Father Brown in Russia

Father Brown is everywhere, being available to anyone who wants to read a solid mysterious, and occasionally, fantastical story, which the diminutive priest adroitly reduces to the common place. The God-given gift of reason can do that.

From the written word to the big screen with Sir Alec Guinness’s portrayal in The Detective to Kenneth More in the British television series, which I wrote of in April: G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown on DVD.


I received a comment on that post from Alek, but his comment was not so much a comment, but an invitation to view a stop-action animation adaption of G. K. Chesterton’s The Blast of the Book. The short was produced by the Soyuzmultfilm Studio in 1987 and is presently available on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2NKRxDEezo

No English subtitles are available, but that does not detract from the quality of the work. It’s a little over thirteen minutes long.

And by all means, re-read the original story first; then watch the short. Chesterton is available everywhere on the Internet. Or just pick your copy of The Scandal of Father Brown from your bookshelf.

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You can visit Alek, the purveyor of this wonderful piece of entertainment, at: http://alek-morse.livejournal.com/

H. Beam Piper: Lives …

Through their fiction all writers go on. Even obscures ones, because it’s not hard to be an obscure writer and in time have old fans, new fans and futures fans. If not fans, readers who enjoy picking up the odd book, sitting down and turning the pages.

H. beam Pipe is one of those writers. He’s long dead now, having, sadly, taken his own life on November 6, 1964, using a handgun from his own collection. What a waste. If anyone is interested in his life, the internet provides a number of sites. I have no need to provide comprehensive details of Piper’s life. That’s been done respectively well already.

How I learned of H. Beam Piper is what his post is about, and I can state that I can’t remember exactly when I heard of his name. Rummaging through memory I do believe my first fragment of recollection was of a book by David Gerrold who wrote the Start Trek episode Trouble with Tribbles. He later authored about book about the making of that episode and mentioned Fuzzies, which were a creation of Piper’s, but at that time, Piper’s name didn’t stick. So, I met the creation and to the creator.

Years later, not having read Piper, and still not having read a great deal by him, I was trolling the rows of books at a library book sale. A man I did not know and have not seen since was engaged in the same quest: Seeking literary treasure. His hair was white, curly and uncombed. He used a cane, shuffled and kicked a cardboard box along with one foot. The box held selected books, probably science fiction, a guess on my part, but it makes sense considering he made a comment to one of the library staff ladies, he knew, about being interested in any H. Beam Piper that may be available.

So, Piper was a name, but not someone I had read, and not for some years after that did I finally take the time, find a book and have a read. The novel was Murder in the Gunroom, the only murder mystery Piper ever wrote. I remember liking it. It’s been some time, couple years. Like I said, I haven’t read a great deal. To be most accurate, I just finished one other book: Space Viking. I like it was as well. For the reason that it was simply and Piper, toward the end of the story, said a few things about civilization, and none of it was complementary about socialism and because he saw Hitler linked directly to that socio-political ideology. The story about a man being a Viking to avenge the death of his new, just married, young wife was pretty thin on thought, but high adventurous machinations: Getting a powerful, space ship, a crew, putting together plans on how to locate the villain. But the short comment about civilization and civilization dying or being destroyed peaked my interest and gave the story more meaning, but wouldn’t lose, for instance a young reader, and gave enough for an older reader to stick with the protagonist to the end.

The fact that the Space Viking was serialized in science fiction magazine a long time about there it still has something about it that holds up. It’s honest. In away it may seem dated, but then again, what does the future really whole? What does it look like? All the same H. Beam Piper cared enough to write about it.

Nevil Shute's "Trustee from the Toolroom"

An unusual hero steps out from toolroom

In a literary novel we have the protagonist, but for the Nevil Shute’s Trustee from the Toolroom, I prefer to call Keith Stewart an unlikely hero, and someone we grow to like, very much. He’s an overweight freelance writer for, what one would think to be an obscure miniature machine magazine, Stewart designs and builds working models in his basement for near hand-to-mouth earnings. But he enjoys this life. Stewart has never left his patch of England, and neaer wanted to. He and his wife have no children; they live a quiet life, happily going along, when one day he helps his brother-in-law prepare a safe in the bottom of a small sailing ship.

The brother-in-law, a well off individual, with a landed gentry background, and Stewart’s sister are off on a cruise to America on their own, while Stewart and his wife take care of their niece, Janice. Life goes wrong when the sister and her husband are killed in a storm at sea near Tahiti.

Stewart and his wife learn that the child, which is now permanently in their care, has no inheritance. The suspicion is that the inheritance, now in the form of diamonds, is in the safe on a ruin sailing ship, the remains of which are sitting on a reef in the South Pacific.

