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An Evening with Elizabeth George

October 8, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

“As long as the stories are there to be told, I’ll be writing.” – Elizabeth George.

Last Friday, my wife and attended an author’s talk with mystery writer Elizabeth George at the St. Louis County Library. The library’s foundation maintains a robust author program, bringing in some 150 a year.

It’s been some time (like more than a decade) since we last attended one of these, an evening with poet Billy Collins. That one had been packed with some 800 people; the program was free. I remember having to park across a busy highway at a shopping mall.

George is the author of the Inspector Lynley mysteries. We had been fans of the PBS series (2001-2007) with Nathaniel Parker as Thomas Lynley and Sharon Small as Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. Just recently, a new version has started on Britbox, with Leo Suter as Lynley, Sofia Barclay as Havers, and Daniel May’s as a perfect malevolent detective chief inspector and Lynley’s boss. We’re enjoyed the four episodes of the first season, including Daniel Mays as the character you love to hate. In fact, we finished episode four the night before we saw Elizabeth George.

*Lynley 2025: Daniel May, Leo Suter, and Sofia Barclay*

I’ve read about half of the books by George, now numbering 21. She’s on tour promoting the book, A Slowly Dying Cause, set in Cornwall.

The program was interview-style, with George asked questions by St. Louis writer, filmmaker, and director Katherine Bratkowski. About 250 people attended; the program had an entrance fee included an expanded fee if you also bought the book. The people who attended, and it was largely a female audience, were Lynley fans.

“I really wanted to take my characters around England,” she said, “because I like England.” In the series, Lynley’s aristocratic family lives in Cornwall, so he has a good excuse to be in the area. He has to deal with problems with the family estate (a Grade II listed building, meaning repairs can only be made with materials from the time it was built). He takes DS Havers with him, “because she’s in trouble; Havers is always in trouble,” George said.

She explained that she originally created the two characters to be complete opposites. Lynley was created first – upper class, Oxford-educated – while Havers is from the working class, comprehensive-school educated, and always seems to be eating. In the original TV series, George said, “Sharon Small really got the Havers character.” For all of the characters in the stories, she writes an assessment that’s physical, emotional, and mental before she ever works them into the story.

With A Slowly Dying Cause, she says she wrote five beginnings, rewriting until it worked like she wanted it. She writes everything first draft and then goes back and edits and pares down heavily. For several of the stories, she didn’t know how the crime would be solved, “a really scary situation.”

George says she’s been an Anglophile since the 1960s; she majored in and taught English literature for several years before turning to writing. She writes every day, emphasizing that, for any writer, discipline is the key. She said it takes about 18 to 24 months to write a novel now.

One of the first questions from the audience was “why did you kill Helen?” Helen was Lynley’s great love, and she’s murdered in one of the books (it made a big impression on me, to the point where I can still remember who the murderer was). George’s answer: to keep the story open. Had Helen continued in the series, the overall story line would have closed down in family and children.

*Yes, I got my copy of the book autographed.*

She starts stories with the place or setting, then the victim, and then how the victim was killed.

George said she likes the new Lynley series on Britbox, but the episodes are very different from the books they’re based upon. “You can see the series and then read the books because they’re so different.”

It was a fun, informative evening; George loves to talk about her books and writing, and she was graciously patient in signing copies for the long line of people (including me). And she posed for photos for anyone who asked. I’ve now started reading A Slowly Dying Cause, and it’s already a great story.

“Midnight on the Potomac” by Scott Ellsworth

October 1, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

A considerable portion of my historical novel Brookhaven is set in the last year of the Civil War, and yet the novel only covers a few of the momentous events – the battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Courthouse, the final siege of Petersburg, Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox, and Johnston’s surrender to Sherman near Greensboro.

Indirectly, the novel covers Grierson’s Raid through Alabama, the fall of Atlanta and Sherman’s march to the sea, and the political and social chaos that followed. People lived through those times; my own ancestors (on both sides of my family) lived through it.

