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Thanks for reading!

Carol

The Punishment She Deserves by Elizabeth George

The consummate novelist, Elizabeth George has done it again. A mystery writer's job is to raise questions in the reader's mind, and the author begins the process by using the title. "Who is she?" the readers wonder, and "What possible punishment could she deserve?" Turns out the title question resonates with a number of characters of differing ages, classes and backgrounds. 

Havers and Lynley are characters I've come to think of as old friends, and the promise of checking up on them tempted me to pick up this 690-page tome. The chance to meet those two again, along with the expectation of a look-in at Isabelle Ardery to see if she's still drinking, tempted me on through the early scenes before the police appear. Like many good mysteries, this one builds slowly, then proceeds not quite apace through dead ends and red herrings. 

In the course of the story, we slowly get to know an enormous cast of characters. Through a particularly Georgian alchemy, those whose egregious misbehaviour we'd initially despised become more sympathetic as we learn what forces and circumstances drove them to become what they are. 

Why do so many disparate women feel they deserve punishment anyway? The answers are far from black and white. As George trots out all the big themes, she's relentless in putting the less savoury aspects of culture under a microscope. First she portrays intricate and twisted family dysfunction. In the name of loving and knowing what's best for their children, some parents presume to own them, claiming the right to use any and all kinds of pressure, secrecy and deception in service of their own illusory goals, not the least of which is the ego-driven fear, sometimes not entirely conscious, of what others will think of them. 

She reveals corrupt social mores that chain sexuality to shame, violence, brutality, and the unbridled pursuit of power. We're also made to see the lengths to which people will go to satisfy a desperate need to belong -- or at least to be seen to belong. In the course of unveiling these human flaws, readers must also witness the substance abuse people resort to in their failed attempts to cover the pain that results from the willful determination of families and societies to bend individuals to their pattern, regardless of personal cost.

In the end, the author draws together many threads to bring the book to a satisfying conclusion, offering at least the possibility of forgiveness, redemption, and a future better than the past. 

In series news (spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't read a Lynley-Havers since What Came Before He Shot Her): Havers is learning to tap dance, and Lynley has a lady friend he wants to introduce to his family in Cornwall.

Daughter of the Reich by Louise Fein

Louise Fein has chosen an unusual perspective to write a novel that exposes political evil, including the the devastating effects of war. The love story involves Hetty, the daughter of an SS man, and Walter, a blonde German Jew. By following the changes in their lives, the author zeroes in with precision on the systematic corruption of German society in the lead-up to the war. 

The price of silence, the power of propaganda, the incitement to violence of poor, ignorant and frightened people -- it's all there in this well-researched work of fiction. Hetty's experience portrays the unwillingness we feel to believe the stories of evil until we are confronted with the most devastatingly direct evidence. Her character arc also shows how in a moment of crisis, one's natural morality can engender great courage. The refusal of even one individual to comply with an evil regime can and does make a difference.

It's strong stuff, reading about the rise of Nazism in Germany through the thirties, long before the occupation of Poland that set off the war. The author's note sounds a warning, and explains why she spent years pursuing the enormous project of creating an authentic and completely believable story of four children who grow up together, only to be split apart by political forces they are initially too immature to understand.

In Germany in the thirties, says the author, all media were marshalled to create a propaganda machine that managed to silence dissent in order to control and manipulate an entire population. "Today," she says, "we potentially face a similar trajectory with the resurgence of nationalism; the fast-developing far right and far-left sentiments; and extremism in many awful forms." Along with populist leaders winning elections, Brexit, and increasingly open expressions of racist sentiment, she points to "anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head once more," while people rely for news on the "false bubbles of their social media networks."

Yet stories have power. A good book "can reach out and pull a reader int a world they knew nothing about," and emotionally engage readers in the way that facts and news cannot." Stories, says Louise Fein, can live on in readers' minds. I couldn't agree more. The story of Hetty and Walter will certainly live on in mine.

Patrol North Africa 1943 - a Story of the Desert War by Fred Majdalany

My novel research entails seeking out primary sources: writers who published in the era I'm writing about. This quest for such voices has led to some amazing discoveries.

Fred Majdalany's short novel Patrol (1953) takes the reader into the heart and mind of Tim Sheldon, who leads a night patrol in the WWII desert war in North Africa. The story is simple -- seven men go on a terrifying night patrol randomly assigned by ill-informed officers far away in a comfortable club. Only five return. 

Tiny details carry the reader into Sheldon's mind. We are party to his thoughts as he washes and dries his feet, carefully soaping an incipient blister so it doesn't get worse. Other deftly drawn characters and scenes limn outlines which the reader's imagination can easily fill in. 

Far from where Tim dries his feet in a trench, we glimpse of Divisional Headquarters, a colonial farmhouse turned into "a credible semblance of an English country club." Captain Puttennam-Brown, "a Coldstream officer with a tight, petulant mouth," is obsessing about wine for the mess when the General calls him in to discuss plans for patrols. Eager to complete the transport arrangements for the table wine from White Feathers Abbey, the Captain hurriedly suggests a patrol to White Farm, which he happens in the moment to see on the wall map.  

Accompanying Tim, the reader shares the sequence of feelings flowing through the patrol leader who is responsible for the men. Though he has carefully scouted the route ahead of time, moving by compass in the silent darkness fills him with doubt and fear. "Sustained concentration and the aloneness of responsibility could press on the brain till you felt it must burst and you hated those with which you could not share the burden." Finding the first landmark allows Tim to relax "in a small way," but then fatigue rolls through him "like a shock." As they walk along beside the road, his emotions change again. "While nine-tenths of his mind remain[s] frozen with alertness, concentration, and the burden of leading, the other tenth slipped into...the boredom of the infantryman, mute and sightless, forcing one foot past the other in rhythmical timeless progress through the night from nowhere to nowhere."  

In the "long brown tent" of a hospital, with its "hurt filthy figures lying on baby-blue beds packed closely together," Tim is parked beside a French officer who is trying to teach himself English. He's "a nice fellow" who sets a fine example, but Tim finds his "ineffective diligence" maddening. The hospital padre, "a small bird of a man," always comes in "as though he were already late for six other more important appointments and was fitting you in at great inconvenience." The paperback thriller he provides in response to Tim's request for a book has the last thirty pages torn out. 

The officer class, with their "parched wives from India who love rank more dearly than their husbands," are "deeply receptive to anyone officially classed as an expert." First dismissive of the "new craze for psychiatry," they laugh off the "Trick Cyclists" until the General becomes "very keen" on psychiatry. Then, "uncritically accepting something outside their ken, they litter the back areas with psychiatrists and are pained because the bad soldiers take advantage of them." 

Marching along, Tim thinks about how he heard somewhere that courage is moral capital of which everyone has a limited supply. "How much left in the bank now? Six overdrafts here, Doc." Then his mind wanders to trousers, and to the "getaway bag" devised between him and his batman after the last time he was wounded in the leg. "No more getting caught again with...no bloody kit, no washanshave ten days, ten bloody days, no wash, no shave. Special haversack, we decided...put in books, towel, soap, socks, shave kit, toothbrush. If wounded, tie haversack to body when they send me away. Next time we'll be wounded in luxury, we said. Oh yes: and trousers...Not going to be caught again in Algiers with one trouser leg - no fear, no bloody fear."

