1: Books of the Week

Jung's life turned on 4/4/44, and this Tuesday belonged to the Holy Week from Apr 2, 1944, Palm Sunday, to Apr 9, Easter Sunday (red letter day on this calendar).

This Holy Week could be a very special one, as Jewish Easter (Pessah, Passover) fell this year 1944 on 4/8, a Saturday, as it seems to have been the case in the original Passion. This peculiarity helped to date the Crucifixion on April 7, 30, a date which was long granted for good. It seems now English sources like better April 3, 33, while French sources still prefer April 7, 30.

The important thing might not be reality, if there is any, but what people knew about it in their time, and April 7, 30 was for example the date given in Jesus in his time by Daniel-Rops (1945). I came to find that 1944 is the first Gregorian year when Good Friday falls on April 7 and Pessah on 8, as in 30 CE, and this will not come back before 2479. There might have been Julian years (from 326 to 1582) that would fit, but Julian calendar was wrong as soon as the 2nd century.

I discovered this while enquiring on a very strange novel, And on the Eighth Day..., written in 1964 by Ellery Queen (aka Fred Dannay), which is a parody of the Passion, set in 8 chapters titled from Sunday 2 April to Sunday 9 April, happening in 1944 in a kind of Essenian community somewhere in the Californian desert. The Teacher is killed by his people on 7th at sunset, i.e. on Christian Good Friday as well as on the very beginning of Jewish Pessah.
I've been for long interested in Easter dates in literature, notably in crime books. Two months before I found the pattern around 4/4/44 in Jung's life, I came to distinguish a special category that covers exactly a Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, because I found in July 2008 a new text following such a pattern.
I already knew of two other ones, discovered both in April 1997, in strange conditions. In even stranger conditions I came to find two more books offering the same pattern in Oct 2008, a month after my 4/4/44 discovery.

I'll give details in the next posts, now I'll try to study the set of the five texts together, and here they are, following the chronology of Easter weeks:
1889 - The Decorator by Boris Akunin (1999)
1895 - The Perfume Of The Lady In Black by Gaston Leroux (1909)
1944 - And on the Eighth Day... by Ellery Queen (1964)
1996 - Four Corners of Night by Craig Holden (1999)
2001 - 5 (2001) That's a French collection of short stories about the 5 senses, and the short Little Green Apples by Sébastien Fevry is in 8 sections from Sunday, April 8 to Sunday, April 15 (the 2001 Holy Week).

I found these five books by chance, and each finding was so incredible that I won't be surprised if these five books were the only one, at least the only ones easily available in France. Three of them are by best-selling authors (French, American and Russian), but from so different times that it's unlikely many people read them all.
Then American Craig Holden is not very known, he has no wikipedia file yet, and I don't think his work was translated in many languages. Happily it was in French.
The last book from 2001 was only published in French, in 2000 copies, and I would probably never have known of it if I didn't publish a book with the same editor.

Now these five texts show quite amazing features, notably following the pattern of their discovery, 2-1-2, 2 together in April 1997, then 1 in July 08, and 2 together in October 08.

They repeat this pattern in different ways:
- there are 2 French books, 1 Russian, 2 American.
- 2 texts (Queen and Holden) are whole independant novels, so published; Fevry's was published in a collection of short stories and Akunin's is a short novel always published with another one in Special Assignments; the other novel, by Leroux, was published either as a complete book, either as the second part of a volume including Rouletabille's first investigation, The Mystery of the Yellow Room.
- 2 (Holden and Akunin) clearly state the action is during the Holy Week, ending on Easter Sunday; 1 (Leroux) gives an allusion to Easter time, the 2 others don't give any allusion.
- 2 (Holden and Fevry) have an action contemporary with their writing, 2 (Leroux and Queen) are written slightly after the events (14 and 20 years), and 1 is written 110 years later.
- The Holy Weeks draw a kind of perfect pattern with 1944 in the middle (actually the exact average date is 1945, 1889+1895+1944+1996+2001 = 9725 = 5 x 1945 and the two extreme dates give 1889+2001 = 3890 = 2 x 1945.)

1944 and 1945 make me recall the 4-1 pattern I saw in WWII, starting from Sep 1, 1939 and ending with Aug 15, 1945, 2175 days of which 4/5ths fall exactly on D-Day.

