Forgotten Friday: The Mystery of the Witches Bridge

If it wasn't for standardized testing, I might have missed The Mystery of the Witches Bridge by Barbee Oliver Carleton. It was November 1972 and us fourth graders at Nathanael Greene Elementary, Pawtucket, found ourselves subjected to a week of endless Scantron sheets and NO TALKING. There was one small bit of good news, however. We were told that once we completed each test segment, we would be allowed to read quietly at our desks until time for the next test. We should plan on six to eight segments a day for most of the week.

Up to that point, my reading had been almost exclusively what was required for school. I wasn't opposed to reading — it just hadn't made it onto my radar screen yet. So I dutifully went to the library and poked around to look for something not too boring. I chose The Mystery of the Witches Bridge pretty much at random. Mystery of Something sounded maybe cool. I guess. A witch might be neat, and the cover was creepy.

The first test had a thirty-minute time limit, and I finished in about half the time. After turning in my Scantron, I pulled out the book and started reading. Not long after, when the second test started, I found myself rushing to get done so I could get back to the story. Later that first day I realized the best way to maximize my reading time was to simply ignore the questions and fill in the Scantron ovals at random. I could complete a forty-five minute test in under five and get back to reading.

My teachers were amazed. Them: "You're so fast! How do you do it?"

Me: (ignoring them, reading)

I can't say as I was a shining example of the dutiful student, but I discovered something truly wonderful: not just the first chapter book I read for pleasure, but a book that would stick with me throughout my life and which remains one of my all time favorites. It's a book that ultimately contributed to my desire to be a writer myself, and certainly influenced that kind of fiction that I seek to this day.

The Mystery of the Witches Bridge is the dark, yet stirring story of a young man caught up in a mystery stretching across three hundred years of his family's history. Set in coastal New England, the plot centers around the boy Dan Pride who has come to live with his reclusive uncle at the ancient family home, Pride's Point, after the death of his parents. The old house sits on an island in the midst of a fertile salt marsh and can be reached only by a long causeway, or over an old road that leads across the eponymous Witches Bridge.

Dan struggles with his grief and feelings of isolation, but he hopes he will find a new home with his uncle, Julian Pride. His hopes are quickly dashed. The old house is grim and forbidding, and his Uncle Julian aloof, haunted by bitter memories. He warns Dan to keep his place, to do as he's told, and specifically to avoid the Bishops, a rival family Uncle Julian blames for the mysterious death of his own father—Dan's grandfather—years before. Furthermore, the Prides are ostracized by the locals, who believe the ghost of Samuel Pride, founder of Pride's Point, haunts the salt marsh and lures the unwary to their deaths whenever a fog rises. Old Samuel was falsely accused of witchcraft back in the early years of the Massachusetts colony, but his example retains power even in the present, as he kept Pride's Point for his descendants only by standing mute in the face of prosecution and ultimately execution.

As Dan attempts to settle in to his new life, he discovers a few bright moments in the drear, including a friendship with a pair of siblings who live across the marsh. But he's unable to get out from beneath the shadow of his family's haunted past. The feud with the Bishops hovers like a spectre over him and his new friends. The Bishops were source of the original accusation against old Samuel Pride, and were subsequently connected, at least circumstantially, to the events surrounding the death of Dan's grandfather. Ultimately, Dan must solve not only the mystery of his grandfather's death but come to understand the choices of his long dead ancestor, the old witch himself, in order to save himself from the false accusations he faces, like his forebear, and make a place for himself at Pride's Point.

It's been over 35 years since I first read this marvelous book. I consider it to be brilliant, young adult noir—great characters, taut plot, sleep-interrupting suspense, and unexpected redemption yet with an enticing note of ambivalence and ambiguity. Today, I re-read my tattered, disintegrating copy every year or so. Several times I've had to order fresh copies, always used. The book is out-of-print, I'm sad to say, but fortunately enough copies are extant that I've always managed to land a copy that's more or less intact. Recently, the best source has been Amazon Marketplace, where the average price is 89¢, or nine dollars with shipping and handling. More than worth it.
 
 

OC Hobbit

All right, true confession time. I'm one of those people who emailed Peter Jackson to explain to him in fine detail all the many ways he got it WRONG! You know what I'm talking about here, and if you don't, you are banished! Actually, you're not banished. But come on, Peter Jackson? Lord of the Rings, the amazing three part spectacle of visual pyrotechnics that got it WRONG? You know what I'm talking about here.

