Revels in the Craft of Storytelling
So I couldn’t wade through Patrick O’Brian’s endless esoteric descriptions of mainsails and cross catharpings, so I moved on to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and zipped right through it with immense pleasure. What does that say about me?
Don’t answer that.
But since we’re on the subject of Irish farce, let me alert you that my comic novel, High Concepts: A Hollywood Nightmare, is currently a Kindle Countdown Deal at a paltry .99 cents. Enjoy it at my expense.
While supplies last!
I’m very grateful to Mr. Brian Boyd for the following testimonial regarding my recent visit to St. Peter School on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. in order to do a reading from my Kingdom of Patria children’s series, along with some Q&A and a book signing. What a wonderful afternoon it was with the wonderful students from St. Peter!
Teachers–I know it’s impossible for you to take your class on a field trip to the Kingdom of Patria, so why not let the Kingdom of Patria come to you! For those in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area we can certainly talk about a live visit. For those around the world a Google Hangout can work very well. As a former elementary school teacher myself, I appreciate all that you do and guarantee an experience for your students that will enlighten, entertain, and inspire!
“As a general rule, students like assemblies — and still I’ve never seen my middle-school students so captivated as when we had Daniel McInerny visit to welcome them to the Kingdom of Patria. Far more than a book reading, Dr. McInerny also taught the story’s historical background and held a fascinating Q&A about what it’s like to be a “real-life” author, planting good seeds which have already inspired my students to try their own hand at fiction! It was an absolute delight to have Dr. McInerny speak at my school, and I cannot more strongly recommend having him speak to students from 4th through 8th grade: an hour of giggles, groans, and good old-fashioned storytelling is guaranteed.”
Mr. Brian Boyd
Middle School Language Arts Teacher &
Dean of Student Life
St. Peter School
Washington, D.C.
Neither snow nor icy temperatures in the mid-Atlantic region were enough to keep the latest missive from our friends at Wiseblood Books out of our mailbox. Tearing open the envelope with my bared teeth I was delighted to find a bound copy of Dana Gioia’s December 2013 First Things essay, “The Catholic Writer Today.” And whom did I find blurbing away on the back cover? Yours madly! Saying thus:
“Dana Gioia offers us the most significant assessment of the situation of the American Catholic writer since the publication of Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners and Walker Percy’s Signposts in a Strange Land.”
Think that’s all just marketing puffery?
Then I dare you to head on over to Wiseblood Books and grab your nicely bound copy of Gioia’s essay and judge for yourself.
Here it is. Gratis. Free of charge. Without expectation of pecuniary emolument.
The prologue–rather, the “Fade In:”–of my comic novel, High Concepts: A Hollywood Nightmare, absolutely on the house.
Think of it as a free literary wine tasting. And if you like what you gargle–er, read, then you can find the rest here.
FADE IN:
Several hundred yards off the Malibu shore, Midas Demiurgos sat aboard his yacht—christened The Missy in the glory days of the Missy at the Mall franchise—absorbed in the script doctor’s initial notes on Donnie Percival’s Paradise Disenchanted. He wore a wireless ear clip, a false beard, and, underneath the zippered top of his athletic warm-up, a bulletproof vest. In the background droned a CD, Disk 4 of Mega-Vocabulary System II.
“Anarchy: absence or denial of any authority or established order….Autonomous: self-governing or independent…..”
Manny, the wizened Mexican butler, shuffled in like a guilty child to remove Midas’s empty scotch glass.
“La Satana is getting stronger,” he murmured anxiously, referring to the Santa Ana wind by the familiar name “Satan.” Already he had left a text for his woman, ordering her to decapitate one of the chickens and begin the Rosary.
Midas did not look up from his script.
“Somebody die out here tonight. It’s a bad wind, Mr. D.”
“Pour me another drink,” Midas grumbled, still not looking up from the script.
Laying a curse on Midas underneath his breath, one that would cause his boss to become sexually impotent until the next full moon, the butler shuffled over to the bar and began to fix another scotch on the rocks. He did not know what his boss was up to, what with the fake beard and the total blackout of the ship. Midas had even made him cover the painted name of the yacht with a black curtain. But Manny was paid to not ask questions.
Over Midas’s ear clip came a male voice with a clipped, military cadence:
“This is Merman. I have a twenty on the asset. He’s moving westerly toward the beach.”
“Does he have the disk?”
“Inconclusive. I’m moving forward.”
“Let him know you’re there.”
“Roger that.”
Seventy yards from shore a diver, the water up to his chin, switched on a flashlight attached to the corner of his headgear.
The silhouetted figure running frantically toward the beach did not break his path and run toward the light. The diver switched it off and on again.
“Careful,” the diver heard Midas say through his ear clip. “He might have company.”
Another male voice, slurred and bawling, broke into the system.
“HEY, MR. D.! MR. D.! YOU STILL THERE? THIS IS BRADLEY BLOOD. DONNIE PERCIVAL, MAN, HE’S GOT THE DVD. HE’S, LIKE, MAKIN’ RIGHT FOR THE WATER. YOU THERE, MR. D.?”
