Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet)

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Yes. The Japanese samurai used them in the Middle Ages. And that little creature asleep on your shoulder? Glistening sweat and decaying fat. Sunrise. Cairo Martyr puffed lazily and turned his gaze north when he heard the distant drone of an airplane. But before the final hand is played to determine the destiny of the Holy City, a dangerous new player enters the picture: Nubar Wallenstein, an Albanian alchemist determined to achieve immortality, and heir to the world’s largest oil syndicate. He finances a vast network of spies dedicated to destroying the players, and his aim is to win complete power over Jerusalem. But before the final hand is played to determine the destiny of the Holy City, a dangerous new player enters the picture: Nubar Wallenstein, an Albanian alchemist determined to achieve immortality, and heir to the world’s largest oil syndicate. He finances a vast network of spies dedicated to destroying the players, and his aim is to win complete power over Jerusalem./divDIV

According to the World Series of Poker, there are 100 million people playing poker online, and over 60 million of that is in the USA.All of those historical moments make poker one of the most popular ways to spend time both online and offline. Don’t know, do I. Just guessing though, I’d say it has something to do with having been through too much for my age. Excessive experience, I mean. It’s worn me down until now I’m worn out. Here I am only twenty-one years old and I’m already a veteran of a war that was fought nearly seventy years ago. And that’s a weight for a man to carry. Do you follow me? Spy and be spied upon…” It sounds almost like a proverb. Concerning himself with the clandestine activities of mankind Edward Whittemore boldly combines tragedy, mythology and buffoonery…Now what’s this twist? thought O’Sullivan Beare. What’s going on around here? More confusion and things seem to be spinning out of control already. That item’s not English for sure, not French or German or anything natural. And armed with a bow no less, just in case a spot of archery practice turns up while he’s out for a stroll on a dreadful winter afternoon. Some bloody devious article up to no good in the Holy Land, that’s certain. By God, it’s pranks for sure and somebody’s bent on something.

window, document, "script", "https://95662602.adoric-om.com/adoric.js", "Adoric_Script", "adoric","9cc40a7455aa779b8031bd738f77ccf1", "data-key"); But we were wrong. Whittemore, after a tour of duty as an officer in the Marines in Japan, was approached there by the CIA and spent the Kennedy years working for the Agency in Europe. During those years Whittemore would periodically return to New York City. What are you up to? one would ask. Oh, this and that. For a while he was running a socialist newspaper in Rome. After he left the Agency there was a stint with the Addiction Services Agency in New York City. Later, there were rumors that he had a drinking problem and that he was taking drugs. He married and divorced twice. He and his first wife had two daughters. And then there were the women he lived with after the second divorce. There were many; they all seemed to be talented—painters, photographers, writers, sculptors, and dancers. There were more rumors. He was living on Crete, he had no job, no money, he was writing. Then silence. Clearly, the fair-haired undergraduate had not gone on to fame and glory. Those moments of despair come of course, but they can be overcome. Have you ever heard of an English explorer named Strongbow? He joined the Marines and served as an officer on a tour of duty in Japan. Approached by the relatively recently established CIA, he was recruited into the service, when it had many men from the Ivy League universities. Working undercover as a reporter for The Japan Times from 1958 until 1967, Whittemore traveled throughout the Far East, Europe and the Middle East. The novel spans centuries, and The Quartet adds the remaining decades. The characters are not just larger than life but above it and beyond it. It's not a typical fantasy. It takes place in our historical world and it doesn't ask for the willing suspension of disbelief. It forces it upon you. There's no magic in the accepted sense, unless the edges of reality can be called magic, and all of the events and characters are possible, if highly implausible. I've never laughed so hard while being educated in arcane history.The youngest of five children, Whittemore was born on May 26, 1933, in Manchester, New Hampshire, US to John Cambridge Whittemore (1889–1958), a commercial district manager for the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, and his wife Elizabeth Payson Whittemore ( née Prentiss; 1894–1985). [1] He graduated from Deering High School, Portland, Maine, in 1951, and went to Yale shortly after, where he obtained a degree in history. Out of print for many years, all five books were reissued in 2002 by Old Earth Books. The Old Earth Books editions are now out of print, but Open Road Media announced plans to publish eBook editions of all five novels in July 2013.

