CHARLES PORTIS: THE TELEGRAPH OBITUARY

My obituary of Charles Portis is in today's Daily Telegraph; it's also up online, and you can link to it here, though it is behind a paywall. There is no byline on Telegraph obits, and though what appears is pretty much what I wrote, for reasons of space a lot of detail was cut. And there was at least one reference that was not mine: when it calls the first movie of True Grit "corny". It may feature John Wayne having fun with himself, and some overly severe acting, but even in state it is too dark to be called corny. So here is what I originally filed, and I am grateful to the paper for sticking with Portis and eventually finding him some space....

 CHARLES PORTIS, novelist

Charles Portis, who has died aged 86, was, in the oft-repeated words of critic Ron Rosenbaum, America's 'least-known great novelist'. At least he was before his cult following of the good and the great got his five novels back into print, appropriately enough from former Penguin editor Peter Mayer's Overlook Press. Portis' literary low-profile was partly due to his low output and his reluctance to self-promote (though he was hardly a recluse, as he was often described), but mostly because his claim to fame happened to be a western, and worse, one made into a movie starring John Wayne.

Yet when True Grit appeared, Roald Dahl, in a rare book review, called it 'the best novel to come my way for a very long time...he hasn't put a foot wrong anywhere. What a writer.'

True Grit is the story of 14 year old Mattie Ross who, seeking to avenge the murder of her rancher father, hires hard-drinking deputy US Marshal Rooster Cogburn to track him down. Like all Portis' novels, it is a journey, peppered with eccentric characters, and stands its frequent comparison with one of the greatest American novels, Huckleberry Finn. Like Twain, Portis' eye for America's ingrained absurdities is presented almost as reportage. But like Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, True Grit is a recollection, with a now-elderly Mattie providing prickly, unreliable narration. Her aged Arkansas voice is pitch-perfect, which Portis once attributed to his time working on a paper in his college days, editing local reports by the Arkansas town ladies who filed in longhand.

Charles McColl Portis was born, appropriately enough for someone whose fiction was a series of quests, in El Dorado, Arkansas, 28 December 1933. His father Samuel came to El Dorado during an oil boom, where he met and married Alice Waddle. He began teaching, and his mother wrote for local papers. Portis grew up in a series of southern Arkansas towns, and after finishing high school, enlisted in the Marines and fought in the Korean War. Discharged a sergeant, he took a journalism degree from the University of Arkansas, working on the college paper, the Traveler, and the Northwest Arkansas Times. His first job was at the Memphis Commerical-Appeal, followed by two years with the Arkansas Gazette, where his work got him hired by the New York Herald-Tribune. At the Tribune his coverage of the civil rights movement across the South was so impressive that in 1963 he became their bureau chief in London.

Although he was considered one of the stars among a group of reporters at the Trib who went on to define 'new journalism', after a year in London he quit to return to a lake-side cabin in Arkansas and write fiction. Two years later, in 1966, his first novel, Norwood, was published after being serialised in The Saturday Evening Post. In it, Arkansas-born ex-Marine Norwood Pratt returns from Vietnam determined to become a famous singer, and is conned by Grady Fring the Kredit King into moving cars to New York, encountering a cast of eccentrics along the way, including Joann The Wonder Hen, a college-educated chicken.

True Grit was published two years later, its episodic journey again perfect for the Post's serialisation. After the film's success, Kim Darby (who played Mattie) and Glen Campbell were reunited alongside gridiron star Joe Namath in a friendly but flat movie version of Norwood, which was stolen by actresses Tish Sterling and Carol Lynley in smaller parts. Portis briefly tried script-doctoring in Los Angeles, but returned to Arkansas and his writing career, best summed up by his famous new journalism colleague Tom Wolfe in his usual flamboyant style: 'He made a fortune...A fishing shack! In Arkansas!...It was too goddamned perfect to be true”

It took 11 years before Portis' third novel, many people's cult favourite, The Dog Of The South appeared. Dreamy innocent Ray Midge heads south from Arkansas to track down his runaway wife, her lover Dupree, himself is being sought for writing letters threatening the president, and, most crucially, his Ford Torino car. His con-man is Dr Reo Symes, literally a snake-oil salesman, who himself is searching for the mysterious John Selmer Dix, author of inspirational self-help books for salesmen. Portis was hugely well-read, and it is not unreasonable to draw comparisons with another of America's greatest neglected novels, Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, with its panoply of hopeful, deluded Americans being taken for rides. The trick was the way Portis reported their sometimes surreal stories with straight-faced seriousness, in voices that resonated authenticity. As Portis scholar Carlos Rotella put it, 'when my 9-year-old daughter turned over a straight that beat my two pair and said “Shot by a child!” I knew that reading True Grit to my kids had been a good idea.'

