John C. Rankin. The Screwtape Text Messages. TEI Publishing, 2019.

We have reviewed a few books by John Rankin, and have mentioned him in other posts. This book was a little sad for me to pick up because I had known and occasionally worked with Dr. Rankin for over thirty years. He passed away two years ago. His face is on the book’s cover. I saw him in my memory every time I picked the book up.

The Screwtape Text Messages clearly borrows from the C. S. Lewis classic The Screwtape Letters. The Screwtape Letters first introduced me to C. S. Lewis. (I did not learn about his kids’ books till years later.) The Screwtape Text Messages takes the same concept a generation later, beginning in the nineties up to the time the book was written and published. As the book progresses, Screwtape complains more and more about having to use an old Blackberry when newer tech works better, but that is life where he comes from.

There is, however, a major difference. The Screwtape Letters is fiction. The Screwtape Text Messages is a memoir, really. One could call it creative nonfiction. Besides mentor-devil antagonist Screwtape and student-devil Wormwood, the protagonist is John Rankin, the author. In effect, this is a story of Rankin’s spiritual battles over the course of his life. That part is not fiction.

It begins with flashbacks to his childhood, especially after he went away to a boarding school. There he encountered some of the “initiation rites” typical of such places, but he also ended up encountering both God and evil spirits. We see his conversion and spiritual growth—and backsliding—from the perspective of Wormwood and Screwtape. Yes, there is humor. If anything, Screwtape’s language has gotten more colorful since Lewis wrote about him, but we soon understand this is a serious book. It is very much an autobiography. Yet, it is one that makes us understand there is an unseen world.

The Bible gives us glimpses, for example when Elisha prays that God opens his servant’s eyes, and we see the chariots of fire surrounding the valley of Dothan. (See II Kings 6:15-17). Rankin reminds us that:

…we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

Time and again the tempters try to work on a personally perceived strength, which can also be turned into weakness if our pride or other deadly sin gets in the way. Rankin’s tunnel vision optimism (TVO) helps him persevere and overcome many obstacles. But it can be twisted by the enemy to wear him down. As the Bible warns, “Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (I Corinthians 10:12)

As has been noted on our blog, Rankin served in an area that few Christians in ministry serve. He was active in the pro-life movement and also conducted many forums with atheists, academics, and activists who oppose Christianity and/or religion. His ministry overall was effective in getting at least some people to see things in a different light, just as this book does even to a reader who is a believer. This book definitely reflects deeply onto our own lives, but from an infernal perspective.

At one point Rankin becomes involved in what would politely be called a marginal or pseudo-Christian cult. Ironically, Rankin is doing this because he thinks he is researching other groups which are cults. This gets Screwtape excited:

Remember—Hierarchy not Freedom! Now, we do not necessarily flee the possibility of such studies, but if we can, we do everything possible to help the subject get sucked into the “deceptions” he thinks he is studying, thinking he is above “deception” himself. (50)

Later, Rankin comes to his senses, so to speak (see Luke 15:17 HCSB). Screwtape worries:

Then there was the dangerous idea and initial work where Rankin started writing a book called “No Coercion in the Gospel” (a nasty attempt to counterpunch the Motto of Hell: Hierarchy, not Freedom!) (60)

Rankin pulls no punches:

So, when he began pro-life (we prefer to call it “anti-abortion” because a double negative is easier to degrade than a double positive) ministry in late 1983, we shuddered (Oh how we desperately hate anything that affirms women and their unborn as equally human, for we hate marriage, we want women to be treated as property by chauvinistic men, who love the abortion, the killing ethos, and we hate children, all of whom are the seed of woman out of whom the Redeemer came). (67)

We see that The Screwtape Text Messages are quite pointed and very honest. Rankin himself comes across as a flawed individual, one who does sometimes fall into sin. In some ways this may be most serious spiritual autobiography since Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. Ultimately grace is all we have, but still we can see the Lord working out his salvation in the life of one of his people. Not trivial at all.

Carol Schlorff. How to Kill a Giant. Elk Lake Publishing, 2023.

How to Kill a Giant is a middle grade or young adult novel that kids should get a kick out of. Readers may find echoes of Stories from Grandma’s Attic or the Magic Treehouse books—with maybe a touch of The House of the Seven Gables.

In this case Hugo and his friends, brother and sister Stefan and Julia, find a secret room in the old farmhouse of Stefan and Julia’s grandparents. In the room, which clearly has not been occupied in a long time, they find an old family Bible and soon are transported to Ancient Israel near Bethlehem where they meet up with young shepherd David.

From the title readers can guess the general trajectory of the story. Stefan, Hugo, and Julia are twelve, thirteen, and fourteen respectively. David is a few years older. But much of the story tells us how David takes care of his sheep. We also see how he handles a lion attack and an attempt by some Philistine marauders to sell the three young time travelers into slavery. Our modern youngsters do experience some culture shock, to say the least.

