A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin

In A Slight Trick of the Mind, Mitch Cullin imagines the life of an aged Sherlock Holmes. He has lived through two world wars and seen most of his closest friends and family die. He is a man with no place in the world, and even the little place he has separated out for himself cannot hold back time.

This is not a crime story, but it deals with mysteries. These are not mysteries in the secret society sense of things revealed only to the cognoscenti. They are mysteries in the Christian sense of things that are beyond the understanding of man. The Holmes of this book is struggling with memory, death, war, abandonment, relationships, and grief. Even with diminished capacity, Holmes can tell how a boy died. What Holmes can’t grasp is how this boy he had come to love should die for no apparent reason while he has lived long after his place in the world faded away.

I have always thought that part of the appeal of Holmes was his humanity. Though he has a cool demeanor and focuses on reason, these things don’t motivate him. Beneath the surface is a passion for justice and a compassion for his fellow man. Cullin captures both of these sides of a very old Holmes who is struggling with mysteries that stump us all.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

The Peerless Peer by Philip Jose Farmer

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Cullin, Mitch. A Slight Trick of the Mind. 2005. New York: Anchor, 2006.

The Writings

The Writings is a collection of poetic and wisdom books. These books are Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. In Christian Bibles, these Old Testament texts are typically placed between the historical books and the prophets. These books are organized a little differently in the Hebrew Bible, where they are grouped with other books that some considered to be of similar vintage (the Ketuvim).

Poetry is a link to all these books. Job and Song of Solomon are both long poems. Psalms is a collection of songs, but these lyrics can be read as poems and follow poetic forms used in the other books. Proverbs and Ecclesiastes also use poetic forms; the contrasting or comparing couplet in particular is used in much of Proverbs.

These books also deal with subjects that can be difficult. Job suffers incredible loss, and has long debates about sin and suffering with friends who are supposedly there to comfort him. Many psalms are songs of praise and thanksgiving to God, but in some the psalmist, especially when it is David, freely expresses grief, anger, disappointment and fear. The wisdom literature collected in Proverbs sometimes shrugs its shoulders hopelessly at folly, and Ecclesiastes takes a very dark view of life. Song of Solomon deals frankly with passion and physical love in marriage, possibly to the point of eroticism.

These books address tough issues, but they do not offer easy answers. Sometimes the best they can offer is trust God. Trust God is good advice. Even so, we often would like to hear something else. We’d rather have an answer, or find strength in ourselves or our communities, or be assured that we can reason it all out on our own. We’d rather do almost anything instead of trust God.

Because of this, these books can be tough going for both the faithful and nonbelievers. I encourage Christians to read these books. Come prepared with an understanding of the more straightforward parts of the Bible. You’re going to wrestle with challenges in your life, and you’re not always going to have easy answers, or answers you can even understand. Wrestling with these books, prayerfully and faithfully, can help you prepare to deal with the strange difficulties of real life, where prayer and faith seem to be all you have and even that doesn’t seem to be enough.

You may find these books troubling, especially if you are a new Christian and you’re still seeking answers and encouragement to help you live your new life. You may find yourself asking, “Why would God including this in His Word? Why would he bring up these issues and say things about the I cannot fathom?” I don’t know. Trust God.

These feelings, like all feelings, will eventually move on

If you let yourself feel such different emotions as grief or emptiness, these feelings, like all feelings, will eventually move on.

-Dan Neuharth, Ph.D., Secrets You Keep from Yourself

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. New York: Random House, 2000.
ISBN 0-679-45004-1

This novel is partly about comic books. It is more about identity, with corollary themes of family, race, nationality, sexuality, talent, profession, and self-expression.

The title characters, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, are cousins and creators of comic books during that medium’s golden age. They are fictional counterparts to the writers and artists who took elements from the popular arts of their day, explored the boundaries of a new medium, and created a form of storytelling. For comics fans, Chabon includes plenty of name-dropping and asides into the industry in that era. These elements don’t bog down the story, but fill in the background.

Joe escapes from Prague as a young man just at the Nazis are beginning to implement the isolation of the Jews there. By happenstance, he was born in the Ukraine and eligible for a Soviet passport. His family’s arrangements fail, and he is sent back to Prague. He enlists the help of Bernard Kornblum, an escape artist who taught Joe his art. Together, they smuggle the golem of Prague out of the country. Joe takes a long journey to New York, where he moves in with his aunt, Sam’s mother, and begins his creative partnership with his cousin.



Joe spends the rest of the book involved in escapes, with varying degrees of success. He tries to escape his survivor’s guilt, his grief, his hatred of those who killed his family, love, his own self-isolation.

Sam is a product of New York, an absent father and a caustic mother. He is a hustler, looking to escape poverty and loneliness, and later looking to escape the difficulties of his sexuality. He sees an opportunity in Joe’s artistic talent. Within a day, he persuades his boss, a seller of novelties, to publish a comic book; within a weekend, he manages to get his friends to produce one.

Joe and Sam are naturals to create a comic book superhero. They struggle to be and do things that seem out of their reach. They are like Tom Mayflower and the Escapist, the hero they created. Mayflower is a crippled kid who can only dream of being the great magician he longs to be. As the Escapist, he has the power do above and beyond what he imagined. Nothing can hold him. Through their creations, Joe and Sam engage in fictions that fulfill their own needs. Joe seeks revenge at first, and later seeks and reconciliation with his past. Sam seeks to end his loneliness, both his need for a father and a desire for a kind of love he could not safely pursue.

In the end, escapism becomes not just away to get a break from troubles, but a way of finding oneself. While Sam never becomes fully reconciled with his art, he finally gives himself the freedom to stop fearing and be himself. Joe embraces the comic book, and the escape it permits, as a way of both relieving the pressures of the world and to imaginatively deal with them.

• If your interested in this book, you may also be interested in The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont.