{"id":424,"date":"2003-10-28T01:29:38","date_gmt":"2003-10-28T09:29:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2003\/10\/how_to_hug_a_bear\/"},"modified":"2003-10-28T01:29:38","modified_gmt":"2003-10-28T09:29:38","slug":"how_to_hug_a_bear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2003\/10\/how_to_hug_a_bear.html","title":{"rendered":"HOW TO HUG A BEAR"},"content":{"rendered":"

One brilliant writer I know who used to be a major sports columnist keeps telling me he has
\ntwo novels in mind. This is someone who wrote four smart, densely literate columns a week at a
\nminimum of 1,000 words each, for years. Try it some time, it ain’t easy. After Rupert
\nMurdoch bought the paper he worked for, he decamped to Hollywood and became a top TV
\nwriter-producer. But he has yet to write those novels. When I ask him why, he says it’s because
\nnovels are the toughest test of literary merit. <\/P>
\n

Which brings me to Henry Kisor<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A>, another writer I know, whose first
\nmystery novel, “Season’s Revenge,”<\/EM><\/FONT><\/B><\/A> is just out. I finished
\nreading it the other night in one pleasurable gulp, and I have to agree that even a genre novel is
\nsome kind of test — maybe the toughest test.<\/P>
\n

Kisor has been good before. As a journalist he’s been a Pulitzer Prize finalist in criticism. As a
\nnon-fiction author, he’s written “Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America”<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> and “Flight
\nof the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 Feet.”<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A>
\n<\/FONT>I especially loved his memoir, “What’s
\nThat Pig Outdoors?,”<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> about how he grew up deaf with hearing
\nparents and how he made both his life and career in the hearing world. <\/P>
\n

Modest to a fault, he recently told an interviewer<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A>: “The tools of a
\nmystery writer are very much like those of a journalist except that journalists of course can’t
\ninvent things, while mystery writers must.” <\/P>
\n

For “Season’s Revenge,” about the murder of an eccentric millionaire in Michigan’s Upper
\nPeninsula, Kisor invented an unusual mystery-novel hero: Deputy Sheriff Steve Martinez, who
\nshares something of the author’s outsider status. He’s a man caught between cultural identities.
\nMartinez isn’t deaf, but he is a Native American of Lakota descent who was adopted by white
\nmissionaries and who grew up in a white world. Martinez doesn’t usually think of himself as
\nNative American until he’s reminded by others, largely because of his looks and their
\nprejudices.<\/P>
\n

Kisor’s development of that theme in Martinez’s dual sense of himself, along with the rich
\ndetail he brings to the story, sets “Season’s Revenge” apart. It not only creates the sort of
\nsuspense that kept me turning pages, it paints an authentic portrait of life in rural America. Kisor
\nalso inserted the subplot of a budding romance, rather deftly handling the sex, and entertained me
\nwith a lot of natural lore about bears in the northern woods (especially whether a bear can be used
\nas a murder weapon). <\/P>
\n

In fact, there are so many colorful characters living in fictional Porcupine County that I didn’t
\nwant to let them go. I wished I could stick around after the mystery was solved just to see what
\nhappens to them. Apparently Kisor had the same idea. He says he’s planning a series
\nof Porcupine County mystery novels with Martinez at the heart of
\nthem and is already onto the next one.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One brilliant writer I know who used to be a major sports columnist keeps telling me he has two novels in mind. This is someone who wrote four smart, densely literate columns a week at a minimum of 1,000 words each, for years. Try it some time, it ain’t easy. After Rupert Murdoch bought the paper […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-424","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-6Q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}