Continues at InkSpot...
 
 

Deep Time

Were you to ask me to name my desert island book, I'd be a pain in the ass and demand two, one fiction and one non-fiction. My fiction choice is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. It's not necessarily my favorite book, which of course changes every five minutes (my list of my top ten favorite novels of all time has a couple hundred entries on it). But One Hundred Years of Solitude is, to me, the most lush, the most abundant of my many favorite books. I can read it a hundred times and find something new with each reading, or understand some aspect of the story in a new way. A gorgeous novel, alternately heartbreaking and inspirational, it possesses an abiding sense of time and history, and of our relationship as human beings to both.

But if you insist on just one book, that's it, no categorical weaseling, no one-of-each nonsense, well then I'm going to shift to non-fiction and choose Basin and Range by John McPhee. Basin and Range is the first in a series of four books in which McPhee tells of the development of the theory of plate tectonics.* But it's not just a science book. McPhee tracks his way across the United States roughly along the path of Interstate 80 in the company of a number of geologists, and along the way he tells not only the story of the rock beneath his feet but of the men and women with him who know the terrain—and terranes—like they know their own skins.

And if I got really stuck and you insisted I could only take one chapter out of one book on my desert island sojourn, I'd pick the chapter in Basin and Range in which McPhee describes the evolution of the geological time scale. McPhee doesn't title or number the chapters, so look for the one which starts "The Old Red Sandstone was put down by rivers flowing southward to a sea where marine strata were accumulating in the region that is now called Devon." No matter your interest or disinterest in geology, I urge you to take twenty minutes in the library one day to read that one chapter.

The story McPhee tells is as much poetry as science. Periods during prehistory named for Welsh tribes, geographic regions, philosophical conceits. Scientists bickering over the relationship between this or that fifty or hundred million years. Eons delineated by the appearance and disappearance of a particular type of mollusk or arthropod, by the flow of primordial rivers inferred in exposed sediments. When the science of geology came of age during the 1800s, much of the technology that would enable scientists to determine how far back events occurred didn't exist; vast chunks of time were identified and named decades before radiometric dating and similar tools would assign actual values to eons. There was in fact a certain geological quality to the development of the time scale, as new chunks of time were identified and named and divided in an accretatory and erosional manner. McPhee describes the process beautifully in what amounts to one of the most far-reaching yet intimate essays I've ever read. I can pick it up at any time and it will take my breath away.

In this essay, McPhee coined the phrase "deep time" to describe that vast weight of time before the present, the billions of years it took for the earth to reach its current state. It is a depth of time so great, McPhee notes, "With your arms spread wide to represent all time on earth . . . in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history." And yet so much of it remains beyond knowledge. The nature of geology is that it deals with surfaces and shattered remains beneath which far more is hidden than revealed. Describing the first four billion years of Earth's lifespan, McPhee says, ". . . so little is known of this seven-eighths of all history that in a typical two-pound geology text book there are fourteen pages on Precambrian time." He goes on to note that the "Precambrian has attracted geologists of exceptional imagination."

This to me is the lure of geology in the picture painted by John McPhee. For all the measurements, for all the core samples and lab tests, the calculus and the piled collections of rocks there lives at the heart of the science that spark of imagination, not so different, I believe, from the spark that lives in the heart of writers—or any artist. The art of writing, like the science of geology, is like exploring a dream with a candle, illuminating more and more until at last a history is revealed, often in broken pieces, often incomplete. Yet also sparking a further drive toward exploration and revelation. To me, McPhee—master of analogy—is speaking only partly about geology and history, just as García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude is speaking only partly of the town of Macondo and the Buendiá family. When I read about McPhee's deep time I find myself excavating my own sedimentary layers. He wakes me up and shows me how to look backward and forward in a single glance.

The chapter ends with McPhee sharing a number of comments made to him by geologists over the years as he traversed so many terrains in their company. "In the company of geologists," he says, "the least effect of time is that they think in two languages, think in two different scales." He ends with a quote from one geologist who says, "If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then, in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever."

It may be a comment about deep time, about the geological time scale, but for me it's an apt description of how I often feel when I write, and why this essay by McPhee is so important to me. When I write, I feel disconnected from ordinary time, freed from the constraints of day-to-day life. I can be anywhere, anywhen. It's a freedom, both exhiliarating and frightening, that I don't experience under any other circumstances. And so the best answer to the question "why do you write?" I can give is this: when I write, I feel like I am living forever.

