Jerome Charyn

Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Ravage & Son; Sergeant Salinger; Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin; In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song; Jerzy: A Novel; and A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century. Among other honors, his work has been longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and PEN Award for Biography, shortlisted for the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and selected as a finalist for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Charyn has also been named a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York.

Recently I asked Charyn about what he was reading. His reply:

I am currently reading a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein by Ray Monk. I intend to write a story about Wittgenstein, who served as a porter at Guy’s Hospital during World War II. This was his war service. My narrator, a young American caught in London during the Blitz, befriends Wittgenstein and the story is about their curious friendship.

Wittgenstein was the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century. He was also a Jewish homosexual who converted to Catholicism. He came from the richest family in Vienna and gave his entire fortune away.

Wittgenstein never read Aristotle, and didn’t believe in the history of philosophy. He was a poet who hurled himself into the world of mathematics. He was a musician; he could have played the clarinet in any orchestra. He was an architect who built a house for his sister without ever studying architecture. He was a genius who had nowhere to go. He was a professor of philosophy at Cambridge, who gave up his chair to live like a monk. He did not believe in anything other than the mysterious music of language.

Philosophy was a riddle that Wittgenstein knew he could never solve. He died trying to do so.

Visit Jerome Charyn's website.

The Page 69 Test: Under the Eye of God.

My Book, The Movie: Big Red.

Q&A with Jerome Charyn.

The Page 69 Test: Ravage & Son.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mark Pryor

Mark Pryor is a former newspaper reporter and felony prosecutor, originally from England but now living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of the Hugo Marston mystery series, set in Paris, London, and Barcelona. Pryor is also the author of the psychological thrillers, Hollow Man, and its sequel, Dominic. As a prosecutor, he appeared on CBS News's 48 Hours and Discovery Channel's Discovery ID: Cold Blood.

Last year Pryor introduced Detective Henri Lefort in his first World War II mystery, Die Around Sundown.

His new novel is the second book in the series, The Dark Edge of Night.

Recently I asked Pryor about what he was reading. His reply:

I'm reading The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. I like to step away from crime fiction from time to time and one of my favorite books ever was A Gentleman in Moscow, so I knew Lincoln Highway would be good. I'm about halfway through and loving the prose, plot, and characters. I'm always impressed when an author is good enough to capture and convey a sense of place, and Towles proves how good he is in this book, just as he did in his historical Moscow hotel.

Visit Mark Pryor's website.

My Book, The Movie: Dominic.

My Book, The Movie: Die Around Sundown.

Q&A with Mark Pryor.

My Book, The Movie: The Dark Edge of Night.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's new novel is Lunatic Carnival, the tenth legal thriller involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and, most recently, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

In the copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom T.E.Lawrence gave to his friend, E.M.Forster, he wrote: “Not good enough, but as good, apparently, as I can do.” Forster disagreed. Lawrence, he explained, “was so modest that he never grasped its greatness, or admitted that he had given something unique to our literature.” To say that the book describes the revolt in Arabia against the Turks, is like saying that “Moby Dick is about catching a whale.”

The book that Lawrence did not think good enough, and E.M. Forster thought one of the greatest ever written, was written more than once. The original manuscript, left in a bag at the Reading station, was stolen, and Lawrence had to write it all over again. This second manuscript, known as the Oxford edition of l922, did not do much better. Nearly 330,000 words in length, only about a half dozen copies were known to exist. Lawrence cut this version by 50,000 words, including all of the first chapter, which contained one sentence Forster always remembered: “All the subject provinces of the Empire to me were not worth one dead English boy.” It was a sentence to be weighed against the seven words stamped on the cover of the edition finally offered to the public in 1935, the year of Lawrence’s death: “The sword also means cleanness and death.”

Forster understood why Lawrence had become so famous. The war in the desert was the “last of the picturesque wars. Camels, pennants, the blowing up of little railway trains by little charges of dynamite in the desert - it is unlikely to recur. Next time the airplane will blot out everything in an indifferent death….” The Arab Revolt, Lawrence’s war, was “the last effort of the war-god before he laid down his godhead and turned chemist.” How did it happen? How did a twenty-eight year old English intelligence officer who had joined the army only at the outbreak of the war become one of the greatest generals England ever had?

Lawrence was sent out from Cairo, where he was stationed, to make an assessment of the Arab capacity to help the British fight the Turks. He met Feisal, the Arab leader, who was himself only thirty-one. When Feisal asked him, “And do you like our place here at Wadi Safra?” Lawrence replied, “Well; but it is far from Damascus.” That remark, that it is “far from Damascus,” reveals a depth of understanding, an idea of what the Arabs should be doing, that from the start separated what Lawrence thought necessary and what the British high command had in mind. “I believed in the Arab movement, and was confident, before ever I came, that in it was the idea to tear Turkey into pieces; but others in Egypt lacked faith, and had been taught nothing intelligent of Arabs in the field.”

Lawrence would have to act alone, but that meant he would, in a way, have to change identities: “no man could be their leader except he ate the ranks’ food, wore their clothes, lived level with them, and yet appeared better in himself.” He had also to rid himself of much of what he had been taught. He had read all the the classic works of military strategy and tactics, “Clausewitz and Jomini, Mahan and Foch, had played at Napoleon’s campaigns, worked at Hannibal’s tactics, and the wars of Belisarius, like any other man at Oxford, but I had never thought into the mind of a real commander compelled to fight a campaign of his own.” He did this, finally, after laying ten days in bed in the desert with an illness.

The British were insistent that the Arabs capture Medina. Lawrence woke up one afternoon “from a hot sleep, running with sweat,” wondering “what on earth was the good of Medina to us.” In a revelation that, had it been understood by the American military authorities a half century later, might have made them doubt the wisdom of fighting an insurgency in places like Vietnam and the Middle East, Lawrence decided that the attempt to destroy the enemy in battle was all wrong.

Why take Medina? The Turkish garrison had been “reduced to an inoffensive size” and their effort to keep the town would only cost them men and material. The best way to win the war was not to fight. “Out of every thousand square miles of Hejaz nine hundred and ninety-nine were now free.” The Turks were “welcome to the tiny fraction in which they stood.” They had to defend 140,000 square miles. That would require a fortified post every four square miles. It would take 600,000 men “to meet the ill-will of all the Arab peoples combined with the active hostility of a few zealots, “of which there were at present 50,000.” The Arab revolt should be “a war of detachment.” Lawrence would attack not men, but materials. He would cut the railroad lines.

Cut them, not to prevent, but to delay the movement of men and supplies to the various Turkish positions. This was the key. The object was not to destroy the Turkish army, or to force them to withdraw; it was to make the maintenance of the Turkish garrison “just a shade less difficult than its evacuation….” The Turkish army would be held prisoner in the places it thought it had to defend. Led by Lawrence, the Arabs “were never on the defensive except by accident and in error,” because “we had nothing material to lose, so our best line was to defend nothing and to shoot nothing….” What the Turks, and not just the Turks, but the accepted military judgment of the allies, failed to grasp was that “in Arabia range was more than force, space greater than the power of armies.” The Turkish army was an army of occupation in an area greater than could be dominated effectively from fortified posts.” That meant, for Lawrence, “that our rebellion had an unassailable base, guarded not only from attack, but from the fear of attack.”

The conclusion, at least for Lawrence, was obvious: “We must not take Medina.” To the contrary, “we wanted him to stay at Medina, and every other distant place, in the largest number.” The Turks would not want to do anything else. “His stupidity would be our ally, for he would like to hold, or think he held, as much of his old provinces as possible. His pride in his imperial heritage would keep him in his present absurd position - all flanks and no front.”

Lawrence knew what had to be done, but the reason why it had to be done had to remain his secret. No one else had a serious interest in England’s honor. Everything Britain had done, all the promises made to the Arabs, had been a lie. “The Arab revolt had begun on false pretenses.” There were secret agreements in which England, France, and Russia had agreed to annex some of the areas of the Middle East and to create spheres of influence “over all the rest.” The only way to force England to keep its promises was to make the Arab revolt so successful England would have no choice.

This meant Lawrence would have to speak like Odysseus, tailoring his speech to his audience. To keep Egypt, on whom he depended for supplies, satisfied, Lawrence and the Arabs “must reduce impolitic truth to keep her confident and ourselves a legend.” He “could not explain to Allenby the whole Arab situation, nor describe the full British plan to Feisal.” The reports he wrote to the British headquarters in Palestine were, quite on purpose, done to “make them think me a modest amateur, doing his best after the great models; not a clown, leering after them where they with Foch, bandmaster, as their head went drumming down the old road of effusion of blood into the house of Clausewitz.”

It is striking how much everything Lawrence did was a conscious attempt to make himself “a legend” who would be given the respect, and the independence, without which the Arab revolt could never succeed. He became as hard, as heedless, as any Arab, and as indifferent to the demands of his body as any Stoic ever dreamed, able to go “two, three, or four days without food.” He had never ridden a camel, but became better at it than any Arab follower of the Arab revolt, because only with the camel could his forces go without supplies for six weeks, which meant, in the desert, “a thousand miles out and home.” Fifty miles covered in a day was considered an easy stage, eighty miles was good, a hundred ten was possible, riding through a breathless wind, “with the furnace taste,” riding with “Our shriveled lips cracked open, and the skin of our faces chapped; while our eyelids, gone granular, seemed to creep back and bare our shrinking eyes.” Like torture, to most civilized men, but something else for Lawrence, “since its torment seemed to fight against mankind with ordered conscious malevolence, and it was pleasant to outface it so directly, challenging its strengths, and conquering its extremity.”

