Whispers and lies

The Great War drags on in Charles Todd's 2015 novel A Pattern of Lies, and Bess Crawford continues to work long hours as a nurse near the front. She does get an occasional leave to return to England for a few days, however, and on one such leave she meets a former patient, Major Mark Ashton, and learns of the difficulties his family now faces.

Mark's father managed a gunpowder factory that had exploded, killing many local residents. (The novel was inspired by an actual wartime explosion in England.) The Army had found no evidence of sabotage, yet now the senior Ashton is the subject of a whispering campaign that holds him responsible for blowing up his own factory. He is arrested while Bess is staying at the Ashton home, and conviction for murder seems likely given the mood of the community.

Bess must return to France, even before she can visit her own family, yet even there she manages to investigate the pattern of lies besieging the Ashtons. When another nurse is nearly smothered to death while sleeping in Bess's cot, she knows she must be getting close to discovering what's really behind it all.

The action takes her back and forth across the Channel several times and eventually leads to a hair-raising chase and gunfight. The novel has more action than a typical Bess Crawford mystery, yet the plot becomes so convoluted that it becomes difficult to understand exactly what happens and why. Complicated mysteries are usually harder to believe than relatively simple ones, and that is the problem here.

Fast-food fiction

All Fiction is Genre and all Genre is Literature!

Ursula K. LeGuin, Words Are My Matter

Ursula K. LeGuin

I've written before about the late Ursula K. LeGuin's frustration with being stuck in the genre ghetto ("Committing genre," March 17, 2021). She thought she was writing literature for a broad audience, but her books were always classified by publishers, booksellers, critics and even readers as science fiction or fantasy. To most people, it seems, science fiction cannot be literature, and literature cannot be science fiction.

Sometimes the distinction seems arbitrary. Margaret Atwood's futuristic novels are regarded as literature, not science fiction. You probably won't find Matt Haig's The Humans, reviewed here a few days ago, in the sci-fi sections of most bookstores and libraries, yet it is a novel about aliens from space. The same goes for Dexter Palmer's challenging time travel novel Version Control. Many sci-fi fans might enjoy these books, yet never find them. Meanwhile many books, like those of Ursula K. LeGuin, might never be found by people who enjoy outstanding literature but never think to browse the sci-fi shelves. Nor, for that matter, the mystery shelves, the romance shelves or the western fiction shelves.

Yet LeGuin's ideal — that all fiction is genre and all genre is literature — is probably too good to be true. She well realized that genres exist for good, commercial reasons.

Publishers like genre because it helps them sell books. Booksellers like it for the same reason. "Genre addicts want books to be easy the way fast food is easy," she wrote. "They want to go to the big online commercial fiction dealer who knows what they like to read and offers cheap fixes, or go to the library shelf and stick out their hand and get a free fix."

And those who appreciate fine literature don't want to browse through all the trash, real or imagined, that genre supposedly sorts for them.

Perhaps it is the critics — those who write about books and talk about books — who have the greatest responsibility here. Their job is to separate the good books from the bad ones, even if it is only their own opinions. If critics were more open to the quality to be found in science fiction, fantasy, mysteries and other genre fiction, it might make a difference, at least among those who pay attention to critics. In this regard, LeGuin sets a good example with the essays, speeches and reviews found in the book that closed her career, Words Are My Matter.

As strange as truth

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but Caroline Leavitt challenges that idea in her intriguing 2011 novel Pictures of You.

Leavitt imagines two women, Isabelle and Alice, who live in the same neighborhood and decide to run away from their husbands on the same foggy night, then collide. Alice dies in the accident, while Isabelle, although not legally at fault, is overcome with guilt.

Wait, it gets better.

Sam, Alice's little boy, survives the crash with minor injuries, but he sees Isabelle at the scene and becomes convinced she is an angel capable of bringing back his mother. Sam later spots Isabelle in the neighborhood, follows her and soon comes to love her. Charlie, his father, cannot understand why Alice wanted to leave him He tries to discourage Sam's relationship with the woman who, accidentally or not, killed his mother. Then he falls in love with Isabelle, too.

As for Isabelle, she begins to view Sam as the child she has never been able to have and Charlie as the man her husband turned out not to be.

The novel may not end the way you want it to — it certainly doesn't end the way the characters want it to — yet it ends in a way that makes fiction seem like truth.