“What the hell’s going on?” Midas said, who by this time had tugged a ball cap over his eyes and assumed his post along the rail of the yacht. He scanned the beach with a pair of infrared binoculars.
“Merman, is that Percival coming toward you?”
“Inconclusive.”
“Does he have the disk?”
“Inconclusive.”
“Dammit, I’m paying you to be conclusive!”
The diver was waist-high in the water now. He waved his arms. The running figure finally appeared to notice the light. He stopped and stared at it. Again the diver waved his arms.
But at this the silhouetted figure turned away, running northward up the beach.
“What in hell—?” the diver said.
“What’s going on?” Midas shouted.
“He’s running away.”
“Did he see you?”
“I thought he did—”
“What the hell is he doing?”
“I think he’s trying to get away.”
“Go after him!”
“I’m in flippers!”
“Well get ashore and go after him! I want all of you to go after him!”
Midas rushed back into the game room and threw the binoculars on the couch. He kept several rifles on a rack on the wall. He grabbed one with an infrared scope and made sure that it was loaded. What the hell was Percival trying to do? he wondered. Run his own game?
He raced back out to the deck. He leaned over the rail, squinting against the wind and the spray as the boat pumped up and down in the waves. Still, he succeeded in picking out Percival trudging up the beach. He raised the rifle, but his eye was distracted by Simon Todhunter’s beach home illuminated in ghoulish green floodlights—there was also a light on in some kind of arboretum up on the roof. He wondered whether Todhunter kept a sniper up there. Even if he didn’t, he no doubt had security on the premises who packed heat. So if Midas fired this rifle, the evening could well turn into a Wild West shootout. But he wasn’t going to let that disk get away.
Midas aimed well over Percival’s head and fired.
He lowered the rifle and saw Percival waving his arms in a sign of surrender. Yet he kept running.
“That’s my DVD, Percival!” Midas roared pointlessly into the savage wind. “Give me that goddam disk!”
He raised the rifle again, steadied his arm as best he could, and aimed for the kneecaps.
This time his victim fell, making a clumsy pirouette before dropping into the waters of the rising tide.
Midas returned to the game room and pressed a button on an intercom. The captain responded in his customary longsuffering drawl.
“I hope you were just shooting at a shark.”
“Get the hell out of here,” Midas shouted. “Go!” Then he spoke to the diver through his ear clip.
“Have you got him?”
There was no answer.
“Have you got him?”
The other male voice, slurred and hysterical, returned:
“YOU SHOT HIM, MR. D.!”
“Get the disk, you moron. Is he alright?”
“YOU KILLED HIM, MR. D.! YOU KILLED DONNIE PERCIVAL!”
Midas felt the oxygen blow out of his head as from a popped balloon.
“Merman?” he gasped, black spots exploding before his eyes. “Get the disk. For the love of God get me that disk.”
Midas flopped down on his leather couch. Manny handed him the fresh scotch. Midas took it and gulped from it, sloshing most of it onto his fake beard.
“Oh God,” he moaned, craning his head back against the back of the couch. “I just killed Donnie Percival.”
“I knew it,” Manny crossed himself and ran out of the room. He had to call his woman. If he was going to make it through this night without getting thrown in jail, she’d better sacrifice another chicken.
A few hours later, as a thick, toxic dawn oozed over the valley, two figures could be seen strolling down a stretch of Malibu shoreline. One was Walter Blinker, a detective in the Homicide Section of the LAPD. The other was über-producer Simon Todhunter, who requires no further introduction. For Blinker, relatively new to the section, the experience of meeting his favorite celebrities at murder scenes was a thrill that had not yet abated. To his bedazzled eyes, Todhunter looked just like he did in the magazines, huge and hirsute, with the beret and signature scarf which, like a priest’s stole, reached down in two strands to his shins.
To a cold eye, however, Todhunter looked like hell. His face was haggard and drawn, and he sucked the tumid air greedily as he hauled his massive body across the sand.
“I have a little screenplay of my own I’ve been working on,” Blinker, with an air of scripted casualness, interjected into the investigation. “Been puttering away on it for years. It’s a romantic comedy about a down-on-his luck police detective and the murderer he needs to track down in order to save his job.”
Todhunter knew better than to reply to this, so he said:
“I suppose the killer is somebody close to him. Isn’t that usually the case?”
Blinker hesitated, thinking at first that Todhunter was giving him a note on his script.
“Oh yes. You’re absolutely correct. So let’s talk about who was here last night. You were having a little party?”
“Little for us. A hundred or so. Our annual celebration of the Vernal Equinox. We had dinner on the beach by torchlight, then went inside for the symposium.”
“Symposium?”
Todhunter sucked in his breath, aware of how pretentious he sounded.
“My wife and I like to host distinguished public intellectuals for evenings of conversation.”
Blinker knew all about the notorious symposia that Todhunter regularly hosted with his wife, the voluptuous, volcanic, Ugolina del Fuoco.
“Who were your distinguished guests last night?” Blinker inquired.
Todhunter mentioned the name of a chaired professor in Religious Studies from Prestigious East Coast First-Tier Research University, as well as the name of a prominent atheist. It had promised, according to the invitation, to be an electric evening of discussion on the theme, “Religion After God,” but it turned out to be a tedious love fest between the two panelists. Indeed, everyone at the symposium was desperately relieved when a hysterical girl in a drunken haze burst into the room screaming that Donnie Percival had been shot.
“How many people at your party knew Donnie Percival?”
“Very few had ever met him.”
“Anyone you know have a beef with him?”
“Of course not. Everyone who knew Donnie worshipped him.”
“If you’ll beg my pardon, Mr. Todhunter, how long have you known Mr. Percival?”
“Personally? Not long. We have an agreement, in principle, to make a movie based upon his unpublished novel—Paradise Disenchanted. I was hoping to start shooting early next year.”
Todhunter was doing everything in his power not to let his imagination revel in the romantic aura the murder of Donnie Percival would cast around the production. He was not, however, much practiced at appearing grief-stricken and compassionate. He came off looking mildly dyspeptic.
“How did you meet?” Blinker asked.
“My contacts in New York first brought Donnie to my attention,” Todhunter lied. “His first novel has made quite a splash in the New York literary world.”
“Is that so? I hadn’t heard.”
“Hardly anyone has,” Todhunter said. “Donnie is—was—very secretive about his work and very reluctant to publish it. I’m one of the few people in the world who’s seen the novel. He’s also written plays, poetry, critical essays—all still unpublished.”
Blinker gave a lightly embarrassed chuckle.
“I understand. I’m pretty bashful about showing my stuff, too. My girlfriend is the only one who’s read my script. She thinks it’s better than most of the crap down at the multiplex, but then she’s a bit biased, isn’t she? Wait. Check that. Once I paid for one of these script reading services to give me notes, even paid for the half-hour phone consult. But all this moron did was waste my thirty minutes trying to sell me his 20 DVD screenwriting course.”
“It’s strange there isn’t a body,” Todhunter remarked, struggling to choke his desire to take a handful of sand and force it down Blinker’s gullet.
Blinker pointed up the beach.
“You can see here from the line of debris how far the tide came up last night. If he went down closer to where the shoreline is now, the outgoing tide would’ve swept him out into the ocean.”
Todhunter turned his head and mouthed an expletive. If a blockbuster Hollywood tragedy was going to take place in his backyard, then he sure as hell wanted a body to show for it.
Donnie Percival was last seen in the wee hours of that blustery Sunday morning running away from Simon Todhunter’s beach house toward the shore. A minute later two shots were heard, several seconds apart, from out on the water. Someone on Todhunter’s security detail reported seeing, right after the second shot, a running silhouette drop into the shallow water along the beach. Just before the shooting, another member of the security detail had apprehended a man named Giggs prowling about the house with a gun, looking for Donnie Percival.
When the police arrived they began questioning the guests who, like avid shell-seekers after a storm, had fanned out over the beach to look for the body of the missing screenwriter. A team of paramedics followed, then Blinker and two of his lieutenants.
One of those lieutenants was now attempting to question the prime suspect, Giggs. Dressed in an immaculately white summer suit and matching white Panama hat, Giggs sat Indian-style on the sand, his cuffed hands resting on his lower back.
“C’mon and do yourself a favor,” the lieutenant said. “Tell me the truth about what went down here last night.”
Giggs gazed serenely out at the immensity of the ocean.
“A man’s most likely dead here, pal, and we’ve got you at the scene with a gun. Don’t you think you might owe us a little explanation?”
Giggs’s countenance brightened.
“‘Tell the truth and give back what you owe.’”
“Come again?” said the lieutenant.
Giggs’s shadowed, lupine eyes looked up at the lieutenant from beneath the brim of his Panama.
“‘Tell the truth and give back what you owe.’ That’s the first definition of justice that Socrates and his friends consider in Plato’s Republic.”
“That’s very nice,” replied the lieutenant. “I’m sure they’ll have all the Plato you want in the prison library.”
“I just find it interesting,” said Giggs. ““A man’s most likely dead here,” you say, implying that if a man is dead, I ipso facto bear some responsibility to—what? Fess up to the crime if I were somehow involved? Turn in my putative accomplices? But the real question is, why? Why should I feel some responsibility in this matter? Why should a man’s death, even granting for the sake of argument that I was the one who pulled the trigger, bind me in some way that is essentially moral?”
“How about—because we can put your ass away for the rest of your natural life?”
“Ah, but you see that’s much less interesting. That’s just, if you don’t mind my saying, a rather gross consequentialism. ‘I should do x because if I don’t do x things will go badly for me.’ Now, setting aside the deep questions of causality that any consequentialist view has to grapple with, what concerns me most about the view is that it doesn’t even consider the possibility—remote, I grant you—that there are certain actions that one must do no matter what the consequences. Do you see the problem? Because if all we’re doing is playing off one set of consequences against another, then there’s nothing underneath our morality—”
But the lieutenant had already started walking away, shouting at one of the police officers, “Can someone get us some coffee over here?”
