Charles Finch

As has already been well documented in numerous places, last night's Republican debate was a joke: Long minutes of sturm und drang about immigration from a northeastern Governor and a northeastern Mayor, little mention of Iraq, no mention of Iran and Pakistan. A lot of breathless nonsense about abortion, including Fred Thompson's bizarre statement that it was the most important issue of our day. (Really? An ancient court decision? While we're at war?) The Republicans could use somebody like Joe Biden, who keeps the Democrats honest about foreign policy. In theory that should be John McCain, but instead, after speaking eloquently and with complete authority about torture, he went off the reservation and started talking about isolationism and how we never lost a battle in Vietnam.

Most pundits have agreed that Mike Huckabee was the winner. Maybe. Hendrik Hertzberg got it about right, as usual; Huckabee has insane policies on taxation and a host of social issues, but at least he seems nice enough, and conscientious. But a question he answered "correctly" last night brought into relief the problems of his party and our country; when a viewer asked if the candidates believed in the Bible as the literal word of God, he said yes, and rather eloquently. But does that matter? Should that question - a very faintly disguised litmus test - be at all significant for either of our parties' candidates, much less our President?

I have a new book coming out in a couple of weeks, on December 12th. Well, sort of. It's the large print version of my first novel, A Beautiful Blue Death, which actually appeared in hardcover about five months ago. It should be in many shops and libraries.

Whenever I look into a large print book, I sort of have the feeling that it's shouting at me. But I doubt I'll think so in fifty years. (Knock wood.) And especially in the mystery community, which tends to skew older, large print books are genuinely useful and great. For my part, any new edition of my book fills me with a kind of awe. I can't wait for the box full of copies to arrive from my publisher.

About a month ago I saw The Age of Rembrandt at the Met. Though the show had flaws, particularly in its digressive and fragmented quality - a trait I often like in museum exhibitions, but not here - it would be captious to quarrel too seriously with it, simply because it's the best assembly of Dutch Golden Age painting you're likely to find outside of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, or possibly the Mauritshuis in the Hague and the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. For people who love Vermeer, Rembrandt, Maes, and de Hooch as much as I do, the curators could have hung the paintings at random and it would still have been just as absorbing. The show stays up for another six weeks or so, and I would urge anybody who has the opportunity to go see it.

But there were two small, significant disappointments of the show, for me. The first was that I don't believe, though I looked, that they had managed to find anything by the terrific Carel Fabritius, a pupil of Rembrandt's who died young and who, in a mitigating factor, only made about a dozen paintings that have survived. But the show's second omission was worse, for me: it didn't include anything by one of my private favorites, Jan Verspronck.

I've been waiting to find Verspronck in a big show. A replica of this small masterpiece hangs above the desk where I write. He was a painter who undeniably cultivated his own style, rare in an era when famous painters produced dozens of students who flooded the market with work imitative of their masters. His legacy in the art world outside of Holland remains elusive, but I challenge anybody to look at his work and not find it as interesting and telling, in its own way, as any of the other work (aside from Rembrandt's and Vermeer's) of the era.

It seems as if ancient Rome has had a resurgent presence in popular culture over the last decade: Steven Saylor's novels, the terrific and sadly erstwhile show Rome, Anthony Everitt's bestselling biographies of Cicero and Augustus. There was even this book.

Perhaps sensing a trend, Robert Harris wrote Imperium. I'm fond of Harris, though he never seems to deliver as much as he promises; both Enigma and Fatherland were more intriguing than successful, and the latter borrowed shamelessly from a premise of Philip K. Dick. This book is about in that line, but has the particular saving grace of featuring a realistic portrait of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero is my favorite figure of Republican Rome, a middle class striver who survived on his wits and later died with his principles basically intact, and one of the few politicians of any age who's writings survive on their own merit. (Churchill may prove to be another, although perhaps not; a few generations ago they would have said the same of Disraeli.) Cicero makes Imperium worth reading, though you might be better off reading one of my favorite contemporary accounts of Rome, Tacitus aside.

Beyond Arthur Conan Doyle, my favorite mystery writer is Dick Francis, just ahead of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Elizabeth George. I mention it because I'm in the middle of a Francis kick, one of those two-month periods when I read five or six of his books. I thought For Kicks was especially good, but I was blown away by a basically forgotten mid-period book called Banker. I think it may even be out of print, but it's worth getting your hands on.

I've been a Yankees fan since I was about 5 or 6, and I'm really pleased that Alex Rodriguez will be coming back next season, after it certainly appeared as if he would go to a team like the the Angels or Dodgers. I've often wondered whether there was a frisson of racism in the way people view A-Rod, undeniably the greatest player of my lifetime, very probably the greatest of all time. It goes largely unremarked that he is one of the most visible and richest Latino-Americans alive, but would the reaction to him be entirely the same if he were white? I don't know. But it's slightly ugly that commentators (not to mention Yankees' officials) accuse him of avarice and soullessness simply because he has an excellent, tenacious agent and honors the terms of his contract. And it's unjust, for this year at any rate, to criticize his playoff performance when the team would never have reached the playoffs without his regular season dominance.

