Theater Extravaganza!

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Last weekend we enjoyed an unforgettable theater weekend. Thanks to gifts, we did not have to remortgage the house to snag tickets for two of the hottest, most interesting shows currently on Broadway: Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in Othello and George Clooney in Good Night and Good Luck.

For more than 400 years, audiences have found Shakespeare’s plays so perfectly capture human motives, failings, and dilemmas that they continue to offer important commentary, however far removed we are from their creation. Good Night and Good Luck, an adaptation of the 2005 film, is set some 70 years ago—an eternity in the age of texting and instant messaging—but it too lent itself painful timeliness. Do such works speak to audiences today? They did last weekend. Is their message lost on today’s audiences? Not for a New York minute.

Othello, you’ll remember, is the story of a vaunted Venetian general whose chief aide, feigning loyalty but secretly vindictive, sows doubt about the faithfulness of Othello’s wife, Desdemona. Suspicion builds, and this false story eventually so enrages Othello that he murders her and, in this version, the play ends with death upon death. What devastating power lies have. And, once accepted, how difficult they are to dislodge.

A major theme of the play is reputation. Iago famously says, “Who steals my purse steals trash; ʼtis something, nothing . . . But he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.” Even in his last speech, the suicidal Othello is concerned about how he will be perceived thereafter.

In Shakespeare’s time, although news of a person’s transgressions—real or imagined or maliciously crafted—might eventually reach the ears of many people or the few who mattered; today, such reports are instantly accessible to a worldwide audience and wreak havoc with the ideas of privacy and safety and innocence. Whether they are true or not seems irrelevant. The point is to hurt. In the face of this onslaught, we are “perplexed in the extreme,” as Othello says, and damaged in some cases, beyond repair.

George Clooney has had a long interest in the topic of how fear stifles political debate. In this project, he and co-writer Grant Heslov took the Army-McCarthy hearings as their subject. Senator Joseph McCarthy was infamous for his sensational accusations that various individuals were Communists based on slender or no evidence. His particular targets were the federal government, universities, and the film industry. It was a fearful time. Tremendous pressure was brought on television journalist Edward R. Murrow and his co-producer Fred Friendly to tread lightly around McCarthy, as anyone who opposed him would very likely become his next target.

Nevertheless, Murrow and Friendly produced a famous See It Now documentary using clips of McCarthy himself and his wild accusations. Commenting on the Senator’s words, Murrow said, “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty” and warning against letting fear push the country into an age of unreason. The production definitely wants to establish parallels with current-day politics, and one of its biggest laughs comes when a newsman laments that he hasn’t quite understood what’s been happening in the past few years and says, “It’s like all the sensible people flew to Europe and left us here.”

Both plays benefit from excellent casts, including Clooney and Gyllenhaal, who are not stage actors. Othello has a spare stage that adapts to whatever configuration is needed, whereas Good Night and Good Luck has a very specific set, a 1950s newsroom, with all the chaos of a production about to go on air. Both work.

Queen of Diamonds

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This is the third in Beezy Marsh’s trilogy inspired by a real-life female shoplifting gang that operated in London in the first half of the twentieth century. The first two books, Queen of Thieves and Queen of Clubs, deal with the gang’s activities during their heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, while this book describes how their leader—Alice Diamond—got her dubious start two decades earlier.

Alice, the future Queen of Diamonds, is an orphan working long hot hours in Pink’s Jam Factory. Aspiring to a better life, she shoplifts little indulgences for herself on her off-hours—silk stockings, colorful scarves, and the like. Alice’s story is interspersed with that of Mary Carr, another legendary leader of a real-life shoplifting gang whose career began several decades earlier. Mary grew up in one of London’s most notorious slums, Seven Dials.

