For some reason, books are flowing through my hands like a welcome breeze. Rather than fill up the September newzine, I thought I’d post them now. ~ JB
A book caught my eye the other day. A book about the Alamo. I’m always interesting in history as well as American myths. The hardboiled private eye is an American myth that just marked it’s 100th year. The June 1st, 1923 of Black Mask magazine contained a story by Carroll John Daly called “Knights of the Open Palm”. It’s agreed to be the first “hardboiled” story.
Then there are other American myths deeply ingrained in our culture: the Western, with the solid town sheriff facing down gunslingers, the cattle baron battling small ranchers; the tommygun era of Dillinger and Bonnie & Clyde robbing banks during the Depression, our own Robin Hoods; even the mobsters of The Godfather or Goodfellas. I suppose you can include our superheros as a mythology, Superman, certainly – Truth, Justice, and the American Way!.
Myths usually deal with heroes struggling against powerful forces. One of our Great American Myths is certainly The Alamo. So the cover of Forget the Alamo was an eye grabber. The authors – Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlison, and Jason Stanford – make clear that this is not be a history, but a historiography, a history of the history of The Alamo. This engrossing, informative, and amusing book examines how the history of what lead up the the 1836 siege became mythologized, as did the battle itself, and how the mythology became the truth.
Along the way, they show through the historical record what actually happened, now that was polished by writers and eventually accepted as the truth by the historians and citizens and, of course, politicians, right up to when the book was published a couple of years ago. Man, what a story. They make clear that the root of the clash between Americans and the Mexican government was slavery. Americans moving into Mexican territory were looking to make it rich raising cotton and the only way to do that was with slave labor. Mexico kept Spain’s prohibition of slavery and refused to allow it. The authors detail the maneuvering in the decade before the battle by all sides. They portray Santa Anna not as the tyrant Hollywood showed but as a leader pushed to the point where is had to stop the Americans if he wanted to keep this land. That, history does show correctly, ended up costing him what he tried to secure.
The authors also end with the controversy over Phil Collins’ collection and the swamp of controversy over the veracity of Alamo collectables and artifacts – which itself is an interesting tale. It is a story, they make clear, that is a continuing American myth.
‘Good morning. May I speak with Mr. Marlowe?’ Her voice was cracked, like she smoked Cubans and stayed up late laughing at dirty jokes.
I had never read the fact that Chandler’s original title for Farewell, My Lovely, was The Second Murderer. No wonder that Denise Mina took that for her new Marlowe novel.
His novel was published in 1940. Hers isn’t dated specifically but two things tell us it’s very near there: Anne Riordan comes back into Marlowe’s life and there are many references to Nazis, but not to the approaching war.
Marlowe is hired to find a missing heiress. Her father, an outlandishly wealthy man, doesn’t seem too concerned with her welfare, more that he needs to secure his family fortune – and it’ll go to her. “The Montgomerys’ money was so old there was a rumour that some of it still had Moses’ teen marks on it.” Sure, the wealth is there but it’s tarnished and the mansion is falling apart. The story is part missing person [Montgomery for Getty?], part art mystery [Peggy Zimmernan surely is a stand-in for Peggy Guigenheim and the modern art involved sounds like Braque], part romance, as sparks sizzle between Riordan – a reporter in Farewell, now the head of her own PI agency – and Marlowe.
There’s an Autumn heat wave baking the city and there’s little escape. Mina does a great job of making you feel it, along with a nifty homage to “Red Wind”: The heat of the day was rising. It was climbing out of the sewer. It was creeping out of the stones. Cracks in the sidewalk flowered open to let out heat-warmed dust that lurked in the air ready to catch children by the throat, smother babies or hold a cushion over Grammie’s face.
But being a Chandleresque story, nothing will really end well. No one is to be trusted, no one is really who they seem, secrets will see daylight, romance is an illusion, and the cheap suit Marlowe bought on sale is the butt of jokes and a stand-in for the different worlds he inhabits.
Mina carves wonderful similes throughout. “Her laugh had a tinny rattle now, sharp edges, like a comedian’s wife planning her divorce during a live show”. Whether it’s intentional or not, there are a number of British-isms (tyre for tire, bonnet for hood) that echo some of Chandler’s spelling. I found them charming but to those not familiar in Chandler’s work, they might well clunk.
“He looked like a headache in a suit“. How can you not appreciate and smile at writing like that? There have been a good number of Marlowe novels over the last couple of decades – Robert B. Parker’s, Benjamin Black(John Banville)’s,Lawrence Osborne’s, Joe Ide’s. Denise Mina’s is the best of the bunch. Can’t wait to see what the Chandler Estate comes up with next.
?????????????????????????????
Bill would’ve loved this book: The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder by Lawrence Block. The conceit of the book is that Scudder is telling his own story with the help of Block. At times, their conversations are included. It’s a trip!
If you’ve read the Scudder books – if you haven’t, you should, start with When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes, which is the one Bill put in my hands when I first started working with him – little in this new one will be unknown to you. But the joy is spending time with Scudder, having his voice in your ear again, and getting a last chance to hear about Mick, Danny Boy, and of course Elaine. I say last chance for I fear this will be the last time we get to spend any new time with Matthew. If so, we’ll still have the solace of re-reading his stories and that is always worth the time!
“She looked older than she had behind the counter, but at a certain point, most people look younger with a gun pointed at them.” The book opens with Walker stopping a bank robbery. He’s behind the clown in line, waiting to deposit a check, when the guy pulls a gun on the teller. Walker’s action? Just shoot the guy in the knee. The teller then becomes his client.
More great pages of private eye with Cutthroat Dogs, the 2021 Amos Walker from Loren D. Estleman. Besides his superlative writing, this one has one of the most unique resolutions I’ve ever read. A sister hires Walker to re-investigate the death that sent her brother to prison for murder 20 years ago. I had thought I’d fingered the culprit early on but, of course, I was way off the mark – to my delight.
Appropriately, the book ends with this: “So I stayed home to heal, catch up on my sleep, and bank my fee. I didn’t shoot anyone this time.”
[A special compliment to Michael Graziolo for the outstanding jacket design!]
It’s always tough to read the final book by a favorite author. All that is left is to re-read earlier books, which is always nice, but you know you won’t be delighted and surprised by a new story.
Completed but published in 2019 after his death, Metropolis is Philip Kerr’s final book and last in his outstanding Bernie Gunther series. Kerr has always played with time in the series, sometimes in Bernie’s future, with detours to the past. In Metropolis, he takes us back to 1928, as Bernie first joins the homicide group, “the Murder Commission” as it was called at the time. Again, Kerr places Gunther amongst historical figures and events. Here, they’re the figures of Wiemar Berlin, with all of its lurid excesses. Someone is killing prostitutes and WWI disabled veterans. Nazi Brown Shirts are around, there’s an air of “who cares” in the city, even in the police department. It’s the start of the sensibility that Germany might be better off without these undesirables. As we know, it was a short distance from societal disgust to extermination. “Weiss frowned. ‘I think it’s highly unlikely I didn’t like them. I didn’t like them at all. But I don’t think there’s any German doctor who would put a gun to a man’s head and pull the trigger in the name of so-called racial hygiene, or ask someone else to do so. Things are morally bad in Germany, yes, but there’s not that bad yet.’” That’s said in 1928 – just wait a decade…
It’s dangerous to ascribe too much to an author’s intentions, but it isn’t hard to see a cautionary warning in this story about how it happened once and how one can see the same sentiments afoot today. Visiting the morgue, Bernie notes “Sometimes there is nothing quiet so dreadful as your fellow man, dead of alive.”
Hi there, sorry I’m late in posting this. I went from not having any movies to tie in to a surplus, but that’s how it goes.
You see, Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny is a complex book. First of all, it really tackles Canadian winters.
“Every winter roofs did collapse and every winter snow and ice slid off to the sidewalk below, crushing unfortunate pedestrians. There was a sound sliding ice made, a sound like no other, a cross between a slow, deep moan and a shriek. Every Quebecois knew it, like buzz bombs in the Blitz.
