County author’s new mystery above par

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Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books written by Maine authors or set in the Pine Tree State.

DALE MCGARRIGLE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

BAD LIE, by John Corrigan, University Press of New England, Lebanon, NH, 2005, hardcover, 284 pages, $24.95.

In golfers’ parlance, this Aroostook County author is still hitting ’em straight and long in this fourth Jack Austin mystery, which came out late last year.

As in Corrigan’s past novels, Jack, a marginally successful professional golfer, gets in trouble while trying to do the right thing for a friend. In this case, he’s trying to help out Nash Henley, his former caddie.

Nash, who Jack looks upon almost like a son, has just discovered that his biological father, Owen, has been found brutally murdered. Now Nash wants to know why, and Jack promises to help him find out.

This gets Jack and his friend Perkins, a burly private eye and security consultant for the PGA, involved with a pack of unsavory characters, and his career and family are soon at risk.

Like any good golf course, “Bad Lie” is unpredictable, with doglegs and hazards, and will keep readers stroking away. Unlike in golf, Corrigan’s latest is far above par.

WAYNE REILLY

SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

THROUGH A HOWLING WILDERNESS: BENEDICT ARNOLD’S MARCH TO QUEBEC, by Thomas A. Desjardin, 2006, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 240 pages, hard cover, $24.95.

America’s greatest traitor was also one of its most gifted military leaders. In his own day, Benedict Arnold’s fabled march to Quebec through the Maine wilderness was compared to Hannibal’s crossing the Alps. His extraordinary performance in the days leading up to the Battle of Saratoga changed the course of the Revolutionary War. Yet, as all schoolchildren know, he turned against his country because he was denied the credit due him by its leaders.

The Quebec expedition turned into a disaster, although it showed the British that the colonies meant business. The story has been told many times. With all due respect to Kenneth Roberts and others, perhaps no one has told it better than Thomas A. Desjardin, historic site specialist for the state of Maine, in his new book, “Through a Howling Wilderness.”

In an age of bloated, overstuffed history books, in which bibliographies, indexes and footnotes sometimes make up a third of the text, Desjardin has pulled off this feat in just 240 pages of terse, well-hewn prose. Through a masterful use of the numerous accounts written by soldiers on the expedition, he has fully preserved the harrowing, often tragic events that occurred as Arnold and his band tried to blaze a military road from the Kennebec River to the Plains of Abraham.

The intentions were simple: Drive the British out of Canada, create a 14th colony, distract the Red Coats from their siege at Boston. Almost everything went wrong – hundreds died from hypothermia, starvation, drowning, smallpox, and a few were actually shot at the anti-climactic battle at the gates of Quebec City in a raging snowstorm. Hundreds more deserted.

Survivors ate dogs, rodents, shoe leather and shaving soap. Rain fell in torrents one day and the next morning men woke up covered in snow, their clothes frozen to the ground. Many walked barefoot. The bateaux built for the trip leaked and fell apart. The old maps were wrong, sending soldiers on nightmarish forays through dismal swamps to their deaths.

Some considered suicide. One soldier recorded: “My privations in every way were such as to produce a willingness to die. Without food, without clothing to keep me warm, without money, and in a deep and devious wilderness, the idea occurred, and the means were in my hands, of ending existence.”

Yet despite all this misery, Arnold and his men almost succeeded. There are many “if onlys” in this thin volume.

Even their failure had a major beneficial impact on the course of the Revolutionary War. Desjardin tells us, “Had Arnold and [Gen. Richard] Montgomery not threatened Quebec so seriously in the first year of the conflict, the British forces that the Crown diverted to Quebec in response might instead have reinforced His Majesty’s armies in Boston or New York, making it far less likely that General Washington’s army could have eventually succeeded. By attempting, but failing, to seize Quebec, Benedict Arnold led a sizable British force into a trap that he helped spring at Saratoga twenty-two months afterwards.”

UNDER THE GOLD SUN, by David Wells Brainerd; Edgewood Press of Maine, 2006; 32 pages, saddle-stitched, $5.

D.W. Brainerd’s new chapbook follows in the same down-home tradition as his 2003 collection “A Turn of the Wheel.” Home-typed, home-illustrated and saddle-stitched, “Under the Gold Sun” offers 25 poems set in and around his homestead in Howland, where he observes “the multilayered universe in which we live.”

His observations have explicitly religious overtones. Everything from dragonflies to tree rings spawn ruminations on creation, time and the Christian Trinity. The poems are given mainly with a sense of awe and good humor, as in “Saint Francis of the Feedbag,” which discloses – through a mnemonic transformation – the holiness in a discarded plastic bag: “The saint’s true form / Is the wind.”

These new poems are cast in open forms, as opposed to the rhymes and meters in parts of “A Turn of the Wheel,” and many convey their meaning through plain images that accumulate into atmospheres with Asian, almost Buddhist concreteness:

Out of this pond,

Green shoots of grass,

Cattails thickening.

Within the round opening,

Ducks floating, herons striding.

Others, such as “Eighty Rings” and “On the Proclamation of the Word,” are more discursive and tend to direct statements (“everything needful is given, / In August, in the gold sun”) rather than the indirectness of traditional metaphor that might better illuminate some of the subject matter.

But once again, these poems – as homespun in their language as in their packaging – contain genuine reverence, clownishness and contemplation. For those who read for disclosures of meaning rather than closures of chaos, “Under the Gold Sun” will make much better 10-minute recreation than Reader’s Digest.