Across the bridge: A personal reflection

Presented to the Club on Monday, February 10, 2020 by Richard L. Floyd

We will come to the bridge in my title in due time, but it is a later piece of the story I want to tell tonight, so I will begin with an important book I read last summer while I was filling in as a guest preacher for my daughter during her maternity leave.

The book was Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman. My pastor had given it to me the year before, but I hadn’t got around to reading it. It was written in 1949, which happens to be the year I was born, and it came out right before the civil rights movement really got moving in the 1950’s.

Howard Thurman, a black minister and scholar, was the Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University. He had traveled to India and had met Mahatma Gandhi. When Thurman asked Gandhi what message he should take back to the United States, Gandhi said he regretted not having made nonviolence more visible as a practice worldwide and he famously remarked “It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.”

Thurman did come back with that message about non-violent resistance, and became one of the influences on one of his students, Martin Luther King, who did his doctorate at Boston University. And the Civil Rights movement did in fact employ a variety of the tactics of nonviolent resistance, such as sit-ins, bus boycotts, Freedom Rides, marches, and mass demonstrations.

In his book, Howard Thurman draws comparisons between the socio-political world that Jesus grew up in under Roman Occupation, and the American South during the Jim Crow era. In both cases powerful majorities disinherited powerless minorities through fear and the threat of violence. The regular lynching in Howard Thurman’s day and the regular crucifixions of Jesus’s day were both designed to instill terror in the disinherited minority and keep them in their place.

Words to live by: The King James Bible and its legacy to the English language

Photo by Jonathan Schmid, used under Creative Commons License

Presented to the Club by Richard L. Floyd on Monday Evening, April 28, 2014

The story I want to tell is the story of the creation of the King James Bible, and its enormous influence on the English language. For over 400 years this was the Bible for the English-speaking world, the best selling book of all time, and still the most frequently purchased translation.

It lasting legacy to English is incalculable. It is the Bible that Abraham Lincoln learned to read with, and its sounds and rhythms can be heard in his Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address, as it can in Melville’s Moby-Dick, the poetry of Walt Whitman, and the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.

How did we get this extraordinary work of literary art that has made such a place in the story of English? It was published in 1611, but there is considerable backstory that needs to be shared before we get there, and so we need to go way back. The English still refer to it as the Authorised Version (AV), but I will use the more popular American title, the King James Version and its abbreviation (KJV).

Our first question is, what is the Bible? The word itself comes from the Greek Ta Biblia, which simply means “the books.” That seems simple enough, but which books?

Under the green canopy: Hiking the Appalachian Trail the the Berkshires

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, March 12, 2012 by Richard L. Floyd

When I told Harold* my title for tonight’s paper he suggested it might be about a wedding! A great guess, but no, the paper is actually about my experiences of hiking on the Appalachian Trail in the Berkshires. “Under the Green Canopy” refers to the lush green foliage overhead when you are on the trail. The AT is also sometimes called the “Green Tunnel” by thru-hikers.

I first encountered the Appalachian Trail over fifty years ago in western New Jersey as a Boy Scout at camp No-Be-Bo-Sco. The camp, which is still going strong, sits alongside Kittatinny Ridge, near the Delaware Water Gap.

I went to camp there for several summers and we scouts hiked sections of the nearby AT. The trail skirts the opposite shore of Sand Pond. I have many memories of that lake; I came to camp as a beginner and learned to swim there, eventually earning my lifesaving merit badge, and when I was fourteen swam the Mile Swim there. I didn’t appreciate that the nearby trail was so special.

It was as a Boy Scout that I first learned to love hiking and camping. I know that when one thinks of New Jersey it does not conjure up pictures of beautiful forests and hills, but that is just what that part of northwestern New Jersey is like. If you don’t believe me you can visit. The camp is private, but years ago it ceded hundreds of acres to the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Park and one can hike the trails there, including a portion of the AT.

Eventually one of the Scout leaders at camp must have told me that the trail went all the way from Georgia to Maine, and that some people hiked the whole thing in one season. From then on it was a dream of mine to thru-hike the trail, a dream I long deferred and have finally abandoned now that I’ve reached the age where one likes to sleep in one’s own bed.

Then, Now and What's Next: Ruminations on Time and Technology

Presented to the Club by Richard L. Floyd on Monday evening, January 25, 2010

As the first Monday Evening Club paper of a new decade I want to do some looking backward as well as gazing forward. Looking backward is not so hard, since we all have 20/20 hindsight, but gazing forward is more difficult. It was Søren Kierkegaard who once said, “Life must be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.” So let me do the easy part first and look backward, telling a couple of brief stories about two men who were born in the late Nineteenth Century, came of age in the early part of the Twentieth, and lived long lives in which they witnessed technological advances unparalleled in any other period of human history. Then I will briefly try to look forward to take some guesses about “what’s next?”

The first story is one you may have read about in the paper this past year. It is about Henry Allingham, one of the last two British soldiers to fight in the First World War. He died last July at the age of 113. He was, for one month of his life, the oldest verifiable living man on earth. Asked about the secret to his longevity he credited “cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women – and a good sense of humor.”

Originally a Navy man, Allingham was first assigned as a mechanic, and later a spotter, to a unit that carried out anti-submarine air patrols for the newly formed RAF. Keep in mind that the Wright brothers’ first flight had been launched as recently as 1903, so airplanes were just a decade old when the Great War broke out, and this would be the first significant use of them in war. The Sopwith Schneider seaplane that Henry’s unit flew to look for German U-boats and other ships was really nothing more than a big box kite with an engine. It had to be lifted by cranes in and out of the water from a ship every time it went on a mission. The plane carried no parachute, no navigational instruments, save a map and a compass, no radio, only a carrier pigeon. To us it sounds primitive, yet at the time air flight was so new that it was cutting-edge technology. Today those fliers needn’t have risked their lives in reconnaissance missions. They could rely on satellites.

The second man whose story I want to tell is my maternal grandfather, William Ira Laffoon. I only knew “Granddaddy Bill” when he was an old man, for he turned seventy the year that I was born. He was born on October 8, 1881, and when he was a boy of eight he traveled with his family from Missouri (“Missour-ah” is how he always said it) to Indian Territory on a Conestoga wagon to participate in the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. The Land Rush offered 2 million acres of free public land for homesteading on a first come first served basis. The rush, or “run” as it is more properly called, began at high noon on April 22, but many of the participants had already picked out choice parcels and hid on them until the official time. These were the “Sooners.” The ones who played by the rules and went when the cannon was fired were called “Boomers.” Unlike Rome, Oklahoma City, was built in a day, for there were over 10,000 inhabitants by late afternoon of the first day of the run. My grandfather and his family were the opposite of the “Sooners,” and waited until the next day to quietly go in to stake their claim, which is how my mother came to be born in Oklahoma City.

On the writing of lives

Presented to the Club by Richard L. Floyd in February, 2006

When Izaak Walton, the seventeenth century writer best known for The Compleat Angler, set out to write a life of poet and divine John Donne, there was as yet no word in English for a biographer, and the very concept of a biography as we know it did not exist. There were “Lives” written going back as far as Plutarch and Suetonius, of course, but these were in no way distinguished from history. There were also “Lives” of the saints written for the edification of the faithful. It was works such as Walton’s “Lives” in the seventeenth century and Johnson’s and Boswell’s in the eighteenth that helped to create the literary genre we know today.

You would never know by the popularity of biographies today what recent phenomena they are. The Twentieth Century saw the blossoming of the genre, beginning with Aylmer Maude's Life of Tolstoy, first published in 1910. Since then the floodgates of biography have been opened and never closed. “Of the making of books there is no end,” wrote St. John The Evangelist, and this is particularly true of biographies today.

How popular are biographies? Last Sunday’s (this was written in 2006, but make the necessary changes) New York Times Book Review had reviews of new biographies of John Cassevetes, Phyllis Schafly, Ronald Reagan and Christopher Marlowe.

Half of the books on the current New York Times Best Seller list for non-fiction are either memoirs or biographies, although there is more than a little doubt now whether James Frey’s new book, My Friend Leonard, has as much fiction in it as did his Million Little Pieces, which tops the paperback list.

Frey’s situation is a case in point of the popularity of the factual over the fictional. Unless you are one of those rare souls who actually reads books rather than hearing about them on TV, you probably are aware of the flap caused by the disclosure that Frey’s Million Little Pieces, which was published as a memoir, contains a considerable amount of what charitably could be called fiction.

Oprah Winfrey, a force to be reckoned with in the book world, had strongly recommended Million Little Pieces, sending it to the top of the lists, and, when the expose broke, she at first defended Frey. Oprah called in to a Larry King Live show where Frey was taking a beating, and told Larry and his TV audience she thought the criticisms were no big deal, and to stop picking on her guy.

After some days of reflection, and a blizzard of editorials about her, Oprah recanted, and invited both Frey and Nan Talese, his editor, onto her show. There she delivered to the unsuspecting objects of her wrath a rather severe admonition about the importance of truth in general and publishing in particular. Nan Talese made some half-hearted attempts to defend the lying by saying that memoirs involve the intersection of fact with imagination. I will return to the fascinating subject of where the line is between fact and fiction, but for now let us note that the negative publicity hasn’t seemed to hurt sales of either of Frey’s books. But the nugget of fact that I find most fascinating in this tale is the recent disclosure that Frey had originally submitted Million Little Pieces as fiction to 17 publishers, and had been rejected each time. When he reclassified it as a memoir, he had a ready publisher and public.

In other words, many of us love a tale we think is true, better than one that is simply well told. A purported true story may find an audience where fiction cannot, as Frey discovered. This may help to explain today’s flourishing biography trade, and the peculiar fact that people will buy literary biographies of author’s whose books are no longer to be found in the same bookstore in which the biography was purchased. It’s not always true, of course, that biographies of authors are more interesting than the fiction that made the authors famous, but it often is. How many of you wouldn’t rather read about Gertrude Stein, for example, who is fascinating, than actually read her books, which are impenetrable, at least to me.

One of the marks of modernity is a fascination with the individual, and since Isaak Walton’s time the rise of the biography has coincided with the rise of the individual. There were great men in antiquity, of course, whose lives were well worth knowing about, but the focus of writing about them was on their place in a larger narrative of history, a story of battles and empires. Today we read biographies of people who have nothing to do with the sweep of history, some of whom are merely famous for being famous, such as the ubiquitous Paris Hilton.

We are greedy for biographies, and they cover every literary brow, from high to low. Whether your taste runs to the British Royal Family and Hollywood celebrities or to the literati of the 1930’s you’re in luck. The menu has almost too many choices. Recently there have been major biographies of Lords Byron and Nelson, John Coltrane, Edvard Munch, Rudyard Kipling, Emma Goldman, W. B. Yeats, St. Augustine, D. H. Lawrence, Samuel Pepys, Sandra Day O’Connor and John James Audubon, to name but a few. Even James Boswell himself, the Ur biographer, is the subject of a new major biography. There were two biographies released simultaneously of Madonna, the singer, not Mary the mother of Jesus.

The recent biographies of America’s founding fathers are a regular growth industry. We have had recent major biographies of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton.

