Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I picked up this Scholastic book to browse during a football game, and I thought, a collection of poems about the life of George Washington Carver for kids? Who needs that? Who would read that?

But, you know what? I kind of got into it eventually. The book builds poems, not very poetic poems but rather poetry-prose with line breaks and distinct phrases instead of full sentences–to talk about Carver’s incidents from Carver’s life. From his early years as a slave and his early attempts at formal education to his eventual work with the Tuskogee Institute and, yes, peanuts.

So perhaps a good intro to an amazing life, but you would definitely want to follow it up with something more weighty, such as George Washington Carver and/or a trip to Diamond, Missouri.

Also, you know George Washington Carver was a black American. This book, coming from the turn of the century, makes a couple of references to our people, and the poet’s father was one of the Tuskogee Airmen, but the book is not an especially racially themed book. One wonders whether the poems were written twenty years later would differ greatly from the interesting and straightforward presentation of a fascinating figure of American history we have here. Sadly, one thinks so.

Oh, but this children’s book has the baddest word ever in a poem called “My People” about the envy the other instructors and staff at the Tuskegee Institute felt toward Carver. But it’s further proof of my latent white supremacism that I read books with the baddest word in them. That is, books written in the dark past of twenty years ago.

As you might know, gentle reader, I consume a lot of what I call “Grandma Poetry.” These are usually chapbooks published by older women with themes of family and God; the authors are not professional poets and probably don’t even have a magazine credit on their copyright pages. Most of it is not sublime or exhilirating; some of it is nice. If you read the collected works of a Great Poet, you’ll find their works are limited to the really, really good once in a while and maybe nice most of the time.

This collects presumably the best poems and some artwork from residents in nursing homes owned by Beverly Enterprises. So the tone and shape of the poems varies. Some are about youth, some are about being your best self in a nursing home, but more than one are about being lonely and forgotten–even if it’s only in the subtext of a poem lauding volunteers who come to visit.

So it’s uneven and lacks a single voice, and some are poems by committee–classes where several people put a poem together. You can actually tell these poems apart from others as they lack internal consistency and voice.

Man, I remember nursing homes in the 1980s. Two of my sainted mother’s aunts ended up in a couple of different facilities, and the facilities were as cold and efficient as hospitals but with less care. It depressed me to go visit those old ladies–I was young then, and impatient. Times have changed now, though; one local senior living facility has been running ads showing a tatted up, goateed and mohawked pierced grandpa with big headphones on taking a selfie. One expects the new facilities are more fun, but then again, the ones that advertise in 417 are probably the nicer ones anyway; one would probably find my relations in more traditional centers.

At any rate, something to flip through during a football game, but not something to emulate in one’s own poetizing.

So as I mentioned when I reported on Lake Honor and Gone in the Night, I was going to pick this book up next, which means I read all the books I bought from Brian Brown at his book signing in rather short order which is probably the best endorsement by my actions rather than quibbles I post in my book reports.

This book does without the frame story present in the other two books, where the authors insert themselves and listen to or work with Booger McClain to “solve” an unsolved mystery–but whose resolution is not actually the solution of the crimes, perhaps an allusion or a theory that cannot be acted on.

Instead, this is a more straightforward story: An old friend comes to Booger to find his estranged wife and daughter who were last known to have been living in a trailer park in Pea Ridge, Arkansas. So Booger and his new wife Rose move into the trailer park to figure out what’s going on. Well, Rose does: A couple of injuries land McClain in the local hospital, which takes him out of the action for much of the book, so he acts mostly as a sounding board for what Rose is doing and as comic relief. So Rose uncovers a prostitution ring running in the trailer park, and that the shadowy Branson organized crime types behind it are dealing with the introduction of cocaine trade in the same area. Two guys in a blue truck make shadowy appearances, including perhaps killing the wife and daughter, and the sheriff of Pea Ridge is one of McClain’s former deputies. So they manage to depose the sheriff and get him to turn state’s evidence, so they take out the drug ring. But they don’t really solve the case they started with except for allusions and some speculations, perhaps.

So maybe that’s thematic, then, and not just how a quickly written book turns out.

