A DEEPER LOOK: PURSUED: TEN KNIGHTS ON THE BARROOM FLOOR (from the notes of Mel R. Jones)

In Jones’s novel, not only does the Christus Consolar statue in the Billings Hall at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, play an important part as one of the novel’s settings, but the sundial placed in the circular terrace in front of the main entrance to this Administrative Building does as well.

One look at this ornamental bronze sundial captivates one’s curiosity with its unusual design. It’s not a traditional sundial with a flat dial and an upright triangular blade to cast shadows.

Instead it features a partial cylinder held upright at the proper angle supported by four pillars. A bead on a wire strewn between the four pillars casts a shadow on the cylindrical plate, annotating the hour. More unusual, there are only five such identical sundials in existence, the fifth’s location yet to be found by sundial enthusiasts. The North American Sundial Society (NASS) believes it went missing years ago near Portland, Maine.

This new and improved version of the sundial was patented by scientist and inventor Albert Cushing Crehore of Yonkers, New York, in 1905 and was donated to Johns Hopkins Hospital by trustee George McGaw in the same year. Its weathered inscription reads, “One hour alone is in thy hands, the hour on which the shadow stands.”

As the novel opens in 1973, the protagonist, forensic pathologist, Dr. Emerson Stanek, couldn’t care less about this iconic sundial and its message. He and the Johns Hopkins dons and his mentor, Dr. Thomas Haviland, who are on his committee to decide whether his cancer research project qualifies for a grant, approach the sundial on their way to a conference area. They stop at the sundial where Dr. Haviland asks his colleagues what meaning each attributes to the saying on the sundial. Haviland reminds Stanek of the pathology department tradition that each time the group passes the sundial, they devise new meanings for its message.

One doctor’s contribution reminds them “one’s courage is greatest at the beginning of a journey.” Haviland’s contribution is the first principle of pathology used in his lectures. He asks Stanek if he remembers, and Stanek replies, “’Look intently enough at anything, and you’ll see something that might otherwise escape you.’” When Haviland asks Stanek to make his own offering, the pathologist’s mind, filled with repressed memories of past suffering in this area, tersely replies, “Never paid much attention to monuments strewn along the path of scientific progress on this campus.”

But Stanek can’t escape the committee’s attention, even after his outburst about estranged family relationships when reminded by Haviland the Stanek Foundation maintains the old sundial and other monuments. He finally relents and offers a clipped message designed to stop the committee from frittering away time on campus monuments when his cancer research project is awaiting its attention. He says, “All hours offer opportunities, but wasted ones kill all potential in the end.”

Despite his efforts to dismiss the sundial and its message, Stanek comes across it once again. As a favor to his mentor, he takes notes for him on a bundle of papers about a crime scene within a crashed WW II B-24 Liberator bomber from 1943 recently discovered in the Southern Highlands District of Papua New Guinea. The sundial’s image and message come into his view as he examines a piece of physical evidence offered to Haviland to interest him in taking on the B-24 case investigation.

Stanek picks up a Zippo lighter originally found clutched in a severed hand discovered inside the WW II B-24 bomber wreckage. The lighter has the saying, “One hour alone is in thy hands, the hour on which the shadow stands” along with an image of the sundial inscribed on it.

At first Stanek discounts the connection between the Johns Hopkins sundial and its message and the one on the Zippo lighter. Baltimore and New Guinea, so distant from one another in every way, seem to Stanek as too incredible a connection to be linked as a substantial clue in the crime scene investigation.

As Stanek inadvertently becomes involved in the inquiry in New Guinea, we wonder if his “hours” will be “wasted” there, or whether his “courage at the beginning of his journey” will last through the challenges inherent in the situation, or if he will “look at anything intently enough to see something that might otherwise escape him” in the mysterious and deadly intrigue the crime investigation reveals? Or will he discover a hidden connection that ties the sundial’s message in Baltimore to the same one on the Zippo lighter?

What’s more, will Stanek discover the human connectedness beyond science he has shut out of his life since the betrayal and injustice suffered in his youth? Will Stanek “look beyond science to probe the human soul when survival depends upon the pursued become the pursuers”?

Stanek’s choice is our choice as well. Does the sun shine on your “sundial,” or is it a cloudy day in your life? What meaning will you, and all of us, choose to see in the sundial’s message whatever the circumstances? “One hour alone is in thy hands, the hour on which the shadow stands.”

[avatar]Marian[/avatar]

A DEEPER LOOK: PURSUED: TEN KNIGHTS ON THE BARROOM FLOOR (from the notes of Mel R. Jones)

The fictional protagonist, forensic pathologist Dr. Emerson Stanek, experiences the worst emotional injustice of his life (which paradoxically also holds the possibility of the best) at the feet of the ten foot Carrara marble statue of the Christus Consolator in the rotunda of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.

