Jack Gatland’s Silver and the Christmas Caper – An Enjoyable Mystery

Silver and the Christmas Caper is the second in author Jack Gatland’s new series featuring Laura Carlyle and Sebastian Silver. You can read my review of the first book, Silver and Sunday Cypher here. They are both very enjoyable and interesting mysteries that feature an unusual hero: Sebastian Silver is a persona of Phillip Morris, a mild-mannered retired accountant from Boston. He has read about espionage and police detectives obsessively, and he has amassed an arsenal of tools and weapons. However, he can only use them when he assumes the personality of Sebastian Silver, and to do that, he must wear a trilby hat. When he is Silver, he becomes a brave, brilliant, and resourceful private investigator. Without his trilby, he reverts back to the shy and retiring Morris.

His partner in criminal investigation is Laura Carlyle, the widow of a highly placed British diplomat. Her social skills and general smarts complement Silver’s skill set perfectly. Rounding out the team is Laura’s college student grandson, Kyle, and her aunt, Celia. Celia does not suffer fools gladly, and she keeps everyone on an even keel.

Silver and the Christmas Caper begins with a cleaning woman, Dorothy Hartwell, in ancient St. Botolph’s church in the Cotswold village of Ashwood St. Botolph’s. It’s early morning, three days before the important Christmas Eve service, and Dorothy comes across a body at the foot of the stairs going down to the crypt. It’s the body of the church’s priest, Father Patrick. He is wearing a shabby overcoat, and his head is resting on a pile of hymnbooks.

His death is soon ruled an accident, but an extremely old and valuable pyx (an ornamental container for communion elements that priests used to take them to homebound parishioners) is missing. The pyx and other sacramental pieces belong to Lord Robert Sinclair and his wife, Lady Margaret. Lady Margaret hires Silver and Carlyle to recover the pyx for the Christmas Eve service, and when they begin their investigation they quickly realize that Father Patrick was most likely murdered.

They soon find themselves embroiled in a tangle of village politics and secrets going back centuries. Just before he died, Fr. Patrick had been researching the history of St. Botolph’s, and he had uncovered some interesting details about the Sinclair family’s traditional ownership of the religious treasures. The Sinclairs were deeded the land and the church’s possessions by Henry VIII during the Dissolution of the Roman Catholic monasteries.

The local expert on antiquities, Geoffrey Thornton, has also been researching old documents, and he is convinced that St. Botolph’s contains even more treasures that were hidden in it by Catholic priests to prevent Cromwell from confiscating them. Also, there appears to be a longstanding feud between the Sinclairs and the Hartwells (yes, the family of the cleaning woman) over who should have been chosen by Henry VIII to rule over Ashwood St. Botolph’s.

Throw in a corrupt local policeman, a new young village doctor with a complicated past, an ambitious young priest hoping to replace Fr. Patrick, as well as lots of gossipy villagers, and you have a very tangled web for Silver and Carlyle to unravel. Gatland does an great job keeping the reader in suspense right up to the final unveiling of the culprit. The device of Silver switching personalities with Morris is very clever, and his teammates take it in stride. In fact, Laura goes out of her way to give the shy and humble Morris credit when it’s deserved.

Gatland already has the third installment in this series ready to be released in April (he’s one of the most prolific authors I’ve ever come across!), and I can’t wait to see what Sebastian’s and Laura’s next adventure will be!

Geddy Lee’s My Effin’ Life: A Personal History of Rush

I have been a big fan of the progressive rock group Rush since the early ’80s when “The Spirit of Radio” was all over the radio. In fact, Permanent Waves is probably my favorite Rush album. I also enjoy reading musicians’ autobiographies and getting a “behind the scenes” look at how their music is created.

That said, Geddy Lee’s autobiography, My Effin’ Life, is somewhat of a disappointment. Lee is the bassist and vocalist of Rush; he and guitarist (and lifelong best friend) Alex Lifeson wrote almost all of the music to their vast catalog. Drummer Neil Peart was their lyricist. My Effin’ Life weighs in at a hefty 536 pages (the draft was allegedly 1200 pages!), and I was hoping to learn about the genesis of such classic songs as “Natural Science”, “Tom Sawyer”, and “The Big Money” among many others. Lee comes up short on the working details of how they composed their songs, but he doesn’t stint on describing how much and how often they all consumed drugs!

