Forgotten books

For more than 50 years I have been keeping a record of all the books I've read, and I recently came upon my notebooks from the 1970s through the 1990s. They also contain lists of all the movies I've saw in theaters during those years, but that's another story. Reviewing these book lists, I've found some surprises.

Eric Ambler

In time I usually forget most of the plots, characters and details of books I've read, but I've always thought I could at least remember reading the books themselves and whether I liked them or not. Not so. Had you asked me a week ago if I had ever read any of Eric Ambler's novels, I would have said no, but I've always wanted to, It turns out I've read two them, including the classic A Coffin for Dimitrios. 

I don't remember reading so many John LeCarre novels. I just remember A Small Town in Germany. I certainly don't recall reading Debby Boone's memoir. I can't even imagine why I read it. The Sins of Herod by Frank Slaughter? No memory at all.

I still have my copy of Savage Sleep by Millen Brand, thinking I'll get around to it one day. Turns out I read it back in 1970. I didn't think I'd ever read Around the World in 80 Days, but I did. Same with a biography of John O'Hara.

Even some more recently read books are a surprise to me, such as Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott read in 1995. Don't remember it at all. Yet I clearly recall reading Ivanhoe back in the 1960s. 

In 1975 I read something called Bright Shadow of Reality. What do you suppose that was? Or what about Pablum, Parents and Pandemonium? 

Awhile back I thought I read J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey for the second time. Turns out it was the fourth time.

Other books I remember very clearly: Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson, Livingstone by Tim Jeal, The First Deadly Sin by Lawrence Sanders, The Forgotten Victory by Thomas Fleming, Bring Me a Unicorn by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P.D. James, etc. All these were read in the early 1970s. So why remember them and not the others?

A good start

In the brief first chapter of Bullet for a Star (1977), Stuart Kaminsky works Charlton Heston, William Faulkner, Pat O'Brien and Errol Flynn into the story, setting the pattern for the 23 other name-dropping Toby Peters mysteries that would follow.

Peters is a private investigator based in Hollywood during the 1940s whose cases always involve movie stars or other famous people from that era. In Bullet for a Star, Errol Flynn is being blackmailed with a fake photograph showing him in a compromising situation with an underage girl, and the studio hires Peters to pay the money and retrieve the photo and the negative. It's not that simple, of course, and soon there are a series of murders, with Peters himself becoming the main suspect.

Always complicating these novels is the fact that our hero's brother is a homicide detective with a love-hate relationship with Toby. Sheldon Minck, the hapless dentist with whom Peters shares an office, appears briefly, while other regulars in this wonderful series have yet to be introduced.

This first Toby Peters adventure, if not as funny as those that would follow, sets the pattern. Why the first book in the series remained unread by me for so long I cannot explain.

Typewriter magic

I had become a writer by the simple act off owning a typewriter.

Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life

Ellen Gilchrist

I became a journalist with modest success, not a writer of literature like Ellen Gilchrist, yet I was struck by how the origins of my own career devoted to words mirrored her own.

She was 12 when her father bought her a Royal portable typewriter. I was 13 when my parents returned from a shopping trip with a Smith-Corona portable. The typewriter was never actually mine, although I monopolized it for years. At first my sisters and I fought over it, but they soon lost interest. I never did.

Gilchrist says she redecorated her room to match her typewriter, including curtains and bedspread. I never went that far, and at first the typewriter wasn't kept in my room. It was soon moved there, however, because I was virtually the only one in the family who ever used it. It replaced my bookcase and my chemistry set, perhaps even my bed, as the most important object in my room.

Gilchrist started by writing poems on her new typewriter, poems that perhaps never would have been written if that machine hadn't inspired her to write them. I wrote a few poems, mostly silly ones, but within days I was soon writing stories, comic fairy tales and satirical magazines and newspapers. Before the arrival of the typewriter, I had never felt any impulse to do such things.

As a teenager Gilchrist began writing a newspaper column, then later turned to writing fiction. I tried my hand at writing fiction in my youth and only later wrote a newspaper column.