Available titles

When looking for a vivid book title, many authors turn to the King James Bible, Shakespeare or any notable poetry.

John Steinbeck's East of Eden, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, for example, were inspired by the Bible.  Aldous Huxley got Brave New World, Faulkner got The Sound and the Fury and Isaac Asimov got The Gods Themselves from William Shakespeare. The title Cold Is the Grave, the Peter Robinson murder mystery that I reviewed here a few days ago, comes from a traditional folk ballad. 

Yet it seems to me that writers have barely begun to mine the potential for good book titles from these sources. You don't have to read very far into the Bible, Shakespeare's plays or any good poetry to find phrases that would make excellent book titles. Here are just a few examples found with a few minutes of browsing:

The Bible

"Unto the Lowest Hell," Deuteronomy

"In Time of Snow," II Samuel

"Go Forth Like Sheep," Psalms

"The Stones Cry Out," Habakkuk

"Go Through the Gates." Isaiah

"A Tower and a Fortress," Jeremiah

"Evening Wolves," Zephaniah

"Behold the Stone," Zechariah

"Certain Strange Things," Acts

"For Love's Sake," Philemon

"In the Land of Promise," Hebrews

"Every Island Fled Away," Revelation

Shakespeare

"A Hot Friend, Cooling," Julius Caesar

"The Noble Ruin," Antony and Cleopatra

"Fitted With a Husband," Much Ado About Nothing

"In Silence of the Night," The Merchant of Venice

"Let Your Drums Be Still," King Henry VI

"Love's Settled Passions, King Henry VI

"Fortune's Pageant," King Henry VI

"Thy Heaven Is Earth," King Henry VI

"One Bloody Trial," King Richard III

"There's Hell, There's Darkness," King Lear

"Come, Death, and Welcome," Romeo and Juliet

"A Lovely Gentleman," Romeo and Juliet

Poetry

"Angels, Twice Descending," Emily Dickinson

"When Roses Cease to Bloom," Emily Dickinson

"Such a Gallant, Gallant Sea," Emily Dickinson

"Pursuing Winds," Emily Dickinson

"Life's Embittered Sea," Edward Arlington Robinson

"Lovely, Dark and Deep," Robert Frost

"Spring Is the Mischief," Robert Frost

"A Pattern Called a War," Amy Lowell

"Heroes Seek Release," Edna St. Vincent Millay

"The Earth as a Tomb," Carl Sandburg

"Magic in Her Nearness," Ezra Pound

Some of these "titles" probably have already been used, but since you cannot copyright a title, all are still available. One can almost imagine what kind of novel some of these suggested titles might grace. "Unto the Lowest Hell," "One Bloody Trial," "Evening Wolves" and "Heroes Seek Release" suggest thrillers. "Certain Strange Things," "A Hot Friend, Cooling" and "Spring Is the Mischief" sound like humorous tales. "Fitted With a Husband" might be a light domestic story, perhaps about newlyweds. "Love's Settled Passions" could be a novel about a married couple in comfortable middle age, while "For Love's Sake" and "Magic in Her Nearness" hint of new romance.

One can only guess what "Angels, Twice Descending," "Let the Drums Be Still" or "Every Island Fled Away" might be about.

If are are thinking about becoming an author, help yourself to any of these titles. Now all you need is the book to go behind it.

A detective with a heart

... he realized with a shock that the loss of innocence never stopped happening, that he was still losing it, that it was like a wound that never healed, and he would probably go on losing it, drop by drop, until the day he died.

Peter Robinson, Cold Is the Grave

That Peter Robinson closes Cold Is the Grave (2000) with the words above tells us something not just about this particular novel but about his entire series of Inspector Banks novels: This is serious stuff. This is quality stuff. Here is a fictional detective hero who actually feels something about his cases, about the victims and the families of the victims and even about the villains whose actions cause so much suffering. So many fictional crime solvers seem to forget one case when they start another. Banks remembers, and so innocence drips out of him like blood from a wound.

Chief Constable Jimmy Riddle doesn't like Banks, but when his 16-year-old daughter runs away to London and subsequently appears on a porn site, he asks Banks to bring her back, but in an unofficial capacity rather than as a police officer. Riddle may not like Banks, but he knows he can do the job.

