My Experiences with John G. Diefenbaker

As set out in my review below of The Mystery of the Moonlight Murder the Diefenbaker homestead near Borden was about 200 km west of our family’s homestead at Meskanaw.

When I was growing up on the farm John G. Diefenbaker was a mythic figure. When I started school he was Canada’s Prime Minister. He remains the only Prime Minister to have come from Saskatchewan.

He was fondly referred to as “Dief the Chief”. The Mystery of the Moonlight Murder sets out his close connection with the Indian peoples of Canada.

While he was Prime Minister, Dief was remembered in our community as a talented criminal defence lawyer. One report says he represented 18 people charged with capital murder. He was successful in defending many of them but at least one of his clients was convicted and hung. An interesting article on his legal career is available at http://ecommons.usask.ca/bitstream/handle/10388/242/Whiteway_Diefenbaker_manuscript.pdf?sequence=3.

Diefenbaker’s first law office in 1920 was in Wakaw which is 85 km down the highway from Melfort. He traveled for court cases through our rural area. A photo of a replica office is to the right.

By time I reached university in the early 1970’s he was no longer Prime Minister or even leader of the Progressive Conservative Party but he remained a Member of Parliament (MP) for Prince Albert. Through changes to riding boundaries Meskanaw became part of the Prince Albert Constituency.

I had finished first year law and was back home for the summer when a federal election was called. Dief, in his late 70’s chose not to travel by car or bus while campaigning but hired a helicopter. He descended out of the sky one afternoon and I was one of the community members to have a chat with him. We talked about law school. We each had gone to the College of Law in Saskatoon.

When I graduated he was Chancellor of the University and conferred my law degree upon me. His class, 50 years earlier, had 20 students while there were about 100 in my graduating class.

While his health was in decline he was determined to remain an MP. In 1979 he was in ill health and 83 years of age but he ran again and was the winner. He had reached the stature of winning elections no matter his personal circumstances.

A short time later he died in Ottawa. A showman to the end he orchestrated his return to be buried in Saskatchewan. He arranged a train trip for 2,500 km journey home. People across Canada came out to watch the train go by and say farewell to the Chief. Our province deeply mourned Dief.

He is buried at the Diefenbaker Centre in Saskatoon beside his second wife, Olive.

The website for the Centre is http://www.usask.ca/diefenbaker/.

Leaders & Legacies series - The Mystery of the Moonlight Murder

Today’s post is the second of three posts involving The Mystery of the Moonlight Murder. Tuesday had a review of the book. My next post on Saturday will discuss personal experiences related to John Diefenbaker.

I had not been aware The Mystery of the Moonlight Murder was the first in a Young Adult Canadian history series until I read the book.

On author Roderick Benns website, http://www.roderickbenns.com/, the series is described:

“The ‘Leaders & Legacies’ series is truly a first in Canadian publishing. This historical fiction series for ages 11 and up stars none other than our own Prime Ministers as mystery-solving, adventurous youth.”

It is a great concept for a series. The collective knowledge of our country’s history by our young people is incredibly low. In a 2007 study, http://www.dominion.ca/YoungAdultHistory3.pdf, of 18 to 24 year old Canadians only 26% knew the date of Confederation, the year we became a country. (Margot Kinberg on her great blog, Confessions of a Mystery Novelist, occasionally has quizzes about mysteries. This post is not intended to be a quiz but she has inspired me to ask readers if they know when Canada became a country? The answer is at the end of the post.) In the study young Canadians were given a basic history test. 82% failed the test. It was not a difficult test. The pass rate in Saskatchewan and Manitoba was 29%. While it is hard to be proud of a 29% pass rate was a 10% increase in test performance for the two provinces from 10 years earlier.

In The Mystery of the Moonlight Murder readers, in the context of a good mystery, learn about the settlement of Western Canada, how farming was conducted by pioneers, what was expected of kids living on farms at that time, the transition faced by Indian people from hunters to farmers and the grievances of Metis (part French and part Indian) that led to a rebellion.

The second in the series - The Legends of Lake on the Mountain: An Early Adventure of John A. Macdonald – has been published. It features an adventure involving our first Canadian Prime Minister.

Benns website includes suggestions for teachers on how to teach Canadian history.

It is a brave concept directly seeking to combine mysteries and history for young Canadians. I hope it can succeed. History has always been most interesting for me when I am reading about people within the events of history.