Both Ellen Gilchrist and I might have found our futures without the benefit of a typewriter coming at just the right moment during adolescence. But then again, perhaps not. One wonders how many other young writers were inspired by portable typewriters during that period of history. Today it might be some phone app or perhaps the ease of blogging that gets a young writer started.

Yet it may still be possible for an old-fashioned typewriter to work its magic. Tom Hanks imagines just such a thing in one of his stories in his book Uncommon Type. Beginning with the purchase of a toy typewriter, then moving ahead with the purchase of a real one, a woman discovers that she actually has something inside her worth putting down on paper. The title of the story is "These Are the Meditations of My Heart." I was moved by this short story, and I'll bet Ellen Gilchrist would be, too.

Still a winner

Dorothy L. Sayers

Many murder mysteries have been given odds titles, but Have His Carcase (1932) by Dorothy L. Sayers must be one of the oddest, at least for American readers. Yet for its time and place it is actually a very good title. Under British law, the Have-His-Carcase Act, you cannot hold an inquest into a death until you have a body.

In this clever, always interesting novel, there is photographic evidence of a death, yet the body is swept out to sea by the tide, so for about half the book the sleuths, both professional and amateur, can only speculate.

Mystery writer Harriet Vane, herself a murder suspect until cleared after the intervention of Lord Peter Wimsey in a previous novel, discovers a young man with his throat cut along the coast. She finds fresh blood and a razor, but no footprints in the sand other than hers and the victim's. Realizing the tide is coming in, she takes a few photographs and then leaves to summon help

The body soon disappears, but Wimsey arrives, still trying to get Harriet to marry him. He believes it's a murder case, even through the local police and, eventually, the inquest say it's a suicide.

The victim had supported himself by dancing with wealthy older women at a nearby hotel. One of these women says the man had promised to marry her.

Other than the missing body, the case's other major complication is that two men, including this woman's son, had been behaving suspiciously, but both have ironclad alibis for the time of the murder. But if they didn't murder the man, who did?

When I devoured the Dorothy L. Sayers mysteries back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, I considered Have His Carcase my favorite. This rereading doesn't change my opinion.

Size matters

Readers often put down a book after completing a chapter and go do something else. I know I do. So it might seem to make sense for authors, who want to hold onto their readers for as long as possible, to write long chapters. Yet just the opposite is true. Short chapters, not long chapters, keep readers reading.

David Morrell

Thriller writer David Morrell explained why his chapters are often just a page or two long in an interview published in The Armchair Detective way back in 1984. After a long chapter a reader may be exhausted, put down the book and, sometimes, never pick it up again. "But in what I'm trying to do," he said, "the reader can see there's another chapter just on the other side of the page, so the reader will say, 'Oh, I'll give it just another minute.' Then he'll say, 'Ah, what the heck, another minute more I'll read.' You take enough of those minutes and I've got that person for two or three hours."

I recently finished reading The Fix by David Baldacci, another thriller writer who believes in short chapters, so I know that what Morrell said is true. This novel has 81 chapters. Some Baldacci books have more than 100 chapters.

One can save a 20-page chapter for another day. But a two-page chapter? Not hardly, especially when the book is as exciting as those by written Baldacci and Morrell. Reading their books is like eating potato chips one chip at a time. Pretty soon you've finished the whole bag.

Yet the short-chapter strategy works not just with thrillers. More serious literature and even nonfiction can hold readers more effectively when chapters are kept relatively brief. I just started reading Erik Larson's The Splendid and the Vile, which covers slightly more than 500 pages and has 100 chapters. That's five pages per chapter on average. Some chapters are barely one page in length. These brief chapters help make a history of Winston Churchill's family during World War II seem almost as exciting as a Baldacci thriller.

Bill Bryson has 23 chapters in The Body, making them 16.6 pages long on average. That's much longer than Larson, yet still unusually short for a nonfiction book. Most people can read 16 pages at a time. But when chapters are 30 or 40 pages each, one hesitates to start another chapter until there is sufficient time to finish, and how many of us have that much time? Books with long chapters are too easy to place back on the shelf and forget about.

The exciting life of a biologist

Who knew being a biologist could be so dangerous?

