It’s September 1. New school year! New shoes, after a hot barefoot summer! New outfit, for the first day of school! And then––new classes! New subjects, new teachers, new tools! New friends! New lockers, new classrooms, new hallways…. New season—new teammates, new coach, new plays.
Remember your first day back at school? Back to college, back to university? Do you remember the excitement, the nervousness, the anticipation?
Today is Labor Day. And now there will be apples, apple pie and apple crisp. There will be chrysanthemums, spilling out of baskets. Even in central Texas, leaves will change color—as Maxwell Anderson’s lyrics have it, “When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame.” Here in the Hill Country, sumac and Spanish oak turn red, sweet gum turns yellow. No, not the glory of the maples, but a change in the landscape. Because finally, after the dog days of summer, that’s what September brings: something new.
It’s time to pull up the tired summer flowers and thank them for their service. Time to dig some holes and plant new trees, and order some bulbs. I’ll be planting the Mexican plum seedlings a friend gave me, and ordering narcissus bulbs for indoor blooming.
Then the Hill Country brings its own fall excitement. Dove season began today and a down-the-road neighbor, disturbed by shotgun pellets falling on her roof, had to call the sheriff, and have officers explain to a clueless (thoughtless? lawless?) neighbor that it’s contrary to law to allow your ammunition to cross your own fence line. Also unneighborly. But hmm, that could find its way into a future book plot….
Our Hill Country holds surprises. One is the way water hides in the Hill Country—down in secret seeps and creeks, around curves and hollows. And what odd creatures live out here! For example, this fall we’ve seen again the rare and secretive rock squirrel.
(We’ve seen a solitary rock squirrel only once every few years.) We’ve heard the great horned owls that call at night, up and down the creek, and the herons who call, flying down the valley. The buzzards drone, annoyingly, from the tops of telephone poles. We treasure glimpses of the shy, gorgeous painted buntings who appear briefly at the bird feeder, then flit away. Porcupines visit. Roadrunners dart across the road.
And finally the dog days are over. (This year they were July 3-August 11, and these hot sultry days have borne their name from ancient times supposedly because it’s when Sirius, the Dog Star that accompanies Orion, rises with the sun.) https://www.almanac.com/content/what-are-dog-days-summer But during the dog days I took refuge at night reading two mystery series that were new to me, by British author Peter Grainger: the DC Smith Investigation series and the Kings Lake Investigation. http://bit.ly/4gmPsad
These wry British procedurals are set on the coast of Norfolk, providing a cool and rainy ocean-side backdrop for the appealing characters. At least I could read about rain and cool breezes. But the books offered not only a respite from ridiculous heat, but a welcome respite from writing. For the last few weeks I’ve been finishing Ghost Justice—Book 10 in my Alice MacDonald Mystery Series, set here in the Texas Hill Country. For me that process inescapably includes waking in the wee hours with my mind on plot additions and subtractions, dialogue, characters. For just such moments—when the characters wake me up at night voicing their further demands (yes, they come alive!)—I find mysteries provide absorbing distraction.
Watch for Ghost Justice this week!
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited the past keeps crashing the party. Follow her at http://www.helencurriefoster.com.
Not enough rain fell this year to allow the brilliant cerulean fields of Hill Country bluebonnets we usually expect, but the hardy lupines are busy making seedpods. “Maybe next year,” they say. Now instead we have the bright yellow coreopsis lanceolata, nodding their heads with any breeze,
the wine-cups with their indescribable color—a member of the mallow family, not quite fuchsia, not maroon, just—heart-stopping,
the milkweed flower globes beloved of monarch butter-flies, and others. Heaven includes a few prairie celestials, magically opening in early in the afternoon, then vanishing by dusk.
Also, “Sweet Mademoiselle,” planted a couple of years ago, and who has never bloomed, produced her first rose!
Meanwhile, the ever-interloping cactus hope to assuage my fury at them (remember those secretly spreading roots and the huge basal “plates” that help the Cactus Conspiracy spread?) by popping open their yellow flowers. I am not fooled. I’ll continue to battle them with shovel and hoe. And a picker-upper.
See? Perfectly possible. It’s still wild out here in the Hill Country, even as suburbs press upon us. At dusk I often find myself glancing at the edge of the drop-off behind the house, wondering if I’ll see a pair of ears. You can say mountain lion, puma, cougar…they’re secretive, strong, and active in the spring.
But the big cat I once saw on Bell Springs Road west of here was likely a large bobcat. I was alone, driving home from the post office. Up ahead a golden vision, spotted, walked slowly to the edge of the asphalt. I stopped. The cat stood, gazed at me, and after a breathless (for me) interval, gracefully turned and vanished through a fence into thick cedar. A magical moment. Every time I drive that road, I hold my breath, longing for one more sighting of something looking like this:
ANCIENT BONES? I wrote about old bones in my Ghost Bones (2024)—and now have learned that our Hays County police deal with ancient bones more often than you’d think. One resident recently called to report she’d found a skull in her firepit. The skull, with its lower jaw present, was obviously fairly old, but in an unexplained death Hays County is not permitted to send a body to the Travis County Medical Examiner without including the name of the person whose skull it is. (Hays County doesn’t have its own medical examiner.) So this skull traveled instead to Texas State anthropologists who reported, after testing, that the skull apparently belonged to a long, long-ago teenager who’d gone through hard times, as was evident from the “enamel lines” (a bit like tree rings) in the teeth.
But how it wound up in that firepit? So far as I know, that’s still a mystery. We forget—until reminded by a skull in a firepit—how long humans have roamed these hills, drawn by hunger and thirst to spring water and the hunt for food.
We also forget the age and history of this landscape. Some trees have sheltered native Americans, deer, and buffalo. The Columbus Live Oak near the Colorado River in Columbus is estimated to be over 500 years old. Others may be as old as 1,000 years.
I revere the live oak in our front yard as if it were a beloved ancient relative and a symbol of stability and the power of trees. If anything were to happen to it—woe! I tried to estimate its age—using the calculator instruction to measure girth in inches at 4.5 feet, divide by pi, then multiply by a “growth factor” of 4, which gave me 127 years old. Perhaps this tree was a sapling in 1900, before either World War, before the Viet Nam war, before our current fraught politics. On a nearby hill there’s an ancient patch of even bigger live oaks. Perhaps those particular oaks depend on the odd little ribbon of wet white clay that lies about five feet underground and has been there—who knows how long. But the feeling of walking in beneath these old live oaks can confer a sense of being in the protection of one’s elders.
So, welcome to the Hill Country in spring—southeasterly winds from the Gulf, blowing the flowers back and forth; reasonably moderate temperatures; fields and trees as green as green, as far as you can see. At the bird feeder, more color! Purple house finch, yellow-throated vireo, lesser goldfinch with brilliant gold breasts, vermilion cardinals, black-crested titmouse, white-winged dove—and the shy and tiny, but utterly gorgeous, painted bunting. (Reportedly it loves millet.) They provide not just color but music, from the titmouse, the tiny but high-volume Carolina wren, plaintive doves, whistling cardinals, and, at night, chuck-will’s-widow.
Not for long, of course. In winter ice can wreak havoc on trees and people. Summer sun? Scorching. Autumn? Nothing like the colors of New England, but hey—the sumac turns red. So welcome, Spring, with your bluebonnets and live oaks, with bird music and color, and with your reminder of the power and beauty of nature!
