The Draining Lake

I’m loving how so many of the people I’m reading about are reading and taking some time off. Erlender, another of my favorite police officers, is taking some time off from work when his reading is interrupted by a phone call that will call him back to duty in Arnaldur Indriðason's The Draining Lake.

By page eight I was howling with laughter with a lovely description of Iceland: ‘Sigurdur Óli was standing by the skeleton when Erlendur and Elínborg arrived at the lake. A forensics team was on the way. The officers from Hafnarfjördur were fiddling around with yellow plastic tape to cordon off the area, but had discovered they had nothing to attach it to. Sigurdur Óli watched their efforts and thought he could understand why village-idiot jokes were always set in Hafnarfjördur.’

I’m glad for some good dry Icelandic humor in otherwise bleak surroundings and a brooding Icelandic detective reading “a series of accounts of people who had got lost and disappeared in the wilds of Iceland.” Each of the lives of our three detectives is being delved into, revealed to us. We know them, have some inklings of their lives beyond work, but in this fourth in the series we are being let in even further.

Indriðason is using The Draining Lake to educate us about Iceland during the Cold War as this mystery unfolds. It may seem insignificant, but just as Iceland was a player in WWII, it was also a player in the Cold War. A German Ambassador relates this to Erlendur: “I know you’ll find it amusingly absurd,” she said, ‘but in terms of the diplomatic service, Iceland is the back end of gthe world. The weather’s dreadful. The incessant storms, the darkness and cold. There is hardly a worse punishment imaginable than to be post people here.” Of course Erlendur has to ask her when he leaves, ‘”Why were sent to this dreadful country?” I love to see Erlendur showing this spunk and patriotism. Spying does go on in the Cold war and Iceland is in play as we will learn. Returning Icelandic students from East German universities provide this intrigue that reveals itself when the lake begins to drain because of natural disaster or was it divine so as to let them ‘take a closer look.’ The main international airport on Iceland, Keflavik, was the American military base before it was turned over to Iceland. And who can forget the classic chess match between Fischer and Spassky in 1972? Although our murder takes place in the early 60’s, the tension can’t be neglected and consider the importance of the chess match which helped put Iceland on the map and into the minds of the people of the world.

Elínborg, the female detective of the trio, wrote a cookbook that received rave reviews. She and the youngest member of the detective team are having a BBQ at which Erlendur comes without his female acquaintance, everyone is eager to meet. At this point, I wish Indriðason had been more detailed about the cooking process just as Martin Walker is in the Bruno series. Icelandic food is very, very good and learning more about it, especially from an insider and a member of Erlendur’s team would enhance the storyline as it does The Bruno series.

So much has advanced in this book for all three of our detectives. It is rich in humanity as we watch them grow and share more of themselves to us.

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Devil's Cave

Martin Walker’s Bruno Courrèges is a most delightful and agreeable character. He is the Chief of Police in a little community called St Denis in France. Bruno is a hunter, a cook, a horseman, a lover, a non-politician with great political skills, and a good cop. I’m always amused by the description of the elaborate meals he cooks for himself, his lover, his friends. His knowledge of wine is also superb. He is human, unlike so many of the other cops and detectives I’m reading about. In the fifth in a series, The Devil’s Cave, we are introduced to a drifting punt on the local river containing the dead body of a dead woman surrounded by all the accoutrements of a Black Mass. During his horseback rides on Hector, his horse, he meets a lovely intriguing woman. On a canoe trip to determine the source of the woman’s place of embarkation, he meets another lovely woman. His main squeeze, Pamela, is off in Scotland taking care of her comatose mother. Isabelle re-enters into his life for a cameo with a special surprise. So much is going on in such a short time and it is all so human as well as related to the business of death and other happenings of a small community for the local police.

The complexity of the stories, the interweaving of so many pieces makes these books intellectual gymnastics and so addicting. Walker has built an incredible series and with each installment we get more complexity, glimpses to the past books and current events built on information we already know. He has drawn us into the St Denis community.

The Author’s note at the end of the novel is excellent, especially the first paragraph which is great satire.

One of the treats of this series is the meal. Apparently his wife has a food blog and his daughter maintains a webpage for Bruno that has recipes. Here is an example of the type of meal Bruno enjoys throughout the entire series:

He left J-J and Isabelle sitting at the table on the terrace in the sunshine, watching Balzac explore his new home. Bruno took from his kitchen a small knife and bowl and went looking for lunch. He could never understand Pamela’s obsession with eradicating dandelions from her lawns; he presumed it was some odd British idiosyncrasy like its royal family and its warm beer. Everyone in France understood the pleasure of young dandelion leaves in a salad, but Bruno went further. He looked for the tiny green buds of the future flowers, snipped them off until he had a couple of dozen and then added some leaves of fresh parsley. He went back into the kitchen to peel a few cloves and wash the white asparagus. (This was obtained earlier, picked in the wild.) Humming to himself with pleasure at entertaining his friends, he cut some slices from the big smoked ham that hung fro the main roof beam. He put water on to boil for the asparagus and he tiny new potatoes, cracked a dozen of his own eggs into a bowl and took plates, glasses and cutlery out to the table where Isabelle and J-J were chatting about politics.

