I am politically correct.
I take pride in the fact that for my entire adult lifetime I have tried, very hard and not always successfully, to realize that the words I choose to use have the power to diminish others, to make them less than, or different from, me. And I do this because I truly believe that deep down we share a common humanity. We all bleed and cry and laugh and sigh and love. What differences we share don't change the essential commonality of the human experience.
I am what Rush Limbaugh would call a feminazi (although i am not sure how to spell it). When I was in my twenties, back in the 70s, I corrected my boss (a Berkeley grad, no less) when he referred to a courier as a "girl," suggesting that he would not call a black man a "boy," because to do so would be to suggest that he was of less value than a fully grown adult male.
When reading fiction I tend to turn down my politically correct sensibilities for the sake of the story. So many novels reflect the era or the culture in which they are written, that it is essential that they be read on their own terms. So when I have to stop reading a book due to its misogynism, I must find it truly offensive.
Amazon frequently puts certain ebooks on sale for limited periods of time. I scour their sales bins, as I do at Barnes & Noble, looking for a bargain on a book. When I found a mystery set in Poland, I immediately downloaded it.
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We visited Gdansk one spring morning some years ago. It was only a day trip, but I was stunned by the beauty of this city that was once known as Danzig. The old town, which was destroyed by Allied bombs during WWII, has been rebuilt to reflect the heritage of the seaport that was once part of the Hanseatic League.
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It was one of my favorite stops and fondest memories. It was such a surprise to see so much color in a city that I had only seen in black and white news photos of the Solidarity Movement decades earlier.
Coming from Chicago, I grew up surrounded by the music, culture and food of the Polish immigrants. I even know how to pronounce the names that seem to consist of so many consonants from the last half of the alphabet.
I was ready for a literary visit to this land with its tumultuous past and promising future when I downloaded A Grain of Truth (Polish State Prosecutor Szacki Investigates) by Zygmunt Miloszewski (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones). But, after only 38 pages I found I could no longer continue. This was the passage that finally did it for me:
The door slammed. Szacki turned round, adding the thought that he also had a partner who had made PMT into a way of life. He automatically adopted his cold, professional prosecutor’s mask as he watched the principled pussy, Basia Sobieraj, approach him with a folder in her hand.
“This has just arrived. We should look at it.”
He pointed to the sofa (that’s right, he had a sofa in his office) and they sat down next to each other. He glanced at her bust, but couldn’t see anything interesting there because it was shrouded in a completely asexual black polo neck.
The first woman to appear in the book is a woman with whom Szack is in bed, having invited her to his apartment. It has been so long since I have heard a woman who enjoys sex called a "nymphomaniac" that I was kind of surprised and chalked it up to cultural differences when the protagonist refers to his bedmate with that term. Her sin was to want to have sex with him twice in one night, earning his contempt.
But as I continued, I realized that every woman that enters the story is treated to similar contempt. Every time she appears or reappears in a scene. Even women who are not in the scenes are treated this way:
Prosecutor Teodor Szacki had no luck with his bosses. The last one had been a technocratic bitch, as cold and attractive as a corpse dug out from under snow. Many a time, as he had sat in her office absorbing smoke and putting up with a person totally devoid of femininity trying to make a feminine impression on him, he had wondered if he could possibly do worse. Not long after, malevolent fate had answered that question.
Our differences are highlighted by the fact that he calls it "malevolent fate'" while I know it as karma.
The irony is that this is supposed to be a book that explores the Christian/Jewish current and historic relationship. One reviewer wrote:
Teodor Szacki makes an interesting detective, mercurial and quick-thinking, with little tolerance for stupidity or prejudice.
Apparently the prejudice referred to is only that against Jews.
NPR seems to like the book, and
Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review.
Which makes me wonder if I may someday be able to hold my nose and push through the first chapter and find what others have enjoyed about this novel. It sits on my kindle and offers the possibility. Maybe. Someday.
Meanwhile, I found another new, to me, author of police procedurals in a different foreign land. Although I have spent so much fictional time in Great Britain that it hardly feels different or foreign anymore. This series features an interesting new Detective Sergeant that I can't help but think of as a Dudley Do-Right.
And one of my best friends is a twenty-plus year veteran law enforcement officer whose past also includes an incident guaranteed to put him at odds with future bosses. My friend is a man of the same moral integrity as the hero of Mark's novels. There are no shades of grey in their moral worldview, only the black and white of right and wrong. They just don't even think about doing something underhanded. Until they have done something underhanded.
David Mark does a wonderful job of creating a living city for his characters to function in. Much like Ian Rankin's Edinburgh, or Peter James' Brighton, Mark's Hull is fully developed. A trawler port whose fishing industry has died, Hull is visibly deteriorating and is “on the bones of its arse.”
In The Dark Winter, we are introduced to Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy, a large burly Scot serving in the Serious and Organized Crime unit of the police department. Two weeks before Christmas he is enjoying an afternoon with his young son in Hull's Old Town shopping district when he hears screams from the nearby historical church. Racing to help, he abandons his son in the cafe where they had been sipping hot chocolate. The conflict he feels between his need to be a policeman and a father is very real.
The screams are a result of the stabbing death of a young girl, in the church during a service. Soon, other deaths occur in the Hull area, all of the victims sharing the common fact that they each were the sole survivor of some past tragedy. Who would know this about these individuals?
His colleagues, who distrust him for an earlier incident involving a much liked rogue cop that left McAvoy as the sole survivor, settle early on a suspect, not caring enough to look further into the case. But, with an admirable doggedness, McAvoy continues searching for someone who could have done all of the murders.
There were times when I was sure I knew who dun it, long before I should have, only to find some reason to eliminate every suspect until the very end. But the mystery is secondary in this first entry to what I hope will become a long-lived series. The city and the main characters are what prompted me to read the second entry, The Original Skin. In The Original Skin, the promise of the debut is redeemed.
Aector McAvoy is deeply in love with his almost perfect wife, who was a Traveler, and now a stay at home mom with a son and a daughter. The Travelers play a bit of a role in
The Original Skin which is about Vietnamese cannabis growers in Hull being forced out by an ominous new gang, and the apparent suicide of a young gay man with a peacock tattoo on his back.
Since the incredible (as in WTF?) success of Fifty Shades of Grey, BDSM has gone mainstream and the hookups arranged via the internet are an important part of this story. Fortunately, not only is Mark David a far better writer than E.L. James, (low bar, I know) he presents a view of the sexual activity, for the most part, in a non-salacious, almost clinical manner. At least, that is how it struck me. Far more interesting than the sexual activity was the motivation for participation in the sexual activity. Into what dark alleys did the thrill seeking behavior lead, and what price could it carry?
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