The Arabs followed Lawrence because they hated the Turks and were inspired by Feisal. The first rule of Arab warfare was that women were “inviolable’; the second rule was that the “lives and honor of children too young to fight with men were to be spared.” The Turks had no rules. After taking one village, “Hundreds of the inhabitants were raped and butchered, the houses fired, and living and dead alike thrown back into the flames.” The Arabs followed Feisal because “he brought nationality to their minds in a phrase, which set them thinking of Arab history and language…. Another phrase showed them the spirit of Feisal, their fellow and leader, sacrificing everything for the national freedom….” Lawrence felt some of what they felt. “Even I, the stranger, the godless fraud inspiring an alien nationality, felt a delivery from the hatred and eternal questioning of self in my imitation of their bondage to the idea; and this despite the lack of instinct in my own performance.”

One year of this, then another, his conscience racked with the question - a question that may seem, if not impossible, archaic, in our more sophisticated, and morally less rigorous, times - whether he had not lost his honor, “when I assured the Arabs that England kept her plighted word.” He was tired of it, the “pretense to lead the national uprising of another race, the daily posturing in alien dress, preaching in alien speech….” But there was no escape. He had to stay. Turkey had to be taken out of the war, to redress the stalemate of the Western front.

Lawrence became even more insightful. It was all a fraud, but the Arabs had been given something that made that fraud a gift. “By our swindle, they were glorified. We paid for them our self-respect, and they gained the deepest feeling of their lives.” Fraud itself became a subject. “Here were the Arabs believing in me, Allenby and Clayton trusting me, my bodyguard dying for me: and I began to wonder if all established reputations were founded, like mine, on fraud.” He wondered if he himself was a fraud. He had “a craving to be famous; and a horror of being known to like being known.”

With a constant close eye on himself, and yet observing with extraordinary clarity the world around him, Lawrence never lost sight of what he had set out to do. He led the Arab revolt and took Damascus, which “meant the end of the war in the East and, I believed, the end of the general war, too: because the Central powers being inter-dependent, the breaking of their weakest link - Turkey - would swing the whole cluster loose.” It was something that, astonishing as it must seem, he had planned from the beginning, when he was still a boy. Seven Pillars of Wisdom ends with these three sentences: “I had dreamed, at the City School in Oxford, of hustling into form, while I lived, the new Asia which time was inexorably bringing upon us. Mecca was to lead to Damascus; Damascus to Anatolia, and afterwards to Bagdad; and then there was Yemen. Fantasies, these will seem, to such as are able to call my beginning an ordinary effort.”

It is no wonder that Winston Churchill said of Lawrence: “I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time…We shall never see his like again. His name will live in history.”

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Third Reading: Bread and Wine.

Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.

Third reading: Eugene Onegin.

Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Third Reading: The Europeans.

Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.

Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.

Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.

Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.

Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.

Third Reading: Mansfield Park.

Third Reading: To Each His Own.

Third Reading: A Passage To India.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Furlong

Susan Furlong is the author of several mysteries including What They Don't Know and Shattered Justice, a New York Times Best Crime Novel of the Year. She also contributes, under a pen name, to the New York Times bestselling Novel Idea series.

Her twelfth novel, The Killer's Wife, is now available. She resides in Illinois with her husband and children.

Recently I asked Furlong about what she was reading. Her reply:

Thanks to a recent visit to my local used bookstore, I’ve added a few new books to my reading pile, including several by a new-to-me author—Julia Keller. I’m half-way through A Killing in the Hills which is the first in her series about Belle Elkins, a single mom and public prosecutor. The writing is powerful, and the author provides a realistic glimpse into some of the issues faced in the poorer regions of Appalachia. But what draws me to this book is Keller’s character development, not only of the main protagonist, who is flawed and relatable, but several lesser characters including a mentally challenged young man accused of a brutal murder. So far, I’m hooked and looking forward to the rest in the series.

I like to keep a copy of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in my bag for those times I’m stuck waiting in line or for an appointment. I just finished the May/June issue. All the stories were good, but I was especially happy to see the short mystery “The Incurious Man” featuring Terence Faherty’s protagonist Owen Keane. It’s been a while since I’ve read Faherty’s novels with the same protagonist, my favorites being Deadstick and its prequel The Lost Keats. Finding this short story was like a surprise visit with an old friend.

I’ve also been reading Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for the second, maybe third time. It’s a beautifully written coming of age story about a young woman in the late 1900s, and a slow, steady read with a narrative that is both heartbreaking and uplifting. If I had to describe the story with one word, it would be “honest” and maybe that’s what keeps bringing me back. Whatever it is, if books were comfort food, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn would be my homemade mac and cheese.

Visit Susan Furlong's website.

My Book, The Movie: Splintered Silence.

The Page 69 Test: Splintered Silence.

Q&A with Susan Furlong.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bonnie Kistler

Bonnie Kistler is a former Philadelphia attorney and the author of House on Fire and The Cage. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College, magna cum laude, with Honors in English literature, and she received her law degree from the University of the Pennsylvania Law School, where she was a moot court champion and legal writing instructor.

She spent her law career in private practice with major law firms. Peer-rated as Distinguished for both legal ability and ethical standards, she successfully tried cases in federal and state courts across the country.

She and her husband now live in Florida and the mountains of western North Carolina.

Kistler's new novel is Her, Too.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I usually have three novels going at a time––two on audio and one in print. The audios are typically mystery/suspense/thrillers, while the print is either contemporary literary fiction or a classic. Literary thrillers are the best of both worlds and always top my list. Think Long Bright River by Liz Moore or Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby.

I listen to one book on the treadmill every morning, and my husband and I listen to another during our nightly cocktail hour. (If the story’s particularly engrossing, we continue to listen during dinner and into the evening.) The third book I read in print whenever I have a chance to put my feet up.

Here are my three most recent reads:

On the treadmill: Faithful Place by Tana French. This is one of her Dublin Murder Squad books, and it may be my favorite of the lot. It’s a 20-year-old murder mystery tightly interwoven with a richly realized portrait of a family in a poor neighborhood in Dublin. The narrator is Frank Mackey, a detective who thought he escaped his family and that neighborhood, until the past rears its ugly head and he’s launched back into the thick of a bitterly complicated family drama. His voice is a revelation—wry and curmudgeonly and sometimes so achingly sweet. The prose in French’s books is levels above what’s usually found in mysteries: it’s lyrical and colorful and even sometimes hilarious. And ultimately heart-breaking.

Cocktail Hour: Suspect by Scott Turow. Presumed Innocent was a major influence on my own writing, so it’s wonderful to find Turow back in fine form in this new novel, complete with a new, totally original protagonist. Pinky Grannum has pink hair and tattoos and wears jewelry that looks like a nail through her nose. She’s also bisexual and falls somewhere on the autism spectrum. But she’s a brilliant investigator, and her skills are on full display in this neat subversion of a sexual harassment case. In Suspect, it’s a woman police chief who’s brought up on charges. Believe it or not, the most exhilarating scenes take place during an administrative hearing! This novel reminds me how thrilling a legal thriller can be. The mental gymnastics on display during cross-examination are every bit as heart-pounding as any car chase or fight scene.

Feet Up: The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. I first read this classic decades ago and probably thought of it as a western with a moral. Now on re-reading it, I realize that it’s by no means a genre western. The Old West is merely a setting for a deeply philosophical study of mob mentality, the power of a charismatic bully, and the thin veneer of civilization. A group of otherwise decent townspeople and cowboys are exhorted into a posse turned lynch mob that ends up hanging three innocent men. It’s chilling how much it conjured up the events of January 6 in my mind.

Let me finish with the novel I’ve just begun, the book everyone’s talking about this spring: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. It’s a delicious takedown of the publishing world, and I’m loving all the insider insights. A literary and commercial darling dies, and her lesser author friend steals her latest work and passes it off as her own. We’ve seen this premise before––The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz comes first to mind––but Yellowface folds in the hot-button topics of cultural appropriation and authenticity, and I am riveted.

Visit Bonnie Kistler's website.

Q&A with Bonnie Kistler.

The Page 69 Test: The Cage.

The Page 69 Test: Her, Too.

--Marshal Zeringue

D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's new novel is Lunatic Carnival, the tenth legal thriller involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and, most recently, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on E.M. Forster’s A Passage To India:

When E.M.Forster was writing A Passage To India he read T.E.Lawrence’s Seven Pillars Of Wisdom, one of the greatest books written in the twentieth century. Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia as he was known to the world - described what it was like to live among those of another race and religion:

…the effort for those years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only. Easily was a man made an infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith. I had dropped one form and not taken on the other…with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do.

The story of a European who finds himself forced to live among an alien race had been told before Lawrence led the revolt in the desert in the First World War and before E.M. Forster made his first trip to India. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad described what happened when a European, sent into the heart of Africa to help bring civilization, but freed of civilization’s restraints, became more savage than any native had ever been. That was the infamous Kurtz, but near the beginning there is a description of another European that shows a different effect on someone part of a colonial enterprise:

When near the buildings I met a white man, in such an unexpected elegance of setup that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear.

He was the company’s chief accountant. He had been there nearly three years. The meaning is clear: “His appearance was certainly that of a hairdresser’s dummy; but in the great demoralization of the land he kept up appearances. That’s backbone. His starched collars and got-up shirt fronts were achievements of character.”

Character. The discipline of a way of life, everything that is acquired without conscious thought living among others, natives of the same time and place, the habitual customs that for those exiled by their profession or their duty to some foreign, different place, become a conscious, and therewith an artificial, necessity, the rigid formality by which they cling to their own identity. It was the way the British in India tried to remember who they were and what they were there to do.

A Passage To India is set in Chandrapore, a place where, “Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life.” The English colonists inhabit higher ground, and newcomers refuse to believe Chandrapore is as squalid as reported until they are “driven down to acquire disillusionment.” The roads are named after British generals. The social life of the British officials and their wives centers around a club where, when the amateur orchestra plays the National Anthem, “Conversations and billiards stopped, faces stiffened. It was the anthem of the Army of Occupation. It reminded every member of the club that he or she was British and an exile.”