He tossed a know of butter into a large frying pan and turned on the gas, opened a bottle of Bergerac Sec and took it with baguette of fresh bread and a bottle of Badoit, his favourite mineral water, out to the table. Back in the kitchen, the butter was starting to bubble and he added some crushed garlic and the dandelion buds, and began stirring the eggs with a large fork. He seasoned the eggs with salt and pepper and turned back to the buds. When he felt the little buds begin to soften under his spatula, he added the eggs and began to swirl them around the pan. He broke off briefly to stand the asparagus in their special tall cylindrical pan that he’d found in a broucante; now they were ready for the boiling water.

‘Can I help?’ Isabelle asked, coming into the kitchen, Balzac at her heels, raising his nose to sniff the tantalizing new scents of a kitchen. “It’s so good to be back here, watching you cook. It’s even better with the sunshine and a dog at our feet. It feels like summer.’

Bruno threw her a smiling glance before starting to fold the omelette. Last summer had been that first, glorious rapture of their love affair before she had decided to pursue her career in Paris. He could never decide whether he wanted a clean and surgical end of it, or to go on with their thrilling but frustrating reunions on snatched weekends. Just to look at her was to know he could not give her up, although in the back of his mind he knew that her inevitable departure would leave him miserable and guilty at the sense of betraying the distant Pamela.

“You can take this out to the table, ’ he said, sliding the folded omelette into a large oval dish, and then tearing up the parsley leaves to sprinkle on top. Before she picked up the plates, Isabelle took his arm and turned him to her to kiss him gently on the lips. He felt her tongue tease him briefly before she broke off and picked up the dish.

I smell truffles, but I don’t see any,’ J-J, fork in one hand and bread in the other. His wine glass was already empty. Bruno refilled it.

‘I left a small one in the egg box,’ Bruno replied. ‘Egg shells are porous so they absorb some of the flavour, not enough to overwhelm the pissenlit.’

When they finished the course, Bruno went back to the kitchen and sliced butter into the frying pan to melt before he drained the potatoes and asparagus. He put them into new dishes, poured on the melted butter, sprinkled more parsley on the potatoes and rejoined the others. (pp 166-68)

Bon appétit!! I am always hungry when I read a Bruno crime story but sated.

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The Vault

Inspector Wexford has retired and he is enjoying the good life, reading the latest Booker award winners, reading other books, playing with his grandchildren, and puttering about. I can relate to this man, I’m doing the same. But all too soon, he is back at it, police work. He is not a good spokesperson for retirement. There are those who can retire and those who can’t. Could Ruth Rendell be setting up Wexford for future private detective work in The Vault?

One of Wexford’s many quirks is his aversion to the clichés people use. Counting these and finding them is a fun diversion as I read. The story demonstrates a real dilemma for new retirees as Wexford learns to stay home and not play cop. But when he plays cop, he does good. Eventually he gives retirement a fair shake by traveling with his wife. I’m glad I have come to Inspector Wexford at the end of his career. Now that the Pope announced his retirement, I know I’m in good company.

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Care of Woden Floors

Care of Wooden Floorscaught by eye on the new books shelf at the library.  This first novel by London architect Will Wiles begins with the very sentiment I had after I put down a wooden floor in my apartment: PLEASE YOU MUST TAKE CARE OF THE WOODEN FLOORS. This sentence was placed in the middle of a very lengthy (4 A4 pages) letter written by the owner of the apartment, Oskar, to his former college roommate who will stay in the former communist city flat to write a novel while Oskar is in LA working on his divorce. Oskar, a musician, is very anal about things and uses notes to communicate with those who share his living spaces, college and the flat. The wooden floors provide two delightful scenes in the very first day. The two cats living with Oskar have figured out the glide of these floors and the current resident also tries his luck with gliding only to injure himself. Of course, the guest leaves a red wine stain on the floor near the sofa on which the cats are not allowed, but always seem to be found, he has fallen asleep. He becomes obsessed with this stain and its eradication. It has become like Poe’s classic “Tell Tale Heart.”

