Review: The Samurai's Octopus

 

What if … Charles Dickens were not a name synonymous with Victorian London, but were transplanted instead to 18^th century Edo (Tokyo)? You might wind up with something like Jonelle Patrick’s triumphant new novel, The Samurai’s Octopus.

It’s not written in Dickens’s style of course. Patrick’s style is all her own, lucid and sharp-edged as Japanese calligraphy. But it’s Dickensian in subject matter, and in two of its central elements: the scope of character and passion, and the way each character’s fate is ruled by the dead hand of the past.

The past is centered upon one event: murder. The opening presents us with the four classic elements of the murder mystery: the murderer, the victim, the motive for which the murder committed—and the witness. We see the crime through the eyes of the witness, Takahisa Takeda, the impecunious samurai of the title. But he doesn’t know the murderer, the victim, or the motivation. He’ll spend the next sixteen years of his life trying to fill in the blanks. His fortune depends upon the answers.

Hive Mind

 I’ve been bingeing on Hercule Poirot on PBS lately.

Poirot, if anyone in the English-speaking world is unaware, is Agatha Christie’s funny little Belgian detective, the most celebrated fictional detective this side of Sherlock Holmes. I’ve read all the books and seen all the shows already, more than once. So now I suppose you could say I’m luxuriating in nostalgia. Poirot is always talking about the necessity of order and method in detection. One fact leads to another, forging a chain of causation.

(I don’t know whether Mrs. Christie wrote with order and method. Perhaps Poirot forced her to adopt method, or perhaps she looked to him for these qualities, which she lacked. I myself have written three Sherlock Holmes novels. I wrote them because questions arose in my mind ((Why did van Gogh cut off his ear and give it to a prostitute? If he wanted to make a real sacrifice, why not cut out an eye?)), so I chose Holmes to find the solutions I could never have discovered on my own. True story.)

As you may have glommed* onto if you’ve read a few of my posts here, there’s no order or method in the way I think or write. Jeez, I don’t even have my books organized on the shelves. And since I’ve shed books every time I’ve moved to a different city (eight, so far) I’m not even sure which books I actually own. Some books I treasure may be in the Phantom Zone. like lost children.

When I think, it’s more like working on a jigsaw puzzle, picking out the brightest, most colorful pieces, the most interesting shapes, to put together first. I’m aware of edges, but comfortable not seeing the forest for the trees until I’m lost in the heart of it.

And when I write, I’m blowing up a balloon. I’ve joked before that when I start a novel, I write the first sentence and follow it with—

The End

—and the rest is just filling out the middle part. Only it’s not really a joke.

So—in my mystery in progress, The Detectives Downstairs, there is no order and method. On purpose.

Gravity and Me

 There are a few years in your childhood when you can positively fly. It’s a natural progression, when you think about it. We’re born nailed to the earth. Then we learn to sit up, to crawl, to stand, to run, to dance. I know this program intimately. When I had my stroke seven years ago, I had to repeat the program, every step of the way. And every night in my bed I dreamed of running.

After you learn to run, you know you can fly. You just need to learn the trick of it. Build up momentum. Flap your arms. Fly. You’re small and light. Gravity might take its eyes off you for just a second. That’s all the time you need to break free.

Or maybe you need an equalizer.

When I was in third grade, my sister’s high school put on a production of Peter Pan. She smuggled home the Peter Pan hat. Mind you, it was made of folded-up newspaper, painted green. But it had obviously been sprayed with pixie dust. 

That was the edge we needed. We’d take turns mounting the porch railing with the hat on, myself, my brother, and the Burns boys. There was an oleander bush standing guard in the yard between our apartment and the neighbor’s. We figured if we could clear the oleander bush, we could officially fly.

That bush took a lot of punishment. We’d fling ourselves toward it, hoping to catch an updraft. Gravity usually grabbed us by the ankle just before we took off. None of us actually flew, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Rex Stout on character

Rex Stout was prolific--he claimed it took between 35 and 41 days to write a novel, as long as he wasn't drinking. He wrote 33 novels and I won't get into the number of stories. His best-known as the creator of Nero Wolfe--the genius detective with the too too solid flesh.

"A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat."

I won't pretend to have read more than about a dozen of his books so far, but these are three of my favorites so far:

The Silent Speaker

The Golden Spiders

Not Quite Dead Enough

Here's a bonus quote:

"There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living cook books and detective stories."