Laurence Fox as James Hathaway (l) and Kevin Whately as Robbie Lewis in 'Lewis'

The PBS series Masterpiece Mystery returns with another year of relatively thoughtful genre stories tonight, starting with a new Lewis mystery titled “Down Among the Fearful.”

The series, featuring characters from Colin Dexter’s “Inspector Morse” novels and short stories and the Inspector Morse TV series that was based on them, tends to reside on the more thoughtful and less trendy side of the Masterpiece spectrum. Detective Inspector Robbie Lewis, formerly the sergeant assisting the now-deceased Inspector Morse, is an intelligent, sensible, mature, skeptical, and practical but not very imaginative or intellectual detective—just what one would have expected based on the character in the Morse series. He’s paired with Detective Sergeant James Hathaway, a former divinity student who retains his religious faith and is wont to read heavy books and ponder deep questions.

This week’s case allows both of the a good opportunity to show their personalities and interests. The two investigate a series of murders centered on a phony psychic who works with grief-stricken people, and on a psychology experiment in which the scholars break down people’s religious beliefs using “logic and reason,” as the psychologist in charge tendentiously puts it. The experimenters “grill” and “mock” the religious-believer subjects of the experiments, as one of the subjects accurately characterizes it, and they seem to be vastly more interested in giving themselves reasons to feel good about their atheism than to understand what religious faith really is and does. The experiment is ultimately suggested to be nothing more than a cruel and idiotic exercise in brainwashing.

The Oxford professor conducting the study does not make an attractive advocate for atheism: he is arrogant, cold-hearted, and openly contemptuous of nonintellectuals. The episode does not suggest that religious believers are without shortcomings of their own, however, as the unfolding of the mystery shows. Nonetheless, it is the professor’s “experiment” that sets the killings in motion.

Interestingly, the series is increasingly bringing Lewis’s partner, Hathaway, to the fore, with Lewis even becoming something of a supporting character. In so doing, it moves the show more toward the tone and interests of Inspector Morse, the series from which Lewis is derived, while reversing the ages and departmental status of the two. Morse was the central character and the more philosophical and deep-thinking of the two in the earlier series, and Lewis was his callow partner. Hathaway fills Morse’s role now, despite his inferior departmental status, and his greater prominence in recent seasons makes the show increasingly interesting and sophisticated.

This is particularly important to the subject matter of the present episode, for middle-aged Lewis is an atheist and not interested in deep things such as arguments about theology, whereas Hathaway is a very thoughtful Catholic who studied for the priesthood before leaving school to join the Oxford police. As all of this suggests, Lewis is after more than just identifying the murderer, as it explores topics of deep import without ever becoming pretentious or lugubrious. Those who are interested in thinking a bit about the deeper mysteries of life while enjoying a cracking good story would do well to look in on Lewis.

Out of nowhere, B.Y.U. — a Mormon university owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — has become a farm team for the country’s top animation studios and effects companies. Unlikely as it sounds, young Mormons are being sucked out of the middle of Utah and into the very centers of American pop-culture manufacturing.

Praising the program in a speech on campus in 2008, the president of Pixar, Edwin Catmull, noted: “It’s the perception not just of Pixar, but also at the other studios, that something pretty remarkable is happening here.”

And it isn’t just teaching students skills, it is teaching them a vision that their work will matter, that one day they will become culture shapers:

I kept being reminded that B.Y.U.’s program was only 13 years old: most of the moral emissaries that it has been pouring into the industry are still climbing to the positions from which they’ll be able to truly influence a film’s tone and content. One day, there will be alumni directing and producing, students insisted — it’s an inevitability. “Right now we’re the workhorses,” an alumnus at DreamWorks told me. “But I think our future is bright in terms of being able to shape the industry.”

As important as politics and elections and government policy are, and they are critically important, the future of America belongs to those who shape the worldview and plausibility structures of its citizens. Conservative Christian and Catholic institutions of higher education, and non-sectarian conservative ones like Hillsdale and Grove City need to learn something from our Mormon friends here: professional excellence will open doors that ideology cannot keep shut.

