MYSTERY WRITERS

by William H. Benson

September 13, 2001

     Last Saturday evening on television John Travolta played the starring character in the movie, “Get Shorty”, adapted from a book written by the mystery writer, Elmore Leonard.  To read any of his books or to watch the movie is like peeling back the covers of decency and peeking into a vicious underworld loaded with ignorant oddballs, thugs, psychopaths, and savage criminals.  Few of Leonard’s characters can be considered normal, and the plots revolve around revenge or small-time nobodies about to commit horrific crimes.  Tasteful literature it is not.

     My first exposure to mysteries began with a birthday gift while still in grade school of the first two volumes of the Hardy Boys–The Tower Treasure and The House on the Cliff.  Over the next couple of years I then worked my way through the rest of the Franklin Dixon books that featured the boys: Joe and Frank Hardy and their father, Fenton Hardy, a private investigator.  The stories include simple plots, such as a ring of car thieves that Joe and Frank happen upon.  If given a chance, the stories can hold a boy’s interest.

     In junior high I then discovered Earle Stanley Gardner and the Perry Mason series.  Into about the fourth book though, I realized that they were all virtually the same book, or I should say the same format.  (John Grisham is accused of the same cookie-cutter pattern.)

     Perry Mason defends someone, who it turns out later, is innocent of murder.  His secretary, Della Street, and his private investigator, Paul Drake, are there to help, but it is Perry who does the thinking.  In a final dramatic scene in the courtroom, he turns and accuses somebody else of the crime, who then breaks down and confesses.  The old black and white television series from the 1960’s starring Raymond Burr, I think, provide better entertainment than do the books.

     Neither Agatha Christie nor P. D. James, the two prominent British women mystery writers, could hold my interest to the final pages.  Numerous times I have started both and failed to finish.  Neither Miss Marple nor Hercule Poirot nor Adam Dagleish captivated my attention, and I would invariably get lost on about the fifth page in one of P. D. James’s convoluted sentences.

     The same cannot be said of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes.  Who possibly could not like either of them?  Doyle could write, and Holmes could think.  With superhuman reasoning powers, a violin, a magnifying glass, and wearing a hunting cap and a tweed cape, Sherlock Holmes strode the streets of London and solved the most insolvable crimes, astonishing the police and his friend Dr. Watson, who told the stories.       

     John D. Macdonald’s Travis McGee lives on a boat, The Busted Flush, along the Atlantic coast of Florida and lives the solitary life of a beachcomber.  Problems appear, and he sets them right.  The titles include a color, such as  Darker than Amber or A Deadly Shade of Gold.

     However, my two favorite mystery writers are Sue Grafton and Dick Francis.

     Sue Grafton writes the alphabet series: A is for Alibi, B is for Burglary, and so on.  Her most recent is P is for Peril, which means she has 10 more to go.  Kinsey Milhone lives in Santa Teresa, California, is 32-years-old, twice divorced, and is a private investigator.  She lives in a converted garage next door to the 80-year-old Henry Pitts who bakes bread and writes crossword puzzles.  Kinsey tells the stories.  Each book is unique, the characters are all believable, the plots are all intricate, and you never know who the crook is until it is over.

     Dick Francis is truly the best of the best.  His sparse sentence structure and believable stories always make sense, and when reading him, you know you are listening to a superior intellect.  (Why is it that the British write such great English?)  After a successful career as a steeplechase jockey in England, he turned to writing mysteries.  Getting close to 80 now, for the past 35 years he has published a book a year.  The teller of the story is the hero, who is a single guy in his late twenties or early thirties who finds himself swept up in events–not of his making, but usually based in England and revolving around some aspect of horse racing.

     The enemy is a particularly vicious and powerful brute who is identified early on, and for the remainder of the book, the hero calmly works it out and in the end defeats the enemy.  However, plenty of physical pain is faced along the way.  If you like learning about the British aristocracy and race horses, check out a Dick Francis novel– any of them.  They are all a delight. 

LABOR DAY

by William H. Benson

August 30, 2001

     The Labor Day weekend approaches–a welcome relief.  It means that summer is about over, and school has begun.  Labor Day honors the nation’s working people, sometimes called the laborforce or the workforce.