“But hearing it, and being able to do anything were two different things. The sound echoed off the old stone buildings, disguising location. It might be right above you, or it might be streets away.
“True Quebecois walked in the middle of the road. Tourists often thought the Quebecois gracious, to cede the sidewalk to them, until the sound began.“
The brutality of Canadian winters figures heavily in the three stories Louise Penny tells in Bury Your Dead. There’s the mystery of the homicide in the Literary and Historical Society in Quebec that Inspector Gamache finds himself caught up in, and all the history that goes with it.
Then there’s the quiet investigation Jean-Guy Beauvoir is taking on at Gamache’s request. Yes, Olivier was convicted of the murder of the Hermit, but Gamache is doubting himself, and he asks Jean-Guy to use some of his recovery time to check it out.
Lastly, there’s the reason both Gamache and Beauvoir are recuperating. Bit by bit we learn about what happened on that fateful day where agents were killed and Gamache and Beauvoir were critically injured, which is why they’re on leave from the Surete.
So, a murder or two in winter leaves a lot of movies to pick from, but the deciding factor was the clash of cultures. There’s a definite clash between the English and the French in Quebec, and it can rouse tempers like nothing else. There’s a culture conflict between the Cree and the whites as well, and that’s important. And there’s a clash between city and country, their different ways of approaching matters, of dealing with issues.
That left me with two movies yet again, so here they are.
The city/country clash is clearly a theme in Shoot to Kill. Winter figures heavily, and, like so much of Louise Penny’s writing, there’s enough humor to leaven the suspense.
Besides, Sidney Poitier, Tom Berenger, Kirstie Alley, and Clancy Brown? What”s not to love?
The other movie, Wind River, has the winter background but it also has the Native American/Anglo clash, and it touches on an important topic. Honestly, I think everyone should see this movie. It’s highly underrated, probably because it’s a mystery and it deals with an uncomfortable truth.
People often overlook Jeremy Renner, too, and that’s a shame. The man has talent. Then too, Graham Greene is one of my favorite actors, so I admit to bias.
But in the end, they’re all about murder, and as Louise Penny observes, “Chief Inspector Gamache knew that most killers didn’t consider their act a crime. They’d somehow convinced themselves the victim had to die, had brought it on themselves, deserved to die. It was a private execution.“
For a couple of weeks, staff@seattlemystery.com has not received any email. That’s strange. Usually there are at least some messages in Spanish, which seem to be this era’s efforts to unload thousands of dollars, or euros, quickly – Dear One…
Investigation lead to the revelation that, though our domain was renewed in May (we have the receipt), it was marked as “expired”. This meant that, for the last couple of weeks, no emails have reached us and anyone sending one received some sort of message saying the address no longer worked.
This is – we hope and trust – something that can and will be rectified soon and we’ll be once again be able to receive the normal amounts of trash, leavened with an occasional message from a friend.
“Because whoever did this was already inside,” said Madame DuBois. “What happened here last night isn’t allowed.”
It was such an extraordinary thing to say that it stopped the ravenous Beauvoir from taking another bite of his roast beef on baguette.
“You have a rule against murder?” he asked.
“I do.”
In this novel, Louise Penny takes us on an adventure that it straight out of Agatha Christie, with the isolated hotel (that’s very much like a manor house), a quirky and intriguing staff, and a family that is drawn together like moths to a flame, and inevitably, someone dies.
You would almost expect Hercule Poirot to meander out of the gardens, but I assure you that Inspector Gamache and his lovely wife, Reine-Marie, are quite up to the task, although of course it wouldn’t be the same without the usual back-up cast, and Three Pines is quite well represented with the presence of Clara and Peter Morrow. It is, after all, his family in the spotlight, and they are wonderful and vicious and surprising, valuable and vulnerable as any story by Dame Agatha.
It really is about manners in manors that sets the tone and the background. How one behaves, how one is perceived, how one presents oneself is key to the story, but it also makes us look at the face and facade we present to the world.