Sometime in 2012 or 2013 Rodriguez will probably break this year's new home run record, and everyone will agree that it's nice to have the record untainted again; but that won't efface entirely the almost tragic, and certainly traumatic, saga of Barry Bonds. When I was young and truly in love with baseball, Bonds was a skinny, ultra-talented player on those exciting Pittsburgh Pirates teams of the 1980's. Since that time he's made bad choices, but then I wonder again what role race had to play in those choices; perhaps ambition, when combined with a certain defiance at the circumspection that greeted him as a black player, added up to produce the veiled and uncertain figure who will now be part of baseball history forever, for better or worse.

I'm a moderately proud Yale alumnus.

I had a lot of fun when I went to school there, and formed deep attachments to professors and friends, but I also had serious issues with the school's administration. Yale has an absurd amount of money, but during my time there that didn't stop them from investing in tobacco and weaponry as they sought out more. (I'm not sure whether that issue is still alive.)

Worse, for me, is that the financial aid office figures out precisely what every family can afford to pay, be it $1,000 or $9,000 or $35,000 a year, and then asks for that. As a result many of my friends had to go directly into high-paying jobs against their preference after graduation, or had to work (as I did) a job or even two in between classes. I know that it was profoundly precarious for some families to pay, say, $1,000 a year, and that despite the fact that everyone from now on could go to Yale for free forever while the university still comfortably maintained its endowment at a level beyond any possible practical use. (The school could at least do this.) And then they have the gall to ask me for money every few days, or so it seems, and usually so that disadvantaged children can get scholarships! It's the worst and most dishonest kind of blackmail.

But there's one weekend each year when even the most curmudgeonly, least nostalgic Eli turns as ardent as Dink Stover, and it starts tomorrow: the weekend of The Game. I leave for New Haven tomorrow afternoon, and however irrational it might be I'm desperate for the 8-0 Bulldogs to demolish the 8-0 Crimson. The last time both teams were unbeaten going into The Game was in 1968, when Yale famously "lost" a 29-29 tie. We're looking for revenge this time, and it would be nice to add to our luxurious overall lead of 15 games, and make the total record 66-50 in our favor: 16 more seasons, at the very least, of some silly but meaningful kind of superiority.

I often get e-mails about A Beautiful Blue Death, some that praise it and others that criticize it, and I'm grateful for all them. In particular there's one class of reader who find small historical errors, and I like to get their e-mails. The sharpest of these pointed out that a character called Miss Harrison, George Barnard's housekeeper, would almost certainly have been referred to with the honorific "Mrs." whether she was married or not. As a lover of Sherlock Holmes I should have recognized this on my own because of the character of Mrs. Hudson, the landlady at 221b Baker Street, where Holmes and Watson lived for many years (and where Holmes lived alone in the uncertain periods when Watson was married). There's never any mention of Mr. Hudson, though there's Billy, a page boy, if I recall correctly. And I've always thought it was an underrated act of courage on Mrs. Hudson's part that she pulled the strings to make the wax sculpture of Holmes seem animated, in order to entice Colonel Sebastian Moran, the second most dangerous man in London, to shoot it.

I wonder how Norman Mailer, who died on Saturday, will be remembered. His first book, The Naked and the Dead, and his last, The Castle in the Forest, were equally unreadable, though some of the pretension and self-congratulation of the first had gone by the last. As a prose stylist he was awful, as far beneath Capote and Roth as a writer for Reader's Digest is. His best books, including Executioner's Song (though not, I'd say, Armies of the Night) were part of the New Journalism, but still probably inferior to Didion's, Capote's, and even Wolfe's.

In the end, as much as anything, he was a personality, rather like Anatole France or Robert Greene. He belonged to the second, attenuated generation of the masculine tradition, and literary historians may well look back on him as a last expiring gesture of Hemingway's. Even though the obituaries so far have contained an element of hagiography, already there are writers of his generation far more respected and famous than he.

But that sounds judgmental. He spent his life in service to some inner counsel nobody else could hear, and for fifty years he was significant. He just may not have been a genius, but he can hardly be blamed for that. It was Emerson who said, and might almost have been describing Mailer's exact opposite, that, "Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them. Plato especially has no external biography. If he had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He ground them all into paint. As a good chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher converts the value of all his fortunes into his intellectual performances."

"It's shocking to me that I live in a country with a protocol and infrastructure for torture; but even more shocking is that I live in a country in which torture has become a subject for debate, with a right side and wrong side to it. If you had told me that this would be the state of affairs a decade ago, I wouldn't have believed you. It shows how quickly any of us can become intellectually accustomed to the bullying and ugliness of a government."

That's what I jotted down as I read about the Senate confirmation of Michael Mukasey, thinking I would post on it later. Then I read Glenn Greenwald's blog (one of the two I check every day, along with Hendrik Hertzberg's.) In it, he made the same case as well as I ever could. To quote him at length:

'The most amazing quote was from chief Mukasey supporter Chuck Schumer, who, before voting for him, said that Mukasey is "wrong on torture -- dead wrong." Marvel at that phrase: "wrong on torture." Six years ago, there wasn't even any such thing as being "wrong on torture," because "torture" wasn't something we debated. It would have been incoherent to have heard: "Well, he's dead wrong on torture, but . . . "

Now, "torture" is not only something we openly debate, but it's something we do. And the fact that someone is on the wrong side of the "torture debate" doesn't prevent them from becoming the Attorney General of the United States. It's just one issue, like any other issue -- the capital gains tax, employer mandates for health care, the water bill -- and just because someone is "dead wrong" on one little issue (torture) hardly disqualifies them from High Beltway Office.'

Well: exactly. There's one additional point to be made here; namely, that the worst transgressions of Abu Ghraib have now been proximately sanctioned not only by this administration, but by the weak will of the Democratic party. The presiding irony of the entire issue being, of course, that waterboarding and extreme temperatures are apparently means to the end of democracy and human rights: those purple thumbs.

Pat Robertson, who endorsed Rudy Giuliani yesterday, once blamed this bizarre roster of culprits for the attacks of September 11th: "Pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the American Civil Liberties Union and the People For the American Way." That this is incoherent is beside the point; what's salient is that Rudy Giuliani values the endorsement of the man who said that. And who once led a 21 day "prayer campaign" for a vacancy on the Supreme Court. And who said, "You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist."

Media Matters (one of my favorite websites) has documented the insufficiency of the coverage of the endorsement. Still, there are three things to say here. One, that a country in which Pat Robertson and Christopher Hitchens have about the same Q Rating may be irretrievably riven; two, that there still isn't a consensus about homophobia as there is about, say, racism (imagine if Robertson had said "blacks," rather than "gays"); and three, that the Republican party is delusional if it believes that evangelicals are or were ever the key to their success. After all, the vast majority of Pat Robertson fans support President Bush, and his numbers remain exiguous.

I found out recently that Library Journal has named A Beautiful Blue Death one of the best books of 2007. Last year's list had about sixty books on it, only five of them mysteries; an honor, given that LJ reviews something like 6,000 books a year. Sure, half of those are by James Patterson. But what about the other half?

For me one of the strangest parts about publishing this book is that I haven't read it since it was in manuscript. I'm sure there are last minute changes I've never scanned, and probably some typos I haven't caught. Last week I vaguely contemplated cracking the spine of my reading copy, but now that I'm giving its sequel a third close read in the last month, I remember why I haven't: between writing a book and seeing it published, you lose all perspective on its contents. Sometimes I think how satisfying it must be for a composer to hear his symphony in its full glory for the first time, or for an artist to see her sculpture installed in a gallery somewhere. No such satisfaction for the writer and his 80,000 words, unfortunately. But I have to admit the deep pleasure I had in opening a package and finding inside it real, tangible copies of my book. Dozens of them! Sometimes reproduction can enhance an object's aura, I guess.

I may be the last person in America to have read Irene Nemirovsky's astonishing novel Suite Francaise, which lay dormant for 64 years after her death in Auschwitz. The book's broadsides against upper class hypocrisy are too uncomplicated, and its faith in the Michauds' middle class virtue too complete, to merit the comparisons it has to Tolstoy etc. But for all that it's a remarkable book, and above all an entirely credible one, because of its place in history. The book's chief virtue is its ability to see the simultaneous absurdity and significance of individual experience against the vast canvas of war, and its descriptive powers are surpassing. But above all, that credibility, which every scornful mention of Petain and Laval confirms. When I last lived in Paris Maurice Papon died, and Nemirovsky predicted with eerie accuracy the reaction of the newspapers to a last breathing vestige of Vichyism: half-condemnation, half-curiosity. I'm curious about whether her book revived or put to final rest that great national debate about whether World War II was an aberration from or a revelation of the French character...

As probably goes without saying, I support the writers' strike. There's a lot of nonsense circulating about this subject, most of which seems to focus on the scales of pay involved. Today at a coffee shop I overheard an ABC producer (the studio is quite near my house) describing in vivid detail how spoiled the writers of, for example, Grey's Anatomy, must be to strike. But that objection misses the point. For one thing, as professional sports have proved over and over, poverty isn't a necessary condition for unionization -- which is a good thing. And more importantly, the attenuation of one union is equal to the attenuation of all unions. It's terrible to read about workers crossing this picket line; that's exactly what big corporations must want at this moment.

For me, the greatest blog came into being about half a century before the internet, and lasted two years: As I Please, George Orwell's endlessly readable weekly column in the Tribune. (Which still comes out, by the way.) Consider this sample column, in all its magpie glory. Orwell wrote chiefly about politics in his column, but also about book collecting, daily life in World War II London, gardening, pamphleteering, pubs, Shakespeare, and, in one memorable instance, Woolworth's sixpence rose bushes. (Here's a complete roster of the columns, all of which are well worth reading.)

Though my subjects, mystery novels and the life of a writer, are less serious than Orwell's were, I'd like to borrow his style, and use this blog to write about all of my own small loves, from travel to Arsenal FC to the presidential campaign to New York City life to Edmund Spenser (not too much, I promise) to the show Lost. If the best bloggers are those who post often -- the one scarcity on the internet is content -- I may not be a success. But where else will you find Spenser, the mystery novel, and English footie in one place?