     In the U.S. in 2001 there are about 140 million workers–some 75 million men and 65 million women.  Just over half of those 140 million people have white-collar jobs and the remainder is divided between blue-collar, service, or farm workers.  At any given point in time, a generous percentage of those 140 million derive much satisfaction and happiness from their work, a smaller percentage are miserable, and the remainder (probably the majority) just consider their work a job that gives them a paycheck that pays their bills. 

     Bill O’Reilly, an opinionated television commentator, recently wrote a best-selling book entitled, The O’Reilly Factor.  In his chapter “The Job Factor”, he writes, “But since work is a fact of life and can also be rewarding, we’re better off when we find the job that’s best for us.  It’s too big a chunk of your lifetime to let it go to waste.  If we’re unfulfilled at work, it’s harder to be a happy, generous person.”

     He further says that a worker must identify his or her true talents and then find out how to use them to convert their time and energy and work into a paycheck.  He writes, “I don’t care how old you are.  It is never too late to use the gifts God gave you.  Not many things are sadder–or more darned annoying–than someone who says, ‘I wish I had started my own woodworking business’ (written a book, moved to a farm, gone back to nursing school, etc., etc.)  Do it now!”

     In the September edition of “National Geographic”, I noticed a sobering statistic.  “One-fifth of the full-time jobs in the U.S. pay eight dollars an hour or less.  Filling most of these jobs are the 40 percent of the workforce who have no education beyond high school.”

     Forty percent!  In other words, 40 percent of that 140 million are stuck where they are, unless through sheer will power and determination and a measure of luck they crawl up the payscale.  Returning to school is the better option, for it is there workers can improve their reading, writing, math, and technology skills.  It is a jolting fact of life in America in the 21st century that those who refuse to further their education (due to choice or circumstances) are forced into work that pays little.

     In that same “National Geographic” article, a school counselor named Mel Riddile said, “Computers are important, but not as important as literacy.  The kids have to be able to read or they can’t even use computers.  Here we spell “hope” r-e-a-d.  It’s no guarantee, but it’s essential.”

     Also, Bill O’Reilly suggests that getting along with others in the workplace is a necessary skill.  In a don’t-do-as-I-do-but-do-as-I-say sermon, he argues for an agreeable and conciliatory and non-combative attitude in the workplace.  Throughout his career, he dealt very poorly with what he calls “the toxic people” he met along the way–a big mistake.  He fought them with a passion.

     He says, “Do not do what I did in the workplace.  It’s not worth it.  I’ve survived and even prospered in the world of TV news, but that’s a miracle, believe me.  I made my life a thousand times harder than it had to me.” 

     However, he noticed that the truly brutal and toxic people in the workplace do make life so miserable for those around them, but that they do not last long.  Their supervisors either fired or demoted them.  “Hitler had a run of about fifteen years; the junior Hitlers of the world usually get much less.  Even though the occasional animal does sustain material success, ruthless is not the way to go.”

     School plus skills plus a job equals a paycheck–the formula for success and happiness in America.  Enjoy a well-deserved day off on Monday.   

CHANCE

by William H. Benson

August 16, 2001

     There is a word that has inspired more hope and opened more new lands than any other, and that word is gold.  On August 17, 1896 three guys (whom no one today remembers) — George Carmack, Skookum Jim, and Tagish Charlie — discovered gold on Bonanza Creek in the Canadian Klondike.  Of all the thousands of golddiggers across the western United States who patiently panned for gold in hot weather and cold day after day, it was those three guys who found it.  It makes a person stop and wonder.  Why were they the lucky ones?

     At the rodeo last week I watched calf-ropers and saddle bronc riders and barrell racers and bull riders.  I had to ask myself:  why does one cowboy stay on a bull for the required eight seconds and another is immediately tossed aside when barely out of the chute?  Is it skill of the rider or is it how the bull moves and bucks and jumps?  Or is it the luck of the draw, of chance, of which cowboy sits on which bull?