Progress report: madly working on Book 10 of the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series, set in the Hill Country. Have ordered “Forest Bathing” by Dr. Qing Li. Would enjoy hearing what you all are reading too, and any reports of “forest bathing”!
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She remains deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party.
“An excess of animal spirits”–springtime! Really? Molly Ivins was right as usual when she wrote, “Texas–land of wretched excess!” We’ve had ridiculous lows, unseen for decades. Early daffodils and hyacinths came, shivered, and shriveled in the unholy cold winds roaring across the plains. But we’ve also had the earliest 90 degrees in decades! Wretched excess indeed!
Just two days until the vernal equinox on March 19, and spring. What makes us wander outside, searching for the first bluebonnet, the first violet? What makes us huddle outside the garden store, searching through the little plants shivering in the breeze, fingering seed packets, carrying home small pots of basil and blue salvia even though the weather’s far too untrustworthy for planting? What is this proto-agricultural spirit that makes us lug home the potting soil, hoe the garden bed? More sunlight? Cabin fever? Some early human gene? We, the Animal Kingdom, working with the Plant Kingdom?
I’m rereading Barry Cunliffe’s Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000 (https://amzn.to/3RfJzj6), a book I value not just for the stunning photographs of prehistoric sites and art, but for describing a history of human inventiveness. Cunliffe, Oxford Professor Emeritus of Archeology since 2007 (many books–– https://bit.ly/3XZkmNA), says “massive transformation” occurred in Europe between 1300-800 BC. Population growth required developing more crops than wheat and barley, including lentils, peas and—“the celtic bean (Vicia faba).”
Immediately I ordered a giant pack of fava bean seeds.
Then I read the label: they’re mostly a winter crop–but this year I’m desperate. With last year’s blistering hot drought, I wound up with only one pot of cherry tomatoes on the porch and a dozen wilting jalapeno plants in the garden. Cunliffe’s reference to Vicia faba fired my imagination—envisioning myself harvesting large fuzzy green pods, containing delectable beans, and adding a little vinaigrette…olive oil (since 4000 BC) and vinegar (3000 BC). Using an ancient bean and ancient vinaigrette recipe! Possibly those beans were harvested, and the vinaigrette shaken, by some long-ago ancestor 3000 years ago, making me wonder if we have genetic preferences, genetic recipe roots? After all, we of the Animal Kingdom depend on the Plant Kingdom (oxygen, vinaigrette, and wine!).
Mysteries offer escape—a protagonist we like, an intriguing plot, a vivid setting. Like plants, favorite old mysteries offer much when we revisit. Mystery writers? They’re good to “talk to.” This morning I discovered on the shelf my dad’s 1934 Modern Library edition of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, with a brief bio and the “new introduction” by Hammett.
I didn’t know Hammett had worked as an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency before he started writing! “Drifting through a miscellany of ill-paid jobs, he found a temporary solution to his economic problem by shadowing real malefactors with what might be called conspicuous success.” Then came the World War: “He won a sergeantcy and lost his health.”
Hammett can remember where he got his characters. Here’s a snippet of what he says about The Maltese Falcon:
“Dundy’s prototype I worked with in a North Carolina railroad yard; Cairo’s I picked up on a forgery charge in Pasco, Washington, in 1920; Polhous’s was a former captain of detectives…Effie’s once asked me to go into the narcotic smuggling business with her in San Diego…”
Hammett then muses about his own protagonist. “Spade had no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not—or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague—want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.”
What a great description, and didn’t Humphrey Bogart nail it?
It strikes me that this new character of his upended the vision of the members of the London 1930 Detectives Club—Hammett gave the wide-eyed mystery audience a protagonist who is not a secret member of the aristocracy (Albert Campion) or a perfect gentleman (Roderick Alleyn) or a hyper-particular French veteran drinking tea and waxing his moustache (Hercule Poirot)…but a “hard and shifty fellow…able to get the best of anybody.” Welcome to the New World’s new-style mystery protagonists, the children of Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Sara Paretzky and others…including that hybrid protagonist, Mary Russell, in Laurie King’s Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series.
For Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, the scent of honey is a repeat theme (her Holmes is a beekeeper). I like her Holmes, I like her Russell, and just finished her Garment of Shadows (2012). https://bit.ly/4iTwmYZ King has chosen a fascinating and ambitious setting: the 1920’s, with Spain and France fighting for control of Morocco, each coveting its crucial strategic location at Gibraltar, while various Moroccan groups—Berber and otherwise—fight for independence. King uses first person point of view for Mary Russell, who’s suffering from acute amnesia—forgetting her childhood and even her marriage––but uses third person POV for Holmes’s chapters. Those shifts sometimes confused me. But her depth of history and geography, and her vivid descriptions of the magical city of Fez with its souk, bring the setting alive. Mary Russell herself has become quite a protagonist, with linguistic skills—including Arabic––and the imagination and drive to devise a daring escape from a horrible prison. I’d like to learn knife-throwing like Mary Russell (she keeps one in her boot) but the likelihood seems dim.
Writer/theologian Bruce Reyes-Chow mentioned how, when stuck, he’d “talk through ideas with myself, my plants…” I intend to follow his lead. On our deck sit five jasmine plants we’ve toted around since the seventies. I think they sometimes do communicate with me—“I’m dry-y-y-y!” But from now on, when I’m stuck on a plot, I’ll go consult them. Every spring, those jasmine produce tiny white flowers with an unmatchable scent. In search of even more scent, this year I’ve planted another mix of old and new. Rose de Recht is a fragrant pink heirloom damask, Fragrant Blush promises pink perfume, and Star of the Republic is tough, like her name, but delicate pink with exquisite fragrance.
And now suddenly the redbuds, with their irresistible yet evanescent fuchsia buds, are blooming. I’ve seen our first bluebonnet,
and the first purple prairie verbena. The live oaks know it’s almost the equinox—they’ve flung down their old leaves (aided by the fierce winds) and are preparing their catkins and baby leaves. The cedar elms have put out tiny chartreuse leaves just in the last two days.
So it’s spring! Grab that trowel! And after all your work, you deserve to loll on the couch at night with a good mystery. I’m halfway through the tenth book in my Hill Country murder mystery series. This one raises a question I find intriguing and difficult. Can justice be served when, unauthorized to pronounce justice, we take justice into our own hands? Is that still justice? I’m discussing it with the plants. More to come….
Here are Helen, Noreen Cedeno, and Juanita Houston at the Texas Book Festival!–Heart of Texas Sisters in Crime
Award-winning Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series (9 volumes so far) north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s working on Book 10. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party.
Brr!! It’s so cold the foxes are prowling the front yard looking for snacks and the birds are up at dawn waiting for their humans to show up with the bird feeders.
Dawn and twilight, twilight and dawn: Out here in the Hill Country, planets and stars still visit regularly. Lately Mars (on Jan. 12 it came as close to us as it gets, every couple of years) has been showing off after dark in the eastern sky, glowing orange-red like a war god’s shield. Jupiter rises high above, competing on brightness with Venus off in the west. Last week Venus revealed itself above the sunset, above rows of pink clouds like swishing skirts below. Close to Venus but a bit “left” or south you can spot Saturn (admittedly I get help from the Skyview app)—small and far away but Saturn still hopes we’ll at least leave a comment in the planetary visitor’s book. I find it both exciting and comforting that out here we still can see planets, unbothered by earthly chaos, spinning through space, away from us, then back again. (If lights are encroaching on your nights, consider joining Dark Sky!)