In this stark story of the damage wrought by war, the beauty and evocation of the language offers a consoling counterpoint. Algiers represents "the paradise of Leavetown -- glamorous, sordid, beautiful, noisy, vast, crowded, desirable" as the bus groans in low gear "up the rue Michelet, the handsome main street which climbs through half a dozen hairpin turns from the heart of the port" affording tantalizing glimpses, "a kaleidoscopic impression of dense military traffic ceaselessly choking the crowded streets; of three-car trams teeming within, festooned without, with Arabs, so that you wondered how anyone inside the cars escaped or collected a fare; of mysterious smells in which garlic and charcoal and betel could be identified; of ships, warehouses, shops, offices, alleys, steps, cafes, cinemas, and tier upon tier of pretty red-roofed houses rising steeply to the peak of the hill which towered above the harbour." 

Then the town disappears and Tim finds himself in a real hospital, "large and light and antiseptic ...a well-run institution that has little to do with the war." Under the care of "real English nurses," his wound heals, and the initial joy of lying in a clean white bed palls. Sated with the sleep he wanted so badly when he arrived, he now feels the antiseptic bed constrains him like a prison. Lying there, he waits and watches for the visits of Sister Murgatroyd, a nurse he deems to have "too much character" to be beautiful or even pretty. 

After recovering from his first wound, Tim enjoys some time with a fellow officer who takes him to see a unique troop of Berber dancers, and he persuades the nurse to come on a date. After this exposure to the distance between his dreams of bliss and reality, he wants nothing more than to get back to the battalion. There, filled with responsibility and trepidation, he leads his men by night on the ill-starred patrol across landmarks they've dubbed Piecrust, Burnt Tank Ridge, Twin Tits and Bond Street.

By taking us into the minutiae of Tim's thoughts and showing us the context, Fred Majdalany takes us into the heart of deep universal themes, showing us how men lead and obey and bond and cope in war, and revealing how they view duty and responsibility and fantasize about rest and women and the variety of things that interested them -- sports and music and art -- before they were torn in youth from all hope of ever enjoying ordinary lives.

Because of the persistence of grass

Because of the persistence of grass, life goes on

Season to season, generation to generation.

Stubborn grass roots cling to the earth,

Their generations trampled and eaten down by cattle. 

With the relentless persistence of grazing animals,

We humans seek wisdom, our driving desire

As persistent as the growth and regrowth of grass.

The human quest for wisdom is as perennial as the grass.

The War Widow by Tara Moss

Billie Walker is an experienced war correspondent whose missing European husband may or may not be dead. Back in Australia in 1946, she finds women reporters are getting sidelined to provide jobs for returned men. Needing to earn her living while awaiting news of Jack, who remains incommunicado, she moves into her late father's old office to follow in his footsteps as a private investigator.

Ms. Walker is fashionably dressed and easy on the eye. Her lipstick shade is Fighting Red. She wears a double-breasted trench coat and smokes on occasion, but avoids drinking alone. Her ally in the police is a woman, and her street informer - observant, fearless and Aboriginal - is female. Sam, her assistant, has a war-scarred hand - an asset in a dust-up. Normally shy, he takes to champagne "like some kind of truth serum." 

As well as treating readers to fresh versions of private eye tropes, Tara Moss judiciously tucks in details that reflect the atmosphere of the era. We're told that Billie's mother, like Marie Stopes, is in favour of women controlling their reproductive destinies, "despite what gray-haired men of religion had to say on the matter." We are also informed that "the great divide in Australia and elsewhere" is between those who served in the war and those who didn't.

Though not yet ready to admit her probable widowhood, Billie is well aware of the fate of the war widows of Australia - "some were objects of pity, others considered a threat." Those with children "received but a pittance," while childless widows got no pensions at all, since the men in charge believed they needed nothing more than another husband. 

In contrast to the poor and unemployed of the city, readers glimpse the lives of Sydney's upper crust. Occupying homes with maids' quarters at the top, many show off their furs and jewels at fancy clubs like The Dancers, where gangsters are known to hang out. Unconcerned about provenance, they buy up pricey art at an auction house run by a well-dressed crook. 

It is rumoured that the Australian government plans to flush out cash hoarded by war-time black-market racketeers by calling in all existing banknotes and replacing them with a new issue. As she broods over this, the detective concludes that a certain auction house is a likely place for the dirty money to be laundered before it becomes worthless.

To keep her mind off her probable widowhood, Billie loves to lose herself in the excitement of the chase. She enjoys driving her Willys 77 roadster fast - even if it means using up her petrol coupons halfway through the month. She also carries a pearl-handled Colt in her stocking top in case of need. On receiving a hand-delivered note, she's hit by jolt of adrenalim, as she's unsure "whether to expect a death threat or an invitation to tea."

Tara Moss's book is an alchemy of humour and realism. Periodic references to the recent war are described in bald and  chilling terms with references to veterans walking around Sydney with skin grafts on their faces, the result of "airman's burn." We're also told that Ravensbruck women slaves "made parts for Daimler-Benz or electrical components for the Siemens Electric Company," while others worked on Hitler's V2 rocket or "were made to pull a huge roller to pave the streets." 

Yet except when describing such harsh historic realities, the tone of the prose is generally light. The setting being Australia, there has to be a reference to a crocodile: in this case, one that escaped from a zoo. The author also has fun with double entendres. In one scene where Billie is intent on her driving as and Sam follow a gunman in a high-speed car chase, her assistant tells her he's out of bullets. "Take mine...take it now," she instructs Sam, offering her own gun from her beribboned holster, just as the wind blows her dress up to expose her thigh. 

Later, when the country cops assume Sam is the driver and car owner, we're told the "sun had set on both the day and Billie's patience." She has good reason, as the rural police seem "more suspicious of her [a woman!] driving" than of the testimony of "a soldier's attempts to bring down a couple of criminals with his long-barreled farm gun." 

Back in Sydney, she has to report to Central Police Station, where she feels the male stares at her back "as palpable as hands" and can "almost smell the testosterone." This sexist attitude greatly annoys her, because she knows that her friend Constable Annabelle Primrose "could have wrestled bank robbers with only one arm, if only they'd let her."

Throughout the book, Moss's use of language surprises, delights, and reflects the character of the feisty detective. A corrupt cop clenches his fists "tighter than a pauper grips a coin," and the auctioneer "conducts himself in a sedate and formal manner that wouldn't have been amiss in a mortician." The paid thug who makes the mistake of kicking Billie looks "underfed and over-beaten." After she pushes her hatpin into his ankle, we see him "standing on one leg like a cowardly flamingo."

Billie also shares occasional terse philosophical observations. The motivations for murder, she opines, are "money, jealousy and power." Considering the relationship between war and wealth, she thinks about "those who did well out of the debacle," and comments to Sam that "'wars wouldn't be nearly so common if no one made money from them.'" On the sober topic of mortality, she realizes how "the proximity of death taught you that you only had this moment."

A classic of its type, this book lightens the tone and shakes up the trope. As a bonus, reading this mystery includes a chance to learn a bit of history. I hope we'll soon be hearing more about the cases of Billie Walker and her sidekick Sam.

