by Helen Currie Foster
An excess of animal spirits”–springtime! Really? Molly Ivins was right as usual when she wrote, “Texas–land of wretched excess!” We’ve had ridiculous lows, unseen for decades. Early daffodils and hyacinths came, shivered, and shriveled in the unholy cold winds roaring across the plains. But we’ve also had the earliest 90 degrees in decades! Wretched excess indeed!
Just two days until the vernal equinox on March 19, and spring. What makes us wander outside, searching for the first bluebonnet, the first violet? What makes us huddle outside the garden store, searching through the little plants shivering in the breeze, fingering seed packets, carrying home small pots of basil and blue salvia even though the weather’s far too untrustworthy for planting? What is this proto-agricultural spirit that makes us lug home the potting soil, hoe the garden bed? More sunlight? Cabin fever? Some early human gene? We, the Animal Kingdom, working with the Plant Kingdom?
I’m rereading Barry Cunliffe’s Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000, a book I value not just for the stunning photographs of prehistoric sites and art, but for describing a history of human inventiveness. Cunliffe, Oxford Professor Emeritus of Archeology since 2007 (many books), says “massive transformation” occurred in Europe between 1300-800 BC. Population growth required developing more crops than wheat and barley, including lentils, peas and—“the celtic bean (Vicia faba).”
Immediately I ordered a giant pack of fava bean seeds.
Then I read the label: they’re mostly a winter crop–but this year I’m desperate. With last year’s blistering hot drought, I wound up with only one pot of cherry tomatoes on the porch and a dozen wilting jalapeno plants in the garden. Cunliffe’s reference to Vicia faba fired my imagination—envisioning myself harvesting large fuzzy green pods, containing delectable beans, and adding a little vinaigrette…olive oil (since 4000 BC) and vinegar (3000 BC). Using an ancient bean and ancient vinaigrette recipe! Possibly those beans were harvested, and the vinaigrette shaken, by some long-ago ancestor 3000 years ago, making me wonder if we have genetic preferences, genetic recipe roots? After all, we of the Animal Kingdom depend on the Plant Kingdom (oxygen, vinaigrette, and wine!).
Mysteries offer escape—a protagonist we like, an intriguing plot, a vivid setting. Like plants, favorite old mysteries offer much when we revisit. Mystery writers? They’re good to “talk to.” This morning I discovered on the shelf my dad’s 1934 Modern Library edition of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, with a brief bio and the “new introduction” by Hammett.
I didn’t know Hammett had worked as an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency before he started writing! “Drifting through a miscellany of ill-paid jobs, he found a temporary solution to his economic problem by shadowing real malefactors with what might be called conspicuous success.” Then came the World War: “He won a sergeantcy and lost his health.”
Hammett can remember where he got his characters. Here’s a snippet of what he says about The Maltese Falcon:
“Dundy’s prototype I worked with in a North Carolina railroad yard; Cairo’s I picked up on a forgery charge in Pasco, Washington, in 1920; Polhous’s was a former captain of detectives…Effie’s once asked me to go into the narcotic smuggling business with her in San Diego…”
Hammett then muses about his own protagonist. “Spade had no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not—or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague—want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.”
What a great description, and didn’t Humphrey Bogart nail it?
It strikes me that this new character of his upended the vision of the members of the London 1930 Detectives Club—Hammett gave the wide-eyed mystery audience a protagonist who is not a secret member of the aristocracy (Albert Campion) or a perfect gentleman (Roderick Alleyn) or a hyper-particular French veteran drinking tea and waxing his moustache (Hercule Poirot)…but a “hard and shifty fellow…able to get the best of anybody.” Welcome to the New World’s new-style mystery protagonists, the children of Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Sara Paretzky and others…including that hybrid protagonist, Mary Russell, in Laurie King’s Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series.
For Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, the scent of honey is a repeat theme (her Holmes is a beekeeper). I like her Holmes, I like her Russell, and just finished her Garment of Shadows (2012). King has chosen a fascinating and ambitious setting: the 1920’s, with Spain and France fighting for control of Morocco, each coveting its crucial strategic location at Gibraltar, while various Moroccan groups—Berber and otherwise—fight for independence. King uses first person point of view for Mary Russell, who’s suffering from acute amnesia—forgetting her childhood and even her marriage––but uses third person POV for Holmes’s chapters. Those shifts sometimes confused me. But her depth of history and geography, and her vivid descriptions of the magical city of Fez with its souk, bring the setting alive. Mary Russell herself has become quite a protagonist, with linguistic skills—including Arabic––and the imagination and drive to devise a daring escape from a horrible prison. I’d like to learn knife-throwing like Mary Russell (she keeps one in her boot) but the likelihood seems dim.
Writer/theologian Bruce Reyes-Chow mentioned how, when stuck, he’d “talk through ideas with myself, my plants…” I intend to follow his lead. On our deck sit five jasmine plants we’ve toted around since the seventies. I think they sometimes do communicate with me—“I’m dry-y-y-y!” But from now on, when I’m stuck on a plot, I’ll go consult them. Every spring, those jasmine produce tiny white flowers with an unmatchable scent. In search of even more scent, this year I’ve planted another mix of old and new. Rose de Recht is a fragrant pink heirloom damask, Fragrant Blush promises pink perfume, and Star of the Republic is tough, like her name, but delicate pink with exquisite fragrance.
And now suddenly the redbuds, with their irresistible yet evanescent fuchsia buds, are blooming. I’ve seen our first bluebonnet,
and the first purple prairie verbena. The live oaks know it’s almost the equinox—they’ve flung down their old leaves (aided by the fierce winds) and are preparing their catkins and baby leaves. The cedar elms have put out tiny chartreuse leaves just in the last two days.
So it’s spring! Grab that trowel! And after all your work, you deserve to loll on the couch at night with a good mystery. I’m halfway through the tenth book in my Hill Country murder mystery series. This one raises a question I find intriguing and difficult. Can justice be served when, unauthorized to pronounce justice, we take justice into our own hands? Is that still justice? I’m discussing it with the plants. More to come….
Here are Helen, Noreen Cedeno, and Juanita Houston at the Texas Book Festival!–Heart of Texas Sisters in Crime
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Award-winning Helen Currie Foster lives and writes the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series (9 volumes so far) north of Dripping Springs, Texas, loosely supervised by three burros. She’s working on Book 10. 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.
Follow her at Helen Currie Foster and at her author page on Amazon.
This is a time where we can escape into our stories. Want to say something pithy in the real world? Act it out in your characters. Want to kill somebody? Do it on the page. (I can speak to this. It’s very cathartic.) The empowerment that comes by sitting down to the computer and writing just 250 words can produce those happy endorphins that’ll spark you right up. At least William Faulkner thought so. He said, “The right word in the right place at the right time can soothe, calm and heal.”
Austin Mystery Writers 