What Theophrastus has to say about bad behavior

Theophrastus, a Greek philosopher and pupil of Aristotle, was born around 372 BC, died around 287. When Aristotle was forced to retire from Athens in 323, Theophrastus became the head of the Lyceum, the academy Aristotle had founded. Under Theophrastus the enrollment of pupils and auditors rose to its highest point. 

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Theophrastus was one of the few Peripatetic philosophers who fully embraced Aristotle’s metaphysics, physics, physiology, zoology, botany, ethics, politics, and history of culture. "His general tendency was to strengthen the systematic unity of those subjects and to reduce the transcendental or Platonic elements of Aristotelianism as a whole." He was a prolific writer and his works, many lost, include Inquiry into Plants, Growth of Plants and treatises attributed to him on fire, winds, signs of weather, scents, sensations, and other subjects. His Charaktēres, written around 320 BC, consists of thirty "brief and vigorous character sketches delineating moral types derived from studies that Aristotle had made for ethical and rhetorical purposes."

Pamela Mensch, a translator of ancient Greek literature, has now produced her version of Theophrastus's Characters: An Ancient Take on Bad Behavior. These include the Dissembler, Flatterer, Yokel, Sycophant, Newshound, Miser, Busybody, Vulgar Man, Social Climber, Coward, and twenty more.

Theophrastus's observations are—with small adaptions—as appropriate today as they were 2,300 years ago: "The Talker is the sort who plumps himself down next to someone he doesn't know and starts praising his own wife; he goes on to describe the dream he had the night before, and then relates in detail what he had for dinner,"

"The Busybody is the sort who stands up and promises what he can't deliver. In court when it's agreed that his argument is just, he overdoes it and loses his case."

The Complainer grumbles at Zeus not because it's rraining
but because it didn't rain sooner

"The Shameless Man is the sort who, after shortchanging someone, goes back to ask him for a loan."

"The Tactless Man is the sort who comes to solicit advice from someone who's busy. He serenades his sweetheart when she's down with a fever. He approaches a man who's just had to forfeit bail money and asks him to post bail for him."

The book includes a useful Introduction and endnotes by James Romm, professor of classics at Bard College, that puts the author into an historic context. Romm points out that unlike every other ancient Greek author whose work survives, Theophrastus observes the Athenians' "food, their clothes, their purchases, the decor of their homes. He notices objects we never hear of elsewhere, like the spurs worn by the Social Climber to show he's wealthy enough to ride in the cavalry . . . ."

Aside from Theophrastus's delightful comments, the book is a lovely object to hold, a delight of book design by Don Quaintance. And it includes apt illustrations of each character by Andre Carrilho, a designer, illustrator, and caricaturist from Lisbon. Characters would make a splendid gift for the right person. (I wouldn't give it to someone who will see herself in it.) It would make a good gift for oneself if only to remind yourself what you don't want to be.

Why you should visit Dukla, the town and the book

Dukla is a small town in southeastern Poland on the Jasiolka river at the foot of Cergowa mountain. It has a population of about 2,200 people, a 17th century town hall, the ruins of a 1758 synagogue, the ruins of a 16th century border tax office, the ruins of a brewery. In 1944, the Battle of the Dukla Pass left 90 percent of the town in ruins. In 1997, Pope John Paul II visited and in his sermon mentioned John of Dukla, one of the patron saints of Poland and Lithuania.

Dukla by Andrzej Stasuik is a remarkable work of literature. It is memoir, travelogue, nature writing, reportage and ethnography. It contains a short essay, a novella, and a series of brief portraits of local people or events. It was translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston, my workshop leader in a translation conference, and that connection led me to it. Stasiuk is well-known in Poland and has won the NIKE, the country's most prestigious literary prize for his collection of essays On the Road to Babadag. That book and four others of Stasuik are also available in English.