The last year of the Civil War is also the focus of Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America. In almost a conversational vignette style, historian Scott Ellsworth guides the reader through the major events of 1864-1865, showing how they not only were significant in and of themselves but also how they shaped post-war America.

You meet spies and ghost armies, experience the horrific battle in the Wilderness near Richmond, and discover how slaves were liberated and sometimes abandoned by Union armies. You follow the acting career of John Wilkes Booth and how it led to that fateful night at Ford’s Theater. You learn how the fall of Atlanta assured Lincon’s reelection, and you join Booth in listening to Lincoln’s second inaugural speech. You meet the famous and not-so-famous, and you experience history in many of the words and first-hand accounts of the people who were themselves involved.

It says something of Ellsworth’s skill that the writing and stories seem almost effortless. You know they’re not; a prodigious amount of research and knowledge was required for that “effortlessness.”

Ellsworth previously published The Ground Breaking: The Tulsa Race Massacre and an American City’s Search for Justice; Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921; The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball’s Lost Triumph; and The World Beneath Their Feet: Mountaineering, Madness, and the Deadly Race to Summit the Himalayas. He attended Reed College in Oregon and graduate school at Duke University in North Carolina. And he also worked as a historian at the Smithsonian Institution. He lives with his family in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and he teaches at the University of Michigan.

Through the power of stories, Midnight on the Potomac explains what happened that last, fateful year of the Civil War, and it does so in a highly readable, engaging way.

“The Summer of ’63: Gettysburg” by Chris Mackowski and Dan Welch

September 17, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

My historical novel Brookhaven is set during the Civil War’s final two years and immediately after, and then in 1915, 50 years later. The moment that sets the story into motion happens in late April of 1863 – Grierson’s Raid, in which a troop of some 1700 Union cavalry made their way through Mississippi from the Tennessee border to (eventually) Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The soldiers came to Brookhaven, most notably burning the train station and tearing up railroad track.

The raid had a specific point: divert attention from Gen. Grant’s army preparing to cross the river from Louisiana and end the siege of Vicksburg, the last Confederate position on the river. The fall of Vicksburg would been the Union controlled the entire length of the river and would split the Confederacy in two.

The Vicksburg campaign was covered in a collection of articles edited by Chris Mackowski and Dan Welch, part of a series called “Summer of ’63.” Their Vicksburg & Tullahoma covered the events and milestones of that campaign, including a raid on Mississippi’s capital of Jackson, which eventually led to a Union victory.

Now Mackowski and Welch have done it again, this time turning to another major Union victory in 1863 – the Battle of Gettysburg.

The Summer of 1863: Gettysburg follows a similar format. Mackowski and Welch have gathered and edited articles from the Emerging Civil War web site (which I can’t recommend highly enough if you’re interested in American history generally and Civil War history specifically). When you read a concentration of work like this, you realize just how fine the historical scholarship is on the site.

The subjects include understanding why the Battle of Chancellorsville is so vital to understanding Gettysburg; how Gen. Meade took control of the Union army on the eve of battle; the mascot of the 11h Pennsylvania; prominent local families; how the Union retreated through the town at the beginning of the three-day battle; the impact of three men on the battle’s outcome; the role of Stonewall Jackson; the poet and writer Herman Melville on Pickett’s Charge; the aftermath, including the effort to punish Gen. Meade for “allowing” Lee’s army to escape; how the wounded saw the battle; how the battle was memorialized; the famous 1913 reunion of both Union and Confederate veterans,; and much more.

A professor at St. Bonaventure University, Mackowski has received B.A., M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. degrees in communication, English, and creative writing. The author of some nine books, he’s written extensively on the Civil War for a number of publications. He also worked for the National Park Service and gave tours of the Civil War battlefields at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania.

Welch is an educator in a public school district in Ohio and serves as a seasonal park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park and associate editor of Gettysburg Magazine. He’s written two books in the Emerging Civil War Series and co-edited several volumes.

A collection like The Summer of ’63: Gettysburg makes you appreciate the quality of the articles at Emerging Civil War. It also reminds me of the debt I owe to the writers there; I spent considerable time using the site for research and background for Brookhaven. It’s a debt I can’t repay. And my book has been published for some months, yet I still spend considerable time on the web site.

Top illustration: The Battle of Gettysburg as depicted by artist Thure de Thulstrup for Harper’s Weekly.

Wendell Berry and the “Mad Farmer Poems”

September 10, 2025 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

It was a conversation that went much like you might expect.

“I don’t understand it,” the executive said. “They hate us. They hate what we do. They don’t even really understand what it is that we do. They don’t understand how important our products are for farmers and for the world’s food supply.”

I was sitting in the executive’s office, working with him on a speech he was to give. What he was talking about wasn’t the subject of the speech, but it was clearly on his mind. I listened to what was essentially a rant, and then I asked a question.

“Have you read Wendell Berry?”

He stared at me. “Who’s that?”

And there it was. The animosity about the company’s products, the position of the company in the marketplace, the company’s close identification with “Big Agriculture,” and the executive’s being perplexed with the activists and animosity on social media could all be summed up that that question – “who’s that?”

I answered his question. “Berry,” I said, “is the man who has articulated a very different understanding of agriculture, the idea of community, and the understanding of the land. He’s widely read and admired. You have to read his essays to understand what’s behind all the animosity and controversy. His fiction and poetry will help, too.”

The response? “I don’t have time to read that stuff.”

Now 91, Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky, where his family had farmed for five generations. He worked as a writer for agricultural publications like Rodale Press, but he eventually returned to Henry County and worked his own farm, Lane’s Landing.

But he continued to write. He wrote essays, poems, general interest articles, short stories and novels. He fictionalized his region of Kentucky, renaming the nearby town of Port Royal as “Port William.” Slowly and then rapidly, his ideas of land, community, and agriculture permeated American culture, influencing people like Joel Salatin and Michael Pollan, who in turn have had a huge influence.

I generally prefer Berry’s fiction and poetry to his essays. A good place to start is with The Mad Farmer Poems, where Berry articulates his major problems with agriculture as practiced in the United States. It’s a relatively short collection, about the size of a chapbook, and it includes such poems as “The Mad Farmer Revolution,” “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” (which is not as radical as it sounds) and “Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer.”

The poems introduce you to a man who is, yes, angry about the state of modern agriculture, but who maintains a reverence for the land, the people who farm it, and the community the people create together. This is what Berry sees as broken and lost in America of the 21^st century, and it’s difficult not see the sense he makes.

In 2007, Jason Peters, a professor at Hillsdale College, assembled and edited a collection of essays about Berry under the title Wendell Berry: Life and Work. It’s a good introduction to Berry and his writings from people who admire his work and his beliefs and have generally been strongly influenced by him.

The contributors include non-fiction author Sven Birkerts, novelists Barbara Kingsolver and Gene Logsdon, poets Donald Hall and John Leax, Patrick Deneen of Georgetown University, ecology writer Bill McKibben, and numerous others. They speak to Berry’s fiction, his poems, his faith, his philosophy, his deep beliefs in land and community, and related topics. And the key here is the word “related.” Berry doesn’t compartmentalize different parts of his life. It is all part of an integrated whole.

Berry received B.S. and M.A. degrees from the University of Kentucky. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and studied in Italy and France under a Guggenheim Fellowship. He taught at New York University and the University of Kentucky and served as a writer for Rodale Press. Since 1965, he and his wife have lived at Lane’s Landing. And he has a new Port William novel publishing in October – Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story.

When the executive and I had that conversation, more than a decade ago, I had read much of Berry’s poetry, two of his novels, and several of his essays – a mere drop in the bucket of what the man has published. I’ve read much more since then. And I think my answer to “Who’s that?” is even more on point now then it was back then. If you want to understand the culture – and cultural battle – of American agriculture, you have to read Wendell Berry.