David tells his new friends: “Listen, I know it is not easy. I’m often terrified, too, but little by little, my courage has grown with each test of faith” (856).

We know the basic story of David and Goliath, but this shares more insight into what makes for a good shepherd. As Hugo comes from a broken home and has been victimized by a couple of bullies at his new middle school, he comes to see what courage really means. The junior punks who torment him have nothing on Goliath. But David may have been bullied as much by his older brothers. We know that at least a couple of them looked down on him.

David admits, “My brothers never really cared for me because I am the youngest, but something happened to make them hate and resent me” (1032). He then proceeds to tell them about the visit of the prophet Samuel and how Samuel anointed him—and not one of them.

In the hands of many this could be a somewhat saccharine moralistic story that accomplishes little. Schlorff makes it real. We begin to admire David even apart from his giant-slaying, and we begin to root for Hugo and his friends as they find themselves in various jams. To retell the David and Goliath story is hardly treading new ground, neither are stories of time-traveling teenagers, but this gets beyond the routine and helps us see some things with new eyes.

In her notes at the end, the author acknowledges Bill Myers for some help. Many readers of late elementary and young adult books recognize the name. He is one of the most prolific and popular writers of books for those age groups. Any writer would be wise to pay attention to suggestions that he may have made. Miss Schlorff was not taking Mr. Myers’ name in vain.

N.B.: References are Kindle locations, not page numbers.

Hank Philippi Ryan. One Wrong Word. Forge, 2024.

One of us at English Plus has read a number of Hank Philippi Ryan novels, but I never had. I figured that her latest would be a good introduction.

If you like fast-paced thrillers, you will like One Wrong Word. The writing is very effective. Few chapters are more than four or five pages long, but they always end with a surprise or a cliffhanger. In other words, it makes the reader want to keep on reading.

Arden Ward works for a Boston public relations firm that specializes in fixing reputations. The wife of a prominent real estate developer comes to her for help. Her husband Ned Bannister had been on trial for running over a twenty-something skateboarder late one night in his firm’s parking garage. The local press followed this case closely, and the district attorney zealously wanted a conviction. While he was found not guilty, he still had public opinion against him. Mrs. Bannister wanted them to move on with their lives and was looking for help.

Arden sympathized. Her father had been governor of Pennsylvania when some government officials were involved in a scandal. While her father was in no way implicated, the scandal put an effective end to his political career. With this week’s news, one might think of O.J. Simpson. He was acquitted of murder, but he could never face the public in quite the same way after his trial. One might also think of Donald Trump, a real estate mogul who seems to be in the crosshairs of two or three district attorneys who dislike him.

Arden also finds herself on the wrong end of a scandal. Her boss, Warren Carmichael, fires her because a client noted Arden uses the same brand of perfume that the client’s philandering husband gives to his paramours. It is strictly coincidental, but Mr. Carmichael explains that he cannot lose the client’s business. He promises that if she handles the Bannister case well, he will give her good recommendations as she searches for work elsewhere.

Ned’s defense attorney suddenly gets run over by a car on her way to see Ned. Before she completely loses consciousness, she says his name. Now it looks like Bannister may have run her over as well—though Arden asks, logically, why would he want to harm the person who just successfully defended him in a murder case? Monelle Churchwood, who works for the D.A. and was Ned’s prosecuting attorney, is eager to find evidence to implicate Bannister in another case.

Meanwhile, Monelle and Arden get occasional text messages implicating Ned in other crimes. These texts are anonymous, but seem to carry some legitimate information. At one point Ned and Arden visit Ned’s mother in rural Vermont only to find out they have been followed.

There is much more action. As I noted, nearly every chapter has some kind of twist or revelation. The surprises keep coming right up until the end. One Wrong Word is truly entertaining. While more of a mystery than a suspense thriller—reputations, not lives, are endangered here—One Wrong Word keeps the reader guessing and likely misdirected. But isn’t that what good magicians do?

P.S. Ryan is a news reporter for a Boston television station. Her given name is Harriet, and Hank is a nickname for Harry. This reviewer enjoyed the book partly because of its Boston setting. At one point, though, I felt bit disoriented. I said to myself, “I do not recall Route 2 going where they were going.” But in the note at the end, Ms. Ryan admits that she did take some liberties with the geography of the Boston area. For the sake of the story, who will notice?

Bill Carey. True Tales of Tennessee. History P, 2023.

Well, we have reviewed anecdotal history books on various states in the recently, specifically Connecticut and Florida. Now Tennessee takes its turn.

True Tales of Tennessee mostly covers the nineteenth century from about 1810 until the Civil War, with a few details from earlier and later. Most striking are simply the changes that took place during that time. Part of that were changes in the settlement of the land, but there were also significant technological advances that would affect the territory/state, too.

