Ghost Cat

THE TINCTURE OF TIME

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By Helen Currie Foster ~  June 9, 2025

I’ve always loved Guy Clark’s version of “Stuff that Works.” Dublin Blues, 1995.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mprD2MN5vo

Listening, I can just see, just feel, that “old blue shirt” that “suits him just fine.” I can imagine the old boots that let him “work all day” and then go “dance all night.” And of course that friend who “always shows up when the chips are down”––I’m thinking, my bestie. Just hearing about the shirt, the boots, the friend always leaves me with the same settled, restful confidence he’s describing. “Stuff that works!”

“Brown paper packages tied up with string” may have undeniable charm, “stuff that works” means stuff I turn to, go back to, and rely on. Like old travel pants with pockets that zip, soft shirts without a scratchy label, shoes that just carry me along, soles not too thick or thin.

What about you? Things that keep working, that stand the test of time? The pens that always work, the ink you like, the just-right-feel in your hand as you write? The car that always starts, the recipe you can count on?

Part of the charm of “stuff that works” is reliability – working each and every time.

Time, that deep human preoccupation! Is time reliable? Time messes with us. Time stands still. Time passes. Time flies. Time heals. Time runs out. Time grows short. The time changes…and times change. “Time, like an ever-flowing stream…” Sometimes an hour feels interminable; sometimes an hour passes in a flash. Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity says that even in the universe, time is not constant, but is influenced by gravity. Yikes! (says the English major).

Writers struggle to analyze time’s impact on us. Just a couple of examples––Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time; Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory;Virginia Woolf, particularly the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse. Historians try to make sense of the impact of events over time, like Drew Gilpin Faust in This Republic of Suffering, on death and the Civil War.

Poets remind us of their mortality—and hence our own. Here’s Robert Frost, in Ten Mills, Part II, THE SPAN OF LIFE, from A Further Range (Henry Holt and Company, 1936):

The old dog barks backward without getting up.

I can remember when he was a pup.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or Billy Collins at the beginning of “Life Expectancy” in Whale Day (2020):

On the morning of a birthday that ended in a zero,

I was looking out at the garden

When it occurred to me that the robin

On her worm-hunt in the dewy grass

Had a good chance of outliving me….

T.S. Eliot begins East Coker : “In my beginning is my end,” then:

…there is a time for building

And a time for living and for generation

And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane

Ad to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots

And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

Sebastian Junger reflects on near-death experiences, including his own: In My Time of Dying (2024).

Of course animals can be aware of time. Right? The three donkeys– Sebastian, Amanda, and Caroline ––appear promptly at the gate in front of the house at 11:30 a.m., and again at 4:30 p.m., which, they are confident, are the hours when carrots ought to be offered. We know animals can mourn the loss of a member of their pod, their herd, their litter. But do they worry about their own mortality? Do our friends the non-human primates? Well, maybe! Um, time will tell! https://bit.ly/4mZqi4k

To be human is to be aware of our own mortality. And for humans, time is both reliable—tick, tock—and unreliable: we cannot know what the future holds. Fiction writers, however, get to make those decisions for their characters. In the mystery genre, we get to decide: who shall live? Who shall die? How, and why?

I’ve wrestled with these questions in my Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery Series: what happens next?Should I not  have killed a particular character? Should a new character survive and reappear in the next book? It’s a heavy responsibility! We readers can become quite attached to characters. In the last few weeks, finishing Book 10, I took refuge in Laurie King’s Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series. She created a character I found particularly appealing in The God of the Hive. https://bit.ly/449Lugn

But then? The book made me revisit the pain of losing a beloved character to—well, literary death. Remember Gus in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove? I still miss Gus… Gus, don’t ride over that hill!

In addition to night-time plunges into Laurie King land, I found banging on the piano a helpful respite from the writing process. But after two broken wrists in the past two years (careless, careless) I’d had to quit the beloved boogie woogie lessons and feared I’d never be able to play those strenuous pieces again.

My brother the physician, when asked by his siblings for advice, often prescribes “a little tincture of time.” It’s amazing how often that prescription works. This past week, after (really quite a lot of) tincture of time, I persuaded our century-old piano once again to play boogie-woogie pieces from the 1942 All Star Boogie Woogie Piano Solos! Pete Johnson, Meade “Lux” Lewis, Pine Top Smith, Hersal Thomas, Albert Ammons. Suddenly—how long is “a little tincture of time”?––finger memory began to return. Not all the way back yet, but still! Maybe I’ll get to resume piano lessons with that Austin treasure of jazz, boogie, country and everything else, Floyd Domino.

