Book Recommendation: THE AMATEUR by Robert Littell, an Espionage Classic

Soho Crime, a Soho Press imprint, today releases a reissue of Robert Littell's 1981 espionage classic, THE AMATEUR. What a gift! Littell even catches the tang of some sardonic Russian fiction of that time, as he positions one angry coding analyst, Charlie Heller, as an American geek who find he just has to do something about the murder of his darling fiancée. When Heller discovers that the CIA -- to him, the Company -- knows which three terrorists have killed his sweet and beautiful Sarah Diamond, jeering at her for being a Jew, and knows where those three are, yet plans to do nothing about this, his unexpected emotions lead him to an insistence on action.

Heller's quickly aware that no action will come from his employer. In fact, he's subtly demoted, moved away from the urgent daily coding and deciphering that have been his area. He's been managing communication for an embedded spy located near where the killers now reside. What can he do about all this?

His geeky decision to take matters into his own untrained hands leads him to blackmail his boss into letting him train to go after the murderers. Even the Company's trainer thinks he'll fail -- a gun in the hands of such an amateur is less than fifty percent likely to hit what he fires at. And as a desk jockey, he's not in the physical shape to choose other killing methods, is he?

But Heller's almost father-in-law, Sarah's father, is a Holocaust survivor who already lost his first family, and tells Heller bluntly, "To survive the death of people close to you, you need ritual. ... I spent three years tracking the doctor who sent them to the gas." Mr. Diamond confesses that he strangled that doctor. When Heller says, "it didn't bring them back from the dead," the old man gives him the real point: "It brought me back from the dead!"

Even the Company shrink seems to agree: "From a medical point of view, revenge is very therapeutic." So Heller feels he has all the best reasons to pursue his new plan.

Things get tangled up, of course. The spy he chases isn't who he thought it was. His feelings aren't manageable. He is, indeed, a clumsy amateur, and when the Company tries to control his actions, things get quickly even more dangerous.

Littell's delightful plot takes Heller into highly satisfying changes and actions, and reveals slyly the other meaning of amateur that we've known all along: One who loves.

Pick up a copy for the pleasure of this still great story, for insight into how Littell cut a path for today's espionage authors, and for the foreword by Mick Herron. Totally worth it!

Lyric, Lyrical, and Is It Poetry Yet? A Story About Writing

Barnet VT post office, Wikimedia Commons, photo by Jared and Corin (Thanks!).

I've signed up for a class this weekend on the lyric poem. The price to enroll equaled a week of groceries. Trust me, at that price, I spent some time soul-searching before pressing "Register" for the class.

The moment that changed "everything" for the way I write happened at a rural post office in a small village many years ago. And it wasn't about a poem -- but about a story I'd written, fictional but framed with things I'd experienced, and published in a very small regional newspaper.

My mail carrier was just coming out to his truck when I was entering. He stopped me at the door, beaming with pleasure. "That story of yours, that was a good one, did it really happen?'

"More or less," I said. He grinned. 

An explosion was taking place in my chest. THIS. This was why I was writing. For my neighbors to read all the way to the end of a story or poem and wonder, Did this really happen? Or, equally good, So someone else has felt the way I did, imagine that!

This episode saved me.

I'd already been to a couple of sessions of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, where people I'd never heard of stood at the front of the lecture hall and read aloud their work, most of it so foreign to my life (like, tied to Greek heroes, or braiding together angels and the Irish with some foreign words as well) that I felt smaller and smaller. I'd brought my very best poems, the ones I really cared about, and one of them made it to a critique session. The mostly unshaven poet in charge, who lived in a city a thousand miles a way, lifted my page, waved it in the air, and said "This says nothing to me." He dropped it back on his desk and went on to someone else's poem. Frozen into stillness, I watched my page flutter to the floor.  

At the post office, though, later that year, I finally understood: When I'm writing a poem, I can't care whether a city resident from a very different culture "gets it." It would be nice, sure, but ... what I care about is whether my neighbor recognizes that same feeling about the bird feeder, or the cold spell, or the pain of wanting to fix your grown child's life and make it all better ... and knowing it's no longer your business to do that.