In Jones’s novel we learn that through the years young Hopkins doctors have rubbed the toes of the monumental statue for good luck. And patients often pray before the statue where the words, “Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” (Matthew 11:28) are visible on the pedestal. Two prayer books on stands at the side of the rotunda invite visitors to write down prayers and concerns if they wish.

But our protagonist’s first view of the statue after being away from Johns Hopkins for eight years brings back long repressed memories. As he walks by the statue with the Hopkins dons who will vote on a possible grant for his cancer research, Stanek will not rub the toes of the statue as his peers do. The symbol of compassion and forgiveness but rekindles the memory of the burning experience of the violent injustice suffered in his heart, mind and body at the site intended to inspire comfort, courage and hope to all who enter into the hospital.

The sensation of awe in silent admiration of the impressive Christus Consolator statue that an American textbook writer in 1896 described as “the most perfect statue of Christ in the world” with its welcoming gesture of open arms and downward gaze that can invoke in a viewer the awareness and emotion of the very presence of the Christ, but is lost on our main character as the novel opens. What’s more the statue’s pedestal that has been set low so that visitors may come close but reminds him of the ultimate betrayal, rejection and pain of his young life that he experienced there.

The breathtaking magnificence of the statue is splendidly placed in the center of the open rotunda under the interior dome of the Hopkins Hospital’s Administration Building. The statue’s series of approaches impact the viewer from any angle, and the ascending balconies surrounding the statues in the rotunda lift one’s view upward. The open arms of the statue await our hero’s choice of peace or conflict in his life journey.

Other eyes can enjoy the exact copy of Danish neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorwald’s Christus Consolator, the original first executed for Copenhagen’s Vor Frue Kirke, or Church of our Lady, in Denmark. So impressive is the statue that many other copies of it exist around the world.

We might wonder why a non-sectarian hospital acquired this religious symbol. In fact, the hospital’s first president of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and University, David Coit Gilman, at the opening ceremonies of the hospital in 1889, expressed the wish that a copy of the Christus Consolator, the Great Healer, be placed in the rotunda of the hospital, tying medical research into the furthering of Christian charity and relief of suffering. Seven years later a Scottish immigrant and one of the wealthiest businessmen in Baltimore, William Wallace Spence donated a copy of the massive statue to Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1896.

The statue was pulled from the wharf on a wooden sled drawn by four horses all the way up Broadway to the hospital’s north entrance, then slid down the corridor to its place in the rotunda. “Jesus came in the north door,” said William Thomas, the hospital’s first doorman, perhaps remembering the Bible quotation, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be opened to you. (Matthew 7:7)

Others wondered if the statue was sought to offset criticism from the more conservative element in late 19th century Baltimore that the hospital had no religious affiliation. The Christus Consolator statue’s impression has a universal and non-sectarian appeal that emphasizes Christ as the Divine Healer and minister to the sick at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

But would the “sickness” in the heart of character Emerson Stanek find healing through his experiences in the novel? Will he hold onto his painful suffering experienced at the feet of the Christ statue, or will he choose the peace offered by the welcoming, outstretched arms of the Christus Consolator? It is a choice each of us must make over and over again as we journey through life. Will we, or won’t we, listen to the words of Christ, “Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest?”

[avatar]Marian[/avatar]

A DEEPER LOOK: PURSUED: TEN KNIGHTS ON THE BARROOM FLOOR (from the notes of Mel R. Jones)

Having served two tours of duty in Vietnam, Mel R. Jones wrote in the acknowledgements to his novel, “Those of us who have been involved in the military in one way or another have been sent to protect our country by engaging in war to attain peace—a paradox of human experience that repeats itself generation after generation, century after century.”

Jones’s vision for his novel, the first of his planned trilogy with the underlying theme of why we go to war, was inspired by a non-fiction book of political philosophy by John G. Stoessinger titled Why Nations Go to War in which he posed this question and possible considerations. He asked, is it the way we organize ourselves as nations? Or is it how we form alliances with other nations? Or is it inherent in the nature of man?

Pursued: Ten Knights on the Barroom Floor explores Stroessinger’s first question. Is it the way we organize ourselves as nations, or cultures, interacting with each other that holds the seeds of both peace and war?

In Jones’s novel, “two worlds, civilized and primitive, past and present, and four cultures—American, Japanese, Australian and native Papuan–deal with the horrors of war and conflict, yet also with the paradox of times of peace that relate to the connectedness of the human community.”

The novel abounds in the complexity of these cultural interactions in a land of primitive beauty, but also lethal danger, which is under Australian political authority. At the site of a recently discovered 1943 crashed WW II bomber in a remote mountain jungle in Papua New Guinea, a U.S. Army remains recovery team, headed by a physical anthropologist is joined by a forensic pathologist there to investigate a crime scene within the fuselage of the wreckage in 1973. The Americans are camped between two antagonistic, primitive native tribes, one a river tribe and the other mountain dwellers, who are fueled by their own payback customs.