Charles Darwin was not known to rush into print. In 1837 in Edinburgh he presented his first paper concerning the action of worms “on the formation of mould,” a topic he studied for over forty years. Not until 1881, after two scientists pooh-poohed his theories, during the Great British Agricultural Depression (1873-1896) he published The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms on the work of earthworms. Curious about their senses, their awarenesss, their work, he studied how worms could tug leaves into their burrows, eat and digest them, and then produce worm casts—millions of tons of richer soil. His query as to whether earthworms were sensitive to light “led me to watch on many successive nights worms kept in pots, which were protected from currents of air by means of glass plates.” His summary after all those years? Darwin doubts “whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world” as earthworms. Producing stuff that works…!

For so many of us, books are the “stuff that works.” Hurrah for reading!

 

Award-winning author Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by the three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She remains deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing our party. Follow her at http://www.helencurriefoster.com and on Amazon, and find the books at Austin’s BookPeople!

https://www.facebook.com/helencurriefoster

The Woods Are Lovely: A Passion for Trees

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by Helen Currie Foster

October 29, 2024

The mystery is solved! In my search for  what I recalled as “the “Blitzkuchen” once served at Schwamkrug’s outside New Braunfels, in the Texas Hill Country, I had the name wrong. It’s a blitz torte, not a blitz kuchen! Several readers sent recipes from German cookbooks indicating that “Blitzkuchen” is a quick cake, usually one layer only. My memory, though? A tall two-layer confection, baked with meringue and almond flakes on top and between the layers! And in my memory, more meringue on the outside, plus some moistness in the filling.

Online I found Oma Gerhild’s “Oma’s Blitz Torte Recipe ––Lightning Cake.” https://www.quick-german-recipes.com/german-blitz-torte-recipe.html  Each almond-flavored layer is baked with meringue and sliced almonds on top of the batter. The recipe offers either custard filling or whipped cream filling. I opted to finish off with whipped cream with powdered sugar and vanilla, not just inside, but around the cake (and in blobs all around the kitchen).

FINALLY! First, that lovely almond taste. Plus, everyone at the table now wore an attractive little white mustache of whipped cream. You don’t get that with a madeleine and a cup of tea, do you, M. Proust?

As October runs into November, Texas Hill Country towns are celebrating Oktoberfest, or, in New Braunfels, Wurstfest. Normally by now our trees would show some fall color––nothing like New England, of course. The cypresses by Lake Austin are turning bronze. Out here north of Dripping Springs, the possum haws are showing their red berries. The cedar elms turned bright yellow, then slowly lost their leaves. The live oaks, thankfully, stay green.

But this year? Drought brings bad news for trees. Cypress-lined creeks are dry…the cypresses’ arched roots groping into the earth for water. Downhill at our place Barton Creek is dry, and I mean dry, with only occasional small pools. Up on the limestone plateau the leaves on some smaller saplings just turned brown and fluttered to the ground, with the tree already looking dead. We’re watering, but in Stage 2 drought restrictions. Will our wells run dry? Have we drained the Trinity aquifers that lie hundreds of feet below?

So, to general geopolitical angst, I’ve added…tree worry.

Trees in books play such a role in our imaginations. After reading Johann David Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson (1812)—where the shipwrecked family builds a tree-house on their desert island––I always wanted to live in a tree-house! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swiss_Family_Robinson We’re drawn to forests, home of the trees—scary, but sometimes the safest place. In The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White (1939), first of the four volumes that make up The Once and Future King, the Wart (the young Arthur, under Merlin’s tutelage) and Kay meet Little John who tells them about Robin Wood (explaining why it’s not “Robin Hood” and why he lives in the woods (or “‘oods”):

“They’m free pleaces, the ‘oods, and fine pleaces. Let thee sleep in ‘em, come summer, come winter, withouten brick nor thatch, and huntin’ ‘em for thy commons lest thee starve; and smell to ‘em with the good earth in the springtime; and number of ‘em as they brings forward their comely bright leaves, according to order…”

There the boys, the future King and Sir Kay, approach “the monarch of the forest. It was a lime tree as great as that which used to grow at Moor Park in Herefordshire, no less than one hundred feet in height and seventeen feet in girth, a yard above the ground….” Headquarters for Robin Wood and Maid Marian! And there begins a great and perilous adventure for Kay and Wart, who break into the castle of Morgan le Fay, Queen of Air and Darkness—to rescue prisoners paralyzed by magic. (Speaking of paralyzed victims of witches—note how C.S. Lewis later describes turned-to-stone courtyard figures in his first foray into fantasy, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950).)