Which takes me back to our earlier sky-watching ancestors. Housebound this icy weekend, I found myself checked 23andMe and discovered I have the first in a list of Neanderthal gene variants, tactfully (really beautifully) described as: “…one variant associated with having difficulty discarding rarely-used possessions.”
Spang on! So true! I know some of you readers are fully capable of blithely opening a dusty box of someone’s old t-shirts and thinking—does he really want to keep his t-shirt from basketball camp thirty years ago? Surely not. Off to Goodwill!
But because that shirt unearthed memories of stories of basketball camp, my Neanderthal variant ordered, “put that box back on the shelf!”
Still, in our “too much stuff” world, while 23andMe offered a tactful way to describe this Neanderthal variant, perhaps a more useful term is—“difficulty discarding memory-stirring possessions.”
Maybe your home (like mine) also holds a number of “rarely-used possessions.” For Marie Kondo the operative question was “does it evoke joy?” My new question for the “rarely-used possession” is, does this actually stir memories? What “memory containers” do we really, truly, keep going back to? Not just keep, but go back to? Pick up and look at again? And remember?
For me? Not old diaries. Certainly not yearbooks. Nor even boxes of pictures. But certain old clothes do remind me of memories and milestones: the suit bought for interviewing during law school. A treasured fleece from a rowing competition. Even childhood clothes that are long-gone live in memory—the sweater a grandmother knitted (second grade), the scratchy little swimsuit for swimming in a mountain lake (third grade), the blouse saved for with baby-sitting money.
Other sources of memories, similarly intangible? Music, of course, especially if dancing was involved! First time slow-dancing in seventh grade! First time at the Broken Spoke, trying the Cotton-Eye Joe! Sam’s Town Point on a perfect night–– https://www.samstownpointatx.com/––with Floyd Domino and the All-Stars and everyone dancing! http://www.floyddomino.com/dates-news.html Do dance memories stick in your head too?
One cache of memories I desperately wish I had––and you might too––involves the night-time communal dances of the San people of the Kalahari, in southern Africa. These memories are vividly described in Once Upon a Time Is Now, A Kalahari Memoir,
by the extraordinarily distinguished anthropologist Dr. Megan Biesele, a treasured friend. https://amzn.to/4at9o8o Megan lived with the San people and on many, many nights watched them engaged for hours of singing, dancing, retelling traditional stories—and healing. She describes the synchrony of the dance around the fire:
“Anything…could happen as the people took up the tools…of their voices and their hands, their legs and their feet, their knowledge of each other, and of their reliable power to create, with each other, a force for heath and peace. As the voices blended in a polyphony of endless incremental variation, as the powerful stamping of the men’s feet took them in measured, inexorable progress around and around the dance circle, I felt the waves of energy…it was impossible not to become linked to the process myself. [P]eople seemed with each movement, each note of singing, to call out to each other and to receive instantaneous response…. Every dark night could become a bright night of the soul.” (Id. at 173-4)
I still haven’t figured out how to get Alice, my protagonist in the Ghost mystery series set in the Texas Hill Country, to the Kalahari. She and her beau, Ben Kinsear, would really like to go. Meanwhile they will keep dancing at the Beer Barn, in Coffee Creek. Also, Alice still keeps her kids’ baby clothes, and one of her mother’s hand-made dresses, and the white Gibson-girl dress her great-grandmother wore back before WWI.
But maybe I’ll take a spring-cleaning-vow for a box or two. Watch this space.
Meanwhile, remember the birds can lose 10% of their weight just keeping warm on a frigid night. Keep your feeders filled! And stay warm!
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the award-winning Alice MacDonald Greer mystery series in the Texas Hill Country, north of Dripping Springs, loosely supervised by three burros. Coming soon–Book 10 in the series!
New reads! If, like me, you desperately miss John le Carré, consider A Spy Alone, the 2023 debut spy thriller by Charles Beaumont, a field operative veteran of Britain’s MI-6. https://bit.ly/3ZzHjHs His premise is fascinating: we know of the “Cambridge Five” who spied for Russia from the 1930’s to 1950’s—Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Five But has there ever been, or could there be, a spy ring linked to Oxford? Beaumont’s protagonist Simon Sharman feels real, right from the first page:
“It is their shoes that give them away. As a lifelong fieldman, Simon Sharman hasn’t forgotten the lesson: walkers might change their jackets, pull on a pair of glasses, even a wig. But nobody changes their shoes on a job. Look at their shoes.
I was hooked. Warning: Beaumont’s book is contemporary, well-written, tense, and may interfere with sleep.
Two other recent reads: old adventure and a new “adult fantasy.” I’d never heard of The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson (1954). Set from 980 to 1010 A.D., the book recounts the wide-ranging adventures of Norseman Red Orm Tostesson, and the collision between Christian priests (the “shaven men”) and the Norse culture of Skania at the south tip of Sweden. Now I know what it meant to go “a-viking”—to go sea-raiding! 500 pages, with Red, a very engaging Norseman. Great maps, too.
The Lost Bookshop, by Evie Woods (2024),offers time travel between the 1920’s and 30’s in Britain, and the present; a search for a lost Brontë manuscript; a disappearing attic; and disappearing and reappearing characters.
I confess I flipped through big chunks, relieved when true love finally won out after two women, generations apart, survive appalling treatment. The disappearing attic reminded me of Susan Cooper’s Over Sea, Under Stone,
and of course the wardrobe into Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I’m always up for secret doors.
I’m rereading a fascinating and fairly demanding study by Graham Robb, who has probably bicycled and walked further in Britain and France than most humans.
In The Search for Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts (2013), he describes how the Keltoi, or Celts, developed a system of surveying based on a midline transected by the lines of the summer and winter solstice to estimate travel distances and times—a feat not replicated for centuries. He maps the Heraklean Way, the path from southwestern Iberia that runs northeast across the Pyrenees to the Alps along the diagonal of the solstice sun, which Hannibal took when he invaded Italia. He describes Druid schooling (20 years to learn) and maps out protohistoric forts which turn out to lie along survey lines. He provides amazing maps. Two ongoing lessons from Robb’s devoted research: the winners write history; and humans tend to underestimate the accomplishments of earlier civilizations.
Several of you asked about the three burros, given the recent cold snap. Thank you, they’re well. Their hair’s not waterproof so in cold rain they gather on the south side of the stable, under the roof, safe from rain and the north wind. They were relieved to see green grass again after the drought broke, but they’re also eating—and rolling in––green hay. And mud!
Yet despite hay, they gather outside the gate every morning and afternoon for carrots. They consider this part of their deal.
Burros are curious. They amble over to watch us garden and hang up laundry. They need company. They graze near each other. They may live into their 40’s. Sebastian, the short stubby knock-kneed male who invited himself to live here, may be 35 or more. Amanda (who insists I tell you she’s registered, with papers)may be 20. Her daughter Caroline is 12. Sebastian deems it his duty to bray loudly when any person or car appears at the end of the driveway, and to welcome the sun every morning with a stunningly loud bray. Now both Amanda and Caroline have begun to bray occasionally.
Only donkeys can bray. Unlike horses or zebras, donkeys begin a bray on the inhale and continue braying on the exhale. They have great hearing—supposedly they can hear another donkey bray 60 miles away.
They especially detest canids and will attack, dance on and kick dogs, coyotes, bobcats, foxes. A spooked horse will run away: donkeys stand together until they decide what they’re going to do. This morning, leaving for the post office, I saw the three donkeys standing together, knees locked, ears cocked, eyes fixed on two trespassing dogs who’d strayed across the cattleguard and into the donkeys’ domain.