In Dikla, Stasuik says, "I always wanted to write a book about light. I never could find anything else more reminiscent of eternity. I never was able to imagine things that don't exist. That always seemed a waste of time to me, just like the stubborn search for the Unknown, which only ever ends up looking like an assemblage of old, familiar things in slightly souped-up form. Events and objects either come to an end, or perish, or collapse under their own weight, and if I observe them and describe them it's only because they refract the brightness, shape it, and give it a form that we're capable of comprehending."

As a writer, I've felt sometimes my weakness—inability perhaps—in describing the physical world. It is easy (relatively) to write dialogue, to explicate ideas, to write useful abstractions. It's not so easy to find the words that convey a vivid sense of place. Stasuik (and Johnston) seem to do it with ease:

"The shadows of early morning lie upon the earth as if the wind were blurring them. They're black yet hazy, because the dew atomizes the light and refracts it back at the edges. Even in the middle, the black is far from distinct—it rather resembles a reflection. Beyond Dynów the San touches up against the road with its crooked elbow. We have to flip down the visor, because the sun is shining directly in our eyes. It hangs there just above the road. The blacktop is peeling like old gilding. The river down below has the color of a mirror in an unlit room . . ."

In his Introduction, Johnston suggests that Dukla is "a languid prose poem." Perhaps. But few of the prose poems I've read are as engaging. Stasuik is not playing with language for the sake of language. He's not trying to create a beautiful, if impractical, object like a Christmas ornament. He's trying, I believe, to do what he says, to write about light, but also tom write about "things and places no one else thinks worthy of writing about," says Johnston. "Polish literature has preponderantly been urban in character; writing set in the countryside has traditionally involved country estates, and has concerned above all the life of the gentry. What goes on in the small towns and villages has . . . been overlooked."

The book includes a section describing the Pope's visit to town, but Stasuik says almost nothing about the Pope or the pomp. Rather, "I walk about and watch people. They all look like my grandfather, my grandmother, my mother my father, like all the people I've known and seen in my life. Their shoes pinch, they limp, they sweat in their wrinkle-proof outfits, and examine the goods for sale at the stalls, medallions, white busts, color prints, canvas beach chairs for four fifty; they sniff at the food on the grills, chicken breasts, sausage, bacon, dark glistening blood pudding. From time to time the sun comes out and captures their silhouettes in misty aureoles. Busy with their ice creams, Pepsis, mineral water, and children, they fail to notice this indifferent caress. . . "

I'm afraid that the bulk of this review is quotation from Stasuik and Johnston. I had to restrain myself or there would have been more. How else to convey the book's flavor? I can say it's a remarkable work of literature (and I did), I can urge you to find it and read it (and I do), but without the extended quotations I don't know how to let you know about it. I feel fortunate that circumstances conspired to lead me to it. It enriched my life.

Meet Mattie Cobb, Timber Creek's K-9 cop

Killing Trail is Margaret Mizushima's first Timber Creek K-9 mystery. I wanted to read it because I enjoyed the fourth in the series, Burning Ridge. In Killing Trail we are introduced to Deputy Mattie Cobb who has just completed twelve weeks of training with Robo, the county's new police service dog. We meet Cole Walker, Timber Creek's only veterinarian, whose wife has left him and their two daughters. We meet the town's sheriff, Abraham McCoy, and another deputy, Brody, who resents Mattie because she beat him in the competition to become the town's K-9 officer. We also meet Detective Stella LoSasso who is called in from the county seat to take charge of the investigation of the crime and who, by book four, is living in Timber Creek.

Asked about her writing, Mizushima said in an interview, "Initially, I wrote mainstream, and then historical romance. I placed in a few contests but didn't get published. Switching to mystery came from my love of crime documentaries and crime fiction, as well as a little push from a friend."

In the same interview, she advises aspiring or beginning writers "to attend writing conferences where you will learn about writing craft and the publishing business. I met both my agent and editor at writing conferences; that personal introduction will get you much further than a query letter or a slush pile submission."

I suspect she also learned that a mystery series is more likely to be published than a single book, that it is best to have a spunky detective with an original or unusual partner, that a mystery needs complexity but not too much, and that it doesn't hurt to have the heroine rush into danger in the last fifth of the book.

Killing Trail begins when a forest ranger finds fresh blood on the porch of an empty cabin in the national forest outside of town . . . and Robo sniffs out the body the blood came from buried in the wilderness.

Although Mizushima is writing from the inside—she grew up on a cattle ranch in the Colorado high country and Timber Creek is a composite of several small Colorado towns—and although it took her three years to write Killing Trail, she was still finding her way in this book. The mystery is not very mysterious (experienced readers will have identified the villain by the middle) and Robo has more personality than Mattie.

Mizushima has given Mattie troubled childhood: an abused mother who disappeared when Mattie and her (now estranged) brother were small, an imprisoned father who was killed in prison, a foster home with a loving, if overworked, Hispanic woman. Mattie's been a deputy for seven years (she seems to be about thirty years old), but she seems to have no life beyond police work. Cole Walker is a potential love interest, one that is still developing by book four.

Nevertheless, Killing Trail is a creditable first effort. Robo is not a prop but an active and important character in the book. Cole's veterinary skill has consequences. And the book is good enough to justify three more installments.

Who all is buried high on Redstone Ridge?

Burning Ridge is Margaret Mizushima's fourth Timber Creek K-9 mystery and the first I've read. It's a police procedural with an interesting cop—Sheriff's Deputy Mattie Cobb and her German shepherd K-9 partner Robo who work out of small Colorado town. Mattie is romantically involved with the widowed local veterinarian Cole Walker, and the narrative shifts from Mattie to Cole and back, sometimes in the same chapter.

The action commences when Cole takes his two daughters riding into the mountains to show them some bighorn mountain sheep before he and a crew from Colorado Parks and Wildlife relocate them to another area. Redstone Ridge is high enough and remote enough it can be reached only on horseback. The outing turns grim when the family's Doberman pinscher who has been ranging off the trail returns with a charred boot that contains a foot and leg bone.

When Mattie and Robo, Cole, and Sheriff McCoy and his team return to the area, Robo sniffs out a shallow grave in which a body has been partially cremated. We learn almost immediately that Mattie has a close personal connection to the dead man. The legal team also discovers three similar graves, two adults and a child—but these are thirty years old. What's the connection? Is there a connection?

According to the book's publicist, "Mizushima lives in Colorado where she assists her husband with their veterinary practice and Angus cattle herd." In other words, she's writing from the inside. She knows the landscape, she knows how to treat of animals, and has picked up enough about police dog handling to write convincingly about it. For example:

      Mattie opened her pack, removed Robo's collapsible bowl, and filled it with water from her own drinking supply. He'd drunk freely from streams on the way up, but she wanted him to moisten his mucus membranes now to enhance his scenting ability, Besides, it was a valuable part of their routine.
     After he lapped at the liquid, she took off his collar and put on his tracking harness, his signal that it was time to search. Robo assumed his all-business face, adopting a serious attitude for the first time on this outing instead of acting like he was along for a picnic.
     "Robo, heel." Taking the ice chest [containing the charred boot and leg] with her, she led him a short distance from the rest of the group and began to tousle his fir and pat his sides. She used the high-pitched chatter meant to rev up his prey drive. "Robo, are you ready to work? Are you? Let's find something . . . ."

Timber Creek, Colorado, is a small town. Mattie has lived there all her life. Everyone knows everyone not by six degrees of separation but by two. How much mystery can there be?

Burning Ridge plausibly implies there's a lot. Rough men pass through town on their way elsewhere. Strangers move into town to make a new start. Men abuse women. Parents mistreat children. There's enough work to occupy the Sheriff, his deputies, the detective (and Mattie's friend) Stella LoSasso, the Parks and Wildlife manager, and state resources in Denver.