One writer, Elisabeth Brewer, notes that “The Sword in the Stone shows a passion for trees that White shared with Tolkien. https://bit.ly/3Ceqk. How about the Ents we meet in Fangorn Forest, in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth? Trees that walk…and tend other trees. Not all trees are benign––including the wicked old willow which captures Frodo and friends (rescued by Tom Bombadil).

I’m reading a fascinating graphic (yes, graphic!) book about Tolkien and his close friend C.S. Lewis: The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, by John Hendrix. https://bit.ly/4hqiyFr

Tolkien and Lewis met in 1929 in Oxford, where they were, famously, members of a writers’ group, the Inklings, and shared many hours at The Eagle and Child. That’s not all they shared. In 1916, both men experienced horrific warfare on the Western Front in France. Young and just married, Tolkien fought in the trenches, then contracted life-threatening trench fever. At nineteen, Lewis was wounded by shrapnel (from friendly fire) on the Somme, and carried shrapnel in his body the rest of his life. Hendrix’s wonderful book uncovers the sort of salvation two disillusioned veterans found in the healing power of imagination, including Norse mythology and the European fairy tale. Tolkien knew of Yggdrasil, the sacred ash tree central to Norse mythology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil; https://dc.swosu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2130&context=mythlore

And how the worlds created by Lewis and Tolkien fired our imaginations! The fantasy world of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia emerged when The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published (1950). Tolkien’s The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, was first published in 1937 but became a pop-culture phenomenon only in 1960’s, when the paperback edition became available. https://time.com/4941811/hobbit-anniversary-1937-reviews/

Both Lewis and Tolkien had copies of The Sword in the Stone early on. Indeed, in 1939 it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. T. H. White 1964 obituary, https://nyti.ms/4hlasht. Curiously, Hendrix’s book on Tolkien and Lewis doesn’t mention T. H. White, perhaps because Hendrix focuses on the impact of war; T.H. White 1906-1964) was born too late to serve in World War I. Nor was he an Oxonian. While C.S. Lewis reportedly disparaged The Sword in the Stone in 1940, he later invited T. H. White to the Inklings if he ever visited Oxford. https://bit.ly/4f4wcww (“Dickieson post”). Perhaps Hendrix doesn’t mention T. H. White because unlike Tolkien and Lewis, though he creates a fantasy world, White grounds The Once and Future King firmly in England.

But Elisabeth Brewer commented in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King that The Sword in the Stone shows a passion for trees that White shared with Tolkien. (Dickieson post.)

What about powerful trees in more recent books? Consider the Whomping Willow, in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Wizard of Azkaban? https://bit.ly/4f1koex Magic—but terrorizing—it reveals the secret passage which ultimately allows Harry and friends to discover––well, remember? Indeed, Harry reminds us of T. H. White’s Wart, both with an earnest determination to do right, and a magical tutor.

Maybe children are especially open to tree power because they still climb trees. My dad swooped us off to grad school in Atlanta, and then to Charlotte, before we moved back to Texas. In the southeast I discovered the power of pine trees. We children built an admirable and secret treehouse in the woods, where we surveyed the world from on high. No parents came near to scold or warn: deep in the trees we ruled our own domain. Later in Carolina at eleven, I could climb the neighbors’ big back yard pine all the way to the top. The tree swayed slowly back and forth, but I could see the entire neighborhood and beyond. Tree power.

Out here on the Edwards Plateau, in the rugged karst landscape above a hill country creek, live oaks rule. The big evergreens, up to sixty feet tall, with a wide crown and massive limbs close to the ground, are Quercus Virginiana. They often grow in a circle—and you know they are communicating through their root systems. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/05/04/993430007/trees-talk-to-each-other-mother-tree-ecologist-hears-lessons-for-people-too

The way live oaks vary their leaves makes identification tough. On the Edwards Plateau, the species passes into the “shrubby Texas Live Oak”—shorter with smaller trunks: “…[I]ntermediate forms occur between the variety and the species and the distinctions are often difficult,” per Robert Vines, Trees, Shrubs and Woody Vines of the Southwest (1960). Well, thanks.