As the piece shows, it also takes money for such a program to prosper. So of all those millions of dollars that go to politics and think tanks on the right, some needs to make its way to programs that encourage cultural engagement, inside and outside of Academia. Otherwise those dollars will swim against a cultural tide that renders their effect for limited government, liberty and personal responsibility moot.

When you follow free and discount e-book blogs, you learn to have low expectations. Generally the free or low-priced books you get are worth the price (I leave it to others to make such judgments on my own e-books). But now and then you discover a gem. Grave Passage by William Doonan is, all things considered, a breath of fresh air, a well-written, often funny story with a genuinely original and engaging hero/narrator.

Henry Grave is 84 years old, a retired archaeologist and one-time World War II prisoner of war. Somehow (it’s never quite explained) he got himself into a post-retirement career as an investigator for a cruise line. In that capacity he’s helicoptered onto the deck of the Contessa Voyager one night, to look into the death of one of the cruise lecturers, an FBI agent who recently announced he’d solved a famous murder and had promised to name the killer on this voyage.

Henry’s method of investigation is to settle into the routine of the cruise, enjoy the buffets, drink to excess, schmooze with the passengers, and generally project the image of a harmless, semi-senile old man. It’s hard to tell sometimes whether he’s actually faking all this – some of his lapses of memory seem genuine, and his frequent unplanned naps suggest he might want to talk to his doctor about a C-Pap machine. But the wheels are always turning behind his bumbling, buffoonish façade, and he has some surprises in store for the murderers – as well as for the readers.

I thoroughly enjoyed Grave Passage. Christian readers will not be comfortable with Henry’s heavy drinking or his sexual recreations (he flirts with any woman he likes, but reserves his actual Viagra tablets for a woman of appropriate age), but these elements are no more prominent here than in many other mysteries. Author Doonan writes good prose, creates believable, intriguing characters, and describes the cruising life authentically (as I can testify). Highly recommended.

Lars Walker is the author of several published fantasy novels, the latest of which is an e-book, Hailstone Mountain.

That led to a lost season last year when the New York Jets signed him and then hardly ever allowed him onto the field.

Patriots coach Bill Belichick,winner of three Super Bowls, has complimented Tebow in the past, citing his “versatility, intelligence, and character,” as the ESPN story put it. Belichick has a history of making great players out of smart, tough athletes whom other organizations considered fatally flawed. Tebow fits that mold perfectly, and if anybody can make him into a consistent NFL quarterback, Belichick is it. Belichick is also a master at deflecting controversy, a talent which will surely come in very handy in this instance. The Patriots’ current offensive coordinator, Josh McDaniel, was instrumental in originally drafting Tebow at Denver when McDaniel was head coach of the Broncos.

Tebow will be completing with Ryan Mallett for the number 2 quarterback position with the Patriots. I would be far from shocked, however, to see Belichick find innovative ways to use Tebow’s abilities. It should be quite an interesting summer in the Patriots’ camp.

Thus Major Crimes paid obeisance to the contemporary custom of spending a significant amount of time looking at the detectives’ personal lives and the inordinate amount of tragedies, disasters, betrayals, and secret vices therein, but without the usual excessive soap-opera stuff and forced wringing of emotions. The tragic personal life of the detective is a cliche of our times and unrealistic, and the producers of Major Crimes are to be credited with keeping this material to a reasonable level. Let’s hope they do the same this year.

Season 1, by the way is available for a very reasonable $1.99 per episode on amazon.com, for those who missed it and would like to catch up. Recommended.

Following the Major Crimes season premiere is the series premiere of another detective drama, King & Maxwell. Reports indicate that this show will feature a sprinkling of comedy as it follows two former Secret Service agents who are now private detectives. The central characters are played by Jon Tenney (The Closer) and Rebecca Romijn (X-Men).

The promotional material defines Romin’s character as “a former elite athlete who uses her brains, beauty and Beltway connections to solve cases.” Tenney’s character, by contrast, has a troubled past: his “career in the Secret Service ended when the presidential candidate he was assigned to protect was assassinated, sending him on a downward spiral. Today, King has added a law degree to his arsenal of skills, allowing him to navigate the system in ways a typical private investigator never could.”

The descriptions suggest that she is a likable, salt-of-the-earth beauty and he’s a fallen snob. Obviously Romijn has the easier job here, but Tenney was quite personable in The Closer, so there is the possibility he’ll be able to make his character work.

Evidently this couple is to be another in the long line of Nick and Nora Charles descendants, as indicated in the TNT promotion page: “Along the way, King and Maxwell clash over everything, from her garbage-strewn car to his love of wine over beer.” I don’t usually don’t see much fun in watching people argue over trivial matters, but perhaps their clashes with two F BI agents who disapprove of the pair’s investigative methods will provide a respite from the domestic-style quarreling. One must certainly hope so.

The series is based on a series of bestselling novels by David Baldacci and was developed by Shane Brennan (NCIS: Los Angeles). It premieres tonight at 10 EDT.

We often forget that it was conservative hero Ronald Reagan who signed American’s first no-fault divorce law in California in 1969, not that he was proud of it. But within 10 years pretty much every other state passed similar laws. Once people were allowed to get out of a marriage for any or no reason at all, divorces skyrocketed. In the old backward days of the 1950s and prior, a spouse who wanted out of a marriage had to show one of the three A’s, adultery, abuse or abandonment. Then there would be a trial; it was messy and difficult to get a divorce.

For the modern secular liberal whose mores took over American culture in the 60s, this just wouldn’t do. Staying in a marriage if you weren’t happy and completely fulfilled was stifling and not at all fair; self-fulfillment as the new cultural norm led naturally to no-fault divorce. Undergirding the coming divorce revolution was a fundamental modern liberal mistrust of the traditional family unit. Patriarchy was by definition bad and oppressive; women needed to be liberated and easy divorce was the way to break the unjust hold marriage had on women. Children of course were an afterthought.

So here we are over 40 years later and what hath a divorce culture wrought? For some of us the answer would be statistics, because divorce hasn’t touched us personally. Sure we know there are lots of divorces and single mothers and children who have grown up without moms and dads, and we know this isn’t a good thing, but civilization isn’t falling apart around us; we have our jobs, our middle class lifestyles; suffering as a result of family breakdown only touches us tangentially.

Yet the personal consequences of easy divorce have been profound and ubiquitous. I would guess every American knows someone who has been divorced or is a child of divorce, and in almost every single instance the fallout has not been good. Everyone pretty much agrees that Dan Quayle was right, even though he was piteously mocked at the time; he is mocked no more. We now know the worst of the personal effects of easy divorce largely break down across class lines, as Charles Murray has pointed out in his latest book. Yet I’ve personally witnessed the emotional and psychological damage of children and adults of upper middle class divorce.

But something rarely talked about or admitted, especially by the modern liberal, is what flows into the void created by marriage and family breakdown? You guessed it, the state. The size and scope of the welfare state would be minimal if divorce was rare. The more marriages break apart, the more divorce culture infiltrates family life, the more the state is required to step in and pick up the pieces. Of course we know that welfare often makes worse the conditions it seeks to ameliorate, but left-liberals don’t seem to much care about that; as long as people have their most basic material needs met, who cares how much dysfunction there is. Well, don’t ask the people who live on the south side of Chicago, where murder is a fact of daily life. The breakdown of the family there is literally a matter of life and death.

But the consequences of the easy divorce culture go beyond personal misery. I learned about this recently in a long article at The Imaginative Conservative by Dr. Stephen Baskerville: “Freedom and the Family: The Family Crisis and the Future of Western Civilization.” I was going to put some quotes here from the piece, but there were just too many good ones, so go read it yourself. What stands out is how an easy divorce culture leads naturally to the tyranny of the state over family life. Again, we don’t live in a dystopian Blade Runner America (then again it’s not 2019 yet), so for many of us the consequences of the easy divorce/family breakdown culture don’t impinge on our every waking moment, but for many others they do.

This should give libertarians and so called “fiscal conservatives” who don’t think those messy “social issues” have anything to do with liberty and the growth of the modern state pause, especially “social issues” revolving around the family. Further redefining marriage to make gender irrelevant to the institution is not going to improve the strength of marriage and families. How can it? Children need a married mother and a father to have the best chance of growing up as healthy contributors to society. The Founders of America knew how important the virtue of its citizens would be to the success, or failure, of this experiment in republican self-government. Without stable families, mom, dad, married, kids, not the “modern family” kind, the experiment is destined to fail.