I will be looking for The Legends of the Lake on the Mountain.

The answer to my one question quiz: Canada became a country in 1867.

 

The Mystery of the Moonlight Murder by Roderick Benns

54. – 614.) The Mystery of the Moonlight Murder by Roderick Benns – I do not often read books written for ages 11 and up. I was drawn to this book because its subtitle is “An early adventure of John Diefenbaker” and it is a Saskatchewan mystery. The book is the first in a series of historical adventure books featuring Canadian Prime Ministers when they were 12-13 years of age. On Thursday I will put up a post on the concept of the series Leaders & Legacies. I will add a further post on Saturday discussing personal contacts with John Diefenbaker. He has been the only Canadian Prime Minister to come from Saskatchewan.

The book is set north of the village of Borden in 1908 when John was 12 and his younger brother, Elmer, was 10. Their parents and uncle had homesteaded a few years earlier.

The book gets off to a rousing start when the boys, returning home in the night after getting some water from a neighbour, are startled by a gunshot. Rushing to the Schneider farm they find that Hans Schneider has been murdered.

Immediate suspicion falls upon River’s Voice, a Cree Indian, from the nearby reserve who has had public confrontations with Schneider over fur pelts that River’s Voice claims were stolen from him by Schneider.

The Diefenbaker family does not believe River’s Voice is the murderer. John and Elmer are determined to prove his innocence. They are aided by Summer Storm, the 11 year old daughter of River’s Voice. They have but a few days to find evidence for River’s Voice is scheduled to be taken to the provincial capital of Regina to be tried for the murder.

The author is sympathetic to the concerns of the Indian peoples trying to make the adjustment from free ranging hunters to farmers in one generation.

While the young John is trying to focus on the murder there is growing turmoil in the area as a young Metis man, Andre Dumont, is agitating against the Federal Government. Asserting he is a nephew of the great Metis military leader, Gabriel Dumont, he raises the different grievances the Indians, the Metis and the white settlers have with the distant government in Ottawa. It is been 23 years since the Riel or Northwest Rebellion and few of the issues that sparked that revolt have been addressed.

Life is demanding for the settlers. Only prompt action by the family saves their home from a raging prairie fire.

The mystery is solved with flair. John is a clever boy with a great memory, an ability to assemble arguments and a talent for convincing arguments. The book shows why he became the best known lawyer of his generation.

The descriptions of life on the farm in 1908 are accurate. Everyone had to work hard to develop farms on the good soil of Saskatchewan. My grandfather homesteaded our land in 1907. He came from South Dakota with a few cattle and horses and built a farm.

It is a fine book. I wish there had been such a fiction adventure when I was growing up on the farm in the 1950’s about 200 km away from Borden. When I was a boy all the books in the library about young people were set far away in Eastern Canada or the United States or England. Had there been an adventure set a short distance away involving Saskatchewan farm kids it would have been wonderful.

The book is an excellent means of providing significant historical information on the settlement of Saskatchewan within a credible mystery. I expect I will look for more of the historical adventures of young Prime Ministers. (Oct. 4/11)

****

The book is my 4th book in the 5^th Canadian Book Challenge at the Book Mine Set. I have now reached the Bras d’Or Lake level.

The Messenger of Athens by Anne Zouroudi

The Crime Fiction on a Euro Pass hosted by Kerrie Smith at Mysteries in Paradise has reached its second last stop in Greece. Reading about Anne Zouroudi through other blogs encouraged me to choose one of her mysteries for my post on Greece.

****

48. – 608.) The Messenger of Athens by Anne Zouroudi – Since Greece is the origin of classic myths it is appropriate that Zouroudi creates a modern myth set on the island of Thiminos.

Irina Asimakopoulos has died and the local police are indifferent. Suicide is presumed and the file closed until Hermes Diaktoro, the fat man, arrives to re-open the case. Was her death suicide or murder?

It should not have been a myth but I found that I had presumed life was as idyllic on the Greek isles as in the village of Three Pines in the rural Quebec mysteries of Louise Penny. I expect I was unduly influenced by the beautiful photos and posters of Greece that fill the world. I know the movie, Mama Mia, reinforced that myth. My self-created myth was shaken, if not shattered, by the descriptions of Thiminos in winter. It is a bleak place with miserable weather. Its people live in cold crumbling stone houses. Life is a struggle with the tourists gone until summer. I was depressed by the grimness of winter life on Thiminos.