The book starts with one of the most significant events in recent (geologically speaking) North American history, the New Madrid earthquake. Centered just across the Mississippi River, it had a great effect on the relatively few settlers in the area and especially on the river traffic. In those days, the standard river boats were keelboats that sailed downriver but rarely upriver.

That would change in Tennessee beginning in 1811, just four years after Fulton built the first steamboat. True Tales of Tennessee describes in detail riverboat arrivals in Memphis, Nashville, and eventually Chattanooga. This made a great difference in commerce in the region, especially once they tamed certain rough patches such as Muscle Shoals and the Suck.

During this time Tennessee was the home to two presidents, Andrew Jackson and James Knox Polk. This is not a political history, but it does describe some of the things these two did that made them appeal to fellow Tennesseans. We also learn a few things about another son of the state, Davy Crockett, and what happened to the Native Americans. Carey reminds us that Crockett did not support the Indian Removal Act.

The two other technical marvels from the time period that would greatly affect the state were the telegraph and the railroad. The first news item sent there via telegraph described a passenger ship arriving in Boston from Europe. The news itself was hardly earthshaking, but the fact that the news arrived only about two hours after the ship docked in Boston was a big deal. The 1850s brought the arrival of the railroad. The rivers had connected the state to the north and west, now the railroad connected it across the Appalachians to the east.

We read about the lives of slaves. One very interesting chapter tells of an old family photo that led a man on a collection of family oral history that details what life as a slave was like and the effects of Reconstruction and the reaction to it. Cotton was a chief cash crop then, and even the railroads were built partly by slave labor. There is a chapter dedicated to runaways and abolitionists. We learned that the John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “The Cross” (1852) was written in memory of a man who died in a Nashville prison. He had been convicted of helping slaves escape.

We also read about some other labor movements and entrepreneurs. In some cases there are historical homes or other edifices such as a furnace that still stand today. Other times there is just the historical record. In all, we get a good sense of what was going on in Tennessee as it grew into statehood prior to the Civil War.

Carey is careful to separate speculation from what likely truly happened. Some stories changed over time. He tries wherever possible to cite primary sources such as letters, diaries, and contemporary newspaper accounts. Some things do not change much. When we read what political figures and newspapers said about people they disagreed with, the crude discourse we occasionally encounter on the Internet does not seem that different, e.g., “…the total want of all that is required to constitute the man.” Ah, humanity!

Stephen R. Turley. The Abolition of Sanity. Turley Talks, 2019.

The Abolition of Sanity is basically an intelligent Cliff’s Notes (or Spark Notes) type of work on C. S. Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man. Lewis (1898-1963) observed that modernism—which today still has a great effect on our culture—is generating “men without chests.” In other words, people with intellect (heads) and bodily urges (stomachs), but with no moral base (chest, or heart). Turley does a nice job of summarizing this in relatively few pages. Hopefully, the book will get people to read the original Lewis work.

One illustration in both books meant a lot to this reader. Lewis cites a cotemporary textbook telling about an experience the great poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge had upon seeing a waterfall. Coleridge called it sublime and felt badly for another person who simply called it pretty.

The book Lewis and Turley quote says, in part, “We appear to be saying something very important about something; and, actually, we are only saying something about our own feelings” (12). This dismisses something potentially uplifting to something merely mechanistic and subjective. (For what it is worth, I have read other similar misunderstandings concerning Coleridge in I. A. Richards and Emerson.)

The problem is not merely that people are missing out or that some folks appreciate nature more than others. The problem is worldview. If we are educating people to see things in a strictly mechanistic and utilitarian way, then they will be far more likely to submit to tyranny. Why? Because morality becomes merely mechanistic and utilitarian. And that leads to horrors.

I recently read something that the largest cause of death in the twentieth century was death by government. When we look at totals from Turkey, Indochina, central Africa, Germany, Russia, and China among others, far more deaths were caused by political executions and imprisonments than any other single cause. If war casualties are included, nothing comes close.

Both authors note that all cultures have had a tradition of some kind of moral code—Lewis uses the word Tao. This moral code is fairly similar across cultures, but since the so-called Enlightenment some people have tried to dismantle it. But what replaces the Tao is not utopia, but tyranny. Both books are timely today. Read Lewis if you can. For a concise interpretation, see Turley.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. 1975; Translated by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien, Mariner, 2021.

I am not sure whether it is because of the original material or the quality of the translation—likely both—but this is great reading!

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the earliest extant tales in English concerning King Arthur and his knights. While it and the poem Pearl were likely written by a contemporary of Chaucer, the English dialect was significantly different from Chaucer’s London English. It is much closer to Anglo-Saxon, so for most readers a translation really helps. Here are the opening lines in the original:

Siþen þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at troye
þe borȝ brittened and brent to brondez and askez…

Here is Tolkien’s translation:

When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy
and the fortress fell in flame to firebrand and ashes…

Definitely more recognizable!