In Marsh’s story, Mary is noticed by a Mayfair lady out slumming. She’s looking for subjects for her paintings of dirty, downtrodden, poverty-stricken children and finds Mary a perfect model for her art. By inviting the girl to her home and studio, the condescending Lady Harcourt exposes Mary to a completely different side of life, whetting her appetite for better things. Mary soon realizes she’s treated completely differently when she’s wearing Lady Harcourt’s daughter’s hand-me-downs than when dressed in her own dirty rags. From that point, there’s no going back for her.

Author Marsh evokes sympathy with her descriptions of the women’s sordid living conditions and unambitious, resentful family members. It isn’t surprising they aspire to glamour beyond the understanding of the people they grew up with. What’s remarkable is that both Mary and Alice are brash and determined enough to get it, with potential trouble with the authorities always right around the corner.

All that is fairly sociological. What about the story? It never flags and rests on the tremendous strength of the characters Marsh has created. She puts us right there, fingering those silks, decorating those bonnets, and running for our lives when the coppers appear.

Permissible Laughter

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In a thought-provoking interview with award-winning Lebanese-Canadian novelist, journalist, and visual artist Rawi Hage a few years back, he talked about how it’s the writer’s job to push the limits, to not settle for being only entertaining. For me this resonates with the idea that authors shouldn’t try to bang out the next “The Girl Who. . .” book, but strike out into some new territory. Of course, for many, it seems, they run up against a failure of imagination or an excess of anxiety, which is why when a particular book catches on, it will have so many clones. In a contradiction bound eventually to fail, many authors try to recapture that uniqueness.

Think, for example of Dan Brown’s books and all the religio-cryptic thrillers that came afterward. Or all the books where a discrete set of people with a shared past and rivalries and bitter secrets are stranded on an island, in a remote area cut off by a storm, or wherever, and . . . they start to die. Or the Gone Girl clones, or, rather, would-be clones.

Hage said he thinks of himself as “a confrontational writer,” and the more marginal he feels about a piece, the better his writing is. In other words, he’s not trying to please everyone. “Writers who try to please and go by the rules and try to do the right things, they tend to fail,” he thinks. It’s an interesting stance to take, and difficult for authors, when the publishing industry seems increasingly risk-averse.

He talked interestingly about the way the Arabic language affected his writing. He read a lot of Arabic poetry as a young man, and it’s very visual, perhaps making up for strictures on visual representations of people and animals in the culture generally. It’s a “very elaborate” language, he says. Writing in English, he pared back.

Even so, he brings “bags and bags of history, travels, concerns, revenge; a mixture of the emotional, the experiential, and the cultural” to his writing. That comports with my view of writing as like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with a thousand disparate pieces of the kinds he mentions, and seeing what picture they create. He wisely infuses that mix with dark humor too. Pavlov, the protagonist of his fourth novel, Beirut Hellfire Society, says, “Laughter should be permissible under all circumstances.”

Like to Write? Just Dig In!

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Looking through my stack of old Martha Stewart Living magazines (guilty pleasure), I’ve found some gems. Not just tempting cocktail recipes (try the bourbon-Canton ginger liqueur-splash of lemon juice and garnished with star anise at the holidays), but also a lovely article on “the writer’s garden.” I don’t know how Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Lawrence, Edith Wharton, and Edna St. Vincent Millay found the time—maybe your name has to start with “E”—but their gardens were lovely. Getting away from the desk and doing something totally different, that’s interesting but doesn’t require 110 percent of your mind, nourishes creativity, I’ve found. Fresh air helps too. At least that’s what these writers seem to have learned.

Edith Wharton’s tilled the soil in the Berkshires and said “Decidedly, I’m a better landscape gardener than novelist.” Her home in Lenox, Mass., is now a National Historic Landmark, and you can visit, see all she did to develop its three acres of formal gardens, and go back to your B&B for a nap. Pictures at the website.

A little less constrained, perhaps, are and were Edna St. Vincent Millay’s gardens in Austerlitz, N.Y., where she once hosted what Living called “Bacchanalian parties.” The poet worked hours each day in a writing shack she built in a pine grove, which she planed. In her case the gardens definitely nourished creativity. Was the “shack” tax deductible?, I wonder. Her large estate, Steepletop, is open to the public. Website here.

In Jackson, Mississippi, you’ll find Eudora Welty’s home and the beautiful garden her mother originally planted and her lifelong connection to it shows up in her work. Welty, says the garden website, “mentions more than 150 kinds of plants in her stories, and the garden includes many examples of her favorite flowers, camellias. Although the carefully selected plants create a year-long “parade of bloom,” including many roses, I found a photo that features my favorite, irises.

Gabriel’s Moon & Havoc

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Pack your traveling clothes. These two books will take you on adventures far afield.

In Gabriel’s Moon, the new espionage thriller by William Boyd, a brief prologue tells how thirty-something Gabriel Dax is haunted by the house fire that took his widowed mother’s life and destroyed his childhood home. Gabriel has become a book author and travel writer, speeding off to one destination after another, trying to outrun the flames.

Now Gabriel is in Léopoldville (Kinshasha), capital of the newly established Democratic Republic of the Congo. A friend arranges a spectacular journalistic coup: an interview with the prime minister, the controversial, pro-Soviet Patrice Lamumba—a poor political choice for a leader sitting on a “gold mine” of uranium. Gabriel works hard on the Lamumba article, but his editors spike it. Lamumba, apparently, is old news. Kidnapped in a coup.

Rumors say Lamumba is dead. His editor says that’s not true, and if it were, he’d know it. Of course, it is true, and Gabriel slides into a mirror-world of truths, half-truths, and lies, delivered most convincingly of all. Someone desperately wants his interview tapes, in which Lamumba claimed US, British, and Belgian government operatives were out to get him. He named names.

It’s an exciting read as Gabriel zooms from one assignment to the next, from one strange encounter to another, and develops the self-preservation skills he seems increasingly likely to need. The story is packed with interesting, richly developed characters. Aside from Gabriel, there’s a Spanish artist whose star is falling; a young American woman with a dubious agenda; a CIA operative who uses a minor French author for his nom de guerre; his louche, hard-drinking, and slippery contact in Cadiz; an irritating Liverpool journalist; and a dogged insurance investigator who decades earlier doubted the official story about the deadly fire.

London, Warsaw during the Cold War, Spain, the Congo—Boyd captures them all as effectively as travel writer Gabriel himself might. It’s no surprise that award-winning Scottish author Boyd’s writing is top-notch. He’s a two-time finalist for the Booker Prize.

Christopher Bollen’s protagonist in the new psychological thriller Havoc is Maggie Burkhardt, an 81-year-old widow from Milwaukee, residing at a somewhat unfashionable hotel in Luxor, Egypt. She’s lost everything—husband, daughter—and is making up for their absences by trying to become a presence in other peoples’ lives and “fixing” their problems. Truth told, she’s an interfering busybody, and you may wish she’d get her comeuppance.

Probably you won’t expect her nemesis will turn out to be an eight-year-old boy. Otto Seeber is cunning, fearless, and the orchestrator of much of the havoc that descends on the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel. (This fictional hotel was in part inspired by Luxor’s Winter Palace Hotel, where Bollen got his first notion for this story and Agatha Christie wrote part of Death on the Nile. I’ve been there myself and can attest to the loveliness of the garden with its exotic birds, a frequent meeting place for Bollen’s characters.)

Only Maggie—and her archaeologist friend Ben—see through Otto’s mask of childish innocence to the demonic personality underneath. Ben’s husband, Zachary, having a belated stirring of paternal interest, draws the boy into their circle, and Maggie cannot avoid Otto. He has her in his sights and keeps her there.

Maggie attempts to arrange situations that will prompt Otto’s mother to return with him to Paris. Her plots only succeed in drawing her deeper into a cycle of retribution from Otto. It’s a chess game between them, with a core of malevolence that has prompted comparisons to Patricia Highsmith’s writing.

Bollen’s vivid descriptions seem exactly right. Egypt is a distinctive, “romantic” place, but an unfamiliar world. The rules are different there. Things can go wrong. And do. Maggie is a completely believable, if not completely likeable character. I thought I understood her and her flaws, but in the end, Bollen has some revelations in store that may lead you to reevaluate her. In short, Havoc is a beautifully stage-managed trip to another world.

Sunscreen Shower by JP Rieger

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Sunscreen Shower, the new crime novel by Baltimore author JP Rieger takes advantage of the varied cast of characters from his first novel as they, it’s fair to say, lurch through life. This group of friends who survived the horrors of high school together has managed to stay close over the decades since, despite wildly different life paths. The main character, Kev Dixit, is a South Asian police detective, who finds creative uses for his friends’ varied skills in serving and protecting the citizens of Baltimore. Dixit, his friends, and his team in the police department are well-developed characters, and their occasional quirks make them believably human.

In this story, Dixit is confronted at the outset by a bizarre pair of killings, which at first blush appear to be the murder-suicide of a married couple named Matthiesen. The more he learns about the couple the less likely that seems. Something is off. And part of that something, he learns, is that the Matthiesens weren’t husband-and-wife, they were siblings, possibly even twins.

He has little time to spare for the Matthiesen case, though, as he’s confronted with a series of young woman attacked in their homes, each a bit more violent than the last. The women have nothing in common but impending marriage and are from different surrounding towns. The multijurisdictional complications give Dixit the chance to do what he does best, and often quite humorously—figure out a way around mindless bureaucratic obstacles.

In a separate plot, two of his long-time friends—a physician and an actor—have hired an uninterested public relations agent to promote their new book. For an inkling of what the p.r. maven is up against, here’s the book title: Blood Brothers: How Two Longstanding Friends Saved Themselves From The Ugly Streets Of Baltimore In the Midst Of Personal Trials and Chaotic Lives—And The Bonds That Formed, Only To Be Tested, Time And Again, Within The City’s Dark Cultural Wasteland. And, if that isn’t enough, there’s this pair’s great invention: the sunscreen shower. Scenes with them are full of humor (a nice break from the crime), but not especially integrated into the rest of the story.

Already lots is going on in Dixit’s world (did I mention someone is out to get him?), when he’s saddled with a new straight-arrow Academy grad. She carries the notion of political correctness to extremes, and Dixit’s attempts to avoid saying anything inadvertently offensive are hilarious. But not as much as the “sensitivity training” he’s required to complete. The two cases—the possible murder-suicide and the attacks on brides-to-be—are complicated, and watching Dixit and his team make sense of the tiny details is a lot of fun. You also get a big-picture appreciation for the competing pressures urban police departments face and will wish for common sense to win out. That’s Dixit’s view, in any case.

His first book, Clonk! is laugh-out-loud funny. Reviewed here.

An Irish Classic: the International

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hotel bar, barman
(photo: shankar s, creative commons license)

“If I had known history was to be written that Sunday in the International Hotel I might have made an effort to get out of bed before teatime,” writes Daniel Hamilton, an 18-year-old Belfast bartender and narrator of Glenn Patterson’s novel The International: A Novel of Belfast.

The history he refers to is the meeting to launch the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), an organization formed to focus attention on discrimination against Northern Ireland’s mostly Catholic nationalist minority. We call the succeeding three decades of violence and despair The Troubles, and The International “is the best book about the Troubles ever written,” says Irish author and Booker-Prize-winner Anne Enright.

Funny thing is, there’s almost no overt violence in this book, apart from the fact it’s set in a busy bar with lots of coming and going and football on the telly and political shenanigans where money changes hands and gay men and straight women hoping to meet someone and people who should have stopped drinking hours before ordering another and weddings upstairs in the hotel, at one of which the clergyman plays an accordion. In other words, enough latent violence in reserve to keep the average semi-sober person on his toes.

