Archaeology in the Anthropocene Epoch. Louis Shalako.

Mommsen: history is a moral question.

Louis Shalako

Archaeology in the Anthropocene Epoch.

 

The great thing about archaeology in the Anthropocene Epoch is that you really don’t have to dig down all that far.

I was digging a garden, some years ago, probably digging down a foot or so into rich, black humus, and all of a sudden, I was coming up with all kinds of marbles, and green plastic army men. The propeller from a Cox 0.49 airplane engine. Bits of a plastic model car. That was out behind my old man’s garage, on Bright St.; here in Sarnia.

Imagine digging down about forty years and finding your own artifacts—pieces of your own life, buried there in the dirt. As Mommsen said, ‘history is a moral question’, but it is also a philosophical question…looking at my own past life, so to speak.

I’m not too sure of how I got here, but this is where I came from.

The modern equivalent of the good old shell midden is right outside our back door, in some cases.

Your typical thrift store, in any city or town in this nation, is literally riddled with artifacts of a kind. Every one of those artifacts has its own story, and collectively, they tell a bigger and more complex story.

It is a very human story.

The Anthropocene is the story of what human beings have done to this planet, outside of all other natural causes. Essentially, we can’t really shift tectonic plates, but what we can do, is to cut down forests, build great cities and pump out all kinds of products…including waste products.

What is a shell midden?

We don’t have to wait five thousand years before going back in time and digging up our own time and place. It exists, right here and right now, and all we have to do is to look about us—at the world we have created.

This is the world we are living in, right now.

Five thousand years from now, they will live in a different world. Five thousand years from now, they will dig down, and discover that the entire world was wrapped in a sheet of plastic a hundred metres deep, too.

You can build a pretty good picture of a society by sifting through their trash bins…

In any ditch, you will find pop cans and beer bottles, broken baby carriages and sacks of clothing, auto parts and the skeletons of roadkill. This gives us a pretty good picture of the life of the day, which includes proper drainage of farmland, high-speed roads and vehicles, and an established infrastructure—all very obvious, and so no one observes it. No one really analyzes it from the archaeological, the cultural point of view. You could trace an entire ancient road system, just by following the trail of crap in the ditches.

This is, clearly, an abundant society, also, a wasteful one. Great resources are being squandered, and it’s like no one has a second thought.

This is a wealthy society indeed, and a well-fed one, considering the human race has gained, in the collective sense, several inches in average height, and a good hundred pounds in terms of the average weight over the last century. This is an evolutionary response to a social change, (and chemical changes in the food we eat), in the sense that the world is growing more food, more efficiently—all those hands, all those workers, and rather contradicting of Malthusian economics. But of course we have so much better technology now. The oxen and the plough have been replaced by the combine and the skilled modern farmer. Immigration, has replaced the higher birth-rates, that in the past would have naturally grown or at least replaced, the national populations. Lower birthrates are a feature, and not a bug, of technologically-advanced civilizations. Nowadays, four out of five births reach five years of age, which is a complete reversal of medieval populations, and as long as more babies survive, there is less need to produce more.

Kids are expensive, as any parent can tell you.

What is Malthusian Theory.

We don’t actually have to dig down in the here and now, in order to realize that archaeologists of the future will be digging up skeletons with breast and bum implants, or teeth that sit on metal posts, or had electronic tickers for the heart, or a chip in the brain, or that men will be buried in their toupees, or that a skeleton might have three steel pins in an ankle. It does say quite a bit about the medical science of our day.

Still searching for the Ark of the Covenant.

We might even feel a little sorry, for the archaeologist who digs into some old mound and finds nothing but tires, tires, millions of tires, ladies and gentlemen. Tires waiting for recycling, and in too many cases, that will never happen.

They might even think of us as Mound Builders, which is apt enough.

The real irony is that these are not centres of worship, but symbols of desecration.

It doesn’t take a big stretch of the imagination to realize that archaeologists, historians, scientists of the future won’t have too much trouble figuring out what we have done with our atmosphere, our soils, our water, our climate—and why. This includes our social structures and institutions that have enabled such obscenity, for surely that is what it is.

We have the best educated and the best-informed society in all of history. We have all of the information that we require, in order to make good decisions. And never, in all of history, have we been so wilfully blind, and to show such little wisdom in the care and maintenance of what is rightfully to be held in trust for all of humanity.

We hold this Earth in trust for future generations.

