Atkinson's Case Histories -- Two Stars At Best

I listened to a review on NPR of Kate Atkinson’s newest novel, A God in Ruins. The glowing review described Atkinson as being capable of inspiring tears on one page and laughter on another. That is exactly the kind of writing I look for.

I’d never read Atkinson before, so I thought I’d give her a try. And when I found out she wrote murder mysteries, which I especially like, I decided to try the first of her Jackson Brodie series.

You know how disappointed you are when you eat meatloaf at a restaurant and it’s not as good as the meatloaf you make yourself at home? That’s how I felt about Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories.

When I started reading it, I realized I had seen it. On PBS’s Masterpiece Mysteries. And I enjoyed that production. I’m one of those people who say “the book’s better, but not in this case. The BBC production is much better. And not just because it’s set in Edinburgh instead of Cambridge.

Atkinson's skillful use of the English language is not enough to cover the mishmash plot.

Jackson Brodie, the main character has personal problems – a new divorce, a daughter he loves, and a wife he still doesn’t understand. He and his life are much more interesting than his Case Histories.

The construction of the novel was a bit disconcerting for me. The first case is the missing child case and its six significant characters. The second case is a seemingly random knifing of a fat lawyer’s daughter and his partner. In the third case Ms. Atkinson gives us a really great ax-murder. Each is presented as unrelated.

The only interesting constants are a crazy, old cat lady and Brodie’s sensible child.

The novel is predictable. And not just because I’d seen the TV production. The only real surprise was in the Michelle/Shirley story. And it was so out of left field as to be unbelievable.

Atkinson’s machinations to connect the stories are so obvious as to be irritating. And where we have been trained since Holmes and Christie that there are no coincidences, Atkinson makes such liberal use of them as to “gag a maggot” – to resurrect an admittedly disgusting phrase from my youth.

Immediately following the saccharine ending of Case Histories, I read John Lescroart’s Treasure Hunt. Lescroart does a yeoman job of giving us a mystery complete with a gathering of the suspects ala Agatha Christie. A gathering that had me holding my breath and laughing out loud.

He did indulge his writer-self following the exposure of the baddie. Which I enjoyed thoroughly. And, as always, he turned me on to other books I must read. In his Acknowledgements he names The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman. Years ago I read that his character Abe Glitsky reads Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, the first of which is Master and Commander. I have enjoyed reading O’Brian ever since.

I have a tradition of reading at least two books by any one author before I strike them off my reading list. Which I will do with Ms. Atkinson, but no more of her mysteries for me. You don’t have to follow that tradition unless you’re just hard up for something to read. If that is the case, I’d recommend the BBC productions instead of the book and/or visiting your public library for an unlimited banquet of good books.

Seniors Speed Dating -- Flash Fiction

image from ctpost.com

“I’m 72 and fit,” he said puffing his chest out like a strutting tom turkey. He was carrying what looked to be a good cowboy hat.

“Yes, you are.” She smiled and tried to recall why she’d agreed to do this – speed dating for seniors. She thought it was a running joke for the thirty-somethings. What was she thinking?

The man sat down and laid his hat on the table.

“Been married four times. The middle two were young and hot, just after my money.”

Her smile disappeared.

“Trudy, the last one was a beautiful woman. I knew her back in college. She took care of me. Elegant, you know?” The more he talked of Trudy, the softer his voice became. “But she died.”

His gentility disappeared.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She tried to redirect his attention for this ridiculous meet and greet. “What do you do?”

“As little as possible. I’m an old football player. Have some exercise equipment, but don’t seem to find the time to use it as much as I used to. You know what they say ‘Once you retire, you don’t see how you ever had time to work.’”

She thought about the blind guy – what was that? Two men ago? Maybe three. Eight minutes with each man. Too long for this football player, not long enough for Nathan, the blind guy.

Nathan still rode the Light Rail into Denver three days a week. He’s an accountant and still services half a dozen long-time clients. His daughter and two other young people (he considers 50’s to be young) took over the firm four years ago. But he still enjoys the work.

“What did you do before you retired?”

“Insurance. Almost got a degree in Petroleum Engineering, but my eligibility ran out. Then I got drafted.”

“Vietnam?” she asked.

“Nah. Dallas.”

“Oh, I see.” Five more minutes. “What do you like to do for fun? Travel?” she prompted him. Might as well encourage him to express his best side. “Eat out? Go to movies?”

“Sure. Travel. I got a Lexus RC F.”

She knew Lexus, but what was an RC F?

“Exhilaration from the asphalt up,” he quoted from what must have been a television ad.

It made her think of that Maserati commercial “I have a Maserati Ghibli, not because there’s room for my golf clubs in the trunk.” That’s when she changed channels, no matter what she’d been watching.

Nathan had said he walked or took public transport wherever he wanted to go. Or rode with friends.