Portis' next novel followed only six years later. Masters Of Atlantis (1985) begins in 1917, when an American doughboy, Lamar Jimmerman, is handed a manuscript by a London beggar. The Codex Pappus leads him to the secret Gnomon Society and an Englishman called Sir Sydney Hen with whom he creates a religion, which attracts an American con-man preacher, Austin Popper. It reads like a slapstick combination of Thomas Pynchon's V and Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. Six years after that came Gringos (1991), in which another ex-Marine, Jimmy Burns, sells illegal antiquities in a dangerous Mexico almost as strange as Portis' America.

In 2010 the Coen Brothers remade True Grit, which propelled Portis back into the public eye, and in 2012 a miscellany of his shorter writing, Escape Velocity, was published. That year also saw Portis diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In 2014, he was honoured at a Gala at the governor's mansion in Little Rock, but he was unable to attend. In a moment of pure Portis fiction, the keynote speaker, journalist Ray Reed, sent his last-minute regrets, because the headlights of his car weren't working. Portis died 17 February 2020, in a Little Rock hospice, survived by his brother Jonathan. In Gringos, Jimmy Burns muses that 'none of us, not even the high-jumper slithering over his crossbar, ever gets very far off the earth. And yet we come down hard.' He never married and leaves no survivors.

WHY DOES ANGELINA HAVE TO DIE: THE UPDATE

Portland Green and I have updated our 2012 essay on the role of women in dance film, and published it on Medium. You can use this link to by-pass the Medium paywall and read it. As the Medium teaser says: In film, female dancers get infantilised, denied sexual agency, removed from the real world. Why can they only smile, dance & sometimes die?

JOW BURROW, THE DRAFT, THE PRIMARIES & NINE INCH HANDS

I wrote this last week before the NFL combine started, and Joe Burrow came to terms with his tiny Trump-like hands and the possibly of being drafted by the Cincinnati Bengals. I published it at Medium, where I tend to do long form, and at my subscription football column, Friday Morning Tight End, at Patreon. You can visit either of those sites to investigate and ideally subscribe....

 

JOE BURROW, THE DRAFT, THE PRIMARIES & NINE INCH HANDS

 

The NFL Draft is a lot like an election, albeit with a limited voter base, especially if you think of quarterbacks as the top-of-the-ticket presidential candidates. Those quarterbacks spend four months building up their resumes and turning themselves into stars. Then, after the Super Bowl, the tables get turned. Only those who've crossed a certain threshold in the polls get to enter the Combine, not even if, like Michael Bloomberg, you were to offer $60 billion as collateral.  The Combine is the equivalent of the campaign 'debates'.

Like presidential 'debaters', the players at the combine will face examination and grilling from Gms,coaches and scouts who, like a gaggle of Beltway Chuck Todds, mostly follow the same mainstream script they've followed at every combine. The script is designed to somehow squeeze square-peg quarterbacks with individual characteristics, who have succeeded within systems often unique and sometimes antithetical to the mainstream paradigm for NFL offenses, into the round holes of the classic NFL dropback passer, possessed of size to see over the pass rush, arm-strength to throw over a cross bar from the knees at 60 yards, leap over tall buildings in a single bound and with hands big enough to squeeze hogs by the neck until dead. One of those may be an exaggeration. Having been built up through the college season as potential saviours to the worst NFL teams, having been allocated top spaces in the draftnik's premature orgasms of early mock drafts, they now turn into chopped liver. And no one gets picked apart harder than the so-called recently-proclaimed front-runner.