The people of Thiminos live in a small world with rigid social rules. As in the distant days of the Greek gods these islanders breach the norms at their peril. I grew up in Saskatchewan near a small village and live in a city of a few thousand people. Thankfully my real life neighbours are far different than the insular islanders.

It is a challenge seeking information in a closed society. The people of Thiminos guard their secrets from non-islanders. Yet the fat man, with genial persistence, gradually learns of Irinia’s troubled life. The tension builds carefully as the details of Irinia’s life unfold.

The book comes alive as the author alternates between the current investigation of Hermes and the past with the islanders, including Irinia, talking about their lives.

There is a robust, even mythic, presentation of passion that is far more powerful than the descriptions of physical coupling customarily presented in fiction for passion.

It is rare that the means of dying shock me but I was startled by the cruelty of Irinia’s death.

It is a lovely book even if it has discouraged from considering visiting the Greek islands outside summer. Hardcover or paperback. (Aug. 27/11)

What to Read Next?

Before I started this blog what to read next was almost a random question. It might be a book just purchased that was highly recommended or from an author I especially liked. If I had been reading a lot of fiction I might consciously turn to a non-fiction book. Sometimes it would be looking at the TBR pile and deciding it was time to go to the bottom to see what I wanted to read but had let be buried from view. I say it was not quite random as I usually tried to alternate a book from a previously read author with a book from a new author.

Since becoming a blogger I find my reading has become more organized. I have participated in a couple of memes hosted by Kerrie Smith at her blog, Mysteries in Paradise. The first was the Alphabet in Crime Fiction and the second is Crime Fiction on a Euro Pass. The first I joined at the letter “G” while I have been on the train for the whole journey to date. I am also participating in the 5^th Canadian Book Challenge at John Mutford’s Book Mine Set blog.

As I usually prefer to place a book review in the weekly memes it means my next reading has been influenced by what is the next letter in the alphabet or next destination on the train. Living in a community of 6,000 people with no bookstore means it is harder for me to go buy what I want to read for a meme. The nearest large bookstores are 185 km from Melfort in Saskatoon.

To get what I want to read next for memes has taken me to the library more often than I have been in recent years. As a library board member it is probably a good idea that I have been going into the library more frequently.

Another impact of writing blog posts concentrated on mysteries has been to read even less non-fiction.

Blogging, by getting me to the blogs of other book lovers, has also expanded my author horizons. The recommendations of other bloggers have sent me looking for authors I had not found on my own.

What I rarely do is re-read a book. There are so many books I am anxious to read that I have not read that it will take a special reason to go back to read a book again.

I do not think I will take part in a meme again for awhile though I reserve the right to change my mind! I would like to read next for awhile the book that looks most interesting from the stacks of the TBR.

In looking over the stacks on my desk I know that The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen is going to read next shortly. When it is done I think I am going to complete some non-fiction that has been languishing.

There remains one imperative in what to read next. A newly published Saskatchewan mystery will not even reach the pile. It will be my next read as soon as purchased. Next week I will be reviewing the most recent Saskatchewan mystery – The Mystery of the Moonlight Murder – which I purchased last month.

“U” is for Undertow by Sue Grafton

53. – 613.) “U” is for Undertow by Sue Grafton – Kinsey Milhone is having a quiet spring when Michael Sutton walks through the door and wants her to investigate what he believes was the burial of a young girl, Mary Claire Fitzhugh, who was kidnapped 21 years earlier in the summer of 1967.

Without any pressing commitments Kinsey takes on the investigation and seeks out information to identify the alleged location of the burial. She is far from confident of the information given by her client who has recalled the incident as a repressed memory.

Patiently she assembles facts and eventually, with her help, Sutton comes up with a specific location. The police descend upon the site in the words of a wealthy neighbourhood. When the body of a dog is found police interest ceases.

Kinsey, one of the most dogged sleuths in crime fiction, refuses to close the file. She follows slender threads of information. Who else would work diligently to identify the buried dog?

The book has three interlocking stories. Foremost is Kinsey’s investigation. Second is the history of the events of 1967. Third is the story of the contemporary lives of the killers. Grafton does an excellent job of tying together the plot.

