Amuse Me

What I like about writing is the words.

I was passing the exotic cheese shop the other day and I noticed a sign for, I think it was, salami made from wild boar meat. The sign said, "Feral swine."

Feral swine. How cool is that for an expression? It calls up all sorts of images, from Wonder Wart-Hog to a rag-tag cadre of old Nazis living off the land in a remote area of Bavaria, the Feral Swine Brigade. Or a motorcycle gang. The Feral Swine. I can see their jackets now. You wouldn't dare wear one in certain bars.

One morning last week I fell ill with chills and fever, which is a story for another day, and sooner than run off to the ER and give everybody whatever the hell it was I had I decided to take a hot water bottle and a book and go to bed. After awhile I got better, as planned, but in the meantime I read the book. It was Green Hazard by Manning Coles, two writers who liked words. Cyril Coles fought in the trenches and then was a spy in Germany during World War I. He knew how bad things can get, probably knew it better than many of us, and yet managed to dance around the edge of the pit with the most elegant and amusing language imaginable.

This is the opposite of the way things are done today. Nowadays the Knowing Ones will tell you, there isn't enough conflict here. Create conflict. I've tried to read a couple of books by people who took this advice, injecting bogus conflict into a limp manuscript. "Oh, why did I say that to my boyfriend? Now he's mad at me. Well, I'm mad at him." As the murderer creeps closer. Fling! Another book goes crashing against the wall. Unless it's a Kindle. Then it just gets soundly cursed.

Where are the amusing writers? That's what I want to know. I've run out of Manning Coles novels, I've read everything by Terry Pratchett, and I need something else to read. History books are good, if the writer doesn't have some unpleasant axe to grind. Some history books I have to feel terrible about, since they chronicle the bestial sins of my ancestors. Mayflower, by Nathaniel Philbrick, for instance—My God! How horrible we were to the Indians!—and A Great and Noble Scheme by John Mack Faragher. I was all set to read A Great and Noble Scheme when I realized that my ancestors who "settled" Nova Scotia in 1760 did so a scant five years after the area had been ethnically cleansed of Frenchmen.

Right now I'm waiting for a delivery from the Naval Institute of a book about German spies in Baltimore in the years before we entered World War I. This should be diverting. I don't have to assume any personal guilt for whatever happened. I might write an amusing piece of spy fiction based on that book, and on the memoir of Franz von Rintalen, The Dark Invader, who was a saboteur in those times. Maybe I'll call it Feral Swine.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Comfort Reading—What Does It For You?

Last Sunday afternoon I slipped a disk. This came on top of a couple of weeks of increasing misery—the abscessed tooth, the itchy skin rash from the medicine for the abscessed tooth, and before that the other thing, what was it? Oh, crap, right, the colonoscopy. Increasing misery. After exhausting all the available reruns of Foyle's War I understood that the time had come to read something, preferably something comforting.

The First World War has always interested me. My grandfather was a Royal Canadian Army officer who fought in the trenches. So I like stories about that, and about spies and sabotage, like the story I told you last week where Werner Horn tried to blow up the Vanceboro bridge. In the course of researching Von Papen the spymaster, Germany's naval attache in the U.S., I came across a wonderful book by another spymaster of the early days of the war, a more competent man than von Papen, or so he says. Captain Franz von Rintalen wrote The Dark Invader: War-Time Reminiscences of a German Naval Intelligence Officer, about his days in the sabotage business before the United States entered the war.

American munitions factories were in full production, and though the U.S. was officially neutral, the arms were shipped only to the Allies, since the Central Powers were effectively blockaded by the British navy. Von Rintalin recruited an inventor of timed incendiary devices and a ring of Irish dockworkers in New York, who hid the devices on ships in places other than where the munitions were stored. Far at sea, fires broke out. The munitions had to be soaked with water to save the ships, ruining the cargo but sparing the men.

At some point the clumsy Von Papen was exposed and expelled from the country for activities of his own. He claimed diplomatic immunity as he traveled through Britain, but the British made him surrender his papers. The whole network of German spies and saboteurs in America was blown by the fleeing diplomat's check-book stubs, carefully inscribed with names and addresses. Von Rintalin went to jail. The Irishmen went home and started the Easter Rebellion.

But I was talking about comfort reading. My favorite book about spy work in the First World War is Manning Coles' Drink to Yesterday, a bittersweet account of the life of a British spy in Germany, followed by the more upbeat sequel, A Toast to Tomorrow. I could read those again and again, and after I did the thing to my back (it's getting better, by the way, not to worry) I rushed to the bookshelf (as best I could) and got them down to read once more.

I'm proud to say that the best of my own work has been considered comfort reading. My first agent told me she read one of my manuscripts while recovering from gum surgery. You might ask, why don't I write spy stories, if I like them so much? The answer is that the life of a secret agent is completely foreign to my experience. I would have nothing true to say about it. Okay, there was the time forty years ago, at the height of the divorce paranoia, when I dressed up in a wig to take the train to Manhattan and meet a man for a steak dinner. That was good for a couple of sinister thrills. I'll tell you the story sometime.

Or maybe not.

© 2015 Kate Gallison