Any Civil War General worth his salt has his own Life; I have read biographies of both Grant and Lee in the last year and started one about Longstreet, but decided after a few pages that I didn’t want to know that much about him. Nonetheless reading several biographies can often make you intimate with a period better than a standard history.

So what is a biography? If biology is the study of the organization of life, biography is the writing about life, from the Greek words bios for life and graphein, to write. Like many words biography has expanded from its strict meaning, so now it can be used to denote the mere facts and information about a person. Used in this looser sense, a Wikepedia entry on the Internet, or a Hollywood biopic are both biographies.

But biography, in the strict sense, is a life in writing. It isn’t the life itself, but a written account of it. By way of analogy, I have often explained to people over the years that my written sermon manuscripts are not actually sermons, but only literary artifacts of oral events. To read the sermon is not the same as to experience the sermon. The manuscript has words on a page, but it leaves many questions unanswered. How many people were in the congregation? Were they alert or sleepy? Was the preacher animated, somber, or amusing? Did he mumble or speak up? What was he wearing? Was there a thunderstorm going on outside, or a baby crying? You get the idea.

In much the same way a biography is also a literary artifact, but of a much less ephemeral event, not a half-hour oration but the entire life of a person. This is no easy task. The complexities and nuances of a human life can only partially be captured in words. If only the bare facts of a human life were needed, then a biography could be condensed into a few paragraphs. Where did he live? What did she do? Why is he famous? When did she die? (That sort of thing.) Dictionaries of biography can sum-up several lives this way on a single page, but a full-dress biography, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, for example, do far more.

They try to capture something of the genius of the life they portray, as a portrait painter tries to do more than simply mirror the physical image of the subject. An engaging biography leaves you feeling you understand something of the person’s inner life, his passions and motivations. And since every life must to some extent remain a mystery, even to its closest intimates, even to oneself, good biography is made up of both careful research and deft art.

The biographer must ask, “What made this person tick?” What is it that she accomplished that makes her a worthy subject for the biographer? Leon Edel, the distinguished biographer of Henry James, put it like this: “The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.”(Jay Parini, SALON | Nov. 19, 1997.)

I have said that good biography is made up of both careful research and deft art, and both are necessary. Without careful research, the art will not create a good biography. So how does the biographer go about the task of finding the information necessary? Edel was asked the secret to biographical research, he said, “Get a big desk.” The biographer is like a detective, putting together the pieces of the puzzle, some of which are missing. There will be gaps and silences as well as letters and diaries. James Boswell, who did as much as anyone to create the modern biography, was blessed with a personal acquaintance with Samuel Johnson. He ate with him, drank with him, and traveled with him. He egged him on into lengthy discourses while he took notes in shorthand. In other words, he had access. But that is the exception.

Most biographers aren’t so lucky. The paper trail can be hard to find. Letters are lost, or even burned by protective family members or lovers. Ian Hamilton has written a fascinating account of the obstacles placed in the way of biographers in his book, Keepers of the Flame. He himself knows something of these frustrations in his own attempt to write a life of the notoriously reclusive J. D. Salinger. Hamilton’s book is full of stories of widows and executors fighting off those they perceive as predatory biographers.

Some examples: Lord Byron’s executor put Byron’s memoir to the flames. Thomas Hardy destroyed most of his life’s papers and then conspired with his second wife to pretend she was the author of a biography he was actually writing about himself. Jane Austen’s sister destroyed letters she thought revealed personal material. Poet Ted Hughes, husband of Sylvia Plath, destroyed her last two journals, and then published his own edition of the rest.

And those are only some of the problems associated with writing about dead people; there is a whole different set of problems when dealing with the living. First there is the problem of authorization. If you seek permission to write an authorized biography, does it make you beholden to the author and family so as to skew the final picture? On the other hand, an unauthorized biographer can be perceived as not much better than a stalker.

Listen to Janny Scott of The New York Times tell of the trials and tribulations of two biographers of living subjects: Carole Klein, who was writing about Doris Lessing, and Ann Waldron, who was writing about Eudora Welty:

“These may be boom years in the biography business, but the economics of publishing and popular tastes have put pressure on writers to select living subjects instead of the kind one biographer calls ‘nice and dead.’

The problem is that the living ones tend to say no. Some even encourage their friends to do the same. Which can make spending three or four years reconstructing a hostile subject's life a lonely, dispiriting way of paying the bills.

Letters go unanswered, calls unreturned. Sources hang up when the biographer introduces himself over the phone. One potential source let Ms. Klein fly all the way to London before canceling their lunch date.

'“I will never, never do another living person,'' said Ann Waldron. ‘I have a pretty thick skin but not that thick to undergo this for the rest of my life.’

Ms. Klein was ‘a tremendous fan'’ of Mrs. Lessing's books, interested in the social and cultural context of her life. As she puts it: ‘I had this feeling that we would connect.'’

Mrs. Waldron and Ms. Klein . . . each approached their subjects before making a book proposal. They had known them, at least slightly, before. . . . But Miss Welty and Mrs. Lessing said no, repeatedly. They were not interested in having biographies done, they said. They gave reasons subjects often give: Miss Welty said she wanted her writing to stand on its own; Mrs. Lessing said she was writing a memoir.

‘I was a fool,’ Mrs. Waldron said in retrospect. ‘I rushed in where angels would have feared to tread.’ She said she allowed herself to believe Miss Welty was not adamantly opposed. And being from the South, like Miss Welty, she figured she would be able to get Southerners to talk.

One of the first people she called was a man she had interviewed for an earlier book. ‘I’ll have to call Eudora,’ she remembers him saying. When he called back, he said he had been asked not to cooperate. He said Miss Welty had said: ‘Ask Ann to call me.’ Mrs. Waldron didn't. “She’d just talk me out of it,'” she explained.

Mrs. Waldron went to Memphis and tracked down a retired college administrator who had known Miss Welty years before. Does Eudora know you're working on this book? The woman asked over the phone. Mrs. Waldron said yes. Do you have her permission? No. The woman hung up.

Mrs. Waldron wrote to another man; he never answered, then declined to talk when she reached him by phone. Still another agreed to see her as soon as he returned from Europe. When he got back, he called her. ‘Don't come,'’ he said. ‘I've talked to Eudora.’

Mrs. Waldron drafted and redrafted a letter to him, explaining how much she wanted and needed the interview. She offered not to quote him, if that would help. To try to convince him she was a serious literary biographer, she sent along a copy of one of her earlier books.

He sent the book back unopened and a one-line letter saying: ‘The last thing Eudora needs at this stage in her life is an unauthorized biography,’ Mrs. Waldron said.

Ms. Klein ran into similar problems. When she published an author's query in The New York Times Book Review, looking for correspondence and personal recollections about Mrs. Lessing, Mrs. Lessing's agent sent a frosty letter to the editor that was then published in The Book Review.

‘I am writing on behalf of Mrs. Lessing to say that this biography is totally unauthorized, that no permissions will be granted for extracts from the author's work and that her letters are also copyrighted and cannot be used without her permission,’ the two-paragraph letter said.

Ms. Klein was stunned. ‘If you were an unsophisticated person reading this, you would have thought it was illegal to answer,’ she said. ‘I did think that was out of bounds. This was cutting off the most valuable research tool a biographer has. It was such an extreme step, particularly for a writer to do to another writer.” (New York Times article October 6, 1996. “For Unauthorized Biographers, the World Is Very Hostile” by Janny Scott)

And yet, can we not understand why someone would be leery of a lurking biographer? Most subjects of biographies are famous people, and most biographers are not. Can this writer be trusted with something as precious as the way posterity will view ones life? These doubts are natural, and if truth be told, not all biographers are reliable, fair or even truthful. The market for scandalous biographies is insatiable and often lucrative. Who can resist? Many cannot, and the tradition of scurrilous lives is as old as the emerging genre of modern biography.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, as the literary life became increasingly detached from the royal court, writers began to earn their bread in the marketplace and rogue publishers would accommodate their publications to public tastes. The poet Alexander Pope battled one Grub Street hack named Edmund Curll, who has the distinction of being the first peddler of scandalous biographies:

“It occurred to (Curll) that, in a world governed by the laws of mortality, men might be handsomely entertained on one another’s remains. He lost no time in putting his theory into action. During the years of his activity he published some forty or fifty separate Lives, intimate, anecdotal, scurrilous sometimes, on famous and notorious persons who had the ill-fortune to die during his lifetime. He had learned the wisdom of the gravedigger in Hamlet, and knew that there were many rotten corpses nowadays, that will scarce hold the laying in. So he seized on them before they were cold, and commemorated them in batches. . . . His books commanded a large sale, and modern biography was established.” (Walter Raleigh, Six Essays on Johnson, Clarendon Press, 1910, p 117 quoted in Hamilton, p 50)

So a tradition of suspicion and distrust towards biographers began at the creation. But even with cooperation the research into biography is hard work. James Atlas describes his ten-year effort to write a biography of Saul Bellow: “Over the next decade, I made my biographer's rounds, like the postman deterred neither by sleet nor snow--nor by occasional emanations of reticence or frostiness from my subject--from the routine (often a fascinating routine) of poring over his unpublished manuscripts in the rare book and manuscript division of the University of Chicago Library; lugging my laptop all over America in quest of high-school classmates, cousins, friends, and lovers of my famously peripatetic subject; driving Avis rental cars into the remotest suburbs of Los Angeles and flying into Buffalo, N.Y., in pursuit of letters in private hands. Biography is no vocation for old men; it requires physical stamina. By the time I'd filled up my cupboard with the building materials for my book, I was, to borrow one of Bellow's favorite words, bushed.” (James Atlas, “The Last Word: How it feels to finish a 10-year writing project.” Slate. Posted Tuesday, Aug. 17, 1999)

After all this collecting then the biographer must choose what to leave in, and what to leave out. Out of his particular collection of information, including the gaps and silences, the biographer must sift and sort to create a literary artifact that conveys a living life. What you leave out may be as important as what you put in, and the holes must be respected. Julian Barnes once wrote that a net may be defined two ways, as a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. . . But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net . . . as a “collection of holes tied together with string.” (Quoted in Lee p 5)

And what to leave out is no easy matter as authors get attached to their research like parents to their children. James Atlas again: “The trouble is that you've gone through so much pain to collect the damned junior-high-school transcript or the quote from Bellow's landlord in Paris in 1948 that you feel you have to put it in--just to get credit. Only after you have a completed manuscript does your confidence build to the point where you can go through the top-heavy pile of pages and, encountering the third reference to Bellow's occasional book reviews for the New York Times Book Review, decide: Who cares? and slash it with the red pen. On my second go-round I cut 200 pages. . . . On the third pass, recalling Proust's admonition to one of his correspondents that if he'd only had time he would have written a shorter letter, I managed to cut another 200 pages.”

And when does the biographer know that the research part of the project is over? Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, about which we have had a paper here in the Monday Evening Club, tells of her plight as she finished her research:

“It was July of 2004, and I had just turned in the 765-page manuscript of my biography of the Peabody sisters—three women at the center of New England's Transcendentalist movement of the 1830s and '40s—a project that had taken me nearly 20 years to complete. Free at last—or so I thought—I was on vacation in New Hampshire when a family friend asked me, hesitantly, over gin-and-tonics at a cocktail party, ‘Have you finished your book yet?’ For once, I sensed, this question didn't carry the usual subtext: Why haven't you finished your book yet? She'd been poking around in her attic, my friend told me, and found a trunk full of letters that had belonged to her husband's great-grandmother. One thick packet, tied in pink ribbon, was labeled ‘Mary T. Peabody’—the middle of the three sisters. Would I be interested in reading more letters? Or was it, finally, too late?