Two British women have come to Chandrapore on a visit, Mrs. Moore, whose son, Ronny, is the British official in charge of the local system of justice, and Adela Quested, a plain looking and plain minded young woman with whom Ronny is engaged. They have only just arrived when Ronny explains to his mother what the British are there to do. “We’re not out here for the purpose of behaving pleasantly,” he insists, dismissing any notion she may have had about making friends. “We’re out here to do justice and keep the peace.” But then Mrs Moore wanders into a mosque and everything changes.

Dr. Aziz, an Indian physician who has been forced to walk home after a couple of English women had taken the carriage he had ordered, has stopped there as well. Aziz, like nearly all the Indians in Forster’s novel, is a Moslem. The mosque is “his own country, more than a Faith, more than a battle-cry, more, much more…. Islam, an attitude toward life both exquisite and durable, where his body and his thoughts found their home.” When he discovers that an elderly English lady is there, he is “ferociously angry.” But when he learns that, unlike most English women, Mrs. Moore has taken off her shoes, he changes his mind, and when she excuses what those other thoughtless women had done with the remark - “That makes no difference. God is here.” - Dr. Aziz thinks he has found a friend.

With the assistance of Mr. Fielding, a teacher and the only British citizen with any independence of mind, Dr. Aziz invites Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested to tea. Adela, who wants to see the “real India,” takes everything Aziz says as true. She regards him as “India,” and “never surmised that his outlook was limited and his method inaccurate.” If the British have their own set of unquestioned and unquestionable beliefs, Aziz and the other Moslems have their own, especially when it comes to the Hindus. Aziz looks down on them because “they have no idea of society.” One of his friends is even convinced that “all illness proceeds from Hindus.” Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs and other Indians get along, “as long as someone abused the English.” Everyone - British and Indians both - agree that “if the British were to leave their cooperation will vanish.” Mrs. Moore’s son, the officious Ronny, thought that if the British left there would be “bloodshed.”

Though it will cost him money he does not have, Dr. Aziz agrees to take Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested on an expedition to the Malabar caves. The teacher, Mr. Fielding, will go with them, a kind of European chaperon. It will take most of one day, starting early in the morning by train. Through no fault of his own, Fielding misses the train. This does not bother Mrs. Moore, who tells Aziz, “We shall all be Moslems together now. As you promised.” Aziz is overcome with gratitude for her understanding and the great generosity of her unbiased heart. Aziz believes what his religion teaches, the possibility of love for everyone everywhere. “There was nothing he would not do for her.”

The Malabar caves are not a long deep shaft with ample room for exploration, but a series of circular chambers, each of them twenty feet in diameter with walls like polished glass, connected by tunnels eight feet long, five feet high and only three feet wide. One of them, still unsealed, “is rumoured within the boulder that swings on the summit of the highest of the hills; a bubble-shaped cave that has neither ceiling nor floor, and mirrors its own darkness in every direction infinitely.” This rumor, with its suggestion of the repetition of mirrors, gives a sense of foreboding, the fear that the universe has no meaning, that there is no difference between existence and non-existence, that everything is ephemeral, that nothing lasts. It introduces, and helps define, what happens next.

Mrs. Moore enters one of the caves and nearly faints. The crush, the stench, the terrifying echo in that small, tightly enclosed place had been horrifying. She won’t go into any of the others. When, a few minutes later, Adela Quested goes into a cave, her mind is on her marriage. The engagement had been broken off and then resumed, neither decision made with any great passion. She had asked Aziz if he had many wives. Aziz, a widower, had been offended at the suggestion, but Adela’s curiosity suggested her own apprehension about what she felt, or did not feel. She is not certain what she should do.

Aziz goes to join her in the cave, but she has already left the cave and descended the hill. He sees her, far below, going off with a woman in a motor car. Her binoculars had fallen on the ground and the strap was broken. He picks them up and puts them in his pocket. When he gets back to Chandrapore he is arrested and taken into custody, charged with assault. The glasses in his pocket are all the proof the authorities need.

The result of the arrest is immediate, and catastrophic. “All over Chandrapore that day the Europeans were putting aside their normal personalities and sinking themselves in their community. Pity, wrath, heroism, filled them, but the power of putting two and two together was annihilated.” Adela Quested had not been much liked by the British women when she first arrived. She was too opinionated, too liberal in her views, but now, a British woman, the victim of an outrage, everyone was as devoted to her as if there had never been any doubt she belonged. She was not as important, however, as the issue raised by her assault, and “people inevitably forgot her.”

The trial of Dr. Aziz becomes, in a way, a conflict between British prejudice and British justice. Unlike the Belgians who ruled the Congo with an iron hand and treated the natives as slaves, the British had done what they could to make India more like Britain. The lawyer for Dr. Aziz is an Indian, a Moslem “with the dignified manner and Cambridge degree,” and the leading barrister of Chandrapore. The presiding judge is also an Indian, though this is resented. That “he should be judge over an English girl had convulsed the station with wrath.”