In Alice Henderson's first Alex Carter adventure, A Solitude of Wolverines (2020), the young biologist is targeted by a crazed gunman in Boston and then takes a job counting wolverines in the Montana Rockies, where an entire gang of ruthless men are soon trying to kill her.

Alex has incredible survival skills and can best any man she faces in hand-to-hand combat, yet unlike those wolverines she tracks, she is not entirely alone. Some unknown man, it turns out, has been tracking her, saving her life first in Boston, then later in Montana. Who is he? Henderson leaves that as a cliffhanger to entice us into her second novel, A Blizzard of Polar Bears.

Wolverines tells us much about wildlife and the need to protect it, but mostly this is a thriller from beginning to end. The pace encourages fast reading, and if you read it quickly enough you may not notice that much of it makes no sense at all. For example, a man takes Alex's journal out of her backpack and reads it — in the dark. Alex can hear a conversation word for word at a distance — during a snowstorm. Even the plot itself sometimes stretches credulity. 

Still, it is fun.

One writer's life

Ellen Gilchrist, now 87,  has never written that one book that might have made her a big name in literary circles. Just the same, novels such as The Annunciation and The Anna Papers and short story collections such as In the Land of Dreamy Dreams and Victory Over Japan have been satisfying discerning readers since the 1980s. Her 2005 book The Writing Life gives us a look at the woman reflected in her fiction.

The book's brief essays, often repetitive, are divided into three overlapping categories: her life, her writing and her teaching. The latter — she had been teaching creative writing at the University of Arkansas for four years at the time this book was published — seems to have been its trigger. It was inspired by young people, she says, another way for her to help young writers become better writers.

So devoted has she become to teaching writing that she confesses her own writing has suffered as a result. Although "Writing Is Rewriting" is a slogan she impresses on her students again and again, she admits she has lost patience with rewriting. She insists she prefers her original drafts, and if they don't please her editor, so be it. She has come to the point in her career where she takes more pleasure in her students' successes than her own.

Gilchrist herself was taught by Eudora Welty, whose work she adores. She also has high praise for such writers as William Faulkner and Larry McMurtry, and the collected advice of Ernest Hemingway, On Writing, is something she always recommends to her students. Her favorite Sunday afternoon pursuit has for years been reading Shakespeare's plays aloud with a group of friends.

Well short of being an autobiography, On Writing nevertheless shows us a great deal about Gilchrist's eccentric life, her many marriages, her devotion to her sons and her grandchildren and her almost parental love for her students. The book was written over a period of years, which helps explain why she repeats herself so much. Only a few of the essays have been published elsewhere. The essays, rarely more than three or four pages each, never fail to entertain and, if the reader is another writer, inform.

Genres change with the times

Donald E. Westlake

Elmore Leonard wrote westerns before he turned his attention to crime novels. After Robert B. Parker made his name writing novels about a hardboiled private investigator named Spenser, he tried his hand at writing westerns.

To Donald E. Westlake, this switch from one genre to another was nothing dramatic. The heroes in each were essentially the same men.

In a 1982 talk at the Smithsonian Institution, repeated two years later at a gathering of mystery writers, Westlake traced the history of hardboiled detective stories. "Both the western and the hardboiled detective story are involved with the same ritual subject," Westlake said. "The chivalrous man in an unchivalrous world."

The western came first and was extremely popular for many years. After World War I, writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler put the western in modern dress, moving the action from the dusty streets of cowtowns to the mean streets of big cities.

Westlake argued that the private eye novel was dead and that contemporary writers — this was the 1980s — were just turning out pale imitations of Hammett and Chandler. Parker and many others apparently didn't get the message, for they kept writing successful private detective novels, hardboiled and otherwise.

But just as Hammett and Chandler updated the western hero, so other writers have updated the hardboiled detective. Sue Grafton and others showed us that women, too, could be hardboiled. Stuart Kaminsky in his Toby Peters series showed us that a hardboiled private investigator can be funny. Westlake himself showed us that hardboiled crime fiction can be written from the criminal's point of view, as he did in his Parker novels.

