Too many memories

In The River We Remember, the fine 2023 novel by William Kent Krueger, it is not just the river that characters remember. Most of them have torn pasts they would like to forget. In many cases, that past involves their World War II experiences.

One of the characters is Sheriff Brody Dean, a war hero who doesn't feel like a hero. The year is 1958, and Brody is called to the bank of the Alabaster River, where the body of Jimmy Quinn, one of the most prominent, and least loved citizens of Jewel, Minn., has been found.

Brody would like to believe the shotgun death was either an accident or a suicide. If it was murder, he figures Jimmy Quinn probably deserved it. He wipes all prints off the shotgun to protect whoever might have done it.

Yet as much as everyone, including members of his own family, hated Quinn, there is someone they hate even more. That is Noah Bluestone, another war hero. But he is also a Dakota Sioux, and he married a Japanese woman. Soon evidence forces Brody to arrest Noah, against his own will.

There's much more going on in this novel. Brody carries on a long-term affair with his brother's wife, then falls for Angie, a former prostitute who runs a local diner in her new life. Unwise behavior by Angie's teenage son and his friend put them dangerously in the middle of this murder case. Both Noah and his wife refuse to talk about what really happened on the night Jimmy Quinn was killed.

This is a wonderfully written murder mystery that reads like a literary novel. Don't miss it.

Reflections on a life

John Mortimer's father gave him the same advice I once gave my granddaughter. If you want to become a writer, first seek another career. This will pay the bills while you struggle as a writer, and it will also give you something to write about. It will put you in daily contact with real people in real-life situations.

Mortimer took his father's advice and became a successful barrister, as well as a successful author, most notably of the Horace Rumpole stories. He tells all about it in Where There's a Will, his 2003 book of essays that can also pass as a memoir.

Much of this book is about his experiences practicing law and the amazing people and situations he encountered in this profession. There is much here, too, about the writing profession. Yet most of these essays are simply about the art of living. They have titles like "Getting Drunk," "Listening," "Lying," "Living with Children," "Male Clothing," "Giving Money to Beggars," "Eating Out," and "Looking after Your Health." They are all short and, in most cases, amusing. And sometimes full of practical advice.

He suggests, for example, to avoid eating at restaurants with menus full of page after page of entrees. Those restaurants with few options, he says, probably know how to prepare those meals very well.

He says he learned to listen to others because that is part of a lawyer's job, and he highly recommends the practice. Most people have fascinating stories to tell, if only we can stop talking long enough to listen to them.

Mortimer says many things worth quoting:

"One of the miracles of life is that few people pass through it without finding someone to love them."

"Murder has this in common with Christmas, most of it goes on in the family circle."

"The trouble with double-beds is that people tend to go to sleep in them."

Mortimer's Rumpole stories make wonderful reading, and this is no less true of this short book of short essays.

The solution is the mystery

They had met in France, where the worthy Inspector Pyke had come to study the methods of the Police Judiciare, and of Maigret especially, and had been surprised to discover that Maigret had no method at all.

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Ghost

Most of the great fictional detectives, from Sherlock Holmes to Columbo, are smarter than their fans. Even so we have some idea how they work. At the very end, at least, we learn how they got from Point A to Point B. Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, however, has no method at all, as Georges Simenon tells us in Maigret and the Ghost (1964). We have no clue how he reads his clues, or even in many cases what clues he is reading.

Even so, these relatively short novels make compulsive reading, and this one is no exception. And no, this is not a ghost story.

One of the other detectives in the Paris police force is a man named Lognon, but behind his back he is usually called Inspector Luckless or Inspector Hard-Done-By. Although a clever detective, something always goes wrong with his cases. Even when they reach a successful conclusion, somebody else always gets the credit. Now Lognon is found shot and near death just outside the residence of a young woman, with whom the married detective had been spending each night.

An extramarital affair gone wrong? Not to Margaret's eyes. He goes across the street to try to discover what has been going on in the home of a notable art dealer and his beautiful wife. Why has Lognon been watching this house every night?

Maigret may be famous and mystifying, but in most respects he is an ordinary man with a wife he loves and a home he loves to go home to. Madame Maigret usually appears in these novels, and here he credits her with helping to solve the case, even though she has no idea how.

Neither do the rest of us, but it is fun watching it happen just the same.

Pretend reporters

"I'm just trying to get as much information as possible. To really write the truth, you know. I want to paint as objective — and truthful — a picture as possible."

