The Hangman - Louise Penny

Louise Penny’s novella, The Hangman, was part of the Good Reads project sponsored by ABC Life Literacy Canada. That project, funded in part by the Canadian government, was meant to introduce Canadian authors to a wider reading public. By the time Penny wrote The Hangman, she had already written six Inspector Gamache novels, so some booksellers list this 2010 novella as book number 6 ½ iThn that series. (With the planned September 2020 release of All the Devils Are Here, the series will have reached 16 novels.) The problem is that The Hangman is a shadow of any of the Gamache novels.

Gamache is called back to Three Pines to investigate a suspicious death after a morning jogger stumbles upon a dead man hanging from a tree. By all appearances, the man seems to have taken his own life, but after Gamache reads his rather cryptic suicide note, the inspector decides it is more likely that he was murdered. Now, Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir are going to have to figure out who the man really is, what he came to Three Pines hoping to find, and who decided to kill him.

Louise Penny

The Hangman is short even by novella standards, coming in at only 89 short pages of text, so there is not a lot of room in it for character development or setting description. Readers familiar with the Gamache series will recognize Three Pines, Gamache, Beauvoir, and a Three Pines character or two such as Myrna (the bookstore owner) and Gabri (the pub owner) from the village, but other than Gamache none of the characters are much fleshed out, and their previous relationships get only a quick nod from Penny.

But short as it is, Penny does offer a few insights into Gamache’s methods and a general observation or two about people and crime that, although not particularly deep, are striking. Little asides like:

            “People rich in money might belong at the Inn and Spa, but those rich in other ways belonged in the tiny village of Three Pines. Here, kindness was the real currency.”

Or this observation from Gamache:

            “Still Paul Goulet looked blank. Chief Inspector Gamache knew how difficult that was. A person’s face almost always had some expression on it.

            A blank face was a wall. Put there on purpose, to hide something.”

And, finally, this Gamache thought after a comment by Gabri:

            ‘“Arthur Ellis,” said Gabri, almost to himself. “He sounds so normal. Seemed so normal.”

            Gamache had to agree. But he also knew normal people were killed all the time. It was the murderer who wasn’t normal.”

Bottom Line: The Hangman is an entertaining mystery story, but it is a little too stark for readers who first met Gamache and Three Pines in the Inspector Gamache novels to really sink their teeth into. Gamache completists will definitely want to read it, but it is not likely to become one of their series favorites.

The Other Wes Moore: One Name,Two Fates - Wes Moore

     “One of us is free and has experienced things that he never even knew to dream about as a kid. The other will spend every day until his death behind bars for an armed robbery that left a police officer and father of five dead. The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his.”

As shown in the above quote, Baltimore’s two Wes Moores, roughly the same age, ended up in very different places. But it didn’t have to be that way. In The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates, one of the two men tells exactly how, and maybe why, it happened the way it did for them. The book is divided into eight chapters and three sections. The three sections, representing distinct periods in the lives of the two men, are titled: “Fathers and Angels,” “Choices and Second Chances,” and “Paths Taken and Expectations.” Each section is introduced by a conversation between Wes and Wes in the prison’s visiting room, with the chapters within the sections representing the eight pivotal years in their lives.

            “…for those of us who live in the most precarious places in this country, our destinies can be determined by a single stumble down the wrong path, or a tentative step down the right one.

Both Wes Moores grew up in fatherless homes. The difference, though, is that one Wes lost his father to a tragically misdiagnosed illness and the other never really knew the man who abandoned him before his birth. And, both little boys were blessed with strong mothers who wanted better lives for themselves and their children. But again, there was one difference. In the author’s case, his mother never lost her determination to keep her children safe from the drug culture that surrounded them. She even went so far as to move her family from Baltimore to New York so that her own parents could help her raise her children in a “better” environment (as questionable as their new neighborhood actually turned out to be). The other Wes didn’t get that level of attention and help from his own mother for as long, and when he did become intimately involved with the Baltimore drug world, she only went through the motions of trying to stop him. As it turned out, she had her own addictions to deal with.

It is not surprising that both Moore boys, one by now in New York, the other still in Baltimore, would eventually find themselves at the same crossroad in life. Both were tempted by the big money that could be earned on the streets. One succumbed to the temptation. The other was sent to military school. And their lives would never again have much in common.