Up on Todhunter’s patio, the other lieutenant, a stumpy, bald-pated man named Steckles, was questioning Persephone Mills. The sad, beautiful starlet, whose drug arrest record had gone platinum among her prurient public, sat on a cast-iron bench as Steckles stood limply in front of her like a high school geek finding himself paired in Chem Lab with the gorgeous captain of the cheerleading squad. Persephone’s damp hair was freshly combed and she wore a thick, rose bathrobe borrowed from Ugolina del Fuoco. Steckles was doing everything in his power not to look at the heart-shaped space where the robe fanned open to reveal the nape of her lovely neck and the dizzying constellation of freckles on her upper chest.
He cleared his throat and uttered in a voice about an octave above its normal range:
“How long have you been acquainted with Mr. Percival, Ms. Mills?”
Persephone brushed back a strand of hair.
“We’ve been dating a few weeks. Or we had been—oh God!”
“And you came to the party together last night?”
Persephone nodded.
“Did Mr. Percival appear upset about anything?”
“I’ve never seen Donnie upset. He’s always so—integrated.”
Steckles drew a doodle devil on his pad. He thought that he must not be very integrated. Geez-o-pete, he lost it whenever they sold out of his favorite jelly-glazed at The Donut Hole!
“Did you talk about anything special on the way to the party?” Steckles resumed.
“Nietzsche.”
Steckles acknowledged this with the nod of a man who keeps among the comic books and gun magazines stacked on the back of his toilet a volume or two of Nietzsche of his own.
“We’re reading Beyond Good and Evil together,” Persephone clarified.
Steckles scratched a beard on his doodle devil. He felt so—stupid. What was the last book he read? Did graphic novels count? What a stupid illiterate DOOFUS he was! On his pad he wrote, Becoming Good and Evil, and made a mental note to check it out of the public library.
Then he cleared his throat again and tried to grab hold of the tiny, spluttering balloon of his voice.
“Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to—harm Mr. Percival?”
Persephone bowed her head for several seconds. When she looked up there were tears brimming over her lower eyelids.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said.
“You do?”
“You want to ask me about my record.”
“Oh God. No!” Steckles was mortified. “I mean, only if you think it would be helpful.”
“I’ve been clean for awhile now. I’ve like, totally changed my life. I don’t hang out with those people anymore.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
Stupid! Steckles didn’t want to admit that he’d read the feature story on Persephone that appeared some weeks back in the Star Sunday Magazine, about how she was trying to grow up, get clean, and take on more serious acting roles. God, he didn’t want her to think he was some crazed fan who’d read everything about her! Backpedaling, he continued:
“I—just think—I mean, you just seem pretty mature.”
“Thank you. Donnie believed in me when no one else did. He told Simon that he wouldn’t sell him Paradise Disenchanted if I didn’t play the female lead.”
Steckles nodded, affirming the plain truth that Donnie’s stand had been only just.
“Simon’s dumbass security guard thought that I was trying to hurt Donnie. She saw me take out a can of mace and thought I was going to use it on him. I’m like, where did she get that? When I saw that creep over there (she pointed a manicured finger at Giggs), I told Donnie that I had seen him before, that he used to stalk me when I was filming Missy II. Donnie wanted to take me right home. I only took out the mace to show him that I was prepared to protect myself. But that security guard saw me do it and, like, totally wigged out and threw me into the freaking swimming pool.”
“She most definitely overreacted,” Steckles said. “I’m going to have a word with her about that, if you don’t mind. But first, is there anything else you could tell me that might be useful?”
“I don’t know,” Persephone said, wiping a tear away. “I know Blade was jealous of Donnie. But I can’t believe even he would do a thing like this.”
Steckles didn’t need to ask who Blade was. Axe-man for the power trio, DeathToll, Blade was Persephone’s boyfriend from the release of the original Missy at the Mall movie until about six months previously—when she abruptly and very publicly dumped him at the beginning of her metamorphosis.
“Did Blade and Mr. Percival ever encounter one another?” Steckles asked.
“Once,” said Persephone. “The night Donnie and I first met. Blade got all jealous and started a fight.”
Steckles, of course, like most everyone else on the planet, had watched a clip of this encounter on PeekyBooTube, the video arm of The Daily Voyeur.
“Maybe I’ll pay a little visit to Mr. Blade,” Steckles said, articulating “Mr. Blade” as though he were saying the words: “girly man.”
“Oh God,” Persephone said as she welled up again; “he might be dangerous.”
Steckles closed his eyes in a complacent expression.
“Please don’t worry about that, Ms. Mills. I want you to know that I’m, like, one hundred and fifty percent committed to finding the sonofabitch who did this.”
“That’s so awesome, lieutenant. Thank you!”
Blinker, meanwhile, had turned to take in the view of Todhunter’s avant-garde beach home: a grey, featureless rectangle that looked to Blinker like a prison building.
