As part of the semicentennial commemoration of the
assassination of JFK, the radio today, after playing Kennedy’s “Clear and
Present Danger” speech about the missiles in Cuba, segued into a song I haven’t
listened to in years: the Rolling
Stones classic “Sympathy for the Devil”, with its refrain
Pleased
to meet you -- Hope you guess my name!
The transition seemed jarring, until the song came to the
verse
I
shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedys?”
when
after all, it was You - And - Me.
Now, ever since the very first time I heard it, that line has
struck me as extremely lame, on several levels. But there is no point critiquing it [*], since, after all, it
is the Devil speaking: The Prince
of Lies.
[*] I’ll do so anyway.
Along with the line “For every cop is a criminal, / and allllll the
sinners -- saints!”, it was well-calibrated to appeal to the sentiments of the
layabout, shop-lifting hippies of the day.
One pictures the late-night rap sessions, amid the cannabis
vapors --
“Yeh-h,
man -- we allll killed Kennedy!”
“Far
out, man …” ]
~
Those unfamiliar with both the ecclesiastical and the folk
take on the diabolistic tradition, will think nothing of that apparently
pointless aside, “Hope you guess my name”. But it is rooted in the nature of that master
dissembler’s wiles and ways. And
that refrain, it now strikes me, likes at the back of the series of mystery
stories I published awhile back, first in magazines and then collected in
logical (indeed, theological) sequence,
as a book, I Don’t Do Divorce Cases. They start of reasonably conventionally, but row
progressively more strange, until one of them, a Miltonic memory, appears in
the meter of Paradise Lost.
In each, the detective, Michael Xavier Murphy, an outwardly
lapsed or at least slovenly Catholic, must solve some little problem or other,
assisted by his younger brother Joey, typically involving a purportedly missing
person; but each case is
overspanned by a meta-problematic:
to guess the name of the Agent behind the client. As the series progresses, the cloven
hoof of Clootie projects ever more insolently out from beneath the hem of his
sable mantle. As, in the story, “The
Temptation of Murphy”:
After he’s gone, Joey stares at me,
something’s occurred to him. ‘Hey
Murphy -- we never even asked the name of our client!’
Bitterly: “Whaddaya wann know ‘is name
for, Joey? You know who he is.
Anyhow, I commend them to your attention. Further particulars here:
A subsequent story, published separately for Kindle and
Nook, involving direct confrontation with His Satanic Majesty (a battle to
which Murphy proves here unequal, since it involves another soul than his own,
and must call in aid from a very special sort of specialist), can be sampled
here:
No comments:
Post a Comment