EMILY – Beate Sigriddaughter

Emily helped heal me this morning. Emily and two more hours of sleep. I'm not saying this as irony, although I can see how it might seem so. But I'm remembering a Norman Mailer assertion in perhaps Advertisements for Myself that some works of art can cure terminal cancer. As an example, he quotes part of a scene in William Burroughs's Naked Lunch describing open heart surgery being done with a toilet plunger. A theme in all of Mailer’s work I recall was his shock-and-awe attack on the boundaries of propriety, I could see how a sophomoric plunger scene in a work of “serious literature” would have aroused his admiration, perhaps even provoking it enough to have assuaged a hangover if not obliterated something catastrophic, as with Norman Cousins’s claimed laughing away a crippling bout of ankylosing spondylitis.

I’m hoping my morning malaise was nothing more than a combination of allergies, tail end of the flu, and a sudden claustrophobic alienation from friends herding online to hide their growing political anxiety. Feeling the onset of a low-grade panic myself, with a dizziness I sensed might floor me, I crashed for a little more sleep. Awoke feeling a little stronger, yet still torpid, weak, dispirited…

...a desperately friendly gathering brought back my sense of balance. This from Emily, setting the scene for a heart-bridging exchange between two women who apparently have nothing in common.

A less robust audacity than the sort to roust a Mailerian hangover perhaps, but the more curative for its subtlety—an antidote for the toxic social-media-required swift, surface judgment. Yes, “desperately friendly” describes many comment threads as they beg instant harmony, and the odd subterranean note can intrude like a deliberate belch in choir practice. Emily’s audacity (switching from title to voice now) is that she reports her sightings with a poet’s sensibility, not the bluster of a Mailer rebel. Two women with nothing in common who accidentally meet on Facebook will soon become invisible to each other. In the flesh, at the desperately friendly gathering, Emily tries a little harder after the other woman looks at her with starving eyes. Driven to survive this moment, Emily tells her she’d heard it was she who brought the honey in front of them on the potluck table.

“Oh yes, the woman eagerly responds. Her eyes relax. It’s rosemary honey. We also brought cheeses from upstate New York. Try some. They go together well.”

It is a short, outwardly simple poem—as are all twenty-nine in Emily—but like a perfect note played by a master violinist its overtones reach far beyond the moment and resonate long afterward in sublime memory. In an instant this morning Rosemary Honey reached all of the way inside me, touching and reassuring my starving heart. I felt something heal.

Ah yes, Emily of Emily is a child of Beate Sigriddaughter. No doubt of this. There’s her dance with joy and innocence. Her dance with disillusionment, disappointment, remembered horrors. Her hope for meaning, for the whisper of Divine. Her gratitude.

She’s a morning child, loving the excitements she knows await her for the day, remembering her breathless elfin adoration, and feeling she was still good enough for life.

Even Sunday mornings at church with her indifferent husband and the preacher insulting women from the pulpit as is so often the case, she enjoys the freedom to wear her hat and to bask in the choir’s voices, her time to sit and soar in private beauty.

She’s ambivalent, a bit of a pushover, as a child giving up her allowance to a fellow camper soliciting for a worthy cause, but disliking the girl from then on. As an adult, avoiding the sidewalk in front of a church where a beggar hangs out, her soul feels dusty and defensive.

Oh, Emily has a sense of humor, she does. To celebrate this, I’ll give you the entire poem, called 16^th Street Mall Shuttle:

On the way home from riding the roller coaster

twice, once in the front car, still fizzy with thrill,

Emily sits down on the mall shuttle, then notices

a small black man, even older than she is,

standing, leaning on a cane. All other seats

are taken. She jumps up and offers him her seat.

“No thanks, he says with a wrinkled smile,

“but you could give me a blow job.

Do something that’s really useful.” She turns

her head. Above them a sign reads

“Cancer cures smoking.”

Give Emily a look. She’ll see you, hear you, feel you. Heal you.

Get your copy here: Emily

Play it, Sam

Would the divine were meek,
a power sublime disinclined to meddle
to quell our crises,
preferring supplication, to be needed so completely one offers up self
for the touch of grace?


