Still One Block West of the Light...

.... revisiting the melancholy but witty crime books of 

Terence Faherty

Deadstick  1991

Live To Regret  1992

The Lost Keats  1993





 

I first read these three books around the 2010s, and I can’t remember now where I came across them. I posted on Live To Regret on the blog in 2012 and can still remember finding this extraordinary picture to match the theme of drowned women – it is, astonishingly, a fashion illo by great blog favourite photographer Toni Frissell - that's when I first came across her, and I have used her photos frequently since. 

I also loved the line from the book that I picked out for the blogpost title: one block west of the light. (I see that I threatened to write a novel with that title – hasn’t happened yet)

I said then the books had ‘a dream-like feel and are full of ideas and emotion. But they are very readable, and they do have secrets, mysteries and solutions.’

I’ve just reread these three and enjoyed them very much. In The Lost Keats, Owen Keane is a seminarian in rural Indianapolis, ie training to be a Roman Catholic priest. As he is not a priest in the other books, it is not really a spoiler to say that he will not stay there much longer. The books are somewhat out of order – Lost Keats is set in 1973. In the other two I’ve read, Keane is a very small-scale private investigator, at first doing jobs for his best friend Harry, who is a lawyer with family money. There is quite a lot about his private life, and this is woven into the three books – and I’m guessing continues into the rest of the series.

Faherty has written a couple of series, a fair number of books, and although he was Edgar-nominated for Deadstick, he is very much under the radar. There is surprisingly little about him online – he has a website, and his crime short stories have appeared regularly in the magazines. He doesn’t seem to have new work out lately. But, a lot of his books are available for Kindle, and are not expensive.

I think many more people might enjoy his books, and I am certainly intending to read more – I am tempted by his Scott Elliott series, private eye mysteries set in post WW2 Hollywood.

The books I’ve read all have a nostalgic, melancholy air, and at the same time are witty and clever. Faherty is amazing at landscapes and atmosphere – the badlands of New Jersey in Deadstick have lingered in my mind. It’s a forested area, close to uninhabited, a place where a small plane came down many years before, and wasn’t found for a long time. On board were the son of a rich banking family, and a young woman, and they shouldn't have been there...Owen Keane goes exploring, and comes across one of the few people living there: a man who tells stories.




The Lost Keats has a real old-school McGuffin that you might be able to guess from the title – the possibility of an unknown sonnet by 19th C romantic poet John Keats (whose brother, astonishingly, emigrated to the United States). But what lives with me from the book is the picture of Indiana, a mid-West state that I have visited for a short time: you get a real picture of Keane driving round through the farmlands, and he explains a strange story of hemp being grown there in WW2, and various matters that result from that. He visits an old people’s home, a halfway house and a farm, and all are equally well-portrayed.

 


Indiana railroad picture – Flickr.

Indiana countryside – Library of Congress

The Library of Congress, one of my favourite resources, has the most incredible archive of photos, which – and this is not a complaint – is searchable, but not really organized. This means that it is hard to manoeuvre in there, but the treasures are many. I liked the picture of the railwayman, above, which I found on Flickr but came from the LOC. So I went to the LOC and searched on Indiana Railroad, and up came 450-odd pictures of railways and related items and people, most of which were either beautiful, or strange, or interesting, or nostalgic, or all of the above. I suppose I should add: that’s if you find railroads romantic, which I do. For example, this one - not related to the books except by mood, taken by Jack Delano in 1943.




You never know what you might find at the LOC, and I am very grateful to them, and particularly for the regular use of the words ‘no known restrictions’.

 

Comments

  1. I haven't read Faherty's work, Moira. As you say, I think he's one of those many authors who fly under the radar, even their work is nominated for/wins prizes. His work sounds interesting, and I like your idea of re-visiting books you read before. Sometimes that gives one a whole new perspective, and sometimes it reinforces first impressions.

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    1. It definitely made me want to read more by him. I think there are quite a few 'lost' authors from that era, if that's not putting it too strongly, and I like to rediscover one now and again.

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  2. I hadn't even heard of him! He does sound good. I read 'one block west of the light' as 'one block west of the night' which I think would also make a great title. I might pinch it for a short story! Chrissie

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    1. You take night and I'll take light!
      I wa...s thinking you might like to try him, so I will enable that

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  3. Also, you have excelled yourself with the photos!

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    1. Ah thank you - I was very pleased myself, so is lovely to have some affirmation!

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  4. I do recommend looking on Wikimedia for Congress photos as most of them are uploaded there and rather better categorised generally too, if you're struggling a bit. I was delighted to find they had photos of the Viennesse paper clothing that apparently toured the States in the early 20s and was poorly received, for example, as it's something that you see mentioned in contemporary articles but never with the actual photo of said offending garments

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    1. Thanks - I do quite often pick them up from there or from Flickr. But I then like to look at the depth and the far reaches of the LOC collection. And of course sometimes I don't know what I want till I start rootling around in there.
      I did go and look at some paper clothes from 1921, very unusual. They could have fitted in the occasional waves of workwear fashion - do/did you know Old Town Clothing in Holt? They are no longer operating fully, but I just took a look at their website and some of the pics on this page https://www.old-town.co.uk/pages/galleries would fit right in with paper-clothes-look.

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    2. And - if only I could find a book that needed a picture of paper clothes!

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    3. I do discuss paper fashion in my book Fashion in the 1960s. It was such a big thing for a few years that I'm surprised there's not been more about it, especially given how mad some of the paper garments could be! How about a paper sari for flyers with Air India, for example....?

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    4. I am old enough to remember the wild claims for paper clothes in the 1960s - the kind of things popular papers liked to do a feature on, with young models displaying the clothes. The suggestion was that we would all be wearing paper clothes quite soon - and I was very young and thought 'well maybe we will', rather like individual jetpacks for travel, and all our meals in pills.

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  5. Terence Faherty is new to me and sounds interesting - adding to the list ...

    Sovay

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    1. Definitely worth a look, I think - and if you like him, he's written a lot.

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  6. Moira, do you ever try dp.la, the Digital Public Library of America, for your images? It includes a roster of state and local collections along with images from NYPL, Getty, and the Smithsonian (the last almost unusable, for me anyway) and millions of less decorative records from the National Archives. Admittedly, they are less likely to focus directly on clothes, but you can find strange prizes in local historical societies' collections.

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    1. Oh thank you, that's very interesting. I am not aware of this resource at all and will most definitely check it out. Why is the Smithsonian unusable?

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    2. and, I just went and checked them out and was delighted to see that they try to provide the chance to read books that authorities have banned...

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  7. I've read a couple of his books now on OpenLibrary and enjoyed them. They seemed a little bittersweet to me. Owen Keane is a nice change from macho all-knowing detectives!

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    1. Oh good, glad you liked them. Yours is a very good description.

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  8. Just what I need, a newish writer to add to my list, when I cannot keep up with the books aIready own. I have heard of Terence Faherty, although it may be more in relation to his short stories. But as far as I know I never read anything by him...

    One good thing is that I can get a Kindle version of Deadstick at a reasonable price. The problem is that I read very few books in the Kindle format. So I will also start looking around for some of his books in paper format in September.

    I am comforted by the fact that Margot has not read anything by him either.

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    1. I know I shouldn't be tempting you Tracy, but he is a good read, and I think someone you would like. I'm sure there are old paperbacks around as well as the cheap Kindle versions.
      I feel the same: fancy there being an author that Margot doesn't know!

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