Literally decades later, after the death of my much-loved (much-missed) husband Dave, I took another long look at what was going on with my poems. Maybe you knew Dave -- if so, you won't be surprised to hear that he didn't really "get" my poems. But oh man, did he ever love to bask in a poetry reading by an outstanding poet like Jane Hirshfield or Galway Kinnell or Donald Hall or Ellen Bryant Voigt. No fancy language or critique from my darling, though. He'd push back in his seat afterward, look at me with glowing eyes, and say "That was the real thing."

So now, even with Dave's body out of reach, I wanted to bring my poems up to a level where if Dave were blindfolded and the sound was distorted so he didn't know it was his own spouse, he might listen for forty-five minutes and say what he said about those other poets. Not for everything I write, maybe, but for some of them. Workable goal? 

I began by applying to my stash of poems some lessons that Vermont (and nationally awarded) poet Sydny Lea gave me one afternoon on the front porch of Robert Frost's home in Franconia, NH: Circle any "new" language -- the surprising phrases and twists. Cross out bland words. Pay attention to how lines of poems end and begin, making them stronger.

It was working, I thought. But the handful of poems that I mailed or emailed to publishers and contests still resulted in polite "canned" rejection notes.

Then another Vermont poet, a woman I trust deeply, suggested that I take a class with poetry professor Ellen Bass -- thanks to the pandemic, the class would be online. This time the price, covering six sessions, added up to three weeks of groceries. In the fine print though was an invitation to explain your situation if you'd like a scholarship. I did (husband recently dead, finances a disaster, barely scraping by) and golly gee (as people used to say), a response said Yes. Scholarship awarded. Come learn.

It would take more than six weeks to explain now all that I learned from this gifted teacher, as I kept taking more of her classes, and carefully setting aside the money in advance to pay properly. But I can give you the single most important thing that I inked onto a piece of posterboard and taped to a nearby wall: 

"All poems live or die on their capacity to lure us from their beginnings to their ends by a pattern of sounds." 

That's from another poet who liked to teach, James Longenbach.

A pattern of sounds. When I added that kind of attention to how I was writing and revising, poems began at long last to get published beyond my local paper. Dave would be excited about that ... 

So that's why I'm blowing the price of another week of groceries on a class focused on "lyric" poetry, because I suspect that's the proper term for what I'm writing now. I really enjoy it.

Oxford Languages describes lyrical this way: expressing the writer's emotions in an imaginative and beautiful way.

Watch for the poems. With Dave out of the room, I'm counting on you to let me know when it's "the real thing."

 

Every Word Matters: A Touch of the Irish

design by Vermont's Danforth Pewter

Writing historical fiction, like my three volumes (so far!) in the Winds of Freedom series, means paying attention to all the little words. It's not automatic to "speak" in the rhythms and vocabulary of another time, and there are days when I spend more hours checking language than I do pushing the plot forward. What did counterfeiters call each other? How did Canadians talk about the "money artists" living in their Eastern Townships? If you're adapting your best dress to a new style in 1854, what do you call the trimmings that you're stitching, if you're classroom educated or if you're happier helping with your father's horses?

All of those came into play as I wrote The Bitter and the Sweet, where Bible-studying Almyra Alexander needs to reach across class and social lines to admit she needs help from Susannah Hall in order to climb into a saddle. Riding a pony in Boston certainly didn't prepare her for carrying urgent messages while perched high above the ground on a full-size horse. (Don't get me started on how tall the horse was. Thank goodness for true experts like Amanda Gustin at the Vermont Historical Society, who can talk clearly and with authority about Vermont Morgan horses.)

As a poet as well as a novelist, I also want the words to sound fluid and interesting in the reader's "ear." One result of that is that I sometimes recognize my own writing in places I hadn't expected to see it -- a description of a local town that someone borrows from my own, posted online, or a review on the back of a book, mentioning the author's earlier work. 