“The trick, always, is to keep the two lovers apart,” he mused.
“I’m sorry—?” said Todhunter.
“Oh,” Blinker smiled sheepishly, “just thinking about my script again. I mean, with any romantic comedy, the trick is to get the two lovers to meet, then to find some way to keep them apart for fifty pages. So I have my protagonist meet this wonderful woman at a bar. She takes him home. They begin an affair. Everything’s wonderful. Then one day at work he’s presented with evidence that links her to the murder he’s been working. Bam! That’s my First Turning Point.”
Todhunter reached underneath his glasses and dug two bulbous fingers into the corners of his eyes.
“But I’m not sure I sustain the necessary dramatic tension throughout the entirety of the Second Act. A classic screenwriting problem, eh? On one level I know I need to deepen their love affair, while on another level I need to increase the evidence fingering her as the murderer. But those fifty pages just kind of sag in the middle. I probably need some professional advice. Maybe I should simply shell out another three hundred bucks to a script consultant. Do you recommend those, Mr. Todhunter? I mean, are they really worth it?”
“Why don’t you send me the script?” said Todhunter wearily.
Blinker turned to him with a ludicrous smile of humbled surprise.
“Are you serious?”
“Utterly. Before you leave I’ll introduce you to my assistant, Georgie Kill. You can email it to her and she’ll make sure it ends up on my desk.”
And then right into the wastebasket, Todhunter finished the thought to himself.
“Actually,” Blinker replied, “I have a copy of the script in my car.”
Todhunter caught himself before his mouth curled into a sardonic smile.
“Even better. Now would you excuse me? I’ve had a helluva night and feel a migraine coming on. I think I’ll take a walk up the beach.”
“One of the first ideas about justice that Socrates and his friends consider,” Giggs was saying to the lieutenant, “is whether justice means simply doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.”
“Sounds pretty okay to me,” said the lieutenant, not bothering to stifle his yawn.
“I agree, it does sound pretty okay. Yet we have to accept that it only confirms us in our parochial customs. After all, even in the mob you do good to your friends and harm to your enemies.”
“Are you in the mob?” inquired the lieutenant hopefully.
“It was a hypothetical, lieutenant.”
Blinker had moved further down the beach and was now talking to a hulking woman in a jumpsuit of yellow spandex and a mane of dyed red hair. This Amazon had been on Todhunter’s security detail for the party. Though she had told her story any number of times that morning, Blinker wanted to hear it for himself.
“Then I see on the video monitor Mr. Donnie and that Persephone tramp come out onto the patio. She pulls a can of mace out of her purse and aims it right at Mr. Donnie.”
“Was he attacking her?”
“Not soes I could tell.”
“So you ran out onto the patio?”
“Yessir. I ran out and picked up that little bit of a thing and thowed her into the swimmin’ pool. I gave the binifit of the doubt to Mr. Donnie. He’d been real nice to me. Offered to git my script in front of his agent.”
Black envy surged in Blinker’s breast at the prospect of this rival screenwriter gaining an advantage over him, but he suppressed it with the thought that a reading from Simon Todhunter trumped a reading from Donnie Percival’s agent any day of the week. He continued his questioning.
“And that’s when Mr. Giggs arrived?”
“Yessir. Got the drop on me, I’m shamed to admit.”
“Was he trying to kill Mr. Percival?”
“He said he was there to retrieve sumpin’.”
“From Mr. Percival?”
“Yessir.”
“He didn’t say what it was?”
“No, sir. But he indicated he was a hired gun. Mentioned his ‘clients.’”
“He said ‘clients’?”
“Yessir.”
“And meanwhile Ms. Mills is in the pool?”
“Yessir.”
“So what happened next? How did you disarm Giggs?”
“He got distracted—there was a whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ from down here on the beach—and so I jumped him and put my signature cattle-ropin’ hold on him. In the mix of things, Mr. Donnie run off. Somebody out here in the dark musta seen him, cuz a few seconds later there was shots.”
“I know you,” beamed Blinker. “You’re Auntie Maim, the professional wrestler. I didn’t recognize you all dressed up.”
Auntie Maim smiled bashfully, revealing a grille of golden braces and a bridge of dentures.
“I only work for Mr. Todhunter for the networkin’ opportunities.”
Alone and far down the beach, Todhunter spied a silver object glinting in the sand. It was some five yards away, half buried by the tide. He studied it for some while without moving toward it. Then he slowly turned around, pleased to note that Blinker and Auntie Maim were the closest to him, and they nearly a hundred yards down the beach. With no apparent firmness of intention he walked towards the object. It was a DVD in a clear plastic circular case. He turned it over with his foot to see if it had a label.
“Good God,” he said aloud.
He sat down, putting his enormous body in between the disk and the investigation down the beach. He looked contemplatively out at the ocean as with his right hand he slid the disk out of the sand and into his pocket. A few minutes later he rose, and with a forced ease, headed back toward the house.
The lieutenant pushed Giggs’s head below the roof of the squad car and shoved him into the back seat.
“Give up your clients, pal, and maybe we’ll let you take a walk.”
“I appreciate the offer,” Giggs replied. “But would it be just?”
“Huh?”
“I mean, if it did turn out that I played some role in a murder, would it be right for me to, as you say, ‘take a walk’?”
“Better than rotting in jail for a couple of guys who couldn’t give a damn about you anyway. C’mon. You want to take the rap for them?”
“Perhaps it’s better to suffer injustice than to do it.”
“Take the deal, pal.”
A thoughtful expression came over Giggs. He said:
“So Thrasymachus, the notorious sophist, reluctantly complies with Socrates’s demand and answers, “Justice is the advantage of the stronger.””
“That’s right,” said the lieutenant. “The advantage is all yours. You got your clients over a barrel.”
“But what would be the effect upon my soul?”
“I’m not your priest, pal.”
“Do you have theological commitments, lieutenant?”
“I’m spiritual, but not religious.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“Neither do I. Take the deal.”
Giggs sighed from out of the depths.
“So we sit here, lieutenant, bound at the bottom of the cave, watching the flickering shadows on the wall, not even sure whether they are shadows. Is there no one who will come to rescue us?”
Keep reading High Concepts: A Hollywood Nightmare for the absurdly low price of $2.99. Just click here.
The photograph above is reproduced courtesy of Graham at Wikimedia Commons.
PBS Masterpiece’s hit show Sherlock, an edgy, 21st-century updating of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective series, returns this Sunday evening, January 19, for a much-anticipated Season 3 (you can follow the countdown clock on the Masterpiece website). As the Season 2 cliffhanger was the revelation that Sherlock’s death at the hands of the evil genius Moriarty was only apparent, fans of the show will be eager to learn just how Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) will make his dramatic return to the land of the living, and how his beleaguered friend, Dr. John Watson (Martin Freeman), will handle it.
The return of this series invites the question: what makes Conan Doyle’s character so perennial? What explains it?
Mystery as Paradox
To answer this question we must first understand what a mystery is. The detective mystery, like all mysteries including theological ones, is a form of paradox. In encountering paradox we experience the shock of (apparent) contradiction. “Silver Blaze,” one of Conan Doyle’s most popular Sherlock Holmes stories, involves a horse trainer found dead on a moor. A London bookmaker has been arrested for the crime, but the facts don’t add up to a conviction. Holmes, and the reader, are thus faced with the shock of contradiction: a man is dead, yet there is no clear cause of his death. An even more profound shock occurs when we encounter a theological paradox. “The last shall be first.” “Three persons in one God.” What do these statements mean? How can they be?
The role of the sleuth and the role of the theologian are similar: each one tries to solve a mystery. The climax of each endeavor is a moment of illumination in which what seemed contradictory is shown not in fact to be so. Theological illumination, however, always remains deficient. Despite the abundant wisdom in St. Augustine’s De trinitate, it does not wholly illuminate the mystery of the Trinity. But in a detective story, the climax is usually wholly illuminating as the culprit is discovered and apprehended.
Two sorts of illumination can be found in detective stories. One sort, call it the Sherlock Holmes sort, sees the paradox or mystery as a riddle or challenge resolvable by the “scientific” discovery of causal linkages. Here, the detective’s illumination is merely material and mechanical. This sort of illumination is interesting and entertaining, and, judging by the enduring popularity of Sherlock Holmes and his many literary and cinematic heirs, it shows no signs of waning. But another sort of illumination found in detective stories is the Father Brown sort (which I name after G.K. Chesterton’s famous priest-detective). Here, the detective’s illumination involves the discovery of material causes, but also, and more importantly, the illumination of causes (moral, spiritual, diabolical) that transcend the material world. These two sorts of illumination are not at all mutually exclusive. They exist along a continuum, and often are in play in the same story. Still, distinguishing them helps us identify tendencies within detective mysteries.
Holmes as Thinking Machine
As a man devoted to the illumination of material causes, Sherlock Holmes is a thinking machine. His world is one of data, “facts”, sensible stimuli. These facts can sometimes seem to contradict one another. Yet a mind sufficiently responsive to the facts, like Holmes’s, can understand them as “clues” which can illuminate or resolve mystery. The same mode of inquiry is on display in practically every mystery we read or watch, whether it’s a work by Agatha Christie or Henning Mankell, or an episode of CSI or Bones.
I don’t mean to deny that there is real moral, interest in stories featuring such thinking machines. There are criminals to be apprehended and justice to be served. It’s also worth mentioning that these thinking machines often display certain impressive characteristics, principally a kind of cunning and courage.
But in the character of Sherlock Holmes, whether as depicted by Conan Doyle himself or by his many adapters, we can also notice a defect that mutates and spreads like a virus through the dramatic lineage of heroes and heroines who succeed him. This defect is not Holmes’s notorious addiction to cocaine. It is his addiction to his “method.” Holmes plays the “game” entirely (almost entirely?) for the game’s own sake. The “game” is his real drug. In “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman,” Conan Doyle has Holmes goes so far as to admit: “Burglary has always been an alternative profession, had I cared to adopt it, and I have little doubt that I should have come to the front.” This startling revelation indicates that Holmes’s mechanic mind is morally neutral; it can just as efficiently be used for evil as for good.