That, of course, is LSU's Joe Burrow, and if the combine were like the Democratic primary, the other QBs would form a circle and test their arm strength by playing dodgeball with Burrow, like Bernie Sanders' long lost grandson, in the middle. Burrow, like Sanders,  made his front-runner status even more interesting by suggesting a little bit of socialist revolution. The guy who at season's end was a slam-dunk to be chosen first overall by the Cincinnati Bengals expressed the belief that he still held some 'leverage' over the process.

This was seen as a shot across the bows of the notoriously tightly run SS Bengal, whose quarterdeck includes owner Mike Brown, executive VP Katie Brown Blackburn, VP Player Personnel Paul Brown and VP Troy Blackburn. They are a family business, so ever dollar is personal, and anyone who remembers when Carson Palmer tried to get out of Cincinnati will member how Paul Brown showed the flexibility of a candy cane until he got what he wanted from the Raiders from Palmer. Coincidentally, Joe Burrow's personal QB coach for the combine is Carson Palmer's brother Jordan.
Last week I went on ESPN UK's Nat Coombs Show (@thencshow) and discussed Burrow's leverage with former NFL GM Mike Tannenbaum. Mike pointed out right away that things are different now, with the rookie salary cap and the fact the drafting team keeps the player's rights for the length of his (unsigned) rookie contract: which for a first-rounder is five years. If I were an agent I'd be looking to frighten the socialist monopoly of the NFL with an anti-trust suit, but that's just me.
It was a non-quarterback, Bo Jackson, who actually sat out 1986 and played baseball rather than disappear into Tampa Bay. But Bo was a major league player; the two more relevant uses of leverage were from quarterbacks who forced trades. John Elway in 1983 also threatened to play baseball, but his time in the Yankees' farm system had already showed he had about as much chance of being a major league regular as, say, Tim Tebow. Elway's  coming out of Stanford's west-coast offense, did not want to play for the Colts and Frank Kush, a fiery coach whose success in college had been based on fierce defense and a somewhat paleolithic view of the forward pass. The Colts caved in and traded him to Denver for the fourth pick overall (tackle Chris Hinton), veteran QB Mark Herrmann and Denver's first rounder in 1984 (Ron Solt, who became a journeyman at guard).
You hear various stories about who engineered Eli Manning's refusal to go to San Diego with the first pick overall. His father Archie, or his agent Tom Condon, are usually blamed, with the reason being either a Kush-like aversion to Chargers' coach Marty Schottenheimer (who had messed up his Doug Flutie/Drew Brees duo) or a recognition that San Diego was a media deadzone. In any event, Chargers' GM AJ Smith had an advantage: the 2004 draft featured three quarterbacks all worthy going in the draft's top 10 (indeed, had he not landed Manning, Giants' GM Ernie Accorsi was supposed favouring Ben Rothliesberger (henceforth Ben) over Philip Rivers. Smith liked Rivers, so after he took Manning, the Giants took Rivers with the fourth pick. When they flipped choices, the Chargers also got a third round pick in 04 (kicker Nate Kaeding), a first in 2005 (Shawn Merriman) and an 05 fifth, which eventually became starting tackle Roman Oben. Two Super Bowl wins apart, you'd call it win/win.

As the combine opens there are two questions. The first is whether the Bengals can convince Burrow to play for them. This is not up to Mike Brown as much as it is up to coach Zac Taylor, who's a young supposed offensive guru whose job it will be to persuade Burrow that he can blossom and star in his offense, and that the team will build around him. Burrow, of course, is from Ohio: but Athens is only 40-50 miles closer to Cincinnati that it is to Cleveland or Pittsburgh (it's 75 miles from Columbus, though, where Burrow went to Ohio State.

The second, more telling question, is whether Burrow will remain the consensus top pick. After all, that undefeated national championship is now a long time in the past. And, on the first day of the combine Burrow was measured with NINE INCH HANDS!!! Not the name of a heavy metal band, nine inch hands might as well be puppy paws in NFL scouting. According to ESPN, in the past decade only three NFL starters have ever been measured with hands that small: Ryan Tannehill, Jared Goff and Chad Henne. Interestingly, Zac Taylor's hands measured nine inches at the 2007 Combine.
A passer with small hands, the theory goes, can't control the ball as well in bad conditions, is more likely to lose it on sack contact, and has questions about his overall maturity and mannish construction. By the way, Iron Mike's span (the measurement from thumb to pinkie) is a full 10 inches, though that in itself wasn't enough to get me to the combine. Also by the way, Patrick Mahomes' mitts measured out at 9 ¼ inches when he went through the combine.