Cairo during the War by Artemis Cooper

During the period this book describes, the world was a very different place from the one we inhabit now -- indeed, even from the era in which the work was published, in 1989. "The British occupation was not popular," the author says, and  Cairo, technically a neutral city, seesawed between support and resentment of the colonial power. Today it is jaw-dropping to witness the racism, sexism, and classism that prevailed as a matter of course.

The human antics of an immense and varied cast of Cairenes and foreigners alike are most absorbing. We learn how the GHQ desk jockeys claim membership in ironically named imaginary units like Groppi's Light Horse, and we hear how Lawrence Durrell had to work to persuade the parents of his second wife -- the model for Justine in The Alexandria Quartet -- to marry him.

We are present at a famous New Year's party hosted by Princess Shevekiar, and learn that King Ahmed Fuad of Egypt was one of her four ex-husbands. We also glimpse the drunken revelries hosted at "Tara" by SAS operative David Stirling. At one of these, his eccentric roommate, a Polish aristocrat, gets into an argument with neighbours after her pet mongoose bites their cat.

We learn of The Gezira Sporting Club with its polo and racing, and many other kinds of clubs. We learn how British Egyptian official and art collector Sir Robert Greg, nicknamed Pompy for his alleged pomposity, approached the Howard Carter estate and persuaded them to return King Tut's treasures to the Egyptian Museum. Cooper also relates the sad story of King Farouk's fabulously expensive gift of chocolates, a kind of low-key political bribe which he orders from Groppi's and which is sent to the UK via Khartoum, Lisbon and Ireland, only to remain unopened on arrival in London.

Indeed, we witness the more fortunate occupants of Cairo eating and drinking sumptuously, while remaining somewhat lackadaisical about following blackout regulations. On the other hand, we learn of bread riots, sugar and paraffin shortages, and how falling cotton prices cause immense hardship to poorer Egyptians.

We learn of the Flap, a temporary period when officials, considering the fall of Cairo to the Axis powers imminent, send their wives and children to South Africa for safety, then frantically burn papers in the British Embassy lest the enemy capture them. We are told tales of spies and of drunken soldiers in the streets, including Australians with a reputation (deserved or not, we do not know) for throwing prostitutes out the window of the brothel when they finish with them.

In this meticulously researched work we also watch Cairo pass through different phases. The chaos of war plays out against internal political upheavals, affording readers a close view of the events that shook the city. We see how the attitudes and actions of King Farouk, routine British political interference, and a series of ineffective Egyptian governments caused resentment, strengthening national aspirations. 

The Epilogue offers a glimpse of the rampaging "Black Saturday riot," when many of the buildings described earlier in the book were burned down in a single afternoon. A military coup followed on July 23, 1952, and the newly appointed Prime Minister was soon asked to deliver an ultimatum to King Farouk. According to the will of the people, he must abdicate in favour of his infant son Fuad, and his family should leave the country. It was a peaceful departure; as Farouk's yacht sailed out of Alexandria, the General in charge bid him a polite farewell in the form of a 21-gun salute. 

Encouraged by Hugo Vickers to embark on this vast project of history combined with mini-biographies, author Artemis Cooper FRSL has done a brilliant job of giving readers a powerful sense of having witnessed the history of Cairo during WWII. 

Simon Fraser on a Pedestal

Pedestals from the past: Simon Fraser

Will this statue be the next one pushed in the drink?

Instead, in this present moment, let us stop and think.
Let's refrain from blaming the dead for deeds we cannot reverse.
The past cannot be altered, as Rumi says,

"The moving hand writes, and having writ, moves on..."

The future cannot be improved by blame or erasure.

Instead of throwing rage upon dead symbols, let us observe and remember our human past -- witness, forgive, and move on.

We have only this moment, this breath.
In the gift of our time on this planet, let us not indulge in rage or harsh judgment.
Let us begin by forgiving and loving ourselves,
Then devote each precious moment to spending our love wherever we can.

Never Before, Never Again

Never before, never again

Spring evening by the sea

The same as other days

Yet not the same

This bird, these clouds, this tree

Never before, never again.

Waves continuously lap the shore

Soporific, rhythmic, eternal,

Yet never precisely the same as before.

The sky, the clouds, the light

Each moment of this unique dusk

Approaching night.

Dear busy mind,

Filled up with thoughts of times ahead,

Of times behind.

Stand still now, in this perfect moment,

Be tranquil, make this moment mine.

Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee

During his tenure as a staff writer for Time and the New Yorker, John McPhee has also produced 33 books. The writing courses he's taught at Princeton have been both generator and source of plangent observations about how to tackle the problems all writers share. This collection of essays highlights frustrations, insights and techniques.

For writer's block, there's the Dear Mother technique, in which you share your feelings of ineptitude and despair in a letter to Mom, insisting that "you are not cut out for this type of work." After whining and whimpering, you mention that "the bear has a fifty-five-inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around, but could run nose-to-nose with Secretariat." You go on like that "as long as you can." And then you go back and delete the salutation, the whining, the whimpering, "and just keep the bear."

The racehorse Secretariat brings us to a topic covered in the essay called Frames of Reference. Do your readers understand what you are referring to? This thorny question involves locale, culture, history, demographics. And it's changing all the time. Although students of Brookline high school in Massachusetts recognized Woody Allen, Muhammad Ali, and Winston Churchill, only a quarter of them had heard of Waterloo Bridge, Norman Rockwell or Truman Capote. Only one was aware of Laurence Olivier, and none had heard of Calabria, Churchill Downs, Bob Woodward or Samuel Johnson. Makes you feel old.

Also in the title essay, McPhee posits a "four-to-one ratio in in writing time," and explains the "psychological differences from phase to phase." Once the dreaded first draft has been laid down,  problems with the writing "become less threatening, more interesting." But first you must "blurt out, heave out, babble out something--anything as a first draft." No matter how incompetent you feel -- and "To feel such doubt is a part of the picture, important and inescapable." The box technique for editing is fascinating; I intend to try it when I reach that pinnacle of achievement, Draft 4 -- that is, if I ever finish blurting out the first draft of the novel I'm working on now.

The same essay contains some fascinating and arcane stories about how editing is done at The New Yorker. That includes tales of the first copy editor, Eleanor Gould, whose sage editorial advice was memorialized by inventing the verb to Gould. The copy editors who have come after her have "lived in her shadow" and "lengthened it."

Other tidbits offered involve the usage of further (degree) versus farther (distance), the silent 's' apostrophe, and demonyms -- Haligonian, Liverpudlian and Minneapolitan are on his A list. "The Chicago Manual of Style is a "quixotic attempt at one-style-fits-all for every house in America--newspapers, magazines, book publishers, blogishers." John McPhee's book is not merely a learning experience, it's a delightful read.

A Match Made for Murder by Iona Whishaw

In the latest Lane Winslow novel, Iona Whishaw elegantly carries off a feat rarely attempted by mystery writers: she marries her sleuth to the aptly named Inspector Darling.

As the genre demands, the honeymooners' Arizona idyll is fraught with danger. Even as tension mounts, a signature moment of light humour evokes a smile. When his captive asks a hired thug why he's driving her out into the desert, his sharp reply inspires her rueful reflection that she's "in the thrall of a sarcastic kidnapper."

Lane and Frederick Darling are surrounded by marital discord. A visit with Frederick's old colleague the Chief of Police reveals cracks in his marriage. Then at the inn where the Darlings are staying, Lane witnesses a fatal shooting, motivated, we eventually learn, by greed and jealousy.

While the Inspector honeymoons, in King's Cove, Sergeant Ames fumbles his current romance. In the course of investigating a strange murder, he stumbles on some delicate emotional territory that sours his relationship with Tina. Themes of emotionally bankrupt marriage and male violence against women arise again, and evidence turned up in the investigation challenges Ames to face certain uncomfortable realities.

Set in the late 1940s, this novel portrays the immediate post-war period, a time when women enjoyed far less freedom than they do today. Breaking the silence around sexual politics in The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir summarized with brutal clarity. "Man-the-sovereign will protect woman-the-liege." But in exchange for material protection and personal responsibility, she must "forego her liberty and become a thing." Male dominance feeds on female powerlessness.

In sharp contrast to this sad stereotype, the unflappable ex-spy Lane Winslow and her husband demonstrate the health of their newly forged union. In one scene, we see this through an honest discussion of their failings and imperfections. He opens up to her about his mortification at having been '"taken in by a slick, arrogant man.'" She responds by reminding him that in her youth she "wasted years on a man just like that," adding that he should not reproach himself since '"being dazzled and fooled can happen to anybody."'

Unlike many other war veterans, this couple are consciously aware of their demons of memory, and they work at coming to terms. When Lane relates a recurring war nightmare and shares her feelings of guilt about the events that inspired it, she discovers that opening to Frederick's perspective helps her achieve a kind of peace that diminishes the power of the traumatic memory.

In the post-war era, veterans frequently indulged unmanageable rage and guilt by violently lashing out. Women were brutalized, dark-skinned people victimized, and civil power structures echoed pyramid-style military hierarchies with their demand for unquestioning obedience.

For the male antagonists in this story, the ravages of suppressed emotion feed into fits of rage and violence, racist attitudes, and the unhealthy will to power at the expense of other people's rights and freedoms. Tacitly tolerated, the crime of rape saddles women with years of secret shame and self-recrimination.

As her fans have come to expect, Iona Whishaw tells a cracking good story while offering the reader many other satisfactions. Set seventy years in the past, this novel raises issues that remain sadly current as daily news media report on similar social ills.

Fortunately, good stories sustain the soul. Reading about Lane and Frederick gives me hope, and I am heartened by the thought that "the long moral arc swings toward the good." Let us hope that the rise of COVID 19 accelerates the increasingly critical human understanding that we are all one.

Love is Blue by Joan Wyndham

This rare book was well worth the search. By turns sharp, hilarious and heartbreaking, the voice of memoirist Joan Wyndham is filled with contradictions. She's a devout Catholic with divorced parents. Adhering to conventions inculcated by her mother, she attends art school and frequents concerts, galleries and theatres as well as mass and confession. On the rare occasion her artist father turns up, he takes her for a meal and then drinking at club after West End club.

Intelligent, convent-educated and artistic, Joan is 17 when the war starts. The RADA, to which she's already been accepted, closes indefinitely, putting paid to her plan of studying to be an actress.

Aware of her innocence, she's also guiltily determined to enjoy experiences the church forbids.

Along with jazz and wild parties, she discovers men. Innocent but filled with enthusiastic curiosity, she plunges into the convention-defying lifestyle of Bohemian London. After experimenting with some benzedrine found at her father's flat, she goes on to get the drug prescribed so she can drink copiously without feeling drunk. Experimenting with sex, she runs through a range of men from immature egotistical artists to depressed refugee philosopher-poets. She develops a special fondness for a gloomy sculptor, a German Jew who's terrified the government will intern him - and he does end up spending much of the war in a camp in Australia.

All that's before she gets involved with the displaced fighting Norwegians on Shetland and the RAF. As the war progresses, she interacts with a "conchie," and watches other artistic friends go to war. The mad party scene filled with art, jazz, booze, sex and drugs doesn't end, but continues in a different form when Joan joins the WAAF, and embarks on a whole new set of adventures.

One volume of a three part memoir of Joan Wyndham's life during WWII, Love is Blue offers an intimate glimpse of wartime life. Based on diaries the author wrote at the time, this volume is rich with details of cafes, bars, slang, mores, clothing, food and sketches of colourful contemporaries. We follow Wyndam through Chelsea and Soho, then on to Preston, Shetland, and Inverness.

The final scenes set down a living record of one woman's reaction to the shock of the liberated concentration camps, the exhilaration of VE day, the somber numbness of VJ day, and the emotional commemorative events that followed the end of the war.

In this deceptively simple journal format, Joan Wyndham portrays the great issues of her time. Refraining from comment, she allows readers to judge for themselves what to make of the rigid class system, the social expectations of women, the casually dismissive terms used for out-groups, and the devastating effects of war on the people caught up in it.

In his book of short essays, Colum McCann offers some practical advice along with meditations and philosophical reflections on the writing life.

One thing he insists on is that fiction writer must get to know their characters with absolute intimacy. This way, the author automatically knows how they'll react in any situation, and thus ring true on the page. Indeed, authors owe them a debt for "ringing the doorbell of...imagination."

Tom Joad, Nick Gatsby, and Leopold Bloom are real, "or at least as real as the seven billion people in the world that we haven't met yet." Remembering a funny story, I'd like to add Jane Eyre to that all-male list. Touring in England, a Dutch-born philosophy professor called Peter (of Liberal Studies at SFU), was reading old headstones.

Seeing the name Jane Eyre gave him a jolt. Excited, he called to his wife, also a fan of the Bronte novel. "Come and see who's buried here."

She read the inscription, then looked up, puzzled. "But our Jane Eyre is not real." Peter realized his mistake, but the world had shifted. That moment of emotional elation followed by rapid deflation stayed with him, a reminder of the power of fiction and imagination.

Imagination, says McCann, "gives us access to the "deepest darkdown things." The powerful force of language is "for saying the things we knew, but hadn't yet made sense of." Calling mystery "the glue that joins us, the author exhorts writers to do all they can to make the reader "the most complicit eavesdropper."

Commenting on structure, McCann says stories, "rely on the human instinct for architecture," with stories filling the the structurally sound container "slowly built from the bottom up." Yet this foundation must remain the author's secret. No reader will want to see "the foundation, or the wiring behind the walls, or even the architectural plans." As for endings, he believes a story "should finish in the concrete, with an action, a movement to carry the reader forward."

Stories require research, yet he warns that facts are "mercenary things," and texture is "far more important." The secret is finding the odd detail "that only the experts might know." Then "use it, but don't draw too much attention to it."

Though the title seems to address the book to young writers, it is well-known that many novelists are on the far side of fifty, who are by no means excluded. Using "young" is a literary reference; within the covers the author speaks to all who want to write, in tones that vary from kind encouragement to this sharp warning. "The most destructive force in your life is liable to be the unwritten story." No matter your age, "The work matters. The story needs to be told."

He also calls attention to the difference between writing non-fiction and writing fiction. You can liberate your stories when you stop writing "directly about yourself." Paradoxically, only then will you "have written yourself. And you're the only one you can, or should change."

