Lucky for you, PresbyPolity types and GA commissioners! Mark Schweizer's latest Liturgical Mystery, The Organist Wore Pumps, has just been published and you can download it to read on your Kindle, IPhone or IPad while pretending to be paying attention in another one of those interminable committee meetings you are stuck in this week.The only problem is that you will be hard-pressed to stifle your laughter while reading it and when you try in vain to suppress those tears of hysteria from flowing down your cheeks your fellow commissioners may mistakenly think you are In The Spirit.
In this eighth adventure of our hero Liturgical Detective Hayden Konig--full time police chief of St. Germaine, North Carolina and part-time organist/choirmaster of St. Barnabus Episcopal Church--the mystery involves the bones of one of the Three Wise Kings, an obnoxious deacon, some skunks, the Best Christmas Parade ever and a dead body in Lake Tannenbaum. Konig is hampered by a broken arm but not hampered enough to prevent him writing his execreble Raymond Chandler knock-offs or to keep him from solving the crime. This book can be read on its own, but you will appreciate it more if you have read the other seven, beginning with The Alto Wore Tweed. Also available on your Kindle and various Kindle Apps.
Favorite line from the book: "anything too stupid to be said can be easily sung." I really don't know how Schweizer does it, but this book is just as good as the other 7. For more fun, go here and you can listen to The Pirate Gloria, The Mouldy Cheese Madrigal among other things from the series.
Now your Auntie QG feels a bit disloyal recommending a book involving Episcopalians to our GA commissioners, but let's face it-- the Episcopal Church is both more colorful and more liturgical than us Presbys.
Though after seeing some descriptions of the opening worship with the Dancing Eagle and other things I'm thinking that maybe we are getting in a position where we can compete with them. The question is: who will be our Mark Schweizer?
6 comments:
Thanks for this - these books are the perfect summer reads.
From what I've read and heard too, the opening GA worship service sounds like it was somethin' else.
It wasn't available on the website, so I don't really know, but the descriptions I have read ..um...leave me at a loss for words.
This is the second time I'm made a mental note to get this series, and I hope this time the note will not be flushed out like other mental notes I've taken.
Re: GA opening .. I'll leave with one comment as noted by the Layman Online: "it was almost a Pagan service .."
~sigh~ yes, I saw that, too.
Dancing Eagle you say....hmmm...
Mark,
There are a couple of videos of this processional now available on You Tube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQfKFFMfaQw
and this one that shows the Dancing Eagle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-N9RM_-7vY&feature=related
Another blogger called this "Giant Paper Mache Calvinist Puppets of Doom"
Don't you think this calls for a Hayden Konig investigation? The nerve of those Presbyterians trying to horn in on the Episcopalians' Clown Eucharist act!
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