It's funny when measurements begin to trump tape. I remember sitting with scouts watching an NFL Europe scrimmage. Barcelona's QB was Robert Daugherty, at 5-10 Boston University's answer to Doug Flutie. When Daugherty had a pass batted down at the line of scrimmage, the scouts started nodding and saying to each other 'that''s what happens when you're too short'. On the next possession Scotland's QB, Matt Blundin, a 6-6 guy from Virginia who was a second-round draft pick of the Chiefs, had a pass batted down. 'That's what happens when you're 6-6', I announced loudly. It got one or two smiles.
But now everyone will be considering Burrow's arm—strength, rated only average based on his college season. But why couldn't be beat out JT Barrett or Dwayne Haskins at Ohio State. What about his 2018 season? Is he a one-year wonder? And in 2019 he played on a powerhouse team with great offensive weapons. Did they make him look better than he was?

Funnily enough, the one thing that gave Burrow some leverage was being the unquestioned first choice. If that status drops at the combine, things get interesting, because as I said to Mike Tannenbaum, I see this year's draft class as something like 2004's, with Justin Herbert of Oregon and Tua Tagovailoa (henceforth 'Tua') of Alabama as the Rivers and Ben of the group.

Herbert is a big but mobile pocket passer who like Rivers played on a team which wasn't that good around him. He can look deliberate, and his decision-making was questioned, but that's what being over-manned can do to you. His arm will measure out strong, and his taking the decision to play at the Senior Bowl and showcase himself paid off: he was clearly the game's MVP and his leadership skills stood out. Tua, of course, is coming off a dislocated hip injury, and other problems with ankles, which raises some red-flags, but his is a rare talent in terms of mobility and arm strength. He was generally considered the number one prospect before his injury, and no one was downgrading him because his Bama teams were powerhouses. As a footnote, it wouldn't surprise me to see Jordan Love from Utah State move into this group with a top Combine; like Ben he comes from a second tier programme, but like Ben he has a rare combination of arm strength and pocket mobility; though he is less likely to step in quickly with the team that takes him.

So if Herbert or Tua step in front of Burrow in some team's expectations it could be a bonus for teams sitting with top five picks. If the Bengals decide a plan B would be fine with them, and other teams still covet Burrow, they could then feel free to do business.

At the very least you'd expect the swap of first round picks to cost the swapping team a another first, a second (those might be futures) and something else: and the Bengals are a team that needs a lot of something elses.

And here's where the Combine, and the post-combine draft process resembles a presidential race. Almost everybody lies. If the Bengals talk up other prospects, they may be trying to get the price up for Burrow. If they talk Burrow up, they may be trying to get the price up for Burrow. Or they may want Burrow, before during and after the Draft. Agents will float rumours, which the Hot Takz mouth clowns will be quick to spread round the twitosphere. In the end, Joe or No Joe, this soap opera will have exactly as long to run as the Bengals decide, and if Burrow does nothing to lessen his stock apart from NINE INCH HANDS, they would do well to play the game from now until April 23, two full months of reality TV. Just like a presidential race.

CLIVE CUSSLER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of the techno-thriller adventure writer Clive Cussler was published by the Guardian online
a few days ago; you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. It was an interesting one to write, because I had dipped into Cussler once or twice, but pulled my toe out of the water quickly. But I found it edifying to try to trace his influences: I had recognised Doc Savage right away (and have noticed some others noting that) but that led my critical eyes to Travis McGee and John D MacDonald, whom I was surprised no one else noted. McGee is a tall, bronzed hero who specialises in marine recovery, although most McGee novels don't actually involve that sort of work. But MacDonald's major best-sellers almost always did involve some bit of technology, or business, which he would explain to the reader in great detail, because the plot was often intertwined with the workings of the business. I thought this was something Cussler used to great advantage.