“Where do you like to go when you travel?” she asked the former Cowboy.

“As a Lexus owner, I get discounts in the Napa Valley.”

“That’s nice. I like Napa.”

She and her Andrew used to meet his brother and sister-in-law there in the winter. Not as many tourists and nicer weather. The men liked steelhead fishing in the Napa River. She and Janine read and shopped. They all enjoyed the food and wine there.

Her dear Andrew drove a Subaru Forester. His knees were bad and it was hard to get in and out of those cars that sit close to the ground. He never would agree to surgery, kept saying he’d do it when they got bad enough, but he died before that.

Returning her attention to the speed dating that wasn’t nearly speedy enough, she asked “Where do you like to stay in Napa?”

“Oh, I haven’t been there.” He ran his fingers through a thick shock of salt and pepper hair, a bit long to still be considered stylish. “Don’t really know much about wine. I lean more to Bourbon and branch, myself. From what I hear there’s not much to do there. Been to San Fran, though. Played the 49ers there.”

“I see,” she said.

The blind man tapped her on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” she said to the oft-married, Lexus owning, former Dallas Cowboy. Maybe it was important. Or important enough.

John Irving's In One Person -- A Rumination

I finished reading John Irving’s In One Person last Friday. I hurried up and read the last 40 or so pages and then it was done. And I was sad that it was done.

Since I took up writing seriously, I discover that I read like a writer. Much more analytically. I pay attention to the construction of a novel, the introduction of characters, the weaving of the different characters’ story lines into the overall fabric of the novel, and the movement of the main character through his own story arch. I watch as he is touched here and there, sometimes it’s a gentle nudge, sometimes a heave from a volcanic force.

John Irving writes from a writer’s point of view. Deus ex machine is oft maligned by writing teachers and editors as a writer’s escape from “having written himself into a corner.” Irving does it without writing himself into any corner. He quotes Shakespeare and talks about wrestling and small-town stereotypes. It’s all done with a wink and a nod and makes me laugh at the jokes like I’m an insider.

Much of In One Person is set in an all-boys prep school in a small town in Vermont. “we saw the cross-country ski tracks crisscrossing the campus. (There was good deer-hunting on the academy cross-country course and the outer athletic fields, when the Favorite River students had gone home for Christmas vacation.)” Billy’s grandfather and his grandfather’s friend like to deer hunt on cross country skis at night.

Of course, I know this will have significance later in the story, whether for good or ill I don’t know. But at this entry it’s funny. Complete with a disapproving game ranger who has no law with which to stop the activity.

I laugh. Because I love Shakespeare and lived in a small town in far southeast Arkansas with people not unlike those small-town Vermonters. Where deer hunting is an important foundation of the culture and young people hunt deer out behind the McDonald’s before school.

I have been told that I do not write reviews because I do not write about what the book is about. It seems to me that the book, if it’s a good book, will do that. It doesn’t need my help.

But in this case I can let John Irving tell you himself. “In One Person is about a young bisexual man who falls in love with an older transgender woman.” And I will add that Billy Abbot is the first person narrator of this story. Irving goes on to say “Billy learns – in part, from being bisexual – our genders and orientations do not define us. We are somehow greater than our sexual identities, but our sexual identities matter.”

In a video on his website, Irving says “To really and truly be tolerant of everyone’s sexual identity, it’s not easy. This is a story about that.”

“Billy is not me,” Irving says. “He comes from my imagining what I might have been like if I’d acted on all my earliest impulses as a young teenager. Most of us don’t ever act on our earliest sexual imaginings. In fact, most of us would rather forget them – not me. I think our sympathy for others comes, in part, from our ability to remember our feelings – to be honest about what we felt like doing.”

I have often said that what I like about John Irving is that he does perversion and tragedy with such good humor. I will have to use a different word. Perversion carries too negative a connotation.

I am not alone in this shift of perspective. “From now on, the truly deviant will be the ones – the scowling churchmen and reprobates who cast everyone into hell – who cease to live their own lives while telling everybody else how to live theirs.” -- Esquire

Progenitor Art and Literary Journal

My daughter Grace Wagner edited this year's addition of Arapahoe Community College's art and literary journal, Progenitor. Ryan Zimmerman was her co-editor. For some beautiful artwork, and some good poetry, nonfiction, and fiction click 2015 Progenitor. Do not be dismayed if you go to the home page and see the 2014 Progenitor cover. It is in fact taking you to the 2015 issue. (By the time you click this, that may be corrected.)

I am especially pleased to be included in this issue with my "Click" a piece of short fiction. And even though Grace is my daughter, the selection committee had no idea "Click" was by anyone related to her. They chose it because they liked it and not because they like Grace -- though I'm very pleased that they like her, too.