At last the most astonishing thing is that 'my' 4th and 5th Books of the Week have 4 and 5 in their titles. I have nothing to add to this as I didn't choose anything. Of course I might have known of hundred of such 'Books of the Week', then have chosen among them five items in order to show striking patterns, but all I can say is that I only know of these five books, and that I would be grateful to anyone that could indicate me any other book.
Simple reason shouts it loud that there should be many such books, as I have only read a very low percentage of the millions of books published all over this world, yet I have a strong feeling that my case is quite against the odds.
Next posts will try to justify this feeling.

2: Leroux

In April 1997 I read The Perfume of the Lady in Black, a novel written in 1908 by Gaston Leroux. It follows The Mystery of The Yellow Room, where young journalist Joseph Rouletabille solves this 1892 mystery where the culprit was the inspector in charge of the case, most famous Fred Larsan, who was too most famous criminal Ballmeyer. He was too Rouletabille's father, and was supposed to have died then in a shipwreck...
He seems yet to have resurrected on April 7, 1895, when Mathilde Stangerson, Rouletabille's mother, calls him in urgency. She saw Larsan during her honeymoon trip! She spends her honeymoon in an old castle, on the French Riviera. A terrible week follows, as Larsan is a genius of disguise, and could be about anyone. A fight in Mathilde's room occurs in the night of the 12th, Larsan seems to have been killed by Mathilde's husband. Yet in the afternoon it's not so sure the man was really dead. And he was not, as at last Rouletabille demonstrates on the evening of the 13th that Larsan was Mathilde's husband. He waited until dark in order to discreetly evacuate Larsan to a secret prison, as nobody had to know Mathilde's infamous wedding, but Larsan suicides.

I happened to know that April 14 was Easter Sunday in 1895, as it's a prominent date in Maurice Leblanc's The Golden Triangle (1917, complete English text here), in which Patrice and his lover Coralie are caught in a deadly trap on Apr 14, 1895. Twenty years later, another Patrice and another Coralie, son and daughter of the previous ones, are led towards each other by a mysterious destiny. They repeat their parents' story so tightly that they fall in the same trap on Apr 14, 1915, and are saved in extremis by Arsène Lupin.
Patrice then learns that the mysterious destiny was run by his father, who came back from the dead in the evening of Apr 14, 1895, but found useful to be known dead in order to prepare his revenge. The father seems to have turned mad, as now he acts like an enemy, trying to kill Patrice and Coralie on Apr 14, 1915. Lupin will solve this enigma.

I found many things alike between the two books, the biggest one being the death of the father (real or not) on the same Easter day. There are other coincidences, as this striking one: in both books the hero, Rouletabille or Lupin, has found the truth, the real identity of the disguised murderer, but he delays its revelation, and this delay is the direct cause of another death, and in both stories the victim is a janitor.

Instead of the Son resurrecting on Sunday, the Father dies...
There might be several allusions in both books to this status of counter-Passion, especially in Leroux's where Larsan is again supposed dead then resurrected on Good Friday. It's quite striking that one of his alias is Salvator Russel (given in the scene adaptation of the Yellow Room Mystery): salvator, 'saver', is the meaning of Jesus, Jeshua, whose human father was Joseph, name of Salvator's son, Joseph Joséphin later known as Rouletabille.
Russel is an English equivalent of Leroux ('The Red'), so maybe Leroux identified a bit with his wicked character. Anyhow it's a strange coincidence he died on April 15, 1927, which was a Good Friday.
Some months after I brought together the two novels, from the common date April 14, 1895, I came to see a documentary about Alfred Dreyfus, where was seen the beginning of his Devil's Island diary, first sentence of which reading:

Sunday, April 14, 1895

Today I begin the diary of my sad and tragical life.

This led me to another look on both novels, and to find strong echoes with Dreyfus case. Here is the most striking one:

- Frederic Larsan, commonly called Fred, is too Public Enemy number one Ballmeyer, sounding like a Jewish name. Rouletabille planned to take him on a craft after dawn on April 13, 1895, towards the discrete place where he would be kept for the rest of his life, but Larsan suicides, and that's his corpse that his son takes on the craft and drowns in the sea.
- Alfred Dreyfus, called Fred by family and friends, was Public Enemy number one in 1895, when a plot made a traitor of him, probably because he was a Jew. He was offered the 'Way of Honor', i.e. to shoot himself, but he refused and was condemned to end his life on Devil's Island, where he would be the only prisoner. He arrived there in the afternoon of April 13, 1895, and Guyana time was about 5 hours late with French time, so it might be exactly at the same moment that the two Freds were taken on a craft to their last place...

I won't go any longer in this direction as I'm not trying to prove anything about Leroux's intentions in this novel. Somehow it has to be considered it might not be just a simple thriller.
I feel sure anyhow Leroux didn't choose the dates by chance, and several clues show he knew perfectly that April 7 when the story begins was Palm Sunday in 1895.

I'm not so sure about Leblanc, who anyhow could not allow himself to write a clearly scandalous novel in 1917; WWI was raging and there was a censorship surveying literary works.
Since I'm fascinated by the switch between Jung and his doctor on 4/4/44, I have another look at The Golden Triangle which begins in the evening of Apr 3, 1915. I keep on wondering about this:
- The wicked man of the story, Essarès, tried to kill Patrice's father on Apr 14, 1895, but the father 'resurrected' on that Easter Sunday. He became Diodokis, and was accepted as a servant by Essarès.
- Essarès succeeds in killing Diodokis on Apr 4, 1915, actually unaware it was Patrice's father, and it was another Easter Sunday! In order to escape to his enemies, Essarès then takes the place of Diodokis and arranges things so that Diodokis' corpse will be taken as himself. This switch will make the case quite tricky.

I have no trace of the exact days of my finding. The only thing made sure is that I heard on March 22, 1997, during a literary seminar, of a book giving strange insights on George Perec's work.
I bought this book, in which some insights about Leroux made me curious to read him again, and that led me to The Perfume, which starts on Apr 6, 1895 with the wedding of the Lady in Black. It was the eve of Palm Sunday, as was curiously enough March 22, 1997.

3: Queen

In April 1997, as told in previous post, I discovered the common points between The Perfume of the Lady in Black, by Leroux, and The Golden Triangle, by Leblanc (quite colored mysteries, as Leroux and Leblanc mean 'red' and 'white'). I spent several days deeply immerged in both books, studying each and every word, until I decided I had enough and chose to read a book just for the sake of it.
My choice was And on the Eighth Day..., by Ellery Queen (1964), that I recently bought as there was a French reedition of it in March 97. I read much Queen about fifteen years ago, including this one, and felt like reading some of it again, but my choice was first coming from its recent availability.
So I went into it, and soon came to wonder, though there was not in my French edition the table of chapters of the original one:

It was about a religious community in the desert, in 1944, led by an old man called the Teacher, helped by Twelve ministers. The Teacher is sentenced to death on Thursday, killed on Friday, and on next Sunday his double arrives strangely in the community.
It was just a formality to check that the week involved was the Holy Week of 1944, but I was quite puzzled to find in this novel some of the tricks I imagined in Leblanc's and Leroux's, as:
- anagram : one of the twelve is Storicai, anagram for Iscariot, and he betrays the Teacher for 30 coins of silver... In Leblanc's there was a character named Fakhi, whom I saw as Caiaphas (in French 'Caïphe', phonetic anagram of Fakhi).
- allusion to the moon, as the first full moon of Spring rules the Easter date : the detective coming in the community has his watch giving moon cycle, while Leroux gave several mentions of the brightness of the moon.

Anyhow it's quite certain this novel is a parody of the Passion, and it was seen before me, yet its exact purpoise stays unclear.
Ellery Queen was from 1929 to 1958 an alias for two cousins working together, Dannay creating plots, Lee completing them. Their disagreements led to a clash in 1958 and to decide not to write together anymore. Yet Lee thought it was stupid to leave the famous signature Queen, and many new novels were published under this name, ghostwritten by more or less minor writers.
This freed Dannay to publish mystical plots that Lee had been reluctant to complete, and in 1963 came The Player on the Other Side, in which a man born on April 20, 1924, Easter Sunday, takes himself for God. Then comes the Passion of And on the Eighth Day..., then comes a set of 4 novels with a common theme, crime of passion!
There is a quite unusual trick in this set, as the 3rd novel, The Last Woman in his Life (1970), begins on the day the 2nd one ended, Face to Face (1967), and most readers of Woman have probably missed the clue, only given in Face, that this day was Monday in the Holy Week, so next Sunday on which a murder is committed is Easter Sunday. The victim is John Benedict III, killed at 3:03 AM by 3 blows with a sculpture of the 3 monkeys.