McCann offers an intriguing exercise on getting to know your characters. "Dear (character)," you write, "Why don't I know you?" Adapting this to "Why don't I know you better?" I wrote her answer quickly by hand. In ten short minutes I learned an astonishing amount of new information about my character. How? 'Tis a mystery. But I believe the indirect trick involved in this exercise gives access to the subconscious inner world where the story is already complete.

Maisie Dobbs: A Lesson in Secrets, by Jacqueline Winspear

Maisie Dobbs is a psychologist and investigator. Beginning with Winspear's first eponymous novel, (originally meant as a standalone), she rises from her original low station.

Her life as a Cambridge scholar is interrupted, she becomes a WWI nurse, an investigator's assistant, and eventually, principal of her own investigative agency. Along the way, she experiences tragedy, friendship. and romance.

Mystery author Lee Child finds Maisie a well-rounded, evolving character whose stories he enjoys. He feels she shares the kinship of non-conformity with Jack Reacher.

Set in the early 1930s, this book deals with the rise of Nazism, communism, and peace education. Now an independent investigator, Maisie is called in by the Secret Service, and also receives another interesting proposal.

Reading this meticulously researched series in no particular order, I've been with Maisie Dobbs in London, India, Gibraltar, Canada, and of course, Chelstone. I've ridden along in her red MG, and imagined the more sedate and less conspicuous Siddeley she later acquires. Through the stories, I've learned something of the plight of WWI veterans without pensions, the terrible treatment of "conchies," conscientious objectors to war, and the social unrest of the 1930s. I've also learned a bit about how the Spanish Civil War affected Gibraltar, and something of the community of Sephardic Jews who live there.

I aim to keep on reading her stories, learning at the same time.

Earth Day: Evening walk on the Serpentine Dike

Dusk on the dike

Open your nostrils

Receive the fragrance of burst willow buds
Breathe spring-steeped air.

Tread lightly:

Hear your own soft footfalls
Feel them reverberate from soles to crown.

Overhear the cadenced conversations of geese

Flying low over the marshlands
Whoosh of wings audible against air.

Catch the splash of squalling ducks

As they swim, see the perfect vee behind each
Traced on the glass-still water.

Scent coming rain

Feel the first hesitant droplets touch your hair.

Sense elusive memories

Connecting this walk with years of other walks.

Feel beneath the feet

The uneven shape, the wild mud and grass-clad body
Of Earth our Mother – familiar, beloved.

The Enemy is Listening by Aileen Clayton

Aileen Clayton (nee Morris) joined the WAAF in 1939. The first woman to be commissioned as an intelligence officer in the British Armed Forces, she served first at Kingsdown in Kent and later at various posts around the Mediterranean. For her devotion to the Y service, to which she contributed so much, she earned honour and recognition.

After years of planning, staffing and supervisory duties in theMediterranean, she was spared at last for a visit home. Once there, she was taken on a tour of the Y stations before being decorated at Buckingham Palace by the king.

In her memoir, Clayton recalls dancing with an officer whose unit she knew was bound for Anzio. At age 25, she bore the "intolerable responsibility" of knowing something ominous that she could neither speak of nor change.

In the chill of foreboding for the young man, (and indeed he perished in the Anzio landings), she was struck by a feeling of premature age, of having "mislaid" her youth, a dark memory that remained with her for life. A similar premonition preceded the loss of her young brother, who failed to return from operations with No. 221 Squadron in March 1945.

For all those who worked in the Y service, the relentless immediacy of hearing pilots crash and die through radio messages took an enormous toll. So, of course, did the pressure to work with great speed and accuracy, solve an endless stream of threats to the system, and of course, maintain absolute secrecy about their duties.

Clayton was over sixty when she published this remarkable eye-witness memoir in 1980, when at last, the veil of secrecy was drawn back. In the Foreword, Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Rosier, GCB, CBE, DSO praises the wartime work of the Y service, along with "the extraordinary resilience and adaptability of women who showed that they were supreme in what they were doing."

Brave, calm and adaptable in the face of unimaginable pressure and adversity, Clayton credits the work done by her Y service colleagues for aiding the advancement of women. In a casual tone, she comments that fortunately "both [US General and later President Dwight D.] Eisenhower and [Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur W.] Tedder were convinced that women could safely and efficiently undertake work which had previously been looked on as strictly a male province."

Earth Abides

A pink supermoon rises over the Serptentine River, with Mount Baker visible on the horizon.

Walking on the dike last night, I remembered a poem that came to me more than ten years ago as I walked home in the quiet dusk from Bear Creek Park.

Today I felt moved to revise it, but only slightly.

Earth Abides

As the sun sets here to bring heat and light to the far side of our planet

the moon rises pink and enormous.

What does it portend?

Growing brighter as I walk,

it clears the gap between trees as dusk deepens.

In the midst of mystery, we have lived careless,  

forgetful beneath the glare of streetlights,

of the nightly blessing of the moon’s faithful lantern

illuminating our earthly path.

Careless, we’ve forgotten the many gifts of our mother,

on whose bosom we yet walk and live.

Yet still, in mysterious munificence,

our earth abides.

The Secret Listeners by Sinclair McKay

Like McKay's book about the wartime codebreakers of Bletchley Park, this is engaging, well-researched, and filled with fascinating details about what life was like for the men and women of the Y (wireless) service in the same historic era. Enjoying and enduring their mundane task of listening to Morse signals and taking them down, they laboured in stations across the world, some "unspeakably dreary;" others comfortable, romantic and exciting.

Breaking up the focus of routine, they experienced bizarre moments, as when late in the war, two Germans were overhead to abuse Hitler and agree on the spot that both would desert. At a base in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), "daubs of colour and brilliance from nocturnal insects" and "lizards on the football pitches" afforded some consolation for "the wearying slog of the shift system."

As they gave their youthful energy to the task at hand, some experienced moments of true horror. The author quotes Aileen Clayton's expression of the terrible burden of secret knowledge she had to bear. When she danced with a young man she felt a chill at learning his unit; she knew it was bound for Anzio. The fact that she could not speak of this, or warn him in any way, made her feel '"very cold and alone...almost old.'" (She was 25.) And indeed her dance partner was killed within a few days of landing. After the war, Clayton penned a memoir called The Enemy is Listening, which describes her wartime work in the Y service. 

Superseded by digital technology, Morse is a dying art. "No one will ever again acquire that fast-thinking fast-fingered skill that the Y service veterans mastered." Working with incredible speed and accuracy as well as patience and endurance, those young people had "a grandstand view of history." In 2009, they were finally given commemorative medals. Most by then were dead.

"Possibly due to their numbers" Sinclair McKay comments, "the various branches of the Y service seem to have been better at organizing reunions over the years, giving a sense of community and remembrance to many who had worked at the more secretive Bletchley Park."

Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald's illustrious writing career began late; this novel came out in 1980 when she was 64. From the rooftop broadcasts over a burning city to the deeply eccentric broadcasting heroes and underutilized female staff, Fitzgerald portrays what she witnessed, for she was there. Seeking "aural perfection," the radio men "never talk about the BBC’s independence – the first word the BBC normally uses to defend itself against outside pressure – they simply practise it." (Mark Damazer Intro 2013).

Her description of the BBC is striking, considering what now passes for news. "Broadcasting House was...dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth. Without prompting, the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective."*

No doubt this early and salubrious beginning at the BBC set the tone for what came later, and accounts for the continuing excellence of its reputation.

