Louise Penny's THE BRUTAL TELLING Takes Readers on an Allegorical Journey

With THE BRUTAL TELLING, Louise Penny has written another novel that appears to follow a familiar theme. A murder has occurred in Three Pines. Inspector Armand Gamache and his team from the Sûreté du Québec arrive, take over the local fire station, and solve the crime.

But things are not that simple. Three Pines becomes the place where we all live … not the community where we interact with strangers, friends, and family … not the place where we eat, sleep, bathe, and make love … but that place within ourselves, where we live with our convictions and our doubts, with our fears and our hopes, with our capacity for charity and our capacity for greed, with our ability to help and to hurt.

And the characters in the book are not the group of villagers we have come know. They are each and every one of us. But we are not portrayed via the persona that we present to others, and to ourselves when we look in a mirror. Our personas are stripped away, down to the essence of our being. Our souls. We are shown things about ourselves that we do not acknowledge because we do not know that they exist, or refuse to acknowledge that they do.

Louise Penny has written an allegory, an extended metaphor, one filled with truths as basic as the Ten Commandments, and one filled with how far afield man’s inhumanity can spread fear, distrust, and harm. And while doing so, she has written another book filled with her unique style of humor and wit that will provide enjoyment to those who wish to read lightly and not think too deeply.

The Watkins Man Was An Important Part of Life For Rural Folks During the 1940s

Organic. All natural ingredients. No chemical additives. These are terms that have recently entered our culture as the new, enlightened method to produce the products we consume. Right? Not if you are old enough to remember the Watkins Man.
His monthly arrival was a big moment every month for the folks who “lived off the gird” in the hills and hollows of East Tennessee in the 1940s. The man’s name is lost in the fog of old age, but the unique sound, the “Oooga! Oooga! Oooga!” of his Model A Ford’s horn, echoing up from the valley, is still a vivid memory.

It was a clarion call to Mom and me. She grabbed her Watkins jar with the money she had collected over the last month before we dashed out to stand beside the road, waiting to see the Model A come round the sharp curve at the at the bottom of the hill and then listen as it puttered up the steep hill through the woods to our home.

What was the Watkins Man? He was one of a legion of salesmen who traveled the back roads of rural America in vintage autos, selling products door to door for the J. R. Watkins Company, located in the Mississippi River Bluff town of Winona, Minnesota.

In 1868, Joseph Ray Watkins started the company in Plainview, MN. He had one product. He purchased the right to produce and sell “Dr. Ward’s Anodyne Liniment.” The product was mixed in the family kitchen, bottled in a woodshed, loaded onto a horse-drawn wagon and sold door to door throughout southeastern Minnesota.

After the company moved to the town of Winona, the product line expanded, but products stayed true to a standard that is still adhered to today. All products are made with natural ingredients with no chemical additives. The Watkins line of products is one of the very few that is certified by the Natural Products Association.

By the 1940s, the Watkins line of products had expanded to include soaps, cleaners, personal care products, and my mother’s favorites, the baking materials. The vanilla cinnamon, cloves, and other spices came in metal cans with a tight-fitting top. They made great toys when they were emptied.


The Watkins Man would deliver the product my Mom had ordered the month before, and fill out a form for the products she wanted delivered the next month. This was the process before it became my turn. The Model A was a coupe, with a rumble seat. Inside, on the rumble seat was always a box of candy, one free piece for every item Mom had purchased.


The J. R. Watkins Company is still in business, still selling only natural, organic products. Company ads can be found in the national magazines of the day. And the product is available in several chain stores across the United States. But there’s no Model A Ford involved. Nor is there free candy for the kids.

Jayne Ann Krentz's RUNNING HOT, a Romance-Suspense Novel,Changes One Opinion About Reading This Genre

I do not read romance novels. I do not read paranormal, woo woo novels. At least that’s what I repeatedly said until last week. Here’s what happened that led to the need for eating a serving of crow.

I scanned the new-book shelves at the library for familiar names. I found one, and then went the potluck route. I grabbed another one without looking at anything more than the type. Was it large enough for me to read?

My eyes are not getting worse. I don’t need Large Type books yet. It’s just that some publishers seem to view themselves as editors of classified sections of newspapers, and see nothing wrong with using a type size that is minimally legal and lined spaced at about half an en.

My first read was Alafair Burke’s ANGEL’S TIP. With the author’s move in real life from the DA’s office in Portland, Oregon, to teaching law at Hofstra Law School on Long Island, New York, she has introduced readers to NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher. As usual, it was a very enjoyable read from an A-list author. It’s a book I would highly recommend to those who enjoy the genre.

That led to Jayne Ann Krentz’s RUNNING HOT. I was still enjoying the after taste of ANGEL’S TIP, and this book appeared to be more of the same. By the time I had finished reading the first twelve pages, two things were obvious. I was hooked. This was a book I was going to read. But there was this other thing.

All the words were there, enough to stuff a large turkey should they have been breadcrumbs. They were no different than the ones a person reads in Business Week or Fortune about what makes highly successful business men what they are, and the edge they have, one that some try to enhance by doing a few drugs.

It was not until that twelfth page that the realization came that all those “auras” and “pulses of dark energy” radiating during an argument between a boss and his assistant after arriving at an island getaway were not Madison Avenue buzzwords. They were not literary hype.

When the boss attempts to attack the assistant, she grabs his wrists. She radiates jolts of energy. Her boss convulses, stumbles, and falls off the boat dock. Dead. The hands of the assistant are burned. She killed her boss simply by grabbing his wrists. Prime grade woo woo!

That realization drove me to Jayne Ann Krentz’s Web site. That’s where I discovered that I was totally hooked on a “contemporary romantic-suspense” novel. She writes these under her married name. She writes historical romantic-suspense under the name of Amanda Quick. She uses her maiden name, Jayne Castle, for what is described as “futuristic/paranormal romantic-suspense.”

When I looked at her Web site, and saw how many books she had written under various names, I took another look at the author’s photograph on the back of the book. In it, she looks too young to have written so many books. Digging a bit deeper on another Web site, I found part of the secret for this former librarian’s success is that “she is famous for her work ethic, beginning her writing by 7 am six days a week.”

RUNING HOT has a plot built around an organization called the Arcane Society. It is far more plausible than many of the grand conspiracy plots that seem to inhabit many of today’s best-selling books that are peddled under the suspense label. The paranormal aspects, the reading and battles of auras, are icing on the cake.

And what about the “romance” parts? Well, they are better written⎯and no more explicit⎯than what’s found in many of today’s “mystery” novels when the plot leads a man and a woman to an encounter between the covers of the book.

So, The Old Cobbler will eat his crow in whatever manner it is ultimately deemed that it should be devoured. And I will probably be looking for more books in the Arcane Society series. There are at least five more to be read.

Forgotten Shipyard in Hampton Was Part of World War I effort To Halt Threat of Germany's Infamous U-Boats

The name on a modern street sign is the only remaining visible connection to a piece of Hampton, Virginia’s history that had faded into the shadows of time. Today, Newcombe (spelled with an “e”) Avenue is a short, dead-end street that ends at a traffic barrier in front of a wall of brushy trees that shield the view of Sunset Creek, now a heavily industrialized tributary off the Hampton River.

During World War I, the avenue led to the Newcomb Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Corp, a name later changed to the Hampton Shipbuilding & Marine Railway Corp. This facility was one of sixty-one such boatyards that sprang into action around the nation to build the “splinter fleet,” boats designed specifically to deal with the threat of German submarines that were changing the pattern on warfare on the seas.

From the beginning of World War I in 1914, German submarines, the infamous U-boats as they came to be called, proved to be a devastating force against all that the Brits could muster. To combat this threat in its home waters, England ordered in the spring of 1915 a total of 550 American-built patrol boats, 75-foot vessels designed to defend its shores and harbors.

The capabilities of the U-boats were brought home to the American Navy when, in the fall of 1916, the German submarine U-53 made a brief port call at Newport, Rhode Island, and without refueling or taking on provisions, returned to the sea. The next day, the U-boat sank five steamships off Nantucket before continuing to it home port in Germany.

In March 1917, two days before the United States officially declared war on Germany, the US Congress voted $115,000,000 for the purchase of war material, including “additional torpedo boat destroyers.” Spurred by the visit of U-53 and its subsequent trail of havoc, naval architects had been hard at work for months designing the American version of a small fast boat to defend the nation’s eastern coast.


With funds in hand, government officials began scouring the nation for facilities and people to build the SC (sub chaser) I Class, a 110-foot, wooden hulled, and gasoline powered boat. The government agents reached handshake agreements, telling participants to begin work and the paperwork would follow later.

In Hampton, the agents found the abandoned facilities of the Chesapeake Gas Engine Corporation. This company, started in late 1908, had a railway large enough to handle several boats.
However, the business had gone bankrupt and had been sold at public auction some three years later. In Richmond, federal agents found a company to run the Hampton shipyard. The Newcomb Life Boat Company, Inc., organized for building “life boats and accessories.”

Starting in November 1916, according to records in the Hampton Court House, thirteen pieces of property were purchased to expand the original size of the defunct company on Sunset Creek. It was not until April 1918 that the official title of the Newcomb Life Boat Company, Inc. was changed in state records and its city of operation changed from Richmond to Hampton.

According to the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Volume VI, a total of 440 of the boats were built between October 1917 and February1919. A large number of the boats were built at then existing Naval shipyards. But small companies from Pensacola, Florida, to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, from Milford, Delaware, to Bremerton, Washington, and even from boatyards in midwestern cities like Rocky River, Ohio, and Dubuque, Iowa, built small numbers of the boats.

Five boats, hulls 218 through 222, were built in Hampton. Two were commissioned
in February 1918 and the other three in March of the same year. Four of the boats went to sea for the duration of the war, stationed in ports from Yorktown, Virginia, to Queenstown, Ireland.

SC218, shown above was stationed at Yorktown, Virginia. Local experts believe this shot was taken on the Hampton River with what is now the Hampton University campus in background.

One boat, hull 219, was destroyed at sea off the Azores when a fire broke out in its engine room. Fire on board the gasoline fueled/wooden hulled boats claimed six boats, equal to the number lost for all other reasons combined.

After the war ended in November 1918, the “splinter fleet” was disbanded. Some of the boats were transferred to the Coast Guard, a few state agencies, or sold to scrap yards. The Hampton Shipbuilding & Marine Railway Corp. went out of business. In April 1921 a circuit court judge in Hampton issued a decree that the facility that once employed 400 workers be sold at public auction.

In a day without connected national media, the widely scattered program sprang into operation, and then faded away without a lot of fanfare. Naval historians do not wax eloquently on the effectiveness of the “splinter fleet” against U-boats, possibly a reason the program is so little remembered.

In today’s world, the “splinter fleet” story is kept alive and continues to grow through an on-line organization, The Subchaser Archives. It is a collection point for formal documents, photographs, and first-hand accounts from men who served on the boats. The organization issues a periodic newsletter edited by Todd A. Woofenden, a grandnephew of a man who commanded one of the boats.