The octopus detective

Can an octopus be a detective? Well, he can in Shelby Van Pelt's wonderful first novel Remarkably Bright Creatures (2022).

Marcellus is an octopus in an aquarium in a relatively small town in the state of Washington. He is nearing the end of his four-year life span, and he is smart enough to know it. He is also smart enough to read English, to identify people by their fingerprints on the glass of his tank, to escape each night to consume seafood in other tanks and even to have a hidden coin collection.

Marcellus is a part-time narrator, as well, but mostly the novel is about Tova, a 70-year-old woman who cleans the Sowell Bay Aquarium each night, and Cameron, a 30-year-old man who leads an aimless life until he starts working there, too.

Tova still mourns the recent loss of her dear husband, as well as the death of her teenage son at sea 30 years before. Yes, those 30 years are significant. Marcellus is the one who recognizes that Tova and Cameron are related somehow. One thing he can't do is speak, so how can he communicate what he knows to these two hapless humans? And can he do it before his own rapidly approaching death?

Van Pelt makes us believe this fantasy. She fills her novel with pleasures and surprises, strong characters and an octopus to love.

Dialogue versus monologue

Dialogue, then, is the basic form of human speech — and monologue, in which one speaker is silent for a very long time, exists only in special cases such as theatrical performances, prayers, and ceremonial speeches.

Peter Farb, Word Play

Peter Farb never met my father or a guy I used to work with or any number of other people I've known who can't seem to stop talking. I saw an old man in a restaurant one day who wouldn't pause his monologue long enough for his server to break away and attend to other diners.

Ideally dialogue is the basic form of human speech, yet monologues are found in more than just stage plays, literary works, speeches and prayer. (Actually, prayer is ideally supposed to be a dialogue. Most people just don't do it very well.) So many individuals enjoy the sound of their own voices. They have their stories to tell and insist that others listen to them, even if they have heard them before. So many of us just don't know when to shut up. Listening is the part of conversation most often ignored. Even when we seem to be listening, we may actually just be waiting for a chance to launch into our own monologue.

Tom Hanks in Cast Away

The best conversations are, of course, dialogues. And dialogue is often the best part of a novel, at least when the author is kind enough to remind us frequently who it is who is talking. Movies without much dialogue are possible — I am thinking of Robert Redford';s Alone and Tom Hanks's Cast Away. Yet in most movies, as in most plays and TV shows, things start to get interesting when people talk to each other.

And so it is in life. Most of us need somebody to talk with, at least once in awhile. Those monologues we recite when we are alone just aren't the same.

Wartime murder

The social dislocation and the emotional toll of war increased deadly violence in the family and among strangers, while the bomb-scarred landscape helped to hide the victims.

Amy Helen Bell, Under Cover of Darkness

As if the Germans didn't kill enough Londoners during World War II — with the Blitz and later the V-1 and V-2 missile attacks — the city's residents seemed driven to kill each other during this period, as well. Amy Helen Bell tells us about it in her 2024 book Under Cover of Darkness: Murders in Blackout London.

Before the war, murders in London averaged between 250 and 300 a year. The murder rate rose throughout the war, climbing to a high of 492 murders in 1945, the last year of the war. And because the bombing left behind so many bodies, there is no telling how many other murders went undetected.

Some of the most tragic cases detailed by Bell were the result of the fear of a German invasion. A nanny killed the child in her care and herself to keep the girl out of the hands of the Nazis. A mother killed her beloved daughter for similar reasons.

Other murders were committed by soldiers stationed in London. Their victims were usually women.

Abortion was illegal, yet not uncommon during this period. Some murder cases involved abortion in one way or another. Women, as well as babies, often became statistics in suspicious-death cases.

People of other races came to the city during the war, and some murders were racially motivated.

Bell tells us about two serial killers operating in London. In one of these cases, an innocent man probably went to the gallows for a murder committed by someone else.

And then there were the domestic crimes, usually husbands killing wives, that are all too common even in peacetime.

Bell observes that in most crime reporting, the focus usually falls more on the killers than their victims. She tries to reverse that spotlight as much as possible in her book, telling us as much as she can about the victims. Yet this is not always possible, for the killers are the ones who are thoroughly investigated and who go to trial, while victims often leave little behind in the public record.

Wandering minds

Is a wandering mind a good thing or a bad thing? It depends.