Now, in drought, with grass turned grayish tan, with dirt powder-dry beneath our feet, we treasure the blessed green of live oaks, often home to swings and hammocks, and providing wide shade to houses, pastures, and somnolent cattle.

Trees inspire us. We know Shakespeare’s song: “Under the greenwood tree, who loves to lie with me…” (As You Like It). The first poem in Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir begins, “I go among trees and sit still.”

Mary Oliver’s “Honey Locust” begins,

“Who can tell how lovely in June is the

honey locust tree, or why

A tree should be so sweet and live

            in this world?”

Robert Frost knows his trees: The Road Not Taken, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Tree at My Window, Spring Pools, so many. Of course, his Birches:

“When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them…”

Frost makes it easy to imagine “some boy” swinging the birches—or Frost imagining that, as he marched through a yellow wood.

And then e.e. cummings, My Father Moved Through Dooms of Love—I like this verse:

“My father moved through theys of we,

Singing each new leaf out of each tree

(and every child was sure that spring

Danced when she heard my father sing)”

And Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall:

“Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?”

Yes, trees: later in the poem we find when “worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.”

The forecast calls for rain. Please cross your fingers.

Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery Series north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s drawn to the compelling landscape and quirky characters of the Texas Hill Country. She’s also deeply curious about our human history and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. Currently she’s working on Book 10. Her protagonist, Alice, gets into legal drama, and matters of the heart. And yes, Alice does have a treehouse.

Why They’re Favorites…? On Rereading

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BY HELEN CURRIE FOSTER

What’s your favorite place to read? A certain chair? The one with a lamp that shines on your book, not in your eyes? Perhaps a ferryboat seat, where you glance up at the horizon, then down at your book? On a plane, or train?

When I was young our house had an elm tree in the back yard which was not only climbable, but offered two branches that stuck out at the perfect angle for a lounging pre-adolescent. Even better—the lounger was invisible from the house. I could scramble up, arrange myself, open my book—and be left unfound, undisturbed, for some time.

A later joy was climbing on the New Haven RR in Boston after final exams (Chaucer, Shakespeare), armed with the latest James Bond and the very biggest Hershey bar with almonds, and being rocked south for miles along the coastline. Uninterrupted.

And I confess to rereading books. I further confess to rereading children’s books. Maybe a more accurate word is: revisiting. At least every two years, I pick up Kipling’s Kim, finding my way to the part where Kim guides his Tibetan lama, who seeks a sacred river, on a pilgrimage into the high deodar forests of the Himalayas. I can almost smell the trees. There Kim steals the Russian spies’ notes––his own initiation into the Great Game. Even more satisfying? The long afternoon where, exhausted, he is “taken apart” by Eastern massage and finally stumbles out, recovered, to find his lama at the brink of—well, no spoilers.

Why this gravitational pull of favorite children’s books?

Maybe because the best children’s books feature enterprise, surprise, disguise. And—most important––the discovery of identity.

Consider The Sword in the Stone, where Merlin transforms Wart into various animals (badger, owl, fish) who teach him survival techniques (“put your back into it!”). And magic! Giants! Griffins! The Queen of Air and Darkness! (See volume below–griffin looming behind tree.) One favorite moment? When Merlin transforms Wart to a raptor—a small merlin––who must sit for desperate minutes during his formal initiation, near the maddened and perilous Peregrine. Why does Wart need Merlin’s special tutelage? Because of his identity, which he and we will finally discover.

Others I still pull off the shelf: The Wind in the Willows, especially Mole’s tearful return home, where he recognizes his true self.

Also Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising. Maurice Sendak’s Nutshell Library – memorizing all the poems. I sneak back to Harry Potter—a feast of enterprise, surprise, disguise, and Harry’s search for his own identity. Occasionally I return to Lord of the Rings––especially the battle for Gondor. You’ll note I missed out on Jack London and many others. But there’s always The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—remember that wondrous moment when Lucy slips through the back of the wardrobe, past all the mothballed coats…into magic? Into the snowy landscape where she meets Mr. Tumnus the faun? Into the realm where––as Lucy later discovers––she is Queen Lucy?

You have your favorites. So do our collective children and grandchildren. Bookstore shelves still offer children tales of enterprise, surprise, disguise—and characters discovering their own identities.

