Ending and Starting the Years With Loren Estleman

I like to end the year in style and start the next one with a statement about distance running and hope and ambition.

Starting the serene day after Christmas, when I am content knowing that I have loved my family well, I make every effort to have a hell of a lot of fun. I start by getting up as early as I can----usually in the four to four-thirty morning hour and heading downstairs to get lost in the world of crime fiction.

Jump starting my heart before my morning run with a cup of hot coffee, I nest in the stuffed chair next to the Christmas tree. Sitting next to this brightly lit ornamental history of the family, I greet a Loren Estleman novel to enter the world of crime.

Loren Estleman has taken me into a trance like few other writers have. In a few pages I find myself in Detroit two generations ago-- as mobsters are making their fortunes running rum and other spirits across frozen Lake Superior from Canada. What fun. What a different world from the strait-laced, buttoned down world of law that I live in year after year.

Estleman, writes with an affection for Detroit from its zenith to its decline and despair. He is also an expert at guns. His descriptions reveal one who has studied them through and through and used them for recreation(I hope).

I admire Estelman's writing for its humor and its subtle moral lessons. An important quality in Estleman's writing is his skill in telling an absorbing story in about two hundred seventy-five pages. Time and time again over the ten or more Estleman novels I have enjoyed, Loren can finish a fine tale in under three hundred pages. Good for him and the rest of us with limited time for novels.

For me Christmas has always been about a pool of brand new books to swim in. My Godfather, Burt Mitchell, a high school history teacher, used to bring me two or three new history books each Christmas---no doubt launching me further into the humanities. My own family had started me down this fascinating road years before. I am deeply grateful to my Greek parents for that.

My end of the year is a chance to stretch out, find stillness and serenity, say thanks and rest the body from the marathons I run weekly. Christmas vacation is about the "Pause" that Jack Shea has spoken about in his Advent reflections at Old St. Patrick's Church. It is a chance to reflect on my very happy life.

After six or seven mornings of this wonderful regimen, we come to New Year's eve. For years the most important part of the turning of the year is the New Year's day long morning run. One such run---perhaps 2007---took place right into a Norman Rockwell type showfall of six or seven inches. I start these New Year's Day runs about seven in the morning. Chicago belongs to me and me alone. My footprints are the first in the snow. The beauty of a fresh snowfall in the wooded Irving Park neighborhood is breathtaking. And the run is usually blessed with some brilliant sunshine-----plenty of hope for the year ahead.

One run went almost seventeen miles---probably in 1999, when I trained for two marathons. It started in a light snowfall and ended almost three hours later in four inches of snow.

Life is grand. Aways has been and always will be.

Voltaire

BASKET CASE by Carl Hiassen: A BOOK REVIEW

This is a funny pot-boiler that I recommend. Though it is not as good as some of this fine novelist's other books, you may enjoy it. I got the book as a gift and enjoyed it while I ran some morning miles.

Hiaasen's hero, Jack Tagger, is a charming investigative journalist with too big a mouth. I can relate to him. I was born with the same defect. Tagger was knocked off his hard-won perch as a newpaper's chief investigative reporter after his public denunciation of his boss, Race Maggot III, the Rupert Murdoch type owner of a Florida daily paper.

Tagger has been exiled to the obit column for the past two years. Most recently he has been bothered by his young editor, Emma, an attractive, smart woman twenty years his junior. This Generation Xer and Tagger have been fighting.

When Tagger's research into the untimely death of a famous singer leads him right into the middle of a murder investigation involving the dead singer's wife and many semi-illiterates poulating the rock music production world (some would say the underworld), Tagger and Emma find their relationship changing.

Blind ambition and greed ruined Macbeth, Nixon, untold others and surely inspired Hiassen's murderer in this tale.

Voltaire