The series tells the story of an alien attack against the earth and its human population, and the small bands of survivors who try to fight back. With 90 percent of the world’s population already killed—the planet’s human population has literally been decimated—the survivors obviously have their work cut out for them.

This brings us to a common logical problem with these alien-attack stories: aliens sufficiently advanced and powerful to get to the earth and attack humanity would very likely be nearly invulnerable to any counterattacks we could mount, as they would surely have studied us sufficiently to know what they needed to defend themselves against. That problem was handled particularly well in the George Pal version of The War of the Worlds in the 1950s: near the beginning of the film, the narrator states that the Martians watched us for years before attacking, and were simply unstoppable by any human response once they began their attack.

Falling Skies has a good answer for this, though it’s only implicit and never stated openly, to my recollection at least. The aliens must surely have seen how fractured and disturbed American society (among others) has become in recent decades, and undoubtedly they expected to be able to count on us to fall apart at the first sign of trouble. Indeed, that may well account for the quick decimation of the world’s population. The few remaining people, however, manage to overcome their differences to some degree and pull together to fight the invaders, and references to American history are adduced throughout the narrative to lend this notion both plausibility and historical resonance.

The two central characters of the story embody this. Boston University Professor Tom Mason (Noah Wyle) and retired Army captain Dan Weaver are initially hostile toward each other, with Mason seeing Weaver as an ignorant hardhead (which is a reasonable assessment of him initially), and Weaver seeing Mason as an overly sensitive intellectual whose insights are impractical in matters military (which likewise carries a germ of truth). The two come to understand the need for each other’s wisdom in leading their motley band of survivors to relative safety, and they soon join forces to protect the citizenry and fight back against the invaders. The group of people becomes the 2nd Massachusetts Militia Regiment under the two men’s leadership.

This relationship between the two leaders strengthens as they battle not only the aliens but also other human antagonists such as the smarmy government official Arthur Manchester (Terry O’Quinn), the clever but manipulative and undisciplined criminal gang leader John Pope (Colin Cunningham), and the alien-controlled teenager Karen Nadler (Jessy Schram). Female characters are given great prominence, including the physician, Dr. Anna Glass (Moon Bloodgood), whose judgment is largely quite sound, and Maggie (Sarah Carter), a young woman soldier of great skill who has a mysterious past of which she is ashamed, in addition to the strange and sinister but also rather tragic Miss Nadler, who is clearly working for the aliens but whose prior self might still be trapped somewhere in her alien-controlled body.

The antagonists and the survivors both suggest the great diversity of the American public, which can be a strength and is shown as such in the narratives, but has equal power to destroy, as these characters indicate. As such the show has much to suggest about both the current state of the nation and its history, but does so by example and not outright statements, and hence it reminds us of important truths without becoming didactic. In this way the show always seems rather subtly patriotic, recognizing the nation’s failures while appreciating the great good of which the American people have always been capable and usually able to produce.

The acting in the show is topnotch, as are the other production elements. The aliens and their buildings, technology, and war-making devices are imagined cleverly and depicted quite convincingly through CGI effects. An especially effective element of the aliens’ technology is their ability to attach a large parasite to the spine of young humans, which takes over their will, enslaves them, and may ultimately turn them into aliens. This creates a sense of great horror at the center of story, beyond even the mass killings and destruction of cities, which is of course quite an accomplishment. In particular, this horrible enslavement of young people motivates the humans to fight back desperately, lest their children be lured or captured and subjected to this fate.

The battle scenes between the humans and aliens are likewise thought out sensibly and depicted persuasively and with suitable energy and excitement. The aliens’ weapons—including large, well-armed robot warriors called Mechs and insect-like creatures called Skidders—are formidable, and the militia’s discovery of potential weaknesses in the aliens’ armaments is both plausible and interesting, especially as it shows human ingenuity and American pragmatism at work. The consequences of the fighting are shown in a level of detail that conveys the true scale of the events while refraining from excessive sensationalism and gore for gore’s sake. In short, the fight scenes are both powerful and tasteful, a combination that Hollywood seems to have all but forgotten since the mid-1960s and is an exceedingly welcome change.

