I have always had a strangely strong relationship to places. It’s difficult to verbalize, but having a deep familiarity with a locale has been a fundamental way I relate to the world. This extends into mapping fantastic places I’ve read about upon the physical world.

For example, when I spent some summer months of my tweens on the Gulf Islands near Vancouver, the archipelago became Earthsea in my mind. Around that same timeframe, I lived near Altadena. When I “discovered” Tolkien’s works, Middle-earth started imprinting upon the local terrain.

The San Gabriel mountains formed an excellent stand-in for the Misty Mountains. In winter, the clouds sit on the peaks, in Spring, the “June Gloom” does the same, and in the summer, the mountains were nearly hidden by the swirling smog of the late 70s.

The area is filled with places that mapped across those worlds. There’s a windy road above a tributary to the Arroyo Seco that goes through forests of oak and deodar, and in the early evening when the sky grows dark the lights in the windows of houses on the lower slope twinkle mysteriously. It was exactly what Rivendell looked like in my mind’s eye.

As I’d read, local places would overlay. The craggy entrance to Colby Canyon with its guardian trees, the steep drop-off ridges around Mount San Gabriel, the rough-hewn tunnel just down the trail at Eaton Saddle, the rustic cabins among the bright streams and white alder groves in Sturtevant Canyon, the high forested ridges above Ice-House Canyon — all mapped to places within the Lord of the Rings for me.

Decades later, when the blockbuster movies came out, I opted not to see them. The images in my head and the mappings to places I know were too important to be overwritten by Peter Jackon’s vision.

(Disclaimer: this photo has been digitally altered beyond just adjusting color and exposure. I removed telephone poles, a power pylon, and a lot of wires.)

In the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction, there was a group of four or five writers considered the Queens of Crime: Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Ngiao Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Josephine Tey. Christie gets most of the glory in the US due to the Hollywood adaptations of her novels, but recently I’ve been reading through Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and Montague Egg mysteries.

Anyone who has read Christie (even the modern, bowdlerized versions) knows they’re chock-a-block with racism, classism, and antisemitism, and, sadly, Sayers suffers from this as well. Unlike Christie, Sayers brings to bear her Oxford education, so her novels and short stories contain frequent allusions to and excerpts from writers ranging back into classic Greece and in a variety of languages. Like Christie, the plots are convoluted with any possible suspects and countless red herrings.

In her 1925 short story, “The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager’s Will” (originally published Pearson’s Magazine, volume 60), Sayers includes a full crossword puzzle that Lord Peter Wimsey and his associates must solve to locate the referenced will. Normally, I let this kind of story just wash over me. I don’t try to solve the murder and I don’t try to analyze the clues. But in this case, I thought I’d try to solve the crossword.

Of course, British crosswords are different than the NY Times style with which I’m more familiar. Furthermore, the number of classical references quickly overwhelmed me. I wasn’t able to complete it. But maybe you will? I took the layout, clues, and solution and laid them out in a convenient PDF for your puzzling pleasure.

I’ve seen this floating around the internet: “To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras.” — Arthur Koestler

I haven’t been able to find the original source of the quotation.

Much more frequently, I see this similar quotation attributed to Margaret Atwood: “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”

This, however, I have found the source: “There’s an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine — “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”

This is from Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing.

So there it is. Atwood indirectly citing Koestler.

(This posting is in no way meant to diminish Atwood’s brilliance in any way or cast any aspersions on her. It’s more a comment about the Internet and the way attributions get lost and/or mangled.)

“Whether they knew it or not, the interest that drew them here was purely psychological – the expectation of some essential disclosure as to the strength, the power, the horror, of human emotions. Naturally nothing of the kind could be disclosed. The examination of the only man able and willing to face it was beating futilely round the well-known fact, and the play of questions upon it was as instructive as the tapping with a hammer on an iron box, were the object to find out what’s inside. However, an official inquiry could not be any other thing. Its object was not the fundamental why, but the superficial how, of this affair.”
— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking’s a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That’s why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions: because, compared to the haphazard way in which they’re arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you’ve got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wrangle yourself out another to take its place.” — Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse