Alan (the Lone Librarian rides again) Teder > Recent Status Updates

She thought of faces as being either softly moulded or carved. His was carved. It was a handsome authoritative face and the dark eyes that looked into hers were kindly. He had an attractive voice, and voices had always been important to her. And then she remembered Muriel’s words. The police believe nothing, that’s the way they’re trained to think.

The iron contained in the Kaali meteorite, about 450 tonnes, was of immense value, totalling more than the entire world's annual iron production. We might assume that attitudes towards Saaremaa changed with the dawn of the Iron Age: notions of terror and catastrophe were complemented with fairy tale-like themes of wealth, ultimately blending and overwhelming the earlier reputation.

Another of my stuffed animals was a giraffe, covered with strange pink wartime oilcloth. Why was his name Squirrely? Search me. During a motorboat trip, Squirrely went overboard ... But the next spring, there was Squirrely, floating in the lake and not much the worse for his ordeal.
Narratives could change. Disasters could be reversed. Redemption was possible. The dead could live again. Miracles could happen.

He had no great interest in technology, requiring only that it should work efficiently. If a machine broke down he replaced it with a different model since money was less important than saving time and avoiding the frustration of argument. The telephone he hated. It was in the hall and he seldom answered it, preferring to listen to the recorded messages every evening.

From all quarters of the capital the petitioners, carrying icons and singing hymns, set off marching through the snow, late on a January morning, to see their ‘little father, the Tsar’. At every cross-road armed ambushes were waiting for them. The soldiers machine-gunned them down and the Cossacks charged them. ‘Treat them like rebels’ had been the Emperor’s command.

Every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives and the one who writes. Every question and answer session at a book event is an illusion. It's the one doing the living, not the one doing the writing who is present on such occasions. How could the writer be there, since no writing is being done at that moment? Like Jekyll and Hyde ...

[from the Introduction, actually page xix]

You were such a sensitive child!
- My Mother
But I'm quite flinty now.
- Me
Yes. You are.
- My Daughter
One of these days that smart mouth of yours is going to get you in trouble.
- My father, when I was a teenager

[from the epigraph, actually page ix]

“You have, Commander, something of the air of a man who feels that he is at last making progress. Some might say, About time. Let us hope it doesn’t all end in the Slough of Despond.”

She said, “I had a boyfriend, a librarian who tried to get me to enjoy Henry James. By the time I’d got to the end of a sentence I’d forgotten how it began. Remember that criticism, some writers bite off more than they can chew; Henry James chews more than he’s bitten off?”

[literary criticism from Detective Inspector Kate Miskin]

Six lines of verse came into his mind and he took a page of paper, ripped it in half and wrote them down:

Epitaph for a Dead Poet
Buried at last who was so wise,
Six foot by three in clay he lies.
Where no hands reach, where no lips move,
Where no voice importunes his love.
How odd he cannot know nor see
This last fine self-sufficiency.

I suppose even Dalgliesh doesn’t seriously suspect any of our fathers-in-God, although he’s probably keeping them in mind, particularly if he remembers his Pascal. ‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.’

Baltic Finns’ relationship to snakes is conspicuously contradictory and does not seem to fit the global myths in which a snake represents evil, downfall, and death. Instead, Baltic-Finnic folklore reveals a friendly and tenderly caring attitude towards the reptiles. Snake worship persisted in Estonia until the 20th century,

The thought sparked off another, even more disgracefully irreverent thought. What would Lady Macbeth have said to Duncan’s widow had that lady come to Inverness Castle to view the body? “A deplorable affair, madam, which my husband and I deeply regret. It was a most successful visit until then. We did all we could to make His Majesty comfortable.”

there came to him a conviction that was as powerful as it was seemingly irrational: that the three deaths were connected. The apparent suicide, the certified natural death, the brutal murder—there was a cord which connected them. Its strength might be tenuous and its path convoluted, but when he had traced it, it would lead him to the heart of the mystery.

“Who hath done this thing?” He would discover the answer, and when he did, this time he would also find the proof, this time he would not close the file knowing the identity of the culprit, the motive and the means, but powerless to make an arrest. The burden of that past failure was still heavy upon him, but with this case it would at last be lifted.

Beside them was a row of paperback detective stories. Dalgliesh saw that Father John was addicted to the women writers of the Golden Age: Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh.

Was part of the attraction of his job the illusion it gave that death was a mystery that could be solved, and that with the solution all the unruly passions of life, all doubts and all fears, could be folded away like a garment?

Dalgliesh reflected that to have a suspect taking an active part in the investigation was a novelty he could well dispense with. The situation would need careful handling.

Years of working as a detective had inured his body to the discomforts of a variety of couches and, provided he had a bedside light or a torch for the brief period of reading which was necessary for him before sleep came, his mind could usually let go of the day as easily as did his tired limbs.

Raphael started to read. He said, as if announcing a lesson in church, “This is the first chapter of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers.” It was a work with which Emma, who liked Victorian novels, was familiar, but she wondered why Raphael had chosen it. Ordinands did occasionally read from a novel, but it was more usual to choose a passage.

The other was a woman. Hearing his footsteps, she turned towards him and as he reached his door their eyes met and for a second held as if in mutual amazement. The light fell on a face of grave and astounding beauty, and he experienced an emotion that now came rarely, a physical jolt of astonishment and affirmation.

There are in this sea many other islands, of which a large one is called Estland […]. Its people, too, are utterly ignorant of the God of the Christians. They adore dragons and birds and also sacrifice to them live men. (Adam of Bremen, 1073–6)

Not from the book itself, but is a similar image of the Kaali Crater in Estonia viewed from above as seen on the book cover, although with a different orientation.

The Kaali impact event is Europe’s largest and only; the Saidmarreh landslide is unique and the greatest to have happened globally. The Kaali catastrophe took place in a well-populated area during the Bronze Age; the Saidmarreh catastrophe took place in an area that was likewise well-populated, 11,400 years ago during the Stone Age.

People of the time equated the meteorite’s collision to the sun collapsing onto the earth, then Pytheas’s reason for visiting Saaremaa could have been, and likely was, the Kaali phenomenon.

In the first edition of this work, I presented my belief that the impetus for Pytheas’s travels was the Kaali impact event on the island of Saaremaa. True, it did take place two hundred years or more before Pytheas’s expedition. ... I present proof that Pytheas visited Saaremaa, as well as the premise that the reason behind his visit was a mythological and folkloric ripple caused by the Kaali impact event.

It was difficult to believe that the boyish hand which had moved over this quarter-sheet of paper was the same as the hand that now held it. He read the lines silently.

The Bereaved
“Another lovely day,” you said in passing,
Dull-voiced, and moved unseeing down the street.
You didn’t say, “Please wrap your jacket round me,
Outside the sun, inside the killing sleet.”

“You wrote this?”
“Yes. It’s for you. A poem.”
“No it isn’t. It doesn’t rhyme. A boy in our class—Billy Price—writes poems. They always rhyme.”
He said indignantly, “It’s a different kind of poem.”
“No it isn’t. If it’s a poem the words at the end of the lines have to rhyme. Billy Price says so.”
... So much, he thought, for poetry’s famed erotic power.

[Flashback to the teenage Adam Dalgliesh and first love.]