The principal action of the novel takes place during on Saturday evening, January 28, 1967, the night before the big meeting, larded with Danny Hamilton’s memories of other times and barroom encounters. His minutely observed portrayal of everyday life as seen from behind the bar is heartbreaking when, with the lens of hindsight, the reader knows how soon it will all be gone, sucked into a slowly unwinding catastrophe of bombs and gunfire.

The quote at the top of this piece opens the book, and these words about a barmen who was shot dead, Peter Ward, also age 18, help close it:

I can’t tell you much else about him, except that those who knew him thought the world of him. He is, I realise, an absence in this story. I wish it were not so, but guns do that, create holes which no amount of words can fill.

I wrote about this book and a visit to Princeton by Belfast author Glenn Patterson a few years ago, and it seems apt to return to it on St. Patrick’s Day, especially given his writing’s emphasis on history and politics and his deep sense of place. He said that “when history looks back at our present, it will see that what we thought we were at and what we were at, really, were entirely different.” When we think about our current moment in America, that is a sobering thought.

Here’s Glenn Patterson’s list of his top 10 books about Belfast, compiled in 2012.

Meetings, Meetings, Which to Choose?

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So many enticing meetings for crime and mystery writers of every stripe in this season. Some national, some regional, some hyper-local! It’s hard to know where an author should lay their travel budget bets. In the past few years, I’ve put my money toward the Public Safety Writers Association’s annual July conference in Las Vegas. (The hotels are cheap at that time of year, and since the temperature outside is 115, I’m not tempted to wander away from the excellent sessions. And I don’t want to miss the fun prize-drawings!)

The attendees are current and former public safety professionals—police, FBI, CIA, EMTs, fire fighters, military—and people like me who write about them. I can’t tell you how much extra confidence it gives me about my writing, when I’ve been able to check some tricky bit of action with someone who knows what they’re talking about (i.e., not what I see on tv). Many of the friends I’ve made through the group are happy to do that.

I enjoy the conference presentations too. Most important, they’re interesting and informative, especially when presenters talk about their experiences, scary or funny or sad. What I’ve learned from those is not only how a particular individual responded to a particular situation, but much more helpfully, how they think. So, when I put my character into a situation, I can extrapolate. None of us can experience first-hand all the things we subject our characters to (and thank goodness for that!), and we have to extrapolate their reactions from our own experiences and from what we know about how others have reacted in parallel encounters.

I consider this a tough crowd of expert authors, so I’m pleased to say that two of my short stories have won prizes in the PSWA’s annual competition, and my novel came in second one year (beaten out by the estimable James L’Etoile, who any crime writer would not mind being bested by). When this audience respects my work, I know I’m doing something right! My cousin once asked me, suspicion in her voice, “How do you know so much about crime?” I, of course, refused to answer and just gave her a sly look. But now, I suppose, my secret’s out!

More Thoughts on the Curse of the Curse-Word

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Is there an up-side? A few days ago, I wrote about how and why writers may choose to use curse words in their fiction, depending on plot and character. A recent Washington Post article by Sam Jones talked about the “value” of cursing under extreme circumstances. The author wrote, “If you stub your toe or slam your finger in a door, there’s a good chance the first thing out of your mouth is a four-letter word.”

The article points to academic studies showing that that class of taboo words and phrases “has long held a unique and colorful status in language behavior.” (“Language behavior” typifying the unique and uncolorful style of academic writing.) 

But although swearing is a near-universal feature of language, it is still considered taboo by many. This universality suggests that there are benefits derived from using the words, and one of those benefits is this: an increase in pain tolerance and decreased perception of pain. Swearing is “a drug-free, calorie-neutral, cost-free  means of self-help,” said Richard Stephens, a British psychology researcher. I’d add that it also attracts attention, so if you’re there bleeding or clutching your broken arm, someone is more likely to come help than if you mutter, “Ouch. That hurt.”