A Rule Against Murder does take us out of our usual geography, but the inner geography holds true. And while I do always think of Gamache as Poirot in this book, I can’t help but also be drawn to another comparison, equally fastidious, and with quirkiness and humor to boot.
Biblioklept is, in at least some sense of the word, fairly useless. It is two syllables longer than book thief. It is also unlikely to be understood by some portion of the people with whom you use it, and so cannot be said to aid in communication. Happily, we do not have a merit based vocabulary, and words that are useless have the same rights of inclusion as do those that are useful.
Pot-Valor: boldness or courage resulting from alcoholic drink
The fancy way of saying liquid courage, pot-valor is the perfect word to describe how imbibing a few ounces of something can make a very bad idea seem like something you should definitely do right now. Unfortunately, when you are at the point when this word will be most applicable to you, chances are good that you will also be too drunk to remember what it is. Write it down on your arm before you go out tonight.
Neighborstained: Stained with the blood of neighbors
An Example: Rebellious Subiects, Enemies to peace, Prophaners of this Neighbor-stained Steele, Will they not heare? What hoe, you Men, you Beasts, That quench the fire of your pernitious Rage, With purple Fountaines issuing from your Veines. — William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 1623
Vulpinate: To play the fox; to deceive with crafty wiles or deceits. Some Trivia – A similar word is vulpeculated, an adjective defined by the OED as “robbed by a fox.”
The Reality Show contestant on The Traitors with Alan Cumming! (Btw, you don’t need to know who or what show they were on previously to watch this show.)
How many of you out there watched the first Knives Out movie? Well, I did, and it remains one of my all-time favorite movie mysteries of all time (as is The Glass Onion) — second only to Clue. In any case, do you recall the scene in the bar where Ransom (aka Chris Evans) feeds a bowl of beans to our heroine Marta (aka Ana de Armas) and then reminds her about the time they played Mafia? This episode, which happened well before the movie’s start, is the lynchpin of Knives Out and the writers did an excellent job explaining its significance to the audience. Even if, like me, you’d never heard of the game before.
Fast forward to the last day of the Premier League’s 2022-23 season (soccer), where I, unfortunately, watched Leicester City get relegated. After the match ended, I started flipping through the programs on Peacock, trying to take my mind off the Foxes’ uncertain future.
That’s when I ran across The Traitors.
What initially sucked me in was Alan Cumming, whose work I’ve always enjoyed. So, without any expectations, I started the first episode…..Little did I know that I was about to watch a cutthroat game of Mafia (or Werewolf as it’s also known) played out for real money amongst some stunning scenery.
And let me tell you, I am hooked.
The first season of the American version took twenty people, half reality show veterans, half ‘regular’ people, and whisked them off to a castle in Scotland. Where, after hanging out for a few hours, three people are selected to become Traitors whilst the rest of the group remain Faithfuls.
The Faithful’s only job is to weed out the Traitors, and if they do so by the last episode — they split the prize pot betwixt them. However, if a Traitor remains undetected in their midsts, then the Traitor will win the entire pot, leaving the Faithfuls out in the cold.
Now, the Traitors’ don’t sit idly by, waiting to be sussed out. Each night, for one reason or another, they “murder” one of the Faithfuls.
Alan Cumming, as the moderator of the game and, therefore, an agent of chaos in his own right, swans in and out of frame wearing a puckish smile and pulling off some absolutely fantastic fashion.
The second best part of The Traitors (Alan Cumming’s being the very best) is the viewers know who is who from the outset. Allowing you to wince when a Traitor makes a critical mistake or shout at the TV as the Faithfuls vote out yet another Faithful.
There’s more to the show than just this — but I don’t want to ruin the surprises in store for you. Even better? The Traitors has been renewed for a second season!
However, if you can’t wait, Peacock has the UK and Australian versions as well! I suggest watching the Australian version and then the UK — if you want to binge them all. Since both the UK and American versions are shot in the same castle and feature similar (but not the exact same) elements, the Australian version helps break things up.
Seriously, The Traitors is such a fun show. I cannot recommend it enough!
