On our recent vacation, I brought along a treat I allow myself only rarely: one of Carol O’Connell’s Mallory mysteries. I have enjoyed these for years, but I need to be in the right mood to read about gruesome murders, a mood that is rare when I spend my day caring for toddlers. But this last week I finally felt primed for a new Mallory mystery, and picked up Winter House.

Carol O’Connell’s Detective Kathleen Mallory is brilliant, breathtakingly beautiful and a sociopath (mostly). She was a homeless orphan living on the streets until she was adopted by a cop named Louis Markowitz when she was ten. She was loved deeply by Markowitz and his wife, who died while she was still young. They remain the most humanizing influences on her life. Mallory became a police officer herself, with a feral quality that intimidates everyone around her.

O’Connell’s mysteries are dark, often with gruesome images or disturbing details. Mallory herself is a dark element, with a traumatic past and a disregard for basic morality. But throughout the series O’Connell examines realities of love. Mallory is so beautiful that men are always falling in love with her, with predictably painful consequences. Mallory cannot be wooed. The popular idea that romantic love will change a bad person into a good one is not found here. Mallory remains cold and inconsiderate. As the series progresses, she recognizes and receives love in some ways, but never expresses it as normal people do. The power of love is not in the yearnings of men attracted to her; the power of love is shown in how her adoptive parents continue to affect her life long after their deaths. Mallory can function in normal human society because of the love of her parents, and how they passed that love on to other people in her life.

I suppose I am seduced by these novels partly because the author resists the usual genre novel paradigm that dictates the strong woman must be ultimately conquered. Mallory cannot be conquered and still be Mallory. She may be disturbing, but she is always strong. That is not to say she is an example to anyone. I find her character compelling without being likable. She is someone you never want to meet, because she just might kill you. But she is a fascinating read.

Winter House sets up a fifty year old mystery that must be solved in order to understand a currently unsolved killing. There are a few weaknesses in the story. The murderer’s character is not sufficiently developed. Mallory’s skill at computer hacking is left unrealistic and hazy (she hacks into the IRS’s database of tax records during a couple of minutes of conversation), though in Winter House it is mercifully brief. But despite its flaws, I gobbled it in three days and loved it. I look forward to more.

After reading Streatfeild’s autobiography, I decided to read one of her children’s novels. I began with her first and most famous, Ballet Shoes, published in 1937. Written in her spare and breezy style, it tells the story of three orphan girls adopted by an itinerant paleontologist, known affectionately as Gum. Gum travels the world for years at a time, and leaves money behind to provide for the girls. Unfortunately, he disappears and the money gets low and the girls have to decide how to manage. They all enter a dance school and train for the stage, because the only job they can legally hold at age twelve is in the performing arts.

I found Ballet Shoes a little disappointing, but I don’t think it would disappoint a child. The characters are sketched rather than developed, and seem to exist mainly as a rubric to inspire a child’s imagination. Pauline the eldest is an actor, Petrova is fascinated by cars and planes, and Posy is a dancer. The book closes with the question:

“I wonder” - Petrova looked up - “if other girls had to be one of us, which of us they’d choose to be?”

Young readers will ask themselves that question early in the story and enjoy the rest of the book answering it.

I suppose I also found the book a little disappointing because of one of its strong points. I read children’s novels as escapist entertainment, sparing me the concerns of the adult world. But a major feature of Ballet Shoes is the strain of family finances. That’s a little too close to home for me. Money is counted to each pence and shilling. And that’s another problem. Between a few decades of inflation and the changing of British money to a decimal system, I haven’t a clue what a shilling is. A child reading the book would be introduced to the necessity and importance of money as part of the story, but the outdated money system might make the lesson less useful.

The summer before I started grad school I decided to read Shakespeare’s plays. Somehow I had missed them in school, and I was a little embarrassed that I could get so much education without ever reading his work. I find reading plays difficult. In narrative I have pictures painted for me; in plays I must imagine much more. It is unfamiliar brain work for me, and I enjoyed learning how to do it.

I say this to let you know that my evaluation of a play may lack something. I started reading Christopher Fry when I was looking for modern interpretations of Moses. I was blown away by The Firstborn. But I have never seen it performed, and envisioning a play is still something of a challenge. I read the play primarily as poetry.

Christopher Fry was a twentieth century playwright who wrote both verse plays and screenplays. He wrote the screen adaptation of Ben-Hur. In 1938 he began The Firstborn, a modern interpretation of the Exodus story that worked in themes of the Holocaust then beginning in Nazi Germany. He finished the play in 1945.