The dogs immediately acknowledged their gross error of judgment, raced frantically away and never returned.
If donkeys could read (wait—maybe they can, but have trouble turning the pages), I predict they’d prefer mysteries. They enjoy puzzles (like how to lift the chain and invade the fenced garden).
Humans and donkeys. We are both curious animals.
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery Series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party! Currently she’s working on Book 10. Her protagonist, Alice, gets into legal drama, and matters of the heart. Alice does have a treehouse…
The mystery is solved! In my search for what I recalled as “the “Blitzkuchen” once served at Schwamkrug’s outside New Braunfels, in the Texas Hill Country, I had the name wrong. It’s a blitz torte, not a blitz kuchen! Several readers sent recipes from German cookbooks indicating that “Blitzkuchen” is a quick cake, usually one layer only. My memory, though? A tall two-layer confection, baked with meringue and almond flakes on top and between the layers! And in my memory, more meringue on the outside, plus some moistness in the filling.
Online I found Oma Gerhild’s “Oma’s Blitz Torte Recipe ––Lightning Cake.” https://www.quick-german-recipes.com/german-blitz-torte-recipe.html Each almond-flavored layer is baked with meringue and sliced almonds on top of the batter. The recipe offers either custard filling or whipped cream filling. I opted to finish off with whipped cream with powdered sugar and vanilla, not just inside, but around the cake (and in blobs all around the kitchen).
FINALLY! First, that lovely almond taste. Plus, everyone at the table now wore an attractive little white mustache of whipped cream. You don’t get that with a madeleine and a cup of tea, do you, M. Proust?
As October runs into November, Texas Hill Country towns are celebrating Oktoberfest, or, in New Braunfels, Wurstfest. Normally by now our trees would show some fall color––nothing like New England, of course. The cypresses by Lake Austin are turning bronze. Out here north of Dripping Springs, the possum haws are showing their red berries. The cedar elms turned bright yellow, then slowly lost their leaves. The live oaks, thankfully, stay green.
But this year? Drought brings bad news for trees. Cypress-lined creeks are dry…the cypresses’ arched roots groping into the earth for water. Downhill at our place Barton Creek is dry, and I mean dry, with only occasional small pools. Up on the limestone plateau the leaves on some smaller saplings just turned brown and fluttered to the ground, with the tree already looking dead. We’re watering, but in Stage 2 drought restrictions. Will our wells run dry? Have we drained the Trinity aquifers that lie hundreds of feet below?
So, to general geopolitical angst, I’ve added…tree worry.
Trees in books play such a role in our imaginations. After reading Johann David Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson (1812)—where the shipwrecked family builds a tree-house on their desert island––I always wanted to live in a tree-house! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swiss_Family_Robinson We’re drawn to forests, home of the trees—scary, but sometimes the safest place. In The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White (1939), first of the four volumes that make up The Once and Future King, the Wart (the young Arthur, under Merlin’s tutelage) and Kay meet Little John who tells them about Robin Wood (explaining why it’s not “Robin Hood” and why he lives in the woods (or “‘oods”):
“They’m free pleaces, the ‘oods, and fine pleaces. Let thee sleep in ‘em, come summer, come winter, withouten brick nor thatch, and huntin’ ‘em for thy commons lest thee starve; and smell to ‘em with the good earth in the springtime; and number of ‘em as they brings forward their comely bright leaves, according to order…”
There the boys, the future King and Sir Kay, approach “the monarch of the forest. It was a lime tree as great as that which used to grow at Moor Park in Herefordshire, no less than one hundred feet in height and seventeen feet in girth, a yard above the ground….” Headquarters for Robin Wood and Maid Marian! And there begins a great and perilous adventure for Kay and Wart, who break into the castle of Morgan le Fay, Queen of Air and Darkness—to rescue prisoners paralyzed by magic. (Speaking of paralyzed victims of witches—note how C.S. Lewis later describes turned-to-stone courtyard figures in his first foray into fantasy, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950).)
One writer, Elisabeth Brewer, notes that “The Sword in the Stone shows a passion for trees that White shared with Tolkien. https://bit.ly/3Ceqk. How about the Ents we meet in Fangorn Forest, in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth? Trees that walk…and tend other trees. Not all trees are benign––including the wicked old willow which captures Frodo and friends (rescued by Tom Bombadil).
I’m reading a fascinating graphic (yes, graphic!) book about Tolkien and his close friend C.S. Lewis: The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, by John Hendrix. https://bit.ly/4hqiyFr
Tolkien and Lewis met in 1929 in Oxford, where they were, famously, members of a writers’ group, the Inklings, and shared many hours at The Eagle and Child. That’s not all they shared. In 1916, both men experienced horrific warfare on the Western Front in France. Young and just married, Tolkien fought in the trenches, then contracted life-threatening trench fever. At nineteen, Lewis was wounded by shrapnel (from friendly fire) on the Somme, and carried shrapnel in his body the rest of his life. Hendrix’s wonderful book uncovers the sort of salvation two disillusioned veterans found in the healing power of imagination, including Norse mythology and the European fairy tale. Tolkien knew of Yggdrasil, the sacred ash tree central to Norse mythology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil; https://dc.swosu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2130&context=mythlore
And how the worlds created by Lewis and Tolkien fired our imaginations! The fantasy world of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia emerged when The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published (1950). Tolkien’s The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, was first published in 1937 but became a pop-culture phenomenon only in 1960’s, when the paperback edition became available. https://time.com/4941811/hobbit-anniversary-1937-reviews/
Both Lewis and Tolkien had copies of The Sword in the Stone early on. Indeed, in 1939 it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. T. H. White 1964 obituary, https://nyti.ms/4hlasht. Curiously, Hendrix’s book on Tolkien and Lewis doesn’t mention T. H. White, perhaps because Hendrix focuses on the impact of war; T.H. White 1906-1964) was born too late to serve in World War I. Nor was he an Oxonian. While C.S. Lewis reportedly disparaged The Sword in the Stone in 1940, he later invited T. H. White to the Inklings if he ever visited Oxford. https://bit.ly/4f4wcww (“Dickieson post”). Perhaps Hendrix doesn’t mention T. H. White because unlike Tolkien and Lewis, though he creates a fantasy world, White grounds The Once and Future King firmly in England.
But Elisabeth Brewer commented in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King that The Sword in the Stone shows a passion for trees that White shared with Tolkien. (Dickieson post.)
What about powerful trees in more recent books? Consider the Whomping Willow, in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Wizard of Azkaban? https://bit.ly/4f1koex Magic—but terrorizing—it reveals the secret passage which ultimately allows Harry and friends to discover––well, remember? Indeed, Harry reminds us of T. H. White’s Wart, both with an earnest determination to do right, and a magical tutor.
Maybe children are especially open to tree power because they still climb trees. My dad swooped us off to grad school in Atlanta, and then to Charlotte, before we moved back to Texas. In the southeast I discovered the power of pine trees. We children built an admirable and secret treehouse in the woods, where we surveyed the world from on high. No parents came near to scold or warn: deep in the trees we ruled our own domain. Later in Carolina at eleven, I could climb the neighbors’ big back yard pine all the way to the top. The tree swayed slowly back and forth, but I could see the entire neighborhood and beyond. Tree power.