We should try and remember this of all things.

And in the meantime...

 

END

 

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

A Little Chunk of History.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

A Little Chunk of History. Louis Shalako.

A rendering of an archaic longhouse.

Louis Shalako

If I should ever fail as a writer, I shall surely go back to my first love, which was archaeology.

(Which is kind of sad when you think about it, but that would be a story for another day.)

I blame the Bookmobile of elementary school days, and Louis Leakey and the Olduvai Gorge; which I read all about as a very small boy…the Bookmobile was a trailer, dropped off in front of our school, regular as clockwork, every Thursday morning, about nine a.m., rain or shine. More importantly, the teachers encouraged us to go out there and have a look, two or three at a time, and if nothing else, it got us out of class and out of the building for a while.

It’s just a little promise that I make to myself sometimes, and the funny thing is, it’s not such a bad idea. I might even look good in the archaeologist’s hat, but I do promise to shave, trim the hair and the eyebrows once in a while, and the odds of good old Tony Robinson, (a.k.a. Baldric), and the Time Team following me around anytime soon would appear to be rather slim.

No, ladies and gentlemen, it’s just that my sister gave me this crazy old map, and I was a little startled to see that the bones of a mastodon had been discovered down by the river. Studying that map, I see that more mastodon bones were found near Brigden. It seems that when the glaciers melted around 12,300 years ago, they and other creatures were following along the Wyoming and Seaforth moraines. Primitive man arrived not too far behind, with their spears and their bows and those big brains, which we still enjoy today. I can find the Wyoming moraine. If you leave Wyoming, and head west on Churchill Line, you really can’t miss it: just north of Marthaville, the land climbs, there’s few small dips, and then, voila! You’re looking down from a height, and down below are the flatlands so familiar here in Sarnia-Lambton.

I was interested to learn, that there were ancient Algonkian earthworks in Corunna of all places. These are long since gone, or otherwise inaccessible due to being on private, or industrial land.

...some crazy old map...

Here’s the thing. At some point I was Googling key words and all of a sudden I’m reading a pdf of an archaeological dig in the Thedford area. I’m reading about an Iroquoian village from pre-Columbian times, in the Burley section of Pinery Provincial Park…I’m looking at drawings of arrowheads, and looking at photographs of pottery sherds, some of which had been reconstructed in order to demonstrate the shape of the original piece. I’m looking at site maps, I was looking at photographs of the famed Kettle Point chert, the dominant colour of which turned out to be a surprising shade of yellow, and which was traded all over the Great Lakes. It is, essentially, a kind of flint, and used for arrow points, spear heads, scrapers, and knife-blades.

I’ve actually seen that stuff on the beach, and never even gave it a thought.

The map at least claims, that the final resting place of the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh is on Walpole Island.

This site is typical of Iroquoian culture, it is in Middlesex.

That may be true, I simply don’t know, but this map is a gold mine of information. I won’t name them all, but at various times the Dawn Tramway and the Erie and Huron Railway operated in the south of the county. The Canadian Southern, the Michigan Central. There were half a dozen companies, most of them short-lived, all dating to that golden era of rail and steam.

When you consider the present population of Dawn-Euphemia is less than two thousand people, even the smallest of spur lines seems like a very ambitious project. Ah, but when the roads were muddy tracks through the bush, this was the way the milk, butter and eggs, all those bushels of corn and wheat, got to market.

The other thing was settlement—if you want people to take up and clear the land, build homes, schools and the like, you’re going to have to produce some kind of surplus, and get those products to market. The big economic lesson here is that it was a cash-poor, and credit-poor society. Turnaround from investment in seed to selling a crop was a yearly cycle. The margins must have been very tight. What they did have was land—just land, their own, back-breaking labour, and some kind of a dream, I guess.

When they got around to building that first, one-room schoolhouse, it was a communal effort, where the majority of materials and labour were donated. All they had to do then, was to find the money to pay a teacher, and it would be eight grades, all under one roof.

Next time I go for a walk in the woods, I will definitely be keeping an eye out for mastodon tusks sticking out of the side of a creek, or arrowheads, or fossils, or a piece of chert. Some location, one that looks like the perfect campsite from times immemorial, or almost anything, really. If I find a chunk of history or something, that would be okay too.

Also—

Iroquoian pottery had rounded bottoms. It distributed the heat more evenly, and the pots could rest in soft earth or ashes, as all cooking was done over an open fire. In that sense, I am learning something new every day.

