What Would You Call It?

Abstract

WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 17 top photo : kris williams Adam Dalgliesh novel—but took to the task afterward, publishing it in 2009. I immediately saw that it filled a need in my class for a reading that discussed the “traditional ” mystery, as opposed to the variously labeled hardboiled, noir, or American mystery, which was amply represented by Raymond Chandler’s brilliant essay “The Simple Art of Murder.” For all their differences, James and Chandler show some interesting parallels. Both were educated in English schools and interested in writing from an early age but postponed it for various reasons. Chandler did not go to college. He did some newspaper work but lacked confidence in his talent and worked as a bookkeeper and accountant before his firing in the Great Depression for drinking and absenteeism compelled him to try selling pulp fiction. Phyllis Dorothy James had a father who did not favor a college education for women, so she worked in a tax office and as a manager for a theater company. She married a physician in 1941, but her husband returned from the war suffering from mental illness. James supported her husband and two daughters by taking a position in the civil service. She attended night school to improve her prospects, and when she decided it was time to write, rose at six to write for two hours before work. She remained in government service until she was fifty-nine. Chandler did not publish his first novel, The Big Sleep, until he was fifty-one; James published Cover Her Face when she was forty-two. Both of them, however, believed that detective fiction had much greater literary potential than was being shown by their contemporaries. And both of them showed they were right. “When I began Cover Her Face,” James told the Guardian, “I didn’t foresee a writing career primarily as a crime novelist. However, as I continued with the genre I became increasingly fascinated with its possibilities, and in particular how one could use what some might see as an outworn form to produce a contemporary novel which would provide excitement and mystery and yet say something true about What Would You Call It? by Linda Hogan What would you call the soul, lacking in language? What is it in us that dreams the lost jungle or the true world we didn’t know with spirals carved in stone or that singular creation of blood elements, ruled by the changing moon and one tide pulling another with the red water we call River running to the confluence of two. Maybe it is an invisible bond between blood and water in just one turn of the world, some re-cognition between those once unknown. The invisible around us, all in great number unseen but known. It must be why even before rain tree frogs sing in grand number in their hidden places. After rainfall, a hundred fireflies beneath trees open their light, one matching another. What would you call it if not spirit to spirit? And the spark of bloodroot and hickory with undreamed futures, of sweetness and height, healing for some, and even birds return guided by ancient stories of those who taught them those stars and the shimmering waters across potent earth, while back in other waters the silver uncounted clouds of herring are all one creature like the bee and the ants, one mind. What else could you call this world soul that speaks many tongues, but all of it one intimate equation. Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) is an internationally recognized public speaker; the author of poetry, fiction, and essays; and an environmental activist. Her books have won the Oklahoma Book Award, the Mountains and Plains Book Award, and been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her latest collection, Dark, Sweet: New and Selected Poems, appeared in 2014 (see WLT, Jan. 2015, 75). ...