The way live oaks vary their leaves makes identification tough. On the Edwards Plateau, the species passes into the “shrubby Texas Live Oak”—shorter with smaller trunks: “…[I]ntermediate forms occur between the variety and the species and the distinctions are often difficult,” per Robert Vines, Trees, Shrubs and Woody Vines of the Southwest (1960). Well, thanks.
Now, in drought, with grass turned grayish tan, with dirt powder-dry beneath our feet, we treasure the blessed green of live oaks, often home to swings and hammocks, and providing wide shade to houses, pastures, and somnolent cattle.
Trees inspire us. We know Shakespeare’s song: “Under the greenwood tree, who loves to lie with me…” (As You Like It). The first poem in Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir begins, “I go among trees and sit still.”
Mary Oliver’s “Honey Locust” begins,
“Who can tell how lovely in June is the
honey locust tree, or why
A tree should be so sweet and live
in this world?”
Robert Frost knows his trees: The Road Not Taken, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Tree at My Window, Spring Pools, so many. Of course, his Birches:
“When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them…”
Frost makes it easy to imagine “some boy” swinging the birches—or Frost imagining that, as he marched through a yellow wood.
And then e.e. cummings, My Father Moved Through Dooms of Love—I like this verse:
“My father moved through theys of we,
Singing each new leaf out of each tree
(and every child was sure that spring
Danced when she heard my father sing)”
And Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall:
“Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?”
Yes, trees: later in the poem we find when “worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.”
The forecast calls for rain. Please cross your fingers.
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery Series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. Currently she’s working on Book 10. Her protagonist, Alice, gets into legal drama, and matters of the heart. Alice does have a treehouse.
I wasn’t going to mention the dreadful heat. But facing August in Texas requires early rising. And early this morning came two in-spite-of-the-heat surprises. First, moonset of the August Supermoon:
Second, a tiny frog, less than an inch long, sitting quietly in the shade. Could it be a Texas cricket frog? Maybe some frog-maven will know. Can you spot it here, on the big rock?
Another treasure: an email from a reader who’d read Ghost Cave, first book in my Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series, and wanted the recipe for the coffee cake served by Alice’s redoubtable elderly friend Ilka:
They settled at the tea table. Ilka poured. Bone china, thin and old, the glaze crazed. Like Ilka’s face and hands, thought Alice. The cake stand held something Alice had never seen—a pale smooth yeasty-smelling cake with thin cinnamon topping…
“Oh, goodness, Ilka,” said Alice. “What is that?” The yeast dough, ivory and fragrant, left a mysterious fragrance in the air.
“Cardamom,” said Ilka.
Yikes! I had to tell the inquiring reader I had no recipe! Only—a memory! As kids we were in awe of our neighbor Mrs. Slinn, up the street. She wore her hair pulled back in a bun and longish dresses and, I think, always an apron. When we scruffy little children approached her door she always offered cookies. (We still roll out her classic “teacake” sugar cookie dough to make Santas, snowmen, reindeer.)
But occasionally Mrs. Slinn swept down the street to our kitchen bringing magic: a round yeast coffee cake, no taller than 3 inches in the middle, ivory-gold with a delicate sprinkle of cinnamon and sugar on top. It smelled amazing and when cut into small wedges was absolutely delicious…
To this memory, in Ghost Cave, I’d added cardamom—not a spice we knew when I was little. But where to find a recipe for the inquiring reader?
THE READER HERSELF! She wrote back that she’d located cookbooks from Mason County, Texas (dated 1976), and Fredericksburg (12th edition–Fredericksburg cooks published their first cookbook in 1916!). Each included a recipe for “yeast coffee cake.” (The Fredericksburg recipes include the original names—like Apfelkuchen, Schnecken, Kolatschen.) Which is further proof that mystery readers themselves are bright, curious sleuths. And why hearing from readers is wonderful.
Below you’ll find a slightly modified recipe from the excerpts she sent, but with a little cardamom added.
At a recent book talk I called the relationship between mystery reader and mystery writer a collaboration. Indeed, a primary rule of the 1930 Detection Club in London was that any clue must be instantly produced for the reader. No holding back explanations or back story until the end of the book! Of course that rule was sometimes violated (yes, Madam Christie, we’re talking about you). In contrast, Christie’s contemporary, the New Zealander Ngaio Marsh, occasionally added some colorful backstory at the end, but she also generally had already given the reader fair notice of the clues that identify the murderer.
In her series featuring the elegant Scotland Yard sleuth Roderick Alleyn, Marsh typically begins with the setting––often provided by a variety of characters––of the site where murder will inevitably take place, either in England or New Zealand. The setting could be an artist’s colony (“Colour Scheme”), a tour boat on an English river, a village church hall, a pub, a guest house in New Zealand, an elegant country house (“Dancing Footman”), the London apartment of a practically bankrupt upper-class family (no one seems to have a job) (“Surfeit of Lampreys”). Thus when we open a Marsh mystery, first we meet the potential suspects, including one we may hope is innocent, may hope is truthful. Then comes a seriously tricky murder. (Did someone disturb the fly rod on the wall? Why?) At that point Inspector Alleyn arrives, with his sidekick Fox and the crime scene specialists. For the competitive mystery reader—collaborating with the author to detect the murderer–each detail matters and is promptly disclosed. But who lied? Who was mistaken?
Rest assured Marsh knew her subject matter and her settings: she was an artist, an actor and a theatre director as well as a writer. She lived and worked in England as well as New Zealand. She was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1966. The Mystery Writers of America bestowed the Grand Master Award for her lifetime achievement as a mystery novelist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngaio_Marsh I suspect her character Agatha Troy (an artist who finally marries Alleyn) may be in part a portrait of Marsh.
Marsh’s first book came out in 1934, featuring Alleyn as the upper-class “grandee” who resigned from the foreign service to join Scotland Yard. By then a different sort of sleuth was emerging in the U.S. In 1930 Dashiell Hammett published The Maltese Falcon and we met Sam Spade. In 1933 Raymond Chandler, like Hammett, was already publishing in The Black Mask magazine, and in 1939 he published The Big Sleep, presenting Philip Marlowe. Decades later the mystery genre continues to grow and grow: Noir! Culinary mysteries! Cozies! Mysteries narrated by dogs! (Spencer Quinn’s Chet and Bernie series.) Cowboy mysteries! Fantasy/sci-fi/mystery! Sleuths in Laos, China, Australia, Scandinavia, Russia, Alaska, Louisiana, national parks, Native American reservations. Edinburgh! The Shetlands! Botswana! Canada! Italy! France! Israel! Scandinavia! Legal thrillers! Spy thrillers! What a wealth of mysteries for us to enjoy.
What about the Texas Hill Country? In her latest adventure, Ghost Bones, lawyer Alice MacDonald Greer grapples with the murder of a deeply respected judge. His death was apparently triggered by his efforts to solve the murders of six people on his property almost two centuries ago. Alice needs all the help she can get from her irrepressible assistant, Silla, and from Ben Kinsear, as she tangles with mystery, legal drama, and matters of the heart.
And a request: if you can identify the tiny froglet above, please share the name!
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and prehistory, and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. Follow her at www.helen.currie.foster.com.
Nearly Mrs. Slinn’s Coffee Cake, with thanks to a wonderful reader and the cooks of Mason and Fredericksburg!
