Y'all don't step in that there chronosynclastic infundibulum, y'heah?

 I picked up a book on tape at the local library with the promising title of Bootlegger's Daughter, by Margaret Maron. I was a little bit disappointed that it turns out to be a lawyer-mystery set in modern North Carolina. (There are cop-mysteries, lawyer-mysteries, psychologist-mysteries, forensics-mysteries, all of whichcan be sometimes over-laden with procedural details, as opposed to the more romantic genres of the PI mysteries, outsider mysteries, and mythical-figure mysteries (Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, who occupy a niche found nowhere in real life.) Still, rather than a great huge plate of ethnogrphic details, there's plenty of sprinkles on top of a more conventional mystery--which I always enjoy.

My first jolt was when the ultra-rich owner of the local pharmaceutical company was named Owen Barfield.  He's not only an important philosopher (who writes great stuff) but famous as one of the Inklings, the group that included J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. It's a strange choice to name a mystery character, especially a(seeming) incidental one. Still, writers will pick up names from just about anywhere, and it didn't seem to be establishing a pattern. So it's possible to ignore it.

But after I get into it for a while, something positively eerie begins to dawn on me. The central story of the book is the fiercely contested election for District Judge between a white woman lawyer and a tall, angular black lawyer. After the other candidates drop out, the primary is between the two Democrats, and it begins to get ugly, with shadowy people bringing forth nasty characterizations: The black man is accused of being, well, black, and the woman (the point-of-view character) is accused, among other things, of being a Lesbian.

This was written in 1992.

I haven't finished the story yet--but then again, I don't know how the other story ends either.

Brrrrrr.