“Everybody in Amsterdam Speaks English.” Not.

It was our 25^th anniversary trip – a week in Amsterdam and then a week in Paris. My wife had been to Amsterdam some years before on a business trip; I’d been to neither city. 

We arrived early one May morning. It turned out to be Ascension Day, a public holiday in the Netherlands. We’d reserved seats for a shuttle bus, but as we neared the city center, everything looked like an early Sunday morning. Many shops were closed; little traffic was moving on the streets. Our shuttle driver dropped us off across the canal from the hotel; he decided the street wasn’t wide enough to accommodate his (very small) bus.

 

We had a lot of luggage. I mean, a lot of luggage. Even then, we didn’t really travel; we migrated.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: The Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam, via Unsplash.

Some Thursday Readings

 

A Genuine Petrarchan Note on William Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets – poem by Tom Riley at Society of Classical Poets.

 

“The Moons” by Grevel Lindop – Malcolm Guite.

 

Burdens – poem by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

 

A king goes out to cheer his men on the night before battle – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Top 10 Dip into Poetry – Tweetspeak Poetry.

"Dutch Threat" by Josh Pachter

College student Jack Farmer gets a dream assignment from his professor: spend two weeks in Amsterdam doing research, and all expenses are paid. The next thing he knows, he’s landing at Schiphol Airport and in a taxi to his hotel. 

The man he’s told to meet is a researcher and archivist at the Begijnhof, a complex of old buildings (including the oldest in the city) originally built for a Catholic sisterhood not unlike nuns. It’s original purpose has evolved; now it’s only older women who live there, and the waiting list is long indeed. Jack’s introduced to several of the residents, including one with a live-in nurse who bowls the student over. Then his host takes off for a conference, leaving Jack as a temporary resident so he can do his research – and feed the cat.

 

But then one of the ladies, the one with the attractive nurse, is found stabbed to death. Given that the complex is locked at night, suspicion falls on the nurse. The police are even more suspicious when the nurse turns out to be the victim’s sole beneficiary. But Jack knows better, and he’s determined to vindicate the young woman he’s falling in love with. 

 

Dutch Threat is the first, but not likely the last, of the Jack Farmer mysteries by Josh Pachter. It’s a fun story, full of Amsterdam’s sights (and food), written in an almost breezy, college-student style (with a good dose of colorful language). Pachter uses real locations, and while it’s been 25 years since I visited the city, I remember the Begijnhof, the Amsterdam Historical Museum, the Liedesplein, and many of the other scenes in the book.

 

Josh Pachter

Pachter has been a writer and teacher in high schools and universities in the United States and Europe. He’s also a translator, writer, and editor, and has had more than 100 crime stories published in a wide array of magazines, including Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine when he was 16. He’s edited numerous anthologies and translated both fiction and nonfiction, primarily from Dutch into English. He lives with his family in Virginia.

 

Dutch Threat (possibly a play on words of “Dutch treat”) is a fast-paced, something-always-happening mystery, filled with the color and people of Amsterdam.

 

Top photograph: The Begijnhof, Amsterdam by Yoan via Unsplash. Used with permission.

 

Some Thursday Readings

 

Josephine Tey, woman of mystery – Malcolm Forbes at The Critic Magazine.

 

9 Historical Mysteries That Have Been Adapted to Cinema – Patrice McDonough at CrimeReads. 

 

The Light No Light Allays – poem by Andy Patton at Rabbit Room Poetry.

The Poetry of Silence: The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam

At the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the first thing you notice is the crowds. This is one of the most visited sites in the city, and people begin to line up early to enter the museum. The weather seems not to matter. I was there on a rainy, overcast day in May, and the rain had not discouraged the crowds, standing in line under a sea of umbrellas.

The second thing you notice is the silence. As crowded as the museum becomes, silence seems to reign here. After walking through the museum exhibits and the rooms where the Frank and van Pels families hid from 1942 to 1944, I can’t recall a single conversation, a single voice, a single word being uttered. It was a profound silence, a poem composed of no words.

The house containing the “secret annex” (the original title of The Diary of Anne Frank when it was published in 1947) is actually the smallest building in the museum complex at Prinsengracht 263-267. It’s very close to one of Amsterdam’s famous churches, the Westerkerk, at Prinsengracht 279. And it was a very short walk from my hotel, the Pulitzer, at Prinsengracht 323.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph: The bookcase entrance to the secret annex in the Anne Frank House. Via Wikimedia.