And that, as they say, is archaeology.

 

END

Chert, ladies and gentlemen.

 

Notes.

The Moore Museum is located at 94 Moore Line, Mooretown, Ontario.

The Lambton Heritage Museum is located at 10035 Museum Road, Grand Bend, Ontario.

The former Stones & Bones Museum has found a new home on the second floor of the Sarnia Library, 124 Christina St. South, Sarnia, Ontario. It’s a $3.5 million project, hopefully opening in 2028, and you can donate here. 

Sources indicate the final resting place of Tecumseh has never been proven.

The earliest known use of archery dates back approximately 60,000 years as evidenced by artifacts recovered from Sidubu cave in South Africa.

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

Thank you for reading.

 

Spiders in Space. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

 

It all started off innocently enough, as such things often do, from a casual remark over a pint down at the old Cock & Bull.

Perhaps it was that third pint, but Harry had gotten this look on his face—Harry often had that look on his face, and this was one of those times.

“Spiders. Spiders writing Shakespeare—in space.”

“Hah. It will never go, old chap.” Hamble made a face. “It’s too obvious—too derivative.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

Hamble snorted.

“What are you going to do? Gobble down some radioactive psilocybin and write that up?” He shook his head. “Why not monkeys, anyways?”

They’d have a much better chance in his opinion.

“It’s just like you said. It’s a little too derivative.”

“Uh, huh. Why not. It’s a hundred-million dollar grant, after all. Or more.”

The competition would be fierce, and not all of them crackpots, either.

Hamble considered it further.

“All right. We have nothing to lose. Just promise that you will try and keep it short—”

In the end, they had agreed to go with the monkeys.

***

The American Association of Astronautics had been founded by a bunch of major tech-bros in order to do some third-party lobbying on behalf of an entire industry. This was understandable enough, considering their plan to put a gazillion satellites into orbit, not to mention colonizing Mars and eventually, at least to hear them tell it, the very stars; and maybe even Uranus. Their biggest problem in terms of public relations was the prospect of forty launches a day, from each of a hundred-odd sites all across the nation, and as often as not from ecologically-sensitive areas, and just a little too close to suburbia in some cases. The odd rocket blowing up on the pad, or worse, above people’s heads, was only a secondary consideration.

Some genius had suggested a competition, open to all comers—and in their own words, give us your idea, and we will put you into space.

The total pot was two-hundred-fifty billion dollars. Once a year, in what had become an annual media ritual. Literal pocket change, or pulled out from under the cushions of the couch, for what were some fairly major dudes...

The competition involved first, second and third place, with a series of consolation prizes of one hundred million each.

Harry grinned, hunched over the keyboard.

Using existing assets, he figured he could easily do it for a couple of hundred million, three, three and a half at the most.

A few work-from-home engineers and a post office box was all they really needed.

It wasn’t the technical feasibility which worried him—it was the rationale for such an experiment, especially as he was going up against all the best universities, as well as a hundred, a thousand other hopefuls, big defense corporations and even high-school science projects. These were always good for some feel-good publicity, and every year, it seemed an effort had been made to squeeze one or two of the latter into the launch schedule. Calling it pure science, for some future benefit of the human race, (or hetero sapiens, by a recent presidential decree), had been the best he could do, and no one expected the President of the United States to be all that good at Latin anyways. Or even anthropology—

It was all laid out, thirty-one pages, all nicely formatted and with a few artist’s impressions just to bring it to life.

It was all there.

He bit his lip, and hit send.

 

***

 

The International Space Station had its challenges these days, abandoned for some years in fact, but a team of professional astronauts had brought up the original cargoes, first the work-stations, then the feeding and watering apparatus, a few bales of straw for bedding, and then, finally, a half a dozen monkeys, who, in some sense, reflected the challenge of maintaining a number of unsophisticated hominids in Low Earth Orbit when the subjects had limited knowledge and zero understanding of the ethical implications of their existence.

They were, in a sense, colonists—

They would have to be fed and watered, and provided with heat and an atmosphere just like everybody else.

When it came to intellectual stimulation, all that really took was a few pictures of bananas on a screen.

The last flight had brought up Hamble, joining Harry through the hatch and after stowing his gear, they had spent a few hours bringing in priority consumables. After a quick breather, on a word from Harry, he was strapping his backside down for a thorough briefing.