Here the story really gets underway. Stewart, the man that’s gone nowhere, is faced with the daunting task of leaving his insular world of miniature models and journeying to a reef in the middle of the pacific. This is when we and Steward learns how insignificant he is not. This is the key to the story, and I don’t like to divulge too much of any story. I want you to read it for yourself, of course, but what I can say is the depth of Stewart’s own life is revealed to him and amazes him as much as it will please any reader.

If you haven’t read Shute before, well, you should. This story is a fine one to begin with. His writing is straight forward and is laced with technical explains, which his characters always delve into, because Shute himself was an incredibly talented man.

I have a caveat or two, nothing serious, but, there are moments when the continued repetition of Steward’s motives for his journey clutters up the narrative, and if they could’ve been pared down just a little, the story would’ve been tightened up. The ending was not bad, matter of fact, it was happy, that’s reasonable, because that’s the way life can be, but the true resolution, the retrieval of the Janice’s inheritance, did not work out well in the way the story was constructed. At over three hundred pages, I think Shute was pushed to finish by the length of the story already.

Don’t get me wrong, as the reader I was continually moving with Stewart and pulling for him. Our unlikely hero maybe traveling great distances for his niece but he learns that he’s touched the lives of many others.

Read it. You’ll enjoy the time spent. Stewart’s life is simpler, no faster then the postal service or a rotary phone call is made or a phone conversation is made on a tape recorder and transcribed to paper, or a sailing ship glides through the water.

Borders to close: An old friend dies.

A couple days ago Borders announced its closing of all its stores. Yes, a major gap is going to be left in retail book selling. Locally, Borders is the only bookstore there is for me. Worst of all hearing of the closing was like learning the imminent death of a friend.

Every reader knows a bookstore its just a place you visit. The store is an entity all its own. It has name, character, quirks, and what is available on its shelves is the same as what anyone wears. In short:

“By the books on your shelves, I shall know thee.”

Hours were spent walking the literary landscape, perusing the genres, running a finger over the spines of novels, flipping through a magazine, and drinking a favorite and exotic coffee blend.

I must admit that the music playing was not always conducive to my browsing, but a friend tolerates the occasionally peculiar musical tastes of a friend.

The reported caused of the terminal closure has been reported as an internet associated pathological illness. Alas, death by internet because the friend didn’t keep up with online retail access. Borders entered the eBook and music download area fast enough. Meaning that selling good books just wasn’t enough, but an added burden was the fact that Borders was also hauling a debt which it could not sustain trying to reorganize several times after declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy a couple times of the recent years. But again, selling books, a thing a reader can hold in his hand, just wasn’t enough.

I personally have not enter the eBook/Kobo area or Kindle yet, and I’m sure I’m not alone. While a technology driven reading market concerns me as not necessarily as a positive it is a subject for another time. For I come not to mourn Borders, but praise it.

The passing of the Borders chain leaves a gap, and not just in the market, but in my search for good reading, good service, pleasant surroundings, and that particular feel, and aura of being around books.

Borders will be missed like any good friend is.

Last at Bat by Mark Donahue

Baseball is the American sport. Period. It’s is true that there are more football fans and basket ball fans, but baseball has grow up with America and is, as the cliché goes, a part of the American fabric. Baseball has changed over the hundreds of year since its earliest reported appearance in the first part of the 1800s.

A history of the sport isn’t the goal here, but the reality is baseball has spawned story after story, from poetry to short story to the novel and, of course, film. Name a legendary player like Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig and there’s a film. Pairing fiction and baseball and more films come to mind. We have The Natural by Bernard Malamud and Field of Dreams, based on the novel Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella. Go online and the lists are there. Not to fault other sports, but off the top of your head named that great basket ball film or football … or hockey?

It’s all about baseball, and Mark Donahue created a great story, which I will do my best not to tell you anything about, because you should read it. I will give a negative though, and I’m quite sure Mr. Donahue would agree, and that is he’s no Hemingway or Faulkner. But, and the ‘but’ is huge and that is, going back to the first line, he ‘created a great story.’

Once General Douglas MacArthur declared: "… old soldiers never die; they just fade away;” the same could be said about athletes, but when it comes to Last at Bat, I’d think Mark Donahue would say MacArthur is just plain wrong. Baseball has its legends and the author of Last at Bat creates one, which won’t die or faded away.



Mark Donahue - Last At Bat

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G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown on DVD

Sometime ago, meaning, I can’t remember when, and the time that has passed probably amounts to a year and a half now, I bought the first volume in the British produced of the Father Brown series starring Kenneth More.I’d only read The Blue Cross at the time, but I had read Orthodoxy and Heretics, and The Man Who Was Thursday.