Yes, that's a great gift of being a published author: If you choose to, and don't mind working without pay (we can discuss that more at some other time), you can get involved in reviewing other historical fiction. I treasure the chance to do that for the Historical Novels Review. It can be a great challenge to devour 400 pages, then work out a description to guide other readers -- condensing it to 300 words,  which is a bit less than a page. (The end of that sentence reached 359 words here, just to give you a better notion.)

One book I am reading for review this week is set in the 1850s, like my work, and by 10 pages into the story, I realized its author didn't care about language in the same way that I do. Probably the most shocking moment was when one of the characters, of Irish heritage, referred to Irish immigration to the United States as caused by "the potato famine." That raised two problems: First, Irish immigration began much earlier than that, and Irish Americans were well represented in our patriots of the American Revolution. Second, and what drives me to write about this today, is I knew that the Irish didn't say "the potato famine."

At least, I was pretty sure. But it's part of my way of writing and researching, that I needed to check. So I pulled out one of the vital books on my reference shelf: The Story of the Irish Race by Seumas MacManus. It came to my collection during the writing of Cold Midnight, a novel set in 1920 in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, when many people working for the well-to-do came from Ireland. And I bet you might not ever have heard of Seumas MacManus, because he died in 1967, but here's how he's been described: "Seamus MacManus is considered by many to be the last great seanchaí, or storyteller of the ancient oral tradition. He wrote down and interpreted traditional stories so that they would not be lost to future generations." (Wikipedia summary.)

Sure enough, his chapter LXX starts on page 602 (people did write longer books then), and is titled The Great Famine. It begins:

The Great Famine, usually known as the famine of '47, really began in '45, with the blighting and failure of the potato crop, the people's chief means of sustenance. 

You'll search long and hard for a copy of that book. But you can get a marvelously well-written modern (2015) exploration of America's relationship with that part of Irish history in Maureen O'Rourke Murphy's book Compassionate Stranger: Asenath Nicholson and the Great Irish Famine. Are you hooked on Vermont and its history? Asenath Nicholson was born Asenath Hatch in Chelsea, Vermont, on February 24, 1792.

Give yourself an adventure for this month of St. Patrick's Day: Look up a bit more about Asenath Nicholson. Let me know what you think, when you discover what she did. 

And I hope you noticed the phrase "the Great Irish Famine." Not the potato famine. See, you're already gaining an ear for the well-chosen words of  well-written historical fiction. Go ahead, tell someone else what you've discovered!

 

To Be a New England "Girl"

My mother, managing five children and the social commitments that went with my father's management job, rarely spent money on herself (if we don't count those cigarettes). But she indulged in two magazine subscriptions that meant the world to her: Yankee Magazine, and Down East, "The Magazine of Maine." When a copy of one of those arrived in the mail, she'd curl up in her armchair under the portrait of her four-greats grandmother, and reconnect with the New England self she'd left behind in 1950 when she married my dad and moved with him to that land of plentiful engineering jobs: New Jersey.

Each summer she'd craft lengthy lists of meal plans and clothing needed, and we'd all head to New England for family camping. Our visits to great-aunts and various sorts of cousins dwindled with time, as either they passed away or the chaos of a large family couldn't be welcomed. So my memories of "Auntie Mi" (my grandfather Palmer's sister) and her husband are very faint indeed. I recall a donkey and maybe a pony at their New Hampshire home. And one of the more distant cousins, also called Aunt out of respect for her age, made doughnuts in Vermont. I don't know which town, now.

My folks had a challenging marriage, but around 1980 Dad went to a "gestalt" psychological workshop in Florida and came home repentant, determined to start over. They put their house on the market, quickly accepted an offer, and were weeks away from moving to Mexico City, where Dad would manage a lighting factory in transition, when Mom dropped to the ground outside the nursing home where she worked, and in a shockingly short time, she died.

In between the fresh start and the devastating ending, Mom sold or gave away most of her family treasures that spoke of New England. "You kids aren't interested in the stuff," she said firmly.