Sooner or later, the ISS must come down, but in the meantime, the human complement were all volunteers and all operations were on their own personal waivers.

He took a good sniff and heaved a deep sigh.

Hamble could smell every person that had ever been up there, and that was just a fact—

“So. Tell me about the spiders.”

 

***

Those are some ugly spiders...

“I’ll get to the spiders in a minute. Suffice it to say, the monkeys haven’t gotten too far along, although they did come up with a pretty good little sonnet just the other day…it was quite romantic. Also, you’re going to be up here for a hundred and seventy days. Try not to masturbate too much; it saps your vitality.”

“Hah.” Hamble’s brow clouded.

His most recent conquest had been a pretty little blonde of indeterminate gender orientation, with corn silk hair that had, in the end, gotten caught up in his teeth.

“A hundred seventy days, cooped up with half a dozen monkeys…and how many spiders did you say?”

“Well, it’s not that bad. We have to keep our eyes on the goal, after all, which is whatever cash is left over after all of this. And then there’s our memoirs, late-night talk shows, obscure podcasts, merchandising, and the like.” He glanced at his notes. “…so. In order to avoid explosive decompression, the bananas had to have an atmosphere at sufficient pressure to be transported into orbit. This is how the original spiders, or a bunch of eggs maybe, got up here. They seem to be doing very well, once the first few generations hatched out, and it’s all very exciting…somehow they survived all physical checks and routine irradiation, stuff like that…” He’d been thinking about that irradiation, and the micro-gravity, and perhaps some unique genetic expression in a novel environment.

People thought that evolution took a hundred million years, the very same people who had added five or six inches of height and a hundred pounds of average body weight in a single century.

It wasn’t always like that—the Galapagos finches, for example.

The monkeys, born on Earth, had been thoroughly screened and no surprises there.

Hamble considered it.

“The PETL people are all over it.”

“The what?”

“People for the Ethical Treatment of Literature.”

“…ah.”

“…why can’t we just get AI to do it, that’s what they’re saying…”

“Because that would be too easy—and it wouldn’t get us a few hundred million for this bullshit either. It would also defeat the whole purpose of the experiment. Which is to get a few hundred million for this experiment, but enough said about that…”

“If it wasn’t for bad news, we wouldn’t have too much news at all.”

“Hmn. Speaking of bad news, in compartment eleven, there’s a big, fat marmot that likes to eat rocks. No idea where he came from…that being said, we’re not here for science, so much as to generate controversy.” This was the old Russian module, which had leaked like a sieve.

Repairs had been carried out with brushes and crazy glue, and it was said the crew had been high for days due to the fumes…

Hamble stared, mouth open.

“Ah—a what?”

“A big, fat marmot that likes to eat rocks. My current theory is that it was some kind of unofficial mascot from a previous mission. When they returned, of course they had no idea of what to do with it. Figured it would just die or whatever, but, by this time, it was such an influencer, a real internet sensation, that some folks founded a foundation, and decided to feed the thing as long as it lived…” It was just one more payload, at so many dollars a kilo. “His name is Peter and the kids just love him.”

“And where in the heck did the rocks come from?”

“Ah. Gifts from adoring fans, just raising awareness of the need to send rocks or something. Some little place in southern Illinois. Ineffectual do-gooders, if you can believe it.”

“Oh, Darwin.”

“We only did so much research, right, and this was one of those popular middle-school projects. Miss Hillman’s grade-seven class of 2034, somewhere in Illinois, all those bright and shiny little-kid faces. The judges went for that one like fruit-flies on a baby’s blanket.” In that sense, an unforeseen circumstance.

 

***

 

Harry consulted his notes again.

“Okay. One more thing.”

“What’s that?” As if that weren’t enough.

“The spiders have come up with something resembling a short passage of Nietzsche infused with subtle undertones of Kafka. And I mean new material, and not just some egghead rehash…in spite of all those legs, plus the mandibles, all them freaking eyes, spiders really don’t type all that much faster than monkeys. Also, the caps-lock appears to be stuck on. It may be a while before we get much more on that one…”

Argh.

He looked up.

“So. I guess it’s about time we had a look at those spiders.”

***

“Ah! Ah! Ah!”

Hamble recoiled from the small view-panel on the hatch. The common, yellow house spider, Cheiracanthium, hundreds of them, had grown impressively large, their abdomens now as big as a tomato…

“I did say it was interesting.”

“Ah! Ah! No…no.”

