FAYE, Lindsay: SEVEN for a SECRET [Putnam’s, 2013]
Timothy Wilde is a woman,
even though he is a rough and ready cop. I mean that in the best way.
The author is a woman. She
has given Wilde, one of the very first “copper stars” in NYC, when the police force
was first formed in 1846, more sensitivity than a man usually possesses. She
gets him to think like a woman, even though he acts like a man—fisticuffs and
the whole thing. That’s a good combination, at least in a novel.
The new police force is a
background for the story here, as is Irish Immigration, romantic longing, child
abuse, the “underground railroad,” and political corruption via Tammany Hall. With
all that going for it, what else could it possibly need?
Well, “blackbirding,” that’s
what, slave “catchers” who kidnap free blacks and take them south to sell them
as slaves. That ignoble part of our history has been brought back to
consciousness recently by the film, “Twelve Years a Slave,” Solomon Northrup’s
real experience of having been blackbirded.
The phrase, “seven for a
secret,” is from a children’s rhyming game, what happens according to how many
magpies you happen to see. If you see seven, it’s “…for a secret, never to be
told.”
That secret is told here,
though, an important and intriguing story, told well.
I like Timothy Wilde. When
he is short on brains, he recognizes it and tries to learn what he needs to,
instead of doing something stupid just to advance the plot. That’s a refreshing
change from a long list of protagonists in novels like this, who are so
self-destructive you hope they fail.
I like his brother,
Valentine, too, so unlike Timothy in many ways, a man of strong appetites more
than strong sensitivities, but they work well together.
From time to time I was
confused about which character was which in Seven
for a Secret. Part of that is the setting. If most of your characters are
Irish, they’ll have Irish names, and even though I’m Scottish-American, with an
Irishised Scottish surname, Irish names tend to sound alike to me. If one
character is named John Jones and the other Wing Fat, I’ll be able to
distinguish them without the aid of titles, descriptions, etc. but if they are
named John Jones and Bill Smith, or Wing Fat and Wong Foo, I’ll have trouble. It’s
helpful if an author refers occasionally to “the sheriff, Bill Jones,” or “Mavis
Maverick, the rodeo rider,” instead of just “Jones” or “Mavis.”
I am aware that it’s
tricky to comment on the differences between male and female authors. Daughter Katie
had a student in her college history class who did not like ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. “You can
tell it was written by a woman,” he said. “You can tell she has no knowledge of
war.” When told that Eric Maria Remarque was a man, who added the Maria into
his name on purpose, and a five-times wounded WWI veteran, he decided that
maybe it was a good book after all.
As usual, I read the 2nd
book in the series first, because that is the one given by my daughters. The
first Timothy Wilde novel is THE GODS OF
GOTHAM. I think what happens is that one of my daughters reads the first
book in a series by a good new author, likes it, so buys me the 2nd.
Or something like that…
John
Robert McFarland
Daughter
Katie Kennedy’s Learning to Swear in
America will be published by J. K. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Press,
in 2016.
Author
guru Kristen Lamb says that author blogs are counter-productive, that a blog
must be “high concept.” I have no idea what that means, but just forget about
JUST WORDS being an author blog and consider it ‘high concept.”
My
novel, VETS, about four handicapped
and homeless Iraqistan veterans who are accused of murdering a VA doctor, will
be published by Black Opal Books in 2015.
I tweet as yooper1721.
I also write Christ in
Winter: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter. http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/
