Eudora Welty on characters

“Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.”

                –Eudora Welty

Favorites:

Losing Battles

The Robber Bridegroom

The Ponder Heart

Plus, a bonus quote:

“I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.”

Robert Graves on story-tellers

The Devil’s Advice to Storytellers 

 Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue, 

Keep probability – some say – in view. 

But my advice to story-tellers is: 

Weigh out no gross of probabilities, 

Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of 

Known instances of virtue, crime or love. 

To forge a picture that will pass for true, 

Do conscientiously what liars do – 

Born liars, not the lesser sort that raid 

The mouths of others for their stock-in-trade: 

Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps 

That may shake down into a world perhaps; 

People this world, by chance created so, 

With random persons whom you do not know – 

The teashop sort, or travellers in a train 

Seen once, guessed idly at, not seen again; 

Let the erratic course they steer surprise 

Their own and your own and your readers’ eyes; 

Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair) 

Motive and end and moral in the air; 

Nice contradiction between fact and fact 

Will make the whole read human and exact. 

 

                                      —Robert Graves

Favorites:

Collected Poems

The White Goddess

Goodbye to All That

And a bonus quote:

“To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.”

Review: The Law of Falling Bodies

 The Law of Falling Bodies is like cooking a souffle while doing a high wire act.
There’s no way it’s going to work. But what if it does? I’m almost tempted to leave my review it at that, but I’ll go further, at the risk of a few mini-spoilers. It does something I normally despise: it turns a murder story into an espionage story. With Nazis.

But: the author pulls it off, largely through the agency of his main character, a thoroughly grounded, down-to-earth, self-deprecating, modest graduate student in physics who is the only person who could ever solve the many mysteries presented to him, in part because he and his antagonist go together like yin and yang.

It’s a spy novel which may also qualify as a cozy mystery. It includes an alluring local cop and an asshole FBI agent who may be allies or enemies. Through it all, it’s strangely believable. This is an overlooked gem. Pick it up now.

The Law of Falling Bodies can be found here on Amazon.

Review: Go Find Daddy

Modern society is a minefield, and was even before Covid-19. But there was a lot of discussion at the height of the pandemic as to how writers should handle such an event. Ignore it?—or plunge into it? Steve Goble elects to skip it, but in doing so he (intentionally) shines a light on the aftermath, and what it means to us going forward. The waning of trust—in institutions, in each other seems to have accelerated to dangerous new levels. A lot of readers were waiting to see how writers would handle Covid and the post-Covid arena. If Go Find Daddy, Steve Goble’s third in his Ed Runyon series is any example, I would say—honestly, straightforwardly, levelly. Which happens to describe his hero, Ed.

Ed has left the force, gotten over (largely) his anger issues, and is trying to make it work as a private detective in small-town Ohio. He’s a no-nonsense kind of guy. As he says, “accountants get head-aches from staring at a screen store clerks get head-aches from dealing with assholes all day, I get shot at. No big deal.”

But he’s about to go down the rabbit hole. A cop’s been killed. The main suspect—the only suspect as far as the police are concerned—is a right-wing podcaster who’s made his hatred for cops his brand (thus helping to diminish further our faith in authority), and who’s vanished without leaving a clue, even to his wife and child.  Every cop in three states is out for his blood. And now a pro-cop entity online has offered a million dollars for him—dead. No one knows whether the offer is real, whether the organization is real, or a hoax—but it’s drawn every bounty-hunter to the chase.

All of which would have nothing to do with Ed—until he takes on a mission for the fugitive’s wife—to get a vital message to him. If you know Ed, you’ll know why it’s a job he can’t refuse (involving the fugitive’s little daughter) even though he’s going up against the fugitive’s friends and enemies both, all of whom are trigger-happy, none of whom trust each other or can be trusted. Yes. Ed Runyon gets shot at—a lot. 

But Ed is a person who can be trusted, a person who holds his integrity dear, a person who can be believed, a doggedly decent man—and that’s the key to the job he’s taken on, and it’s what makes him a hero for this post-Covid age. 

This is the third book in the Ed Runyon series. Jump on the bandwagon. Go Find Daddy can be found here on Amazon.

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