When the play begins, Moses has long been absent from Egypt, having fled to Midian after murdering an Egyptian. The Pharaoh, Seti, discusses with his wife, Anath, the possibility of inviting Moses back to Egypt to lead their army against a new enemy. Moses appears before Seti and Anath make a decision, and condemns them for the oppression of the Hebrews.

The play explores many issues, too many to discuss here. The responsibilities of power, the love of the homeland, the solace of pride, and the ties of ethnic identity. Throughout the play there is a tension between the comfortable life of the wealthy and safe elite, and the desperate misery and violence of the Hebrews. The focus of the play is the internal crisis of Moses, in his decision to stand in solidarity with his Hebrew brethren and as he realizes what God’s demands will mean for Egypt. When Moses first appears to demand freedom for his people, he explains his return by saying:

My blood heard my blood weeping
Far off like the swimming of fear under the sea,
The sobbing at night below the garden. I heard
My blood weeping. It is here it wept and weeps.
It was from here I heard coming this drum of despair,
Under your shoes, under your smile, and under
The foundations of your tomb. From Egypt.

There are several elements of the play that become troubling when it is seen in light of the Holocaust. One is the character of Shendi, Miriam’s son, who is effectively a collaborator with the Egyptians. The difference between enslavement for labor in the biblical story, even with its horrors, and the programmatic annihilation of the Holocaust make the Shendi character somewhat implausible and possibly offensive, if the play is seen as an interpretation of the Holocaust.

Another possibly troubling line occurs in Moses’ debate with himself when Pharaoh’s son offers the generalship of an Egyptian army:

Egypt and Israel both in me together!
How would that be managed? I should wolf
Myself to keep myself nourished. I could play
With wars, oh God, very pleasantly. You know
I prosper in a cloud of dust - you’re wise
To offer me that. And Egypt would still be,
In spite of my fathers, a sufficient cause.

Moses refuses the offer, but his consideration of it shows that the play should not be read too precisely as an examination fo the Holocaust.

But Fry’s deft use of tension left me feeling that these jarring choices were deliberate and meant to make us consider more thoroughly the ripple effects of oppression. There is a necessary tragedy to justice. By the end of the play, the violence and horror which Egypt inflicted on the weak has been brought home to the powerful, even those of good will and relative innocence.

A noticable difference between the biblical story and Fry’s play is the absence of God as an active character. In Exodus, YHWH has many speeches; in The Firstborn he says not a word. God’s speeches to Moses are implied but never described, and the closest God comes to speaking is an ambiguous rumble of thunder after Moses calls to him. But this does not mean God is uninvolved in the play. Fry was a Christian playwright, and the theology of his plays can be seen in Moses’ description of God as “the infinite eavesdropper,” a paradoxical title. An eavesdropper sits outside the action, listening in on what others are doing. But an infinite being cannot be outside the action; there is no place where he is not. In all of Fry’s plays God appears not as a character, but as the ineffable mover in all actions, the omnipresent spirit, the place in which all places have their being.

Fry’s metaphors and careful rhythms are not easily reviewed in this little prose description, and I urge you to read the play yourself, if you have any enjoyment for poetry. I find myself frustrated in trying to convey the power and complexity of his work. I have read The Firstborn five times now, and the characters are so complex that I find something new in it every time. I would love to see it performed someday, but until then, I am content to read and re-read it.

I am a big fan of the classic detective story. When I don’t have anything else to think about, I regret that Agatha Christie only wrote 70 mysteries or so, that Josephine Tey died after six novels, that Dorothy Sayers turned her attention to translation work. While other women turn to comfort foods during pregnancy, I turned to the comfort literature of the mystery. I spent my pregnancies reading everything by Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh that I could get my hands on. God bless the public library.

I am always a little sad that the mystery’s Golden Age is past. While some mysteries today are excellent (PD James springs to mind), the concisely written, spare descriptions of the whodunit of the 30s and 40s is a neglected art form. Mysteries today tend to be driven either by a new arena of specialized knowledge (”set in the heart of Samurai Japan” “fourteen new quilt patterns included” “) or exist as a way to provide a plot for characters the author doesn’t know what to do with otherwise. The use of a mystery as a mystery - a conundrum to be solved by the reader using the clues provided - seems rare, at least to a casual reader like me. So I was delighted when I discovered Patricia Moyes.

