"Death in Delft" by Graham Brack

It’s Holland, 1671. Master Mercurious is a professor at the University of Leiden. As a professor, he’s also an ordained Protestant minister. Unknown to anyone but himself, he’s also a consecrated Catholic priest. It’s an unusual combination, but this is 17^th century Europe and 17^th century Holland, and the wars of religion are still fresh in people’s minds. Holland is officially Protestant, which is why Mercurious keeps his Catholic position a secret. 

His university rector gives him an assignment – to travel to Delft to assist the mayor in solving a terrible crime. Three young girls have disappeared, and the body of one has turned up. The girls have barley even a passing acquaintance with each other. One comes from the upper class, one from the middle class, and one from the lower class. The girl found dead is the poor one. 

 

Master Mercurious feels a bit out of his depth. He’s never investigated a crime before, and he knowns no one in Delft. He soon makes two friends who help him in his investigation – the ascientist and creator of the single-lens microscope Antonie von Leeuwenhoek and the painter Johannes Vermeer. The three follow all kinds of leads and end up in a number of blind alleys, until they stumble upon what the three girls had in common.

 

Graham Brack

Death in Delft by Graham Brack is the first of four novels in the Master Mercurious series, and it’s full of twists and turns. It’s chock full of historical detail about Delft and the period; the author has done some impressive research.

 

Brack originally trained and practiced as a pharmacist. In addition to the Master Mercurious series, he’s also written seven novels in the Investigator Josef Slonsky series, set in Prague. Brack blogs regularly at his author page; you can read his posts here.

 

Death in Delft is a fast-paced story, with a number of possible suspects and a number of possible motives. Brack does an excellent job of hooking the reader and keeping him guessing as to what’s behind the girls’ disappearances.

The Hiding Place: It is All of Our Stories

We were living in Houston in the mid-1970s when I first heard of Corrie ten Boom and the story she had to tell in The Hiding Place. The book had been recently published, and a movie of the same title was released in 1975. It starred Jeannette Clift as Corrie, Julie Harris as her sister Betsie, and Arthur O’Connell as their father. I read the book but didn’t see the movie.

Forty years later, the story has stood the test of time. It is still a good story. It is still a heartbreaking story. And it is a story that keeps begging the question, what would I do in their situation? What question the story does not beg is could this happen here?

The answer to the second question is obvious – yes, it or something like it could happen here. Never underestimate the darkness of the human heart. We saw the same human lunge toward evil on Sept. 11, 2001. We see it in Syria and Iraq and Libya. We saw it in the killing fields of Cambodia, and with the tribal warfare in Rwanda, and in Bosnia. But this isn’t a problem limited to radical Islam or people in faraway countries. The same desire for authoritarian power and control can be seen all too close to home, and it isn’t an impulse limited only to governments.

In the Epilogue to the book, we read that Corrie and her family learn that her teenaged nephew Kik died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He was caught helping an American parachutist escape to the Dutch coast. In 1959, Corrie herself returned to the Ravensbruck camp, where she was imprisoned and where Betsie died. And she learned something both familiar and profound. A Nazi guard or commandant or functionary had mistakenly released her late in 1944. She was supposed to have been killed with all of the other women her age the following week, but someone had made a clerical error.

A bureaucratic mistake.

Or the hand of God.

Perhaps both.

We often hear people ask, if there is a God, how could he allow so much evil in the world? The real, and perhaps surprising, question should be, why isn’t there more evil than what we see? My answer to that age-old question is simple: if there was no God, if there is no God, then our world at best would look much like what Corrie ten Boom experienced during World War II. That impulse to evil exists within each of us.

What also exists within each of us is the impulse to reach for God.

The Hiding Place is the two of two sisters in a small city in Holland, caught up in a gigantic turn of history. Because of their faith in God, they embark upon a course of helping Jews hide and escape from the Nazis. That course eventually leads to their arrest. Betsie comes through the story as something of a saint, the believer giving thanks in all things, in all circumstances. Corrie questions and kicks against what happens. She is the most recognizable of the two, the most familiar, at least to me. She gets angry at God, she shakes her fist at him, she refuses to believe that she should give thanks for fleas, of all things.

Corrie survives the horror of imprisonment and the concentration camp. She survived with a purpose. She knew what God would have her do. And her path started with forgiveness, as difficult as it was.

In so many ways, the story of Corrie ten Boom is all of our stories. Perhaps not as extreme, bit it is – and can be – our stories.


Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we've been reading The Hiding Place. This concludes the discussion. To see more posts, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph: A scene from the 1975 movie The Hiding Place, with Julie Harris as Betsie (left) and Jeannette Clift as Corrie (right).

Before It Was the Hiding Place

The winds of change are underway in the United States, and yet, for most of us, life goes on each day as normal. The change is happening across most of society – economic, social, educational, religious, national, and local. Like most change, it began almost without notice, although the critical period was likely the 1960s.

While it’s easy to point to the Beatles, the sexual revolution, three assassinations, the Great Society, college protests, the explosion of the drug culture, and other headline-grabbing events as examples of the change, the fact is that not all of what happened was bad. Some of it was good, and necessary, like the civil rights movement. And for many people, perhaps most, the change didn’t immediately affect them, but came only years and decades later.

So it must have seemed in countries like Holland, Belgium, Poland, France, and the United Kingdom in the 1930s. The world as it had been known had shifted dramatically with World War I – whole empires had been swept away, new countries carved from them, millions of people killed. And then came the Great Depression, which Europe struggled with as much as the United States.

In 1937 on a quiet street in Haarlem in Holland, Ten Boom Watches celebrated its 100 anniversary in business. It was a joyful occasion for the Ten Boom family, the neighborhood and the community. The business was something of a local institution; the business had been started in 1837 by the father of Corrie Ten Boom’s father, “the grand old man of Haarlem,” as he was known.

There were flowers, lots of flowers, for this was Europe, after all, and Europe loves flowers. And food. And visits by relatives and neighbors. This was life, normal everyday life, marked by a special occasion like a business anniversary.

Signs of change were becoming a little visible, even on that street in Haarlem. Jewish refugees were arriving or passing through from Germany. Watch suppliers in Germany, who made some of the best watches in the world, were no longer shipping to Ten Boom Watches. They were mostly owned by Jewish families, and life was changing drastically for Germany’s Jews.

But despite these occasional shadows, in Holland, quiet and picturesque Holland, normal life continued, the life families like the Ten Booms had known for much of their lifetimes. (And Holland had not been a party on either side to World War I.)

“I know that the experiences of our lives,” writes Corrie Ten Boom in The Hiding Place, “when we let God use them, become the mysterious preparation for the work He will give us to do. But I did not know that then.”

The change would come to that street in Haarlem, and to that little shop known as Ten Boom Watches. And the wind would become a whirlwind.

So, too, we are prepared – mysteriously – with the routine of the everyday for the work He will give us to do.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re beginning a discussion of The Hiding Place. I first (and last) read it four decades ago, and I’m looking forward to read it again. Consider reading along; you can see other posts on this first chapter, “The One Hundredth Birthday Party,” by visiting Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Top photograph: The Ten Boom sisters: Betsie, Corrie and Nollie as young girls. Bottom photograph: The Ten Boom shop and house in Haarlem, now a museum.