The romantic plot is amusing, and centres around a new employee called Annie. A frank and self-sufficient girl who has "drawn since birth on the inexhaustible fund of tranquil pessimism peculiar to the English Midlands," she used to work at Anstruthers in Birmingham at the hosiery counter, where "they hadn’t asked the customers whether they wanted plain knit or micro-mesh, but ‘Do you want the kind that ladders, or the kind that goes into holes?’" Annie falls for an unsuitable middle-aged flirt during a staff dinner at a French restaurant, and true to her habitual frankness, declares her feelings to him, with unexpected results.

The comings and goings of the occupants of BH are fascinating -- the fanatical sound engineers, motherly secretaries, and "high up in the building, refugee scholars in headphones, quietly clad, disguising their losses, transcribed page after page of Nazi broadcasts in a scholar’s shorthand."

One of many tragicomic incidents involves a French general whose live interview never takes place when fate intervenes -- just as well, perhaps, since he insists that there is absolutely no hope of the Allies winning the war. "'We (France) are ruined, and we blame it on you,'" he tells the interviewer, referring to Churchill as "'that courageous drunkard you have made your Prime Minister.'"

Meanwhile, the super-conscientious mobile unit, while preparing a program on de Gaulle's new headquarters for the Free French in Westminster, have decided the background sounds of "footsteps coming and going on the bare boards, a nice bit of echo there, your wine coming out of the tap" are insufficient, and they must return the following day to "get some more atmosphere." Discussing the "threadbare" Archives, the programme directors complain that they've "no Stukas," and must therefore borrow from Pathe when the need for dive bomber sounds arises.

This writer's vignettes of life in Broadcast House during the blitz are priceless. "Recordings...apt to be mislaid [were] all 78s, aluminium discs coated on one side with acetate whose pungent rankness was the true smell of the BBC’s war." Jeff scarcely needs to show his face. The best-known in the entire BBC, it resembles a comedian’s, "but one who had to be taken seriously." We feel we are beside him when he stands "for a moment among the long shadows on the pavement, between the piles of sandbags which had begun to rot and grow grass, now that spring had come."

Meanwhile, early each evening "men in brown overalls [go] round BH, fixing the framed blackouts in every window, circulating in the opposite direction to the Permanents coming downstairs, while the news readers [move] laterally to check with Pronunciation, pursued by editors bringing later messages on pink cards." The  canteen provides sandwiches made with National Cheese, manufacturers having agreed to amalgamate their brand names in support of the war effort.

Often it's impossible for employees to get home at night. But when metal bunks are dragged into BH and stacked outside the concert hall, senior broadcaster John Haliburton (nicknamed the Halibut) trips over them. He has been chosen to read "in case of enemy landing," since he has a voice "of such hoarse distinction that if the Germans took over BH and attempted to impersonate him the listeners could never be deceived for a moment."

The reader scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry when the Departmental Director is told that, with the news being so bad, he is now "entitled to the use of an armoured car every evening on standby until further notice" but is expected to be public spirited enough to share it as necessary.

Up to now, a cab has been held for him at the ready in a side street. "‘Jack," he says, "you want my taxi for somebody else. Who is it?’" When told its's a "very distinguished American newscaster" arriving from France," he calmly says to give this man his armoured car; he will keep the taxi. But, he is informed, in the wording of a gentle order, that the American wants a taxi, complete with a Cockney driver. And so we laugh.

All quotations from *Fitzgerald, Penelope. Human Voices. HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Chasing Painted Horses by Drew Hayden Taylor

We meet city police officer Ralph Thomas on a winter day in Toronto. "A first Nations man authorized to toss white people in jail," he's chosen to live and work "among the concrete mountains." Though he misses his northern home, with its clean silence and access to wild meat like moose and elk, there are compensations. Here he can see movies at noon, shop any time, eat food from anywhere in the world, and meet "more women he's not related to."

On this particular day, Ralph sees some graffiti that stirs up memories of his childhood. He's deeply unsettled by the conviction that the remarkable painting of the horse has been done by Danielle, a kid he knew briefly in elementary school on the Otter Lake reserve. He and his family tried to help this neglected little girl, but when social services came calling, her family upped stakes and left town.

Under the sharp questioning of Harry, a homeless man Ralph treats to a meal in Tim Horton's, he realizes that the incident with Danielle started him on the trajectory to become a policeman, in the hope of making a positive difference.

As Ralph remembers his childhood, we meet his mother, Liz, an artistic soul who possesses "the energy that could fuel a thousand bingo games." One of her many bright ideas is to create The Everything Wall, where kids can try their hand at painting pictures. Danielle is thin, solitary, undernourished and dressed in clothing too small and inadequate to the weather, but she astonishes everyone by painting a horse that seems to leap right off the wall.

When Ralph, his sister and his friend learn that Danielle's mother told her she was bad and that's why Santa didn't bring her presents this year, the kids are confused, because they know "no parent should tell a child something like that. Santa was supposed to be like Jesus, he had to like everybody, even though he knew who was naughty or nice." They feel very sad about the neglect and unkindness suffered by their artistic schoolmate. Ralph was only eleven when he and his sister asked their parents to help Danielle. They told the social services woman, who "looked into it" but could do little. In the end, their efforts backfired, forcing young Ralph to confront a deep philosophical question. What can we do in the face of another's suffering?

In Ralph's work as a policeman, he's learned that "Wisdom and knowledge come with many faces." Deciding that "it didn't hurt to investigate all possibilities, he decides to trust Harry, "the crazy homeless man" who can read people's characters in their eyes.

In his Acknowledgements, the author says that this tale, which he touched on earlier in a short story and a play "nagged him" to be more fully explored. There is something mysterious, something ancient, about Danielle -- hinted at by a reference to the cave paintings of Lascaux that inspire her in a book given as a prize in the art competition. Taylor thanks his publisher for "giving my little girl and her Horse a larger pasture to explore."

Though the work has moments of the hallmark humour of its author, this time Drew Hayden Taylor chose a more sombre tone for his tale.

The Twelve by Stuart Neville

Stuart Neville's first novel, The Twelve, aka The Ghosts of Belfast, came out in 2009 and won an LA Times Book Award. Also named as a top novel of that year by the LA Times and the New York Times, it's been followed by eight other novels and Neville's work has been widely translated.

Set in Belfast after the peace, but haunted by the recent sectarian Troubles, this book deals with universal themes: appearance versus reality and the costs of privileging the one over the other; loyalty versus betrayal, seen through chilling close-ups of people who assess the world in terms of insiders versus outsiders, and the moral bankruptcy of a creed of loyalty that absolutely forbids dissent. Neville's characters reveal in agonizing detail the the lengths people will go to in pursuit of money, power and belonging. Above all, this is a story about conscience.

Now that they "have their feet under the table at Stormont," former gangsters and killers have begun "shifting away from the rackets, the extortion, the thieving." Paul McGinty, once the enforcer who propagandized ignorant young foot soldiers to bomb and kill for his own ends, is now a (crookedly) elected politician. He dresses in fine clothes and has a lawyer in his pocket to distribute sinecures meant to keep former comrades in line.