Stereotypes
Ever since she died, I’ve kept my mom’s daily journals even though I can’t read them. She wrote them in shorthand, and I have no earthly idea how to read it. And I know that everyone’s shorthand became personalized, individualized, so I may never know, but I keep them anyway, because I have the futile hope that one of these days…
The thing about stereotypes is that they’re our own form of shorthand. They conjure up images so complete that we don’t need to fill in the blanks. Everyone just gets it. Of course, they’re not complete, and they pigeonhole people (and events, and animals, and and and, you get it, but for our purposes, we’re talking about people. Okay, I’m talking about people) causing those doing the stereotyping to frequently overlook the individuality, the uniqueness of each person.
Here’s the thing about Louise Penny, and I didn’t realize it until I read the books for the third time. She deftly uses stereotypes to her advantage, so she allows us to fill in the gaps in our heads, but she makes the individuality so pronounced that you can’t overlook it.
Hear me out.
Take The Cruelest Month. As I re-read it, I saw the stereotypes in play, really saw them, because the characters saw them. They all think of Jeanne Chauvet as a witch, Madeleine Favreau as a ray of sunshine, the old Hadley house as a thing of evil. And they all are, but they’re so much more than that. So I got to looking at the rest of the characters that I love so much, and there they were: the flamboyant gay man, the tidy and precise gay man, the large black woman, the distracted artist, the hag, the stalwart detective and his quirky sidekick. They’re all there.
And yet. And yet they’re so much more. Instead of pigeonholing each character, the built-in stereotypes enhance and give depth to each of Louise Penny’s characters. And she uses their characteristics to make each stereotype into a real, living, breathing person.
Plus, she tells a good story.
“But had everyone really let go of all their bitter thoughts? Was it possible someone was holding onto theirs, hoarding them? Devouring them, swallowing them until they were bloated with bitterness and had become a walking, breathing version of the house on the hill?
Was there a human version of that wretched place, walking among them?”
And that led me to consider the movie (and the book, but I’m sticking with movies for comparison) Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Stereotypes, but fleshed out into living, breathing people. The inquisitive reporter, the rich and entitled gay man, the gold digger, the drag queen, the voodoo queen. You don’t have to know the backstory of any of these people, because you know them already, so you can take your strong base and add color and dimension and personality, and suddenly you have John Kelso, Jim Williams, Billy Hanson, the Lady Chablis Deveau, Minerva.
And you know them, and love or hate them, but not because of the stereotypes. You respond to them as people, because they ARE people. The stereotypes are shorthand that we all know and understand, and there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as we all remember that people are more than the stereotype.
*Besides being a great writer and an obviously brilliant man, S.A. Cosby shows he has fine taste. In his “By the Book” responses, Cosby says his ideal reading experience would be “Early morning, on my back deck, rereading the signed, weathered paperback of ‘Darkness, Take My Hand,’ by Dennis Lehane.” I would enjoy comparing my weathered, well-read copy of what I believe to be the best mystery of the 1990s with his!
And catching up on his past books: My Darkest Prayer was his first book, published by a small press, and didn’t get much notice. It’s definitely a first book: good plot but the writing is rough, meaning not as smooth as his writing would become. It’s been reissued by his current publisher in trade paperback.
His third book, Razorblade Tears, tells the story of two very different fathers who never accepted their gay sons but come together after their murder to find out who pulled the trigger. I’ve been picturing Danny Glover (or Idris Elba) and Will Patton. Both have rough pasts and did time and as they search they become accepting of how badly they wasted time with their boys and how they’d do things differently, if they could. Cosby is a fully mature writer now, capable of a Chandlerian simile such as “The wound on his cheek was weeping like a broken-hearted bride.”
Two books I’d tried to read some time ago but just couldn’t get into – for whatever reason I finally could:
Fran was absolutely right back in 2016 when she told me I had to read Joe Ide’s debut, IQ. Great read: quirky, dark humor, interesting fully-formed characters. Reminded me of early James W. Hall in it’s over-all tone and construction. Now I’ll have to start in on his books that I’ve missed. I seems to spend a great deal of my reading in catching up on author’s I missed since the shop closed… The lesson, which I knew, is always trust Fran!