Virginia Feito, Mrs. March

Virginia Feito

The words above are spoken by a fake newspaper reporter in Virginia Feito's novel Mrs. March. They are spoken by Mrs. March herself, a suspicious wife well on her way toward insanity. She is trying to gather clues to prove her husband is a murderer.

Even mad Mrs. March, pretending to represent the New York Times, knows very well what is required of a good reporter: gathering as much information as possible, writing the truth, being objective.

Yet newspapers across the United States today are in trouble, in part, because their own reporters don't know this. Or if they do, they ignore it. And now more and more people are ignoring them.

I am a former newspaper reporter who practiced journalism more the way Mrs. March practices it than the way most current reporters on the New York Times, Washington Post and other prominent newspapers practice it. They are more propagandists than objective reporters. They do public relations for the political left. the Biden administration and the Democrat Party. They scoff at objectivity and truth. They ignore any facts that don't fit the chosen narrative.

This, of course, is not the only reason newspapers are in trouble. They have been in trouble for decades now. Thanks to their televisions, phones and computers, people have access to many other sources of information. They can get whatever flavor of "truth" they desire, whether it is really true or not. They don't have to buy newspapers, and newspapers, having lost any pretense of objective reporting, keep making it easier to ignore them.

Something snaps

Comedy quickly turns to tragedy in Virginia Feito's 2021 novel Mrs. March.

The wife of a best-selling novelist, Mrs. March is shocked when a woman in a pastry shop raves about his latest book, then adds that the main character, a plump and unattractive woman, appears to have been inspired by Mrs. March herself.

Something snaps in Mrs, March, who appears to have been not all that stable to begin with. Without bothering to actually read the novel, she listens to conversations about it and suspects people are talking about her. She steals and destroys copies of the novel. She starts lying  about everything, however unreasonable the lies. She has always been one who puts on airs, but that trait intensifies. When she spots a cockroach in her kitchen, she won't call an exterminator for fear of what people might think.

When the body of a young woman is discovered in the town near her husband's hunting cabin, she concludes that he must be the murderer and begins looking for evidence, even to the point of visiting that town and searching for clues in the cabin.

The biggest mystery in Feito's novel is what George March saw in Mrs. March in the first place. And Mrs. March is what she is called throughout the novel, even in flashbacks to when she was a little girl. Her mother, we are told, was "pregnant with Mrs. March." Was she ever truly stable, and what is she capable of now that she is truly insane?

Secrets and lies

Chris Pavone cheats his readers in his thriller Two Nights in Lisbon (2022). Whether readers feel cheated or, on the contrary, feel rewarded by one more plot twist, is up to them. I felt cheated.

Ariel Pryce, a middle-aged newlywed, wakes up alone in a Lisbon hotel room. Her much younger husband has taken her there on a business trip, but now he has disappeared. Later that day comes an appeal for a ransom, much more money than she has.

She goes to the Lisbon police and the United States embassy for help, and the CIA gets involved.

To get the money she blackmails a man high in the U.S. government by threatening to reveal a secret about him.

Much of the novel comes as flashback as we gradually learn what that secret is. Meanwhile the authorities, who at first think Ariel is just overreacting, take the situation more and more seriously. And the tension builds.

Pavone's story gets complex, and the characters can be hard to tell apart. Readers will have fun trying to guess what's really going on. If the author told us the truth that would be too easy, which is the reason for his deceit.

Different contexts

Susan Cheever

Biography is an exercise in context.

Susan Cheever, E.E. Cummings: A Life

Think about your own life, the home you grew up in, the neighborhood you lived in during your youth, the choices you made, the people you loved,  the defeats you suffered as well as the victories you celebrated, the culture that shaped you. What you look like, where your talents lie and what ailments you suffer from are mostly the result of genetics, but most everything else in your life was influenced by environment, and each of us experiences a somewhat different environment. Or to use Susan Cheever's word, a different context.

She goes on to explain what she means in the above-quoted line: "In writing a life, biographers must create the time in which that life was lived."

Some biographers fail to do this. She observes, without naming names, "Sometime biography looks back in judgment, condemning a subject's action with the advantages of modern knowledge and customs. Sometimes a biographer will try to re-create circumstances in which a subject's action may be understood in a way in which they could not be understood at the time of writing."

In other words, biographers — and also readers of biographies — need to show a little tolerance, a little understanding, a little grace. People of a different time just didn't think the same way you do. For that matter, other people living today don't necessarily think the same way you do. They come from different contexts.