“Yes.” Harry uttered a long, deep sigh. “Come on, Buddy. They’re beautiful spiders. It’s only a hundred seventy days…we might even learn something from it.”

“I want to go home.” Oh, Mother, how he wanted to go home—

But those spiders were effing big.

Hamble had a thought. He turned to look at Harry.

“How in the hell are you feeding them things, anyways?”

“Oh. Very, very carefully.” With a twist of the crank of the hatch, and one good, quick shove, Hamble was in there and it was time to kill the microphone and the cameras for a while.

So far, so good.

And—

Tomorrow was another day.

 

END

 

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

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Please consider leaving a rating or a review.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

Coming Soon: The Dead Man's Touch, the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series #11. Louis Shalako.

Hedy Lamarry, as I recall.

Louis Shalako

Coming soon.

 

The Dead Man’s Touch is the eleventh in the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series. Still recovering from a fractured skull and temporary amnesia stemming from the Dead Reckoning case, Inspector Gilles Maintenon accepts three cases from the hand of Roger Langeron, head of the Sûreté in Paris. Two are baffling enough, and one seems deceptively simple. This is just the beginning of a complex but ultimately successful investigation by the officers of the Special Homicide Unit, one where truth is mostly lies and there are plenty of surprises.

***

Long Cool One Books is pleased to announce that The Dead Man’s Touch, the eleventh in the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series, will be digitally published in a very short time.

It will appear as an ebook across multiple platforms, and as an audiobook on Google Play.

In the meantime, here is the tenth in the series, Dead Reckoning, available for free from Google Play in audiobook form.

Louis Shalako is the founder of Long Cool One Books and the author of twenty-five novels, numerous novellas and short stories. Louis studied Radio, Television and Journalism Arts at Lambton College, later studying fine art. His stories have appeared in Perihelion Science Fiction, Bewildering Stories, Aurora Wolf, Ennea, Wonderwaan, Algernon, Nova Fantasia, and Danse Macabre. He has been published in Dutch, Estonian, German, Greek, Portuguese, Romanian and two dialects of Spanish.

Louis Shalako does not use artificial intelligence (AI) in the creation of his works. 

Design by J. Thornton. A Long Cool One Book by Louis Shalako.

Thank you for reading.

 

#Louis

 

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

 

END

 

 

Broadsword Calling Danny Boy: on Alistair MacLean. Louis Shalako.

"Broadsword calling Danny Boy."

Louis Shalako

 

On Alistair MacLean.

I was just watching the 1979 film of Alistair MacLean’s Bear Island.

It has been said that the quality of his work was uneven. You could say that about any writer, if one compares the first thing they ever wrote against the last thing they ever wrote, along with some of the really great stuff when they were at their peak. Of course their work was variable, and so is mine and so is yours.

Author John Creasy wrote something like six hundred books, and there are a few in there, which I have read, where one wonders how it actually got published in the first place. Truth was, he was grinding them out relentlessly, at the dining room table, and trying to feed a family, when the going rate for a novel might have been a measly twenty-five pounds.

(How in the hell do you even do that? - ed.)

There is a big difference between six hundred books and twenty or thirty, that difference is the luxury of time.

I wanted to talk about Alistair MacLean due to the number of films that were adapted from his works.

First, a little background.

“In 1941, at the age of 19, MacLean was called up to fight in the Second World War with the Royal Navy, serving with the ranks of ordinary seaman, able seaman, and leading torpedo operator. He was first assigned to PS Bournemouth Queen, a converted excursion ship fitted for antiaircraft guns, on duty off the coasts of England and Scotland. Beginning in 1943, he served on HMS Royalist, a Dido-class light cruiser. There, he saw action in 1943 in the Atlantic theatre, on two Arctic convoys and escorting aircraft carrier groups in operations against Tirpitz, and other targets off the Norwegian coast. He took part in Convoy PQ 17 on Royalist. In 1944, Royalist and he served in the Mediterranean theatre, as part of the invasion of southern France and in helping to sink blockade runners off Crete and bombard Milos in the Aegean.” (Wiki)

Where Eagles Dare consistently ranks among the top five war adventure films of all times, and that’s pretty good company to be keeping for any writer. The Guns of Navarone is an acknowledged classic, one I have viewed many times. Force 10 from Navarone, another classic film.

Alistair at about twenty.

