Daily Archives: December 31, 2006

A Tribute to John Dickson Carr

December 31, 2006
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A Tribute to John Dickson Carr

This is the last day in which I can decently mark the centennial of the birth of the truly great detection fiction writer John Dickson Carr. Carr flourished as a writer during the 1930s and ’40s and wrote numerous classic detective novels and short stories, continuing to write until the 1970s. With Doyle, Chesterton, Christie, Queen, and Sayers, Carr is one of the greatest of all mystery writers. Carr was the master of the "impossible crime" story and its best-known subset, the locked-room mystery. Carr’s narratives are fiendishly deceptive and puzzling, yet he leaves the crucial clues right out there for the reader to see. Yet we never do, and the detective’s revelation of the killer nearly always comes as a big surprise. Carr’s stories tend to include a bit of overly cute romance between some young couple unique to each book or story, and he has a habit of piling on melodramatic language at times (primarily in the dialogue) and setting obviously artificial rhetorical cliffhangers at the end of some chapters, but these are minor inconveniences that detract only a little from the overall excellence of most of his books and stories. His achievement rests mainly on two series.

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Rocky Balboa, Christian Warrior

December 31, 2006
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Rocky Balboa, Christian Warrior

Your correspondent has been very busy with other work during the past week and has neglected his work here, for which he apologizes profusely. During this hectic time, however, we did manage to take a couple of hours to see Rocky Balboa, the sixth and supposedly last of actor/writer/director Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky films. Stallone has promoted the film aggressively to Christian audiences, pointing out that he has become much more greatly committed to Christianity (and jolly good for him!), specifically the Catholicism in which he was brought up.  Stallone says that the character of Rocky Balboa always had a strong element of Stallone’s Christian thought behind him: It’s like he was being chosen, Jesus was over him, and he was going to be the fella that would live through the example of Christ," Stallone said. "He’s very, very forgiving. There’s no bitterness in him. He always turns the other cheek. And it’s like his whole life was about service. Those are reasonable claims about Rocky, and of course his Christian name is a clear and rather charming reference to the disciple Peter (whose name, Petra, means "rock" and whose clear statement of Jesus’s divinity was the "rock" on which Jesus

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