Agatha Christie meets Stand-up Comedy - Ten Dead Comedians

Drawn to Fred Van Lente's Ten Dead Comedians by the book flap's nod to the homage paid to Agatha Christie's (one of my all time favorite authors) And Then There Were None, I gladly checked it out of the library. It was a quick fun read, but when I sat down this morning to think about the messages within Van Lente's and Christie's work, I was struck by the very dark under tones in each.

Like much of her work, Christie focused on justice and whether or not it may be attained within the legal system of the time. In her novel, she focuses on ten characters who have managed to get away with murder. Playing to either their vanity or needs, the executioner of justice has lured them to a secluded island where they are systematically executed according to the manner of death laid out in a nursery rhyme about either ten little indians or ten little soldiers (see printing dates and countries). Those who have committed the graver crimes have longer to live, but suffer the greater amount of psychological terror as they await their turn.

Contrast that with Van Lente's book where the ten characters, who are stand-up comedians, are collected because of their crimes against comedy when in reality (SPOILER ALERT) they are crimes against one particular comedian - their supposed host. Instead of seeking justice the killer wants revenge for being made the butt of their jokes.

And that's where my thoughts changed from fun mystery read to dark everyday reality. It is not uncommon for comedians and other celebrities to stand up in front of an audience or members of the media and put down others in their industry. Is that the price celebrities pay to be in the spot light? Are they all capable of taking the words they hear and brushing them off with no harm to their souls? They're grownups after all aren't they?

When is a joke bullying? Think about how often you or someone else has followed up a remark with "I was just kidding." Once those words are out it's to late to follow them up with a disclaimer that we didn't really mean it? If we didn't mean it, why'd we say it in the first place? We are all guilty of this crime.

Bear with me here as I make a big leap. As a school teacher, I have heard the remarks of students against other students and their back pedaling when they are called out by teachers or others. How is Van Lente's killer any different than those bullied students who take their revenge out by committing a school shooting? The comedian's crimes were verbal slights, but can be nothing compared to the physical, emotional, and psychological damage that happens to children in our schools and on social media sites. Everyday in my classroom I need to be vigilant for the signs of bullying - the withdrawal, the decline in grades, the failure to maintain personal hygiene, the loss or gain of weight, the use of alcohol or drugs, and the unthinkable - signs of self harm. Some bullied students lash out against their bullies, but more often they turn their rage internally and decide to make the bullying stop by committing suicide.

Let's all remember to take a moment to think about our joke telling - is it really a joke or will somebody end up hurting?

Reawaken, repair, and renew - Rise and Shine Benedict Stone

Awakening Stones - art journal page
collage

Sometimes we find ourselves weighted down by the burdens of life, or even the secrets that we hold within our hearts. Our hearts themselves may feel like they have been turned to stone. Benedict Stone, the title character of Phaedra Patrick's newest novel, is such a man. Benedict is a man who is currently separated from his wife, scarcely eking out a living with his small jewelry shop having lost his creative spark years ago, when the sixteen year old daughter of his estranged brother shows up on his doorstep. 

Gemma has secrets and burdens of her own. Like all teenagers, she is struggling to finding her own place and passion within the world. She has traveled to England from the US in search of answers. Her hope is to learn more about the bag of gemstones her father received from his dead parents, and why he hasn't invited her uncle to be a part of their lives. 

It's Gemma that spurs Benedict to face his past, beginning with opening the trunk in the attic containing his parents' gemstone journal, tools, designs, and some of his own early work. Together they read the journal passages, written by Gemma's grandfather, about gemstone properties, "Peridot - A rich green stone, sometimes called chrysolite, peridot is widely known as the birthstone for August. It can be found in volcanic landscapes. It was used in ancient times to ward off evil spirits. It can assist us to recognize negative patterns in our lives, override unwanted thought patterns, help let go of the past and ease fear and anxiety. It can lessen stress, anger, and jealousy in relationships, and also help us to find what is lost.." (p.76-77) Before long they are dispensing gemstones to the members of the village based on their needs. Benedict finds himself inspired to work on new designs which renews his creativity and even gives him the confidence to fight for his marriage. But those hidden secrets come back to bite them in the butt. I'll let you read the outcome. 