Everything hangs on what Adela Quested will say, and she herself is not quite sure. In her initial account, she stated that the encounter could not have lasted more than thirty seconds. She saw a shadow. “I hit at him with the glasses, he pulled me round the cave by the strap, it broke, I escaped, that’s all. He never actually touched me.” Later, alone with her fiancé, she insists she has made “an awful mistake,” and that Aziz is innocent. Ronny, the strict, narrow minded civil servant, asks her, “Have you any evidence in the prisoner’s favor?” She may think Aziz innocent, but she is still certain that he followed her into the cave. The case must proceed, “the machinery has started.”

The temperature the day of the trial is 112. The courtroom is packed. The English, who have come to support Adela Quested, have all the best seats. Adela sits there, wondering if she really loves Ronny. “The question was somehow draggled up with the Malabar. It had been in her mind when she entered the fatal cave. Was she capable of loving anyone?” While she is thinking about this, the prosecution is telling the court that the darker races are physically attracted by the fairer, but never the other way round. Adela supposes Aziz must be guilty, “but wonders if she could have made a mistake.’ Then, when she is finally called to testify, she realizes that she has. “I’m afraid I have made a mistake…. Dr. Aziz never followed me into the cave.”

There is jubilation among the Indians, rage and derision among the British women. The case is over, and so is Adela’s engagement. Ronny cannot marry her now; it would mean the end of his career. Adela goes back to England, but before she leaves Fielding tells her that, “Indians know whether they are liked or not - they cannot be fooled here. Justice never satisfies them, and that is why the British Empire rests on sand.” Fielding also leaves India and Aziz, whom he has supported through everything, tells him he should, and all the other English as well.

“Clear out, clear out, I say. Why are we put to so much suffering? We used to blame you, now we blame ourselves, we grow wiser. Until England is in difficulties we keep silent, but in the next European war - aha, aha! Then is our time.” Aziz believes he knows what will happen. “India shall be one nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and all shall be one!”

A Passage To India was published in 1924. When the British left, a generation later, Hindu and Moslem went to war, more than a million Hindus and Moslems died, and, with Pakistan a new nation for Moslems, India became two instead of one. E.M. Forster had written this ending a dozen years before he wrote A Passage To India, in his novel The Longest Journey: “…if you herd together human beings before they can understand each other the great god Pan is angry, and will in the end evade your regulations and drive them mad.”

Only Mrs. Moore had come to understand this, and then only at the end, just before she died, on her last, unfinished, passage to England.

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Third reading: The Great Gatsby. 

Third reading: Brave New World.

Third reading: Lord Jim.

Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.

Third Reading: Parade's End.

Third Reading: The Idiot.

Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.

Third Reading: Justine.

Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.

Third reading: Anna Karenina.

Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.

Third Reading: Emile.

Third Reading: War and Peace.

Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Third Reading: Bread and Wine.

Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.

Third reading: Eugene Onegin.

Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Third Reading: The Europeans.

Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.

Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.

Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.

Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.

Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.

Third Reading: Mansfield Park.

Third Reading: To Each His Own.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rachel Cochran

Rachel Cochran was raised in Texas and received her PHD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She currently teaches literature and creative writing at UNL and is also an assistant editor of Machete, an imprint of Ohio State University Press. Her short stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Masters Review, and have won the Mari Sandoz/Prairie Schooner fiction award, and the New Ohio Review's nonfiction contest.

Cochran's debut novel is The Gulf.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Cochran's reply:

I adore books about obsessive friendships, particularly friendships formed in adolescence. In my life–and in my novel, The Gulf–adolescence is a strange, stormy time, one in which attractions and repulsions are overpowering and occasionally deeply intermixed. Novels that can paint this complicated dynamic in convincing ways utterly absorb me.

One such novel I recently read and adored is Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, recommended to me by a close friend. I’ll admit, at first I was skeptical: the synopsis, which tells you that the novel is about an artist who returns to her hometown in adulthood and thinks about her childhood, seems to admit that not much happens in the story, plot-wise, and usually that’s a sticking point for me. But in Cat’s Eye, the happening is deeply embedded in the language itself–and ultimately the mind of the narrator–as she turns these gut-wrenching, white-hot memories over and over, handling them and gazing into them much like she used to do with the cat’s eye marble named in the title.

Two much more recent examples are Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You and Polly Stewart’s The Good Ones. Both of these are crime novels, murder mysteries of a sort, in which adult women look back on an old crime in which the victim was someone they knew–though the word “friend” is a troubled, tricky term in both cases, a complication that leads both protagonists to feel tortured over their own obsessions. A similar theme appears in Katie Gutierrez’s More Than You’ll Ever Know, in which a true crime writer seeks to understand–and ultimately build a friendship with–a female bigamist whose crime culminated in the death of one of her husbands at the hands of the other.

Other forms of obsession are also a dominant theme in the other books I’ve recently loved. In Elaine Hsieh Chou’s gripping, funny, and deeply strange Disorientation, the protagonist’s obsession with coming up with an acceptable dissertation topic takes her on one of those classic- thriller rabbit-hole journeys of discovery that has the power to undermine her entire reality–though where the book goes from there is nothing you’ll be able to expect. Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season is about a community’s obsessive fixation on–and ultimately hatred of–the Witch, whose body is discovered in a canal in the novel’s opening lines; the truth of what happened to her is teased out of the tempestuous obsessions of the novel’s various narrators.

