A promise is a promise

After Galatians 3:15-25 

A promise made is

a promise kept.

A promise made

to one man becomes

a promise to his

offspring. Once 

the promise is made,

no one annuls it,

no one cancels it,

no one abrogates it,

no one reverses it.

When the law comes

later, 430 years later,

to be exact, the promise

stands. The law did not

replace it; the law did

not void it. The promise

is made, and the promise

is kept.

 

Photograph by Karsten Winegeart via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"Avarice" by Pete Brassett

Detective Inspector James Munro has retired from police work. He’s living in Scotland, still mourning the loss of his wife who died in a arson-set fire. But a former colleague in Scotland asks him to step in and take over a murder case, before the local police have to turn it over to authorities.  

Munro tracks down his former detective sergeant, Charlotte West. She’s returning from an extended retreat, and she doesn’t have to return to London for some time. But Munro and West have only five days.

 

The case involves the murder of a woman, found in a glen outside a small town. At first it was thought the death was accidental, but the blows on the back of her head are too uniform and the medical examiner determines she was actually poisoned with antifreeze. 

 

Pete Brassett

Suspects abound: the divorced first husband; the former second husband; the estranged daughter; and the former lover -- and that's for starters. She had a track record of seeking our people with money. Munro and West have a considerable amount of investigating to do in a short period of time. The victim seems to have had a penchantTo complicate matters, Munro finds himself the object of affection the top local police official, who finds him much to her liking, and West is pursued by one of the local police sergeants. 

 

Avarice is the second mystery novel in the Munro & West series by Scottish author Pete Brassett, and it’s a classic police procedural leavened by humor and wit. The story keeps the reader guessing, even when we think we have it all figured out. Both Munro and West are engaging characters, even with their quirks and all-tooh-uman flaws.

 

Brassett, a native Scot, has published 10 novels in the Munro and West series, as well as a number of general fiction and mystery titles. 

 

Related:

 

She by Pete Brassett.

A Reflection on “Winesburg, Ohio”

I’ve always been attracted to the works of the American Realist and Modernism periods. In fiction, that meant Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser, and moving into Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, among others. In poetry, that meant Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teadsale, Vachel Lindsay, and T.S. Eliot, among quite a few others.  

This attraction likely relates to my middle school and high school English teachers, almost all of whom graduated from college in the 1940s and 1950s. They would have defined the Realist and early Modernism writers as the ones they were most influenced by, and they tended to wax eloquent on these particular writers and poets in particular. As a high school junior, taking American literature, I read Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Cather’s My Antonia, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and The Waste Land, and Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. It was a challenging year for all my subjects, but what I read in English was wonderful.

 

What I don’t recall reading at all was anything by Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941), not even a short story. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph: Sherwood Anderson in 1898, about the time he enlisted int he army to fight in the Spanish-American War.

"The Heart of American Poetry" by Edward Hirsch

I began to read a recent and highly praised biography of Robert E. Lee, and I was startled by the opening paragraph of the introduction. It was a kind of apology for writing about a man who “committed treason.” My immediate thought was a question: could you say the same thing had the Battle of Gettysburg, for example, had gone the other way and ended in defeat for the Union army? My second thought was also a question: are you apologizing for writing your book, trying to justify it in the context of today’s culture wars? I closed the book and put it away. 

It’s perhaps a sign of the times we live in. 

 

I had a similar experience – but a different outcome – with The Heart of American Poetry by Edward Hirsch. It’s a combination personal history, memoir, and love letter to American poetry by one of the most distinguished poetry critics of our time. Few people know as much about poetry as Hirsch, himself a poet, essayist, and champion for poetry. He’s published 10 poetry collections and six books of prose, including How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry. He’s been awarded a Macarthur Fellowship, a national Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, and a host of poetry-related prizes. If there’s a poetry establishment in the United States, then Hirsch is at or near the pinnacle.

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

“Winesburg, Ohio” by Sherwood Anderson

In the years leading up to and including World War I, a no-longer-young writer named Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) had been trying desperately to become a full-time, recognized author. He had worked in the advertising business in Chicago, but he returned to his home state of Ohio to work in the paint business while writing fiction in his spare time. Nothing seemed to help. 

He went back to advertising in Chicago, but he was encouraged by writers like Carl Sandburg and Theodore Dreiser to keep at his writing. He published verse and fiction in various literary magazines and soon had two published but undistinguished novels.

 

Then he turned his hand seriously to short stories, and in 1919, Anderson published a group of connected short stories entitled Winesburg, Ohio. Based roughly on his upbringing in Clyde, Ohio, southeast of Toledo and set about the turn of the century, the stories departed dramatically from the nostalgic idea of small-town Midwestern life. 