Swearing also “has been linked to bolstered social bonds, improved memory, and even an alleviation of the social pain of exclusion or rejection,” as well as increased strength. (All I can say is that the characters in the Academy Award-winning movie Anora must have the memories of elephants.) The increase in strength makes sense, because when someone swears because they’re in pain, their heart rate increases, adrenaline surges, and blood diverts to your muscles in the “fight or flight” response.

If you’re an author debating whether your character should be swearing so much, or if you’re a reader wondering the same, think about whether the circumstances are such that swearing is more than a habit; it’s a coping mechanism. Next maybe they’ll research whether constant swearing reduces the physiological impact and, for those who swear constantly, weakens that potential source of help just when they need it most.

Exposure: Navajo Crime-Solving

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This is the second in Ramona Emerson’s planned trilogy about Navajo crime scene photographer Rita Todacheene, a follow-on to Shutter, her impressive debut. Exposure again takes you on an intense ridealong with Rita, who uses her camera to meticulously and unflinchingly document the most gruesome tragedies. You may believe that the images themselves suggest clues to the commission of these murders, or you can accept Rita’s understanding, that the spirits of the dead are guiding her to see beneath the surface. Either way, you know she believes those ghosts are with her. (She and another popular indigenous author, Marcie Rendon, have discussed how their cultural backgrounds give them a different, intriguing way of seeing and interpreting the world, which I wrote about a few weeks back.)

Rita’s colleagues in the Albuquerque, New Mexico, police department are less-than-thrilled with her insights. They like simple solutions and quickly closed investigations. Worse, she’s not a cop. Their hostility has led to the requirement that she undergo psychological counselling to combat her “ghosts.” (Labelling a woman crazy in order to dismiss what she says is an old, old story, of course.) To keep busy while on this furlough, she’s been working in the office of the Medical Examiner, one person unable to dismiss her so lightly.

The story opens with Rita being unexpectedly called out to a murder scene. A mother, father, and their six children have been shot to death. The police believe the oldest son, alive, blood-spattered, and holding a gun, is the culprit. The spirits of the children, one in particular, lead Rita to a different theory of the crime.

In parallel with Rita’s story, alternating chapters recount the story of a man who, in childhood, witnessed the violent deaths of his family, followed by a back-breaking and spirit-quenching ordeal at a religious orphanage. An adult now, he’s a lay Brother doing outreach among the impoverished residents of Gallup, New Mexico. He’s determined to help the indigent people he encounters—alcoholic, too little food and shelter, and too much desperation. For them, wintertime is a deadly trial, and death too often comes from exposure (another meaning of the book’s title).

Meanwhile, the dead children so torment Rita that she returns home to her grandmother, who lives on the reservation, north of Gallup. There, perhaps, she can start to heal. As the clouds over her spirit begin to lift, she’s asked by a female Gallup police detective to help figure out a set of murders in the town.

Emerson so effectively describes the starkly beautiful country and the uncompromising weather, that you may need a hot cup of something as you read. She integrates Navajo traditions and beliefs into the modern tale in a way that gives science (the medical examiner), belief (the Navajo), and procedure (the police) their due. All three come together in Rita. But they are not easily reconciled, and her struggles make for a unique and compelling story.

I’m not personally a big believer in the supernatural, but I do believe unexplainable events happen. It’s Rita’s belief in the spirits that matters, though, and they have never led her astray.

The quality and sensitivity of the writing is much to be appreciated, and it persists despite the sometimes brutal subject matter. Shutter, Emerson’s 2023 debut novel, was nominated for numerous awards in the crime and mystery field, frequently appeared on “Best Books of the Year” lists, and received recognition from both the National Book Award and PEN Literary Awards programs. A Navajo (Diné) writer and filmmaker, she lives in Albuquerque.

Relatedly, the new season of Dark Winds, based on the Tony Hillerman characters, was scheduled to start 3/9 on AMC. We watched past seasons on Amazon Prime. Looking forward to the new one!