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!