Sometime around the Spring of 2017, when the advance copy arrived at the shop, I tried David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, his account of a string of deaths in the Osage Tribe in 1920s Oklahoma. The investigation abilities of the time were rudimentary, crimes were dealt by the local authorities, and were complicated by jurisdiction – Native land, Federal or state authority questions, and a complete lack of imagination. With so many deaths within one tribe, no one seemed capable of seeing a pattern, and corruption amongst the powers made sure no one connected the dots. It’s a frustrating read because of our modern exposure to true. The writing still didn’t grab me but I thought, with the Scorsese movie coming, I should give it another try. Interesting history, would make a good documentary series.
As a kid, I spent countless hours with my comics – mostly Marvel. Besides reading them, I spent countless hours copying them. From that I learned to draw, and all that you need to understand to draw well: perspective, proportion, composition, and something else, call it drama.
There were a few artists that I followed: Joe Kubert at DC, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko at Marvel, and when Ditko left Marvel, there was John Romita. Many of my favorite covers were created by him. Those guys (’cause all were guys back then) helped form my visual sense, and the result was an undergraduate and graduate degree in painting. It carries on today in my love of pulp imagery. So here’s to those titans of the temporary, the powers of the pencilers, the fabulous of the fun and drawers of the dramatic ~ Excelsior!
I vacillated on which movie to use for this one, but ultimately, it just had to b, because both are about community and what’s in their hearts. And winter. Oh, so much about winter!
In A Fatal Grace, we meet CC de Poitiers, who has come back to Three Pines to flaunt her upcoming success. There’s just something satisfying about going back to the place where no one believed in you to rub their noses in it, isn’t there? And CC was all about making sure people noticed and remembered her.
So when she ends up dead at a curling match, she’s definitely the center of attention, and she becomes Inspector Gamache’s focal point. The problem is, there’s a surplus of suspects.
“Clara’s poem fell into the silence round the fire. Behind them, conversations ebbed and flowed, bursts of laughter were heard, glasses clinked together. No one was mourning the death of CC de Poitiers. Three Pines was not diminished by her passing. She’d left behind a stink but even that was lifting. Three Pines felt lighter and brighter and fresher for its loss.“
But however much it may be a relief that someone has died, Inspector Gamache is relentless in finding who’s responsible. Louise Penny is, of course, marvelous at capturing all the nuances.
And that brings me to my movie comparison, and you’ll have to bear with me because there’s no murder in Mystery, Alaska. At least nothing overt. It’s just a movie that is, improbably, about hockey.
So it’s about hockey instead of curling, and it’s in Alaska instead of Canada, but it’s also about family and friends and what makes up the heart of a community. If you haven’t seen it, Mystery, Alaska is about a small town hockey team that a former resident manages to promote into the Big Leagues, at least for one glorious event. But is the town ready?
Both Three Pines and Mystery are small towns locked into a familiar but brutal winter, and both towns have their own personalities that fame and the spotlight can change, even if they’re not ready. Both are gripped by controversy and unwanted attention, and both have to fight for their hearts. Despite the differing subject matter, A Fatal Grace and Mystery, Alaska have much in common, especially if you like drama and humor set in intimate locations.
I’d suggest that you watch the movie first, if only to set the visuals of a small town locked into winter, and how that forces people to find a way to get along, which is not to say that Louise Penny doesn’t transport you there with her words. But if Three Pines doesn’t already resonate with you, having the visual of life in Mystery might help. And both are excellent, regardless of the order.