Wendell Berry and the Land.

My review of Berry’s Jayber Crow.

Wendell Berry and This Day: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Wendell Berry and Terrapin: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Wendell Berry’s Our Only World.

The Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry.

Nathan Coulter by Wendell Berry.

Andy Catlett: Early Travels by Wendell Berry.

A World Lost by Wendell Berry.

A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry.

The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry.

Poets and Poems: Wendell Berry and Another Day.

Top photograph by Megan Andrews via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Two Reviews of “Brookhaven”

September 5, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

One day, I’ll figure out how Amazon works. Here are two reviews of Brookhaven, both dated December of 2024 (the month it was published), but which didn’t show up until the last week. Still, I thank both reviewers for their kind comments.

From Dec. 26, 2024:

Immensely Satisfying

A quick admission, I usually have to be drug kicking and screaming to read new novels. So, when this book was placed into my hands, I’m now glad my tantrum was brief and that I settled in to both read and enjoy Brookhaven. The novel is lovely, sad, joyful, redemptive, and all around a thoroughly satisfying example of entertaining storytelling. Without giving away the plot, the author artfully weaves in the awful complexity of the Civil War, along with its immediate aftermath, into the lives of the generations that came after, and all with a most satisfying conclusion.

And from Dec. 31, 2024:

“Brookhaven” kept me up late wondering what would happen next!

“Brookhaven” is a retrospective novel set amidst the grim realities of the American Civil (and often not-so-civil) War and its aftermath. While Young’s descriptions of the war feel so authentic and in the moment, it is his love story—one of romantic love and, even more, love of a place and its people—that drew me in. Young’s writing is clear and concise, and he weaves together a complicated tale that is engaging, endearing, and enlightening. I don’t have a lot of time to read, but the book managed to keep me up late at night wondering what would happen next. I expect it will do the same for many other readers.

“A Month in the Country” by J.L. Carr

September 3, 2025 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

In 1980, British writer J.L. Carr (1912-1994) published a short novel. It was one of eight he would publish during his life. And it turned out to be the one that became something of a classic. Even today, it’s considered a “perfect novel.”

The novel is A Month in the Country. It has the kind of plot that wouldn’t lead you to believe it would become as famous as it has. A veteran of World War I, who specialized in art restoration before the war, has been hired to uncover a mural in a small chapel in Yorkshire, one dating to early Anglo-Saxon times. At some point in the past, perhaps during the dissolution of the monasteries and raiding of the churches by Henry VIII, the mural has been covered over.

Now the church authorities want it restored, if possible. Thomas Birkin, the veteran is still suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (called something else back then), largely manifested by a nervous tic in his face that he can’t control. His wife has deserted him, although she had deserted him many times before. It’s a perfect job for Birkin – away from people, away from stress, and it might just give him the time he needs to heal.

Working near the adjacent cemetery is another veteran, Charles Moon, who’s been hired to find the bones of an ancestor of a former parishioner, who believed the burial was somewhere near the cemetery. Moon and Birkin become friends. And it will turn out that Moon is also healing from a different kind of wartime experience.

Inevitably, Birkin finds himself being drawn into the life of the nearby village of Oxgodby. The townspeople, including the vicar’s wife, will also help Birkin heal. Rather surprisingly, nothing will quite turn out the way the reader expects, and that’s part of what gives the novel its charm.

The book was made into a movie of the same name in 1987, starring Colin Firth as Birkin, Kenneth Branagh as Moon, Natasha Richardson as the vicar’s wife, and Patrick Malahide as the priggish vicar.

Carr drew on his own background of growing up in Yorkshire for all his novels, including A Month in the Country. The themes of art, vanished village life, community, and healing are worked through his books.

It’s a gem of a story, the uncovering of the mural (and the artist) a significant part of it. Life never quite works out the way you think it will, and sometimes that’s a very good thing.

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