I can't say for sure about my siblings, but I was already in Vermont, rebuilding the family connection to New England, parenting a toddler, and expecting a second child. By the time I knew what Mom was up to, she'd done it. 

Then three years later my home burned to the cellarhole, in one of those devastating Vermont winter fires where there's nothing left—except in this case me and my children, which of course meant the most important part survived and went forward. (Yes, this is part of why my novels often include a fire.)

Somehow, these many years later, I do have a few small items from Mom's New England life. That probably means my father held onto them and passed them to me after the house fire. Two of them, small and without family initials, remain tiny treasures to me ... and those are what I carried to the Concord Historical Society last year, when I suddenly needed cover images for my newest novel, THE BITTER AND THE SWEET (Winds of Freedom Book 3). Concord's Beth Quimby kindly opened the museum to me, so I could stage a few photographs.

This one didn't get chosen for the cover, but it includes the two small items that remind me of Mom's New England roots: a locket that now holds a bit of my late husband's hair in its specially made interior, and a tiny mirror, far smaller than the one that always rested on my mother's "dressing table" next to her rose-scented eau de toilette and her face powder.

Somehow it seems like I should look into getting my own subscriptions again to those two classic New England magazines that engaged my mother so deeply. The story keeps spiraling, though: My first published poem in a national magazine? Yes, it was in Yankee Magazine, in 1995 -- too late for Mom to see it, but confirming for me anyway that I was becoming the New England "girl" she had always been at heart.

 

MAPS: Poetry, Historical Fiction, and My Mind

It feels like I've always loved maps: looking at them, figuring out how places are connected, planning trips, and with historical fiction, discovering more about how things used to be. One of my pleasures has been trying to re-draw maps of the two neighborhoods I lived in as a kid, seeing how many family names I could still place on the houses.

So I was very surprised to learn, some years ago, that maps are not intuitive -- someone has to sit with you and show you how they represent places and distances and relationships. Ever since then, I've tried to include them in school presentations, and once helped a kindergarten/first grade create a map of their town and the bus routes, on an old white sheet.

This map of my home town of Waterford is such a big reference item for me that I have it on the refrigerator, not on the front (where grandkid items and medical appointments may cluster) but on one side, all to itself. Even the smallest notes and family connections on it remind me of things I should make clear in my 1850s historical fiction. I depended on "old" maps of Peacham and Danville for THE BITTER AND THE SWEET. I needed to know the turns that Almyra would make with the horses, and what she'd see along the way.

In the past few months I've tried writing poems in clusters around themes, and MAPS became one of them. So I was tickled when Hole in the Head Review published this one. If the type here feels too small, look on their page at this link.

What kinds of things might you "map" about your life -- as a kid, or now? 

"Day Job" + Poem = A Winner ... in Lit Shark Magazine's "The Best of 2024 Anthology"

Where do poems come from? Each one comes differently for me. My "day job" is copyediting articles and books written by other people, often in the sciences, and one day I noticed some writing about resilience in nature -- how it happens, how to plan for it as you work with your yard or woodlot or forest. 

It sounded good, but I was having a tough time that day on the personal side, really missing my late husband Dave and the way two people do things so much differently from one alone. So I felt a bit skeptical about "resilience." And maybe a little guilty, too, because I don't want to feel sorry for myself. Dave and I had a great "run" of 17 years and there are plenty of great memories. Plus I grew into a different kind of person through that marriage and his constant curiosity and encouragement.

So the poem became both a talking-back to the article, and another bit of the grief process. Lit Shark Magazine's editor chose it to be one of the Poem of the Month group last summer, and she also pulled it into this year-end anthology.

 

Then the editor had the notion of asking for an "old" poem from each of her poets, to add to the anthology -- actually she asked for three so she could pick one -- and that's how Never-Ending List also slid into the pages!

 There are such varied and tasty poems in this anthology. To pick up your own copy, here's a link to the paperback version (you'll see a hardcover is available too, for an extra $5). Let me know if you opt to buy one ... I'll be thrilled.