Wiles weaves an entertaining tale as the narrator informs us of his and Oskar’s college days woven into his daily touring and obsessing over the stain. These two are opposites. A series of cascading accidents take over the plot as Oskar’s friend has stumbled into his own little hell. I was reminded of an incident that occurred to me a quarter of a century ago or more. I was at a party in NYC. The house was like Oskar’s, but instead of wooden floors this house has plush white rugs and furniture, perhaps an Iranian as described early in Wiles novel about Iranian jails. Anyway, I spilled a glass of red wine on the white rug. Immediately a woman grabbed a glass of white wine and poured it on the red wine spill and used a cloth napkin to soak it up. With more white wine and more napkins the red stain was gone. She was a flight attendant and explained the science behind her actions of using white wine to extract the red wine from the carpet. A trick she learned for passengers who spilled red wine on themselves on first class cross continental flights. Oskar’s friend may have been wise to also buy some white wine, although Oskar did leave the red wine for his guest.

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When the Killing's Done, a Lovely Day

I’ve picked up another cheeky TC Boyle novel, When the Killing’s Done, a nautical tale in the Northern Channel Islands of California. Drowning is probably my biggest fear. Imagine my delight when he reintroduced the Tokachi-maru, a twelve-thousand ton freighter out of Nagoya, Japan in this book, the same vessel he had a Japanese sailor jump from to start East is East, my first Boyle novel.

I’ve spent all day of rain inside, by the fire inhaling this novel of conflict, deceit, selfishness, rain, death, and above all hypocrisy. What a celebration of misadventure of man and nature. Of man attempting to right nature, to correct nature, to control nature. It’s all an accident with the predator competing with predator. This is one of the most karma-laced books I’ve ever read. Man and his Eden always in conflict.

It's stopped raining, moved north to wreak havoc on the NE with Nemo. I'm off to the beach to see the waves and enjoy my little Eden. It has turned into a Lovely Day. 

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Waging Heavy Peace

My son, Tommy Nellen, gave me Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace   (Part 2) on my last birthday in October. I took my time reading it. I wanted to savor it. During a bike trip to Staunton, Va, last October a fellow rider and I were speaking of Young at breakfast. He and his wife from Belfast, Northern Ireland had made this trip at this time to see Young in Pittsburgh. He had already read the book. I told him I had it, but hadn’t started it. All he said was he liked it. At this point I’m going to start all over again from the beginning. It’s a cold week here on the beach in Maryland, so I’ll read it while sitting in front of the roaring fires I’m having in my lovely fireplace. I love this fireplace and my fire pit in the backyard and my backyard which gives me such a glorious view of the night sky and the moon sweeps across when it is roaming the sky. I am 8 miles from the beach. This is my spiritual home, the place where I am centered and where I commune with the Spirits daily.

Part of this new beginning for me is getting my LP’s and 45’s out of the boxes and shelved. Then I need to replace the turntable I broke in my last move. I haven’t heard these vinyl memories in years. I know the sound is better than my CD’s. I’ve refused the MP3 era, except what I have on my computers and through online music sharing programs. The local brewery has vinyl night ever Tuesday. Now that my vinyl has been freed, I will be partaking in these evenings. I’m fascinated by Young’s desire to promote Pono, a music system that will rejuvenate listening to vinyl quality in the digital age, if I understand what he is trying to do. At 65, Young is bouncing back and forth between then and now and constantly letting us know “I’ll keep you posted.” This book is his way of getting on with the ideas that flow inside that genius mind. He is multitasking and is straight especially after some of the medical emergencies he has recently had. He’s back to pure, no drugs, no tobacco, and no alcohol. Like Crosby. I’ve loved him with CSN, Horse, and solo and am now enjoying getting the back-story on these times.

As he talks about the Green Board, a tool that he hopes brings him back to life, and Feelgoods, the garage housing his extensive car collection, each has a story, I’m reminded of my situation now in this rented house with my possessions. This is the first time in decades when I have all my possessions in one place. I’m unpacking my life, box by box and slowly reassembling myself. I love the friendly conversational method of this book. His ultimate obsession is LincVolt, the ’59 Lincoln Continental that will resurrect Henry Ford’s idea of using biomass as fuel for automobiles. Biomass and ethanol to power this monster and Pono as the sound system. Yes, he is certainly a dreamer, but he is doing things to make these ideas real.

The conversational tone is magnificent as if it were me and Neil just having a conversation, like best buds. He does start lots of things. Attaching memories and events in life to ‘things’ and people is a common attribute we all share. Young shares these with us and some are very personal and damning at the same time. Writing this book has to be cathartic and perhaps the first time he has actually said these things to himself as he reveals them to us. It’s very spiritual for him and us. It is making me reflect on my friends who have passed and on some things I possess because they have a story.  One is an old gray Neil Young & Crazy Horse hat a former girlfriend threw at me after going to a concert without me. We did a lot of CSNY concerts together and a couple of Crazy Horse as well. We saw the Greendale debut at Madison Square Garden. It’s the only thing I have from that relationship. I wear it to every Young concert I go to and interchange it with my Imagine Peace hat these days.

