes) and invitations from across the globe to perform, including at Phoenix’s Musical Instrument Museum in 2013.

Now, most of these music makers are committed to careers in music education and performance.

According to the film’s website, “the Orchestra has grown from just a few musicians to over 35. Their recent fame has piqued the interest of the families and children of the community in such a way that many children are now enrolling for music classes. The music school of Cateura does not have its own building yet, but teaches music and how to build recycled instruments to more than 200 kids of the landfill.”

The documentary, which benefitted from a Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $200,000, has earned acclaim at independent and children’s film festivals around the world. Most recently, it won a 2016 Director’s Choice Award at the Sedona International Film Festival.

This review is by Tucson-based guest reviewer Jodi Goalstone, who writes the highly entertaining blog Going Yard, Offbeat Baseball Musings and is bringing us the best from the recent Sedona IFF.

Goodbye to All That

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(photo: Alex Proimos, creative commons license)

(photo: Alex Proimos, creative commons license)

It’s a blue Monday for fans of Downton Abbey, or Abbots as we’re called.The soapsuds around Highclere Castle are subsiding, people upstairs are learning to pour their own tea or at least let Mr. Barrow help, and Mr. Carson has been given a dictionary with the word “vicarious” circled in it. And the programmers at PBS responsible for its All Downton All the Time schedule of specials are decidedly nervous.

Downton has been a money-making machine. It’s “the most-viewed drama in PBS’s 45 years,” helping the American broadcaster gain a worldwide audience estimated at some 120 million people, Forbes reports, with global merchandising revenue hitting $250 million in 2014. More satisfying than any of that is that revenues to beautiful Highclere Castle—in need of nearly $20 million in repairs six years ago—have enabled the owners to restore it fully and secure its future.

But Downton has built this mega-empire not because viewers were interested in public television’s resurgence or castle restoration, but because it’s fun! It’s entertaining to see how other people live and the depths of misery in the midst of high posh. You can put your own expertise on the downs of Downton to the test. The New York Times offers a quiz to see how many calamities the characters have endured that you can recognize. I scored 22 out of 39 points. Hint: Thomas pretty much had them all.

I’m not surprised to receive regular Downton-related promotions from Masterpiece sponsor Viking River Cruises. Farther afield is the advertising I received yesterday for ‘Downton Abbey’ roses. I can fill my garden with Anna’s Promise (coral), Violet’s Pride (violet, natch), Lady Edith’s darling (in a shade closest to Marigold), and the Pretty Lady Rose rose (fuchsia). We’re only missing Lady Mary’s Heart, which I suppose is not offered because (after the recent treatment of Edith) roses don’t come in black. Though she’s trying.

In case you think what you’ll miss most are Dowager Countess Violet’s zingers, here’s a whole list of them. One of my favorites: “I don’t dislike him, I just don’t like him. Which is quite different.” Indeed. Or last night’s “Why can’t men ever paint themselves out of a corner?”

If your withdrawal symptoms are too acute, Chanel Cleeton for BookBub has prepared a list of books to help you through it. (I see House of Mirth on the list. I thought that was going to be Julian Fellowes’s next big project—a series about New York in the Gilded Age?) Top of the BookBub list: Wendy Wax’s romantic While We Were Watching Downton Abbey.

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