As with the previous two, this one could have used a copy edit to catch things like:

• Again referring to the Sheriff of a town; McClain was sheriff of Branson, this book also mentions, and another town. But sheriffs are county officials and the law enforcement for unincorporated parts of a county. In cities and metropolitan areas with cities whose boundaries run right up to each other, such as the St. Louis area, the sheriffs and their deputies mostly serve papers. It’s probably no help that St. Louis County, where the Browns live, has a St. Louis County Police force which handles law enforcement and differs from the St. Louis County Sheriff.
• Talk about the trailer park and living in a trailer. At one point, someone is a couple hundred yards away from a trailer; in general trailer park sizes, a couple hundred yards is clear on the other side of the trailer park. The lot sizes are not generous. The book mentions going into the cellar under a trailer; okay, that’s rare in a trailer park; sometimes you can put them on foundations, but that’s more permanent than a trailer park. But at the end of the book, the trailer is towed away, but when trailers are placed on foundations and can have cellars, the wheels are generally removed.
• Rose goes to a neighbor’s trailer during a power outage; the trailer is lit with a lot of candles because the neighbor is used to this. Rose learns that the neighbor has security cameras, so they go back to another room to look at the computer monitors that show the view from the cameras. That would be a lot of batteries to power monitors.
• The wife and daughter are named Tammy and Carly, and I had some trouble keeping them straight in my head. At one point, too, the book says Tammy sold her stocks and bonds and moved back to Little Rock–but that’s the daughter’s name, not the wife. So I was not the only one having trouble keeping the names straight!

I also flagged a couple of things to comment on:

• At one point, while driving down to Pea Ridge, one of the characters said “Maybe we should have stopped in Berryville.” As you know, gentle reader, Berryville earlier this year, and I mentioned to my beautiful wife (but did not post on the blog) every time that I have seen Berryville mentioned in the news–although I think one of the other mentions of Berryville that I encountered might have been in Lake Honor.
• Somebody calls the local paper the Tri-Lakes News; however, last year or the year before, the paper changed its masthead to emphasize it’s the Branson (Tri-Lakes) News. As I boasted recently, I get that paper twice a week.
• At a wedding at the end of the book (See? It is a comedy!), they play a Shania Twain song (“You’re Still the One”). I can reveal to you, gentle reader, since it’s not the security question on any Web site that I am aware of, that at my wedding, our first dance as husband and beautiful wife was to a Shania Twain song–it was “From This Moment On”, and I forgot to get the CD back from Ernie, the owner of Occasions, when we left. When we were in town this summer, it looked like Occasions was still there and maybe open.

Also, it had typos and wrong word substitutions–instead of alter for altar which appeared in a couple of places in Lake Honor, we got conscience for conscious a couple of places here.

So it was a fun bit of reading that could have used a bit of copyediting. Kind of like Elton Gahr’s books. I’ll pick up more of them if I bump into Brown or Brown in person again, but they’re not so compelling that I’ll go out and order them. After all, I have many, many fine stacks of books to get to in the interim.

I’m going to do a dual book report on two of the three books I bought at the book signing at ABC Books last month because they have some similarities that I’ll talk about at the end.

After reading a chonking Stephen King book and a shorter palate cleanser on Descartes, I thought, wouldn’t it be something if I read the author-signed books from ABC Books soon after buying them instead of years later? So I picked up what is the first chronologically in the series, although the author I met (the son of the father and son duo) says you can read the three books in any order, but I went with the first one first.

The book deals with a fictionalized version of a real case: In the 1970s, two young men were found floating in the fountain pond on the School of the Ozarks, now the College of the Ozarks, campus. They were fully clothed, and the authorities pretty quickly said it was death by misadventure or drugs, maybe, and kind of swept it under the rug. A student at the school ends up re-evaluating his attendance there and quits, only to come back a year later to interview people about the killings for a story. He meets a private investigator, Booger McClain, who tells the story. So this book has two frame stories, really: In the present day, the former student is thinking about the case and comes back to town; and the second, which dominates the book, is the private investigator telling the story of his investigations along with some scenes with the principals in the action, including the boys who died. So the narrative takes place in real time, sort of, as events unfold, but it’s partially told by a private investigator a year later. And the now frame around the whole thing really doesn’t add anything.

The book, like the one that follows, has some typos (altar is spelled alter a couple of times) and a couple of little problems that factchecking would solve, like:

In fact, when I first watched the movie “Halloween,” and saw the mental hospital where Jason escaped, I immediately thought about that dorm.