That is to say, detection for Holmes is as amoral as geometry (Holmes often refers to a case as “a pretty little demonstration”). Hugh Kenner has pointed out that in “The Return of Sherlock Holmes,” when Watson protests in horror Holmes’s quasi-seduction of a housemaid with information to give, that Holmes calmly replies, “You can’t help it, my dear Watson. You must play your cards as best you can when such a stake is on the table.”
Toward Savagery
What the character of Sherlock Holmes plays with is the idea of the detective as aesthete. The aesthete, writes philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, is one who fends off “the kind of boredom that is so characteristic of modern leisure by contriving behavior in others that will be responsive to their wishes, that will feed their sated appetites.” Doesn’t this serve as a good description of Sherlock Holmes? Isn’t Holmes always complaining of boredom? And whenever he isn’t fighting boredom with cocaine and his violin he is indulging in the pleasures of being a thinking machine, pleasures which motivate him far more than justice, and in which other people are treated as means, not ends.
Holmes’s misanthropy becomes even more exaggerated in Sherlock, in a way similar to that of Hugh Laurie’s eponymous character in Fox Television’s House (an audial pun on the connection with “Holmes,” House creator David Shore has said). In both of these characters the image of sleuth as savage is carried far, yet not quite all the way. For a good part of the pleasure in watching Sherlock or House is waiting for the point when these thinking machines betray a sign of real human affection. They play the savage for a good part of each episode, greedily collecting the facts that excite their mental impulses, treating those around them like imbeciles. But before it’s all done, there is usually some suggestion that the thinking machine is not really, at heart, a savage. That he sees at least a glimmer into the deeper mystery of what it means to be a human being.
This article originally appeared on Aleteia and is reposted with permission.
The photograph above is reproduced courtesy of Fat Les (bellaphon) via Wikimedia Commons.
Someone who loves being a storyteller (in words, images, song, or all three).
Someone who realizes that a story exists as the lived estimate of what the author believes to be the truth about human beings and their ultimate destiny.
Someone who appreciates that the teachings of the Catholic Church do not restrict one’s creative imagination, but enrich it immeasurably.
Someone who, if not a Catholic, holds a religious faith or philosophical viewpoint that sees human existence as an adventure that transcends the material and which directs us to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
Someone who understands that sincerity cannot substitute for craft.
Someone who is energized by the way in which the new media and new digital technologies open up all sorts of new opportunities for authors and publishers.
Someone who is afraid of falling short of what his or her talent is capable.
Someone who loves to talk about:
Someone who is looking for others interested in the same.
Someone who is going to write that novel (screenplay, play, etc.) this year.
Did I get it right, or have I misdescribed you? Have I missed something important? Let me know. I want to know who YOU think you are.
The image above is reproduced courtesy of Mike Licht at Flickr Creative Commons under the following license. Note the writing instrument that Tolstoy is using.
Nick Ripatrazone, staff writer at The Millions, contributing editor to Marginalia Review of Books, and author of The Fine Delight: Postconciliar Catholic Literature, as well as several books of poetry and fiction, maintains a site also called The Fine Delight that is well worth adding to your bookmarks if you don’t know it already. The Fine Delight features substantive interviews with Catholic writers broadly construed, meaning, as Nick says, that “some writers are practicing Catholic, others have lapsed; some question more than they accept, others are Catholic by proxy, schooling, or influence.”
The most recent interview is with Joshua Hren, publisher and editor of Wiseblood Books and managing editor of Dappled Things. Nick talks to Joshua about the state of Catholic literature in the Anglophone world, his venture at Wiseblood Books, and the nature of belief in Hemingway, Dostoevsky, and David Foster Wallace.
Here’s an hors d’oeuvre:
What, in particular, gets in the way of contemporary fiction grappling with belief in a believable way? I think we can arrive at a partial answer to this question by turning to David Foster Wallace, a “post-modern” writer who was not afraid to reckon with the question and problem and subject of belief. As Timothy Jacobs argues in his study of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Wallace, who took his own life in 2008, confronted the “contemporary literary ironic nihilists” just as Dostoevsky’s “particular foes were the Nihilists” of the 19th century, those who openly rejected belief in anything at all, who openly rejected adherence to any moral principles. And yet, Wallace muses in an essay on Dostoevsky, “maybe it’s not true that we today are nihilists. At the very least we have devils we believe in. These include sentimentality, naiveté, archaism, fanaticism. Maybe it’d be better to call our art’s culture one congenial skepticism.” Wallace goes on to note that “in our own age and culture of enlightened atheism we are very much Nietzsche’s children, his ideological heirs”; the contemporary arts carry on as though God is dead, but not always consciously. In his novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace calls this “enlightened self-interest” and “unconsidered atheism” (267). Existing amidst this culture, Wallace proclaims the importance of fiction that does not shy away from belief: “believing in something bigger than you is not a choice. You either do or you’re a walking dead man, just going through the motions.” Sickened by a self-absorbed culture, he demands that we believe in something larger than ourselves, but doesn’t know quite what he himself believes. How, then, does he tackle that something bigger than oneself, how does he tackle that weary cynicism he finds so awful?