Would reason be in play,
a mutuality of sorts,
open invitation: you seek us out, we take you in,
succor's yours, your soul joins ours,
all in kind?


Would this be culling,
recruiting kindred spirits from the random multitude
with still the same old signs that point the way from primal
to live with love
or die?

THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE – Stephen Crane

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, ambertinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army’s feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.

One of the better openings of a novel I have ever read. It beckons you straight-up, easing you into its dark milieu with an indelible foreshadowing scene using plain yet startling words that tickle portentous corners of the imagination.

Marvelous writing, that opening scene. My jaw hung open as I copied it from Kindle page to Word document to use in this review. Surprised I hadn’t remembered it from my first reading of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, as a boy, and it didn’t dawn on me until just now that it’s the finest writing in the entire novel.

All I did remember from back then was a vision of the protagonist--a boy a few years older than I—running terrified from the battlefield through a woods amid a stampede of retreating soldiers. I remembered the shame he felt, that he hadn’t lived up to his fantasies of heroism, and that he eventually was able to justify fleeing the fight when one of the others shuffling to the rear—they weren’t running, all were wounded—clubbed him on the head with his rifle. The injury drew blood, thus he obtained his “red badge of courage.”

Ominous talk lately about “civil war” in our current political word skirmishes prompted me to take another look at Red Badge. Surprised to see it’s only eighty pages, I was worn out from the flu and decided it would be a quick, non-taxing read. Mistake. Slogging along as if it were War and Peace, I was surprised again when I finished it and checked again for the page count: Eighty. Seemed more like three-hundred and eighty. 

Crane

And the problem was the writing. It seems once Crane put the finishing touches on that glorious first paragraph, he pulled out all the stops. Arching over the entire narrative is the strained, convoluted 19^th century literary style. I’ve navigated it in other works, but found it strangely out of place in a novel that takes place solely on battlefields and their environs. On top of that is the barely literate vernacular of the characters—all soldiers, and mostly uneducated enlisted men. I’ve always found extended phonetic representations of dialect tedious. A little bit, for flavor, and then, please...no more. Here’s a sample of the kind of dialogue strewn across the story as so many stumbling blocks I started feeling like one of Crane’s infantrymen trudging along wondering where in hell we were going.

“Oh, there may be a few of ’em run, but there’s them kind in every regiment, ’specially when they first goes under fire,” said the other in a tolerant way. “Of course it might happen that the hull kit-and-boodle might start and run, if some big fighting came first-off, and then again they might stay and fight like fun. But you can’t bet on nothing. Of course they ain’t never been under fire yet, and it ain’t likely they’ll lick the hull rebel army all-to-oncet the first time; but I think they’ll fight better than some, if worse than others. That’s the way I figger.

Okay, I move my lips when I read to myself. Sometimes. Found them, my lips, jabbering silently trying to pronounce whatever the hell was being said up there and in all of the rest of the dialogue. Bit my lower lip accidentally more than oncet. And here’s Crane’s narration, self-consciously literary, out of context for an uneducated youth: “Swift pictures of himself, apart, yet in himself, came to him—a blue desperate figure leading lurid charges with one knee forward and a broken blade high—a blue, determined figure standing before a crimson and steel assault, getting calmly killed on a high place before the eyes of all. He thought of the magnificent pathos of his dead body. These thoughts uplifted him. He felt the quiver of war desire.”

Most of the narrative takes place in the protagonist’s head. He’s referred to only as “the youth,” although his name is mentioned casually here and there in conversations with other soldiers. His two closest acquaintances are likewise named similarly, but we know them as “the tall soldier” and “the loud soldier.” Not having the names foremost in my mind irritated me at first, but eventually I came to find it helpful. More than a few named characters in novels often confuse me as to who is who. So that’s one for Crane.

