'Dappled Things' blends murder mystery and faith | DON NOBLE
Joe Taylor, while a professor of English, has also, as director of the Livingston University Press, been the publisher of over 200 books. Astonishingly, he has also edited at least 10 volumes and written three volumes of stories and at least 13 novels, several in verse. His fiction is usually speculative. This volume, “Dappled Things,” is as close to realistic as Taylor is ever likely to get. It is, at its heart, a murder mystery, sort of. In an Abbey near Cullman called here Our Lady of Seven Sorrows, Brother Benedict and Brother Julius, monk-artist, are together a few minutes after midnight on Christmas morning assembling a somewhat unusual creche: the infant Jesus is Black and the Holy Mother as well. This inspiration had come in a vision. Just as Benedict is placing the stone infant into the manger, Brother Julius is killed by a bullet to the head. The scene evokes both the murder of JFK in Dallas and St. Thomas Beckett in Canterbury. The murder is racist, surely, especially since a butchered black cat and a severed Black hand had been found on the grounds some time earlier. Two investigations ensue: police search for the killer and Benedict