“A Cold Death in Amsterdam” by Anja De Jager

Europe’s fictional police detectives are a suffering lot. In recent months, I’ve read contemporary police procedurals from Britain, Ireland, and the Continent and found diabetics, recovering alcoholics, neatness neurotics bordering on psychotic, and divorced detectives, struggling with personal problems as they undertake murder and other criminal investigations. In fact, the criminals seem more normal than the detectives trying to bring them in.

And then there’s Amsterdam’s Lotte Meerman.

Meerman investigates cold cases, and she’s just finished a big one – the 15-year-old disappearance of a little girl. She should be gratified, but instead she’s going to pieces. The case and its details continue to haunt her, at times almost immobilizing her.

One cold winter night, just driving around, she stops for gasoline and interrupts a holdup at the gas station. She ends up having to shoot the teenaged perpetrator, but the wound isn’t fatal. And he tells her that his uncle had killed someone. It turns out that the uncle is a very powerful investment banker, and involved in a case from years before.

It was a case her father investigated, the one he was working on when he was told to retire. The case files were supposedly picked up by the new detectives assigned to the case, but somehow the files disappeared. And Meerman must come to grips with the idea that her father may not only be involved in destroying police files but in committing the murder itself.

A Cold Case in Amsterdam, published in 2015, is the first of three Lotte Meerman police novels by Anja De Jager, the others being A Cold Case in Amsterdam Central and The Murderer’s Guide to Family (not yet available in the U.S.). A fourth, Death on the Canal, is scheduled for publication in November.

Anja De Jager

The book is much as psychological novel as it is a police procedural.  De Jager allows us to crawl inside Meerman’s head, as she slowly unwinds what happened with the missing child case and gradually winds up the current case. This detective is suffering from what she learned, what she did, how she unknowingly became personally involved, and the known (to her) reason for her parents’ divorce years before.

Netherlands-born Anja De Jager worked for 20 years in London’s business district before becoming a full-time writer. Her father is a retired police detective, and she herself is more than familiar the investment and financial transactions, which become important to the Meerman investigation.. She lives in London.

A Cold Case in Amsterdam starts slowly and gradually works itself to almost fever pitch. We’re not sure how to react to this detective, isolated from colleagues and family, who seems bent on her own destruction and not particularly caring about what is happening to her. But she will work her way through the personal and investigatory challenges to solve the case.

And leave just enough issues hanging to make the reader want to reader the second novel.

Photograph of Amsterdam in winter courtesy of Netherlands Tourism.

And Now for Something Totally Different

I've been reading Christian fiction at almost breakneck speed -- and I decided to take a break. Last night, my wife and I watched a YouTube video that combined paintings of Van Gogh with Don McLean's "Vincent." It was cool. I wandered over to the bookshelf and spotted the guidebook to the Van Gogh Museum I bought when I was in Amsterdam last summer.

I'd been there on business, and found myself with a free Friday afternoon. I hopped a taxi and got dropped off at the museum. I'd never seen it; my wife had visited it back in 1978. We had tried to see it when we were there in 1999, but it was closed for renovation. So I stood in line (wildly eclectic mix group of people, of which I undoubtedly looked the most unusual -- sports shirt, slacks, socks, shoes and a light jacket; nothing pierced and no obvious tattoos, and no spiked or dyed hair) and found myself inside within 10 minutes.

I loved the place, and I liked the paintings of Van Gogh's comtemporaries as much I liked the Van Goghs. I think my favorite was Van Gogh's The Bedroom, located in his yellow house in Arles and painted in 1888. I found it later reproduced on a tile in the gift shop, and the tile now sits on my bookshelf at work. (Whenever I go to any museum, I always buy the museum guidebook and something else; my wife can tell you all about it.)

The guidebook is a friendly little thing, something that looks like it would have been created by the Dutch -- compact in size, straightforward text and containing reproductions of most of the paintings in the museum. The little book taught me several things I had forgotten or never knew about the artist:

• He died in 1890 at age 37; only in the last year of his life did even minor notice begin to be paid of his work.
• His younger brother Theo died a year later, and was reburied next to him in 1914.
• It was Theo's wife, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, who doggedly worked at gaining recognition for her brother-in-law's art. Theo and then Jo (and their son, Vincent) ended up with the bulk of the artists's unsold paintings. She sold a few, organized exhibitions, and edited the first Dutch edition of Vincent and Theo's letters. The paintings she held on to form the core of what's in the museum.
• He didn't cut off his entire left ear, but only a piece of it.

Odd how a video, a song by an American singer and a little guidebook can transport you across the ocean in a flash.