This is my first short fiction to be published. Many years ago I had poetry published in several literary journals. I couldn't afford to continue submitting poetry. In those days we didn't have cell phones and anything outside our area code was long distance. Not to mention that literary journals only paid two free copies of the issue your poetry appeared in. And there was no such thing as journals online. I couldn't afford the phone calls to brag and the extra copies to show.

I've also written for two small town papers in Oklahoma.

When I was in college I wrote a Women's Sports column for the Edmond Sun-Booster -- no pay, but I got to go to all Central State College's women's sports events. I wasn't good enough to make the teams, but I could write. and where there's a will . . . .

Years later when I was pregnant with my son I did obituaries, covered the local courthouse, wrote feature articles complete with photography, and edited the Women's Page at the Guthrie Daily Leader. 

For some reason I can't explain, the acceptance of this short story seems more important. (Maybe I'm entering my dotage.)

       "Dear Claudia Wagner, 
       The staff at the Progenitor Art & Literary Journal has accepted your submission for
        publication. Congratulations! Click has been accepted for the 2015 issue and will
        also be published in the online edition of Progenitor." 

These were the magic words via email.

And they invited me to read three minutes worth of "Click" at the release party. Hooray!

The party was held in ACC's Gallery of the Arts. I got to meet Stephanie Rowden, the Fiction Editor, and visit again with the staff sponsor Dr. Kathryn Winograd.

                                 

             Stephanie Rowden, Fiction Editor       &               Dr. Kathryn Winograd,

                                                                                                    Staff Sponsor

They let me read early on the program which allowed me to fully enjoy the other presenters. We were surrounded by fine art, served with tasty infused water (which I needed before I read) and comestibles of the most enticing kind (which I did not need.)

And to repeat what I wrote so many times back in my Women's Page Editor days -- A good time was had by all.

Click -- Short Fiction

image from chicagotribune.com

This is an excerpt from my short fiction Click published in this year's Progenitor, Arapahoe Community College's art and literary journal.

She missed them. All of them. Her fine, serious, hard-working father. He was a cowboy. A real cowboy. His hat sweat stained and misshapen from rain and snow and worse. All from work, not bought new looking like that. What did some singer know about hats like that? They might know about hard living, but what did they know about hard work?

She could still see him and her momma two-stepping around the VFW Hall.

She didn’t understand how she’d become who she was. They’d never had much, but it always seemed they’d had enough. They just knew how to make things come out right.

Click.

She muted the TV. The sports news and a rerun that wasn’t that funny the first time it aired came and went. She didn’t care about sitcoms with their nice houses and fine clothes and stupid problems. She was waiting for 9:59. She touched the ticket nestled in her pocket.  Six numbers – 6, 23, 27, 42, 54, and 9.

The woman with the machines that spat out five white balls and one red ball appeared on the screen.

Click.

She turned the sound back on. The announcer said, “23.” She had that number, but one match paid exactly nothing unless it was the power ball number. That would be $4.00. Not even enough to buy a cappuccino at Starbucks.

The announcer said, “27.” She didn’t look at the ticket. It didn’t mean anything yet. Once she’d won $7.00 with three matching numbers and no power ball number.

Click.

The door knob turned and he came in. Walking pretty steadily.

“I’m going to take a shower then go to bed,” he said.

She glanced at the TV screen and saw the numbers 6 and 54. Four matching numbers. That was $100. She’d never won that much before. One more would be a million dollars even without the power ball.

She heard him start the shower.

No “sorry, I’m late.” Or “how was your day?”

A good thing he was taking a shower. Did he think she couldn’t smell the alcohol on him? And sex? Never mind the perfume. Perfume that probably cost enough to pay the damn gas bill so he could have a hot shower.

Click.

She turned on the light in the bedroom and took a blue velvet bag down from the top closet shelf. It was heavier than she remembered. She removed the Smith and Wesson Model 10 from its bag. It was worth four or five hundred dollars. The only thing she had worth anything. Her insurance. Not enough to pay the rent, but worth more than anything else she had.

Her father left it to her. Not a big gun, but big enough to do the job he’d always said.

She went back into the front room. The pistol grip fit her hand perfectly. She held it, cradled it against her bare arm like a baby, its metal silky smooth and cool.

This story was also awarded Honorable Mention at the 2015 Rose State Writing Short Course. Click here for the whole story.

A New Character in Dead and Gone

image from youarestrong.com

During the 2015 A to Z Blogging Challenge I discovered a new character that I really liked. She was a present-day, tough-as-nails, gun-toting mama. ( See Briers and Brambles) She now has a name and some military restraint and is living in the future. She probably still carries. But it's likely a hand-held rail gun. Here she is introduced at the end of Chapter 1 with the start of building her character as she interacts with the main characters in Dead and Gone, a work in progress.

