The Path to Reading

Often, but not always, there are external reasons as to why one might be reading any particular book. This story starts some ten years ago. I have attended the annual Medievalist's Congress in Kalamazoo since 2001, save for the covid years. One of the pleasures used to be a large winding room of booths for booksellers and publishers. Alas, a few years ago, the old building which housed the book room was razed, and the Exhibits Hall was moved into a smaller cramped and sterile place in a new building, with a doubling of prices for the booths. Many dealers and publishers ceased coming, to the detriment of the entire Congress.  

Around ten years ago, on one of my surveys of the book room, I found someone selling rare books and manuscripts, who also had some Ballantine Adult Fantasies and some early Tolkien paperbacks. We started chatting, and he saw my name tag and said:  "I quote you in my recent book!"  The book, it turns out, is called The Visible Text: Textual Production and Reproduction from Beowulf to Maus (2014) by Thomas A. Bredehoft, and my “Note on the Text” to The Lord of the Rings is quoted with regard to a view of textual scholarship, and sources of textual errors, in the late twentieth century.

Since meeting, Tom and I usually chat and catch up at some point during each Congress.  Last year he gave me a copy of his newest venture as the author of a mystery with a twist.  It’s called Foote: A Mystery Novel, and is published by West Virginia University Press, out of  Morgantown, West Virginia, where Tom lived for years. Oddly, the blurbs on the rear refer to it as a hard-boiled thriller, but it’s not at all what I think of as hard-boiled. It concerns a private investigator in Morgantown who finds himself involved in two murder investigations. The tale mixes the small town life of Morgantown and the country life of the lands surrounding the town.  The first murder took place at a ramps festival—something I’d never heard of before.  “Ramps” are wild onions (or leeks) that are cooked in a wide array of ways that sound delicious. Other gatherings visited by the plot include an airstreamer group (airstreamers are aluminum travel campers), and a civil war reenactment.  

The twist (and I am not giving anything away here by mentioning it) is that the P.I. Jim Foote, known as “Big Jim,” is not human. He is a bigfoot, a long-lived sasquatch, who works in Morgantown to shield the nearby Homelands of his people from human meddling, and vice versa.  The questions surrounding the two murders make Foote wonder whether there might be bigfoot involvement.  Big Jim’s musings at the civil war reenactment gives an interesting perspective: “The whole idea of historical reenactment must be an exercise in imagination. It is one of the greatest differences, I have always thought, between bigfoot and humans: for most bigfoot, life in the forest is life in the present, in our minds and hearts it is a kind of unchanging and eternal present. For humans, as long as I’ve known them, and even longer, life in the forest is life in the past.”

The pace of the narrative is slow and easy, and the plot stretches over about ten days. The set-up is refreshingly different from many mysteries, which is of course part of the appeal. Even the Medievalist Congress makes a brief appearance, as one character describes the paper he is working on for it:  “about medieval wild-men: big, hair-covered guys, living outside of civilization, out in the woods,  The payoff will be where I look at the Middle English poem, Sir Orfeo as making use of the wild-man motif.” 

Tom has posted some small Jim Foote adventures at his substack, and a longer story, “Ghost in the Machine” (more comedic than the mystery novel, with more fantastical cryptids), came out this past Christmas at Booktimist, the official blog of West Virginia University Press.  I hope this bodes well for further “Big Jim” novels in the future.