Banks does find Emily Riddle — in the company of a suspected mobster — and takes her home. Days later Emily dies in a pub after taking cocaine laced with poison. Banks takes her death hard, both because he thought he had just rescued her from danger but also because she is close in age to his own daughter.

Meanwhile, told by his wife that she wants a divorce, he reignites his affair with Annie Cabot, the officer who serves under him in this always-interesting series of crime novels, yet Annie wrestles with her own demons when a cop who had once participated in a gang rape of her shows up to assist in another case.

This novel may be longer than most of those in the series, but it never slows down and never seems too long.

Making a better human

I'm thinking about how life is so miraculous, none of it really deserves the title "reality."

Matt Haig, The Humans

In The Body Snatchers, later turned into at least three movies, Jack Finney gave us the frightening idea that aliens from space might be able to pass as human beings. Decades later Matt Haig imagines an alien from a distant galaxy not just turning into a human being, but becoming a better human being than the one he replaced. This time, somehow, it seems reassuring.

The Humans (2013) becomes, in turn, a comic novel, a sci-fi horror story, a domestic drama, a thriller and a love story, while always remaining a fascinating commentary on what it means to be human. To finish reading it is to be inspired to start it over again.

The alien narrator has been sent by an advanced civilization on the planet Vonnadoria light years away to replace a British mathematician who has just solved a problem that could significantly advance Earth technology to a dangerous degree. His mission is to destroy all traces of the formula, including killing anyone Andrew Martin might have told about it, such as his wife and teenage son.

At first the new Andrew Martin looks like the old one but knows nothing about actually being human. He appears naked, and it takes him a few chapters to realize human beings are expected to be clothed in public and that spitting is not considered proper social behavior. He finds humans incredibly ugly and their food repulsive, at least until he discovers peanut butter.

He also finds that virtually everyone, including his own wife and son, despises him. The real Martin had been so wrapped up in his work that he had ignored human decency and kindness. His wife, Isobel, only tolerated him. His neglected son, Gulliver, is suicidal. That the new Andrew Martin comes to love his family in a way the old one never did may seem predictable, yet how this happens is what makes Haig's novel so rewarding.

When the powers that be on Vonnadoria realize their agent is not following orders, they send someone else to do the job, meaning that a third Andrew Martin has landed.

Any book club that selects The Humans will have a lot to talk about.

Adaptations

Did you realize that It's a Wonderful Life, the favorite holiday movie of millions, was adapted from a Christmas card? Or that two classic American films, Stagecoach and Bringing Up Baby, were both adapted from short stories that appeared in the same issue of Collier's magazine (April 10, 1937)? Or that the Oscar-winning movie The Best Years of Our Lives sprang from an article in Time magazine?

There's a lot about movie adaptations in the July/August 2007 issue of Fine Books & Collections magazine. Perhaps most interesting of all is a reprint of something written by Ernest A. Dench in 1916 about movies adapted from books. Adaptations, like movies themselves, were still new in 1916, so Dench's thoughts about turning novels into silent movies are fascinating.

We may think of movie tie-ins as a relatively new development in the publishing industry, but we find that they were already common in 1916, although Dench faulted publishers because they were not more common. Booksellers, he believed, could sell a lot more books if they paid more attention to what was popular at movie theaters. The movie business may only be a few years old at this point in history, yet already Dench saw film producers as the top dog and publishers as the tail.

He argued that publishers should focus on books that could easily be adapted to the screen. "The motion picture has created a demand for clean-cut stories, without a particle of padding," Dench wrote. "Yet there are publishers who have continued to turn out fiction of all kinds with frightfully slim plots." He seemed to think publishers shouldn't even bother with novels that could not easily be turned into films.

Surprisingly Dench wrote that the longest novel can be converted into a two-hour movie, with most of them running just an "hour or so." Yet today we know that making a two-hour movie out of a novel, even one of moderate length, requires cutting out significant portions of the plot. The entire story may require a six- or eight-part miniseries on television.

Another surprise, at least to me, is Dench's assertion that people "prefer to see it on film first, because it is the quickest and easiest way to arrive at a decision. It is also the truest test." The truest test of what? The worth of the story? Yet great novels are routinely turned into mediocre movies. Sometimes great movies are adapted from mediocre novels. Personally I prefer reading the book before seeing the movie, for the movie, whether good or not, usually makes me less eager to read the book. I have had the DVD of The Sisters Brothers for more than a year without watching it because I want to read Patrick DeWitt's novel first. A movie can spoil the book more than the book can spoil the movie.

Ernest Dench had some curious ideas about movie adaptations, but that's what makes his article so interesting to read.

The problem of blue retinas

I came upon the July/August 2007 issue of Fine Books & Collections in a stack of old magazines in my home. Inside are several fascinating articles worth a second read and a little discussion.

One short article by Rebecca Rego Barry is about a controversy surrounding F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Which Gatsby is the real Gatsby? Fourteen years later I assume the question remains unanswered, for there will always be a difference of opinion on such matters.

Some writers — Walt Whitman and Thomas Hardy among them — continue to revise their work even after publication. So which version of Leaves of Grass or Two on a Tower is the true one? In Fitzgerald's case, the main controversy involves changes made by editors after Fitzgerald's death. A key point of contention in The Great Gatsby centers around Fitzgerald's description of blue retinas. Presumably this was a mistake by the author, for retinas cannot be seen. But should editors correct this apparent mistake, changing it instead to blue pupils or blue irises?

On one hand are those who maintain that a work of literature, especially one considered a masterpiece, should be left as the author left it. Others argue that mistakes are mistakes, and it's an editor's job to correct mistakes. The original editor missed this one, but does that mean subsequent editors should ignore it? Were Fitzgerald still alive, might not he be embarrassed by blue retinas?

Great works of literature are routinely, and without controversy, translated into other languages. The very act of translation involves changing what the author wrote into something else. Sometimes this change can be quite significant, for some expressions and ideas cannot be easily understood in other languages. Yet changes within the original language remain problematic.

I think this demonstrates the value of annotated editions of great literature, or at least the liberal use of footnotes. In this way an edition of Gatsby could include Fitzgerald's blue retinas along with a note saying he probably meant blue pupils.

Next time I'll have more from this edition of Fine Books & Collections.

A mansion with a mystery

Lisa Jewell's 2019 novel The Family Upstairs makes a pleasant diversion, always engaging while stopping short of becoming an actual nail-bitter.

On her 25th birthday Libby Jones, who was adopted as a baby, inherits a large, long-vacant house from the parents she never knew. Their bodies had been found along with that of another man in an apparent cult suicide. Ten-month-old Libby, then named Serenity, was found in another room. Her older siblings and other children living in the house were missing.

Libby thinks she'll sell the mansion for enough money to be able to live comfortably for the rest of her life, but it seems those other "children" have been waiting for the day when she turns 25 and they begin turning up at the house after she does. In alternate chapters Jewell fills us in on both on developments in Libby's life and what happened in that house years before. And the latter is, in fact, the real story, the one to which the novel's title refers.

Libby's story seems unresolved at the end. We get to learn what happened then, but what happens now?

Mastering our languages

Oliver Kamm

Oliver Kamm's book Accidence Will Happen reminds us that most of us who speak English have actually mastered multiple forms of English. We use one on some occasions, another on others. It's like the guy who ordinarily can't seem to say two sentences without using the f-word at least once but sounds very different when speaking with his boss, his mother or a priest.

Linguist John McWorter has made the same point with his metaphor of the four language boxes. One box is labeled formal speech, another informal speech, another formal writing and still another informal writing. Being able to check off each of these boxes is a good thing, he argues. We need formal speech for when we speak in public, informal speech with our friends, formal writing for a letter applying for a job and informal writing for e-mails and texting.

Within each of the boxes we probably have smaller boxes. Most of us speak differently to children than to adults and differently to friends than to strangers. I wrote several days ago about the college professor who wrote one way in his newspaper columns and another in a scholarly book. And I've written before about the receptionist where I worked who spoke in a very refined way to visitors and when on the telephone with a stranger, informally with her white colleagues and with a very different kind of informality with other black people.

Then there is the language we must learn for our jobs, lingo that may sound foreign to outsiders but is necessary in our chosen fields. Thus we sound different at work than when we go home.

Kamm's term for formal speech or formal writing is "conventional English." There are occasions when we want to use grammar that even our pickiest teachers would have approved. Other times we can get away with less conventional usages and might even sound stuffy if we did use conventional English.