Now critics have written much about Sir Gawain the Green Knight. Even this edition contains a preface by the editor, an introduction by the translator, and the text of a J. R. R. Tolkien lecture on the subject.

This is not going to be any literary interpretation then, but a mere review of sorts for the reader, with perhaps a little appreciation for Tolkien. (If I just say Tolkien, I am referring to J. R. R., not his son Christopher, who edited this collection.)

Tolkien gives some reasonable evidence that Chaucer knew the poem if not the poet, but the dialect they spoke was notably different. One near contemporary would write that one could travel twenty miles in England and not be able to understand the dialect spoken in the new place. Chaucer is more or less readable to the educated modern reader. The poetry in this volume would not be so.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are found on the same medieval manuscript book, and there is good reason to believe they were written by the same anonymous poet, often called the Pearl Poet. The two poems are quite different, however.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has elements of many of the Arthurian stories, namely courtesy, courtly love, and magic. When reading it, we are reminded that both courtesy and courtly love have the same root, court. Courtesy is the behavior or actions one would be expected to take in the court of a king or nobleman. Courtly love is the formal relation between a man and a woman who are members of a court and expected to chastely honor one another.

The tale begins with some magic. An exceptionally large knight, all dressed in green, with green skin and a similar green horse shows up in Arthur’s court with a challenge. Without going into too much detail, none of the knights (Lancelot, Bors, Bedivere, Agravaine, Iwain, and Lionel among others) want to accept the challenge, so Arthur takes it on himself. The test is dangerous, and no one in the court really wants the king to do it. Finally, Arthur’s young nephew Gawain says he will accept it, even though he will probably be killed in the attempt.

After some serious magic—I will leave the reader to discover what it is—Gawain realizes that in one year, he has to go to the Green Knight’s castle to take the second half of the challenge. He must arrive by New Year’s Day. As the following Christmas approaches, Gawain sets out to try to find the Green Knight and his castle.

He finally is welcomed by a nobleman who says he knows the Green Castle. He invites Gawain to spend a few days with him celebrating the holidays. The nobleman (we find out near the end his name is Bertilak) goes hunting every day for three days, but he insists that Gawain stay at the castle and entertain the ladies of the court. Again, without going into too much detail, the ladies of the court provide pleasant diversion but also temptation. This creates real tension in the story. What if the expectation of courtesy or courtly love conflict? What if either behavior conflicts with the Biblical moral code?

Tolkien’s own commentary notes that “Gawain is forced to draw…a distinction between ‘sin’ (the moral law) and ‘courtesy’” (128). I note that in this story the young Gawain is not the libertine we meet in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and other later tales.

The poetry here is very lively. The poet clearly observed hunts and enjoyed them. On the first day there is a deer hunt led by the nobleman. As I read this, I could not help thinking of the description of fox hunts in The Eustace Diamonds. On the second day the lord and his men hunt a formidable wild boar. And on the third day there is indeed a fox hunt. Meanwhile back at the castle, the tension mounts.

Finally, Gawain sets out for the nearby castle of the Green Knight. The “castle” turns out to be a cave in a hill, more like the Hörselberg in the story of Tannhäuser, a courtly story made famous in more modern times by a Wagner opera and an Aubrey Beardsley novella. Gawain does meet the challenge, but not in the way he was expecting. There really is a surprise ending—sorry, no spoilers here!

The tale is divided into four “fits” or cantos of distinct stanzas with a varying number of lines. The first fit is set at Arthur’s Court (at Winchester here, not Camelot) when the Green Knight shows up. The second is Gawain wandering the British countryside till he finally comes to Bertilak’s castle. The third and longest fit describes his stay at Bertilak’s with the hunting and feasting at the castle. The fourth fit describes the second encounter with the Green Knight at the Knight’s place.

The stanzas are very distinctive, too. Most of the lines follow the older Anglo-Saxon or Old English alliterative style. Though he sometimes changes which sounds alliterate, Tolkien is careful to keep this up throughout. Notice in the second line of the poem translated above, the line still alliterates but instead of repeating the b sound, it alliterates with f. Still, the narrative poem reads here like a short novel.

The final four lines of each stanza are shorter and instead of alliterating, they rhyme abab. The poem, then, has elements of both the older English—think of the alliteration of Beowulf—with the rhyming which was becoming more standard, especially as courts took on French styles of singing. Tolkien masters this as well, so the poetic quality comes through even to a modern ear.

We are reminded that Tolkien himself was a medievalist. His commentary that accompanies the poem is worth reading and very helpful. Unlike many critics, even in his day, he does not try to impose a more contemporary worldview, but takes the work at face value. We are also reminded that his Middle Earth was a medieval world. His love of such things comes through in his novels, his translations, and in his scholarly work. That, plus his skilled writing, makes these writings appealing even to those who have no interest in medieval literature.