I would have liked to spend more time on his classic car collection, and a little on his career as an
ad man too, because his reputation as a writer was made, or at least maintained, in part by clever marketing of himself and his work as a brand, much like Warren Adler, whose obit I did for the Guardian last May (you can link to that here). I probably could have mentioned that. But I'll have to wait until my next trip to Colorado to see the cars.

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS

You may have noticed a certain bit of radio silence from IT in the past two months. I have
been considering how to move forward in the New Year, and do more writing which can
help me earn a living, which IT patently does not, nor do many of the pieces which appear
elsewhere gratis on my part. I'm not sure I want to reduce this to being simply a notice
board for work published elsewhere; I'm also not convinced it's worth the effort of having
a review/essay site for its own sake; it reminds me too much of fanzine writing when I was
much much younger. I enjoy it, obviously, but I am perhaps unsuited to monetizing social
media.

I haven't reached any conclusions yet, but my idea is to transfer the archive of IT into a
website. My work on Medium(including the estimable Arc Digital site) and Patreon has not
attracted as much notice as I might have expected -- the difference between being involved and
committed perhaps.

In the meantime, I wish you all a very Happy New Year: what more can we hope for?

JOE BIDEN, JEREMY CORBYN & THE US ELECTION: MY ARC DIGITAL ESSAY

I did another piece for Arc Digital on Joe Biden's claim that being 'too far' left cost Labour
the election in the UK and would cost Democrats the election in the US. Is he right? Use this link
and you can read the article on Medium without enrolling....
https://arcdigital.media/american-corbyns-does-labours-electoral-catastrophe-disqualify-the-american-left-ecc7033ad70?source=friends_link&sk=05b48ee257a3c1b585e350a07c78f4f7

THANKSGIVING AT IRON MIKE'S FOUNDRY

I wrote this for my weekly Patreon column, Friday Morning Tight End, as a freebie special, so I decided I should offer it here to those of you whom I have disappointed by not posting more in the past few months. The column picks all the games every week, I'm running at about 2/3 correct, and subscriptions are $3 a month. Try it at patreon.com/mikecarlsonfmte 

Thanksgiving is my favourite holiday, just as fall may be my favourite season. In the US it is the biggest travel weekend of the year, and with the traditional turkey, like Christmas without the attendant trauma of gift-giving. In Britain, Christmas is the biggest travel time, even though it seems to torture most people (Scrooge is after all, British) and being British they took the day they dislike and extended it by another day, then closed all public transport and annually locate highway works where no one is working along most of the major roads. But Thanksgiving also beats Christmas because it's the greatest football holiday, and football permeates not only the day but the whole weekend.

Oddly enough, I never played in a Thanksgiving game. Most non-professional colleges don't have them, because their students (including the football team) head home, but nowadays, of course money talks, and this year it's also a late Thanksgiving, which means that although the Egg Bowl, between Mississippi and Mississippi State will be played on Thursday, the rest of the weekend will also feature such match-ups as The Clean Old-Fashioned Hate, between Georgia and Georgia Tech; Vanderbilt vs Tennessee; Clemson vs South Carolina (Palmetto Bowl); Ohio State vs Michigan; the Iron Bowl between Alabama and Auburn and two of the West Coast's biggies: Oregon vs Oregon State (The Civil War) and Washington vs Washington State (The Apple Bowl).

Of course the extending of the college season through conference playoffs has been a factor here too, not least because conferences realigned to add enough teams to justify a playoff. So the Texas-Texas A&M match which was once a staple of the November calendar is now gone because they play in different conferences.

Thanksgiving morning was usually the time for the great high school rivalries. My dad played for West Haven against New Haven's Hillhouse High in a game in 1943 that drew over 20,000 to the Yale Bowl; Hillhouse had the legendary Levi Jackson, one of the best players to by-pass the NFL, on their team. But I played as an academic scholarship boy at a prep school, whose team was mostly local post-grads doing a 'prep' year before college (our most famous was Yale's Albie Booth; now it's Shady McCoy) but whose student body was about half boarders, who like college students went home for the holiday.