After a certain point in the research, as any biographer will tell you, such information induces a shudder of dread. Letters take a long time to read, especially handwritten ones like those I'd plowed through by the hundreds for my book. . . . (And) there was the all-too-real possibility that some new information in these letters would throw off everything I'd written. What if I had to start over again—as I'd already done once before? That was after a manuscript find at the 10-year mark turned up Elizabeth's adolescent diary, the daily journals she'd kept while visiting Ralph Waldo Emerson in the late 1830s. The same material yielded my greatest scoop, Elizabeth's confession of love for Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer who ended up marrying her youngest sister, Sophia, a landscape painter, in 1842.

In truth, far more of the material I uncovered in the Peabody sisters' letters had to do with intellectual disputes than with love triangles. Yet the confessional nature of the manuscripts I was working with seemed to bother some people when I talked about them. ‘Don't you feel guilty, reading all that private mail and then quoting from it in your book?’ my friends would ask. It's a common attitude: What was written in private is meant to stay that way. A few years ago I had a tough time trying to convince my own aunt not to pitch a diary my grandmother kept as an Army bride in Paris during WWI, which gave a rare glimpse of civilian life in wartime; she was only trying to protect my grandmother's privacy, my aunt protested.

. . . Perhaps most biographers are plagued with the worry, as they near the completion of their books, that they haven’t been as faithful to the facts as they might have been. As a first-time biographer, anxiously proofreading nearly a hundred pages of documentary endnotes, I certainly was. The farther a biographer is removed from research in the archives, the more she suspects the characters in the historical drama she is constructing may have become her own creations—not invented out of whole cloth, as in a novel, but shaded to make certain personality traits more vivid and to fit a larger narrative. But reading these new letters, I was struck by how distinct each sister's voice was, emerging from the clutter of pages, and how true to the characters I'd put forward in the book. I could almost predict what each one would say as I pulled her letter from the pile. It was as if the Peabody sisters were speaking to me, one last time, across the centuries.” (“The Spirit of the Letter: What biographers find in other people's mail. By Megan Marshall.” Slate. Posted Tuesday, May 17, 2005. Megan Marshall is the author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism.)

In these accounts we get glimpses into the creative process of putting the material together. This is where the deft art comes in to shape the research. With or without cooperation you have your big table full of research, now what do you do with it? The biographer must get a feel for the material and find the way to convey the truth of it. The English writer Richard Holmes has described the biographical process as a “haunting, an act of deliberate psychological trespass, a continuous living dialogue between subject and author as they move over the same historical ground.”

Although the idea of some objective magisterial biography still lingers among us, careful thought tells us that biographers must have a point of view. That point of view can enlighten the picture or distort it. Two opposite besetting sins of biographers can be an excessive love of their subject, hagiography, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, an excessive preoccupation with the dark side of their subject, what Joyce Carol Oates calls “pathographies.” It is all right to like the subject of the life you are writing, after all, who wants to spend that much time with a distasteful subject? But one can overdo it, and biographers often do. The historian Thomas Macaulay called Boswell’s worship of Dr. Johnson “Lues Boswelliana,” or disease of admiration. For as useful and interesting as Boswell’s Johnson is, many later biographers have faulted him for excessive attachment to his subject, what has been called biography as a work of love.

On the other hand, a biography can be a good place to settle scores or get even. I am thinking of Hannah Tillich’s biography of her husband, theologian Paul, in which she depicts his marital indiscretions. Or Susan Cheever’s fine biography, Home before Dark, about her father, writer John Cheever, in which she discloses his promiscuity and alcoholism. These purgings of the soul are often done in the name of healing, but to my mind they often seem like a cheap shot.

It is clear by now that every biographer is an artist, not conjuring up a spirit, but creating in words a facsimile of the life in question. This means each biography, even of the same subject, will be unique. We nod to this reality when we talk of Ellman’s Joyce or Edel’s James. Biographers call this versioning.

So if the old God’s-eye view has been discredited what takes its place? Contemporary biographies now often fly their ideological flags openly, for example the feminist versions of Jane Austen that have proliferated since the seventies. Some of these say she was a feminist and some say she was an anti-feminist. Modern biographers often operate with a hermeneutic of suspicion of class or race or gender. “Was Lincoln gay?” a recent biographer asks, on the basis of documents showing that he once shared a bed in a rooming house with another man, a not uncommon practice in the nineteenth century.

Or if it is not Marx behind the curtain, it is often Freud and his gang. Perhaps Lincoln wasn’t gay at all, but depressed, as another recent biographer has suggested. These make me long for the magisterial Lives of yesteryear, such as Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln, or even Gore Vidal’s.

One would think you couldn’t get someone long dead on the therapists couch, but it has been tried. Our former neighbor from Stockbridge, Erik Erikson, wrote psychoanalytic biographies of Gandhi and Martin Luther. In the latter, Young Man Luther, Erikson’s interpretation suggests that Luther’s famous Anfechtung, often translated as “doubt” or “despair,” was, at least in part, caused by his recurring constipation, which would explain why there is often more scatology than eschatology in Luther’s Table Talks. But I find Erikson’s hypothesis, apart from being unprovable, highly, may I dare say, irregular.

And the canons of biography change from generation to generation. If Victorian biographies were sanitized, today’s are anything but. Bodily ailments, mental illness, sexual infidelities or fascinations, are standard fair. A spate of recent biographies about British writers in the 1920’s tells us more about their sex lives than what motivated their work.

Which illustrates that biographies in every generation say as much about us and about our times as they do about their subject. This recalls Albert Schweitzer’s famous dictum in his book Quest of the Historical Jesus, that each generation peers as if down a deep well in search of the face of Jesus and instead sees its own reflection.

This should make biographers modest about their claims. Some subjects are well documented, while others leave a scant trail. For example, we know practically nothing about Shakespeare’s life, although a whole industry churns out their best guesses. Theories that Marlowe or Bacon wrote his plays flourish because we know so little real facts. He had no Boswell, and kept no diary. On the other hand, we do know a good deal about Samuel Pepys, but only for the nine years in which he kept his diaries. Biographers can only use the materials they can find, but the temptation to say more is often irresistible.

So in my view good biography is a modest work. The biographer should make no claims he can’t substantiate. Where she makes inferences from the record she should say so. Too often the biographer says that her subject “must have felt” or “must have thought.” Who knows what they felt or thought? Unless there is a journal or a letter speaking of the subject’s interior states and deepest thoughts we are left to guess. If it is a guess, let it be an educated one and say it is a guess!

Otherwise the truth is not served, although a story might be. Those who saw the film version of The Hours will always think of Virginia Woolf as a young Nicole Kidmann with a prosthetic nose calmly walking into the river to her death on a lovely spring day. It was, in fact, an unwitnessed death that took place on a cold, dark, winter day. This is versioning twice removed from an actual event, and raises the question, at what point does biography become fiction? It’s a fine line.

A responsible biography, I am thinking of Hermione Lee’s Woolfe and Victoria Glendenning’s Trollope, for example, will leave questions as questions and honor the essential mystery of a human life. The holes will be acknowledged as such. Yet the biographer will shape and serve up the facts as they can be known in a flowing narrative which can be every bit as engaging to the reader as the very best fiction. This doesn’t happen too often, but when it does a life comes alive, and if we don’t know the subject with completeness, we know enough to feel they would have been worth knowing.


Bibliography

Atlas, James, “The Last Word: How it feels to finish a 10-year writing project.” Slate. Posted Tuesday, Aug. 17, 1999

Hamilton, Ian. Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography from Shakespeare to Plath. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography. Princeton, 2005

Marshall, Megan. “The Spirit of the Letter: What biographers find in other people's mail.” Slate. Posted Tuesday, May 17, 2005.

Scott, Janny. “For Unauthorized Biographers, the World Is Very Hostile” New York Times article October 6, 1996.

Photo by Daniel Y. Go — used under Creative Commons License

How I lost my marbles on the Mohawk Trail: Memoir of a long ride

Presented to the Club in 2003 by Richard L. Floyd

1. It’s like riding a bicycle
You can see Mt. Greylock from one of the upstairs rooms of my home in Pittsfield. On winter days the mountain and its surrounding peaks and ridges are often covered with a mantle of snow, even when there is not a flurry to be found in the surrounding towns. It was such a sight that inspired Melville, looking out from his home at Arrowhead a couple miles from here, to imagine a great white while breaching the waters of the South Pacific.

Greylock is technically not even really a mountain, just the largest of the Berkshire Hills. Nonetheless, it is the highest point in Massachusetts. At a mere 3,491 feet it is hardly Everest, but for a cyclist in Berkshire County it beckons, not only because “its there” but because it has a paved road to the top. Riding up, and preferably over, Mt. Greylock establishes certain low level bragging rights. Not, however, if you do it on one of those ubiquitous mountain bikes with 27 speeds and a granny gear. Any reasonably fit person with the time can do that. No, you must go over Mt. Greylock on a road bike.

To acquire some serious bragging rights you must do the Greylock Century Ride, a loosely organized annual pain-fest that attracts a certain sketchy clientele from around Western Mass and neighboring states, and is a regularly scheduled event for a few dozen of the hardest of the hardcore Berkshire cyclists.

I wanted to do it. I had seen the coveted T-shirts at my spinning class at the Y, and the people who wore them were not chopped liver in the local cycling community. The t-shirt changes some from year to year, but typically includes a side view chart of the one hundred mile course with elevations. The line resembles nothing so much as the EKG of a very distressed heart patient.

I had begun to cycle again in the autumn of 1998. I say “again” because I cycled as a child and then as a grad student before family life pre-empted most of my hobbies. But now my children were poised to leave the nest, and I was about to turn fifty. That summer I had started to try to get back in shape. I began with walking and some running at the Taconic High School track, but found that my joints were not as forgiving as when I had been a serious runner during the running craze of the late seventies and early eighties. The current craze for aging boomers was “spinning,” an aerobics class on stationary bicycles, much easier on the joints than running. I signed up for a Cycle Reebok class in August and began to spin three times a week. Soon some atavistic cycling impulse was stirred deep within me. I felt the need to get on a real bike and hit the roads.

So I went down to the local “serious” cycle shop, which is owned, operated and presided over by an amiable but eccentric character named Tom, who is philosopher, local historian, and grease monkey in equal parts. I am the pastor of a Congregational church in Pittsfield and Tom is a life-long Methodist with a theological cast of mind, so not infrequently when I want to talk about bicycles he wants to talk about religion.

Nevertheless, Tom knows his bicycles and is the purveyor and mechanic for many of the serious road cyclists in central Berkshire. Tom is not known for pitching a hard sell, but he allowed as how he might order me a bicycle and gave me a couple of catalogues and a disinterested evaluation of the pros and cons of each one. After picking the brains of my cycling friends I finally decided on a racing (rather than a touring) bike. After all, if what you are doing is getting in touch with your inner 13 year old and trying to forget that you are about to turn 50, a touring bike “with a longer wheel base and more stability” is not nearly as enticing as a racing bike that is “lighter, quicker and more responsive.”