At the same time, his own commentary on the poem hints at what makes his storytelling so effective:

Behind our poem stalk the figures of elder myth, and through the lines are heard the echoes of ancient cults, beliefs and symbols remote from the consciousness of an educated moralist (but also a poet) of the late fourteenth century. His story is not about those old things, but it receives part of its life, its vividness, its tension from them. That is the way with great fairy-stories—of which this is one (110, author’s emphasis).

One could say the same thing about the legendarium of Middle Earth.

Pearl

Pearl is the second poem Tolkien translated in this book. While Sir Gawain and the Green Knight could be considered a short epic of four “books,” Pearl is a visionary poem. While quite different in style, it has echoes of Dante’s Paradiso.

Again, Tolkien does a great job of translating the poem into modern English so that it reads like a narrative. Yes, it is devotional. It even has elements of hymns. But it mainly tells a story.

Like The Divine Comedy, it is told in the first person. Like Dante, too, the poet’s role to some degree is as a passive observer. But like Dante in his poem, the Pearl Poet reacts to things and carries on conversations. In this poem, Pearl is the poet’s Beatrice.

Like Dante at the beginning of his poem, the Pearl Poet is distressed, even depressed at first. In his case it is not because of exile; it is because his own young daughter named Pearl has died. (Tolkien notes in his commentary that some do not take this literally but see this simply on a symbolic level. He explains why he takes it literally. Pearl is no mere symbol but a real person.)

Indeed, there is a tone at the beginning not unlike Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son.” Both poets not only miss their child, but they wonder about purpose—both a purpose for their own lives and why God would allow one so young and innocent to die. While Jonson answers that question in a few lines, the Pearl Poet takes a hundred and one twelve-line stanzas.

The stanzas themselves are very tightly written. They clearly have more influence from French style than Old English. Each stanza has an ababcdcdefef rhyme scheme. Also the first line of a stanza takes a phrase from the last line of the stanza before it. The stanzas then are arranged in groups of five (one group of six) that have the common lines, so there is a thematic order to the poem.

As with Dante’s, much of this poem records a supernatural vision. The poet gets taken into Heaven where he sees many things and people including his daughter. Much of the poem consists of ethereal descriptions of what he sees. More of the poem, though, relates the conversation between the poet and Pearl, his daughter in Heaven. There are numerous allusions to the Bible, often naming the book of the Bible where the teaching or story is found.

Ben Jonson says God took his son from him at an early age because he had been turning his son into an idol. He also asks, “Will man lament the state he should envy?” Similarly, the poet and the reader understand that daughter Pearl now lives in a far, far better place. As St. Paul tells us: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (I Corinthians 2:9 KJV, cf. Isaiah 64:4 KJV). The poem, too, especially as it is translated for us, is a thing of beauty, as is the better place it tries to describe.

Sir Orfeo

Sir Orfeo is by far the shortest of the three narrative poems translated by Tolkien in this book. It has a little over 600 lines, so it really is a short story compared to the other two. Most readers can tell that the hero’s name suggests Orpheus, and, indeed, this is a medieval, courtly recasting of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. This poem appears in various forms in three different manuscripts and may have been written as much as a century earlier than the other two poems. Tolkien tells us that it was probably translated from the French into Middle English.

In our story Orfeo and Heuridis are already married. He is a good king ruling a mythical England, not unlike Arthur. He also is a skilled harpist. One day while resting outdoors with her ladies-in-waiting, Heuridis suddenly disappears. The king is so distressed at his loss, that he gives up his throne and his riches to go on a quest to find his queen. He lives the life of a poor begging minstrel. As with Orpheus in Ovid, his music enchants even trees and animals.

A loyal retainer takes over the throne as a steward. Orfeo gets him to promise that if he ever returns with his wife, that he will return the kingdom to him. After roaming for ten years, Orfeo discovers that Heruidis was taken captive by faeries (that is the way Tolkien spells it here—though not in his commentaries). One can guess the rest of the story. He begins singing and playing his harp. He is so moving that the king and queen of the faeries grant him his wish. Let us just say that it has a happier ending than the original Greek myth.

One thing stuck out to this reader. The medieval kingdom has been ruled by a caretaker, a steward, for ten years. What happens when the legitimate king returns after spending time with woodland faeries? Hmm. One can wonder how much this inspired the story of the Stewards of Gondor and Aragorn and the elves in The Return of the King…

Sir Orfeo is fun to read. From all three of these works we see reasons why Return of the King continues to be an Amazon bestseller.

P.S. Speaking of Amazon, when is Season Two of The Rings of Power coming out?

M.C. Beaton and R.W. Green. Death of a Spy. Grand Central, 2024.