C’mon, man, we can tell our Jason from our Michael Myers, ainna? We can even spell Myers right on the first try. You know, a dilligent fact-checker would have found this, but when writing and editing our own work, we check on things we’re uncertain of, but not the things we know (that just ain’t so). It’s always the one little throwaway that goes awry.

“Where are you staying?” he asked after a few seconds.

“The Bel Air Motel on 67,” I said.

Highway 67 runs along the eastern part of the state, not the western part, although I understand why it would be top of mind to the authors–it runs through south St. Louis County where they live (and where I once lived).

There are some other anachronisms and things that make one wonder–one of the dead young men played football for Kickapoo; I had thought Kickapoo opened in 1972, which would have made this iffy, but Kickapoo actually opened in 1971, which would make this more plausible. Coupled with the typos, though, one wonders if it was really that way.

This Booger McClain mystery takes place in the present day, but again it deals with a crime that occurred decades ago. In this case, it’s the disappearance of three women, two recent high school graduates and a mother of one of them, in 1992. This story still resonates in the Springfield community–every so often, it pops back into the news when it is featured on a podcast or in a book such as this one. My beautiful wife informed me that she had already bought this book during its initial publicity burst. She was in Springfield when this happened (and an attractive young woman), and she went to school with the two recent graduates who disappeared. So this story resonates with her, and it’s one of the top two defining crimes that really shook Springfield (the other was the 1904 lynching on the square for which Springfield is only now seemingly emerging from self-flagellation).

Like Lake Honor, the book centers on a writer coming to Booger McClain to the story of his investigation. McClain has a war room with evidence in a seemingly abandoned warehouse on the north side of town, and he lets the writer review it. Someone tries to break into the evidence room, though, which leads McClain to believe he’s close to solving the mystery. So this book has a little more action in it, but it’s very similar to Lake Honor in its storytelling and resolution.

I flagged a couple of things in this book as well.

“Pull into the next parking lot,” the man in the back ordered his partner. That parking lot was a 24-hour Wal-Mart grocery a few miles from the Levitt home.”

It’s a quibble, but in those days, the Walmarts were Walmarts; the Walmart Neighborhood Market was a ways off, and the Walmarts of the day were more department stores. It’s only later that they would expand their grocery offerings.

“I was a sheriff for a time in Branson back in the 60’s.”

McClain would not have been a sheriff for Branson. Sheriff is a county office; he would have been Taney County Sheriff, which is an elected position by the way. But city folk can be forgiven for thinking that sheriff is what you call the police in a small town.

Again, some anachronisms and errata that one might overlook if it weren’t for the typos.

Also, I recently read a post on Mad Genius Club about whether authors were including the Malingering Unpleasantness in their works; this book mentions the Wuhan Flu conditions, as a business slowdown gives the writer in the story time to come to Springfield to interview McClain. It’s mentioned, but not doted upon.

At any rate, the books were very similar in the following:

• They’re both rather expository. The stories are told, often by McClain, rather than experienced or shown. Which is to be expected. Although both have elements of contemporary action where McClain is not present, but even those passages are telling more than vivid creations of a scene.
• Which is probably explained a bit by the fact that the crimes occurred decades before the actual setting of the books. Lake Honor has more of recreations of scenes contemporaneous to the crime; Gone in the Night has one, and it’s one that thwarts McClain’s assumptions of the case.
• Neither book “solves” the case. Lake Honor alludes to possible solutions. Death in the Night offers a section where McClain presents his theory of the case–which, as I mentioned, is counter to the one contemporaneous scene (quoted above, where the perpetrator has a partner, whereas in Booger’s theory of the case, a suspect acts alone).
• The authors Asimov themselves into the story. In the first, “Alan” is Alan, the author. In the second, the writer is “Brian,” the author, and the biographies of the characters in the story kind of match the authors’ stories. I’m not sure why to choose such a frame–perhaps to keep the writing interesting for the authors themselves?
• In both books, some information is repeated, almost in the same words, as though they were in the process of moving it, but forgot to remove it from the initial location in the narrative.

That said, I found the books readable and a bit compelling–I read them right after each other, and I started the third book, which is an original, already. So let that be my endorsement as it is: The books are clearly self-published, with the typos to attest, but they’re not the worst of the self-published I’ve seen and put down.

The books affected me so much that when I saw the headline Branson family hires high profile private investigator to join search for missing son, I immediately thought of Booger McClain.