Curling with the Devil (Mitchell, The Black Bonspiel of Willie McCrimmon)

 W. O. Mitchell. The Black Bonspiel of Willie MacCrimmon. (1993) Mitchell’s version of a folk-tale trope: the defeat of the Devil. “Mr Cloutie”, on one of his regular visits to Shelby, Alberta, needs his curling boots repaired. Willie MacCrimmon obliges, one thing leads to another, and he’s pledged his soul if he loses a match against Mr Cloutie and his hellish rink, but gets a guaranteed slot at the Brier if he wins. Mrs Brown, wife of one of MacCrimmon’s rink, opposes curling on Sunday, and has guilted Mr Pringle, the United Church minister, into announcing the prohibition from his pulpit. That and several other obstacles must be overcome, but of course MacCrimmon’s rink wins, and they advance to the Brier. All’s well that ends well, as in any well-made fable it should.

Mitchell’s ability to puncture hypocrisy, show up the confusion of respectability with morality, and other sins makes this more than a mere entertainment. It also affirms, rightly, that curling is the true Canadian game. This edition has nicely apposite illustrations by Wesley W. Bates.

Recommended, if you can find a copy (I’m keeping mine). ****

The Pegnitz Junction (Gallant, 1982)

Mavis Gallant. The Pegnitz Junction. (1982) The title novella plus five short stories, all about post-war Germany. They have the ring of truth; Gallant knows herself, and so knows the human heart and mind. She notes the small gestures, the shifts in voice and posture that express emotions and hint at thoughts, the conventional speech that hides true feelings. She is a writer “on whom nothing is lost”. She has a subtle and ruthless moral sensibility, presenting us with characters who condemn themselves with their words and actions.

Post-war Germany was unmoored, aware of but unwilling to face its past, unable to do more than reconstruct a material prosperity that served as a shield against unpleasant thoughts and memories. Austria also was mired in this moral vagueness and ambiguity. That’s likely why I found these stories strangely familiar and unsurprising.

An early collection, before Gallant’s skill and artistry were widely recognised. Recommended. ****

The Defiant Agents (Norton, 1962)

Andre Norton. The Defiant Agents. (1962) From the back-cover blurb: “Travis Fox, once the unwilling captive of the run-away spaceship Galactic Derelict, has volunteered - eagerly - for the mission to colonize Topaz....” Some kind of mind-alteration reverts the colonists to their Apache ancestry. A similar technique has reverted a rival group of Russians to their Mongol ancestry, and so we have a conflict. The Russians are also subject to vicious mind-control which makes them robot-like slaves to their (unchanged) Russian masters. The assumption that far future space travel would be dominated by the rival USA and USSR demonstrates the common argument that5 SF is about the present. The mind-altering  element recalls the Cold War fear of "brain washing".

There are also mysterious ruins left behind by previous occupants of the planet. This subplot is scanted, I think because pulp publishers wanted short books.

Norton has worked out most of the glitches in this set-up, and provides a typical mid-century pulp entertainment, weak on character and ambience, but strong on plot. It reads like a magazine serial. A pleasant entertainment for SF fans, this is an early work. Norton became one of the masters. **

Q is for Quarry (Grafton 2002)

 Sue Grafton. Q is for Quarry. (2002) Two retired detectives ask Kinsey to help them solve a cold case. They can flash their badges, and call in favours from old colleagues and have new evidence processed, but Kinsey can get unforced and therefore likely more truthful evidence from the people who may be involved.

About twenty years earlier, an unidentified girl’s body was found at the edge of a quarry. The task seems simple: find out who she was, and the murderer should be easy to find.

The quarry happens to be on land belonging to Kinsey’s family; the subplot of her still unwilling response to her relatives’ fence-mending attempts isn’t needed to make a good story, but Grafton’s fans want to know more about Kinsey, and Grafton (and her publisher) are happy to oblige.

A well done puzzle. The basic facts are real: there really was an unknown girl found near Santa Barbara. Grafton’s solution is ingenious, plausible, and entirely fictional. Wikipedia has the current status of the still unsolved cold case.

Recommended. ***