Wes Moore

Even now, author Wes Moore is reluctant to say conclusively what he believes made the critical difference in the life-paths chosen by him and the other Wes Moore. He says, “The answer is elusive. People are so wildly different, and it’s hard to know when genetics or environment or just bad luck is decisive.” If I had to guess myself, I would say that the difference-maker in the author’s life was his mother, a fighter of a woman determined that her children would not fall victim to the environment they were forced to live in. Somehow, with the help of her own parents, she was able to find the money to place her children in private schools (especially the military school that eventually put Wes on full scholarship) to somewhat shelter them from the influence of their peers on the street. The other West Moore was not so lucky.

Bottom Line: The Other Wes Moore is a sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes inspirational, account of two very different lives, what those lives had in common, what was different about them, and how they eventually intertwined.

Covid-19 Journal - Week 6 Begins

I'm kind of in shock this morning as I watch the price of crude oil rapidly fall to near zero. It actually hit one penny per barrel a few seconds ago, and at this moment the price is around twenty-five cents a barrel. That is a disaster for the world economy that is going to have some longterm effects that most people don't think about. It's a great feeling to get gasoline for under a buck a gallon, I agree. But it's a killer for a country that had finally reached energy independence because now many domestic oil producers are going to disappear forever - and we will be dependent on the Saudis once again for our energy. 

(Before I finished this post, the price of oil had gone negative for the day. That, in effect, means that some producers are willing to pay you roughly $35 a barrel just to haul the stuff away.)

Virus Stats from Johns Hopkins:

In the last week,

Worldwide cases increased from 1,846,963 to 2,440,876,
United States cases increased from 555,398 to 766,212, and
Texas cases went from 13,741 with 286 deaths to 19,512 with 504 deaths.

Outside:

We were on the very edge of the storms that clobbered the Southeast yesterday, so we really didn't get any of the high winds or much of the heavy rain. It did rain pretty much all day long, but it really only came down very hard three or four times all day. And today is one of the most beautiful days of the year with bright sunshine, cool temps, and very little wind. 

Reading/Watching/Listening to:

This is the only recently published e-book I was able to get from my library last week, and I'm about 75% of the way through it this morning. The Other Wes Moore was written when its author learned there was another man by the same name in his city who is living a life 180 degrees from the one the author has known. The author is a Rhodes Scholar, a veteran, a businessman, and a White House Fellow. The other Wes Moore is serving a life sentence in prison for his part in a jewelry store robbery during which a policeman/security guard was shot and killed.  Both men are black. 

I was pleasantly surprised that I was able also to snag an e-book loan from my library of Louise Penny's 2010 Armand Gamache novella The Hangman. It appears to be 100 pages long, and I'm wondering how it chronologically fits into the Gamache timeline, or if that even matters. Penny also published Bury Your Dead, the sixth novel in the Gamache series, that year, so I wonder if the novella started life as an intended-novel that she quit early on, or if it was always planned as a novella. I'll read this one as soon as I finish The Other Wes Moore because the due-date clock is ticking on it. 

I enjoyed several good movies and documentaries last week, but  honestly, with such an abundance of choice these days it would probably be more surprising if I hadn't. First Man (2018) is a biopic of Neil Armstrong that focuses on America's quest to beat the Russians to the moon. I had not realized that Armstrong had some emotional problems that he had to battle throughout his life, problems serious enough that they sometimes had the NASA decision-makers wondering if he was the best choice for various missions. The movie stars Ryan Gosling.

The Tomorrow Man (2019), starring John Lithgow and Blythe Danner, is a strange little movie about a "survivalist" who is preparing for apocalyptic times by storing food and gear in a secret room of his house. Because he is divorced and lonely, when he spots the Blythe Danner character he thinks he's found his soulmate after he observes her buying in large quantities just the way he does. Little does he know that she is just a hoarder. The last minute of this one is especially strange - never saw The Tomorrow Man going where it ended up.

Watching Drunks (1996) is a lot like sitting in on one of the AA meetings that take place all over the world every day. It is one heck of a reality check, but not nearly as depressing a movie as you might think it would be. The best part of this one for me was watching the actors, most of whom got so deeply into their roles that it was easy to forget they weren't a bunch of actual alcoholics and addicts. As you can see from the attached image, the cast of this one is pretty remarkable.

Listening To:

I got part of my music-fix last week from watching a couple of documentaries that were truly wonderful. First, I finished up Ken Burns's eight-part documentary series called Country Music. Burns had the good sense to end the documentary in the late 1980s because, sometime in the early nineties, real country music was destroyed by the likes of Shania Twain and Garth Brooks, and it never really recovered from their influence. I also watched Ron Howard's documentary on The Beatles called The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years. Even to this day, I listen to The Beatles more than to anyone else, so this one was a real treat for me last night. Ron Howard did a great job of putting all the material together. 