So I ordered an Italian road rocket, a Bianchi Veloce. What’s not to like about a bike named “Speed” in Italian? For economy’s sake I was ordering from the remains of last year’s models so I couldn’t get my frame size in the classic mint green (and actually rather ugly) “Celeste” which is the hallmark of the Bianchi line. So I chose the only choice I had, bright blue. Then I waited around impatiently for my new bike to arrive, like a child who has ordered some trinket from the back of a cereal box and watches the mailbox each day. When my new bike finally arrived I visited it regularly in Tom’s shop while it waited its turn to be assembled.

As kids know there is nothing as exciting as a new bike. This bike was a beauty. First of all it was really big. I am 6’4” and required the biggest standard frame that Bianchi makes, 63 cm. And it was really blue, bright shiny blue, adorned with beautiful Bianchi logos and a “Made in Italy” sticker in red, green and white on the seat tube. It had shiny Campagnola components, brakes, gears, and cranks. These were exquisite little works of art, like fine handcrafted jewelry. At that time, in 1998, every winner of the fabled Tour de France had won while riding a bike with a Campagnola gruppo. Since then a crazy Texan named Lance Armstrong has won (how many is it now?) four! consecutive Tours on a bike with Shimano components made in Japan. But the Campagnola brand still evokes visions of the great European riders, of Fausto Coppi, Eddie Merkx, and Miguel Indurain crushing opponents in the Alps and Pyrenees. Shimano is to Campagnola what Toyota is to Alfa Romeo. The Japanese components are every bit as good as their Italian counterparts, and considerably cheaper, but tradition is still very much on the side of Campagnola. Think Yankee pin stripes, wooden bats, and natural turf. Think Fenway Park. My bike was not only beautiful it was a classic.

I soon acquired the proper accessories to ride this beauty in style: brightly colored shirts with pockets in the back, spandex cycling shorts, cycling shoes to fit into my clipless pedals, fingerless gloves, and last, but not least, a helmet. I was ready, not just to ride a bike, but to be a cyclist.

2. I am a cyclist
Nearly two years later I was a cyclist. By then I had logged thousands of miles. I had joined the Berkshire Cycling Association and proudly wore their distinctive mango and blue club jersey and the club shorts with “Tosk Chiropractic,” our chief sponsor, in bold letters on the sides. I had become a regular on the Thursday Night Ride, a weekly recreational ride through the Berkshire countryside. On Tuesday nights in the summer I often drove half an hour to the East to Cummington to compete against the clock in a 40 k time-trial as a way to increase my speed. On Saturday mornings, if I didn’t have to officiate at a wedding, I would ride a fifty miler with my new cycling friends. I had caught the cycling bug.

At first, my family thought it was amusing. They know that I am an enthusiast, and get caught up in these passions for hobbies from time to time. My wife Martha had been none too keen on me spending four figures for a bicycle. Her fear was that I would soon tire of it and it would molder in the garage along with the golf clubs and the fly fishing rods. Thousands of miles later her fear had moved in a different direction.

That summer I was always going out to, or coming in from, a ride. Even Abby, our dog was on to me. She had been accustomed to lobbying energetically for a walk whenever I came downstairs. She would smile that dopey Golden Retriever smile and vigorously wag her tail and look as if my attentions were the most important thing in the world. Now she had learned that if I was in spandex to forget about it. She wouldn’t even lift up her head as I prepared for a ride.

The truth is I was no longer riding, but training. I considered the leisurely 20-25 miles of the Thursday Night Ride an easy day. Sometimes I would ride my bike to the start of the ride. Once, when I rode to Jiminy Peak to a ride I failed to calculate the hour of darkness and found myself riding home through downtown Pittsfield in the dark with no lights.

Recreational riders just ride, while serious roadies keep logs. I diligently kept a log in which I entered each day’s ride, the miles, the duration, and the avg. speed. My bike computer has an odometer, so I knew how many miles I had done that year. Big mileage carries some bragging rights, and riders compare cumulative miles and talk about their weeks, as in “I only had 80 miles this week.” Or “Whoa, I just knocked off my 200th mile this week.”

The previous year, 1999, I had gradually become fit enough to stay long periods on a bike. I rode my first fifty miler alone in June, then a seventy miler in July with a friend and finally, on Labor Day weekend, a hundred miles in a day with a group of 14. On that first century ride I blew out a tire in Williamstown, and lost about 45 minutes going to the local bike shop to get a new one. A friendly young man from our group name Shaun was deputized to wait with me, and once the new tire was installed he drafted for me all the way to Pittsfield so we could rejoin the group at the fifty-mile mark, before starting the second half. A few week’s later I rode the bike for a team in the Great Josh Billings Run Aground, a bike, canoe and running triathlon that is a Berkshire County tradition. The “Josh,” as it is called locally, begins in Great Barrington, roams through the Alford Hills before wending its way through Stockbridge to the Stockbridge Bowl, where the canoers do several laps before handing the baton to the runner who runs a 10k, finishing at the cool green lawns of Tanglewood. I had the time of my life at the Josh. I had finished off my first full season of riding with a bang, and I couldn’t wait for spring.

On Memorial Day weekend of 2000 I successfully rode my second century ride, and aimed my sights at the Greylock Century in early August. In the weeks before the big ride I rode up Mt. Greylock twice, the first time on a last minute whim with my friend Rik, and the second time in the pouring rain and down the steep North Adams side, which is harder and more dangerous than riding up. The week before the big ride I was on vacation in Maine and rode to the summit of Cadillac Mountain on Mount Desert Island. I was feeling good. I had turned fifty without incident in February and I was proud of myself. I was ready for the Greylock Century.

3. From New Ashford to Florida
The Greylock Century started that year at the Brodie Mountain ski area on Route 7 in New Ashford at the foot of Mount Greylock. I arrived early for the eight o’clock start, took my bike off the car rack, paid my registration fee and received a t-shirt and a commemorative water bottle. I took a last minute trip to the men’s room and set off with a group of a couple dozen riders. Before we had even gone a mile we saw a rider changing a tire, but he soon rejoined us as we headed south for a few miles on Route 7 before turning left on North Maine Street in Lanesboro to enter the Mount Greylock State Reservation. Mount Greylock itself is but the high point of a vast outcropping of rock that is nearly eighteen miles long from North to South, or about one third the length of Berkshire County. We were coming at it from the South. There is a visitors’ center near the entrance to the park. From there it is about eight miles to the summit along Rockwell Road. The early climbing, just before and just after the visitors’ center, is actually the steepest grade and the hardest part of riding to the top of Greylock. Once you make it up to the ridge the road undulates beneath you until you come to Greylock itself, where there are some switchbacks before the road suddenly climbs, and meets up with Notch Road, which will take you to North Adams. From this junction a short road to the summit climbs, winds gently around the mountain with open views and takes you to the summit. At the top there is a great stone tower, the Veterans Memorial, and Bascom Lodge, a rustic building until recently run by the Appalachian Mountain Club, where you can fill your water bottles, buy food and drink, and use the facilities.

It was a clear bright day, a perfect day to spend on a bicycle. From the top of Greylock you get good views of Pittsfield to the south with its two big lakes, Pontoosic and Onota. To the West you can see the treeless ski runs at Brodie Mountain, and behind it the Taconic Range and New York State. To the East you can see the town of Adams and the Hoosac Range, which is where we were headed. It is hard to see to the North from the summit, but from a nearby overlook you can see Williamstown, with its college buildings and church spires and Vermont’s Green Mountains set behind it, a picture postcard of a New England town.

Part of the appeal of cycling is the scenery. You enter a place under your own power, unobtrusively, without the clang and clatter of an internal combustion engine. On a bike one sees birds and beasts that you would never see from a car. I have come noiselessly upon deer feeding in a field and once, a great blue heron standing by the side of Route 7. I have seen numerous foxes and wild turkeys. It is hard to explain to someone why you want to spend the better part of a day on a bicycle riding a hundred miles through the Berkshire Hills. The scenery is part of it, as are the bragging rights I mentioned earlier. There is too, the pure physicality of the act. The body reacts to such strenuous exercise with a flood of endorphins and enkephalins, the body’s own natural feel-good drugs, which make you feel, well, good.

It is true that the full benefits of cycling come only to the patient. There is a break-in period for your bottom which scares away many novices, and the new cushy comfortable seats that are so popular with recreational riders are too big and create too much chafing for long rides. There is no getting around it; the enjoyment of cycling is directly proportional to the shape you are in for it. The more you do it, the more fun it becomes. A century ride sounds hard, but in fact it isn’t. It is challenging and strenuous, to be sure, but if you have trained properly for it and are careful with your nutrition and hydration during the ride it can be very enjoyable. There is, too, a special camaraderie you experience with the other riders. At the end of the day there are war stories to tell. One of our riders writes a lengthy account of each day’s ride, with humorous anecdotes and observations about the roads and the views and the company. Each chapter is e-mailed to the list of riders at the end of the day, and the ride isn’t complete until you have read our Homer’s daily narrative.

That day I found myself on the top of Greylock with three other riders: my friend Shaun, who had rescued me on my first century ride, another young man I didn’t know, tall and wiry, from Bennington, Vermont, and a hefty man about my age from Rhode Island who had driven up for the day. My usual riding buddies were a little bit behind us (wisely pacing themselves) and they arrived as we were finishing our break at Bascom Lodge and about ready to descend.

I mentioned that I had gone down the north side of Greylock previously during a rainstorm. I thought today would be a piece of cake by comparison. What I didn’t envision was the peculiar problems a sunny day brings to a leafy wooded road. The uneven road surface was dappled with sunlight coming through the leaves, making it hard to see. In the best of times the road over Greylock is a minefield of holes and bumps and buckles. The north side of Greylock is so steep it is where the hardcore Berkshire cyclists train for the Mount Washington Bike Race. Notch Road is much steeper than Rockwell Road. It is a series of sharp and steep switchbacks, and when you are descending you are playing with your brakes the whole time. Gravity, normally a rider’s ally on a descent, goes over to the enemy and tries to kill you. This was the one part of the day I was dreading because I really do not feel entirely safe doing this. But this day the four of us managed it without incident and found ourselves spilled out onto the streets of downtown North Adams.

North Adams was once the industrial center of North Berkshire, but, like many New England mill towns, has been in decline for many years. It lies just East of Williamstown, which calls itself “the village beautiful” and is the home of Williams College. The contrast between the two towns is dramatic. But North Adams is making a comeback, centered around its new Museum of Contemporary Arts, MASS MOCA, attracting artists and craftspeople to its inexpensive housing and spacious lofts in the old commercial center.