And fortunately, children’s books needn’t follow the 1930 Detection Club’s 10 Rules for Writing a Mystery. Rule #2: “All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.” Following Rule #2 would let out magic, of course, and its enormous space for imagination. (If you, like me, crave an occasional touch of magic for grown-ups, try Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. amzn.to/44iIoVj)

As a mystery writer/reader I usually write about mystery. But thinking lately about the bibliophile’s favorites—favorite reading spots, favorite chairs, favorite characters––has sent me down a different path. Why reread? Wait––why revisit?

What is it about the end of Kim, or the plight of Frodo and Samwise in Shelob’s lair, or Harry Potter’s first moment on his broom, learning how good he is at Quidditch––that whispers, “read it again!”

I reread mysteries too. Have you reread a Dorothy Sayers, a Ngaio Marsh, a Sherlock Holmes? Or John le Carré? How many times have you read Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy, or Smiley’s People? (Come on, spy thrillers are part of the mystery-thriller-spy novel genre.) And why do we reread le Carré? One character in particular: George Smiley.

Smiley first appears on page 1 of chapter 1, titled “A Brief History of George Smiley,” in Call for the Dead, le Carré’s first book, published in 1961. Smiley’s marriage to the aristocratic Lady Ann Sercomb has ended when she abandoned him, and he’s described as follows: “Short, fat and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad.”

We learn of his deep love of 17th century German literature, his success at Oxford, his recruitment by MI-6, his dangerous service abroad as a spy in WWII. Not a commanding figure, no. But le Carré allows us to glimpse his sharp mind, his penetration, his ability to absorb all he hears. Smiley’s work as an intelligence officer provides him “with what he had once loved best in life: academic excursions into the mystery of human behaviour, disciplined by the practical application of his own deductions.”

Smiley appears next in A Murder of Quality (1962), where Smiley’s solution to the murder rests on a scathing critique of the snobbishness of British public schools (le Carré despised his own experience at such a school).

By the time we reach Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), Smiley has been put out to grass at MI-6 under the new regime headed by Bill Haydon, who has seduced Smiley’s wife Ann and taken over London Station after causing the bitter dismissal of Control as its head.

In Tinker, Tailor, Smiley is plucked out of retirement to interview a somewhat dubious British agent who claims the Russians may have placed a mole inside MI-6. Here’s Smiley, listening to the agent’s tale:

“He sat leaning back with his short legs bent, head forward, and plump hands linked across his generous stomach. His hooded eyes had closed behind the thick lenses. His only fidget was to polish his glasses on the silk lining of his tie, and when he did this, his eyes had a soaked, naked look that was embarrassing to those who caught him at it.”

Smiley’s investigation marches ahead. The BBC wants to make a series of Tinker, Tailor. And John le Carré has an actor in mind: Alec Guinness. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/sep/05/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-40-years-on-alec-guinness

Le Carré’s letter to Sir Alec Guinness (3 March 1978) appears in A Private Spy / The Letters of John le Carré, at 213. He tells Sir Alec:

“Apart from plumpness, you have all the other physical qualities: a mildness of manner, stretched taut, when you wish it, by an unearthly stillness and an electrifying watchfulness. In the best sense, you are uncomfortable company, as I suspect Smiley is. An audience wishes––when you wish it––to take you into its protection. It feels responsible for you, it worries about you. I don’t know what you call that kind of empathy, but it is very rare, & Smiley and Guinness have it: when either of you gets his feet wet, I can’t help shivering.”

I love that “as I suspect Smiley is.” Does the author’s own speculation about George Smiley explain, in part, why we readers become so attached to this character? What drives us to Smiley’s side? Is it his apparent ineffectualness, his vulnerability, his stillness, his watchfulness, entwined with our certainty that he will somehow keep going?

Not until 1979 in Smiley’s People does Smiley achieve final vindication, catching the Russian master-spy who conceived the long set of steps that led to Haydon’s seduction and Control’s fall. At the climax, we (along with Smiley and his fellow spy Peter Guillam) await the possible arrival of the Russian in cold war Berlin, at the crossing point from East Germany. Will the spy make it across the bridge? Guillam asks what cover the Russian will use:

Smiley sat opposite him across the little plastic table, a cup of cold coffee at his elbow. He looked somehow very small inside his overcoat.

“’Something humble,” Smiley said. “Something that fits in. Those who cross here are mostly old-age pensioners, I gather.’ He was smoking one of Guillam’s cigarettes and it seemed to take all his attention.”