In fact, in this and many other ways Falling Skies seems a throwback to older ways of storytelling in Hollywood, when intellect and character were respected and were depicted as the true deciding factors in people’s lives, with sensational elements always welcome but only in the context of a good and sensible story. Just as the characters of Falling Skies benefit from the lessons of history, it seems the producers have done so as well. Let’s hope other film and TV makers will soon do the same.

This is an astonishingly bold and outrageous action on the part of the U.S. government. The fact that the entire U.S. media were scooped on the story by a British publication is a sad commentary on the cozy relationship between the U.S. press and the Obama administration, a relationship that seems to be holding up despite the recent revelations of federal government monitoring of press conversations, harassment of journalists whose reports embarrass the administration, and other outrages against freedom of the press.

The audacity of monitoring everyone’s phone calls in hopes of catching a small number of terrorists demonstrates the unconstitutionality and self-contradiction at the heart of mass government surveillance. There is no probable cause for which to search any particular individual’s call records, merely a probability that someone, somewhere used a telephone to assist in the planning or commission of a crime. This reasoning nullifies the Fourth Amendment, the very point of which is that government cannot search or seize ‘persons, houses, papers, and effects’ at random.

This revelation by the Guardian should be eye-opening to the many people in the United States who still trust their government. That is no longer a wise course, and has not been so for at least a couple of decades. Now, however, the U.S. government has become so bold as to defy all law and the nation’s constitution, and the Obama administration defends the actions while the U.S. media stand by in willful ignorance. This is a recipe for national disaster.

Become informed: read the Guardian story, and read the Heartland Institute symposium.

Main cast of 'The Bletchley Circle'

I recently complained about the unlikely revisionist feminist rewrite in the new film adaptation of John Buchan‘s The Thirty-Nine Steps (shown already in Britain and scheduled for this summer in the United States on PBS). Well, here is a far superior film mystery series that does something rather more plausible with a period feminist slant, The Bletchley Circle.

The three-part series, showing on PBS stations around the country, is about four women, all of whom were involved with English code-breaking during World War 2 at the government’s Bletchley Park complex.  Now it’s 1952, and life is much different (duller!) for them.

The brilliant Susan (played by the always compelling Anna Maxwell Martin, of Bleak House and South Riding), personally unfulfilled with her domesticated life as a 1950s wife and mother, has taken to tracking the activities of a serial killer of women who has baffled police. After her initial advice to police doesn’t pan out, they ignore her (Susan’s rather patronizing husband, Timothy, who is clearly insecure about himself and less intelligent than Susan, wasn’t all that supportive in the first place).

Susan: wartime codebreaker, peacetime homemaker

So Susan reunites her old Bletchley colleagues–the thoroughly modern (and been around the block a few times) Millie, played by Rachel Stirling (as the fans may know, she played Caroline Crale in the television adaptation of Agatha Christie‘s Five Little Pigs); their somewhat forbidding former boss at Bletchley, Jean, now a library administrator (Julie Graham); and the young and mousy Lucy (Sophie Rundle), who has computer-like recall–to help her track and catch the serial killer (who is not only a murderer of women, it seems, but also a necrophiliac).

The acting by these four leads is great, as are the period details (desaturated photography catches the austerity hanging on in 1952).  I thought the first part of this three-part series was especially good, as the women use their deductive abilities to find a geographical pattern for the killer.  This part was actually much more like a Freeman Wills Croftsdetective novel–say The Hog’s Back Mystery (1933)–than an Agatha Christie.

Millie: mapping out a killer's course

Part Two and Part Three felt a bit more cliched.  In Part Two, the Circle attempts to bait the killer.  I was sure I knew how this would go and I was right.  By Part Three the Circle knows the identity of the killer, who sets up a denouement involving Susan that seemed to me unlikely in the extreme.

Also, a problem I had with Susan (or maybe I should say the script) is that what she’s doing is quite dangerous, obviously, but she repeatedly misleads her (admittedly kind of wet) husband about it, even though by the last part of the film she has put their young children in potential danger (and brilliant person though she is, Susan seems not to realize this until very late in the game).