Find out by going to the full interview here.
Here in the fresh, frigid air of the New Year I’m working on building up my writing muscles. The analogy to running or any other exercise regimen is exact. You begin with muscles and willpower flaccid. Stretching is required (for me, that’s “Morning Pages”). Then you plunge in. And it hurts. And there’s resistance, physical and mental. But you push through the wall. Rinse and repeat. And the more you repeat, the easier it becomes. Muscles and willpower pump up. And you begin to experience the athlete’s “high,” which energizes you further.
Another analogy I like, appropriate to the season, is that of the fire. The more logs you toss into the flames in the fireplace, the more heat you’ll generate. A log = your writing stint, the prime time of original composition. But don’t discount the value of adding kindling in the between times: the short burst, if only a minute or two, of note-taking, brainstorming, revising, doodling. Don’t let the fire die out.
You have to keep pushing yourself, too, just as in the gym. At the beginning, 500 words might seem like Everest. But you have to consistently set higher goals. Make a game of it. “500 words is my goal for today, but I’m going to try and write them in just half an hour, or 45 minutes.”
Speed is not an enemy of creativity, at least at certain stages of the process. I’m trying to write faster on the first draft. Getting the stuff down before the Internal Editor walks in, grumpy and underslept, to over-analyze and criticize every thought and sentence. Writing fast seems to keep him on the other side of the locked door. The first draft is not the time for his contributions.
The opposite advice holds, however, when it comes to the companion activity of the writer’s life: reading. In his blog post this morning Seth Godin speaks of tl;dr, internet lingo for “too long, didn’t read.” That seems to sum up my response to most of what I find online. There’s too much stuff out there, even just counting the stuff I’m interested in, and I can’t possibly get to it all. The temptation is to flit like a magpie from branch to branch, sniffing and pecking at lots of different things, but learning nothing. “Limit the inbound to what’s important,” suggests Godin, “not what’s shiny or urgent and silly.” That requires rigorous habits of selection and attention, and a kind of mortification regarding digital pap, email checking, and mindless social networking.
This is not even to mention the supreme importance of reading slowly offline. This piece by author David Mikics is a salutary reminder of that.
The photograph above is reproduced courtesy of Elizabeth Lloyd at Flickr Creative Commons under the following license.
This Sunday we celebrate Epiphany, which reminds me of a passage from one of the letters of Evelyn Waugh in which he reflects upon this feast. The letter is one written to his wife Laura on 9 January 1945, just after the publication of Brideshead Revisited when Waugh was in (then) Yugoslavia:
“Have you ever considered how the Epiphany is the feast of artists. I thought so very strongly this year. After St. Joseph and the angels and the shepherds and even the ox and the ass have had their share of the crib, twelve days later appears an exotic caravan with negro pages and ostrich plumes. They have come an enormous journey across a desert and the splendid gifts look much less splendid than they did when they were being packed in Babylon. The wise men committed every sort of bêtise—even asking the way of Herod & provoking the massacre of the innocents—but they got there in the end and their gifts were accepted.” (The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Armory, New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1980, p. 197).
It’s a wonder just what Waugh means in associating the Magi with the artist. It seems to have something to do with their late arrival to the scene of Our Lord’s birth. One of Waugh’s biographers takes the exotic caravan, the pages and plumes, as metaphors for the lush style that Waugh displays in Brideshead. The gifts the Magi bring would seem to be the works that the artist offers to God. I had to look up bêtise—it’s a work of folly, a mistake made from bad judgment, ignorance, or inattention. The artist’s foibles and sins…
The adoration of the Magi signifies the pagan world’s attraction to Christ. Perhaps Waugh sees the artist, even the Christian artist, as largely immersed in the secular world (a world in which the artist-celebrity is ever increasingly “king”), yet still called by the beautiful “star” of the faith. It also may be the case that Waugh, a convert, felt a special affinity with these first Gentiles who responded to Christ’s call, however late they may have arrived at the scene.
The artist’s gifts, meanwhile, like the gifts of the Magi, while splendid in one sense—gold, frankincense and myrrh were gifts most valued in the East—are as nothing compared to the splendor of the Babe in the crib. Still, on account of the Magi’s faith, their gifts are accepted and they are given space to adore the Christ. The artist’s call, by the beautiful light of the star, is toward this adoration of the Beauty of Christ. I note that the word beauty, in its Greek etymology, literally means a “call.”
An earlier version of this article appeared on Aleteia.
The photograph above, a detail from an early Christian sarcophagus in the Vatican Museums, is reproduced courtesy of Father Lawrence Lew, O.P. at Flickr Creative Commons under the following license.