3/8 c. milk; 2 Tbls. sugar; 1/2 tsp. salt; 1/4 c. butter; 1 beaten egg; 2 tsp. dry yeast; 1 1/2 Tbls. warm water; 1 5sp ground cardamom; 1 3/4 c. flour, plus additional melted butter (about 2 Tbls.) and sugar-cinnamon mixture for topping (about 1 tsp cinnamon to 1/3 c sugar)
Scald milk and pour over the butter, salt and sugar. Stir and let stand until lukewarm. Dissolve yeast in warm water for 5 minutes. Stir egg and yeast mixture into milk mixture. Stir in 1 tsp cardamom and 1 cup of flour. Beat well. Continue adding remaining flour. Put dough on lightly floured board and knead until smooth (add a bit more flour if too sticky). Place in greased bowl, cover, and let double in size. Then punch down.
Butter bottom and sides of round 8” pan. Put parchment paper in the bottom. Pat in dough. Brush with melted butter and sprinkle on the sugar/cinnamon mixture. Let rise again until double in size. Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes or until just turning golden. Let cool. Serve it forth!
A treat awaits at the end of the Audible recording of The Last Devil to Die, Book 4 in Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series. https://bit.ly/4bJ55EP
The narrator, actress Fiona Shaw, interviewed Osman, who declared that, like so many of us, he believes in Stephen King’s On Writing. Thus his commitment: “Use no adverbs!” As Osman works on a scene he asks—“Is the scene propelling the action”? If not—out it goes. And how to propel the action? “Do it all with dialogue!”
I still believe mystery readers need to love (or at least like, or at the very least admire) their favorite protagonists. Osman says he loves his characters. He tells Shaw that he knows how each one talks. If you’ve read any of the Thursday Murder Club series you know that each character has a distinctive voice. Elizabeth, the retired spy, does not sound like Joyce, the voluble diary-writer, or Ibrahim, the psychiatrist, or Ron, the finally-grown-up Tough Guy. Or Bogdan, the mysterious and indispensable…sometime criminal? Osman issues a challenge to fellow writers: consider what you yourself, or a particular character, would not say? (And maybe—what happens when you—or they––do say it?)
Another treat—this month we have two new books to relish! Daniel Silva gives us A Death in Cornwall, with his now retired Israeli spy Gabriel Allon rebuilding his original life as a restorer of old paintings. https://bit.ly/3LoP7Vz Donna Leon presents Commissario Brunetti in A Refiner’s Fire, confronting and trying to understand youth gangs terrorizing the antique squares of Venice. https://bit.ly/46duLIE Both books center on highly contemporary topics tied to—you guessed it—old sins in old wars.
Daniel Silva takes us on a deep dive into the almost unimaginably corrupt world of the ultra-rich, centered on the Geneva Freeport, where, Silva explains in his Author’s Note, 1.2 million paintings are stored, including more than a thousand by Picasso. Silva doesn’t mince words in describing one way the planet’s ultrarich escape paying taxes: they rent vaults at the Freeport using anonymous shell companies and avoid taxation if they sell paintings (or other assets) to another offshore anonymous shell company—in “transactions largely invisible to tax authorities.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Freeport
A darker side to the Freeport vaults? Hiding works stolen from European Jews before and during World War II, with new “provenances” and new histories. Silva engages us from the beginning with Allon’s return to the Cornwall setting, the mysterious light burning in the cottage of a British art expert who has identified a Picasso stolen in 1943, and the return of young Timothy Peel, a lonely Cornwall lad befriended by Allon years earlier, and now an exceptionally able young policeman.
Add in a corruption issue involving British politics and Russian oligarchs and I predict you’ll be turning the pages. The famous spy doesn’t work singlehandedly, either—we travel to Corsica to find Allon’s mysterious colleague Christopher, then to Monaco with the computer whiz Ingrid, ready to steal documents from the Freeport, and then? As to telling the story with dialogue, and a separate voice for each character, maybe the way Allon chooses what not to say is what pushes the action.
Three days ago I picked up Donna Leon’s new A Refiner’s Fire at 8 a.m. Then I could not put it down. The first chapter starts fast (in a dark Venetian piazza), then accelerates. Meanwhile, Leon must reintroduce her characters. Her mastery of dialogue lights them up. One example: Commissario Brunetti must tread cautiously around Vice-Questore Patta, the vain and arrogant head of the police and not a Venetian, hence untrustworthy. Patta has lost at least five kilos in a new training program at a gym. A colleague tells Brunetti she overheard a compliment paid to Patta by the subtle and dazzling Signorina Elettra, the secretary who quietly controls the entire Questura office. Patta wore a new suit one day; Elettra admired it, saying “it was bolder than what he usually wore,” “[b]ecause it was single-breasted and thus more . . . revealing.” Elettra then complimented Patta “on his dedication to his vitality programme.” Brunetti whispers: “The Vice-Questore’s ‘vitality programme.’” He shakes his head a few times, “marvelling at Signorina Elettra’s ability to seduce people with a few kind words.” This exchange—combining a very Venetian fixation on exquisite fashion with the subtlety with which Elettra manages her boss––leave no doubt that she will also manage to extract from top-secret national computer systems the information Brunetti will need to resolve the crime wave Venice faces.
As in A Death in Cornwall, A Refiner’s Fire links new crimes––ongoing midnight gang battles and a vicious attack on the elderly Questura crime scene officer––to old crimes, committed during Italy’s participation in the Iraq war.
One more recommendation. I reread Dog Will Have His Day, from the Three Evangelists series by French archeologist-mystery writer Fred Vargas, set in Paris and Brittany. https://bit.ly/3WlR7nT This time our protagonist, Louis Kehrweiler, bears the psychic wounds of an old war, World War II, with a German father and French mother. Kehrweiler is still investigating crimes by certain government officials—even though he’s been dismissed from the investigating ministry, he keeps watch over certain apartment buildings where potential targets live. When the book opens he’s watching people who walk their dogs, because he has found dog excrement on a grate by a bench…and then, after rain, when the excrement is rained away, he’s found that a bone remains. A bone from a human toe. Now he’s looking for the dog–and the victim. I found myself liking Kehrweiler a great deal—he’s a subtly drawn character. And Vargas? Oh, you must mean Fréderique Audoin-Rouzeau, French archeologist, historian and novelist, known for her work on the Black Death. and wildly creative with deep roots in French legends, tales, and countryside. https://www.fpa.es/en/princess-of-asturias-awards/laureates/2018-fred-vargas.html?texto=trayectoria&especifica=1;https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/jul/17/fred-vargas-deserves-prizes
Writers and readers both can enjoy Foul Matter, a 2004 sendup of the New York publishing world by Martha Grimes, author of the 25-book Richard Jury mystery series. https://bit.ly/3WnoqqJ
(“Foul matter” is a sarcastic term for original manuscripts, galleys, and proofs which have been superseded by revised (i.e. edited) versions or the bound book and returned by the printer to the publisher.) Grimes’s Foul Matter threatens to morph into a murder mystery, even a thriller, while making fun of genre classifications and publisher behavior. The plot begins with a wildly successful author engaged in his own devious plot. His first step: “What Paul needed was hard to find: a pure writer.” He meant “a writer of a certain kind, one who didn’t really think about the arena of publishing.”
It’s fun to hear Foul Matter’s characters comment on their writing processes. One hates writers’ retreats, “Because we love to complain about not having enough time, or that we lack a proper writing environment. We don’t want any more time, and any environment will do, if we’re honest. Writing’s just damn hard. It can be torturous.. I don’t want to torture myself any more than is absolutely required. Besides, can you imagine having to sit down to dinner with thirty or forty other writers?”