To be honest, I didn’t like Timothy all that much (though he becomes somewhat more sympathetic over time) and thought surely Susan could have done better in a spouse, but I wasn’t comfortable with Susan’s deceptions either, not when she had gotten in so far.  This had gone way beyond being an academic sort of puzzle mystery, like the crosswords Susan loves to solve. What would Susan have said to Timothy if their children had been killed by the criminal maniac that she and her friends had been so avidly–and so covertly–pursuing?

Timothy gets suspicious

This may be an issue inherent in the amateur detective sort of mystery The Bletchley Circle represents, when it’s combined with a strong dose of realism (the other women in the Circle, by the way, all are, like the classical woman amateur detective Miss Marple, childless; one is married, but to a total creep whose feelings need not concern anyone).

Here we have the classical element of the amateur detective blended with a horrific plot involving a necrophiliac serial killer, no less–something old, something new–and perhaps it doesn’t always completely gel (think Tommy and Tuppence versus Hannibal Lecter).

Some reviewers (men!) have complained that the men in this series are all either morons or monsters.  I didn’t think it was quite that bad.  Timothy has some potential for an evolving gender consciousness, I believe. Let’s hope Susan and he are able to work out a more honest and mutually fulfilling relationship with each other, because otherwise I don’t see much of a chance for this marriage! And their two children seem to be adorable (not to mention I love their house).

Bletchley House, where the circle formed

This complaint notwithstanding, I found the film series quite enjoyable and was pleased to learn that another season is to be filmed.  This could be a real winner for English mystery fans, for this initial outing shows a lot of promise.

Crossposted from The Passing Tramp.

In the perfection of her song, by the voice that sprang from her, speaking words as he had never heard them spoken, he now loved her as he had never known he could love. He might never see her again, and decades might pass, yet he would love her indelibly, catastrophically, and forever. If half a century later he were alive, he would remember this song as the moment in which all such things were settled and beyond which he could not go.

There’s a rumor about, colluded in by professors of literature, that literary works and plain storytelling exist in separate universes. A book can be one or the other, but not both. Mark Helprin , by means of his new novel In Sunlight and In Shadow, scoffs at this idea (probably with a Bronx cheer). Exquisitely and poetically written, this novel is also a compelling, nail-biting story of transcendent love, danger, and mortality.

The story begins in Manhattan in 1946 when we meet Harry Copeland, late of the 82nd Airborne, back from the war and trying to make peace with his memories and figure out who he wants to be. One day on the Staten Island Ferry he sees a beautiful girl and falls desperately in love with her. He meets her and learns her name is Catherine Hale. She is a singer, in rehearsal for a Broadway musical.

There are complications. She’s engaged to another man. He’s Jewish; she comes from a WASP family. He’s the owner of a failing leather goods company; she’s the heir to some of the oldest money in America.

They overcome these obstacles without compromising their integrity. But their very success brings forces into action opposing them. All their courage and faith will be required in the new, peacetime battle, and not a metaphorical one, that will sweep them up.

In Sunlight and in Shadow recalls Helprin’s masterwork, Winter’s Tale, in its comprehensive, loving description of post-war New York in fascinating, ever-changing, and polychromatic detail. It also recalls A Soldier of the Great War in its realistic, horrifying, but ultimately courageous view of war and its losses. But the city and the war are different here, in time and in other ways.

There’s a Miltonian quality to this book. Helprin seems to be trying, among other things, to justify the ways of God to man. He’s Jewish, and the theology he teaches (or rather suggests), is not entirely compatible with that of Christianity (though I think the Christian reader will be as pleased as I was by the examination of the real problems of interfaith marriage). But faith of some kind has to be maintained against all odds, as a solder holds out on a lonely hill against an enemy that seems overwhelming, or else all is lost.

“There is a point, a very important point. When you’re in what seems like an impossible situation and it looks sure that you’re going to be overrun, you have to keep in mind that only half of what the enemy does is actually going to put him in a position to overrun you. The other half is to communicate this so you’ll do his work for him.”

Like all Helprin’s books, In Sunlight and in Shadow is beautiful, enthralling, and heartbreaking. It has the further virtue of being long enough that you’ll be forced to spend some time in its world.

Cautions for a little rough language and some disturbing content. I give it my highest recommendation.

Lars Walker is the author of several fantasy novels, the latest of which is an e-book, Hailstone Mountain.