Gerry Fegan has 'the sight.' After his father "dies of the drink," the little boy sees and holds the hand of his ghostly dad. Echoing the Irish political dictum to "say nothing," his frightened mother urges him to keep the sighting to himself to avoid being laughed at or bullied. As a young teen with few prospects, Gerry is recruited and used by McGinty. Caught after a bombing that kills three innocent bystanders, he is convicted and sentenced to twelve years in the Maze for terrorism.

As a middle-aged ex-prisoner, Gerry is deeply disillusioned. The "cause he once killed for [is] long gone, swallowed up by the avarice of men like McGinty." Haunted by the ghosts of his victims, Fegan is no longer able to "turn aside and say nothing." The twelve men, women and children he killed "in the name of politics," before he realized how he was being used and manipulated, have taken up residence. Relentlessly, these manifestations of conscience disturb Fegan's life by insisting he atone for their deaths. Unsurprisingly, he pursues the course they urge on him, hoping to gain some peace.

Though Gerry Fegan is under no illusion that he can ever enjoy a normal life, the mistreated Marie and her daughter offer him a glimmer of hope for redemption. Fiercely protective of her young daughter, the pale Marie inhabits the novel as a reminder of the price a violent society exacts from a woman who stands against the suffocating pressures of social conformity imposed upon her.

The Glaswegian ex-Black Watch soldier, David Campbell, is observed by secret service recruiters  to be "good in a scrap" and able to wriggle out of disciplinary charges. Accordingly, he's inducted into the undercover Fourteen Intelligence Company. Annexed to the SAS, Fourteen doesn't officially exist, though it's known to do "the dirty work, the stuff no one owns up to, the kind of things ordinary people go to prison for." Once Campbell leaves the Commando Training Centre, where he's been "brutalised for the good of the country," he's ready to infiltrate the Northern Irish paramilitaries as a double agent. Though his motivation is less well-developed than that of other characters, we glimpse him stroking the Red Hackle that symbolizes his former regiment and draw our own conclusions.

The history portrayed is all too real, and the story is tragic. Yet some moments of luminous beauty and hope contrast with the general darkness. The author shines a play of light over ironic and symbolic elements. While serving in the Maze, Gerry Fegan befriends Ronnie, a fellow prisoner. Dying of asbestos lung disease he got from working in the shipyards, the old man teaches him woodwork. Before his imprisonment, Fegan's tool was a deadly Walther pistol, but when Ronnie dies, he leaves Fegan a valuable Martin guitar and the skill to finish restoring it. Fegan then adds a third tool to his belt. The cell phone he buys symbolizes the hopeful possibility of protecting Marie and her child. And twelve, the tally of Fegan's ghosts, is of course the number of the disciples.

Though the genre is said to be hard-boiled, this lyrical and unusual novel by a writer with a sure and subtle touch conveys universal themes through deeply satisfying layers of meaning.

The Templars' Last Secret by Martin Walker

This book was my first experience with the work of the amazing Martin Walker, a journalist of vast experience who has worked all over the world. His list of writing and editing credits alone made my eyes pop, and he's also a revered historian and broadcaster.

Bruno, on the other hand, is an ordinary French cop. Though his early life situation did not offer him much in the way of opportunities, this kind and intelligent man has done much with the talent he's been given. A relaxed guy who enjoys life, Bruno befriends his neighbours and puts heart and soul into his work, which provides rich rewards in return. Readers are transported to the rural peace of the Perigord. There we get to experience the people, the wine, the food, and the world-famous UNESCO heritage site of Lascaux with its amazing 17,000-year-old cave paintings.

The Chief of Police is surprised by the arrival of a Parisian bureaucrat sent to job-shadow him for research purposes. Initially, Bruno is resistant to having Amelie constantly at his side; he fears her presence will disrupt his well-oiled routine of getting information from his contacts. But he soon sees how her social media skills can be used for police work. Yet, much as he's impressed by what Amelie can discover on the internet, he still shares a smug glance with Horst the archaeologist when she finds herself stymied by a loss of connectivity at the cave.

Bruno is engagingly optimistic and philosophical. Shocked by the destruction of Aleppo and Homs, he finds it hard to believe anyone could "seek deliberately to eradicate the monuments and the history of their own people." Even so, he feels optimistically certain that the past can "never be wiped away with the arrogant sweep of a violent hand."

Like many fictional cops, Bruno has access to non-logical forms of thought and knowing. He views these "subterranean mental  stirrings" as "hunches, and sometimes as an idea coming from a part of his brain that was not entirely his--a part formed by curiosity, experience and intuition--that kept churning, calculating, and making hypotheses that would suddenly erupt as a breakthrough."

For a mystery, the pace of this book is fairly slow. The body appears early on, but the detective work takes time. As he works on his investigations, we accompany Bruno as he prepares for the wedding to two archaeologist friends, cooks a delicious meal, rides his horse, walks his dog, talks to all kinds of local characters, drinks several delicious coffees, and teaches tennis to at-risk kids.  

Supporting a contemporary plot based on middle-east tensions, we're treated to an impressive array of curious historical facts. Unfamiliar with all but the most basic French history, I was intrigued to learn that the last master of the Templars cursed Phillip IV and the pope before he was burned at the stake by the Pont Neuf in Paris in 1314. Nor did I know the Vikings had sacked Bordeaux and Bergerac. I was equally surprised to learn that the Templars, while involved with the Crusades, "negotiated an alliance with the Mongols."

And who who knew the British intelligence people, those inveterate nicknamers, referred to their diplomats who specialized in the Arab world as camels? Or that the French Winnie the Pooh is Winnie l'ourson? I learned of technological developments too, thanks to scenes where the archaeologists use ground-penetrating radar.

A secondary plot involves a therapist who claims, for reasons of her own, to be "retrieving" memories from children raised in a Catholic orphanage. In reality, she's just bullying them into agreeing with her faux psychological finds. This finds a satisfactory resolution when the therapist is caught cheating on her taxes. The pace of this delightful armchair cosy picks up near the end, where a couple of romances resolve as well.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable read. Fortunately, Walker has created a series featuring Bruno, Chief of Police.

A Better Man by Louise Penny

Armand Gamache is once more surrounded by crisis and change. Amid massive flooding across Quebec, he is faced with an anonymous Twitter attack and a murder. Louise Penny portrays ills of our time: climate change, internet toxicity, and corruption in high places. Witty, gritty, and philosophical dialogue offer moments of relief.

The power of integrity, friendship and love act as strong counterweights to human failings. Gamache once served as mentor to a fellow agent who is also his son-in-law. Jean-Guy Beauvoir internalized the powerful values and practices of his former patron, and now passes on a trinity of questions to ask oneself before speaking. Stop and think: "Is it true? Is it kind? Does it need to be said?" Like the three tasks in a fairy tale, this practice carries strong medicine.

A surprising twist in this story reminds readers that things are not always what they seem. Police must avoid wrongly assuming an unpleasant and alcohol-damaged personality is also a criminal. And as humans, we must beware of the temptation to project our own darkness onto others.

In this book, as in contemporary society, families are divided by continents, by violence and by abuse of alcohol. In the midst of a catastrophic flood, politicians continue their infighting and worry more about how the decisions they make will affect their careers than how they can best save lives and property. The use of social media to deliberately form opinion about art and about the police is intended to enrich the opinion makers at the expense of creators and peace officers. Twitter users ruthlessly exploit the fact that social media is "less about truth than perception" and "people believe what they want to believe."