It was through North Adams that we now road, along Route 2 for a brief urban interlude between more idyllic rural settings. Route 2 comes over from the New York border East of Troy and makes a bee line across the northern part of Massachusetts as it heads to Boston. This Western portion of the road is called “the Mohawk Trail,” and as one heads east on it toward Greenfield there are a couple Mohawk Trading Posts that seem like they are out of another era, roadside shops where you can buy moccasins, beaded belts and other assorted knick-knacks. But to get to Charlemont you must first climb up and over the Hoosac Range and then drop down its other side. So just East of North Adams Route 2 suddenly climbs quite abruptly, and snakes up to an overlook where you have spectacular views of North Adams and Mt Greylock. This section of road is known, for obvious reasons, as the Hairpin Turn, and nearly every year some poor trucker fails to negotiate it and loses his load or his life or both. Our band of four managed to get to the top of the turn, and had our first official fuel stop provided by the high school cross-country team. There was Gatorade and cookies and fruit.

After our short stop we climbed gradually higher to the hill town of Florida, Massachusetts, first to one summit, then to a second, and then began a long descent that would take us to Charlemont and the dreaded Hawley Hill, a climb shorter than Greylock but with a steeper grade. But I wasn’t worried about Hawley Hill. I was ready for it. I had just conquered Greylock and the Hairpin Turn and I was feeling good.

4. Gravity isn’t just a theory, it’s the law!
There came a moment when I quite suddenly realized that I was about to hurt myself, but it hadn't happened yet. There were seconds, or parts of seconds, (who knows?) when I knew I was no longer in control of my bicycle, and that one way or another I was going to go down, and at a pretty good speed on a pretty steep hill. Somehow I had inadvertently managed to drift off the road into what I later learned is called “a paved waterway,” a grooved drainage ditch alongside the shoulder designed to keep the snowmelt off the road. If you drift off the paved shoulder you drop down the steep pitch of the waterway, as I had just done.

How I got off the road I don’t know to this day, but off the road I was. I recall a weird sense of every thing slowing down, as if I was watching this happen to somebody else in slow motion. My adrenaline was pumping but I was strangely detached even as I fought in vain to steer out of the paved ditch and ride back up to the safety of the road. Finally the moment had come to fall, and I fell, something I recall only as pure sensation, without any visuals. Perhaps I closed my eyes. I hit hard on my right side and bounced, and then almost immediately my head thumped hard to the ground, and I thought, “I've hurt myself.”

Soon, or so it seemed, I was curled up in a fetal ball on the nearby grass, and a stranger's voice was asking me if I was “All right?” to which I could only moan. An ambulance arrived. By then, I was bathed in the soothing juices of shock, and gabbed with the EMT's as they put me on a backboard, and to the circle of worried cyclists that had gathered around me. My riding buddies were there, having come upon the scene and seen the ambulance. My friend Shaun was there. He had been in front of me, but was heading down the long hill when a trucker started to blow his air horn at him. Shaun thought he was harassing him, but when he turned around to look he saw the brake lights of a line of cars back near the top. And he didn’t see me. So he turned around and started to climb the hill he had just descended.

He reassured me that he would call Martha on his cell phone. Tell her “I'm OK!” I implored, meaning it, though it was as absurd a thing as I had ever said. I said some silly things. I wanted to get up and finish the ride. I wanted to take my bike with me in the ambulance. I was feeling no pain.

I mentioned that I am tall, and I weigh two hundred and fifteen pounds on a good day. My bike is 63 cm high. I had just crested the second summit and was heading downhill at about twenty miles an hour (in another half mile I would have been going near forty), and the sheer physics of mass and velocity meant bad things were going to happen to me.

The early inventory of those bad things included something obviously wrong with my right shoulder, for as I tried to raise myself the mechanics were weird and I had no strength. On the way to the hospital, I swapped old EMT stories from my days on the ambulance in Maine, and did my best to assure my rescuers that I was really fine, and that this whole episode was an embarrassing mistake of some kind.

Now my ride began a strange reversal. The ambulance took me back down the Hairpin Turn to the North Adams Regional Hospital. I was wheeled into the emergency room and my BCA jersey cut off me. A kind redheaded nurse offered me pain medication, but I refused it, since I wasn't in any real pain, although I could see now that I was pretty bloody and had nasty looking road rash on my knees and elbows and hands. It was only later, when I had to stand up for a CAT scan that the pain announced its arrival, and I felt a wave of nausea roll over me. Not long after that I accepted the offered morphine.

After awhile, Shaun’s mother-in-law Nancy came in to see me. I had never met her, but Shaun had been unable to reach Martha so he called her, and she drove the twenty miles up from Pittsfield to check on me, just one of many kindnesses I was to receive at that time.

Before too long Martha and my daughter Rebecca showed up and looked more concerned than I felt they ought to have been. I found myself involuntarily crying. I learned later that Shaun had called Martha, but she was at our church Blueberry Festival. When Shaun went to leave a message the tape on our answering machine ran out and the message she heard was “Martha, this is Shaun, Rick has had a crash.” BEEP, END OF TAPE. She had frantically started calling emergency rooms. On the second try she found me.

The scan came back. I had a broken rib, a contused lung, and a triple separation of the AC joint in my right shoulder. What I didn't know then, and didn’t discover for some time, was that I had lost my marbles on the Mohawk Trail, or to put in more clinically, I had a traumatic brain injury on the left side of my head from the big thump I felt. I had indeed hurt myself. Nothing has been quite the same since.

5. If one emergency room is good, two must be better
If you ride enough sooner or later you will fall. The number of miles a serious road cyclist logs makes falling statistically probable. Most falls are minor events, you wipe out on some gravel going around a turn or you are careless crossing the railroad tracks and your front wheel is swallowed and turned abruptly to one side. One mark of a really serious cyclist is shaved legs, which facilitates the placement and removal of adhesive bandages. The nasty abrasions resulting from a slide across a hard surface are called “road rash.” Every cyclist acquires some and in time it heals. Cyclists break collarbones and wrists, crack ribs and separate shoulders. My injuries were not unusual. There are also 1300 deaths a year from head injuries on bikes.

I had never fallen before, at least as an adult. I had never broken a bone in my life and never had surgery. I was entering terra incognita in my life’s journey, and the mode of conveyance that day was no longer a bike, but an ambulance. I had been five hours at North Adams and they seemed to be done with me, so I was shipped by ambulance to Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield. Was it the same crew who had brought me down the mountain from Florida? I think so, but that could be a trick of memory. I was no longer chatting. It all seemed unreal, as I lay strapped on to a gurney watching the road behind me through the back window. I certainly was not prepared for the sight I was to see next. On Route 8 as we were coming into Pittsfield I saw six or eight cyclists with our familiar mango and blue jerseys laboring North toward the Berkshire Mall. It was my riding buddies, hours later and still on the bike making their way to Brodie and the finish. I was now on a different ride.

The EMTs and the emergency personal at both hospitals had asked me if I had lost consciousness. I said I didn’t think so, but as my neurologist later said, “Why should they have believed you? You had a head injury.” I was kept overnight at BMC, and discharged the next afternoon with a big bag of Percocet and Ibuprofen, and an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon in a few weeks to look at my ruined shoulder.

6. The Prisoner of Lazy Boy
I had been due to begin vacation that week, so the segue from active ministry to convalescence took minimal arrangements. Martha had called Luther, a retired minister from our congregation, to fill in for me on Sunday. I was soon comfortably ensconced in my old tattered Lazy Boy, and provided with meals, painkillers, company and an endless stream of videos, which I enjoyed indiscriminately, probably because of the painkillers. Because the controls to the chair were on the right side, and I couldn’t use my right arm, I had to call for help when I needed to be escorted to the bathroom. I had an unsettling glimpse of future geezerhood as I hobbled on the arm of my 18-year-old son, Andrew. When Martha was out on errands she left a bell on the table next to my Lazy Boy. One day she asked Rebecca to keep an ear out for Dad. I rang the bell and no one answered. I rang and rang and rang. Finally I turned over onto my bad side and found the controls with my left hand. I released myself from the chair and hobbled upstairs to Rebecca’s room where the door was closed. I knocked. No answer. Finally I pushed the door open and began to laugh at what I saw. There was my minder on her bed reading, with the headphones to her Discman on. She was singing along to the silent music in her head and bobbing her head along with the beat. I bellowed at her and she took the headphones off, “Did you need something, Dad?” You are only sixteen once!

Andrew was due to leave for Pomona College in Claremont, California, in a few days, and since I couldn’t be left behind alone, I was brought along, my ride continuing now in a wheelchair. In some very real sense I viewed everything that had happened to me as one event. I had left Jiminy Peak on August 4th for a long ride and somehow I was still on it. Sleeplessness, pain, and painkillers put me into a state of consciousness far removed from the ordinary, and I had never really gone back to the life I had before the day of my fall.

Now my ride took me to California, where I spent my days in a chaise lounge by the pool at our motel, while Martha and Rebecca helped settle Andrew into the dorm. I had brought some books I needed to read for a pastor-theologian program, but although I could read the words, I didn’t seem to be taking any of it in. It was like when you read before bed and find yourself reading the same paragraph repeatedly, realizing you have been reading the words but not taking in the meaning.

Back in Pittsfield my vacation ended and I prepared to return to my ministry. I had a full schedule for the fall. I had just had a book published and I had a number of public events scheduled. I drifted through a book signing at Barnes and Noble. When asked what the book was about, I realized I wasn’t quite sure. Later I discovered I couldn’t even read my own book (although I suspect others found it unreadable as well, for altogether different reasons.)

All the same, I looked all right, and I seemed all right. I showed up to work and attended to my business, though everything seemed more complicated and took longer. It took me twice as long to prepare a sermon, and where before I had often left my printed text to extemporize, now I clung to my manuscript for dear life.

My friends told me I was repeating myself. I have always had an exceptional memory, but now every day was a foray into forgetfulness. I missed appointments. I bumped into my friend the rabbi and congratulated him on his anniversary, which had happened while I was in California. He looked puzzled and said, “But I saw you last week, Rick, at your 25th ordination anniversary.” “Of course you did,” I said, for now I remembered. After church I would greet parishioners that I had known for nearly twenty years and be unable to remember their names. I would be headed in the car for someplace and drive to someplace else. I dropped things. Objects felt peculiar. My glasses didn’t seem like mine anymore and I was constantly taking them off to see if they were the right ones.

At home I was increasingly a hazard. One of my longstanding hobbies has been cooking, and I discovered I couldn’t cook. I tried to stir-fry chicken with no oil in the wok. Cooking, once my joy, was now a nightmare. I would search wildly for an ingredient while the dish was burning on the range. At breakfast one morning I put the cereal in the refrigerator and the orange juice in the pantry. These things are amusing now but they were disturbing at the time. I had always relied on my wits, and now they seemed strangely unreliable. It was unnerving.

I tried to talk to people about my problems, but most just reassured me I was OK. I told Martha that I was getting “the halo effect.” If I put on a tie and didn’t drool, people just assumed I was Rick Floyd and that I would behave like Rick Floyd. Part of the loneliness of a head injury is trying to explain to people what you are going through. You look OK, and you can talk OK, so what’s the problem? If I talked about my sudden memory problems people would often tell me how their memory wasn’t as good as it used to be either. If I complained of my hearing loss they would recount how their hearing had diminished with age. But not in one day, I wanted to say.

7. Dealing with deficits
It was clear to Martha that something was just not right with me. We had chalked up my erratic behavior to the painkillers and chronic sleeplessness, but there was more going on. Martha is an RN specially trained in the care of Alzheimer’s patients. She didn’t like what she was seeing in me. So we began another leg of my long ride, the chasing of a diagnosis.