What got on my nerves more than anything else was the confusion in The Youth’s head, and as I got back into the book I remembered this is precisely what bothered me when I read it as youth myself. Though premise is valid, there is only so much agonizing over oneself a reader needs to catch the drift that here’s a young recruit, wet behind the ears, fearing he won’t live up to his fantasies of heroism and the expectations of his comrades. Too much repetition, as if Hamlet simply could not stop repeating “to be or not to be” come hell or the Confederate Army.

Historians credit Crane for his “naturalism” and detail in describing battle conditions and psychologies, especially as he’d had no experience himself on a battlefield when he wrote Red Badge. He was a journalist, eventually covering the Greco-Turkish and Spanish-American wars.

Still, his literary imagination and writing prowess at times converge to create scenes of near visceral realism, especially in the wider view. “...upon this stillness,” he tells us, “there suddenly broke a tremendous clangor of sounds. A crimson roar came from the distance. The youth stopped. He was transfixed by this terrific medley of all noises. It was as if worlds were being rended. There was the ripping sound of musketry and the breaking crash of the artillery...the battle was like the grinding of an immense and terrible machine to him. Its complexities and powers, its grim processes, fascinated him. He must go close and see it produce corpses.”

Ernest Hemingway said of Crane’s novel in the 1942 collection Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time, which he edited, Red Badge "is one of the finest books of our literature, and I include it entire because it is all as much of a piece as a great poem is."

A 1951 movie of Red Badge starred genuine war hero Audie Murphy as “Henry Fleming,” aka The Youth, and famed war cartoonist Bill Mauldin. It was directed by John Huston. The book was adapted for TV in 1974. 

Audie Murphy and Bill Mauldin

 

[Find more Friday's Forgotten Books links at Todd Mason's amazingly eclectic blog]

WASHINGTON'S SPIES – Alexander Rose

One of my childhood heroes was Nathan Hale, the Connecticut schoolteacher/spy who gave us those thrilling last words before British troops hung him from a tree, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Whenever I’d think of that moment I’d feel a frisson of wonderment. Could I, at such a dire time, the premature ending of my life, exhibit the patriotic courage and poise and presence of mind to bring forth such ringing eloquence instead of begging, weeping, and pooping my pants? I’m still wondering, and I dearly hope the opportunity to learn the answer never arises. But Washington’s Spies, based on letters, diaries, and official records, did clear up one thing about Hale’s final spoken words.

They weren’t what my gradeschool teachers taught me he said.

Hale likely had uttered the words, but earlier, at Yale, where he and classmates read them in Joseph Addison’s play, Cato. Years later, author Alexander Rose tells us, the memorable words were given as Hale’s last by former classmate William Hull, and others. “Hull could not have known what Hale said in his final moments, though he did remember that Hale had been struck by Cato when at Yale, and that he and Hull and [Benjamin] Tallmadge had talked excitedly of its brilliance. Perhaps he had specifically cited the ‘I regret’ line as representative of his patriotic views, and Hull, loyal as ever, allowed his friend the posthumous privilege of uttering it.”

British Capt. Frederick MacKenzie, who attended the hanging, wrote this in his diary: “He behaved with great composure and resolution, saying he thought it the duty of every good officer, to obey any orders given him by his commander in chief; and desired the spectators to be at all times prepared to meet death in whatever shape it might appear.”

I prefer that scenario. It may not resound through the ages, but it rings far truer than the theatrical Cato quote while yet reflecting Hale’s brave comportment at the end. A stoicism remarkable in itself for an amateur spy barely seasoned as an infantry officer standing on the ladder against the rope-slung tree limb by the freshly dug grave he knew was for him. It was almost as if he sensed the irony of his death becoming a martyrdom that would spark his country’s first military intelligence network.

Code-named it the “Culper Ring,” for no known reason other than that it played on Culpeper County, Virginia, where Washington had worked as a land surveyor during his teens. He chose “Samuel Culper” as the cover name for one of the ring’s first members, Abraham Woodhull, a Long Island farmer whose vegetables and livestock gave him easy access to produce-starved New York, selling to British troops and Loyalists. He and several other friends who’d grown up in the tiny Suffolk County, Long Island, community of Setauket formed the nucleus of the embryo spy ring.