At book’s end, we are waiting with Smiley. It’s cold there by the Berlin bridge. I expect Smiley’s feet are wet. Like the author, “I can’t help shivering.” When we know a character’s vulnerabilities, we begin to perceive true identity.

For Smiley, for all the characters created by their authors with such vividness and such vulnerability that we seem to feel what they feel, for such characters–I reread. Yes, the better word is revisit: I go back just to be sure the characters are still there, still available, still waiting quietly on the shelf. And, yes, just as good as I thought they were.

I’d love to hear your favorites (reading spots, children’s books) and the favorite characters you…revisit.

*****

Author: Helen Currie Foster

I live north of Dripping Springs, Texas, supervised by three burros. I’m deeply curious, more every day, about human history and prehistory and how, uninvited, the past keeps crashing the party. I’ve loved the Texas Hill Country since my first sight of it as a teenager. Artesian springs, Cretaceous fossils, rocky landscapes hiding bluegreen water in the valleys. After law school (where I grew fascinated with water and dirt) I practiced environmental law and regulatory litigation for thirty years––then the character Alice suddenly appeared in my life. I’m active with Austin Shakespeare and Heart of Texas Sisters in Crime. And I’m grateful to the readers who enjoy the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series! 

THE USES OF DISGUISE

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By Helen Currie Foster

So, did you dress up for Halloween? Did you buy a mask in New Orleans, or Venice, perhaps one with feathers? What would you wear to a costume ball?

 

 

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell the truth.”  Oscar Wilde

“Man is a make-believe animal—he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.” William Hazlitt

Both statements have some truth. Maybe Oscar Wilde meant that when we can hide our faces, or adopt a disguise, we feel free to do what we want––without hesitation or regret.  Yell “trick or treat!” Dance at the masked ball as a glamorous mystery person!  Rob the stagecoach! Maybe writers understand Hazlitt: we’re at our best, writing, as we invent characters, invent parts for the characters, invent disguises. Yes, we’re at our best “acting a part…” and we act many parts as we write.

At my college there was a costume room where students could buy clothes from decades earlier.  One year a group of us rummaged around and found remarkable outfits which we’d don sometimes for fun. For $1.50 I acquired a stunning long black silk evening sheath from maybe 1919, with black sequin trim under the bodice, slits in the sides of the skirt, and two long black “wings” attached to the shoulders that I could use like a shawl, or like… wings. When I put that dress on––SHAZAM! I wasn’t a young thing from Texas, I was the embodiment of glamour. (Where is that dress?) So, what’s the outfit you wear, or dream about, when you’re ready to put on that black cat-eyed mask from (New Orleans) (Venice) and enter the party? The disguise you’d choose? The disguise that would let you do what you want, learn what you want, go where you want?

 

Two genres especially abound in disguise: children’s literature, and mysteries.

Disguise lets us learn what may otherwise be unavailable. Think of T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, where Merlyn (White’s spelling) enchants Wart (the future King Arthur) by turning him into a perch in the moat. Wart learns to swim from a fish called a tench, who reminds him, “Put your back into it.” He’s taken to learn about power from the King of the Moat, a murderously hungry four-foot long fish: “The power of strength decides everything in the end, and only Might is right.” He learns from his night as a merlin, in the terrifying catechism imposed by the peregrine, that the first law of the foot is “Never to let go.”

Harry Potter, Hermione and Ron need information to foil the Dark Lord, and to raid Gringotts Bank and the Ministry of Magic. They resort to the invisibility cloak, or use Polyjuice Potion to look like Bellatrix, or Crabbe and Goyle.

 

But knowledge won by disguise carries peril. Wart barely survives the unscrupulous King of the Moat, having to dive “the heartiest jack-knife he had ever given.” The moment when Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak slips, when the Polyjuice potion wears off, threatens exposure and punishment.

Kim, in Kipling’s beloved novel, disguises himself to learn secrets as a child spy for the Company’s intelligence service in India. But Kim doesn’t see disguise as work. He revels in the sheer joy of successful impersonation. He rejoices in the walnut dye that lets him escape on a railroad journey to meet his lama, where he tries out various personae, explaining to the passengers “that he was assistant to a juggler who had left him behind sick with fever.” As the occupants of the train car change, “he varied this tale, or adorned it with all the shoots of a budding fancy…” This joyous talent becomes dangerous as he adopts Mohammedan garb, spying for Mahbub Ali, and priestly garb as he chases Russian spies across the Himalayan foothills.