In her personal life Kinsey continues her wary re-connection with Grand, the matriarch, and other members of the Kinsey family.

While well plotted the book never took off for me. The investigation is a steady slog to the solution. I suspect I was influenced by a collection of characters who are unlikeable. Kinsey’s personal life had little sparkle. It is long series with “U” being the 21^st book. The last really great book in the series for me was “P”. I will read “V” but it will mainly be because I have read the whole series. Paperback. (Oct. 1/11)

Ratking by Michael Dibdin

The Crime Fiction on a Euro Pass, hosted by Kerrie Smith at Mysteries in Paradise, is nearing the end of the journey around Europe. The trip reaches Italy this week. I am looking back to the opening Aurelio Zen mystery from the late 1980's. 

****

44. – 507.) Ratking by Michael Dibdin – The first Aurelio Zen mystery from 1988. Zen, working at a meaningless inventory position after being removed from the kidnapping unit, is chosen to handle the investigation in Perugia of the taking of Ruggiero Miletti, a prominent and wealthy businessman. When Zen arrives the local police are barely co-operative, the investigating magistrate is far from aggressive and not all in the family are distraught about the kidnapping. The book gives a brilliant portrayal of the twisted murky relationships of Italian society. For the Italian police and judiciary the wealth and influence of those involved can hamper or accelerate an investigation depending on the favours exchanged and the pressure exerted. The torturous path of Italian court cases is discussed. As I read the book the ponderous trial of Amanda Knox was reaching its conclusion and her conviction. (Two years later I post this review on the day her appeal from her murder conviction is allowed and she is released from custody.) The title refers to the tangle of tails rats can get into when too closely packed together. It is a vivid, even revolting image. The Miletti family is certainly warped and tangled. Despite the lack of support Zen progresses in the pursuit of the Calabrian kidnappers. It seems strange that, twenty years ago, negotiations for the kidnapped could continue for months. It is a subtle book. I look forward to reading the next in the series. Paperback. (Nov. 16/09)

Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurdardóttir

62. - 612.) Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurdardóttir – Thora Gudmundsdottir has a quiet practice of law in Reykjavik, Iceland. Life is hectic as she is the single mother of two children.

Suddenly her life changes when she is offered a huge fee to help investigate the death of Harald Guntlieb, a young German studying history in Iceland. Matthew Reich, a security official for the Guntlieb family bank, is looking for an Icelander to help him navigate bureaucracies and deal with the language as he does not speak Icelandic. While the friend of Harald in police custody is a credible suspect the family has doubts he is the real killer.

Thora is immediately intrigued though startled when she learns Harald was involved with sorcery, self-mutilation and erotic asphyxiation. She is shaken when she finds Harald’s eyes have been extracted after death and a mysterious symbol carved on his body.

Harald has had a long interest in witchcraft. He has come to Iceland to compare witchcraft trials in Iceland and with Europe, especially Germany. Iceland has been different in that most of those tried and executed were men while on the continent it was women.

It is a macabre subject that is reflected in Harald’s life. He has had a deep personal interest in sorcery. What he has done to his tongue made me flinch when I read the passage. While definitions of normal are difficult I have no hesitation in calling Harald abnormal.

The contrast could not be greater with Thora’s personal life. She has a sunny 6 year old and a moody teenager. They are living average lives far from the dark world of Harald and his friends.

The investigation is well done. Thora and Matthew work well together assessing information and conducting interviews.

Those book reviewers who have described the mystery as creepy are accurate.

Sorcery is not an area of history I have pursued. The mystery did not whet my interest. We do not have to look back centuries to find investigations into alleged black arts. A couple of years ago I read The Butcher’s Tale by Helmut Walser Smith. It was a non-fiction book studied by my younger son, Michael, at university for a history course. It involves the murder of a young man in 1900 in East Prussia and the belief of many villagers that he was killed by a Jewish resident as a ritual killing for blood. Belief in the blood libel persisted into the 20^th Century. I will be posting a review of the book later this year.

I will read more of Sigurdardottir’s books. Thora is an engaging character. The history of Iceland featured prominently in the book.

I have had difficulty categorizing the book on whether it is a legal mystery. Normally I think of legal mysteries as really courtroom trial mysteries. I have arbitrarily decided for myself that legal mysteries are books involving practising lawyers and are not limited to courtroom dramas. (Sept. 28/11)