If you have interfaced with the health care system recently you know it is a frustrating process trying to see the people you need to see when you need to see them. I love my doctors, every one of them, and believe I got the best of care. But I hate the process. I am convinced that the delay in diagnosis and treatment caused my family and me a great deal of extra and unnecessary suffering.

We began with my primary physician. We described my memory problems, my frustration over simple tasks, my headaches, blurry vision, tinnitus, and constant fatigue. “You could have a concussion,” he said, and ordered an MRI. After a very frightening attack of claustrophobia in the MRI tube, I was sent to a neurologist. She said, “You have brisk reflexes and a tremor. You have sustained a traumatic brain injury. It should clear up in time, but you should get tested for cognitive deficits by a neuro-psychologist.” So that is where we went next. Each succeeding appointment took several weeks, so that by the time I got tested it was Thanksgiving, and by the time I met with the neuro-psychologist to hear the results it was December, five months after the trauma.

I expected the neuro-psychologist to say I had tested fine, and everything was OK, but she didn’t. She told me I had a series of significant measurable deficits, and they were consistent with the limitations and frustrations I was experiencing. My biggest deficit was in the area of multi-tasking, doing more than one thing at once. She explained it like this: “In the past, you could cook dinner, talk to Martha, and listen to NPR all at the same time. Now you can’t. You will be taxed by doing one of those things and it will demand your full attention.”

“What should I do?” I asked her. “Try to reduce stressful situations. The big danger with a brain injury is depression as a result of bumping up against your deficits daily. I recommend you consider medication. Depression itself has some memory loss, and if untreated could add on to your deficits.”

Martha and I left this appointment reeling. It is easy to say avoid stress, but the ministry is a stressful job, and being a parish minister is “multi-tasking.” Both the neurologist and the neuro-psychologist couldn’t believe I was working. Nobody told me I shouldn’t be.

In January I finally received medication, almost six months from my injury. At the same time I had surgery to repair my separated shoulder, which required me to be in a sling and a swath for 10 weeks. Once again I was “the Prisoner of Lazy Boy.”

8. Back on the bike on the wrong side of the road
I managed to work through Easter, after which I was scheduled to go to Cambridge University In England for a sabbatical through the summer. In January I wrote the principal of the college explaining my limitations and he had written a gracious letter back telling me to come along and do what I was able.

My arm came out of the sling and I had months of physical therapy. After the accident my bike had ended up in the Florida Fire Station. My friend Arthur went up and retrieved it, and my son had taken it to Tom’s shop. There it had been an object of curiosity, as the handlebars were turned under from the weight I had put on them going over the bars. Before we went to England I had Tom repair the bike. I purchased a new helmet. The old one had been completely crushed on one side.

I was intent on getting on the bike again. I asked Tom to box it up for airplane travel, and I bungeed it to the roof of my Jeep before we headed to Logan. Martha was strongly against me taking the bike to England, and we had a tense negotiation in the driveway. In the end we got the bike and ourselves to Heathrow, then by bus to Cambridge, and by cab to our flat. I took it by bus and foot to a downtown bike shop to be unboxed and assembled and I asked around for a group ride. So the ride I had begun in New Ashford was continued on the wrong side of the road, through the green and pleasant countryside of Cambridgeshire and East Anglia.

I was blessed to have that sabbatical for a period of convalescence. These were anxious times for us. We wondered if I would be able to return to work in September. Martha accelerated her work on her master’s degree in case she might have to become the breadwinner. In Cambridge I took walks and photos and soon began to be able to read again. I returned to work in September and preached my first sermon on September 9. It felt good to be back. I thought I might be able to manage. Three days later terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

One of my doctors told me about the concept of ”new normal.” She said, “Don’t compare where you are to where you were before your injury. Compare where you are to where you were after the injury.” In that light I have done well. I didn’t lose all my marbles, and some of the ones I did lose I have since got back. My shoulder works fine and I am pain free. I am able to work, though many things are harder that they used to be.

In truth every day is “a new normal” for us all. There is no secure, untroubled place or time where we can avoid the changes that life brings. We are always adjusting to changes, some in our own bodies, and some in the events of our lives. Some of these changes bring us joy; others bring us sadness and sorrow. Sometimes these changes are sudden, a bike goes off a road, a test comes back with hard news, terrorists fly planes into the World Trade Center. Sometimes the changes are a matter of course, woven into the very fabric of things. Our kids grow up and leave home and go to college. Our parents become infirm and die. You cannot avoid these changes anymore than you can deny turning fifty by taking up cycling. They are all part of the daily journey through life. They are all part of the ride, and I am thankful for each day of it I am given.

The butler did it: A passion for mystery novels

Presented to the Club by Richard L. Floyd

As some of you may know, both my parents had master’s degrees in library science from Columbia University. Though my father was only briefly employed as a librarian, it was my mother’s life-long profession, first at the main branch of the New York Public Library, and later in life, at the Wandell Middle School in Saddle River, New Jersey. I didn’t realize as a child that everyone didn’t go to the public library on Saturday mornings as a family, or that it was in any way unusual for one’s mother to bring library books home from work all the time for you to read.

Which is to say that I grew up in an extraordinarily bookish family. Other families’ homes had wallpaper; we had bookcases. On those bookcases were a panoply of the best literature in the English language; the plays of Shakespeare, the poems of Milton, and the novels of Dickens, Austen and the Brontes, to name but a few.

Despite many moves in the forty-one years since I left home I still own some of the books from those shelves. Just glancing at the bookcase near me as I write this I can see well-bound hardcover copies of the following books from my childhood home: The Life of Emerson by Van Wyck Brooks, Bullfinch’s Mythology, Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly, Milton’s Paradise Lost, The Writings of Thomas Paine, Toynbee’s A Study of History, Whitman’s Blades of Grass, Cooper’s Leatherstocking Saga, and Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, not to mention Modern English Usage by Fowler and the 1949 Book of Common Prayer, both of which were authoritative on some matters.

From that selection you get the kind of books that predominated in our household, and it wouldn’t be too misleading to say that the Floyd brows were pretty high when it came to books.

Nonetheless, there was a favorite genre well represented in our home that might not pass the Great Works test, and that was the “Whodunit.” And this is what my paper tonight is about: a personal memoir of my love for mystery novels, a bit of history about this sprawling genre, and finally a barefoot romp through some of my favorites.


Like much in life it all began in my childhood. On other bookshelves in our home, usually in bedrooms, were other books than the ones I have mentioned, usually in paperback. Here were titles by people such as Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy Sayers. Like this sample, most of these preferred authors were women and almost all of them of them were British.

And the subgenre of crime fiction that their characters inhabited often took place in secluded English country houses, where the aristocratic guests had nothing better to do than to murder, be murdered, suspect and be suspected of murder. Hence my title The Butler Did It! Too transparent perhaps for a Monday evening Club title, but sometimes in whodunits things are hidden in plain sight, and besides, can anyone ever remember a mystery tale when the butler actually did it? I think not.

My family, and especially my mother, loved what she called “murder mysteries.” And the mysteries she loved were largely from the period that is called “The Golden Age” of detective fiction, written during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, when she came of age.

Christie, Tey, March, Sayers, and, Marjorie Allingham were the queens of British detective fiction. Ngaio Marsh was actually from New Zealand, but was more English than the English, and my mother had a very British friend from New Zealand so that may have been the connection.

Where were the men? There were British men who also wrote whodunits in this period, such as Michael Innes, Nicholas Blake, and Edmund Crispin, but I don’t remember seeing their titles on our shelves.

And there were Americans, too, during the Golden Age, such as S. S. Van Dine, John Dickson Carr, and Ellery Queen, but they imitated the “English” style. My father read Ellery Queen.

Other Americans, such as Rex Stout (my father’s favorite), Clayton Rawson, and Earl Derr Biggers, aimed for a more “American” style.

But the favorite in our house was Dorothy Sayers, whom I later learned was also a gifted Christian theologian. Her detective, the eccentric Lord Peter Whimsey, was rich and dashing, and had a recurrent love interest in the proto-feminist Harriet Vine. My mother, an avid Anglophile and a devout Episcopalian, read these books about and dreamed of an England she would never get to visit. She died at age 53 in 1967, and I have often thought how much she would have liked the novels of P. D. James, with her titles from the Book of Common Prayer.

So I first came to England in the spring of 1989, for my first sabbatical, to Mansfield College, Oxford. There, on May Day, I went with Martha and my two small children to Magdalen College at daybreak to hear the choristers sing from the tower and watch the revelers, a scene I first saw in my imagination when reading Sayers masterful Gaudy Night. We woke in the dark with our sleepy children, made our way through the dark streets of Oxford, and stood with the throngs below the tower at dawn. There were students in dress suits and ball gowns, up all night since the previous evening’s gaudy, many tipsy and some wet and muddy from a tip in the Chartwell while punting. There were Morris dancers, and folks dressed up like animals and trees. It was fifty years later than the Oxford that Sayers had written about, but many things were as she described. My mother would have been thrilled.

For those who say that genre fiction isn’t art I challenge them to read Gaudy Night. My older sister Megan took on that very challenge when she did her thesis at Vassar on Dorothy Sayers As Art. The writing is first rate, the plot intricate, and the characters interesting. It just happens to be a whodunit.

But there was another side to this genre during the Golden Age which was neither highbrow nor high church, and that wasn’t found in our house at all, as far as I know. That discovery came to me by way of my younger brother Bill, who during the 70’s was a New York cabdriver and sometimes student at Hunter College, and took a course on the American noir novels of the 30’s and 40’s.

These books were a distinctively American reaction to the gentility of the genre in its British form. In the hard-boiled novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the victim was more likely a pimp or a bootlegger than a gentleman or a vicar, and the settings were not in English country homes, but in the urban mean streets of America, usually at night. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Hammett’s Sam Spade and Continental Op had small, dark, dingy offices, and kept a bottle of whiskey in the second drawer. The gun was in the top drawer. Hammett and Chandler’s books, like Sayers, are not only great reads, but also great writing.

But there is noir and then there is noir! Not all of this sub-genre aspired to be great literature. At the lower end were the pulp novels, typified by Mickey Spillane, with titles like I Love My Gun. Pulp fiction was full of blood and sex, and spare on character development. I recall from years ago a National Lampoon satire on pulps that imagined detective Mike Hammer’s inner monologue like this: “I opened the door and there was a blond pointing two thirty-eights right at me, and a gun!” Not far from the truth.

I will talk about the changing role of women in the genre a bit later, but in the days of American pulp the roles were somewhat confined. There was the capable nurturing secretary with a not-so-secret crush on the boss, think Della Street, there was the hooker with the heart of gold, who was often the corpse, there was the widow in distress, and the femme fatale, sometimes combined, think Faye Dunaway in Chinatown.

From Dorothy Sayers to Mickey Spillane illustrates that crime fiction is a great sprawling genre that covers a wide spectrum of sub-genres. The British whodunit and the LA police procedural share the same genus, but are of a different species.

So how did it all begin? Although the mystery genre is as old as the apocryphal Susanna and the Elders in some versions of the Book of Daniel, chapter 15, and the ancient Greek play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, its evolution into the novels and stories we know today is fairly recent.