Young certainly does ramble on and on, repeats himself, tells the same story a couple of ways or the same way. And he jumps around in time, jettisons off into another story in another time in the middle of one story. When he says “I’ll keep you posted” on something, he doesn’t always do that.  This has certainly been an intimate and entertaining look into the life of a man I love. Thank you Neil. Thank you Tommy Nellen for getting me this book.

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Renegade Champion

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I purchased Renegade Champion, The Unlikely Rise of Fitzrada by Richard Rust because I knew the author, his mother, and his garandparents. Richard was my best friend growing up. He was the best man at my wedding in 1972. I then lost touch with him until I found this book. My first memory of Richard and his family is from 1953. We were living in Watch Hill where Richard’s Family had a beautiful house on a high hill across from the library in Watch Hill. A specific memory of that time is the hurricane Carol that was intense in the area. To our sadness it took down the ferris wheel in Westerly. Our crazy mothers, who were best friends and two of a kind took us down to the top of the beach road to watch the power of Carol. We also went to see the flooded town of Watch Hill before retreated to the safety of the house on the hill owned by Col and Mrs Pohl. Perhaps the most impressive image was watching these two crazy women swimming in the huge waves the next days after Carol left and provided some of the biggest surf I have ever seen and our mothers ride those waves, laughing and screaming with joy as each wave came. My mom taught me how to swim in these waters of Watch Hill and Jane taught me to ride on the trails in Leesburg, VA. Our mothers were always chatting, laughing and enjoying each other’s company. My mom was a frustrated professional in a man’s world. These two commiserated with each other while chain smoking and consuming pots of coffee. Richard taught me how to shoot a rifle in their Leesburg, VA home. Jane taught me how to mount a horse and get back on it when I fell off. I can’t say I ever learned how to ride a horse, but she did her best as she always encouraged me to gat back on as I was getting off the ground. Richard’s Grandmother, Jane, taught me about palm reading, a passion of hers. Before I went to Vietnam, she and I had many conversations about the power of reading hands and palms may be very helpful for me as it was for her husband when she read palms of his troops before the D-Day invasion. Today, I am now the caretaker of two still life paintings Grandma Jane Pohl painted. She gave them to my parents who proudly displayed them in our houses and now I have them. Another vivid memory was Jane’s marriage to a man named Moore. I didn’t like him. I don’t think Richard did either. The guy was very strict and had Richard doing intense body building exercises. We were both into light weight lifting and basic physical exercise like push ups, chin ups, and sit ups.  Moore took this to another level that wasn’t wanted nor even fun anymore. Our visits were sporadic and sudden during those years. After reading the book, I understand now.  Our visits to Leesburg and theirs to our homes were fewer.  Before I went to Vietnam, I visited Richard on a ski slope at West Point. His uncle had died in Vietnam. When I returned, he was the best man at my first marriage. When he left with one of the bride’s maids that day I never heard or saw him again. Last December, I did a Google search for him. I had taken a trip to Staunton, VA early that fall for a bike ride and drove through Leesburg. I made a note to search for Richard. I didn’t get to it until December and was devastated to discover he had died in 2008 and Jane had died in 2001, before 9/11. The only Google reference to Richard was the book. I knew this book, since Jane often told us stories of Fitz. The family was an amazing group of unique people and I was always sad to have lost touch with Richard after my marriage. I always attributed that to the life he had in the military.. As I started reading this book so many memories overwhelmed me. The most impressive memory was how Jane and my mom were such good friends.  Probably the only female friends both had.

I knew many of the stories told in this book and as always in awe of the ribbons she won. I was never aware of how important she was as a female rider. It makes perfect sense.  “The new Olympia classes were opened to women in anticipation of the rule change. A 1949 headline in a Dayton, Ohio, paper read, ‘Jane Pohl Rust Helps Prove Why Women Should Ride in Olympics.’” (p 153) In addition to the importance of Jane’s role in women participation happened in the year and city in which I was born. The part of the story about Fitz taking off on that field in Hawaii always impressed me. She or someone added that when she was finally picked up after jumping off to save her life, a soldier said to her, “Lady you were doing great until you fell off.” I was so happy to hear about her visits to Iceland and rode their unique horses. During my trips to Iceland I was tempted to ride these horses and remembered Jane fondly as I chose not to mount one knowing I wasn't a rider. Whenever I saw groups of riders on Iceland I always thought of Jane and knew she'd love this place to ride and was so happy to hear that she had made a couple of trips to Iceland to ride. I was happy to read about her and Richard’s life after 1972. When a horseshoe’s open ends face up that means “good luck” and when the horse shoe ends face down, “bad luck as it drains out.” Was it intentional to have the horseshoe used throughout the book to separate parts on page 199 to face down as that section speaks about the dismantling of the US horse cavalry? I loved this book as it reconnected me with a family that had a huge effect on me in my life. RIP

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