Well. we were right. The most recent Hamish Macbeth book we reviewed suggested that even though Mrs. Beaton died a few years ago, we have not seen the last of Hamish Macbeth stories. Mrs. Beaton still gets the header on the book cover, but it seems as if Mr. Green wrote the whole story.

This continues the tale of Death of a Traitor. We noted that in that story, Hamish found an encrypted note which implicated three men of the Scottish police force, Daviot, Anderson, and Blair. Death of a Spy moves that thread along. It is no spoiler to say that the death occurs in the first pages of the novel. We may not know right away that the person had been a spy, but since it is nearly the only death in the whole story, the mystery begins immediately.

The staged traffic accident does not occur in Hamish’s bailiwick, but an American acquaintance of his reappears—James Bland. In a previous novel, he appeared as a well-connected tourist, but now we see that he is some kind of special agent. Indeed, his name echoes James Bond, except, uh, blander. His cover is that he is a Chicago policeman on an exchange program with Scotland assigned to accompany Hamish in Lochdubh. Still he shows up in the office of Daviot, Hamish’s boss, with a classified letter referring to the Official Secrets Act.

Yes, Daviot, Anderson, and Blair are above suspicion—at least with respect to official secrets—but there are a dozen other names on the list that need to be examined. It turns out four have died, a fifth is the victim at the beginning of the story, but Bland wants Hamish’s help to track the others down. And in each case there is the mysterious “Boss” who seems to have an undue influence over everyone.

There is a lot of action. Hamish and Bland travel from Glasgow to the Britain’s northernmost point tracking down leads and interviewing people. In Glasgow they have a run-in with the Macgregor gang. Not surprisingly, the sleazy Blair seems to have a connection with them. At another point, Bland realizes they are being tailed. They visit a nuclear reactor that is being deactivated and a Navy ordnance base. Their appearance surprises some people, and other people appear out of nowhere and surprise them.

Meanwhile things are hopping in Lochdubh, Hamish’s home village. A burglar has broken into a number of homes. A few victims get a good look at him, but no one fitting his description is in town. A prominent tattoo should make the ID easy. He is clever. At one point he robs the Italian restaurant where co-owner Lucia stabs him. He grabs her knife and hurls it into the loch. No blood evidence.

And the stone bridge on the only road into Lochdubh has washed out. Hamish rescues the grocer Mr. Patel who is stuck on the bridge and manages to get an engineering crew to begin rebuilding the bridge the next day and put in a temporary structure in the meantime. The crew of seven disrupts things a bit in town as they like to visit the pub after work each day.

The site supervisor is a woman who takes a shine to Hamish. She enters the Tommel Castle hotel arm in arm with Hamish only to be greeted by Priscilla and Elspeth and Claire. Priscilla and Elspeth are both former fiancées of Hamish. Priscilla happens to have come from London to visit her family who runs the hotel, and Elspeth has come from Glasgow to report on the bridge outage. Claire is Hamish’s current flame who has been waiting for half an hour for a date with Hamish that he forgot about with all the goings-on. Hamish just cannot get it right with women…

There is a lot going on in this story throughout the Scottish countryside. Most of the recurring characters from previous tales show up, the three policemen and three women mentioned before, most of the regular townspeople, Blair’s wife Mary, Daviot’s secretary Helen, among others. This is less a mystery than some and more of a action-adventure or thriller, but readers should get a kick out of Death of a Spy. We understand that while others may consider Hamish lucky in the way he solves crimes, we see that he really is pretty savvy.

Donna Andrews. Lark! The Herald Angels Sing. St. Martin’s, 2018.

Just recently I mentioned Donna Andrews’ Christmas mysteries, and this one shows up at my house. (Books have a way of appearing in unusual ways sometimes.)

Lark! The Herald Angels Sing does not have as much about birds at Owl Be Home for Christmas, but what it does say is right on. There also is not much of a mystery, as I will explain.

During a Christmas pageant rehearsal at the Caerphilly, Virginia, Episcopal Church, someone leaves a real baby in the stage’s manger. There is a note attached saying that a local entrepreneur Rob is the father. The note suggests the baby girl is named Lark, hence the title. Rob is the brother of our narrator, Meg Langslow, who was planning to pop the question to his longtime girlfriend Delaney on Christmas. Needless to say, Delaney is upset and no longer wants anything to do with Rob.

In this case, the embedded ornithology lesson has nothing to do with larks, but with American Cowbirds and Eurasian Cuckoos. Like Lark’s mother, these birds lay their eggs in the nest of other birds.

The one real mystery, the true identity of Lark, is solved pretty quickly. However, just because there is no mystery does not mean that not much happens. The tale gets crazy.

We learn that the baby’s real father is a government whistleblower whose life is in danger. Janet,the mother who wrote the note, wanted to deflect attention from her husband, so she chose the name of the one single young man from Caerphilly she had heard of.