West Haven wasn't playing Hillhouse any longer when I was a kid; New Haven's Commercial High had been rebranded Wilbur Cross and they now played Hillhouse, so West Haven had no natural rivalry, and my dad wasn't interested. He also didn't care about the traditional Milford-Stratford game: teams from towns on opposite sides of the Housatonic River. That one disappeared as both towns added a second school; when Milford added a third, Milford High itself disappeared. There is a more famous cross-river rivalry, however, the State Line Game between Easton (Pennsylvania) against Phillipsburg (New Jersey), towns on opposite sides of the Delaware River, and each a power within their own state.

So we would play touch football in the yard, or down by the right of way to the beach, at least until the year we were up at my uncle's in Chelmsford, Mass and our game attracted a group of neighbours. The game sort of broke up after my brother's complaint about my coverage degenerated into a fist-fight: Myles Garrett eat your heart out.

Connecticut, where I grew up, boasts the oldest high school rivalry: New London High against Norwich Free Academy, now called, somewhat tackily,Ye Olde Ball Game. It started in 1875, but hasn't been played continuously. The oldest one that has been played continuously is between Boston Latin and English High (which for some reason isn't called Boston English) which has been played every year since 1887. Most of the rest of the oldest rivalries are between the posh New England prep (ie private) schools, and probably featured people who went on to run America: Andover/Exeter; Milton/Noble & Greenough; Groton/St Mark's. You also get anomalies: in Connecticut Derby/Shelton and Ansonia/Naugatuck are both big games in the Housatonic Valley that draw Thanksgiving crowds, but the Ansonia/Derby game earlier in the season is actually bigger.

People think the Bears-Lions was the start of Thanksgiving pro football, but actually there were four games in 1920, a couple featuring NFL teams against non-league teams, including the Elyria (Ohio) Athletics, who played a scoreless draw with the NFL's Columbus Panhandles. The Bears (then called the Decatur Staleys) played the Chicago Tigers. Fixed rivalries came and went: the Packers and Lions was the big one when I was a kid, at least until Vince Lombardi refused to continue playing on Thanksgiving after a 13-13 draw in Detroit (in which Nick Pietrosante, who played his high school ball at Ansonia High scored the Lions' only TD. “Four days is not enough time to get ready for a game” Lombardi told commissioner Pete Rozelle.Pete didn't dare cross Vince. A few decades later, the NFL forces teams to play on Thursdays every week.

Three games is overkill, but this is America and we give thanks that more is always better and money (especially more money) always talks. But we really should allow some time for people to enjoy their dinner without the TV drawing them away—it used to do that even when there was only one, or two games (the AFL's made it two, then in 1966 the NFL moved against the AFL by adding the second, with the Cowboys as regular hosts) to distract you. The prime time game is fine, I guess. It's a shame the oddities of the NFL schedule make it hard to make Dallas-Houston, for example, or the Giants-Jets a permanent Thanksgiving Day game; you'd think their computers could deal with that. I'd love to see Chicago-Detroit be regular, and maybe Green Bay-Minnesota too (you could play the late one in whichever dome team was at home).

So enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner, even if you're here in Britain and it's not a holiday. I used to enjoy hosting the triple header at the Number One Sports Bar into the wee hours of the morning, just to be left with the real hardcore who were flipping a metaphorical bird, not a turkey, at their jobs. Whether you do celebrate or not, whether you watch the games or not, stop for a moment and just think about what you have to be thankful for. It's worth a special day to remind you.

BY THE GRACE OF GOD & SPOTLIGHT: Studies in abuse and faith

As you may have noticed I am not writing very much here at the moment, and in truth I am not writing
as much as I should be. But I did write an essay for Medium about two films concerned with child abuse and the Catholic Church, Francois Ozon's By The Grace Of God compared with Tom McCarthy's  Spotlight.  Both fine films, but for different reasons....here's the link.

FAKE NEWS AND THE BRITAIN TRUMP: MY ARC DIGITAL ESSAY

I've written a piece for Arc Digital about the links between Boris Johnson's election campaign and its following the Donald Trump/Steve Bannon blueprint. It was originally going to be much longer and delve deeper into the 2016 referendum, but there just wasn't room. Check it out, this link ought to get you in without the paywall!