All of which is to say that Burning Ridge is engaging (and rewarding) because Mattie and Cole are not isolates; they are embedded in a recognizable social fabric and what they do—or don't do—seems reasonable based on who they are and where they are. Burning Ridge is interesting enough that I'm going to look up Mizushima's first in the series, Killing Trail, and will report back. Stay tuned.

How to go from premed to Paris detective

I would like to write about Cara Black's Murder on the Quai in such a way that it does not discourage mystery readers from picking up the book, which is a creditable effort, but also explains why I have difficulties with certain mysteries.

Murder on the Quai is Black's sixteenth Murder on the . . . series. It stars Aimée Leduc. This book, series readers tell me, is Aimée's backstory, how she evolved from medical student to private detective. Her father runs a private detective agency and he leaves Paris early in the story to go to Berlin where the Wall has just fallen. He wants to obtain certain files before the Stassi can destroy them. This subplot involves Aimée's mother who abandoned the family when Aimee was about three years old, and its resolution is, I presume, saved for another book.

In this one, the first chapter takes place in November 1989 Paris. An elderly rich man is murdered gangland style on—where else?—the quai after an expensive dinner with three rich friends. "You remember, don't you? It's your turn now," the killer tells the man just before he puts a bullet into the back of the man's head. The police have no leads and the man's daughter, Elsie, comes to Aimée's father for help. In a believable series of events, the father takes off for Berlin and Aimée takes over to investigate the one lead Elsie can offer.

Switch to Chambly-sur-Cher, November 1942, a dark and stormy midnight. The Cher river is rising. Villagers are pilling sandbags to prevent the water from flooding their fields. British planes have been bombing the railway line in Occupied France right across the river. Enter a German troop truck, lost on the Vichy side of the river. They want the French farmers to use their horse cart to pull the truck out of the mud. There are only five soldiers and one of the French young hotheads makes a move and before they know it there are four dead Germans, one missing in the river, and a truck with an interesting cargo.

Aimée, who spent much of her childhood following her detective father around and hanging out with her retired police detective grandfather, sets off to help Elsie as best she can. Which is pretty good. She is determined, intelligent, and a good liar when she has to be. It spoils nothing to tell you that there's another murder on the quai, the same M.O., and the new victim was one of the four wealthy men who'd had dinner together before the first killing. By the end of the book Aimée has assembled all the pieces into a coherent picture. 

If this is the sort of mystery that engages you—a spunky young detective, a foreign setting, past events with contemporary consequences—then you should read Murder on the Quai. It held my interest all the way through. So if that's what you like, stop reading this right now!

Because I've decided this kind of mystery—and it's not alone—is a kind of fairy tale. It doesn't tell us how the real world works, which police procedurals tend to do. It invents a serial killer who leads a law-abiding, unexceptionable life who nurses a murderous streak for years. I'm not willing to suspend my disbelief. I believe that in the real world virtually all murder is unintentional or accidental and fueled by anger or drink or both, or it has a single target—the ex-wife, the unsympathetic boss. Finally, I prefer a book where the author is writing from the inside rather than from research (unless, of course, you can't tell the difference, which does happen). 

Black "lives in San Francisco . . . and visits Paris frequently." I do not know Paris at all, and I am sure that she has correctly identified every street, every building, and every landmark. "A short walk under the bare-branched trees on the brightly lit Champs-Élysées, then right past the tiny art cinema, Le Balzac, one of her premed Friday night haunts; down narrow, winding rue Lord Byron, named for the poet who, according to her grand-pére, had never set foot here." I do not question the accuracy of this or other sentences like it throughout the book. But for some reason it sounds like research, not lived experience and I cannot tell you why. And I only noticed toward the end of the book when Aimée is running out of pages and I wanted to know what happened.

On the other hand, Val McDermid is quoted on the back cover, "So authentic you can practically smell the fresh baguettes and coffee." You should probably go with McDermid.