We learn that the corrupt government of neighboring Clay County has arrested Mark the father and has framed him for murder. The mother and her girlfriend are terrified. Much of the story, then, is how Meg digs into the story of Michael and develops a plot to set him free and get state and federal help in dealing with corrupt Clay County. (I could not help thinking of Boss Hogg from the old Dukes of Hazzard television show—a bit stereotyped but one could see the possibilities for a story.)

Things get more complicated as two different groups of men from Caerphilly try to help and all end up in the Clay County jail. Some cars, including Meg’s van, get towed away into Clay County even though they were parked in Caerphilly. A corrupt federal agent tries to thwart any plans of getting the feds involved—Mark is an accountant who uncovered lots of graft in the Clay County books. Oh, yeah, as a couple of Clay County thugs come to Caerphilly looking for Janet, they break into the women’s shelter with a pistol and a shotgun.

Eventually, Meg leads a group of female carolers to the rescue. I have not decided whether the conclusion is funny, clever, or unbelievable. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge noted, whenever we read or watch fiction we engage in the willing suspension of disbelief. For this story, I am not sure I was able to completely suspend my disbelief at its conclusion. Having said that, if you like suspense novels with a touch of humor, Lark! The Herald Angels Sing may be just what you are looking for. Andrews knows how to keep us turning the pages, even if the result might be something you would find on the Hallmark Channel.

M. C. Beaton. The Potted Gardener. St. Martin’s, 1994.

As readers of this blog may know, we have enjoyed several Hamish Macbeth stories we have read. We thought we would try the other series by Mrs. Beaton, namely something about Agatha Raisin. Here goes.

As I started reading The Potted Gardener, I honestly did not care for Mrs. Raisin. She came across as on the rude or testy side. However, as I got accustomed to her, I began to see the humor. She used to live in London and now lives in the small Cotswold village of Carsely. There is a bit of the fish out of water sense, and although she is in her fifties, she has developed an schoolgirl crush on James, a neighbor who is a retired Army colonel.

Things get interesting as another urban transplant comes to town, Mary Fortune. She is an attractive divorcee—Agatha’s husband left years ago, but they never divorced. Ms. Fortune (misfortune?) is a skilled gardener. She becomes active in the local Garden Club along with James, the retired colonel.

Agatha, who really knows little of gardening, decides to join because it is clear that something is going on between Mary and James. To call her is jealous is putting it mildly. Agatha has a plan, though. It involves building a high fence in her back yard and then planting a bunch of fresh plants from a nursery the night before the big garden competition. There is a catch. A former co-worker has arranged all this, so she has to un-retire and go back to her Public Relations firm for six months. (Some of the funniest parts involve her PR hiatus.)

At some point it becomes clear that James and Mary are no longer seeing each other as much. We also learn from others in the town that there is a certain two-faced quality about Mary. She can be charming and friendly, and then come up with a zinger or veiled insult. Even the vicar’s wife admits Mary may be unkind.

And then shortly before the gardening open house in the village, someone begins sabotaging gardens. The roses in one garden are painted black overnight. Another night all the goldfish in a small garden pond are poisoned. And so it goes. And then Mary is murdered and hanged in her garden. The manner in which she is hanged is a bit bizarre. Let us say that that inspired the book’s title: potted literally, not inebriated.

By this time, Mary has managed to offend a lot of people in town. In other words, everyone seems to have a reason not to like her. Still all the slights seem relatively slight—not causes for murder. Agatha and James discover her body, and soon they begin to do their own amateur sleuthing with the help of local police officer Billy Chang. To illustrate Mary’s character, she has called Billy a chink: Not kind, not the first time he has been called that, rude, yes, but not the type of insult that would lead a normal citizen to murder.

We learn that Mary has a grown daughter who is a student at Oxford. She and her stand-offish boyfriend come to town. It seems Mary had not gotten along with her, either.

This is more of a cozy than the typical Hamish mystery. There is no criminal enterprise or hard-nosed crimebuster, but a retired, slightly nosy matron and her village friends. She is observant, and she knows people. That, along with sprinkles of Beaton humor, make this one a light but entertaining mystery.

Umberto Eco. The Name of the Rose. 1983; Translated by William Weaver, Everyman’s, 2006.

A friend recommended The Name of the Rose to me over thirty years ago. Chris, wherever you are, I finally read it!

I see why he liked it. It is very rich, allusive, and exotic. It is set in a time that even people in Italy seldom study or remember: the fourteenth century. This is about a hundred years before the invention of the printing press and nearly two hundred before the Reformation. Things in northern Italy, where it is set, have not changed much since the fall of Rome, but change is coming.