If (as I learned in my first fiction workshop) desire creates action, then perhaps obsession creates extremity. Since there’s usually an element of both positive and negative charge to obsession, it also allows for my favorite narrative dynamic of all time: messy protagonists.

Visit Rachel Cochran's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christina Lynch

Christina Lynch’s picaresque journey includes chapters in Chicago and at Harvard, where she was an editor on the Harvard Lampoon. She was the Milan correspondent for W magazine and Women’s Wear Daily, and disappeared for four years in Tuscany. In L.A. she was on the writing staff of Unhappily Ever After; Encore, Encore; The Dead Zone, and Wildfire. She now lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. She is the co-author of two novels under the pen name Magnus Flyte. She teaches at College of the Sequoias. The Italian Party is her debut novel.

Lynch's new novel is Sally Brady’s Italian Adventure.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Lynch's reply:

I have a large personal library, and always have an eclectic mix of reading material strewn over the bed and surrounding tabletops to suit varying moods and energy levels. The other night I stupidly left Mussolini’s Daughter by the indefatigable Caroline Moorehead on a low shelf and then found it partially shredded by my 11-month-old puppy. You can imagine the angry shrieking. Moorehead is a go-to source of research for my historical fiction projects, the latest of which is set in Venice in 1926. Apparently Jack the supermutt also finds her work delectable!

I’m a sucker for those emails from New York Review Books about the new editions of older works they’re publishing, and on impulse I bought A Private Affair by Beppe Fenoglio, about an Italian Resistance fighter in WWII. I’m not that far into it, but I’m loving that the main character is more concerned with jealousy over a love affair than the German occupation—it feels so real to me, and reflective of how people really behave in wartime, not the glossy poster version of history. Fenoglio was in the Resistance himself, so the details are wonderful.

The most entertaining slice of the stack on my night table is a pair of comic collections by Norman Thelwell, Pony Panorama and Pony Cavalcade, that feature tiny furry equines wreaking havoc on the humans around them. When I’ve had a long day grading essays and can’t bear to read another word, it’s Thelwell time.

I’m embarrassed to say I’m finally reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, about our relationship with the natural world. Better late than never! I’m reading it slowly because it’s the kind of book where you read one page and then lie there thinking about it for a while. Though the ground squirrels strain my patience, I try to live in harmony with the insects, plants and animals here in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. A few years back I even nursed a tarantula back to health over several months—and he never ate any of my books... Puppies!

Visit Christina Lynch's website.

My Book, The Movie: Sally Brady's Italian Adventure.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alex Marwood

Alex Marwood is the pseudonym of a former journalist who has worked extensively in the British press. She is the author of the word-of-mouth sensation The Wicked Girls, which won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original; The Killer Next Door, which won a Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel; The Darkest Secret; and The Poison Garden. Her novels have been short-listed for numerous crime writing awards and been optioned for the screen. She lives in south London.

Marwood's new novel is The Island of Lost Girls.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I’m settling in to writing my next book, which means that my reading habits are taking on their writing pattern. Though I consume books in the manner of someone who fears that all the books will suddenly vanish from the face of the earth, I find it very difficult to read fiction while I’m writing, so my knowledge of contemporary fiction can be quite patchy.

There are a number of reasons for this: I’m always nervous that my focus, which is bad at the best of times, will be drawn away from the subject I’m trying to tackle by the ideas in other people’s novels. If the book is bad, I feel a gnawing sort of rage at the waste of my time, and if it’s good, I fill with melancholic self-criticism and a conviction that my own powers are lacking. So I generally stick, with the odd exception, to non-fic in this period. And obviously, that reading will often be related to the book I’m writing. You might, from the first two books on this list, get a hint of where I’m going with my work in progress. The working title is Boomers, though no doubt there will be reasons to change that by the time it’s published!

Days of Rage – Bryan Burrough

An deep-dive overview of America’s underground terror movements in the early years of the 1970s, this is a mad, broad sweep through a bit of history that seems to have fallen out of many people’s awareness. This study of how the civil rights movements of the 1960s metastasised in the minds of a subset of its followers is superb in every way: jaw-dropping statistics (a bomb a day going off in the States between 1970 and 1974!), beautiful pen-and-ink portraits of how the belief that one is well-intended can transmogrify into a ruthless belief that anyone who doesn’t agree with one is fair game, and moments of shout-out-loud laughter. Honestly, I’m in awe – and its relevance to the current world is hard to ignore.

The Baader-Meinhoff Complex – Stefan Aust

The Baader-Meinhoff gang, otherwise know as the Red Army Faction, was Europe’s equivalent of the Weather Underground. This book takes a literary, rather poetical stance to its subject matter; it’s dense and demanding, and fascinating, and less of a single-sitting read then Burrough’s book. I’m currently reading about the time when the BM went to Palestine to train with the PLO, and the culture clash between the rather solemn Muslims that made up the PLO and this raggedy band of naked-sunbathing German radicals is both sad and hilarious.