Many believe the first modern mystery story to be The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe written in 1841, which featured the first fictional detective, the eccentric and brilliant C. Auguste Dupin. Poe’s basic plot formula has been successful ever since, a brilliant detective committed to ascertaining the truth, and doing so through a process involving intuition, observation and inference. He followed with further Dupin tales: “The Mystery of Marie Roget” in 1843, and “The Purloined Letter” in 1844.

“The Mystery of Marie Roget” is particularly interesting because it is a barely fictionalized account based on Poe's theory of what happened to the real-life Mary Cecilia Rogers. The style of the analysis, with its attention to forensic detail, makes it a precursor and perhaps inspiration for the stories about the most famous of all fictional detectives, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, about whom we had a terrific paper many years ago from David Noyes.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins came along in 1860. Collins wrote several more in this genre, including The Moonstone in 1868, which many believe is his masterpiece. T. S. Eliot called it “the first and greatest of English detective novels.” Whatever else its merits, The Moonstone can claim to have established several classic features of the twentieth-century detective story, so well known to us all. There is a country house robbery, an “inside job,” a celebrated investigator, bungling local constabulary, detective enquiries, false suspects, the “least likely suspect,” a rudimentary “locked room” murder, a reconstruction of the crime, and a final twist in the plot.

The false suspect device is called a “red herring, ” which can be any narrative element intended to distract the reader from a more important event in the plot, often a twist ending. The term “red herring” originates from the tradition whereby young hunting dogs in Britain were trained to follow a scent with the use of a kippered, that is salted and smoked, hence red, herring. This pungent fish would be dragged across a trail until the puppy learned to follow the scent. Later, when the dog was being trained to follow the faint odor of a fox or a badger, the trainer would drag a red herring, which has a much stronger odor, across the animal's trail at right angles. The dog would eventually learn to follow the original scent rather than the stronger scent. So a red herring is a device in crime fiction to throw someone off the scent of the real criminal.

Poe and Collins were joined by another literary figure in the evolution of the modern mystery. Charles Dickens has a sub-plot in the vast novel Bleak House, written in1853. A conniving lawyer named Tulkinghorn is murdered in his office late one night, and the crime is investigated by Inspector Bucket of the Metropolitan police force. Numerous characters appeared on the staircase leading to Tulkinghorn's office that night, some of them in disguise, and Inspector Bucket must penetrate these mysteries to identify the murderer. We tend to think of Dickens as high literature, but much of his output was serialized in magazines, and he wrote chapters to meet these deadlines.

These 19th century prototypes set the stage for the golden age to come. The 20th century is a story of how the crime genre evolved to meet changing technologies. By the turn of the century the genre began to expand with the development of dime novels and pulp magazines.

An important contribution to the genre in the 1920s was the development of the juvenile mystery by Edward Stratemeyer. You may never have heard of him, but chances are you have read one or more of his books. Stratemeyer originally developed and wrote both the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries written under the Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene pseudonyms, respectively, and later written by his daughter, Harriet S. Adams, and other authors. His influence in preparing young reader for a life of mystery reading is incalculable

But though you may never have heard of Stratemeyer, there is one writer from the 20’s you have all heard of: Agatha Christie. Christie is the best selling author of all time. Only the Bible has sold more copies than her books.

She was born Agatha Miller in Devon, England to an American father and an English mother, but she never claimed United States citizenship. Her father died when she was eleven years old, and her mother taught her at home, encouraging her to write at a very young age. Her first marriage, an unhappy one, was in 1914 to Colonel Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps. They divorced in 1928; two years after Agatha discovered her husband was having an affair. It was during this marriage that she published her first novel in 1920, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

During World War I she worked at a hospital and then a pharmacy, jobs that influenced her work, for many of the murders in her books are carried out with poison.

A bizarre incident in her life could have come right out of one of her books. On December 8, 1926, while living in Sunningdale in Berkshire, she disappeared for ten days, causing a flurry of interest in the press. Her car was found abandoned in a chalk pit in Newland's Corner, Surrey. She was eventually found at the Harrogate Hydro hotel under the name of the woman with whom her husband had recently admitted to having an affair.

She had apparently suffered a nervous breakdown and a rare fugue state caused by the death of her mother and her husband's infidelity. She could not recount any information as to her disappearance due to amnesia, and opinions then and now are divided as to whether this was a publicity stunt.

In 1930, Christie married the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. Her travels with Mallowan contributed background to several of her novels set in the Middle East. Other novels, such as Ten Little Indians (also known as And Then There Were None) were set in and around Torquay, Devon, where she was born.

I reread that one while visiting my daughter at Christmas, having forgot whom the killer was. The plot is simple: ten guests, strangers to each other, are invited to be the guest of a man they do not know on a deserted island off the coast of Devon. The host never appears and the guests are killed off, one by one, causing rising panic, until literally “then there were none.” If you haven’t read it you must.

Her 1934 novel, Murder on the Orient Express was written in the Hotel Pera Palace in Istanbul, Turkey, the southern terminus of the railway, and to this day the hotel maintains Christie's room as a memorial to her.

And what was the inspiration for those country houses? First there is the Greenway Estate in Devon, acquired by the couple as a summer residence in 1938, which is now in the care of the National Trust. Then there was Abney Hall in Cheshire, which was owned by her brother-in-law. She based at least two of her stories on Abney Hall: the short story “The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding” which is in the story collection of the same name and the novel After the Funeral. Abney became Agatha's greatest inspiration for country-house life, with all the servants and grandeur which have been woven into her plots. The descriptions of the fictional Styles, Chimneys, Stoneygates and the other houses in her stories are mostly Abney in various forms.

In 1971 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and died on January 12, 1976, at age 85, from natural causes, not poison.

Agatha Christie's first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920 and introduced her long-running character, the dandified Belgium detective Hercule Poirot, who appeared in 33 of Christie's novels and 54 short stories.

Her other well known detective, the spinster Miss Marple, was introduced in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930, and was based loosely on Christie's grandmother.

During World War II, Christie wrote two novels intended as the last cases of these two great detectives, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, respectively. They were Curtain and Sleeping Murder. Both books were sealed in a bank vault for over thirty years, and were released for publication by Christie only at the end of her life, when she realized that she could not write any more novels.

Like Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, Christie was to become increasingly tired of her detective, Poirot. In fact, by the end of the 1930s, Christie confided to her diary that she was finding Poirot “insufferable,” and by the 1960s she felt that he was an “an egocentric creep.” However, unlike Conan Doyle, she resisted the temptation to kill her detective off while he was still popular. She saw herself as an entertainer whose job was to produce what the public liked, and what the public liked was Poirot.

In contrast, Christie was fond of Miss Marple. However it is interesting to note that the Belgian detective’s titles outnumber the Marple titles by more than two to one. This is largely because Christie wrote numerous Poirot novels early in her career, while The Murder at the Vicarage remained the sole Marple novel until the 1940s. Christie never wrote a novel or short story featuring both Poirot and Miss Marple.

Incidentally, Hercule Poirot is the only fictional character to have been given an obituary in The New York Times, following the publication of Curtain in 1975.

Christie’s stage play, The Mousetrap, holds the record for the longest initial run in the world, opening at the Ambassadors Theatre in London November 25, 1952, and is still running after more than 23,000 performances.

So I started this paper talking about books, but already I have referred to a play and to magazines. While it is true that the crime genre begins as a literary one, it has continually adapted to new media. Magazines were for a time it’s most successful format, in the 30s and 40s. Then it moved to radio, a short-live heyday that will be remembered by some in this group with programs such as The Shadow and The Green Hornet.

Pulp magazines decreased in popularity in the 1950s with the rise of television so much that the numerous titles available then are reduced to two today: Alfred Hitchcock's “Mystery Magazine“ and Ellery Queen's “Mystery Magazine.” Comic books, and more recently, graphic novels have also embraced crime genre. The movies gave us Sherlock Holmes with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, and Hollywood turned to Hammett and Chandler for The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep and the other noir films of the early postwar years.

But it has been television that really expanded the audience for the crime genre, giving us Perry Mason, Columbo, Kojak, Quincy, Magnum, Monk, Spenser, and, of course, Jessica Fletcher. More recently we have a host of police procedural shows like Law and Orders and the various CSIs, Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, The Shield, and The Wire.

Then of course, there was Mystery on PBS, now sadly unplugged, but in its day acquainting a wide public to literary characters such as Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Adam Dalgliesh, Jules Maigret, Brother Caedfel, and Inspector Morse. Inspector Morse and Sgt. Lewis were always running through scenes from my Oxford days.

More recently Mystery gave us DCI Jane Tennison, a strong woman detective in Prime Suspect, a tension-filled police procedural. Here was a shift, for the crime genre, despite its great women writers, has long been a man’s world. In the 70s and 80s the blonds, broads and bimbos of pulp fiction disappeared and strong, smart, and tough women detectives appeared in the writings of Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, and Sue Grafton. Paretsky’s Private Eye, V. I. Warshawski would kick-box Mike Hammer’s gun out of his hand, and have him pinned to the ground with one knee, quicker than you can say fedora. V. I. drinks Black Label, breaks into houses to get clues, and enjoys her sex life. She also pays attention to her clothes, and sings along with opera on the radio. It is safe to say she reflects the changing roles for women.

And on television we had Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, who was perhaps a bit more like Miss Marple than she was like Ms. Warshawksi. Fletcher, a writer herself of mysteries, provides a good example of the problem of an amateur detective, for how many of us randomly discover two or three corpses a year in our daily round?

Such implausibility is not a new problem. One commentator has described the quiet little village of St. Mary Mead, where Jane Marple did her deductive magic, as having “put on a pageant of human depravity rivaled only by that of Sodom and Gomorrah.” Similarly, Jessica Fletcher is confronted with bodies wherever she goes. Not only that, but “over the years people who have met violent deaths have also piled up in the streets of Cabot Cove, Maine, the cozy little village where she lives. ”

This implausibility is satirized frequently on the TV show Monk, in which the main character, Adrian Monk, is frequently accused of being a “bad luck charm” and a “murder magnet” as the result of the frequency with which otherwise normal people attempt to pull off elaborate schemes for perfect murders when he is in the vicinity. This is why most crime heroes are more plausibly professional investigators, cops or forensic specialists.

Another solution to the implausibility issue is celebrity. Some amateurs, like Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe, become so well known to the public that they are sought out from far and wide to solve crimes. Wolfe rarely leaves his orchid festooned New York apartment, but must rely on the legwork of his able assistant Archie Goodwin.

This brings us to the issue of sidekicks, a regular feature of the genre. Side kicks are as old as Cervantes, but the mystery archetype is, of course, Dr. John Watson, foil to Sherlock Holmes. The sidekick is a stand-in for the reader, and allows the detective to share his thoughts out loud so we can be privy to them. Poirot has Captain Arthur Hastings, Morse has Sgt. Robbie Lewis, and Batman has Robin.

In the words of mystery encyclopediast William L. De Andrea, “Watson also serves the important function of catalyst for Holmes's mental processes. … From the writer's point of view, Conan Doyle knew the importance of having someone to whom the detective can make enigmatic remarks, a consciousness that's privy to facts in the case without being in on the conclusions drawn from them until the proper time. Any character who performs these functions in a mystery story has come to be known as a 'Watson'.”

