Monday, Monday

Not much to report. I am finally recovered from Covid. Went to a strange play about Jorge Borges today. But other than that I read (La Brava by Elmore Leonard and Mornings Without Mii (Mayumi Inaba) and watched "Oh, so much TV." 

DEPARTMENT Q, PERNILLA (Netflix) and rewatched ABSENCE of MALICE). I know there was a lot more TV but forgetting what. 

What about you?  

FFB MORNINGSTAR: GROWING UP WITH BOOKS, Ann Hood

 

                                    

MORNINGSTAR: GROWING UP WITH BOOKS is a favorite type of book for me. In it, novelist Ann Hood relates the details of her formative years through the books she chose to read at various ages. I am not going to tell you the books she chose because you will enjoy seeing what she read yourself  from her first books onward. We learn a lot about her middle-class family and the town of Warwick, RI. where she watched the decline of the town through her formative years. Mills and factories closed, better stores moved out of town or disappeared. A familiar story by now.

All of the books she talks about (and it's not all that many) were books that meant something to me too. And the thing that I liked best about it was her choices were original, realistic, different. Not the sort of books found on BY THE BOOK in the TIMES each week. But instead what a girl might stumble on herself when her family were not readers. This was also the case with me. No one ever guided my reading so I read inappropriate books often. No one told me to read books like FROM THE TERRACE or BABBITT or THE DEVIL IN BUCKS COUNTY or THE IDIOT, but I did.

This is a short book and Hood confines her discussion to about a dozen books, all which resonated with the times she lived in, her age at the time, and the country itself. . I would have like a list at the back of other books she read but did not include here. Especially childhood favorites.

I enjoyed this short book, almost more memoir than literary discussion but that is just fine. 

Short Story Wednesday: "The Terrapin" Patricia Highsmith

 

Several times, Patricia Highsmith named this as her favorite of her short stories. It appeared in the October 1962 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. 

Victor, at eleven, lives with his mother in New York City. She insists that he wear short pants, recite poetry for her friends, and in many ways humiliates him. One day she brings home a terrapin with the idea of making turtle soup. Victor, friendless himself, begins to play with the terrapin. But his mother quickly begins preparation for her soup. She mercilessly throws the animal in hot water and carves him up. That night...well, you can guess if you haven't read it yourself. 

Many claim the mother in this story bore a strong resemblance to Highsmith's mother. Mary Highsmith told everyone she had tried to abort Patricia using turpentine.  Patricia did not attend her mother's funeral. 

 George Kelley

Kevin Tipple 

Steve Lewis 

Jerry House 

Crimereads 

 

Monday, Monday

                                                                 COVID

                Missed Kevin's graduation, Megan's visit, yes, all of it. 

                Who gets Covid a week after recovering from the flu? That red line shot up in a                                                                             second.

                                                        But tell me about you.  

FFB: ORDINARY GRACE, William Kent Krueger

 (from the archives)

ORDINARY GRACE won just about all the awards the crime fiction community has to offer that year, and it is easy to see why. In this book, Krueger takes a break from his series detective and steps into a story that is timeless, and the crime, although not incidental, is not the primary attraction here.

The story takes place in a small Minnesota town in 1961. (The period detail is superb). Nathan Drum is a minister. He was set to be a lawyer until the war took any desire for courtroom combat out of him. This career change doesn't sit well with his wife, an atheist, who saw her life unfolding differently. But the family grows, with a daughter and two sons. Our narrator is Frank, a thirteen year old, who also serves as our detective when things begin to go awry. Much of the drama concerns the Drums' relationship with a family down the road that represents the life Mrs. Drum hoped to have.

This is book is about prejudice, the striving of ordinary men to do good, the misreadings that children make of adult situations, the conflict between the religious and the nonreligious, the rush to judgment both a town and its ill-prepared police force almost makes.

It is a deep and lovely written book that is worth your time. Highly recommended.

Short Story Wednesday, Ron Scheer looks at LIVIN' ON JACKS AND QUEENS,

 

Robert J. Randisi, ed., Livin’ on Jacks and Queens

This is an entertaining anthology of 14 stories about gamblers and gambling in the Old West. Editor Randisi has assembled a notable gathering of western writers, providing an array of storytelling styles and imaginative treatments of the subject. The names of several contributors will be quickly recognized: Johnny Boggs, John D. Nesbitt, Matthew P. Mayo, Nik Morton, and Chuck Tyrell.

To these he has added a story of his own, plus the yarns of two women writers who may be new to some readers: Christine Matthews and Lori Van Pelt.

My favorites of the bunch include Ms. Matthews’ “Odds on a Lawman,” which tells of a succession of sheriffs who each assumes a tenure of service to a frontier town, before dying or disappearing for various reasons, on which the townsmen place bets until the turn of events claims one of them the winner. It’s an amusing and well-written tale that brings its Dickensian cast of characters to entertaining life, while we wait to see the fate that befalls each of the town’s series of sheriffs.

For a colorful portrayal of the daily life and business of a riverboat gambler, Nik Morton brings that world vividly to life in his story, “Hazard.” In “Acey-Deucey,” John D. Nesbitt’s central character is hired by a woman to retrieve an emerald pendant once given to her by a paramour. Finally locating the current owner of the gem, he has to win a game of cards before he can take possession of it.

Robert Randisi

Randisi’s story, “Horseshoes and Pistols” is so quirky, I kept thinking that it qualified as Twilight Zone material. In it, two men are forced to bet their lives on a game of horseshoes. Matthew Mayo’s “Pay the Ferryman” veers off in another direction, as a man on the run escapes into what might well be called “the heart of darkness.”

My favorite story in the collection was penned by a favorite storyteller, Chuck Tyrell. His “Great Missouri River Steamship Race” evokes a period of river travel from the point of view of a youngster working as a fireman aboard a steamship with a regular route between St. Louis and Fort Benton. Tyrell brings his gifts for characterization, dialogue, and suspense to this story with its echoes of Huckleberry Finn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

George Kelley 

Jerry House 

Kevin Tipple 

TracyK