A tall, handsome woman with short brown hair entered the Command Unit. Whitaker called her over. “This is Sergeant M.D. Eisenhauer, our Interagency Liaison Officer. Ike, meet Detective Sergeant Hudson and Detective Sirocco.” He nodded toward Joe and Rafe. “They’re from Ceres Colony, out past Mars.” He turned to Macy. ““I’ve got some calls to make. Media’s breathing down my neck. If you’ll come with me.” Whitaker led the way out of the Command Unit. “Ike and Mac will get them started.”

Chapter 2

“I’m Joe.” He extended his hand to the woman. “Ike?”

She shook hands. “Like the President in olden times.”

“President?” he asked.

“You know, President Eisenhower? United States? Mid-twentieth Century? Mine’s spelled different.” She put her hands behind her and stood, feet shoulder width apart, military at ease. Her alto voice carried a hint of the local nasal quality.  “His was w-e-r. Mine’s the old fashioned German way, a-u.”

Joe smiled. None of this made any sense to him. The woman was talking some kind of ancient history. “Rafe here’s married to a History Prof.”

Rafe stepped forward. “As a matter of fact, she’s finishing up some research into Twentieth Century Earth right now. She’s in Mumbai, but she’ll be back tomorrow.”

Joe shook his head and grinned. A Manny Turrentine aficionado and an ancient history buff. Some cops have all the luck. “Okay, Ike. What are we working with?”

“One of our street officers took the initial information following a telephone complaint. The girl’s name is Danna.” She touched the photo in the center of the tracking wall and the pleasant looking young woman with shoulder length, dark hair and brown eyes turned from left to right and laughed. “She’s 178 cm, a little taller than average. Seventy-seven kilos,” Ike continued.

“The parents?” Joe asked.

“Daniel and Marlene Porter. Married.” She brought photos of them forward. “None of us know them, which should be an advantage. No preconceived views. We need to check out the girl friend, too. Where the girl was supposed to stay.”

“You got addresses or finding directions?”

“McAlister here is our Information Tech. She has everything we need.” Ike indicated the woman at the computer.

“Just call me Mac,” the IT said and proceeded to collect their contact information then forward what she had on the Porters and Isabella Turtle to their mobiles. “Daniel Porter is a big deal geneticist. He doesn’t do designer genetics. Not for the usual traits anyway – hair color, height, left-handedness. You know.”

Left-handedness? Joe was pretty sure he didn’t know.

“Anyway, he’s into intelligence.”

“As in information acquisition?” Rafe asked.

“Does he always talk like that?” Mac asked.

Joe laughed and clapped Rafe on the shoulder. “He sure does. And I bet with that red hair and mustache, you thought the scholar here was just another pretty face.”

Rafe arched an eyebrow. “Joe, is a jealous man.”

Eisenhauer crossed her arms and looked from one to the other, but said nothing. 

2015 April A to Z Blogging Challenge

The 2015 April A to Z Blogging Challenge has been both inspiration and tyranny. And I’m going to miss it.

Writing every day, except Sundays, has been interfering with my progress on Dead and Gone, the second novel in my Sci-Fi/Murder Mystery series. But I’d be lying if I said I haven’t enjoyed the daily distraction.

Using the alphabet as a prompt has been really useful. Last year I had more trouble thinking of topics that fit the daily letter. Maybe I tried too hard. This year has been no trouble at all.

Also, this year I was willing to use quotes from Murder on Ceres for three of the days – R, S, and T. Last year I felt each day should be something completely original. Not a reprise of something I wrote before.

And the best difference was that I didn’t end up in the hospital for an emergency appendectomy, like last year. Emergency appendectomy? What other kind of appendectomy am I likely to have? And once having had it, it’s unlikely I’d have another.

Clear thinking equals clear writing, right? Right.

The best part of the blogging challenge is reading other people’s blog posts. The organizers suggested we read at least five other blogs each day, starting with those right around us on the sign-up list.

It took me a few days to find my friend and fellow William Bernhardt writing student Sabrina Fish. But find her I did, and glad to see her at that.

I feel like I’ve found a new friend in the Retired Librarian from Scotland. Her daily list of valuable things about a library reminded me of the Edmond Public Library in Edmond, Oklahoma, my own favorite library. And her quotes from people whose names started with the letter of the day sent me back to some writers I’ve long loved, but hadn’t read in a while – Archibald MacLeish, Lemony Snicket, and more. Oh yes, and Carl Sagan whom I keep close in my thoughts and on my bedside table.

There was the blogger who is a Rockies Fan so I know he either is now or sometime in the past has been a neighbor of mine. And the young woman in India who so beautifully describes places I had not known I would like to see. And the Daily Ghost Post from Storytelling Matters.

And. And. And so many more!

So, 2015 A to Z Blogging Challenge – how was it for me? Good! Very Good! How was it for you?