He speaks very highly of Emma Thompson, the British actor, who visited her old school and urged pupils to learn to speak without using slang terms like innit and I was, like. "Just don't do it," she said. "Because it makes you sound stupid and you're not stupid." Becoming educated means learning several forms of our own language.

A permissive style guide

Imagine that, a language style guide that permits virtually anything you want to say virtually any way you want to say it! It's like a libertarian law book. That's what Oliver Kamm, chief columnist for the London Times, gives us in Accidence Will Happen (2016).

The book represents a slap in the face to what Kamm refers to a pedants, amateur grammarians, sticklers, prescriptivists and other less flattering terms. These are the people who get worked up over split infinitives and prepositions at the end of sentences. What these people call rules, Kamm calls conventions, at best, and superstitions, at worst.

While pedants worry that the English language is endangered, Kamm says, "If there is one language that isn't endangered, it's English. The language is changing because that's what a living language does."

He devotes most of the book to his permissive style guide in which he not only explains why usages frowned upon by the pedants are perfectly acceptable and often more clear than so-called proper usage but also provides examples of their use by many of the most respected writers in the English language. If Jane Austen can use they as a singular pronoun, why can't you? If Herman Melville and Thomas Hardy can use the phrase "under the circumstances," why shouldn't you?

He finds nothing wrong with the word hopefully, with the phrase "free gift" or with a phrase like "less people." Only a pedant would say, "It's I." The rest of us say, "It's me," and Kamm thinks that's just fine.

Kamm does concede that certain usages are more conventional than others and are preferable in certain situations. What's important to him is to be understood and to avoid sounding stuffy. Thus when you are in doubt about whether to say who or whom, Kamm advises us to stick with who. "Nobody but a stickler will fault you for anything worse than informality, and that is no sin," he writes.

Lost in the storm

Even a hurricane can't blow enough life into Miss Julia Weathers the Storm (2017) by Ann B. Ross to make it as eventful or as interesting as most of the other entries in this long and usually amusing series.

Virtually all of the major continuing characters are guests of Sam and Julia when they rent a large house along the Atlantic for a few days. Lillian, Julia's longtime maid, stays behind to have foot surgery, but they take along Latisha, Lillian's granddaughter. Also along is LuAnne, Julia's annoying friend, who is convinced her husband, Leonard, is seeing another woman. She will talk about nothing else, while at the same time worrying that everyone else knows about her problems.

After they are at the beach for a few days, Hurricane Marty changes course suddenly and forces their evacuation, though not before some money, perhaps thrown overboard by smugglers intercepted by the Coast Guard, washes up on the shore.

Julia and her friends don't find any of the money, yet still they are followed back home by three people in a black van who seemed to be particularly interested in Latisha.

The ending of this installment in the series proves quite exciting, yet the buildup gets a bit tedious. There is too much of we-did-this and then we-did-that and then we-did-something-else. Mostly this is routine stuff, not what one reads these books to discover. The hurricane amounts to little more than an inconvenience, and LuAnne's problems with her husband are never even fully resolved. The ending is terrific; the problem is just getting there.

So unless you are fan enough to want to read every book in the Miss Julia series, this would be a good one to skip.

The better wolf

"Your bite will be deep. Maybe you will prove the better wolf, Mr. Winge, and on that note I bid you good night."

Niklas Natt Och Dag, The Wolf and the Watchman

The crime that gets Cecil Winge off his deathbed is about a ghastly as any you are likely to find in fiction: A body pulled out of a small body of water in Stockholm in 1793 hasn't much left to it. Each of the man's limbs have been cut off, one by one over a period of time. His ears have been cut off, his tongue cut out and his eyes dug out. The watchman who pulls out the body is Mikel Cardell, who himself lost an arm in a sea battle and now helps keep peace in taverns by using his wooden arm as a club.

Winge is dying of tuberculosis, given perhaps just weeks to live, yet the severity of this crime compels him to yield to a request by the temporary chief of police to try to find the killer. He asks Cardell to assist him, and the two of them make a terrific crime-solving duo in the international bestseller The Wolf and the Watchman by Niklas Natt Och Dag (a name that translates as Night and Day).

The novel becomes a series of stories about key characters, their stories eventually melding into one. Nat Och Dag keeps the tension high and the shocks and surprises coming right up until the end. If anything disappoints about this novel it is that given Cecil Winge's frail body it can never turn into a series.