     Football season is rapidly approaching, and in five months it will be over.  We wonder now: which teams will earn the championships?  Those with the best players?  Or those with the most determined players?  Or will a variety of other factors (some unknown even now) taken together dictate who will win?  Do we even dare predict? 

     The wildly improbable happens everyday.  The remarkable brings us up short, and the miraculous takes our breath away.

     For example, fifty years ago Life magazine published a picture of a group of deer that included three albinos.  The photographer Staber Reese took the photo in northern Wisconsin where there lived an estimated 850,000 white-tailed deer, of which no more than twenty were albinos.  Reese calculated the odds of him taking that picture with those three albinos at 79 billion to 1.  Perhaps.

     We are mistaken when we under-rate the influence of “chance” in our lives, for anything can happen to anybody–both the good and the bad.  There is no complete defense against the sea of improbabilities that surrounds us, but there are weapons–probability theory and statistics.

     It is possible to face calmly this world of coincidences and seemingly miraculous events.  The statistical approach is helpful because it teaches that a person cannot always expect the average one hundred percent of the time.  After all, the average is just one single point on a curve.  The bell-shaped normal curve shows that ordinarily there are more medium cases than either those from the extremes–the far left or the far right.  But the extremes exist nevertheless.

     Clear thinking means that in this world there are multiple causes for why things happen, that there are imperfect correlations between events and people’s behaviors, and that sheer unpredictable chance is what we live with everyday.  That type of clear thinking pushes aside the simpler idea that everything and everyone can be categorized into two camps–the good guys or the bad guys, the winners or the losers.  It also shoves aside the idea that everyone-knows-that-this-is-due-to-only-that kind of thinking.

     After three meetings Goldfinger finally recognized James Bond for what he was–a spy and an enemy bent on his destruction.  Immediately Goldfinger had him apprehended and then he said to him,  “Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago:  ‘Once is happenstance.  Twice is coincidence.  But the third time is enemy action.'”

KATHARINE GRAHAM
by William H. Benson
August 2, 2001

     The right to criticize our government and its leaders extends back beyond the Constitution to the colonial days.  On August 4, 1735 the New York Governor William Cosby acquitted John Peter Zenger, publisher of the New York Weekly Journal, of libel charges.  Zenger had defended himself and won his case by pleading that his charges against the colony’s governor were true, and therefore not libelous.

     Throughout the two plus centuries of this American Republic’s existence, the press and the politicians have bantered back and forth, but in the 1970’s Richard Nixon’s hatred of the press and especially of the Washington Post exceeded the normal to the point of being bizarre.

     Katharine Graham, the owner and publisher of the Post and Newsweek, wrote in her autobiography, Personal History, “Trying to keep all of his hatred of the press, and particularly of the Post, within the confines of the White House proved too much for the president.”

     Henry Kissinger said of Nixon, “He was convinced that the Post had it in for him.  At what point he got that idea, I don’t know, but when I met him, he already had that idea.  He wanted a confrontation with the press.  He really hated the press.”

     Katharine Graham inherited the Post from her father, Eugene Meyer, a wealthy businessman who had purchased the newspaper in June of 1933 at a bankruptcy auction.  He only gave $825,000 for the paper, but it was years before it ever showed a profit.

     Katharine’s husband, Phil Graham, ran the newspaper in the fifties and early sixties, while Katharine played the role of the dutiful “doormat” housewife and mother to their four children.  The difficulty was that Phil, for all of his dazzle and brilliance, was a manic depressive.  On Saturday August 3, 1963, shortly after lunch, he shot himself in the bathroom, and Katharine found him.

     At age 46 she found herself in the top job of publisher and CEO of the Washington Post.  She was a widow.  Shy, insecure, lacking little self-confidence, she somehow found the courage and the internal strength to face the job, to learn what she needed to know, as well as balance her children’s lives with her own.  Decisions were thrown at her.

     In 1971 Katharine Graham gave her editor, Ben Bradlee, permission to publish the Pentagon Papers, information about the decisions leading up to our involvement in Vietnam.  Nixon was furious, which puzzled everyone.  The papers reflected nothing on Nixon personally; they were essentially a history of decisions made before Nixon was even president.  His reaction to the papers was an example of his extreme paranoia about secrecy and national security.