When our minds wandered when we were in school it was a bad thing, or at least it seemed that way. That moment seemed to be when your teacher was most likely to ask you a question. When our minds wander at work, we could lose some time, lose a customer or even, as in my father's case, lose a finger.

I know when my mind is wandering in church because that is when I am most likely to start yawning. Yet sometimes during a sermon my mind turns to a sermon I might preach on that same topic, and because I do sometimes preach sermons, this is perhaps not all bad.

The worst time for mind-wandering, it seems to me, is when one is trying to sleep. Sometimes I awaken at 3 a.m. and cannot get back to sleep because my mind will not relax. It floats from one topic to another — things I've done, things I need to do and fantasies about things I wish would happen. Yet sometimes during these wanderings I think of something I need to do but would have otherwise probably forgotten. So even here, a wandering mind can sometimes be beneficial.

As a part-time writer, I find a wandering mind vital to what I do. So many of my best ideas come unbidden, while my mind is straying from one topic to another. Great thoughts come to me while driving or while taking a shower when I didn't even realize I was thinking about what those ideas pertained to.

I suspect that many of the best inventions, most original business ideas, best lines of poetry, best novel plots, etc., have been the result of a wandering mind.

Unreturned books

McKinney Hubbard

Everything comes to him who waits, except a loaned book.

McKinney Hubbard

Public libraries stamp their name on every book they loan out, as well as the date when it is due back. They know the names of the lenders and where to find them. Yet even they often don't get their books back. Try to walk out of a library with a book you failed to check out properly and alarms will likely go off.

If libraries with their various levels of security have difficulty keeping track of all their books, it is certainly no easier for individuals to ever see their books again after letting friends or acquaintances borrow them. There are many reasons for this:

1. People often have difficulty finishing books, however much they want to. They put them aside to get back to later, and days turn into months and into years.

2. Books can get lost. We put books on top of books. We move. We put clutter away when company comes, then fail to put things back where they were.

3. As time passes, we forgot who actually owns a particular book. Is this mine or did I borrow it from somebody? If I borrowed it, from whom?

4. After a long period of time, it can be embarrassing to return a borrowed item. It calls attention to the failure to return it promptly. Maybe the owner has forgotten all about it. Or at least we may hope.

5. Sometimes those who borrow books like them so much they simply don't want to give them back.

The death of a critic

British mystery writer Anthony Horowitz became more successful than ever when he started making himself a main character in his novels. In The Twist of a Knife (2022) he makes himself the prime suspect.

While Horowitz may be a main character, he is not the main character. That would be Daniel Hawthorne, a former police officer who now gives police officers fits by being smarter than them. The author plays the hapless Watson to Hawthorne's Sherlock.

The idea of the partnership is for Hawthorne to solve perplexing murder cases while Horowitz observes and then writes books about them. The two have parted ways at the beginning of this story, Hawthorne being a difficult man to get along with. But when Horowitz writes a play and when a severe drama critic is then murdered with his dagger after opening night, he begs Hawthorne for help.

The evidence against Horowitz is substantial. His fingerprints are on the murder weapon. One of his hairs is found at the scene. And so on.

The novel becomes more Agatha Christie than Sherlock Holmes, complete with a final scene where all the suspects, plus the investigating officers, are present while Hawthorne makes the great reveal.

This is an engaging murder mystery, one of the best in the series.

Re-creating hope

In his book Wonderworks, Angus Fletcher recalls what Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about poetic language, how it "rearranges usual speech in order 'to re-create.'" Put another way, poets force us to stop and think.

Fletcher uses the example of a poet writing "a flower blue" instead of the more normal "a blue flower." Merely by rearranging words, the poet makes us pause a split second to picture that "flower blue" in our minds.

Emily Dickinson

Lately I have been thinking about Emily Dickinson's wonderful short poem about hope:

Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul,/And sings the tune without the words,/And never stops at all.

She might have written, "Hope is like a bird," but "the thing with feathers" stops us in our tracks. It is what most people remember about this poem.

Dickinson changed the way we think about hope. Birds don't normally come when you call them. They perch where they will. And this bird flies into our soul, each of our souls, perches and stays there. The tune without the words suggests something indefinite. We don't know precisely even what we are hoping for. We simply hear the tune within us that lifts our spirits whatever our circumstances might be.

Emily Dickinson re-created the way many people think about hope. It is not something we can manufacture. "Be positive," we tell each other in vain. Instead hope is just something that flies in and stays there, always singing, always inspiring us to keep going.