The nooze is getting me down, I can hardly bear to cover it.
And so, for the time being, turn we unto murder mysteries–stories about crimes that get solved instead of just sucking whole countries into their depths.
The Bachelors of Broken Hill, an Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte mystery by Arthur Upfield–this is one of the best detective novels you’ll ever read.
No matter how fiendishly clever the crime, “Bony” will always solve it. No matter how big the crime, the perps won’t get away with it.
I know, I know–now it sounds like fantasy. Well, so what? Go ahead–just try to convince me that multitudes of anti-heroes in “I give up, everything’s so awful!” stories have done anybody any good–let alone the country. Prayer and faith are what it takes to help us back to a belief in ordinary goodness, decency, and sanity. But a little dab of fantasy doesn’t hurt.