A Case of Berry Berry

    To paraphrase Garrett Morris's line from an old SNL skit, "John Milton been berry, berry, good to me." Especially since I've never been berry, berry good to him. 

Wikimedia commons, William Faithorn

    

    My knowledge of Paradise Lost, or the rest of the Milton canon, remains sparse. I watched Star Trek growing up. In "Space Seed," Ricard Montalban, playing the character Khan, taught me that it was better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven. He then got transported to Ceti Alpha V. Later, watching Animal House at the State Theater, I saw Donald Sutherland play a lecherous English professor. He deployed Milton to seduce Karen Allen.  

    And that, to this day, pretty much represents what I remember about John Milton. 

    

    Ignorance, however, has never stopped me from putting the poet to work. Years ago, I wrote a novella about Milton as a 17th-century sleuth. A blind, housebound poet became a solid stand-in for Nero Wolfe. "A Meter of Murder" won the Black Orchid Novella award and became my first story to be published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.  

        

    In January 2024, Hitchcock published "The Devil in the Details," my second effort at mining John Milton. In this contemporary story, a sodden English professor becomes convinced that he sees a how-to manual for committing the perfect murder written into the verses of Paradise Lost. Before writing the story, I should have read the epic. I owed it to Milton. He had become a go-to source for inspiration. Candidly, however, a good search engine can pull the quotes much more quickly. 

    

    I will confess that I was aware of my debt. When we visited London two years ago, I dragged my family to St. Giles-Without-Cripplegate. This Anglican church tucked within the Barbican is the burial place of John Milton. It's an easy church to explore. While the headline churches, like Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's are packed with tourists, we had St. Giles to ourselves. I paused, respectfully, before his statue. I gazed at the memorial beneath the gothic arches of the old church. In this quiet and overlooked space of literary history, I read the walls and learned, belatedly, about the final resting place of, arguably, England's second greatest poet. 

    

    I also read that in the 18th-century, while St. Giles was undergoing repairs; local drunkards stole parts of John Milton's skeleton. Inspiration, again, found me. 

    

    Oh, John, you've been the gift that keeps on giving. 

    

In the January/February issue, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine published my story, "Paradise Stolen." (I know this blog runs on March 2nd, so it is no longer, technically, the current issue. But my March/April hasn't arrived yet, so I'm fudging.) In the story, I explore this obscure bit of grave robbing. My tale is loosely based on actual events. 

    

    And having completed a Milton trilogy, I may be forced to find another subject for story material. I hope you enjoy this one. It was fun to write. Drinking a pint and munching fish and chips while staring at a classic English church and calling the lunch "research" was pretty cool, too. 

    It's impossible to say with certainty whether John and I are finished. Milton, after all, said that "the mind is its own place..." Sometimes we don't know where it will lead. 

    

    If your tastes run more towards poetry, William Cowper, an 18th-century English poet, got worked to a tizzy over Milton's alcohol-fueled disinterment. He lived and wrote at the time. "On The Late Indecent Liberties Taken With The Remains Of Milton," his poem, expresses his outrage at the desecration. The poem is short; the title is almost as long as the piece itself. I found it at Poetry.com. 

    

    I hope you have a berry, berry good day. 

    

    Until next time.