A profoundly nutty book full of mysteries, truths, untruths, idiot savants, necrophiliacs, magicians, dwarfs, circus masters, secret agents … A marvellous recasting of history in our century. — The New York Times Book Review The Jerusalem Quartet In the next fifteen years Whittemore went on to write four more wildly imaginative novels, his Jerusalem Quartet: Sinai Tapestry, Jerusalem Poker, Nile Shadows, and Jericho Mosaic. Reviewers and critics compared his work to the novels of Carlos Fuentes, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut. Publishers Weekly called him our best unknown novelist. Jim Hougan, writing in Harper’s Magazine, said Whittemore was one of the last, best arguments against television…. He is an author of extraordinary talents…. The milieu is one in which readers of espionage novels may think themselves familiar, and yet it is totally transformed by the writer’s wild humor, his mystical bent, and his bicameral perception of time and history. A major hole in the book for me is Stern himself. Whittemore handles the mystery, the ambiguity, the paranoia, the charismatic cult around this unknowable shadowy figure well, but when the actual dude finally does show up... He just doesn't seem all that interesting. He is just this guy, you know. (Have to furnish your own German psychoanalyst accent.) His appearance doesn't really answer any of the questions: which Joe frustratingly doesn't seem to want to ask. And it really does feel like a deflation. But no, after this section and the novel goes on, and Joe doesn't seem to have changed his view of Stern. That was a let down for me, though I guess it is equally possible that I missed the point on my rather fragmented first reading. (I'm sure there is a whole graduate thesis to be done on all the pillars of smoke in this novel, all leading to the columns of smoke coming from the Nazi death-camps.) Card games have been an excellent way for people to spend time for hundreds of thousands of years.Playing cards were invented in China before AD1000, and they made their way to the EU in 1360. One of the oldest card game references is a game called the 'leaf game'.

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This is the first Whittemore I've read, based on a recommendation by another author I love, Jeff VanderMeer. Though it is a stand alone novel it's the penultimate book in the Sinai Tapestry series (also the only Whittemore my local library had). The earlier books are supposed to have much more fantastical elements (while Nile Shadows on its own is more an absurdist spy novel in places). I'm quite happy to have discovered this 'hidden treasure' author and can now hunt down the rest of his books. Then one day in early spring 1995, Ted called me. Could he come by the office that morning? I assumed it was to deliver the long-awaited manuscript. There had been two false starts after Jericho Mosaic. Instead Ted told me he was dying. Would I be his literary executor? A year or so earlier Ted had been diagnosed as having prostate cancer. It was too far along for an operation. His doctor had prescribed hormones and other medication and the cancer had gone into remission. But now it had spread. Less than six months later he was dead. They were terrible months for him. However, during those last weeks and days while he slipped in and out of consciousness, he was looked after by Carol, who had never really left his life. In that style, you may like Cordwainer Smith, one of the greatest masters of spec-fi with his standalone stories and novels from THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF MANKIND. None of us had met him, except through his fiction, but we needed him. We needed him badly. Bogged down in the particularities of daily events, in the hourly newscasts and mind numbing series of military and political skirmishes, we needed someone who could soar above it all. Someone who could take the absurd reality in which we lived and weave it into a rich tapestry of realist absurdity. That’s apparent age. The spirit inside is dreadfully elderly and creaking, a regular tottering veteran of the wars at least eighty-five years old. The Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea, remember? I’d have to be more or less that old.

a meeting in 1933 precedes a conversation in the 1920s but illuminates some of the more opaque things that were said in 1933” So it strikes me there are no commonplace people in the crowd, said Joe, and no innocents in the game of life really. We all seem to be double and triple agents with unknown sources and unsuspected lines of control, reporting a little here and a little there as we try to manage our secret networks of feeling and doing, our own little complex networks of life..." (Chp 18, 'Crypt/Mirror', 336-7) At first I thought it was just druggie humour (and it IS damn funny) and then I figured maybe historical speculation with a satirical edge, until it started playing with my mundane perceptions of time, history, and causality. It's the kind of book (series) that weaves itself into your dreams. There was a hushed memorial service in the United Church in Dorset that August. Afterwards, a reception was held on the large lawn in front of the family house. It was there that the disparate parts of Ted’s world came together, perhaps for the first time; there was his family, his two sisters and two brothers and their spouses, nieces, and nephews with their own families (but not Ted’s former wives or the two daughters who had flown to New York to say goodbye); there were neighbors, Yale friends, and a couple of colleagues from the Lindsay years. Were there any spooks in attendance? One really can’t say, but there were eight spooks of a different sort from Yale, members of the 1955 Scroll and Key delegation. Ann and Carol were, of course, there. Ted had finally come home to New England. It had been a long journey: Portland, New Haven, Japan, Italy, New York, Crete, Jerusalem, New York, and now Dorset. Along the way he had many friends and companions; he was not a particularly good husband or father and disappointed many. But gradually he had found his voice, written his novels, and fallen in love with Jerusalem. I would like to think that Ted died dreaming of his Holy City. In a sense he was at one with that stonecutter turned medieval knight, turned antiquities dealer, Haj Harun. For Whittemore was the eternal knight-errant who made it at Yale in the 1950s, lost it in the CIA, and then made himself into a wonderful novelist with the voice of a mystic. The voice of a mystic who had absorbed the best of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His great-grandfather the minister and his great-grandmother the writer would have been equally proud of him. His spirit rests peacefully in Dorset, Vermont.The four books which make up the Jerusalem Quartet are among the richest and most profound in imaginative literature… . A superlative body of work. —Jeff VanderMeer