Family secrets are painful and soul destroying. What we hide from our spouses, our children, our parents, or our siblings breeds distrust and fear and nothing good can come of it. There are even our failed attempts to hide our own secrets from ourselves allowing our souls to slowly wither, ruining our relationships, stymying our creativity, and preventing us from living our lives fully. 

I chose the peridot quote above since it is my birthstone, but also because of the properties that Patrick ascribed to it (see her author's note). Right now in my life I am working to overcome the old negative thought patterns, based on old family issues, that I have allowed to hold me back. We can find ourselves trapped in negative or fearful thought patterns and it seems we can't out run them. I now know that there is a way out. It takes courage and hard work to make changes that bring you to a new place in life. After ten years at a very stressful job, I prayed for a solution and it came in the form of a new job. Now I'm battling the anxiety that comes with starting all over, but it's been a good thing and I am so grateful to be able to renew my life, find ways to express my own creativity, and to repair the damage to my soul. This whole summer has been about finding my voice and using it. 

St. Anthony - The Keeper of Lost Things

Lost Things made into a lapel pin
Auction item

Recently, I experienced something new - bidding on items at an auction. My mother and several of her friends visit the weekly auctions held at Weston's Antiques, a company that specializes in Estate liquidations, looking for items to add to their collections. They prep for the Tuesday sales by visiting the company's website where they can view samples of items as early as Sunday, and then attend the preview on Monday. There they look at items, read makers marks, look for damage, and plan their strategies. Tuesday begins by checking in with the auction house and obtaining a bidding card with a number and finding a good seat.

On the day I attended the sale, I perused the room looking for things I might like to take home to use in decorating my home. The pin featured in this photo was one among the many items of costume jewelry in a cardboard box. Its appearance definitely fits the bill for today's novel  - The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan. 

Anthony Peardew lost the one thing his fiancé placed lovingly in his care; worst still he lost it on the very day she died. For the rest of his life while looking for this special item, he would pick up other lost things taking them home carefully cataloging them with date and location found. It was always his intention to work to return the items to their rightful owners, but found it hard to let the items go. Upon Anthony's death, his home and all the lost items are left to his assistant/housekeeper, Laura, with the one proviso that she take on his unfinished task.

Life hasn't always gone smoothly for Laura and this task seems overwhelming, but her best friend Sarah has some great advice for her and for the rest of us as well, "Laura, you have to let go of the past. You deserve to be happy, but you have to make it happen yourself. It's down to you....Don't keep punishing yourself for things you did then, but don't use them as an excuse either. You have a chance now to make a really good life. Grab it by the balls and get on with it." (p. 140).  And that's what Laura does. Ably assisted by Sunshine, a young woman with Down's syndrome, and Freddy the gardner, the team develops a website for displaying the items along with a brief description. Making use of social and mainstream media, Laura gets the word out about the website and items begin to be reclaimed.

Silver Plated Tea Set bought at auction
above it is a Wallace Nutting photograph
purchased at an antiques shop. 

Part of this interesting novel are the stories that Anthony wrote about the items he found, and like Anthony I began to wonder about the items that were being auction off in front of me. I purchased the silver plated tea service pictured here. Who owned it last? Was it a gift - wedding, anniversary or birthday? Who did they serve tea to? What was discussed while they enjoyed their cup? Who made it? You can imagine the questions might be endless, and I could easily begin to write a dozen different stories that feature this tea set in it.

Over the past few years, I have been drawn to collecting pre-owned items. They have such character and history. Plus there is a bit of an environmental aspect to it - recycling and reducing. When I visit an antique or thrift shop I think of all the stuff there and where will all the stuff that we keep making end up? What do we do with things we've lost - buy a new one to replace it if we can't find it. Is that the best solution? Without making and buying of stuff our economies wouldn't work, so can there be an easy solution for us?

Recurring themes - Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

I am drawn to stories that feature bookstores, most likely because it is my secret desire to own one of my own. Not all stories about bookstores are happy, but all of them have an important message within them. My most recent bookstore read is Matthew Sullivan's Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, which centers around Lydia Smith one of the employees. Lydia we learn is a survivor of a horrific crime one that has changed her and how she relates to the world. To compound to her sorrows, she is the first to discover the body of a customer who has committed suicide in the store. He has left her a clue - a photograph of herself at her tenth birthday party surrounded by her two best friends.