Maybe Kim’s an exemplar of Hazlitt’s statement, that “man is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.” When fate requires a disguise—or just for fun on the Indian railway––Kim uses all of himself to create that disguise, summoning memory, imagination, accent, intonation, clothing, gesture, posture. As actors do! Perhaps all these disguises are part of him…though not all of him.

 

Like Kim, Sherlock Holmes (or Arthur Conan Doyle) loves disguise. Remember “A Scandal in Bohemia?” Disguises everywhere! First, a client sporting a “black vizard mask” seeks help from Sherlock Holmes. The client’s disguised as the Count von Kramm, a Bohemian nobleman, but confesses he’s actually King of Bohemia. He wants Holmes to “repossess” (snitch) a compromising photograph of the King and the famous beauty Irene Adler.

Holmes himself then adopts disguises. First, to spy on Adler, he appears as “a drunken-looking groom, ill-kempt and side-whiskered, with an inflamed face and disreputable clothes,” so convincing that Watson “had to look three times before I was certain that it was indeed he.” Next he plots a disguise to gain entry to Adler’s house, where the photograph is hidden:

“He disappeared into his bedroom and returned in a few minutes in the character of an amiable and simple-minded Nonconformist clergyman. His broad black hat, his baggy trousers, his white tie, his sympathetic smile, and general look of peering and benevolent curiosity were such as Mr. John Hare alone could have equaled.”

Watson notes that it was not merely that Holmes changed his costume: “His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed. The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime.”

But Conan Doyle fools us yet again. Holmes orchestrates a street melée whereby a crowd (of accomplices) carry the clergyman into Adler’s house. When Watson throws a fire rocket through the window, Holmes, as predicted, sees Adler rush toward the photograph’s hiding place. On their way back to Baker Street Holmes happily tells Watson about his ploy, but as he searches for his door key, he hears “Good-night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” from “a slim youth in an ulster who had hurried by.”

Foiled again––Holmes, that is. Irene Adler, disguised as a boy, has followed him home and confirmed the “clergyman” was Holmes. The next morning Holmes and Watson discover her house is empty, the photograph’s gone, and his disguises were in vain. That’s “how the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s wit,” says Watson.

Holmes does love a good disguise, and maybe that’s why he can recognize one. For another example of his Hazlitt-esque behavior, see “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” where Watson almost doesn’t recognize Holmes as an aged opium smoker, and Holmes susses out the (disguised) truth about the disappearance of a client’s highly respectable husband by (literally) washing clean the face of a notorious street beggar.

Josephine Tey teases us with disguise in Brat Farrar where the mystery turns on whether Brat Farrar, a young man who introduces himself as the long-lost heir to the Ashby family estate, is or is not Patrick Ashby, thought to have killed himself, leaving his minutes younger twin Simon as putative heir. Simon will be dispossessed if Brat Farrar is for real. The point of view is frequently in in Brat’s head, and we must decide if we like this disguised pretender as a protagonist, or not. He himself is ambivalent, arguing with himself about the whole scheme: On the one hand, he thinks, “But I’m not a crook! I can’t do something that is criminal.” But then: “All he could do was sit in the saddle and hope for the best. But at least it would be a breath-taking ride; a unique, heart-stopping ride. Danger to life and limb he was used to; but far more exciting was this new mental danger, this pitting of wits.” As he feels his way along, still in disguise, Brat slowly learns who did kill Patrick. That knowledge nearly kills Brat Farrar.

New Zealand’s Ngaio Marsh has the murderer disguise his or her true identity in both Photo Finish and A Clutch of Constables. In the first case, the murderer creates a new identity from whole cloth. He accidentally gives himself away to Detective Rory Alleyn in part when Alleyn overhears his soft-voiced use of a Mafia expression. In A Clutch of Constables, the murderer––a master of disguise––entirely steals another’s identity, including his butterfly-hunting expertise, for the duration of a cruise. He relishes his persona and manipulates the unwitting characters like chess pieces on the board of the plot––more in the Hazlitt manner, being most truly himself as he throws himself into the role.

Mystery writers disguise their murderers, their sleuths, sometimes their victims, sometimes their protagonists.  I use disguise in my new murder mystery Ghost Cat. I’ll be interested in what you think. Happy reading and writing, everyone!

Ghost Cat on Amazon