Washington was breaking new ground using civilians to work undercover gathering intelligence. Previously armies relied on soldiers to scout out military tactical positions. Hale, an Army captain had volunteered for a plainclothes mission to reconnoiter the enemy. He was cautioned against it by a friend who told him he was too good-looking, and that this and his military bearing would give him away should anyone become suspicious. This proved prophetic, as the blackguard Robert Rogers, working for the British, easily spotted Hale, watched him taking notes at military sites, and finally befriended him as a “fellow rebel.” Rogers won the inexperienced Hale’s unwitting confession over beers in a local tavern.

The problem back then with using civilians was stigma. Only military scouting was acceptable, as civilians, working for money, were not deemed trustworthy. But Washington wanted information from civilians embedded in enemy territory. To help him set up such a system he hired Nathaniel Sackett, a middle-aged member of New York’s Committee for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies—the enforcement arm of the political revolutionaries. “If Sackett succeeded in recruiting agents,” author Rose tells us, “he would certainly require a deputy empowered to detail army riders to run their messages to headquarters, as well as able to soothe the snippier colonels annoyed that a civilian was interfering in matters they regarded as their own prerogative. To that end, Washington quietly appointed a freshly made captain, Benjamin Tallmadge of the Second Continental Light Dragoons, as Sackett’s military contact.”

Familiar name? One of Nathan Hale’s best friends at Yale. Rose includes some affectionate letters between the two during and after their college days, and concludes “If anything malign ever happened to one, the other would be merciless toward his assailants.” In addition, Tallmadge was a native son of Setauket, where the fledgling spies would be recruited. One code name leaped out at me as if deliberately bringing irony into our present day Washington imbroglio: Tallmadge was known in the Culper Ring as “John Bolton.”

Benjamin "John Bolton" Tallmadge

Rose’s exhaustive study of previously unexamined documents from this period won praise from colleagues for his scholarship.

“After working on Washington,” writes —Joseph J. Ellis, author of His Excellency: George Washington, “I knew there was a story to tell about his reliance on spies during the Revolutionary War. But I believed the story could never be told because the evidence did not exist. Well, I was wrong, and Alexander Rose tells this important story with style and wit.”

Richard Brookhiser, author of Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, writes that Rose, “making brilliant use of documentary sources...gives us intrigue, crossed signals, derring-do, and a priceless slice of eighteenth-century life.

As an enthusiast of the period, albeit with none of their scholarly dedication, who am I to disagree. I enjoyed this history unveiling immensely, with only one complaint. For the sake of my twenty-first century ear Rose might have gone easier on the direct quotes from correspondence and documents in that era. They spoke, or at least wrote, in what seems now a convoluted style that’s almost another language. Here, for example is part of a letter from Tallmadge to Hale in their college days: “Friendly Sir, In my delightsome retirement from the fruitless bustle of the noisy, with my usual delight, &, perhaps, with more than common attention, I perused your epistle—replete as it was with sentiments worthy to be contemplated...” I’ve read it several times now, and yet am not certain I have the drift.

I came to the book by way of a four-season TV series, Turn: Washington’s Spies, which I borrowed on dvd from the public library. Checking just now I see it is available online from several sources, including Netflix. The dramatization strays a bit from historical accuracy, but at least the dialogue is current. I’d happily watch it again. In fact I recommend watching it first, as I did, and then reading the book. Remembering scenes from the series helped me visualize their counterparts when reading the historical version.

[Find more Friday's Forgotten Books links at Todd Mason's amazingly eclectic blog]

THE SIBERIAN DILEMMA – Martin Cruz Smith

My fears after reading Arkady Renko’s previous adventure have proven unfounded. I’d predicted that Tatiana, #8 in the Russian crime series featuring the intrepid “investigator of special cases,” would mark Renko’s valediction. Soon after I wrote those words I learned his creator, Martin Cruz Smith, was working on yet another episode, giving me a sliver of hope my forecast had been wrong. Had I Renko’s fortitude, stamina, and seemingly unlimited regenerative powers, I might have held my breath. But I knew he carried a bullet in his brain that could kill him instantly without warning, and considering the beatings, stabbings, being locked in a freezer and the exposure to lethal radiation he’d survived since we first met him in Gorky Park, the law of probability had to have his number in sight. At some point I would have no choice but bid him goodbye.