In terms of comparisons, River of Death is quite terrible, at least in the film version. And I have read the book, in fact I used to check for new titles at our local mall book shop, way back in the days when we had time, money, and plenty of hair on the old noggin…a leather jacket and a seventeen-hair mustache, if you really want to know.

Fear is the Key, this film has one of the best car chase scenes ever. What might have been described in the book is fully brought to life in this one. MacLean loved sending things over cliffs, for example vehicles in Where Eagles Dare and Guns of Navarone, as well as Bear Island. There are probably others, and this is one reason why they’re called action-adventure stories. Oh, yeah. In Breakheart Pass, a train goes over a cliff.

He wasn't exactly messing around, when it came time for things to go off of cliffs.

H.M.S. Ulysses, his first novel, was based on his wartime experience in the Royal Navy.

This accounts for some of the naval themes, arctic themes, for example Night without End. There are lots of ships in his novels, Golden Rendezvous for example.

The list of actors that have appeared in the films is impressive. Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, Donald Sutherland, Vanessa Redgrave, Harrison Ford, Robert Shaw, Rock Hudson, Charles Bronson, Christopher Lee, Patrick McGoohan, Carl Weathers, Lloyd Bridges, Anthony Hopkins, Jack Hawkins, Robert Morley, Edward Fox, Franco Nero, the list, ladies and gentlemen, goes on and on and on. Barry Newman, Ben Kingsley, John Vernon. Richard Harris and Anne Turkel, Burgess Meredith and David Janssen, John Carradine.

Robert Vaughn and Donald Pleasance and Michael Dudikoff in River of Death, just to name a few more. And I know I’ve left a few out—I had to, there’s just too many films and too many names.

Gregory Peck, David Niven, Richard Widmark, Ed Lauter, Ben Johnson, Charles Durning, Richard Crenna. Gia Scala and Irene Papas. As I said, this is a very long list.

Throw in a hundred more character actors, whose faces you might recognize, and whose names may be vaguely familiar, and you start to get the idea of just how successful Alistair MacLean actually was. Patrick Wymark and Michael Hordern, in Where Eagles Dare, for example, these actors each have very long lists of credits, starring and supporting roles, in film and theatre. Barbara Bach and Michael Byrne in Force 10 from Navarone is (or are), just one more example, then there were Mary Ure and Ingrid Pitt. Jill Ireland.

These are just a few of the ‘vapid females’ (essentially, Bond Girls), in what are called stories ‘of good Englishmen and bad Germans’. Which would appear to be an entire genre in itself, at least when a good writer gets hold of it.

It’s different for everybody of course, but when I read these books and saw the films for the first time, I was a young man, impressionable, an inveterate reader above all else. I soaked it all up like a sponge.

These are the stories that make a young man’s fancy turn towards writing a few stories of his own someday…

The books that kind of stick to your ribs, like soul food for the adventurous home-boy.

When I fantasize about my own humble bookshelves, which I do from time to time, (if only we had money!), this would be one box set I might be willing to pay money for—just for the purposes of study, scholarship, and maybe even stealing a few ideas here and there as a writer myself. Maybe even just learning a little something at the knee of a master. Or maybe it’s just some kind of an escape.

It always was, an escape.

There is nothing wrong with a little escapism, at the time we probably needed it, and there are times when we still do.

In which case, we will always have someplace to go.

I have written a critique of Where Eagles Dare, and you can read it at the link below. I describe it as ‘a series of plot holes flying in close formation’, and yet I still enjoy the film, just as much as I did the book, such a very long time ago.

MacLean figured out how to make it work for him, and perhaps that is the real lesson here. I have no idea of who the reader is, I have no idea if the lesson is relevant to you, although plenty of folks write, and plenty more dream about it just as I did. I can only hope you enjoyed reading this story.

No, ladies and gentlemen, it turns out the lesson was for me.

And why not.

I’ve always needed plenty of stimulation.

END

Plenty of stimulation.

Alistair MacLean. (Wiki)

When Eight Bells Toll.

The Golden Rendezvous.

Fear is the Key.

Night Without End.

Breakheart Pass.

Where Eagles Dare: A Series of Plot Holes Flying in Close Formation.

Why I Love Louis L’Amour.

On Agatha Christie.

Louis Shalako has books and stories, ebooks and audiobooks, available from Google Play.

 

Thank you for reading. The blog is acting rather wonky today, and trying to get the text all in the same shade of black has defeated me.

#Louis