Shouts from a Third Act

Alas, it wasn’t a partridge. In Dallas, only a tornado could send a truck spiraling into a pear tree. As darkness fell on the 26th, many in this sprawling metroplex were terrorized by a rapid series of twisters that killed 11 people and damaged or destroyed 1,800 homes and buildings.

I happened to be at home late that afternoon (good/bad?) but that meant I could follow the TV news and stay somewhat prepared. I did take our dog for a walk but cut it short. The muddied light and eerie stillness urged us inside. Just before a tornado strikes, they say there’s a dead calm and then, in the distance, what sounds like a freight train. No freight train, only the piercing sound of the town’s tornado warning system. Three of us, plus the dog, were at home. I readied our safe room–an oversized coat closet that does questionable double-duty. As fate would have it, my suburb was untouched, and my family and far-flung friends were among the lucky ones. And what of the rest of year 2015?

By the twelfth month of this year, the world news sent to me:

• a mass shooting in San Bernardino, CA, by a husband & wife terrorist team leaves 14 dead
• coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris kill 130
• two wildfires in N. California destroy 61,000 acres and 1,400 homes in two days
• Russian plane departing Egypt for St. Petersburg explodes over the Sinai Peninsula killing all 224 on board, the suspected work of a terrorist bomb
• a stampede during a pilgrimage in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, kills 2,200+
• 38 tourists killed by terrorists at a beach resort in Tunisia
• 7.8 earthquake strikes Nepal killing 9,000+
• young white man welcomed into a meeting at an historic black church in Charleston, S.C., opens fire and kills 9
• Somalian militants attack Garissa University in Kenya, killing 140+
• multiple beheadings by ISIS terrorists
• suicidal co-pilot crashes German passenger plane into the French Alps killing all 150 on board
• 3-day massacre by terrorists in Paris, first at the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices and later at a kosher grocery store, leaves 17 dead

Natural Disasters, Man-made Accidents, too many Terrorist Attacks. A downward spiral of doom and numbing sadness: why do we bother to go on? Art gives us hope. It’s why we rush to download Adele’s latest album or to watch good triumph over evil in the latest Star Wars movie. It’s why we’re transfixed inside the pages of a great novel like All the Light We Cannot See, or gaze in wonder at the new Frank Gehry-designed art museum in Paris, or laugh at the comedy of Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon. Art inspires and connects us. It gives us a reason to live another day, if only to see what human beings are capable of imagining and creating. And if we’re among the lucky ones, we do.

My husband, a generous man when it comes to gift-giving, is lousy at receiving. “Ah, no,” he says when faced with a gift that seems perfect for him. “Thanks, but it’s not for me.” So it was with a small piece of carry-on/roll-aboard luggage I got for him about five Christmases ago. It was never returned but sat on an out-of-reach shelf in his closet until one day when he inexplicably took it down. Since then it’s become his new FAVORITE. A notorious over-packer, he sometimes under-packs just for the sheer joy of using it.

That pretty much sums up the fanfare surrounding one of my all-time favorite Christmas movies, It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). Anyone who’s a longtime fan of that holiday classic has probably heard that it wasn’t a big box office hit during its initial release. The film received ho-hum reviews; it was nominated for five Academy Awards but didn’t win any. Worse still, it was a money loser attached to some big names: Director Frank Capra, lead actors Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. Fast forward about thirty years and somebody takes the film off the shelf. TV stations around the country begin showing the movie, and that’s when it catches on in a big way. At long last–a standing ovation. But dig a little deeper and there’s more to the story. And as a writer, it warms my heart.

The film is based on a short story The Greatest Gift by a little-known writer, Philip Van Doren Stern. (Some people at the time had heard of him, but he was mainly an historian known for his books on the Civil War.) It took him a number of years to write the story, but when he was done and sent it out, publishers weren’t interested. It’s 1943 and he decides to print up 200 copies himself and send them to friends and family as a 21-page Christmas card. A producer who works at a movie studio happens to read the story, purchases it the following Spring, and here we are all these years later. APPLAUSE!

It’s nice that Frank Capra, Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed and Van Doren Stern were still alive to see the film’s delayed success. Capra, Stewart and Reed each claimed that it was the favorite of all their movies. Today the American Film Institute ranks it as one of the 100 best American films ever made. I’m going to say it’s like that handsome, well-crafted piece of luggage I bought my husband. It started out as an idea. Someone believed in it enough to make it. It was good and in time, even non-believers understood its worth.

What would James have done? I wonder as the media spews red & blue outrage over the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, CA, mixed with heated rhetoric about the U.S. Constitution’s insistence on religious freedom. No doubt she would have soldiered on with whatever piece of detective fiction she was working on (at age 94!). Yet part of that was keeping her eye on the world’s firestorms. James never wrote or lived in a vacuum, even after her novels made her rich and famous.

In many ways, James (1920-2014) was a soul sister of Jane Austen (1775-1817), the novelist she most admired. Both women were largely self-educated; both endured financial hardships. Austen wrote romantic fiction, but her realistic plots reflected what it was like for women in early 19th Century England: want economic security and social standing? Find the right husband. Austen was a master at conflict and irony, but just as wonderful with humor and witty dialogue. She’s also, of course, considered one of the greatest British novelists of all time. (Not bad for a romance novelist.) It seems fitting that James’s last novel Death Comes to Pemberley, published when she was 91, is a tribute to Austen as it’s a murder-mystery sequel to Pride and Prejudice. In a 2011 interview (The Guardian), James said, “A detective story can give a much truer picture of the society in which it’s written than a more prestigious literature.” The murders in her novels are set against social issues ranging from the lingering ramifications of the Holocaust to the dangers/benefits of Nuclear Power.

The Queen of Crime. Not bad for a girl who had to leave school at 16 to go to work. She married an army doctor and they had two daughters, but he returned from WWII with a mental illness. While he was in and out of hospitals, she supported the family and eventually began to write in the wee hours before and after work. Her first novel was published in 1962 when she was 42, and her husband died two years later. She didn’t give up her day job until 1979 when she sold her eighth novel, Innocent Blood (interestingly, a stand-alone crime novel without Dalgliesh). As she said, “At the beginning of the week I was relatively poor, and at the end of the week I wasn’t.” But her prior jobs gave her much material for her novels. A hospital administrator for many years, she later went to work for the Department of Home Affairs in the forensic science and criminal law divisions.

James got a late-ish start as an author, but she wrote 18 crime novels, a dystopian novel Children of Men (made into a major film starring Julianne Moore), a memoir, a book on detective fiction, and a non-fiction book on a real crime. Along the way she served as a governor of the BBC, was named Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991 (for her public service, not her novels) and proudly took her seat in the House of Lords.

The Private Patient (2008) was the last Commander Adam Dalgliesh novel. James told her readers it was, even though she continued to write, and she seemed to be a woman of her word. Whatever she was working on when she died, odds are it didn’t involve that beloved detective. This is an excerpt from the end of that novel. Dalgliesh has married Emma Lavenham, and afterwards, one of her friends lingers in the chapel with her own love.

“She thought, The world is a beautiful and terrible place. Deeds of horror are committed every minute and in the end those we love die. If the screams of all earth’s living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. But we have love. It may seem a frail defence against the horrors of the world, but we must hold fast and believe in it, for it is all that we have.”

One year ago mystery lovers and writers lost one of their brightest stars. British novelist Phyllis Dorothy James died at her home on November 27. She was said to be working on a new piece of detective fiction. If you’re wondering why that’s remarkable–the woman was ninety-four! As a reader and ardent admirer, I’m still mourning the loss.

“The Queen of Crime,” she was called, and not just in England. Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard captured the hearts of an international audience. Elegant and cerebral, he was sensitive (a published poet, no less) yet aloof. “There’s a splinter of ice in his character,” James said of him. Fascinating. If only he, a widower, could meet the perfect woman! Eventually he did: a beautiful and brainy literature professor.

James took murder seriously. The “Golden Age” of detective fiction preceded her, but she didn’t want to follow in those writers’ bloody footsteps. For starters, they weren’t bloody enough. Writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers were cozier. James had no wish to prettify or romanticize a ghastly deed. From the beginning (her first novel Cover Her Face was published in 1962) she set out to create a realistic police detective and show the horror and tragedy of murder. Rather than focus on the killer in the act of killing, she shows us innocents stumbling across the dead bodies. “To many of them, it’s a really appalling and dreadful discovery,” James said. “I think that the reader should share that horror and that shock, so I make the descriptions just as realistic as I can.”

She considered the detective novel a modern morality play–and a major reason for its lasting appeal. It seems slightly ironic that I was rereading some interviews with James when the news first broke about the mass shooting in San Bernardino, CA, this week. (The week before it was a mass shooting at an abortion clinic in Colorado Springs; two weeks before that it was the terror attacks in Paris.) In explaining the appeal of her genre, she’d said: “The more we live in a society in which we feel our problems–be they international problems of war and peace, racial problems, problems of drugs, problems of violence–to be literally beyond our ability to solve, the more reassuring it is to read a popular form of fiction which itself has a problem at the heart of it. One which the reader knows will be solved by the end of the book.” If you look at the Best Sellers List last week (Sunday NYT), you’ll see that a majority of the novels are some form of detective story. That’s been true for quite a long time. And yet. . . An alarming statistic was trolling the internet yesterday: 355 mass shootings in the U.S. this year. A little later I saw a different source that didn’t dispute the figure but claimed the context is wrong: there have been only four along the lines of what we witnessed in California. Even so, how much longer before we throw up our hands, surrender to murder-overload, and switch over to fantasy and/or science fiction as our preferred form of escape?

A single blog isn’t enough for what I want to say about this great writer. (Next week, part 2). In the end, death comes to us all. I accept that you’re gone, P.D. James, but you made a difference while you were here. And you continue to inspire.