Ruth Rendell: "And now, now it's all over."

I finished up Ruth Rendell's final novel, Dark Corners, in near darkness this morning as another major thunderstorm cell sat over me.  We lost power (for the third time in four days as the area continues to battle major flooding) about ten this morning, so I settled in near the window offering the most light to read the final 25 pages of the book.

I was pleased to see that the final sentence of the crime novel is this one: "And now, now it's all over."

That sentence fits the main character's final decision perfectly, but it also reminds readers that there will never be another new book from the brilliant Ruth Rendell...because now it really is all over for her and for her fans.

Of course, the sentence could have been added by a clever editor at the publishing house.  But if that is the case, I really don't want to know.  I would much prefer to believe that it's Ruth's way of capping her own career.  Call it serendipity or call it premonition, it really doesn't matter.  

I will miss Ruth Rendell. 

A Friend of Mr. Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln is one of the best-known presidents in the history of the United States so most people are familiar with the story of his life.  They know about the poverty of Lincoln’s boyhood, the prodigious strength he developed as a teen, his debate skills and presidency during the Civil War, and his tragic end.  The most common gap in most peoples’ Lincoln biography is the one during which he was a young lawyer and aspiring Whig politician – the 1830s and 1840s.  Stephen Harrigan’s novel, A Friend of Mr. Lincoln spans precisely this period of the young Lincoln’s life. 

The “friend” of Lincoln’s referenced in the book’s title is the fictional “Cage” Weatherby, an aspiring poet from Massachusetts who has made his way to Springfield, Illinois.  As yet unpublished, Weatherby derives his income largely from the small boardinghouse he owns in the soon-to-be state capitol.  Weatherby and Lincoln have much in common: a deep love of poetry, reaching young manhood penniless, an uneasy way with the young women of the day, and a deep desire to leave their marks on the world rather than just passing through it.  As a result, the two become fast friends almost from the moment they first meet.  And they will remain good friends until the day that Mary Todd marries Lincoln and decides that Weatherby can no longer be part of Lincoln’s life.

Even as a young lawyer, Lincoln was a man consumed by political ambition.  Already a veteran of the Indian wars, he stood out in any crowd he was a part of, and that was just as attributable to his never ending supply of funny stories as it was to his unusually tall frame.  Harrigan’s plot, though, reminds us that Lincoln and Weatherby were young men who faced, and often succumbed to, the very same temptations that all young men encounter at that point of their lives.  Lincoln has as many vulgar stories to tell his male friends in private as he has stories suitable for mixed company – and he enjoys telling them maybe even more than his audience loves hearing them.  Early on, Mr. Lincoln envisioned himself in Washington D.C. as a Whig congressman – a dream that finally came true for him.

The Abraham Lincoln of A Friend of Mr. Lincoln is a young man easily smitten by a pretty face and even more easily intimidated by a woman strong enough and bold enough to take the initiative in a relationship.  He is also a man so prone to clinical depression that, on at least two occasions, romantic encounters left him so suicidal that Cage Weatherby and others placed him under literal suicide watches. 

Stephen Harrigan

But it is the portion of the book that recounts Lincoln’s months spent on the Illinois legal circuit, during which he and a small team of lawyers and judges road horses from town to town trying court cases under rather primitive conditions, that is the most memorable.  During this period, Cage Weatherby learns that Lincoln is very much a man of his time and place.  He is willing to make whatever backdoor political deals might get him closer to Washington; he is as willing to take the cases of slave owners as he is to defend escaped slaves; and he will abandon his best friend in order to keep peace at home with his wife.

Cage Weatherby, however, is the true central character of A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, and he is a man who proves to be every bit as interesting as Lincoln during this period of Lincoln’s life.  Both men are busy living their “real lives” while portraying themselves to the public as something other than what they are.  Harrigan has written a coming of age novel for both men, one that fans of historical fiction will very much enjoy.