I also broke out a few of my older compilation albums, the kind where a dozen or so different artists contribute a song each based on a unifying theme or one core singer they all duet with. I had forgotten how good some of those albums are. But what I enjoyed most from my collection last week was rediscovering the amazing voice of Patty Loveless (a cousin of Loretta Lynn, by the way). Patty can sing just about any kind of music but I am particularly fond of her two or three bluegrass/mountain music albums. If you are a grasser, I very much recommend the album pictured.

In the Kitchen:

Life goes on. We are still finding pretty much what we need from the grocery stores every week, but it requires me to go to two or three of them every Friday morning to make that happen. I'm a little surprised that there are still large gaps on the shelves of the three grocery stores I shop in my north Houston suburb - and how the outages are so different from store to store. What one chain has been out of for weeks, another has in semi-abundance, and vice versa. I would definitely prefer not having to make three stops every week, tripling my exposure, but I don't expect that to change soon. 

The Outside World:

Texas is starting to open up just a little bit this week. The barriers to all the State Parks have been lifted, and the parks are open to those who wear masks and maintain the required spacing from each other. I doubt that will have much of an impact on the economy, however, since access to state parks is, I think, free. Maybe some folks will at least burn a little gasoline getting to the parks.

The governor has also said it's now OK for small businesses of all types to offer curbside service, something that might help the economy a bit, maybe even saving a few jobs that were on the brink of being lost in the next few days.

I wonder, though, even when things are more generally opened for leisure, shopping, exercise, etc. how soon people like me are going to feel comfortable going out in crowds of any size again. When will I feel comfortable  shopping without a mask, maybe even gloves? Will I return to major sporting events at all this year, or even next year? 

Will the "old normal" ever be normal again?

Some Bookstores Are Delivering "Mystery Bags" of Books to Customers

While independent bookstores all over the world are struggling to stay solvent, the good news is that a lot of them are figuring out ways to generate at least a little cash flow while their doors are still locked tight. 

According to this Smithsonian Magazine article, some are delivering "mystery bags" of books to customers yearning to experience the surprise of going to a bookstore and coming home with something totally unexpected. Since they can't browse the shelves for themselves, they ask the bookseller to do it for them.

"Capitol Hill Books in Washington, D.C. began offering the service in mid-March at a customer’s request.

“Favorite email of the day so far: ‘If I give you guys $100 can you send me a mystery bag of books?’” the bookstore tweeted on March 21.

“Yes. Yes we can.”

By the next day, more than 50 people had contacted the store with similar orders, according to Mary Tyler March of WAMU. Prior to the mystery bag suggestion, Capitol Hill Books had essentially closed its doors, limiting opening hours to 60-minute slots in which four people at a time were allowed to wander the store’s narrow, book-lined aisles."

Bookstores in other states have followed suit, and at least one of them says that it is delivering about 125 mystery bags per week. From the sound of it, the booksellers are having as much fun with this concept as the shoppers, so this is one of those win-win situations for a whole lot of bookish people.

Click on the link up above for the entire article. It might make you smile a little today.

The Case of the Negligent Nymph - Erle Stanley Gardner

I must have read twenty-five or thirty of Erle Stanley Gardner’s eighty Perry Mason novels during my teen years in the mid-1960s. I don’t remember specific titles anymore, but I do remember being fascinated by the Perry Mason, Della Street, and Paul Drake characters and what a great team they made. The legendary courtroom battles that Perry Mason always won were the icing on the cake that introduced me to the legal thriller genre, a genre I’ve enjoyed off-and-on to this day.

So I thought I knew what to expect when I decided to read Gardner’s 1950 Perry Mason novel The Case of the Negligent Nymph. But I was only partially correct, and now I wonder if this one is truly representative of my reading experience all those years ago. In this one, Mason inadvertently becomes a participant in the crime of a woman he will shortly find himself defending in court – all the while trying to cover up the fact that he is the unknown “accomplice” who plucked the woman burglar from the water as she tried to make her escape. (I’m no lawyer, but is that even ethical?)

But before long, Mason has more to worry about than his accidental participation in a home burglary. The bodies start falling and his client, despite all the good counsel she receives from Mason, follows none of it. Instead, she seems determined to drag her lawyer deeper and deeper into a complicated plot that could very easily see both of them ending up in prison. Perry Mason deeply regrets his instinct to help the woman escape the vicious guard-dog that was rapidly gaining on her in the deep water. But, really, what else could he have done?