Well, it’s not this time. Not in #9, The Siberian Dilemma. That’s not to say he doesn’t have another close call. This time it’s being mauled by a bear on a Siberian tundra.

“‘Play dead or be dead,’ he recalls his father telling him as a youngster. ‘Lie flat on your stomach to protect your vital organs. Lace your hands over the back of your neck to cover the arteries there.’ It was a long time since Arkady had felt any reason to be thankful to his father. He rolled onto his stomach and covered his neck as instructed. The bear turned Arkady over. It mauled him and shook him like a rag doll. Play dead or be dead. Pain dug deep within him as if he was being torn from the inside out. Yellow teeth took his parka and flesh down to the bone of his arm, and he felt his right hand go numb and limp. The bear redoubled his attack, picking Arkady up, swinging him left and right, and dropping him. He tore the skin off part of Arkady’s forehead. Arkady heard the huffing and snuffling and smelled the rot of his breath. The bear wouldn’t quit. Arkady played dead. There was nothing else he could do. Eventually the beast would give up and leave him alone...”

It would be reasonable at this point to wonder how it is that a Moscow police investigator finds himself on a Siberian tundra being mauled within inches of his life by a very hungry brown bear. The answer, of course, is another of the complicated plots enmeshing the aging Renko, who remains at odds with his boss and who can never seem to resist tugging the capes of very powerful gangsters despite the virtual immunity they’ve attained from their friendship with Russia’s head gangster. In The Siberian Dilemma this would be Vladimir Putin, with the title “president,” and private properties including “ocean-cruising yachts...four estates with swimming pools, horse stables, tennis courts, and cascading waterfalls...and one with a separate house for ducks.

“In this manner, corruption was quantified and understood.” And sounds rather familiar to some of us, as well.

Renko’s mission to Irkutsk, known as the Paris of Siberia, is twofold. One is official and the other private. Zurin, the Moscow prosecutor who shares a mutual dislike with Renko, has ordered him to interrogate a prisoner who’s being held in a prison there charged with trying to kill Zurin himself. Renko’s private reason is to find his lover, Tatiana Petrovna, the fearless investigative reporter who slipped off to Irkutsk to interview one of the gangster oligarchs who has announced his intention to seek Putin’s job in the next national election.

“Anyone who challenges the Kremlin runs the risk of being murdered,” Tatiana’s boss, Sergei Obolensky, publisher of the news magazine Russia Now, tells Renko. If Tatiana’s with the oligarch then she, too, is a target, Renko know. He’s worried because she did not returned to Moscow when expected, and Renko has no way to communicate with her.

The ensemble cast includes Victor Orlof, Renko’s alcoholic detective/sidekick, who’s in the drunk tank when Renko leaves for Siberia. “They were partners in a peculiar business and he had come to count on Victor for what he felt was half his intelligence and most of his wit. Suddenly he had no one to take Victor’s place.” But a new sidekick kicks in by coincidence on the flight to Irkutsk. Rinchin Bolot, a friendly Irkutskian who introduces himself as a “factotum,” or man of many talents for hire. Renko hires him, making me a little nervous because for all we know Bolot is really working for someone else—Zurin the prosecutor or one of the two oligarchs who own most of Siberia. One of them is the man seeking to unseat Putin.

Also back in Moscow is Zhenya Zurin, the orphan chess-wiz Renko had befriended as a child and then mentored him as he might an adopted son. A threat of Zhenya’s “disappearing” is used to pressure Renko once he’s in Irkutsk and is given an extra-curricular “assignment.”

As to his own safety, Renko uses a line we’ve heard from him before, this time when Victor’s sister tells him how impressed she is that he stood his ground when an angry bear charged at him in the zoo she directs. Someone had released the bear and its mate, and Renko disabled it with a gun that fired narcotic cartridges. It was, she says, “As if you didn’t care.”

His response, which relates to the bullet lodged in his brain, “That’s my secret weapon.”

Recovering from his mauling in Siberia, the prospect of death occupies his mind with more perspective. “Arkady had never wondered or worried too much about his legacy, such as it was.” we are told. “He had never felt the need to leave his mark on the world, either through achievement or progeny.

“There were those who’d be sorry to see him gone and those who’d be delighted. Given the identity of those in both camps, the latter was, in its own way, as much a compliment as the former.”

The book’s title appears as a riddle regarding a person’s choices when either of two options will almost surely be fatal. In explaining it, Renko uses the analogy of a man who falls through the ice on a lake. “If he pulls himself out of the water onto the ice, he’ll freeze to death in seconds, a minute at most. If he stays in the water, he’ll die of hypothermia in five…

“The lesson is it’s better to take action than be passive...better to fight than to surrender, even if you know you’re going to die.”

As usual in the Renko series I found the setting to be ferociously realistic. This authenticity, I learned at the end of The Siberian Dilemma, did not come from reading travel guides. In his acknowledgments the author tells us how he prepared for this Renko adventure.

He thanks Luisa Smith, “my invaluable travel companion with a magic camera...Don Sanders for his help in making the Siberian trip happen...Arkady Persov from Irkutsk generously entertained us while showing us his city and the natural wonders of Lake Baikal...Lyuba Vinogradova has been my brilliant translator and research assistant for more than twenty years. She traveled from Mozambique to Siberia to be part of the team. Finally, there is Andrew Nurnberg, my loyal friend and agent for almost forty years. He has traveled with me on research trips to Siberia, Moscow, Tver, Berlin, and Havana and always kept his sense of humor. These friends buoy me up and keep me on my feet.

And let me add my gratitude, as well.

[Find more Friday's Forgotten Books links at Todd Mason's amazingly eclectic blog]

EASY ERRORS – Steven F. Havill

Were I to consider becoming a police officer I doubt I could find better and more interesting training literature than Steven Havill's Posada County mystery series. I'm confident saying this after reading only one of the nearly two dozen in the series because Easy Errors just might be the only manual a would-be cop—or any cop--would need.

Its narrative architecture is pure meticulous procedural, from the precision of coded radio chatter to a ruptured bag of Cheetos found at the scene of a fatal road accident to the gathering and testing of evidence and preserving its chain of custody, and ultimately to the strategy of presenting witnesses to a grand jury.

The birth of this case is audio witnessed by Posada County (New Mexico) Undersheriff Bill Gastner, an upper-middle-aged widower who’s home alone and has just settled in to read page 107 in Peterson’s History of the Single-Shot Cartridge Rifle in the United States Military. The time is 9:17 p.m on a Wednesday in early June.

“What drew my attention to the clock this evening was the distant shriek of tires tearing rubber and the loud, dull whump that followed. Two lesser contacts and a final ground shaker followed. Whump, then bang, blang, BAM. Just like that, with a pulse or two between each concussion. The clock jerked to 9:18.”

Well, that sure as hell drew my attention, too, but not to the clock, and at least I could sit and follow the action from my recliner while poor old, overweight, out-of-shape Bill Gastner struggles out of the deep, cozy pocket of his “leather reading chair,” telephones dispatch and coordinates a response by the scant available deputies, then tootles off in car 310, his decrepit county-issued Crown Vic, to where he correctly presumes the wump, bang, blang and BAM had occurred. And there the plot quickly deepens into tragedy and thickens in implications. Three dead teens--one thrown from the SUV and crushed when it rolled onto him and the other two trapped in the wreckage but clearly lifeless as well. Gastner immediately recognizes the SUV as owned by the county’s assistant district attorney, and soon determines it was being driven by the ADA’s only son. The other two victims are siblings of the county’s new rookie deputy who’s been out riding with a patrol deputy and arrives at the scene determined to do his duty over his boss’s objections and despite the horrific personal loss he encounters.