* Note: The others in McPhee's geology series are In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California—and for true desert island book convenience, the series has been collected in a single volume entitled Annals of the Former World.

How do they do that?

Last weekend my friend Lee Lofland was in town for the annual Willamette Writers Conference. As he does so well, he was sharing his knowledge and experience of police work in conference workshops. And he was also celebrating the release of his new book, Writer's Digest's Howdunit Police Procedure & Investigation: A Guide for Writers. My copy is sitting right next to me, and it will join those books which I keep on the shelf right next to my desk within easy reach.

I'm a big fan of the original Howdunit series, but Lee has really raised the bar with this book. It's a fabulous reference on procedure, and a wonderful new entry in the pantheon of crime writing reference. Lee covers everything from police training to arrest and search procedures to crime scene investigation and more. As reference, it's sure to be an invaluable addition to any crime writer's library.

But it's also an enjoyably and enlightening read. Spread throughout the book are anecdotes from Lee's time as a police officer and detective. Some of the stories are funny, others harrowing, still more deeply moving. Lee has had a long and varied law enforcement career and he really puts it all on the page. Not only do you get good, solid, and valuable information, but you get a feel for one cop's experience on the job.

I can't recommend this one enough!

Catching Up

It's been a while, I know. Summer appeared rather abruptly, offering its various distractions. Plus, I've been trying to catch up on my reading, which has been lovely, to be honest. I'm getting ready to head east for a week or so, first to visit family and then to travel to New York City for ThrillerFest, as well as a reading event at the New York Center for Independent Publishing.

The NYCIP event will be Wednesday, July 11. It's called LITERARY CAGE MATCH: WHO’S THE MOST CHILLING THRILLER WRITER: CHICAGO NEWSHOUND, NEW YORK EDITOR, OREGON ARTIST? I'm the Oregon Artist, and I'll be reading along with Jason Pinter and Shane Gericke, two writers you'll want to pay attention to if you haven't already. Jason's debut thriller, The Mark, just came out and it's terrific. Shane debuted with the award-winning Blown Away, and his new novel, Cut to the Bone, was just released to great reviews. Learn more about the event here.

At long last, I've last settled on the title for my second novel. It's to be Chasing Smoke. I've delivered the final draft to my agent, and she's doing the agenty stuff she does. Once I know something, I'll be sure to wave my arms and yell. You can read an early draft of chapter one here, though I have to admit the final draft is considerably different, having changed in the interim at least as many times as I changed the title.

For the record, the titles I've considered are, in chronological order: Death with Dignity, The Five Dead Men, Skin, Rat, Oblivion of Hummingbirds, Tin Man, and Smoking Women, before settling on Chasing Smoke. The two finalists were Oblivion of Hummingbirds and Chasing Smoke, and in some ways I like Oblivion a little better of the two. Both work thematically, but in the end I have a feeling Chasing Smoke will be more effective in the marketplace.

Meanwhile, I've begun work on my next novel, tentatively titled The Paths of the Dead—though heaven knows how many times it will change before it's through. It's still very much in the development stage, so I don't want to say very much about it. As in Chasing Smoke, Skin Kadash returns, but a number of new characters will join him, including a new antagonist who I think will make Jake of Lost Dog seem like an Eagle Scout.

That's all the news for now. I'll be posting from New York at InkSpot next Thursday, and at Killer year after I return from New York.

Running Wrecked

Phil Riley is running. Running from his past, and as Mark Combes' debut mystery Running Wrecked opens, running from his future as well. Six months ealier, Phil came to Isla Tortuga to run a dive shop and forget. He guides SCUBA, drinks beer as the sun sets while arguing philosophy with a friend, and enjoys the fresh catch of the day at his favorite restaurant.

So when Phil spots an abandoned sailboat adrift and tows it in to harbor, he's not looking for trouble. But trouble seems to have found him, in the form of an island police chief who seems strangely disinterested in the whereabouts of the boat's passengers and a mysterious visitor to the island who seems committed to keeping Phil from following up on his suspicions about the boat. When his dive master goes missing, Phil feels compelled to investigate -- the consequences of his efforts be damned.

Mark has written a lyrical, thoughtful mystery with plenty of gritty action. His character, Phil, is damaged by his past and controlled by his compulsions, yet evinces a striking nobility. This book is a beautifully written page-turner featuring a character you're going to want to know better even as you hope he can come to truly know himself. I loved this book, and can't wait to see more from Mark.