In the midst of all this, it is reassuring to think, along with Gamache, that "things are stronger where they're broken." Arising in Louise Penny's atmospheric Quebec, this idea reminds readers of the words of the late Montreal songwriter Leonard Cohen: "There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

The Private Patient by PD James

Adam Dalgleish is going to marry Emma.  On asking her father's blessing, the couple are gently teased by the old man. Borrowing dialogue from Oscar Wilde, he inquires, tongue in cheek, about his prospective son-in-law's income and home. This delightful scene is interrupted when Adam's mobile rings.

The case he is must investigate is the murder of a post-operative patient in Dorset. The victim was recovering in "one of the most beautiful houses in England," now a nursing home. Emma is sanguine when her policeman fiance is summoned away. She rearranges her weekend plans to stay in London with her oldest girlfriend, recently married to her gay partner. Little do the three women dream of the unwelcome drama they'll soon face.

The pacing of this novel is exquisite. In the first third, we are lulled by the beauty and privacy of the nursing home where a well-known investigative journalist is about to have an old facial scar removed. She has finally managed to forgive her long-dead father for striking her all those years ago, and tells the surgeon she "no longer needs" the mark. In this early portion of the book, the violence done to Rhoda by her father is part of a distant past.

Meanwhile, before leaving London, Rhoda treats a friend to a meal. Watching her tease him over an expensive lunch, we sense that that she likes but does not entirely trust this handsome young man. Mild alarm bells sound in the reader's mind.

At the private nursing home in Dorset, the competent surgeon and the harmless-seeming staff feel soothing: likewise the beauty of the countryside, the tasteful decor of the manor and the delicious food served there. Only in passing do we learn that a young woman was once burned as a witch at the standing stones that flank the property.

Then the first shocking act of violence strikes, affording a glimpse of what lies beneath the smooth surfaces of the characters. From the points of view of several of them, we witness the papered-over pain and resentment that lie hidden. Once the detectives arrive and begin work on the case, death strikes again. And yet again. This middle portion of the story is fraught with terrifying urgency, and filled with confusion and uncertainty.

The author takes her time to wind the story down, leaving hints and ambiguities to make the reader wonder -- Am I missing something? Is someone else going to die? Was that strange confession true?

A masterfully told story by the renowned PD James, this tale has all the elements of a cosy and much more. It is smart, contemporary, and philosophical. One lovely moment comes when a retired lawyer responds to Dalgleish's comment that he is only a policeman, not an ethicist: "all civilized people must be ethicists." For me, that notion had a satisfying resonance. In this era of social upheaval, as traditional social contracts are being eroded and torn up around us, the only way out its in.

Tattoo by Manuel Vazquez Montalban

This translation is dated 2008; the original Spanish edition was published in 1976. Pepe Carvalho, a macho "ex-cop ex-Marxist" who once worked in Amsterdam for the CIA, is now a middle-aged private detective. This disillusioned maverick anti-hero used to love literature. Now he reads people, and uses one of his books to light the fire to cook a gourmet meal for Charo, his prostitute girl friend.

Paid to confirm the identity of a drowned man with a most unusual tattoo, Pepe follows a lead to Amsterdam, where he gets beaten up and tossed in a canal. Along the way, he drinks copious quantities of beer and liquor, eats at a fondly remembered Balinese restaurant in the Dutch capital, and despises the food he is obliged to order in inferior restaurants while pursuing leads.

The case proves even more sordid than expected; upon learning the details, he is shaken to the core. Fortunately for the gourmet detective, "the smell of frying tomatoes and onions" and the sight of a "steaming pot of mussels" makes life livable again.

Pepe is tough almost to the point of caricature. The "strange cinema he carrie[s] inside his head" portrays scenes of sex and violence, and in one real-life scene, he takes pleasure in a fight. A heavy drinker in a boozing culture, he can read stages of drunkenness in his informants and associates.

Although many of the characters the detective encounters are unappealing, all are beautifully rendered. The language in this unusual book is rich and vivid. Its evocative sensory descriptions locate the reader in the centre of bygone Barcelona, awash in food, alcohol, cigars, illegal drugs, and prostitutes. Amsterdam too is portrayed with clarity, as are the contrasts between northern and southern Barcelona beaches, and French versus Spanish coastlines when seen from the air.

In search of leads, Pepe interviews a tattoo artist, who explains that in the past, only "sailors and crooks" wanted tattoos. Now, sailors "aren't what they used to be," and crooks are getting too smart to mark their bodies with identifiable art. Only one good tattooist remains in Barcelona, he opines, and while there are still a few artist in Tangiers and elsewhere in Morocco, Hamburg and Rotterdam no longer live up to their pre-war reputations as the best places to get tattoos.

We get a powerful sense of the society and the era through vivid and darkly humorous descriptions and comments. About Charo, Pepe cynically observes that "in passionate solidarity mode," she becomes "a monument to class consciousness." In an effort to clamp down on illegal activity, the police close "all the brothels except the really expensive ones." Irritated by one young man's "self-satisfied grin of a jumped-up mafioso," the street-tough Pepe takes pleasure in the chance to clean his clock.

The reader senses the author's philosophy through the inner musings of Pepe Carvalho. who feels that his "journey between childhood and old age is a personal, non-transferable destiny" to be lived by him and him alone, and everybody else can "go and get stuffed." He looks back on the veterans of the Spanish Legion, "full of scorn and literature, setting off between the wars" on another armed adventure that "would never happen today," since people have now discovered "they can only do what's possible."

Lunching with two strangers from whom he hopes to glean information, the detective notices how one of them is "sacrificing an absent friend in order to keep in with the one sitting next to him." Pepe is soon bored with the men, finding their blind and belligerent expressions of nationalism stupid and unappealing.

In the era of women's liberation, the detective wearily observes the "geisha-like submission so typical of those liberated young middle-class women" as they invest their "pre-matrimonial enthusiasm" in "consolation prizes for unfulfilled ambitions." Cynically, he comments on the replacement of the "ancestral tradition of setting up a girl who had brought shame to her family with a corner shop" by its modernized version: "leasing a boutique for unhappily married women suffering from existential angst."

In the "green watery landscape" of the Netherlands, Pepe Carvalho observes the foreign workers "from a whole alphabet of poor European countries" where life is hard. He notices that the Turks, "fugitives from a dry country," have "lost their initial boisterousness and gradually accepted the convention of silence imposed by this part of Europe, where everything looked as though it were drawn with a ruler." Yet however civilized this northern nation may seem, Amsterdam is home to a secret and violent CIA organization awash with connections from Indonesia to Colombia.

Feeling "a rush of blind anger" towards both his own countrymen and the "phlegmatic Dutch cycling past," Pepe Carvalho is depressed by the thought that "Some are born to make history, others to suffer it." Luckily his body, which does not betray him, is at that moment walking him towards a fine restaurant called the House of Lords, where he will console himself with an excellent meal.

Born in a seedy Barcelona barrio as the Spanish Civil War ended, Manuel Vazquez Montalban was a poet and essayist as well as a novelist. By the time he died in 2003 at the age of 64, his 22 novels had appeared in 24 languages. His detective Pepe Carvalho lives on.