At this point I’ve swallowed the hook and am in the creel, even as I begin to lose patience with the tedious use of ten-code radio signals and the excruciatingly painstaking collection and commenting on the minutia of debris, such as the “ruptured Cheetos bag,” any or all of which could prove significant in learning what might have caused the crash to happen. Having covered police departments and courts for decades, I understand how this staggering number of seemingly incidental fragments can make or break a criminal or liability case in a trial, and put juries, news reporters, and judges to sleep as lawyers wrangle for hours over the evidentiary relevance of a clothing fiber or single hair, and at times I found myself skimming over pages of these descriptions. But it was also part of what kept me scrolling through the novel on my laptop’s Kindle app. I knew I was in the hands of a professional, a cop who knew what was important and, through Gastner, was closely monitoring and advising his rookie in the fundamentals of solid police work.

I waited until finishing the novel before looking up author Steven Havill to see where he had gotten his police and court experience, as he also presents his courtroom scenes as realistically as any I have read by real lawyers and judges. Here is what I found in Havill’s brief Wiki bio:

“Havill lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife Kathleen, a writer and artist. A dedicated high school teacher of biology and English by day.” 

Steven Havill

I stared at that for a bit, thinking huh? A high school teacher? There must be more! And maybe there is, but to find it I shall check a little deeper into this mystery police expert’s background. If anything new turns up I’ll include it in my review of Havill’s next Posada County novel, which most likely will not be the series debut, Heartshot. It was blogging buddy Tracy K of Bitter Tea and Mystery, whose review of Heartshot sold me on the series. When I finished Easy Errors and went back to Tracy’s review I nearly leaped out of my recliner when I read how this first of the series opens:

“...a car full of teens, running from a stop by Deputy Torrez, goes airborne into a rocky outcrop, killing all five kids and revealing a package of cocaine under the seat,” Tracy quotes from the book’s blurb. “Has someone brought big-time crime to the county? [Gastner] is now dealing with grieving parents–one of whom starts packing a gun...”

Okay, some of you might have allowed a little gasp reading this, seeing the similarity between the openings—teens killed in car crash. I gasped, too, with the added oomph of seeing that Deputy Torrez had been chasing the car that crashed. Torrez is the rookie in Easy Errors who discovers his brother and sister dead in that crash, and spends the rest of the novel learning the ropes from Gastner on the importance of strictly adhering to procedure in gathering evidence and following where it might lead. Thus the title Easy Errors, which points to the dangers of straying from procedure. I already knew how Torrez came to be a rookie in Easy Errors, when some twenty-three books prior he is already a patrol deputy. Here’s how Havill explains it in his foreword to Easy Errors:

“The Posadas Mysteries have been around for more than twenty-five years, and at one point several years ago, after many titles in the series, a reader asked if I would write the story covering the day that Estelle Reyes-Guzman joined the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department. That’s how the prequel One Perfect Shot came to be. Chronologically, that prequel’s action happens two or three years before the adventures in Heartshot.… the book that started the series back in 1991. ‘How about [Torrez’s] history?’ was the next question. Well, why not? Prequels are fun to write, so how about a pre-prequel? Easy Errors is the result of that exercise.”

Tracy K didn’t mention finding the narrative bogged down by plodding procedure, as I did with Easy Errors, so maybe that was partly—or mainly--because of the plot’s instructional aspect. I haven’t said much of the characterizations, but they were so well depicted, so lifelike and natural, they bring a feeling of authenticity to the book. They’re a little dull, too, just like real people.

“‘I appreciate your initiative, Robert,’ Gastner tells the rookie, gently admonishing him for exhibiting something of a lone-wolf attitude. ‘Don’t get me wrong on that score. But as you’re aware, this is a quasi-military outfit…uniforms, chain of command, all those sorts of things. When you’re taking a department vehicle, dispatch needs to know where you’re going. Don’t just surprise us. If we need you, or the vehicle, we need to know how to contact you.’”

I’m pretty sure at this point Deputy Torrez, a man of few words, answered the undersheriff, “Ten-four, Sir.”

[Find more Friday's Forgotten Books links at Todd Mason's amazingly eclectic blog]