I am currently reading a novel by Alice Henderson called A Solitude of Wolverines featuring a tough, no-nonsense biologist, not a detective. She works alone in the Montana Rockies where something mysterious is going on and someone is trying to harm her. The nearby town is decidedly unfriendly, and a wealthy rancher keeps cutting the fence to let his cattle graze on the wildlife preserve. Are we in a detective story or a western or what?

Bill Bryson's 'Body'

Bill Bryson repeats himself in his masterful 2019 book The Body: A Guide for Occupants, and the refrain that he repeats over and over again is something along the lines of "nobody knows."

Why do we sleep? Why do we dream? Why has the human brain shrunk over thousands of years? Why can't humans regenerate damaged heart tissue the way so many lower animals can? Why do men go bald? Why do we itch when someone just mentions the word itch? Why are women born with a lifetime supply of eggs within them and yet lose so many of them as the years pass? And so the unanswered questions pile up as the pages fly by.

And yet for all that science still does not know about the human body, it has learned a great deal, and Bryson packs a lot of it into his book without ever making it read like a medical textbook. In fact, virtually every paragraph contains some fascinating tidbit that a reader will yearn to share with someone else. He tells great stories about medical pioneers, presents statistics whose impact are more jaw-dropping than mind-fogging,  and amazes readers with details about what our bodies do for us while we're busy doing something else.

Like most great explainers, Bryson has a gift for metaphors. He says things like this:

"Your brain is you. Everything else is just plumbing and scaffolding."

"Each component of the cell responds to signals from other components, all of them bumping and jostling like so many bumper cars, yet somehow all this random motion results in smooth coordinated action, not just across the cell but across the whole body as cells communicate with other cells in different parts of your personal cosmos."

To the tiny mites that live on your scalp, he says, your skin is "like a giant crusty bowl of cornflakes."

This being Bill Bryson, he offers lots of trivia just because it is interesting, whether or not it is actually relevant to his subject matter.  For example, the respected British medical journal The Lancet got its name from the instrument used for bleeding patients, back when bleeding was thought to be a wise medical treatment. Or, the most popular vegetable in the United States is the french fry. Or, one study found 2,368 different species of bacteria in 60 random American belly buttons.

You could host a party at which guests take turns reading random lines from The Body. Add food and drink, and a good time would be had by all.

Some reassembly required

Life took longer to reassemble than it did to blow apart, but that didn't mean it wouldn't be lovely, providing that one remembered to go for country walks, and to tune the wireless to music.

Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

Chris Cleave's fourth novel, Everyone Brace Is Forgiven (2016), is about reassembling lives blown apart by World War II. Yet it is a love story that the war makes possible.

Cleave says his novel was inspired by his own grandparents, although the story is based only loosely on their experiences.

Mary is an idealistic rich girl whose mother only wants to marry well. Instead she volunteers to help with the war effort however she can, then gets assigned to teach school, even though she lacks any qualifications. Most London children are soon sent to the countryside when the Germans start bombing the city, but some children, either because they are black, disabled in some way or otherwise unattractive, are rejected by the country people and returned to London. Mary decides to teach them.

She falls in love with Tom, her supervisor, but then one fateful night she and her best friend, Hilda, go out with Tom and his best friend, Alistair, and magic strikes between Mary and Alistair, an Army officer. Hilda feels betrayed because she likes Alistair, too. As for Tom, a German bomb soon kills him, as well as most of Mary's students. For most of the novel Alistair and Mary are separated by the war, he under siege on Malta and she driving an ambulance during bombing raids. Both suffer disabling injuries.

The war destroys so much. Will it destroy this love that had just one brief night to form? Will everyone brave be forgiven? Will everyone forgiven stay brave? Cleave deals with such questions in an incredibly beautiful and meaningful novel.

Word oddities

Before I place Barbara Ann Kipfer's Word Nerd back on the shelf, at least temporarily, I want to present some odd word trivia that I found especially interesting.

A Pensacola Beach business

Contractions are words like don't, can't and wouldn't, right? From Kipfer I learned that some common words are contractions that long ago lost their apostrophes. Remnant, for example, was originally remenant, but the middle syllable was lost somewhere along the way.  Scone is a contraction of a two-syllable word, she says. Yeoman is a contraction of "young man."