The Dealer and the Dead

Gerald Seymour has a special talent for making sense of the bloody chaos that has become so much a part of the world we live in today, a world in which entire societies seem to crumble almost as fast as the borders of the countries that contain them.  Unlike so many thriller writers, Seymour creates characters that seem real, characters whose motivations are plausible and sympathetic no matter what mischief those characters may be up to.  Seymour knows that it is not the "action" in genre thrillers that sets one apart or above the rest of the pack.  What does it, is so deeply immersing the reader in the experience for a few hours that he understands why these things continue to happen - and will probably always happen.  Gerald Seymour is truly the master of the literary thriller.

The Dealer and the Dead is about a man who might have to pay the ultimate price for a mistake he made almost two decades earlier.  In 1992, Harvey Gillott promised to deliver heavy weapons to an isolated Croatian village located along the border with Serbia, weapons the villagers desperately needed if they were to prevent the village from being overrun by the Serbs determined to destroy everyone who lived there.  Gillott took payment for the weapons but never delivered the promised weapons. 

Some eighteen years later, what remains of the bodies of the four men who had been sent to collect the weapons are discovered in a farmer's field - and in the pocket of one of the dead men is a tiny piece of paper with a name written on it: Harvey Gillott.  Now that the culprit has been identified, an entire village- to whom the slaughter that occurred there in 1992 is still an open wound - wants Harvey Gillott to die for his failure to deliver the goods.  And somehow, they manage to scrape together enough money to hire the best professional assassin in England to make it happen.

Gerald Seymour

This is the point at which Gerald Seymour really begins to shape his story.  The groundwork for his intriguing plot has been set and most of the main characters have been introduced.  Now he will turn these characters into real human beings with everyday cares that sometimes overwhelm them, and he will begin to overlap their individual stories, all the while leading them to the place where arms dealer Harvey Gillott is expected to meet his fate. 

In addition to Gillott and the villagers who want him killed, there is Robbie Cairns, the young hit man whose self-confidence will be shaken almost beyond repair by the time he and Gillott meet for the last time.  We also meet Mark Roscoe, the British policeman who heads the small team sent to warn Gillott that there is a price on his head, and that the department has neither the manpower nor the funds to protect him from his past sins. Then there's the retired British spook responsible for running Harvey Gillott at the time the decision not to deliver the weapons to the village was made.  And as always, Seymour surrounds his main characters with numerous supporting ones that the reader will come to know almost as well as they know the main characters themselves.  Seymour is never one to skimp on characters.

The Dealer and the Dead is a superb thriller, one that I recommend to all fans of the genre.  If you are unfamiliar with the books of Gerald Seymour now, reading this one is going to convince you to change that oversight. 

A Good Book Makes Even a Freezing Hospital Room Bearable

I have been practically living in a chair inside an uncomfortably cold hospital room for the past four days.  It all started Wednesday morning when I got a phone call at the barber shop telling me that my father was on his way to the emergency room because he had had another of his fainting episodes - this one, luckily, while seated in a church pew.  So now he's been poked and prodded so much that it's almost certain he's had every kind of general diagnostic test available to modern medicine.

At the advice of a cardiologist, we made the decision together that he have a pacemaker placed in his chest to regulate his heartbeat in hope that his fainting problem would be solved.  That was done yesterday afternoon.  And this morning, we found out that there is a problem with one of the pacemaker leads going to his heart, so the entire procedure will have to be repeated Monday morning.  Throw in the long night we had trying to control dad's confusion and hallucinating caused by the sleep medication given to him last night, and it's been a bit of a struggle  - during which I have slept something like five hours in the last forty-eight.  (So please don't deduct any points for grammar and spelling this time around.) I'm going to get some sleep tonight before heading back to the hospital early in the morning to relieve my son-in-law who has graciously volunteered to take a shift in my place.

I know you are wondering why am I writing all this here on a book blog.  One simple reason: if I had not had four or five books in that freezing room to keep me company for the last few days, I would have probably lost my mind.  The books allowed me to forget where I was - and why I was there- for at least a few minutes at a time.  Tired and sleepy as I've been, they kept me awake, they entertained me, and they reminded me of why I am such a reading advocate.  I cannot imagine a life without books and reading, and I am ever thankful to the small town librarian who encouraged me to keep reading, and who trusted me with books that were probably way over my head when I first read them.  Thankfully, she took a chance on me even though she was breaking library policy that way.  That woman (who seemed ancient to me at the time but was probably only about 70) opened up the world to me in just the right way and at just the right time in my life.  And it stuck.