     Then, on Friday night, June 16, 1972, police caught five men breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel, and a national nightmare had begun.  For the next two years the Post kept the story alive.  The Post’s two reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, dug and dug until they found “Deep Throat”, a leak in the White House who willingly talked.  Everything he or she told them checked out.  They knew of a cover-up, but how to prove it?

     At one point Katharine Graham asked Ben Bradlee, “All I want to know is if this is such a great story, where are the other newspapers?”  Fighting a president was not for the faint of heart.

     On August 5, 1974 the “smoking gun” was found.  The White House released three new tapes that recounted conversations between Nixon and Haldeman on June 23, 1972, six days after the break-in.  They proved Nixon had directed efforts to hide the involvement of his aides.  On August 9th Nixon resigned.

     Last month Katharine Graham at age 84 died of a brain hemorrhage.  The question many in Washington asked was, “How did she go from daughter, to housewife, to mother, to widow, to newspaper publisher, to a media mogul with the power to topple a president?”

     She had answered that question years before, when she said, “It was different for women of my generation.  We did it like a cake, layer by layer.”      

WOMEN’S RIGHTS

by William H. Benson

July 19, 2001

     Anna Quindlen, the “Newsweek” columnist, describes her defining moment as a mother when she walked into the pediatrician’s waiting room with two children under the age of five, and she herself was pregnant with a third.  She was miserable, hot, nauseated, and tired because her two kids had been up sick all night long.  And then she noticed it–a cross-stitched sampler nailed to the doctor’s wall that read: “God could not be everywhere so he made mothers.”  The emotions that she felt at that moment–incredulity and outright disgust, overwhelmed her physical ailments.

     She and others would concur that despite many very willing volunteers, motherhood in twentieth-century America is not an easy job.

     The author James Michener once suggested that he believed the hardest-working women in the world are American women.  Their job is not the demanding physical labor found elsewhere but is a much more complex occupation, working in public and cultural spheres that demands creativity and punctuality.  They must transport children to and from endless activities, maintain an above-average standard of personal attractiveness and mental alertness, and then emotionally support a husband, besides often hold down a full-time job in an office that they may enjoy. 

     Michener may have been right.  After all he observed women all over the world.  He should know.  However, reaction to his thoughts was mostly negative.  The mail indicated that women did not appreciate Michener’s flattering remarks, and he admitted later that he was astonished by their hostile reaction.

     In a similar vein, another very capable writer, H. L. Mencken, wrote an entire book, In Defense of Women, surprising everyone for his balanced and unbiased approach.  On any given subject, Mencken always attacked, but on this subject of women’s roles he defended the position that life forces upon women.  He was on their defense.

     He wrote, “Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom that comes from experience.  To be a woman is in itself a difficult experience because it consists chiefly of trying to get along with men.”

     What makes Mencken’s view even more confounding is that he was a bachelor when he wrote this.  In fact, he did not marry until much later, past his fiftieth birthday, and then five years later his wife died.  He never remarried.  He perceived much.

     On July 19, 1848 the first women’s rights convention ever met at Seneca Falls, New York, headed by Quaker women, including Lucretia Mott and the fired-up Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who immediately suggested that women should have the right to vote.  A more hesitant Lucretia Mott warned Stanton, “Thou will make us ridiculous.  We must go slowly.”

     All of the convention’s Declarations of Sentiments were passed as resolutions except number 9–women’s right to vote, but then after much debate and prodding by Stanton, it also passed.  A revolution is not won or lost in a few days or even in a few years.  Indeed, seventy-two years passed by before Congress passed the 19th Amendment, and women first voted in the presidential election that same year of 1920.

     Now that we are 225 years past the Declaration of Independence we can see that our republic has constantly and justifiably pushed the boundaries of liberty and equality under the law outward to include virtually everybody.  For a mother, however, the right to vote is one thing, but dealing with sick kids late at night is entirely another.

Of her defining moment Anna Quindlen commented, “If God made mothers because he couldn’t be everywhere, maybe he could have met us halfway and eradicated vomiting and colic, too, and the sugarcoating of what we (mothers) are and what we do that leads to false cheer and easy lies.”