Friar William of Baskerville, our main character, uses spectacles to read. Now they had been invented some time before, but were still uncommon. Some of the monks at the abbey where he is staying consider them almost magical. As he arrives at the monastery, he tells some hostlers where a certain horse has escaped by reading hoofprints in the snow. Yes, he comes across as a medieval Sherlock Holmes. He gives credit to Roger Bacon, whom he has read and is seen as the originator of inductive reasoning (a.k.a. the scientific method) used today. Baskerville has less respect for William of Occam, whom he knew from Oxford.

The story is told by Baskerville’s traveling companion, a novice named Adso. Adso respects and admires Brother Baskerville and wants to learn from him. He asks him many questions and usually takes what he says at face value. In other words, he is a Watson to William’s Holmes.

Baskerville is a former inquisitioner and member of the Franciscans. The monastery is Benedictine, so there is both some mutual respect and also some rivalry. In the background are a number of groups trying to discover “genuine” Christianity including the Fraticelli offshoot of the Franciscans and the radical followers of Fra Dolcino. The Dolcinites would be considered heretical; the Fraticellis, reformers within the pale but suspect by some.

Other groups such as the Waldenses are mentioned as well. Like Chaucer in England, who sympathized with the Lollards, there are reformers everywhere it seems. The Church itself is worldly and political, but it would still take another two centuries before the Reformation would be institutionalized. But the seeds are there.

At one point the real Inquisition shows up. Unlike Baskerville, the inquisitioner from Avignon (based on historical figure Bernard Gui) is more interested in consolidating power and ecclesiastical order rather than discovering truth. Remigio, the poor monk snared by Gui, “now wants death with all his soul” (436)—not unlike Winston “He loved Big Brother” Smith. Plus ça change… (Interestingly, the story begins by the author’s tale of how he discovered Adso’s manuscript that includes a visit to Prague in 1968. He ends up trapped for a while after the Soviet army invades the country.)

Much of the tale, though, is intellectual. The abbey has one of the best collections of books in Europe. At one point it is compared to the Library of Alexandria. But no one is allowed in the library except the librarian and his one assistant. There is a catalog, but the librarian, perhaps under direction of the abbot, can decide what books can be checked out and by whom. Some are never allowed to be checked out.

As Baskerville says, “Knowledge is used to conceal, rather than to enlighten” here (200). Adso observes:

A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks. (208)

Adso and Baskerville sneak into the library one night, seeking both information on some books but also trying to solve one of the murders. The library turns out be arranged like a labyrinth. As a result, they are almost trapped in the library—if the librarian or abbot were to catch them there, they would be dismissed and probably the crimes would never be solved.

We meet monks from many parts of Europe including France, Spain, Germany, England, and Italy. (One thinks of The Magic Mountain, or how “all of Europe” contributed to Conrad’s Kurtz.) One is the old blind monk Jorge de Burgos, whose name suggests Jorge Luis Borges. That could tell the reader the kind of story The Name of the Rose is. And, yes, Borges’ most famous collection of tales is entitled Labyrinths, and one of its best known stories is “The Library of Babel.” The novel is allusive, but not all the allusions are to the Middle Ages.

As best I could tell, all the religious movements referred to were historical. So were the books mentioned. I do wonder about the some of the Arabic texts, but they could be authentic. I recognized a few titles. I was reminded of the books read by Roderick Usher in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Some were invented by Poe, but others such as Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell really exist. Some of the mystery here revolves around an ancient philosophical text known to have existed but lost to history, kind of like Shakespeare’s Love’s Labors Found (see Martin’s Harvard Yard).

The Name of the Rose is a gothic novel and a murder mystery, but it is clearly much more. It is not so much an intellectual challenge as an intellectual feast. What is truth? What is the nature of God? Can we really know what is true? What is objectivity? What did the ancients know that we have lost? What do we know that they did not?

There are many sayings in Latin and a few in other modern languages. Having taken a year and a half of Latin in college, I was able to muddle through most of the Latin. The French was fine for me. When I was stumped by a German quotation near the end, I discovered a web page that contained English translations of all the foreign quotations. I do recommend this to readers: “Translations to Accompany The Name of the Rose.”

The introduction by David Lodge to the Everyman’s Edition covers the story quite thoroughly. Because he says so much well, this review defers to his. I do recommend his advice to the first-time reader to stop at page xiv of the Introduction until after reading the novel to avoid spoilers. It also helps to reader to be familiar with the Bible, especially Revelation and the Gospel of John, though there are allusions to many books of the Bible including the Apocrypha.

This book is a gem. I confess being a little disappointed a the very end, only because it seemed to terminate in a kind of postmodern vagueness instead of a more typically Medieval point of view (think of Chaucer, Dante, Boccaccio, or especially Boethius). The author drops enough hints, though, about what will happen, if, as in a whodunit, we pay attention. It will keep readers thinking and keep researchers investigating. I am glad to have read it. It might even be worth a second look.