Killing for Company – Brian Masters

I have two nesting rituals as I go down into writing mode: I build a piece of flatpack furniture (it was a garden shed this time), and I read this book. Masters’s psych-heavy biography of the British serial killer Dennis Nilsen is a classic, changed the face of the true-crime genre and was the starting-point from which my novel The Killer Next Door grew. I also sometimes read Gordon Burn’s extraordinarily brilliant biog of the folie a deux between Fred And Rose West, Happy Like Murderers, but it’s so disturbing, in a truly visceral way, that I can’t always face it.

The Siege of Mecca - Yaroslav Trofimov

An account of another major incident that seems to have barely registered – partly as a result of severe censorship - on many people’s awareness. In 1979, hundreds of hardline Islamist gunmen descended on Islam’s holiest shrine at the height of the Haj, holding many thousands of pilgrims hostage. This tale of how it happened, and how the Grand Mosque was eventually relieved with the secret help of foreign special forces (non-Muslims are not allowed to enter Mecca), reads like a Boy’s Own adventure and is unputdownable.

None of This Is True – Lisa Jewell

Of course there are exceptions even I will make to my no-fiction rule, and anything Lisa Jewell writes will immediately leap to the top of the pile. Lisa’s an old friend, from the days when we were both categorised under the rather patronising “chick-lit” label, and watching her come over fully to the dark side, and do it so dazzingly well, has been an utter joy. Her Barbara Vine-ish psych thriller The Family Upstairs is one of my all-time favourite books, but dare I say that this gorgeous story of a celebrity podcaster and the stalker who gradually invades her life is even better?

Visit Alex Marwood's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Island of Lost Girls.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eva Gates

Vicki Delany is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers and a national bestseller in the U.S. She has written more than forty-five books: clever cozies to Gothic thrillers to gritty police procedurals, to historical fiction and novellas for adult literacy. She is currently writing four cozy mystery series: the Catskill Summer Resort mysteries for Penguin Random House, the Tea by the Sea mysteries for Kensington, the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series for Crooked Lane Books, and the Lighthouse Library series (as Eva Gates) for Crooked Lane.

Delany is a past president of the Crime Writers of Canada and co-founder and organizer of the Women Killing It Crime Writing Festival. Her work has been nominated for the Derringer, the Bony Blithe, the Ontario Library Association Golden Oak, and the Arthur Ellis Awards. Delany is the recipient of the 2019 Derrick Murdoch Award for contributions to Canadian crime writing. She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

The latest Eva Gates's Lighthouse Library mystery is Death Knells and Wedding Bells.

Recently I asked Delany about what she was reading. Her reply:

I rarely have two books on the go at one time. I’m more of a straight-forward, linear reader. One book, beginning to end, and then pick up the next.

But right now I am reading two. One of my daughters invited me to her book club recently when I was visiting. The book the club was reading is When Women Ruled the World by Kara Cooney. I hadn’t read the book but I enjoyed the discussion and found the topic interesting enough to want to find out more. It’s an account of six queens of ancient Egypt, who ruled their countries and empires and with full power, despite living in an otherwise patriarchal society. In my opinion, the book should be more accurately titled When A Woman Ruled the World, as these women might have had absolute power but those rights and powers did not extend to other women. The societies remained as patriarchal as ever. I’m not far into the book, but I am hoping to find out a lot more about the queens themselves and the society they lived in. The book can be hard to plow through in some places. The names for one thing are hard to get your head around and keep straight!

In a break from non-fiction tomes dealing with gender politics I’m reading Never Coming Home by Hannah Mary McKinnon and enjoying it enormously. This is not a whodunit. We know from the get-go, who did what, why, and how. The story is told completely from the POV of the villain, and I normally wouldn’t care for that, but McKinnon handles her protagonist with sensitivity that never veers on us wanting to be on his side. He has enough humanity that we can, for a brief moment, feel sorry for him. But ultimately he’s a baddy and we know it. The tension lies in watching his clever plan come apart and waiting for him to get his comeuppance, which I certainly hope is what all this is leading to. Great book with marvellous plotting.

I’m a gigantic fan of Kate Morton, and have been since her first book, The House at Riverton. One of my favourite books of the last several years is her The Secret Keeper. Her new book is Homecoming. This book is set in Australia rather than her usual England. It’s not the best, by far, of her books, but still a good book that alternates between a mass murder of almost an entire family in Australia in 1959 and the present day of one of the descendants of a survivor. The plot stumbles at times and the big reveal is way too easy to spot from a long way away but the writing is truly beautiful. Worth a visit to Australia.

Follow Eva Gates on Twitter and visit Vicki Delany's website.

The Page 69 Test: Death By Beach Read.

The Page 69 Test: Death Knells and Wedding Bells.

--Marshal Zeringue