Moyes died in 2000, but she left behind nineteen novels, published between 1959 and 1993, that test the mettle of any armchair detective. Like Christie and Marsh her characters are revealed more through dialogue than description. Concision is a skill, and Moyes has it. Her books are roughly the length of Christie’s novels, and must be read as closely. The clues are provided, and the series detective, Henry Tibbet, mentions his suspicions in asides not given to the reader. “Tibbet explained,” Moyes writes, but the words of the explanation are not given to the reader. Until the very end, you must use your wits and figure things out for yourself, much like reading Miss Marple.

Angel Death, published in 1980, is Moyes’s fifteenth novel. It and it’s predecessor, Who Is Simon Warwick? rely too heavily on ideas trendy for their day, trends that are now a couple decades old. The modern reader spots the plot point too quickly for the purposes of the mystery. This ruins Who Is Simon Warwick?, but Angel Death is good enough to overcome the problem. Henry Tibbet and his wife Emmy visit fictional British possessions in the Caribbean and stay at an inn managed by friends. While there, they meet an old lady named Betsy Sprague, who disappears after leaving a message for Henry. The search ensues, drawing the Tibbets deeper and deeper into the hidden dangers of the islands.

One of the reasons I love the classic mysteries is that they tend to recognize the same moral universe I do. Good and evil still exist. Truth is still a governing principle for those who follow the good. Moyes’s novels do not always fill my hunger in this regard. Tibbet, though he fiercely and unstoppably seeks to uncover the truth, frequently decides that justice would be better served if he presented to his superiors a story more plausible than the truth. I find this personally dissatisfying, but the pleasure of reading a skillfully written whodunit outweighs my dissatisfaction.

Do you remember the peaches you ate when you were a kid? We didn’t have them often, but I remember the juicy sweetness of them. Peaches just don’t taste as good today. I assumed it was the nostalgia of childhood I was missing, but it turns out peaches really do taste worse today.

I just finished a marvelous book, Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm by David Mas Masumoto, published in 1995. Before reading this, I had read some lovely farm narratives by writers who liked to hobby farm, but this is the first book I’ve read from a farmer who turned to writing. Masumoto’s memoir of his attempt to save his peach farm is entrancing. His prose is simple but elegant, and he makes the reader love his farm like he does.

Masumoto raises peaches and grapes in California. His treasured variety of peaches, the Sun Crest, lost its marketability as new breeds with darker color and longer shelf life were preferred by the average grocery store customer. But those new varieties that look so pretty in the produce aisle lack the same juicy flavor. Masumoto says,

“Sun Crest is one of the last remaining truly juicy peaches. When you wash that treasure under a stream of cooling water, your fingertips instinctively search for the gushy side of the fruit. Your mouth waters in anticipation. You lean over the sink to make sure you don’t drip on yourself. Then you sink your teeth into the flesh, and the juice trickles down your cheeks and dangles on your chin. This is a real bite, a primal act, a magical sensory celebration announcing that summer has arrived.”

In an effort to reach a new market for his peaches, Masumoto turns to organic farming. During the process, he discovers new rhythms and beauties to the life of an organic farm. He walks through his fields, noting the wildflowers he plants in his orchards to add organic matter to the soil and provide cover for beneficial insects. He sees his efforts as creating a home for life.

And through this organic transformation, he remains a farmer, a professional whose business is to profitably sell his crop. This is one of the great strengths of the book. Rather than the dogmatism of the armchair extremist, he has the tempered, measured attitudes of a farmer, committed to organic farming, while recognizing its hazards. He compares himself to a neighboring farmer:

“I’ve become friends with a Hmong farmer from Southeast Asia. He and his family are political refugees of the Vietnam war……His livelihood as well as that of his family and extended family depends on the farm. Their dreams are built on [their] strawberries. I don’t talk much with Vang Houa about my peaches and natural grasses and new farming practices. His future is too precious to gamble on good weather and riskier farming methods. Risk takes on a new meaning when hunger and hope are factored in.

People sometimes wonder why farmers don’t like change. After all, in today’s economic system, those who take risks and make changes are the ones who tend to prosper. But a lot of farmers can remember the days when they were like the Hmong refugee. They still carry the burden of protecting family dreams on their shoulders.”

Epitaph for a Peach ends on an uncertain note, like every farming season. The primary customer for Masumoto’s organic peaches decides not to buy for the next year, and the farmer must look for a new buyer for his crop. But the magic of the farm remains, and he continues to farm and continues to hope.

I looked online to find out if Masumoto has been successful in sustaining his peach farm. He has started an Adopt a Peach Tree program, so it must not be going well. He continues to write, and I found this article about an interview in 2003 (The article is worth reading for the description of his mother’s hands).