Beginning with smoking pot in his early teens, Lee was soon experimenting with psychedelics and hash. He dropped out of high school to pursue his dream of being in a successful rock band, and I have to give him credit for being true to that dream. He sacrificed everything and worked his butt off to reach it. Their touring schedule for the first couple of decades of their career was brutal. It’s not surprising that they chose to alleviate the grind of being constantly on the road by using all kinds of drugs, but Lee never seems to outgrow them.

One of the best chapters in the book is the third one, where he documents how his parents survived the Nazi Holocaust and were able to emigrate to Canada. It truly was miraculous that his mother and father were able to meet and survive the horrors of living in various Nazi concentration camps. His mother would tell Geddy and his sister and brother all the terrible things she endured before the British army liberated her and her mother. Her experience had a huge influence on young Geddy. His father died young of a heart attack, because of damage he sustained in the slave labor camps. He was incarcerated in seven different camps, and he managed to survive them and find Geddy’s mother, whom he had met early in the war. They were married at Bergen-Belsen soon after liberation. In the ’90s, Geddy, his siblings, and his mother went to Europe to revisit the camps and her hometown in Poland. Apparently, it was an uplifting experience for her, as she was able to put to rest some of the demons that had haunted her.

The rest of the book is about Geddy’s career in music. In junior high, he met Alex Lifeson, and they were inseparable. They definitely paid their dues, playing in real dives all over Canada. They recorded their debut album, which was going nowhere until WMMS in Cleveland started playing “Working Man”. The song was getting tons of requests, and they managed to get a real record deal with Mercury Records. The rest, as they say, is history. With some ups and downs along the way, they toured constantly and steadily grew their audience, until they became one of the most popular bands in the world.

To his credit, Lee married his high school sweetheart, and, despite some understandable rough patches, has stayed married to her. Alex as well has stayed married to his wife. Lee shares lots of very funny stories of life on the road with various bands like Kiss, UFO, and Styx. He also includes many photos from early childhood through to the present. It’s actually quite impressive he is able to remember so many details of his career given the amount to drugs and alcohol he consumed!

The last couple of chapters are the most difficult, as Lee relates the tragedy of Neil Peart losing his daughter in a car accident and his wife to cancer just ten months later. Even though Lee, Lifeson, and Peart worked together for decades, it’s fairly clear that Peart was never as close to Lee and Lifeson as they are to each other. He was a voracious reader, using all of his downtime during touring to read sci fi, fantasy, and philosophy. Whatever he read ended up influencing his lyrics.

And, of course, Lee shares how they dealt with Neil’s final three years, after he found out he had a brain tumor. He and Alex visited him as much as they could and kept his spirits up.

For those three years, Lerxst [Lifeson] and I stayed in regular contact and visited whenever possible, sometimes on our own and sometimes together, the latter being the best option as the three of us automatically fell into our nonsensical ways. Our job was to tell Neil stories and make him laugh; that’s all that mattered. (Page 493)

Through all the partying and single-minded drive to succeed, Lee comes across as a genuinely nice guy. He devotes several pages explaining how he tries to be open and gracious to fans when they approach him for autographs. He goes out of his way to let the road crew know how much he appreciates their work. He must be telling the truth, because quite a few of the crew stay with Rush for decades. He’s also humble, never quite believing he’s earned all the adulation he’s gotten. He’s one of the greatest bassists in the history of rock music, but he would never put himself on a par with Paul McCartney or John Entwhistle.

I wish Lee spent some time discussing the band’s relationship to their long-time album cover artist, Hugh Syme. He came up with some of the most eye-catching and interesting album covers back when vinyl LPs provided a fairly large canvas. Surprisingly, there is no mention of Syme’s collaboration with them.

A Selection of Hugh Syme Artwork for Rush

Overall, though, My Effin’ Life is a good read, as rock biographies go. Lee is literate, entertaining, and has a good memory. If you’re a Rush fan, you’ll want to get it. If you’re not, then there’s not much reason to spend any time on it. Kind of like their music!