Yeah, I’m promoting a sports movie and a book about a truly misunderstood sport. It’s not like me at all, but that should tell you how very good both are!
cachinnation(n.): “loud laughter,” 1620s, from Latin cachinnationem (nominative cachinnatio) “violent laughter, excessive laughter,” noun of action from past-participle stem of cachinnare “to laugh immoderately or loudly,” of imitative origin. Compare Sanskrit kakhati “laughs,” Greek kakhazein “to laugh loudly,” Old High German kachazzen, English cackle, Armenian xaxanc‘. [Perhaps this is a way to understand what Chandler meant when he wrote in “The Simple Art of Mureder”: In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, but it may be the raucous laughter of the strongman.]
groan(v): Old English granian “to utter a deep, low-toned breath expressive of grief or pain; to murmur; to lament,” from Proto-Germanic *grain- (source also of Old Norse grenja “to howl”), of imitative origin, or related to grin (v.). Meaning “complain” is from early 13th C., especially in Middle English phrase grutchen and gronen. As an expression of disapproval, by 1799.
cackle(v.): early 13c., imitative of the noise of a hen (see cachinnation); perhaps partly based on Middle Dutch kake “jaw,” with frequentative suffix -el (3). As “to laugh,” 1712. From 1856 as “a short laugh.”
grin (v.): Old English grennian “show the teeth” (in pain or anger), common Germanic (cognates: Old Norse grenja “to howl,” grina “to grin;” Dutch grienen “to whine;” German greinen “to cry”), from PIE root *ghrei– “be open.” Sense of “bare the teeth in a broad smile” is late 15th C., perhaps via the notion of “forced or unnatural smile.”
Koontz had the indoor pool removed and installed a custom library of his 20,000 books by other authors, many of them first editions. (Philip Cheung for The Washington Post)
titter (v.): from the1610s, “giggle in a suppressed or nervous way,” probably of imitative origin. Related: Tittered; tittering. The noun is attested by 1728.
guffaw(n.): from the 1720, Scottish, probably imitative of the sound of coarse laughter. Compare gawf (early 16th C.) “loud, noisy laugh.” The verb is from 1721.
chuckle (v.): from the1590s, “to laugh loudly,” frequentative of Middle English chukken “make a clucking noise” (late 14th C.), of imitative origin. Meaning shifted to “laugh in a suppressed or covert way, express inward satisfaction by subdued laughter” by 1803.
chortle (v.): coined 1871 by Lewis Carroll in “Through the Looking Glass,” perhaps from chuckle and snort. Related: Chortled; chortling. As a noun, from 1903.
laugh(v.): from the late 14th C., from Old English (Anglian) hlæhhan, earlier hliehhan, hlihhan “to laugh, laugh at; rejoice; deride,” from Proto-Germanic *klakhjan (source also of Old Norse hlæja, Danish le, Old Frisian hlakkia, Old Saxon hlahhian, Middle Dutch and Dutch lachen, Old High German hlahhan, German lachen, Gothic hlahjan), from PIE *kleg-, of imitative origin (compare Latin cachinnare “to laugh aloud,” Sanskrit kakhati “laughs,” Old Church Slavonic chochotati “laugh,” Lithuanian klagėti “to cackle,” Greek kakhazein).
Originally with a “hard” -gh- sound, as in Scottish loch; the spelling remained after the pronunciation shifted to “-f.” To laugh in one’s sleeve is to laugh inwardly so as not to be observed. “The phrase generally implies some degree of contempt, and is used rather of a state of feeling than of actual laughter” [Century Dictionary].
Deanna Raybourn — A Sinister Revenge
One of the things I love about the Veronica Speedwell Mysteries is how Raybourn seamlessly weaves natural history into her mysteries! In fact, as in A Sinister Revenge, they become critical to the plot! Imparting just enough info, should you like, you can find out more about whatever she’s spliced into the story.
In A Sinister Revenge, we find ourselves exposed to fossils, or more specifically, one giant fossil. Said fossil is at the heart of this murder in retrospect, where the remaining members of a group of friends come back together to discover who amongst them is a murderer….whilst Veronica and Stoker are on the outs, and Tiberius tries his hand at playing peacemaker.
Honestly, this series is so much fun.
I cannot recommend these books enough. You don’t HAVE to read the first in series to read this one….so long as you recognize several books precede it. However, if you do not, you will miss much of the nuance betwixt the main characters — Veronica, Stoker, Tiberius, and Merryweather. Plus, the books are such a lark; why would you not want to start with the first?
For the next several months, I’ll be doing something a bit different. You see, I’m re-reading all of Louise Penny’s Gamache books, and I’ve gone on about them before, but this time, I’m approaching them a little differently, so hang with me.