Erle Stanley Gardner

Gardner managed to pack a rather complicated plot into what is a relatively short novel (the 1968-vintage paperback I read has 215 pages), but the lack of space for character development sometimes makes it difficult to remember which is which and how they tie into the plot. I would, in fact, recommend that readers take a moment to jot down the names of each new character as they encounter them, along with a brief description of who they are and how they fit in. I wish I had done that because it would have helped.

That brings me to my main quarrel with Gardner’s approach to The Case of the Negligent Nymph (other than the dangling participle or two that jumped out at me). The novel ends rather abruptly, after a farce of a courtroom section that was borderline silly, with the reader still not in possession of all the pertinent facts. Gardner then rather clumsily has Perry Mason expose some of the missing pieces by reading a long newspaper article aloud to Della Street. That is followed by a conversation between Mason, Della, and Paul Drake during which the gloating Mason provides the rest of the missing information. Frankly, I felt a bit cheated as a reader that I had to learn some of the key elements of the story at the same time Mason was explaining it to the novel’s other two recurring characters. Please, crime writers, show me, don’t tell me.

Bottom Line: The Case of the Negligent Nymph was a disappointment to me, but I do wonder if I would have actually enjoyed this one as a fifteen-year-old. Maybe it’s just that I’m a more mature reader now than I was when I read all those other Perry Mason novels. I do have on hand another Perry Mason novel, this one called The Case of the Haunted Husband, that I plan to read soon. I’m hoping for a better reaction to that one.

Simon the Fiddler - Paulette Jiles

Paulette Jiles came crashing into my reading world in October 2016 when I met her at the San Antonio Book Festival prior to publication (which had been delayed by about six months) of her News of the World, a book that would eventually become a National Book Award finalist. Jiles offered me one of a handful of the uncorrected proofs she had with her that day, and after a ten-minute conversation with her and author John C. Kerr, it was time for me to head back to Houston. Little did I suspect on that drive home that News of the World was about to become one of my all-time favorite books, but it did. And then, we Paulette Jiles fans waited over two years for a new book from her. Simon the Fiddler, published in April 2020, is that book.

“They’d hang a carpenter, a blacksmith, a gambler, or a horse thief but nobody would ever hang a fiddler.”  Lieutenant Jacob Whittaker to Simon Boudlin

It’s March 1865 and the Civil War is all but over. In about a month Robert E. Lee will surrender the bulk of his Confederate Army to Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia, effectively ending the war. But Simon Boudlin is not in Virginia; he’s in Texas – and he’s still trying to avoid being conscripted into the Confederate Army. That would not be easy for most twenty-three-year-olds, but Simon doesn’t look anywhere near his age. He is a small, boyish-looking man, who if he shaves very, very closely, can easily convince people that he is too young to fight for the Confederacy. It’s worked up to now, anyway. Then, following a barroom fight in Victoria, Simon learns that rather than being locked up in jail for his part in the brawl, he is finally being conscripted into the service of the Confederate Army – even if, as it turns out, it is only as part of the regimental band.

Paulette Jiles

Following a completely unnecessary battle, one in which men on both sides of the fight are needlessly killed, Simon and a handful of other musicians are called upon to entertain Confederate and Union officers, and their families, as part of the surrender process. There, Simon spots a beautiful young Irish girl and falls in love with her on the spot. Unfortunately for Simon and Doris, she is indentured to a Union officer as governess to his daughter and is only six months into her three-year contract with the man. Simon is barely able to speak with her before she is off to San Antonio with the officer and his family to complete her years of service.

Simon, though, cannot get Doris out of his mind. He will spend the next two years playing his fiddle all over Texas, trying desperately to become a man of means so that he can someday make Doris his wife. But it won’t be easy for either of them.

Bottom Line: Paulette Jiles writes beautifully about a period of Texas history during which life could still be rather primitive and dangerous for many of the state’s residents. Much of the narrative takes place in Galveston and Houston, two cities that barely resemble the cities they are today. Having lived in Houston for most of my life, I found it intriguing to imagine, even with the place names I recognized, a city so different from the one I have known for the past fifty years. Paulette Jiles made me see and smell that city and others like it. If you are a fan of well-written, solidly-researched historical fiction, Simon the Fiddler is a book you should not miss.

Review Copy provided by Publisher