In 1929, English crime writer and critic Ronald Knox stated as one of his rules for fledgling writers of detective fiction that “the stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.”

And besides a sidekick you need other helpers and colleague. If you happen to not be a detective you may need one to do your legwork. So Defense Attorney Perry Mason has Paul Drake, and Barrister for the Defense Horace Rumpole has F. I. G. (Fig) Newton.

Then there are mentors. In the Navajo novels of Tony Hillerman, Joe Leaphorn is the wise old detective, and Jim Chee, the brash young cop. Inspector Alan Banks goes to see his old boss, and ruminates on the case while they put odd shaped stones into a Yorkshire dry wall.

Technology, too, has rendered many of the stock devices implausible.
With the predominance of cell phones, many of the predicaments that brought danger are much less likely. One can, of course, avoid the issue of technology altogether by writing an historical crime novel. As global interconnectedness makes legitimate suspense more difficult to achieve, several writers, including Elizabeth Peters, P. C. Doherty, Steven Saylor, and Lindsey Davis, have set their characters in some former period. Such a strategy forces the protagonist to rely on more inventive means of investigation, lacking as they do the scientific tools available to modern detectives.

Another medium for the crime genre is the board game Clue, originally published as Cluedo in the United Kingdom in 1949. It was devised by Anthony E. Pratt, a solicitor's clerk and part-time clown from Birmingham, England. In North America it became Clue and was published by Parker Brothers. It was, naturally, a favorite of my family.

The game is set in a mansion, with the board divided into different rooms. The players each represent a character who is a guest staying at this house, whose owner, Dr. Black (Mr. Boddy in the North American version), has been found murdered. Players attempt to solve the murder, by guessing the three components of Suspect, Weapon, and Room, as in “Miss Scarlet with the lead pipe in the conservatory.”


So what about my favorites? It is hard to decide since there are so many. There is a category I call airport reading, authors famous enough to command a spot at the terminal book kiosk or store. I tend to buy by destination. So on my many trips to Arizona I read most of the Navajo novels of Tony Hillerman. If I’m going to Florida I read the zany novels of Carl Hiassen, with his corrupt politicians and crooked contractors and insane mobsters. If I’m going to England I read the fast-paced racehorse novels of Russ Francis. Elmore Leonard is a favorite of the critics, and of airport booksellers, so you can almost always find those. Any of these would be worthy candidates. There are also old favorites whose series I zoomed through until there were none left, like Spenser and Morse.

But I will limit it to three. The first is one you may not know, but should, and that is Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series. Stephen King calls Robinson the best crime writer today, and the venerable Marilyn Stasio, whose weekly crime column in The New York Times Book Review is canonical, wrote “P.D. James, Reginald Hill and Ruth Rendell may be writing as fast as they can. But what are devotees of the English country mystery supposed to be reading between times? A superior new series by Peter Robinson should do nicely.”

Chief Inspector Alan Banks is a former London cop who hated his job and his life, and moved his wife and two small children to the quiet of the Yorkshire countryside. This is not the rolling hills of the Yorkshire Dales of All Creatures Great and Small, but the rugged Yorkshire Moors. There, in the sleepy fictional town of Eastvale, not surprisingly to those of us acquainted with the genre, corpses turn up with regularity.

The first novel is Gallow’s View, and it is worth starting at the beginning for Banks grows and evolves, as does Robinson’s writing. The books are very time-specific, as Banks listens to the appropriate popular music, watches his children grow and his marriage wither from the acids of domesticity.

Banks is a solitary man, fond of listening to the music of Van Morrison and drinking Laphroig single malt scotch. Robinson’s best book is In A Dry Season, made into TV movie for Mystery. Banks is not a one-dimensional character, but a complex Everyman with financial worries and fragile relationships. Be warned: there is a fair amount of gruesome violence and steamy sex in these books, but if that doesn’t put you off, gives Banks a try. It is a series one can stay with, there are sixteen so far, and you may feel sad when you’re done with them.

My second nominee is Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, begun in 1992 with Black Echo and now numbering thirteen. Harry Bosch is an LA policeman, a Vietnam vet and the son of a murdered prostitute whose mother named him after the 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch grew up in orphanages, foster homes and youth halls, and later ran away to join the army, where he was a tunnel rat with the 25th Infantry Division, venturing into the Vietcong maze of tunnels.

At the age of 18 Bosch went AWOL from the army while in Hawaii, and came stateside and joined the LAPD. He was assigned to the prestigious Robbery Homicide Division, where he worked for five years, until he was drummed out by an Internal Affairs Investigation involving the shooting of a suspect, who was later linked to nine murders.

Bosch, as you may have deduced by now, has a problem with authority. He is always in conflict with superiors, politicians, and/or the FBI. He has an innate sense for what is right in each case, linked with little regard for his career. This quality is described as relentless.

Bosch lives on a house on stilts in the Hollywood Hills he bought with the money he got after a TV mini-series was based on him and he was hired as a technical advisor. Bosch is a serial monogamist, with a different love interest in each book, except for a short-lived marriage to an FBI agent.

You don’t like Bosch as much as Banks, and he is much more damaged, but there is something fascinating about him, and the books are fast paced and full of twists and turns.

If both Banks and Bosh are hard-boiled, my final candidate is just fun. He is neither a cop nor a detective, and, although he always refers to his own brilliance in the long ago Penge Bungalow murders, a murder seldom happens in these tales. There is no sex and little violence, and yet in some ways this is my favorite series of them all. They are not novels, and rather than getting you across a transcontinental or transatlantic flight, they are better suited to the 20 minutes between getting in bed and turning out the light.

I am referring to Horace Rumpole, the aging barrister in John Mortimer’s series of short stories and long-running TV show “Rumpole of the Bailey. Unlike most crime genre, Rumpole began as a stage play, and the TV series and then the stories followed.

John Mortimer, a barrister and writer, has written several novels, Paradise Postponed, a satire on post-war Britain, and Summer’s Lease, a funny tale about Brits renting a villa in Tuscany, or “Chiantishire” as he calls it. He also wrote the screenplay for Brideshead Revisited. But his lasting legacy will be the character of Horace Rumpole and the franchise around him. Mortimer was a practicing barrister when he wrote Rumpole, getting up early to write before work.

What Rumpole shares with Banks and Bosch is an antagonism toward authority. He refuses all efforts by family, friends and colleagues to give up the disrespectable work of defense to be a Queen’s counsel, or circuit judge, QC’s and CJ’s respectively, or as Rumpole calls them, “queer customers” and “circus judges.”

His wife of many years, Hilda, or She Who Must Be Obeyed, as Rumpole secretly calls her, shares his domestic bliss in a cavernous, under heated mansion flat at 25B Froxbury Court, Gloucester Road, London. Hilda never lets Rumpole forget that her daddy (as she calls him), C.H. Wystan, was head of Rumpole’s chambers. The inference is that she expected better things from her husband.

Rumpole, on the other hand, enjoys the simple pleasure of defending his clients at The Old Bailey, London's central criminal court. There he takes on all defendants that will pay his fee.

Despite his affection for the criminal classes, Rumpole's character is marked by a firm set of ethics. Rumpole's credo is to "never plead guilty"[1], and he refuses to prosecute (there was one exception, but he proved that the defendant was innocent and then reaffirmed, "from now on, Rumpole only defends"). This belief also prevents him from making deals that involve pleading guilty to lesser charges.

Many of his briefs involve the large extended Timson clan, a family of "minor South London villains". The Timsons, who specialize in non-violent petty theft, often turn to Rumpole to defend them from their latest brush with the law. In one of his few murder cases, Rumpole defends a Timson with the defense that no self-respecting Timson would carry a gun to a crime. He acknowledged that the Timsons might from time to time nick a pallet of frozen fish or a shipment of CD players carelessly left on the back of an open lorry, but murder, never. For Rumpole there is, then, honor among thieves.

Another time he is brought in to a murder case because the defendant’s family wants him out of the way, and knows that Rumpole never pleads guilty or plea-bargains. Rumpole find a way to win that one too.

His greatest hour was the aforementioned Penge Bungalow Murders, where he wins a triumph based on his extensive knowledge of bloodstains and typewriters.

Cross-examination is one of his favorite activities and he disdains barristers who lack either the skill or courage to ask the right questions. His courtroom zeal gets him into trouble from time to time. More than once, his investigations reveal more than his client wants him to know. Rumpole's most chancy encounters stem from arguing with judges, particularly those who seem to believe that being on trial implies guilt or that the police are infallible.
Rumpole enjoys smoking inexpensive small cigars, drinking cheap red wine, and indulging in a diet of fried foods, overboiled vegetables, cheese sandwiches, and steak and kidney pudding. On a daily basis he visits "Pommeroy's," a wine bar located on Fleet Street within walking distance of both the Old Bailey and his law office at Equity Court, and at which he contributes regularly to an ever-increasing bar tab by purchasing glasses of red wine of a questionable quality, to which he refers to as either “Cooking Claret”, “Pommeroy's Plonk”, “Pommeroy's Very Ordinary”, "Chateau Thames Embankment”, or “Chateau Fleet Street.” When Hilda goes away to visit her old school chum Dodo McIntosh, Rumpole brings a bottle home, and flicks his ashes on the hearthrug. Such are the quotidian pleasures of Horace Rumpole.

His cigar smoking is often the subject of debate within his chambers, especially in his cold war with Sam Ballard, the prissy evangelical head of chambers. Rumpole peers sometimes criticize his attire, noting his old battered hat, imperfectly aligned clothes, cigar ash trailing down his waistcoat and faded barrister's wig, “bought second hand from a former Chief Justice of Tonga” (or the Windward Islands—Rumpole is occasionally an unreliable narrator.)

A devotee of Arthur Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse, Rumpole often quotes Wordsworth, among others. He sometimes muses about giving it all up and moving to the Costa del Sol or Florida, but he never does, because he is Rumpole, and who else will fight as he does for the rights of defendants and the presumption of innocence, “that golden thread running through the seamless robe of British jurisprudence.”

So what is it I love about this genre? First of all it is wonderfully escapist. You can go to Oxford or Arizona or LA, without the expense of an airline ticket. The stories, unlike one’s life and work, have a clear-cut problem and an inevitable solution with lots of entertaining suspense in between.

And our protagonists are fearless, heroic, and dedicated to their vocation and principles with a passion and commitment rare in a secular age. They are knights errant on a mission for truth and justice against crime and evil.

Nearly without exception these crime fighters eschew higher ambition for the pleasure of doing their job well, despite the hampering and bungling of bosses and other authorities.

Like cowboys the crime hero is a solitary individualist fighting conformity and authority in a beauracratized world. They tell their bosses off with impunity. They charge into dangerous situations without a thought for their safety. They get to engage in all manner of trangressive behavior like shooting guns at people and participating in high-speed car chases without any legal consequences.

Besides, they are usually very clever people, attractive to the opposite sex, with interesting hobbies and a much more exciting life that anyone we actually know. So we live vicariously for a brief time in their imaginary world, and in the end, they catch the crook, and we feel better about the moral order. And if we guess whodunit, we feel superior to the benighted folks who didn’t figure it out, or perhaps thought that the butler did it.