I will never forget what she did.

Librarians, your enthusiasm is contagious, and if you treat young readers with respect, you just might permanently change a few lives for the good.  You may never even know that it happened, but if you are lucky, it will.  

Thanks, too, to the following authors for these books (the books I'm living with this week):

Matt Gallagher - Youngblood (a war novel with a mystery embedded in it that is set in Iraq)

Ruth Rendell - Dark Corners (her very last psychological crime novel, one that I suspect would have been a "Barbara Vine" novel if she had not recently died)

Gerald Seymour - Vagabond (new thriller set in Norther Ireland; a what if the Troubles start-up again novel)

Skip Hollandsworth - The Midnight Assassin (true crime book about an 1885 serial killer who terrorized Austin, Texas)

Andrea Valdez - How to Be a Texan (a how-to manual that reminds me just how fantastic a place Texas still is)

So it's back at it tomorrow...hoping to post again soon.

A Darker Domain

In1985, in Fife, Scotland, Catriona Grant and her infant son were taken by kidnappers who demanded that her wealthy father pay a huge ransom of cash and uncut diamonds to get her and his grandson back.  Fearing that something would go wrong, Cat's father only reluctantly got the police involved in the handoff of the ransom.  And, as it turned out, something did go terribly wrong on the beach that night, something that resulted in his daughter's death and the disappearance of his grandson.

Now, some twenty-three years later, Detective Karen Pirie, who was only a child at the time of the botched kidnapping, is head of Fife's Cold Case Review Team, a job she both enjoys and is very good at.  The Catriona Grant kidnapping case, although it was never closed, is not being actively worked at present, but all that changes on the day that a young woman walks into the police station to report that her father is missing - and has been missing for twenty-three years.  Intrigued by what the woman tells her, Karen decides on her own to classify this new case as a cold one – knowing full well that her superiors are going to explode when they learn that’s what she’s done - and begins to work on it before it can be assigned to another section.

Val McDermid

In typical Val McDermid fashion, the missing person report opens up a can of worms involving numerous characters, side plots, and settings that keep the reader guessing until the very end.  Detective Pirie, wondering why no one ever bothered to report Mick Prentice missing up to now, learns that the 1984 national miners' strike greatly influenced what happened to the missing man. With the discovery of evidence that seems linked to both the Grant kidnapping and to the missing man, Pirie jumps at the chance to work to work the two cases simultaneously – whether her boss knows it or not.  The best thing she has going for her is that the two cases occurred within weeks of each other, meaning that the background information she gathers on one case often helps on the other.  As the two cases begin to overlap more and more, Pirie begins to understand that many people are still paying the price for what happened on one terrible 1985 night, and that they will do anything to keep their secrets hidden. 

If they haven't already read this 2009 standalone novel, Val McDermid fans will do well to find themselves a copy of A Darker Domain and get to it.  This highly atmospheric novel also makes a good introduction to McDermid's work for fans of the genre who may still know her only by reputation.

Born to Read Program Means New Babies Leave Hospital with a Library Card

What a great idea!  Every baby born in St. Louis County is going to leave the hospital with a brand new library card of their own.  It's all part of the St. Louis County Library's "Born to Read" program.  

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, each baby goes home with a little gift bag that contains, a book, a toy, and their new library card:

The child will also be invited to celebrate his or her first birthday at the library and receive another free book. 

[...]

There is no doubt that children should be read to from an early age. And even before kids are able to read by themselves, they should have chunky books to play with and to help them learn to look at pictures and turn pages.

The Born to Read program began last year with support from the St. Louis County Library Foundation. More than 15,000 families are expected to receive a bag from the program this year.

 

The purpose of the program is, of course,  to get parents to read to their children as often, and as soon, as possible, in the process exposing the kids to language, story-telling, and the whole wide world of books and learning.  As library director Kristen Sorth says, "Studies show that when children start behind, they stay behind."  Kids, on the other hand, who grow up around books (theirs and those of their peers and parents) are more likely to become readers at an early age - and to do well in school.  

Congratulations to the St. Louis County Library system for making the effort to get kids there off to a good start.