Then I’m reviewing either a movie or TV show that I think you should watch, and of course, I’ll tell you why.
Ready? Okay, here we go:
What brings me back to these books is not Inspector Gamache himself, although he’s an inspiration and an icon. It’s Three Pines, the hidden little Canadian village where so much takes place – and rest assured, it isn’t Cabot Cove – and where so many special and wonderful people live.
“At the top of the hill Armand Gamache stopped the car and got out. He looked down at the village and his heart soared. He looked over the rooftops and imagined the good, kind, flawed people inside struggling with their lives. People were walking their dogs, raking the relentless autumn leaves, racing the gently falling snow. They were shopping at M. Beliveau’s general store and buying baguettes from Sarah’s boulangerie. Olivier stood at the Bistro doorway and shook out a tablecloth. Life was far from harried here. But neither was it still.”
It’s the sense of community that brings me back. All the people with their mixture of good and bad, selflessness and selfishness, small kindnesses and petty cruelties, all the very human parts of us call to me, and the quiet, unassuming little village seems like a refuge. You’ll love it here.
Speaking of community, have you seen the movie The Old Guard? It’s written by an author I know I’ve mentioned more than once, since he’s a fantastic author and an all-around great guy, Greg Rucka.
[JB has watched The Old Guard a number of times and was thrilled to hear a sequel is coming!]
I was 14 and just in high school when Boston erupted over forced school busing in 1974. I remember seeing pictures and news footage of outraged white people screaming and throwing things at the buses carrying black students into their world. Adults. That impression is deep. There were only a couple of black students in my high school, which as in a predominantly – if not all – white suburb. But there was no overt objection to those kids, at least that I was aware of then or now. You can bet there was silent objection. Had to be. But I just couldn’t grasp the snarling fury of those parents in Boston. It reminded me of the news coverage of 60s civil rights protests in the South. I knew nothing of South Boston. Then.
South Boston is the setting of probably my favorite series of books, Dennis Lehane‘s Patrick and Angie private eye novels. Wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve read the series a dozen times, and Darkness, Take My Hand more than that. Reread it just a couple of weeks ago, on a trip home. His new novel, Small Mercies, is set in their world, in 1974 as the busing is about to start. As made clear in his books, South Boston was a homogeneous and insular place, and folks don’t like to be told what to do, especially by cops or government – they’ll only accept orders from the Irish gangster who runs the whole shebang: Marty Butler, surely a stand-in for the actual king, Whitey Bulger.
Set against all of this anger and prejudice and mindless hatred of those people, he gives us the story of Mary Pat Fennesey, a lifelong resident who has never questioned anything she’s been told. But then her last child vanishes – she lost a son to drugs after Viet Nam – and her daughter Jules is her heart. The answers she starts to receive to her requests for help, and the fury released by the upcoming busing, cause her look long and hard at her neighborhood and herself.
Hers was childhood of bewilderment, violence, and devoid of reason. “She can’t remember that girl, but she can feel her. She can feel her bafflement and terror. At the noise and the fury. At the storm of rage that swirled around her and spun her in place until she was so fucking dizzy from it, she had to learn to walk in it without falling down for the rest of her life.” To use a phrase from Darkness, Mary Pat is a person of impact. Her actions cause ripples that alter what comes next.
Her relentless search for answers brings her into conflict with those who want the questions to stop. And then there are her friends, her family, who don’t like seeing the the truth that her answers expose. She won’t be swayed or stopped. One fist-fight – at 44, Mary Pat is still the battler everyone remembers from her childhood – leaves her looking “like she was attacked by the live trees in a fairy tale.” But you can be sure those trees don’t look so hot, either.
Lehane had just turned nine when Boston blew up over busing. It obviously left a deep impression on him. Small Mercies is a book of heartbreak and determination, both from the resistance to change and from those who dare to. It is beautifully written, of course, and provocatively challenging. It’s a proud addition to Dennis Lehane’s shelf of literature.
Seattle Mystery Bookshop 