 

A reader today would find the book surprisingly contemporary. Anderson called his characters a group of “grotesques,” men and women who were misfits in society and sometimes holding prominent town positions. Anderson’s grotesques, apparently, occurred in all walks of life – farmers, bankers, social matrons, and young and old alike. Some had become grotesque of circumstances beyond their control; others seemed to have developed their problems well enough on their own, as if it sprang from their inmost being. 

 

Sherwood Anderson

Almost all of the stories include at least a reference to if not a major character in George Willard, who, while not yet a grotesque himself, has one for a mother. Willard is a young writer for Winesburg’s weekly newspaper. He follows the editor’s requirement to always include the names of townspeople in his stories, no matter how mundane their activities might be. The characters seem to gravitate toward him, as if he’s some kind of talisman. Willard also is the only character in the collection who seems the closest to what we might call “normal,” even though he has his own problems and weaknesses. 

 

The young newspaperman has done what the other characters seemed to have failed to do – figure out how to live a reasonable life.

 

The characters are often unforgettable, even rather haunting. The man who talks with his hands. The doctor who is anything but a success in his medical and personal lives. George Willard’s mother, who seems to teeter on the edge of madness. The young man who was supposed to be a preacher but is called home to run the family’s farm – and becomes utterly ruthless. The girl who didn’t fit within her own family and the family that takes her in. The young woman who realizes that the boy she loves has left for good, never to return. The mother and son who live in the forgotten stone house. And so many more.

 

These short stories are no so much stories with a beginning, middle, and end as they are vividly drawn descriptions of the people who live inside the stories. You may not like these characters, but they are difficult to forget.

 

Anderson was a prolific writer, and it is his short stories that he’s best remembered for. Winesburg, Ohio is a classic, and deservedly so.

Defining faith

After Galatians 3:7-14 

Faith is knowledge,

knowing things, and

faith is conviction,

believing the things

are true, believing

even when it’s hard

to believe, perhaps

especially when it’s

hard to believe. Even

when knowledge is 

easy, conviction

may be hard, living

our knowledge

because we know

it’s true. And faith

is trust, abandoning

reliance upon self

and embracing 

reliance on the one

cursed, the one who

died, the one nailed

on the judgment tree.

 

Photograph by Guilherme Stecanella via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads - April 22, 2023

Way, way back in the dark ages (when I was in elementary school), reading was taught using a program called phonics. It was a system matching the sounds of spoken English with individual letters or groups of letters. And, it worked. Of course, if something works, especially in education, you need to replace it with something new and shiny, and phonics was quite a few educational theories ago. But according to the Associated Press, it’s now back to the future, what’s old is new again, and here comes phonics. 

In my novel Dancing King, there is a scene in which a BBC reporter interviews Michael Kent-Hughes and is made mincemeat of, for bringing in an agenda and being completely unprepared for an interviewee who knows more than the reporter. This week that same situation happened, except it wasn’t fiction. A BBC reporter interviewed Elon Musk and thought he was going to have a “gotcha” on Twitter and hate speech. There was a gotcha, all right, but it wasn’t Musk who caught it. James Carden at The Spectator reports. 

 

It wasn’t a story I expected to see at a secular site like CrimeReads: What Do Modern Mystery Novels and Medieval Mystery Plays Have in Common? The answer was – surprise – sin. I thought that was an idea that died when religion became passe. Yet, there it was.

 

More Good Reads

 

Life and Culture

 

Lessons from Will and Ariel Durant – Brian Miller at A South Roane Agrarian.

 

Are 8 billion people too many — or too few? Welcome to the population paradox of the 21st century – Bryan Walsh at Vox.

 

News Media

 

The security state says jump. The media ask ‘how high?’ – James Carden at The Spectator.

 

A Nostalgic Journey through the Rise and Demise of the Blogroll – Neville Hobson.

 

FBI war on 'rad trad' Catholics: Where's the outrage (or even fairness) in press coverage? – Clemente Lisi at Get Religion.

 

Jack Teixeira and our crisis of trust – Peter Van Buren at The Spectator.

 

Faith

 

How Should Christians Think About the National Debt? – Susan Wharton Gates at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

 

Walk Wisely – Gentle Reformation.

 

Salvation of a Skeptic – Robb Brunansky at The Cripplegate.

 

Why I Work Until the Day I Die – Hugh Whelchel at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

 

Poetry

 

Rehearsal for the Death Scene – Michael Symmons Roberts at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

Shadows – Jane Dougherty at Jane Dougherty Writes (H/T: Paul Brookes). 

 

Faring – Saskia Hamilton at The Paris Review (introduced by Claudia Rankine).

 

British Stuff

 

Ernest George’s London Etchings – at Spitalfields Life.

 

Ukraine

 

Evidence of God’s Faithfulness in Ukraine – Children’s Hunger Fund.

 

Writing and Literature

 

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” & Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe – Sean Fitzparick at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Behold the Lamb of God – Andrew Peterson

 Painting: Old Man Reading, oil on canvas by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792).