The story continues to unfold as we learn about Lydia's past and how she begins to unravel the unusual suicide notes left behind by Joey. Joey has cleverly paired books that he owns with books still in stock at the store, his books have windows cut out from them which when overlaid the corresponding pages in the store's books reveal a message. Lydia is forced to find the truth about how her past and Joey's are intertwined.  

What through me for a loop (SPOILER ALERT) was that central to this story is the search for a birth parent. This is the second book this month that I've read that featured this theme at its heart (see post on Celine). Of course this may simply be another case of Baader-Meinhof (see post) that I am experiencing. Either way, both of these novels reveal the heartbreak of families when they are separated from one another. 

Transplanting - The Little French Bistro

Transplanting - Art journal
mixed media

If you are a gardner like me, you know that every once in a while you must pull up a plant and move it. Early in my gardening career I needed to learn how to pair a plant with its sun needs. Sure the nursery is kind enough to give you a plant stake in the pot to help with placement but what do they really mean by part sun/part shade or full sun. Is that spot in your yard which gets some shade really partial shade or not? It is only by getting to know your yard do you discover how to nurture your garden. Kind of like your own soul.

But things change, nothing stays the same and that is true of your garden and soul. Trees grow and cast new patterns of shade. Soil needs to be amended. Plants grow larger and need to be pruned and moved about. The same happens to us, we change, we grow, we stagnate, we allow fear to overwhelm us, and the next thing - if we are lucky enough - we find ourselves desperate for change, and that's where Marianne of Nina George's The Little French Bistro finds herself.

Marianne is a sixty year old, German woman who finds herself in Paris the famous place of light, love, art, food and she is desperate to rid herself of her husband and her old way of life - desperate enough to throw herself off a bridge and into the Seine hoping to end her misery. She is furious when a homeless man witnesses her suicide attempt and jumps in to save her. A night in a psychiatric hospital, one counseling session with a doctor, finds Marianne stealing a painted tile from a nurse's desk, on which is depicted a scene of a French port where she has decided to travel in order to end her life. SPOILER ALERT - She doesn't succeed.

Marianne, however, does succeed in finding herself. The lesson here is that we can begin the search for our inner beauty, for our passion in life through work that brings joy, we can make like minded friends, we can find love and sexuality, at any time whether it be our twenties, forties, or sixties. It's never too late. Better yet it is important to start sooner rather than later. The pull of our old ways of thinking, that miserable stinking thinking, is strong. Even Marianne is fooled and trapped by it when her husband comes to find her. Luckily her internal sense that her soul is dying in this man's presence and that she doesn't want to experience that for a day longer sends her fleeing from him once more.

What is it in my life that makes me feel dead inside? For that is a clear sign that life needs changing. And like a plant or a Marianne (I spell my name with a y by the way - coincidence? I wonder.), I can be transplanted. Dig one's self up out of the soil carefully not to damage roots, shake free those roots so that they will be free to absorb water and nutrients from its new location. Perhaps there is some pruning to be done to encourage new growth. Maybe some extra babying with frequent waterings and a shot of good fertilizer. Then that plant or person can stretch out their roots and become a new member of the garden community, playing a key role that can only be filled by them.

Not your typical detective - Celine

Celine - art journal page

For the second time this summer, I found myself reading a story that involved a teenaged girl from a wealthy American family who finds herself pregnant during the years following World War II. Unlike Charlie St. Claire in Kate Quinn's The Alice Network (see my post) who is 19 and decides to keep her baby, Celine Watkins, of Peter Heller's novel Celine, is only 15 and her baby is given up for adoption. Both young women had difficult decisions to make regarding their pregnancy. Celine's decision would help to determine the course of the rest of her life.

After delivering her baby Celine returned to her private boarding school to complete her studies, went off to college, married and had a son. She was the unconventional member of her family by becoming a private detective and not your typical one at that. Celine only takes cases involving missing family members; often clients are looking for birth parents or children. On her travels, Celine continues to search the faces of women who would be the right age to be the daughter that she gave up all those years ago. As the novel unfolds, we learn about who Celine is and her family history. She is now in her sixties, remarried to Pete, suffering from emphysema, artist, master of acting, and a crack shot. We meet her adult son, Hank, who has learned his mother's secret from his dying aunt. Unknown to Celine, Hank in his early twenties went looking for his missing sister, and he might just have found her.

