This tidy little mystery was a lot of good fun. It’s a police procedural that takes place in Scotland, where a murder was committed. Yikes, a mmmuuurrrrddddeerrrr. That’s scary. Alright, enough with the funnin’ around.
This has been sitting in my stack of stuff to read for a year or two maybe. It’s a mystery, which is a genre that I like, and it has a link to golf, which I like. So I was gonna get to it eventually. I kept thinking that I asked for it for Christmas or something. Then my wife sees me reading it and says, “Hey, how do you like that book? That’s the one I picked up at Jackson Park Golf Course for free.”
What? I take great care in picking out every book that I read, and my wife is telling me that she grabbed it for free from some writer with a card table and a Sharpie at a Chicago municipal course where you can play all you want for like $15. I think that is the case. Well, it turned out alright, even though it was not even signed. Maybe he just left a stack to give away or something, I don’t know.
Though short on golf-oriented sections, it was pretty long on golf insight. At one point, Inspector St. George and his cohort, Laurence Poole, have to go to historic St. Andrews to do some detective work. The inspector is a golf lover, and during some downtime he is describing his penchant for blowing big bucks at golf shops:
“Make no mistake, Laurence, I’ve spent many happy hours immersing myself therein [golf shops]. And if those various proprietors included my patronage in their annual budgets, then I must confess they did so with good reason.””Ah! In other words, you’re hooked.”
“Yes, I suppose you could say so. But that makes it sound rather pathologic. After all, it’s not like I’m a gambler.”
Always sensitive to his mentor’s sensibilities and moods, Poole hastened to add, “Of course not. Just sounds better than ‘compulsive’ or ‘addicted’.”
“Let’s just say ‘focused’ and leave it at that.”
“All right. Pathologically focused.”
Keen insight into a common malady with golf junkies like myself. You know when you start denying it, or comparing it to vices like gambling, drugs, or internet porn, that you really do have a problem.
I may grab the other Inspector St. George mystery at some point, who knows.