The investigative team has to walk in the shoes of American airmen, possibly living or dead, those of Japanese survivors from their bombing raid, as well as Papuan tribal leaders to find the answers as to what happened there, the location of any remains and, mysteriously, who wants the pathologist killed and why.

We wonder if any of the novel characters can rise above their upbringing–the very backbone of their identities forged in national or cultural homes–which colors their perceptions of so many differences that separate them, one from another?

So, why do we go to war? Is it the way we organize ourselves as nations or cultures that delivers us into war, forgetting the love that binds us together as one, as we “brawl” on the “barroom floor” of conflict with one another? Is it a cause or but a given symptom of a world of opposites where free will holds within it the potential of both choices, like two sides of one coin, depending on which side is chosen at any one time? Will it be war or peace? And the universal paradox continues as the choice is made over and over again, generation after generation, century after century in our earthly experience.

[avatar]Marian[/avatar]

A DEEPER LOOK: PURSUED: TEN KNIGHTS ON THE BARROOM FLOOR (from the notes of Mel R. Jones)

You might ask, “What’s with this unusual, paradoxical title, Pursued: Ten Knights on the Barroom Floor? Thoughts might occur to you, such as, “We expect ‘knights’ to be noble defenders in service to the greater good. What are they doing on the ‘barroom floor?’ And ten of them at that! They certainly must be lost to their mission. Does anyone really care if they have fallen? Why try to find, or ‘pursue,’ them?”

As a nation, we do care about our fallen soldiers and airmen who died to protect their country. We do wish to recover their remains whenever possible to honor their service and help bring closure to their grieving families no matter how many years have passed since their demise.

In our story, thirty years have gone by before a crashed WW II B-24 Liberator bomber is accidentally discovered in 1973 by an Australian kiap and his constables in the Southern Highlands District of Papua New Guinea in the Mount Bosavi region. What’s more, there’s evidence that a more recent crime scene has occurred within the wreckage. When notified, the Americans send a physical anthropologist and her U.S. Army remains recovery team to search for the “ten knights,” or ten crew members, dead or possibly still alive, of the ill-fated bomber, named Ten Knights on the Barroom Floor. And a forensic pathologist joins the team to investigate mysterious criminal activity that later had occurred at the downed aircraft site.

But what about the unusual name painted on the fuselage of the crippled aircraft? The Australian discovery group remarked, “It’s a strange name for an aircraft, even for the Yanks. Oh, well. Must’ve meant something special for the crew who flew her.”

So, what did the name mean to the B-24 aircrew? Later, in the story, a pilot’s log is discovered which reveals the answer. We learn that the ten man crew in question didn’t have their own aircraft at first, only lots of dead time in New Guinea that drove them nuts. In the evenings they “drank and fought the air crews who were doing something meaningful—anything to combat boredom.”

But, in December 1943, General Douglas McArthur himself directed the “Knights of the Barroom Brawls” as he called them, be given a B-24 and a chance to show “they could fight in the air as well.” Thereafter, the first aircraft to come through the pipeline to Port Moresby went to the brawling crew who painted, Ten Knights on the Barroom Floor, on their lady’s fuselage in honor of “escapades so notorious even the brass noticed their plight.” One of the crew members “midnight-requisitioned” the suit of armor handing above the bar in the officer’s club as a totem to accompany the “ten knights” on their first B-24 bombing mission to Wewak the following day…

Thirty years later, one of the characters involved in the “B-24 case” commented: ”Aren’t we all ‘Knights on the Barroom Floor” in this fallen world, hopefully to be lifted up when we close the door on this life?”

What’s in a name or title, then, no matter how strange? Perhaps it holds within it the hope of the human soul that there has to be a better way, a peace without conflict, or paradox, where we are all one, living the noble nature of the “knight,” no longer on the “barroom floor.”

[avatar]Marian[/avatar]

New Book Release!

We’re pleased to announce the release of author Mel R. Jones’s epic WW II Literary Mystery Novel, Pursued: Ten Knights on the Barroom Floor. The novel is now available on Amazon in both Paperback and Kindle editions!

Wary of human emotion, but sure of scientific verity, Dr. Emerson Stanek’s orderly life erupts into a perilous adventure in 1973 when he joins Dr. DeAnn Toland and her U.S. Army remains recovery team at a WW II B-24 bomber crash site in New Guinea. A crime scene within the bomber’s wreckage named “Ten Knights on the Barroom Floor,” spearheads his investigation into a 30-year-old mystery entangling Stanek and Toland in a deadly and intricate web threaded with global intrigue. Stanek must look beyond science to probe the human soul when survival depends upon the pursued becoming the pursuers.

[avatar]Marian[/avatar]