Death of a gentleman ซ ม คอลล นส

A weekend at a squire’s country home was intended to be a relaxing visit for Jane Eyre and her husband Edward Rochester. Jane looked forward to meeting the squire’s bride and the artist who’d been hired to paint portraits of the newlyweds. However, the household is anything but joyous! The squire’s new marriage has infuriated those who hoped to inherit his holdings. Then their host turns up dead. A tweeny—a maid who assisted both the Cook and the housemaids—is immediately blamed for the crime. The girl is an easy scapegoat, but Jane and Edward refuse to believe she killed her master, the kind man who took her off the streets of London and gave her a job. Can the Rochesters find the real killer? Or can they at least save the tweeny from a gruesome fate? Jane Eyre is not about to let an innocent, friendless girl be hanged for murder!

This exciting book is the fourth in a series featuring Charlotte Brontë’s timeless heroine, Jane Eyre, and is a continuation of the series beginning with the winner of the prestigious Daphe du Maurier Award of Excellence, Death of a Schoolgirl. If you like history plus mysteries solved by a plucky heroine, you will love The Jane Eyre Chronicles. Immerse yourself in an English classic with a puzzling twist. Hit the “BUY NOW” button today.

A routine Google search can guide a young man to any number of places where he can learn how to knot a bow tie, what to expect at his first Seder, why the curse of Rocky Colavito has lasted so long — his trade being the principal reason that the Cleveland Indians have not won a World Series in the 52 years since.

But where do you go in early 21st-century America to learn how to become a gentleman? There are certainly no mentoring services for this character trait, and coming of age rituals at many a church and prep school are woefully inadequate as well. (I’m judging that by the product.) Watching James Bond order a martini, before dispatching someone without breaking a sweat, can go only so far.

You need to know a gentleman in order to understand one. And with the death this week of the editor Ashbel Green, we lost one of the last true gentlemen, certainly in the world of letters.

In editing more than 500 books through almost half a century at Alfred A. Knopf, Ash Green — which is what he preferred to be called — was a pillar of institutional style, wit and grace. By example, he was the antithesis of the modern era of self-promotion, provocation and narcissism enabled by Facebook, Twitter and other electronic billboarding services. And even as personality-free, multinational corporations took over publishing, he nurtured fresh books of history, memoir and fiction that defied all trends.

His death Tuesday near his country home in Stonington, Conn., at the age of 84, has prompted a flurry of obituaries in which he is inevitably described as “old school.” That term certainly doesn’t do him justice, though he did hammer his notes out on an aging typewriter until he could no longer find replacement ribbons, and wore button-down blue shirts with paisley ties well into the style mess of casual Fridays.

He was old school in the sense that he knew everyone — presidents and dissidents, giants like Vaclav Havel, Gabriel García Márquez and Walter Cronkite — and never dropped their names. He was old school in that he would edit out a chapter of a manuscript — as he once did to me — and you would thank him, ultimately. And he was old school in the hungry reach of his tastes: baseball, politics, horse racing, history, a very well-told joke.

Ash was my editor at Knopf, having plucked my 10-page proposal for a book about the Pacific Northwest from his pile of weekly offerings. He edited in red pen, and fought over very few things.

“It’s your book,” he would say. “But you don’t want to embarrass yourself, either.” He loved to read early reviews to you over the phone; good or bad, they were not to be taken seriously, he insisted. One is self-inflating, the other can be crippling.

He was WASP to his core, in my eyes, down to his drinks, his Upper East Side apartment, his Presbyterian reserve, his lineage to an ancestor who knew George Washington. That he would take an interest in me — Irish Catholic, a Westerner, 30 years his junior, too much of a smart-mouth for his refined style — was a mystery for many years. I had the Westerner’s distrust of the publishing cabal, this cloistered circle of Manhattan gatekeepers who had such vast command over the tastes of the reading public. It took a lifetime New Yorker to break the well-earned stereotype, and then some.

When I left Ash for another publisher, I thought the regular phone calls from him would discontinue, but we talked up to his death. True friendships do not end, or begin, with a contract.

I never knew, until informed by others or I read about it somewhere, that he might be editing a memoir by George H. W. Bush (another gentleman), or working with Walter Cronkite. When his son moved to Oregon, Ash took an interest in all things Pacific Northwest, and grew to know more about our politics and rich literary culture than most natives. He would be happy, as a student of Americana, to hear that his obituary ran in places like the Idaho Statesman and the Tulsa World.

This son of a newspaperman loved newspapers, and hated to see what happened to them in the drawn out, bloody transition to digital “product.” To his last day, he would mail me clips from some fairly obscure newspapers about topics of mutual interest. Clips!

His own politics were somewhat of a mystery, though I know he was appalled by the vulgarity, xenophobia and know-nothingness of the modern Republican Party.

In old age, he struggled with diabetes, cancer and, recently, Parkinson’s Disease. I never heard him complain — another gentleman’s quality — except about the loss of his tennis game. As it turned out, he was quite the player, though this is something, again, that he kept to himself.

It may sound, oh, elitist, but it’s worth saying: we have too many authors who are not writers. Too many people who get book contracts simply because they took off their clothes, or said something outrageous on a reality show, or need to share every detail about their genitalia.

At the same time, we have too many writers who are not yet authors, but deserve to be. Ash Green, editing until he took his final breath, was in constant search of the latter, and in no small way saved publishing from itself.