ELIJAH CUMMINGS: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Elijah Cummings, recent foil (and thus, inevitably, target) of Donald Trump as head of the House Oversight Committee, was online at the Guardian yesterday, and is in the paper paper today. You can link to the online version here. It is pretty much as I wrote it; a couple of literals snuck in, but they also edited it nicely to make clearer his children and relationships. There were a couple of other stories. One I left out because I didn't see it as relevant, which involved the murder of his nephew at college in Virginia. Another was the mini-scandal around his debts, including on taxes, at one point in his life. The source I was reading attributed it to ill-health, which I thought might have some relevance given his poor health in the last few years, but another source mentioned his child support payments, which led me to dig out his first wife and the parentage of his three kids. I left the debt out, but as I said, I thought the piece in the end explains his children well. One of his daughters was also in the news when it turned out she was using Cummings' congressional car while driving for Lyft, which isn't quite at Hunter Biden levels of scandal, but did get a lot of press.

Last summer I posed for a picture in my Baltimore Elite Giants shirt (they were a team in baseball's Negro Leagues, and the Elite was pronounced ee-lite) in support of Rep. Cummings when Trump was attacking him, and the city of Baltimore, in which I worked one summer and which I liked immensely, because, even though it was still more or less de facto segregated, it was a real city. Cummings strikes me as an old-fashioned machine kind of politician, although the machine has changed as it constituent parts have changed, and one who, when he had his opportunity on the bigger stages, didn't let that constituency down. RIP

DANIEL SILVA'S ENGLISH SPY

The English Spy is the first novel by Daniel Silva I have read, but it is instructive in revealing some of the secrets of his immense popularity in spy fiction. The story begins with the detonation of a bomb aboard a yacht, which kills an English princess, part Diana part Kate, and sparks a massive investigation. The early signs lead English spy chief Graham Seymour, engaged in an ongoing feud/battle with the head of MI5 who is his former boss, to enlist the help of the Israelis, who have identified the killer.'He's an old friend' says the head of Mossad. 'Of yours, or ours?' asks Seymoure. 'Of yours', Uzi Navot replies. 'We have no friends.' Which means Silva's Gabriel Allen, the art restorer about to become head of the Mossad, comes on board. And because they are chasing after a former IRA bomb maker turned international terrorist named Eamonn Quinn, the two men turn to Christopher Keller, an assassin who once knew Quinn while he was infiltrating the IRA on behalf of the British.

From this beginning flows an international game of cat and mouse, a plot that is so inventive it was surprising Quinn, who appears to have structured much of it, does not get enough credit for the brilliance of his plan. And of course, it all points back to Ireland, recalling the past killings and betrayals that are the mark of international spies and assassins.

Allen, in many ways, is the English spy of the title; or perhaps it's Keller, and the two make an interesting pair, one which seems to have been set up for the future (note: I have not read further, or indeed back, in the saga, of which this is the fifteenth). In Silva's world the English are the civilised masters of the game, the Israelis are the harder edged forces having to deal with a more violent reality. Allen is the exception; the Israeli who to all extents and purposes is the very model of a modern MI operative. Their opponents, Irish or Arab, are almost universally evil, a lesser breed. And the Americans are the bulls in the china shop, blundering, unsophisticated, unreliable. It's an interesting world view. It's the sort of stuff I used to see businessmen reading in the business class lounge at Dusseldorf airport.

The story comes down to personal face to face violence. There are two former Russian sleeper agents involved, there are hints of lost love, and all the while Silva's new, Italian wife, is about to give birth in an Israeli hospital. The resolution makes sense, although there is a coda which is appropriate enough, but seems somehow forced, given the nature of Quinn and Keller. There is nothing fancy about Silva's prose, but he keeps the plot moving at a good pace and, as I said, the plot is immensely satisfying.

The English Spy by Daniel Silva

Harper Collins £8.99 ISBN 9870007552337

BREXIT: A MODEST PROPOSAL My suggestions via Arc Digital

I've written a piece for Arc Digital suggesting an easy way to make the current conundrum over Brexit something more bearable, entertaining and successful for all concerned. The piece was recommended to readers on Medium, in their World section, and they have provided a link by which you can read it and laugh without necessarily having to subscribe there, though that's not a bad idea. You can find that link here....happy reading