Another character mocks this “writing is torture” complaint: “You can’t be blocked if you just keep on writing words. Any words. People who get ‘blocked’ make the mistake of thinking they have to write good words.” She analogizes to Field of Dreams: “Write it, and they will come.” A would-be writer asks, “Do you need to start with an idea?” No, says one writer: “If you want to write a mystery, just start with a body draped over a gate.” But do you need talent? “You just take out your yellow legal pad and pen and just start.”
Okay, fellow writers. Laugh, then pick up your pens. I can say that since momentarily I’m in the wonderful space where a book has just come out—Ghost Bones! (Book 9 in the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series)—and a new book is just beginning to ferment.
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series, set in the iconic Texas Hill Country, north of Dripping Springs, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s active with Heart of Texas Sisters in Crime, Austin Shakespeare, and Hays County Master Naturalists.
This week I read with great interest a recent essay by Isabella Cho, Harvard undergrad studying poetry, titled “The Case for Indeterminacy.” Harvard Magazine, June 2024. Cho says that, with students anxiously piling into “useful” majors (computer science, engineering), the dismissive attitudes she sees toward humanities reflect an effort to appear to be “in the vanguard of innovation.” She constantly hears the refrain “What are you going to do with that?”
What is the importance of good writing? In publications that may not always occur to you? Don’t we need accurate truthful writing for all disciplines, all activities? Math, physics, biology, biochemistry, medicine, business strategy? And, of course, cooking!
I recently embarked on a personal campaign to resurrect a favorite taste from childhood: salt-rising bread. But after rereading the recipe for potato salt-rising bread several times in my iconic and hitherto unimpeachable cookbook, I had to conclude I could not tell whether the starter had to stay warm for 15 hours–or not. Did I have to rig up the heating pad and my thermometer? –or not? I have finally concluded I must chuck the resulting loaf off the back deck into the bushes. In this case, “indeterminacy” was unhelpful.
The loaf I’m gonna fling…
But as Isabella Cho points out, it’s worth wrestling with indeterminacy as well. And an indeterminate answer can also “do” something !
For example, what about poetry? “What can we do with that?”
Poetry can “do” on several levels. For example, take the tail end of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”
We can ask, “What did those words do?” And then we realize the poem did indeed do something. Made us think, made us wonder, made us speculate. Maybe even made us consider own our lives, our own choices. Frost’s words didn’t specify what “difference” the road choice made to the narrator of the poem. (Some “indeterminacy” there.) Instead, you and I may find ourselves wondering, thinking –about what difference a choice made–for ourselves.
Poetry can also present a description that is so stunningly accurate that we may think it could never be put any better. Emily Dickinson, with her 1800 or so poems, gave us unforgettable lines. “A narrow Fellow in the grass”–you’re already remembering that she “…never met this Fellow/Attended or alone/Without a tighter Breathing/and Zero at the Bone.” “Zero at the Bone!”
Yes, zero at the bone even with no rattles on its tail. And what about “I heard a fly buzz – when I died”? Yikes! We can hear that fly, we’re there in the room… Or “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”…
The impact of such lines goes beyond mere description. Poetic writing can also simply smack us upside the head. We can’t forget Shakespeare’s terse description in Julius Caesar, in iambic pentameter, when Caesar comments to Antony that “Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look,/ He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”
“A lean and hungry look.” Five little words! –and Shakespeare has told us all we need to know about this character. Cassius is not satisfied, is too hungry ever to be satisfied. The moment we heard those two lines in 10th grade English (or whenever), we knew precisely what Shakespeare meant. The words did something. They showed us what to watch for, when Cassius next walked onstage.
Prose can also “do.” It can make a character (mere words on a page) spring to life. In This Tender Land William Kent Krueger works this magic for Mose, the mute Sioux boy at the “Indian school” where two white boys, Albert and Odie, wound up during the Depression. Since Odie’s mother was deaf, Odie tells us, “even before I could speak, I could sign.” Now Mose has learned sign language as well, and when Odie plays a song like “Shenandoah” on his harmonica, here’s what happens:
“There was something poetic in Mose’s soul. When I played and he signed, his hands danced gracefully in the air and those unspoken words took on a delicate weight and a kind of beauty that I thought no voice could possibly have given them.”
I was instantly drawn to Mose. What a lyrical description not merely of the unsung words Mose puts to music, with his hands, but of the gracefulness of Odie’s duet with a boy who can’t utter a word.
Richard Osman’s fourth Thursday Murder Club novel, The Last Devil To Die, uses dialogue to depict the tender relationship between two characters at the retirement home, Elizabeth the spy, and her husband Stephen, now suffering from dementia. Stephen lies with his head in Elizabeth’s lap:
“I understand this,” says Elizabeth. “For all the words in the world, when I go to sleep tonight, my hand won’t be in yours. That’s all I understand.” “You have me there,” says Stephen. “I have no answer for that.”
But no spoilers here.
Words on the page. So specific that from crisp black and white print, pictures swirl into our minds. Or make us think, make us wonder, raise questions to ponder. Specificity…and indeterminacy…
Rooting around in Emily Dickinson’s poems I saw one I’d never read: “The Brain Is Wider than the Sky.” It explains the values of specificity and indeterminacy in just a few astounding lines. Here’s the first stanza:
The brain is wider than the sky, /For, put them side by side, /The one the other will include/ With ease, and you beside.
There it is. We humans must have both.
Finally–News! Ghost Bones, Book 9 in my Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery Series, set in the Texas Hill Country, will be out this month!
Helen Currie Foster lives and writes north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. Follow her at http://www.helencurriefoster.com.
“But at my back I always hear time’s wingèd chariot drawing near…” (Andrew Marvell, 1621-1678)
Today in pre-dawn darkness, the house quiet except for the murmuring furnace, my characters were already at me, barking orders: “More! More smells, tastes, experiences! More about me! Tell people what I’m thinking, what I’m experiencing, what I’m worrying about!”
They’re right. Readers want to know their favorite mystery protagonists. Why? Because readers are in league with them, walking in their shoes. Readers know that stepping into a protagonist’s sensory experience—smells, food, experiences, relationships—will springboard them into the setting, help them to be in the picture, ready to seize on every clue.
Resolution 1. Tastes! Flavors! Food! As Rounding the Mark, Book 7 of Andrea Camilleri’s long-running series, begins, Inspector Montalbano of little Vigáta, Sicily, can’t sleep:
“Stinking, treacherous night. Thrashing and turning, twisting and drifting off one minute, jolting awake and then lying back down—and it wasn’t from having scarfed down too much octopus a strascinasali or sardines a beccafino the evening before. No, he didn’t even have that satisfaction.”
Fortunately the recipes are described in the Notes at the book’s end. In Sicily, where seafood reigns supreme, Montalbano refers to small octopi, boiled and dressed in olive oil and lemon juice, and then sardines, stuffed and rolled up with sauteed breadcrumbs, pine nuts, sultana raisins, and anchovies. When Montalbano returns home from the police station he always races to his refrigerator to see what his housekeeper, Adelina, has left for him. In Book 16, Treasure Hunt, Montalbano “howled like a wolf with joy” when he finds “eggplant parmesan, done up just right, enough for four.”