It has been something since I purchased the first volume and I did procure the second when it became available, and what it all comes down to is I happy that I did. I’ve watched the DVDs over and over; a few of the episodes are favorites so I enjoy them more often.

I did make the mistake of taking a look at some of the reviews on Amazon. Many were lukewarm and some simply, not complementary at all, and a few were downright savage, but I will say that those reviews just didn’t get it.

Get what?

Get the fact that this series of stories were televised at a time when putting Chesterton’s Father Brown on the small screen was almost too much of a challenge. I suspect that, now, with big budgets and technological expertise and talent that is available, efforts at bring Father Brown to the TV audience would be a huge disaster, especially in America. I can say this with complete confidence because it was tried once in the 1970s with Sanctuary of Fear and well, the program, while making it to VHS, has never been heard from since. I’m not knocking anyone, performer, writer or director. In all honesty the adaption was so loose, the name should’ve been change to protect the Innocence of Father Brown.

Father Brown, the small, painfully unassuming priest was created by a non-Roman Catholic. Later Chesterton converted to Roman Catholicism, and he used his Catholic creation to not only fight crime, but fight evil and attacks on the Roman Catholic Church. Read the stories and you’ll see that—watch the Father Brown series and you’ll see that, too.

But I warn you, the program was produced in the 1970s, and doesn’t know have that commercial ‘snap, crackle, pop,’ which TV audiences are use to and now condemn when they don’t see it. The production quality of 21st television production can hide the worst acting and story.

I would’ve liked to know what G. K. Chesterton would’ve thought of a small screen Father Brown. I would’ve liked to know what he thought of Father Brown on the big screen, being that his priest made it to the motion picture screen in 1934, two years before Chesterton’s death. But I know that I like Father Brown as portrayed by Kenneth More on the small screen, and I’d like to think Mr. Chesterton would be pleased, too.

To be honest, I would like to play the role of the wily, yet, diminutive cleric. But Kenneth More would be a difficult act to follow, because I enjoyed his interpretation. I enjoyed the majority of the episodes, while I just liked a few of the other episodes. Some were hurt by the acting or the dramatizations, or both. But, I watched them all—some more than others.

Episodes that come immediately to mind are The Mirror and the Magistrate, Volume 1; The Secret Garden, Volume 2; and there is The Dagger with Wings, Volume 1. These mysteries and solutions, in particular, and the way Father Brown engages in them and the other characters, are strong and have a good sense of the stories. The acting is solid, yet theatrical. I suspect that the theatrical nature of some of the programs might throw the current TV viewers. Again, the Father Brown series doesn’t have the ‘snap, crackle, and the pop,’ and they’re Period pieces, and unless the historical background, at least for American productions, includes something epic or the mafia, or devious killers, and/or the ongoing effort to ‘get the guy and the girl together’ and into the sack, … well, a celibate priest doesn’t have a chance.

Dickens and what the People wanted.

Charles Dickens wrote a great deal of which most American readers, those who read for enjoyment, have not read. I am one of those American readers, and no, I don’t feel badly about not reading all of his work, but I can feel good about having read his work.

Of course, there is Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol, and The Pickwick Papers, and as I related, I haven’t read all Dickens’s work, not even some, but I can write in honesty that I want to read more and I will. In time, but not in a gorging fashion, but piece by piece and in complete and utter enjoyment.

I step back from his work for a moment to quote something from G. K. Chesterton who wrote, if not the most important biography of Dickens by many, it should be considering the most important biography by anyone, and the quote is:

“Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted.”

Simply straightforward and true, Dickens wrote what he like, and didn’t like to write social commentary, what he wrote; the end result of his efforts, just come out that way to academic types who wish to raise Dickens up above the everyday crowds he wrote for.

We don’t have to read all of Dickens’s work to know that he wrote about the working class and the poor and the miserable wretches who were the rich and the abusers.

Most people don’t know much about Dickens and I suppose one important and necessary fact is that he wrote for money. He wrote a lot to get that coin in hand. He had to. Writing wasn’t the best paying occupation and it still isn’t for those on the lowest rungs of the ladder. Publishers, even in the 21st century still ‘stiff’ the writer of his and her hard earned money. Let us not delude ourselves. Writing, though enjoyable, is still work, very hard work, and very misunderstood work. Misunderstood by those who don’t write or can’t write, and most can’t write.

Dickens wrote, and he was honest about the world he lived in and in what he hoped for. Great Expectations did not have the traditional happy ending, but ultimately, the lesson to be learned is: In life there are choices, and choices have consequences. Nothing is wrong with that kind of writing. Again, it is honest.

So, I will continue to read Dickens, slowly but shortly, I have time still, and he wrote much, and then if that time permits, I will start again.