Celine's current case is  brought to her by Gabriella who is searching for her father a famous photographer who was presumed dead, eaten by a grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park. But there are way to many loose threads to the case when Celine picks up the trail. Celine and Pete have arrived in Jackson Hole to begin their hunt for Gabriella's father and she comments about this town as being only in existence as a location for fun which is very tiring, "Pursuing fun is exhausting. Having fun is just fun. Much more relaxing just to do your work, don't you think? I mean if you enjoy it. (p.138)" What a statement about the American way of life - we work really hard in order to have the time to chase our happiness. In fact Pete responds to her with this, "It's why I always felt coming back to the States after traveling was a bit stressful. I mean our job as citizens, apparently, is the pursuit of happiness. Something I always have to gird myself for. I'd much rather just be happy, or not. (p. 139)"

Being happy has been a topic of mine in earlier posts (Hector and the Search for Happiness, The Happiness Project, and Happiness on the Mind), and I think Pete's quote above hits the nail on the head - happiness is a decision to be or not to be. We can't find happiness by pursuing it (see how i became stupid) rather it is something that comes from within. I believe that we can pursue fun, excitement gained by doing activities,  spending time with other people, or engaging in hobbies. But too many of us work very hard to get those things we think will bring us happiness - a thinner body, a bigger bank account, a house in a better neighborhood, the promotion at work, a new spouse, and the list goes on. What we lose is the precious time to just be. I attended the funeral of a wonderful woman this week, and I know that when she came to her last moments it wasn't her bank account she was thinking about, but the precious time that she had spent being herself for that was her greatest accomplishment and didn't everyone at her funeral say so. This woman was authentic, she used her big booming voice and she wasn't afraid to tell you just how it was. That's the lesson for all of us to take away - to be happy, to be ourselves, to go out there and do life. Thanks Patricia B. for the lesson.

Little Free Libraries - There's a Cozy Mystery for That

Little Free Library - mixed media
acrylic, magazine scraps, ink stamps, pen

Several years ago now, over dinner my son explained something new he had learned at school (yes sometimes children do have an answer to the "What did you do at school today?" question) something called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. What is that you might ask? Well, the phrase originally came from a West German militant group that formed in the 1970s that included two members with the names Baader and Meinhof, but in the 1990s was used to describe that thing that happens to us when we see or hear something and then it continues to crop up. True to form, shortly after my son explained Baader-Meinhof to me I read it in a book and then encountered it somewhere else. Too strange.

How does this relate to today's post you might ask, well remember about two or three posts back I mentioned my librarian friend's Little Free Library that she has in her yard? I had taken a book (how i became stupid) which I read and reviewed here. Meanwhile, I needed a new audiobook title to listen to and searched on new additions (see post on The Murder at the House of Rooster Happiness) and found A Most Curious Murder by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli. This cozy mystery opens with the destruction of a Little Library built by the narrator's deceased father, and maintained by her mother. In a Michigan town with no library of its own, this Little Library served the community and its loss is seen as an outrage. Soon after, the man suspected of committing the vandalism is found murdered. Obviously, there is more to the story of just a vandal at work.

In the course of my reading life I have come across many a cozy mystery story. If you have an interest or a passion for something there is a cozy mystery out there for you. Do you like cooking or baking? There is Diane Mott Davidson's catering series or Joanna Fluke's bakery series. Need something to drink with those yummy treats? Try a tea shop mystery by Laura Childs or a coffee house mystery by Cleo Coyle. Do you knit, quilt, do needlepoint? There's Maggie Sefton, Earlene Fowler, and Monica Ferris.  Maybe you're into gardening, or vintage cookware, antiques, fixer-uppers, Bed and Breakfasts, libraries, I could go on all day, but the point is there is a cozy mystery out there to match any and all of your interests. Just think about it for a while and our old friend Baader-Meinhof will make sure you come across just what you need.