Can’t you just smell this dish? Montalbano consumes the entire panful: “the sauce was a wonder to taste.” (50). We see how he delights in his food, how very particular he is. (And throughout the series Adelina keeps cooking – pasta in squid ink, involtini of small fish, pasta ‘Ncasciata…) https://www.foodandwine.com/pasta-ncasciata-sicilian-baked-pasta-7093847
Here’s Montalbano in Rounding the Mark after discovering a new restaurant:
“The antipasto of salted octopus tasted as though it were made of condensed sea and melted the moment it entered his mouth…And the mixed grill of mullet, sea bass and gilthead had that heavenly taste the inspector feared he had lost forever….After a long and perilous journey of the sea, Odysseus had finally found his long lost Ithaca. “(73)
Camilleri (died 2019) was writing mystery, murder, crime—but he included as major players in the setting Sicilian food, awareness of this ancient Mediterranean island culture, and echoes of classic myth.
We can only imagine Montalbano shaking his head at the food situation of private detective Cormoran Strike, protagonist of The Running Grave, seventh in the series by “Robert Galbraith” (aka J.K. Rowling). To protect his knee, Strike, a military police veteran who lost his lower leg in Afghanistan, must lose weight; he’s now lost “three stone” or about 42 pounds. “Usually he’d have grabbed a takeaway on the way home” but now, “without much enthusiasm,” he’s fixing broccoli and salmon in the tiny flat above his seedy London office.
Does the author need to describe these flavors? Aren’t “broccoli” and “salmon” redolent enough by themselves, especially broccoli? Later, as the plot roars into action, Strike’s off his diet, overcome by “the lure of sweet and sour chicken and fried rice” (767) and demanding that his partner Robin Ellacott stop at a 24-hour McDonald’s on London’s Strand (848) where, as they walk to the office, he’s eating “large mouthfuls of burger” and starting on two bags of fries. He’s back to his usual food habits––pub food, fast food––yet his mind’s on the recent attack, “as though he’d only just felt the heat of the bullet searing his cheek.” At chapter’s end, as they discuss the case, “Strike ate a solitary cold chip lingering at the bottom of a greasy bag.” There’s an urgency to his desperate hunger, to the need for enough energy to stick with an exhausting case—and don’t we all know about that solitary cold french fry in the bottom of the bag? Can’t you see him fishing it out? For Strike, food fills a need, but he’s not immersed in the culinary experience. He’s focused on his case.
What keeps Strike working as a private investigator? Challenge, curiosity, tenacity, terror—but not great cuisine. Food-wise, Montalbano’s habits differ sharply from Strike’s. But for each man, eating habits vividly highlight both personal life and setting.
Resolution 2: Human Scent! Other scents matter to both Strike and Montalbano. In the first chapter of The Ink Black Heart, Cormoran Strike has tried to find a perfect perfume for Robin’s 30th birthday. When she sprays on the new perfume, “he…detected roses and an undertone of musk, which made him think of sun-warmed skin.”
Similarly, in Treasure Hunt, when Montalbano and his compadre, the daring Ingrid, are outside on his veranda, “The night now smelled of brine, mint, whisky, and apricot, which was exactly what Ingrid’s skin smelled like. It was a blend not even a prize parfumeur could have invented.” (175)
Reportedly one writing instructor has suggested that authors “include smell on every page.” These two mystery writers don’t obey that injunction (do you know any who do?). But why is scent so critical for us? Apparently the amygdala (a paired structure, with one in each temporal lobe) “developed from our most primitive sense—the sense of smell.” Joseph Jebelli, How the Mind Changed (Little, Brown, Spark, 2022, at 30). It’s near the olfactory nerve which is why scents connect strongly to emotions and memories. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24894-amygdala
What scents spark your own memories? If a book mentions honeysuckle on a summer day, I might remember my grandparents’ front porch in Itasca, Texas, and how we learned as kids to suck nectar from a honeysuckle blossom. What pops up for you when a book mentions lavender? Or clean sheets? Baby powder? Or iodine, rubbing alcohol, band-aids? Marshmallows toasting on a stick? Pine straw underfoot? The first ocean breeze when you hit the beach? Does a book feel richer to you when your own memories are awakened?
What about the scent of January? Today’s the coldest day of 2024 so far, here in the Hill Country. Inside – hot tea: mint, chamomile, green, or maybe ginger slices, with honey and lemon. Outside, cedar burning in a neighbor’s brush pile.
Resolution 3: Character’s thoughts (and feelings)! In Treasure Hunt Camilleri includes a hilarious italicized interchange between Montalbano (called “Montalbano One”) and “Montalbano Two” where Montalbano Two criticizes Montalbano One’s case-handling as showing signs of deterioration, of “losing his cool,” highlighting Montalbano’s own concerns about aging. (18-19)
Camilleri also uses other techniques to put us in Montalbano’s head. Here’s one from Rounding the Mark, where, again, Montalbano’s worrying about getting older:
“As he was shaving, the scenes of the previous evening on the wharf ran through his head again. Little by little, as he reviewed them with a cold eye, he began to feel uneasy…. There was something that didn’t jibe….He stubbornly played the scenes over in his head, trying to bring them more into focus. No dice. He lost heart. This was surely a sign of aging. He used to be able to find the flaw, the jarring note…without fail.” (61)
Camilleri lets his character feel. When a small boy is kidnapped from north Africa by sex traffickers and escapes on the pier in Sicily, Montalbano returns him to his “mother,” not understanding she isn’t his “mother” at all. When the little boy is killed Montalbano visits the morgue:
“He lifted the sheet with one hand…and froze. A chill ran down his spine. It all came back to him at once: the look the little boy had given him as his mother ran up to take him back….he hadn’t understood that look. Now…he did. The little eyes were imploring him. They were telling him for pity’s sake, let me go, let me escape. And now…he felt bitterly guilty…He was slipping. It was hard to admit, but true… “(84)
In contrast, Cormoran Strike is more inscrutable, more unwilling to reveal his emotions, perhaps even to himself. Galbraith describes Strike as a “mentally resilient man” who tries but sometimes fails to control emotion. One of his tools “was a habit of compartmentalization that rarely failed him, but right now, it wasn’t working. Emotions he didn’t want…and memories he generally suppressed were closing in on him…” As a consequence he was “brooding so deeply that he barely registered the passing Tube stations and realized, almost too late, that he was already” at his stop. (105) In one scene after visiting his sister Strike starts home feeling very angry at his dead mother, who died of an overdose when he was nineteen. Galbraith then uses italics for Strike’s mental attack on her: “If you hadn’t been what you were, maybe I wouldn’t be what I am. Maybe I’m reaping what you sowed, so don’t you f*king laugh at the army, or me, you with your paedophile mates and the squatters and the junkies…” (106) These passages show the reader Strike’s painful upbringing and may partially explain his need (and ability) to compartmentalize—both, ironically, key to his later success.
Strike drinks, smokes, has sex, but almost in the same way as he gulps down fast food. Food seems temporarily satisfying, but not a life pleasure. Early on we become aware that the strongest sensation Strike is described as experiencing is the pain of his stump, and the relief he experiences when he removes his prosthetic. In his compartmentalization of his emotions, has he replicated this binary condition? (No spoilers here!)
Resolution Four: The Weather! Camilleri and Galbraith’s characters don’t always focus on weather, but here in the Texas Hill Country we must take notice. It’s too cold (like today), too hot (pretty soon), too wet (spring rain bombs and dangerous low-water crossings), or too dry (like last summer’s dreadful drought). Blessings on March, which will bring bluebonnets and the ethereal prairie celestial, then wine cups, with the pink of redbud and Mexican buckeye to rejoice the eye. But weather’s definitely a factor in upcoming Book 9 of the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series. Watch for it—coming soon!
Ink-Stained Wretches 