Pensacola is Choctaw for "hair people."

Why does an X on love letters signify a kiss? Kipfer says it's because in medieval times, illiterate people, which means most people at that time, signed their names with an X, then kissed it to prove their sincerity.

Why the quick in quicksand? It means alive, as in the phrase "the quick and the dead." Ground that seems alive in the sense that it moves when one steps on it was thus called quicksand.

O is the oldest letter in the alphabet, Kipfer says, which raises the question of how one can have an alphabet with just one letter.

The original meaning of geezer was "someone who goes around in disguise."

Dainty once meant the opposite of what it means now. It used to mean "substantial and able."

The word elope once referred to someone's wife running away with her lover.

The expression "in the pink" refers to English fox hunting. The scarlet jackets worn were called pinks.

Papier-mache is French for "chewed paper."

State names — what they mean

The names of a surprising number of U.S. states are based on Indian words, the meaning of which may surprise you. Anyway some of them surprised me when I read them in Barbara Ann Kipfer's Word Nerd. Here are a few.

Alabama — This comes from a Choctaw phrase alba ayamule, meaning, "I open the thicket (to obtain food)."

Alaska — The Inuit word alakshak or ayayeks means "great land." Alaska is the Russian version of this word.

Arizona — The word means "small spring place."

Arkansas — This stems from a Sioux word meaning "south wind people or place."

Connecticut — The Mohican word quinnitukqut meant "at the long tidal river."

Dakota — This word referred to the Sioux and means "allies or friends."

Delaware — Must have been named for the Delaware Indians, right? Nope. The state actually got its named from a colonial governor, Lord de la Warr.

Illinois — The Algonquin work illiniwek means "men or warriors."

Ohio — The Iroquois word oheo means "beautiful" and referred originally to the Ohio River.

Kansas — This comes from the same Sioux word that gave us Arkansas.

Kentucky — Kentake was an Iroquois word meaning "meadow."

Massachusetts — The name means "at the big hill" in Algonquian.

Michigan — The Chippewa phrase mica gama refers to Lake Michigan and means "big water."

Minnesota — The name means "sky-tinted water" in Sioux.

Mississippi — No surprise here. Mici sibi means "big river" in Chippewa.

Missouri — The Algonquin word means "canoe."

Oregon — The Algonquin word waregan means "beautiful river."

Tennessee — This sounds like it must have Indian origins, but actually it's based on the name the Spanish gave to the Cherokee settlement, Tenaqui.

Texas  — Like Dakota, the word means "friends or allies," but in this case refers to the Apaches.

Utah — This is thought to have been based on a Navaho word meaning "higher land."

Wisconsin — This comes from an Algonquin word meaning "grassy place or beaver place."

Wyoming — The Algonquian word mache-weaming means "at the big flats."

A mystery before the murder

Some mystery novels are just different from all the others, and one of these is Georges Simenon's Maigret's Doubts, published in 1958 and still a page-turner.

As the relatively brief novel begins, it may be the reader who has the doubts. Maigret, the Paris police inspector, is so distracted when a man named Xavier Marton enters his office that he only half pays attention. He doesn't even remember the man's name after he leaves his office while Maigret is called away. Still he remembers enough to be troubled later. Marton believes his wife plans to poison him.

But then Marton's wife enters his office with another version of the story. What neither spouse tells him, but which Maigret discovers through a little investigation, is that both parties are involved in affairs, she with her boss and he with his wife's sister, who is living with them. On a second visit, Marton tells him that if his wife does poison him, he plans to kill her with his gun before he dies.

The case troubles Maigret greatly because he fears something terrible is about to happen, but to whom? How can he make an arrest before there is a crime? His doubts are about what he can do to stop it. The murder, when it finally does happen, turns out to be a bit more complicated than one might expect.

Early in the novel Simenon refers to his detective's "professional apathy," which seems an apt descriptive phrase for the man, who asks few questions, displays few emotions and often seems not to care about his cases or much of anything else. Distracted by his own marital concerns in that first chapter, he really didn't care. But later he does, and his mind is always at work even when his behavior suggests otherwise.