So And on the Eighth Day... should be studied among all Dannay's plots, that's not my purpoise here. What is sure is that it was inspired by recent discoveries about the Dead Sea scrolls, and I found that all what Dannay needed was in famous The Dead Sea Scrolls by Millar Burrows (1955).
I found in this book that Qumran Essenians had a holy book which is now only known by an acronym, HGW or HGY (or hgu/hgy), as letters waw and yod are quite alike in Hebrew/Aramaic. In Queen's the community of Quenan (subtle mix between Qumran and Queen) keeps in its 'sanquetum' a holy book, book Mk'h, or Mk'n, which was thought to be lost, but the Teacher found it in 1939. When he's allowed in the sanquetum, the detective discovers the terrible mistake: the holy ark contains Mein Kampf by Hitler.

Hitler, born on April 20, 1889, which was the eve of Easter Sunday, might be involved in the story because his birthday is the opposite of Dannay's own, October 20. The expression And on the eighth day occurs in the Bible, about the holiday of Shemini Atzeret, which might have been Dannay's birthdate in 1905, if he was born after sunset. Maybe this could be checked, he was born in Brooklyn as Daniel Nathan on 10/20/1905.

There is a kind of mystery about the apostrophe in Mk'h. I found that's in Burrows' the transliteration of Hebrew alef, also transliterated 'a', so ' h might stand for AH, Adolf Hitler (Hebrew word AH means 'brother', which might have been for something in this George Steiner's novella).

Dale Andrews wrote in 2002 a short story, Yet another Day, on line here, in which he imagines his meeting with old Ellery Queen, and asks him about the Easter eggs concealed in the novel.
He made a clever hypothesis about Mk'n and its apostrophe, I find it better than mine, but maybe Dannay thought of them both...
Anyhow, I thought too of Bible about this holy book kept in an ark by this new Essenian community, but Dale saw that Mk'n is quite near the acrostics used in the Jewish world for the Bible, TN"K, read TaNaKh, in Hebrew letters ך"נת, or rather תנ"ך, following Hebrew writing from right to left.
- T stands for Tora, Pentateuch also called Moses' books,
- N stands for Neviim, Prophets,
- " shows the expression is an acronym,
- K stands for Ketuvim, Writings.
With M for Moses (Moshe) instead of T for Tora, we would have MN"K which is quite near Mk'n of Quenanites.

I would have much more to say about this novel, but the Table of Chapters might have been sufficient to show it was a 'Book of the Week', my first purpose.
When I first paid attention to the schematism of day 4/4/44 in Jung's life (on 4/4/4, Palm Sunday), I immediately thought of Queen's novel, and of the old Teacher's resurrection as a young (Jung) man.
Four years later, when I found the 4-1 pattern in Jung's life, I thought of it again, and looked again to what happened on 4/4/44.
Then the detective, named Ellery Queen as the author, is lost in the desert on 4/2/44, Palm Sunday. He meets the Teacher who brings him to Quenan. Next day he gets a bit acquainted with the place, and on 4/4/44 the Teacher calls him because during the previous night someone touched the one and only key of the sanquetum, in which only the Teacher can enter.

The one and only key might be a commonplace in crime fiction, yet it does not appear in each and every plot, and thinking of Jung one has to recall he had a retiring room in the second tower of Bollingen, in which no one else was allowed except with his permission. Like the Teacher he kept the key with him all the time...
It becomes amazing when observing this tower was square in his first state, in 1927, then Jung decided in 1931 to rebuild it, and to make it round.
In Leroux's castle of The Perfume of the Lady in Black, there is a Square Tower, the oldest part of the castle, in which the Lady and her husband have their room, and Rouletabille made sure there was a one and only key for it, and that it was always kept safe. Despite these precautions there is an assault there in the night of Good Friday 1895.

There is too a key story in Leblanc's The Golden Triangle, important enough to see this key on a frontcover (as on Queen's above).
The book begins in the evening of Saturday 3, 1915, i.e. in the Easter night. Later, on 4/4 as it's past midnight, Captain Patrice Belval, the hero, is led in the dark by a strange rain of sparks through Paris, up to a private hostel in which he cannot enter as the main entrance is guarded, and there's a high wall all around it.
Patrice finds a postern in the wall. It's closed, but incredibly he has got the key with him, the key for this place he didn't know about a while ago...

There is a Queen, Double double (1950), of which 20 sections or chapters are as And on the Eighth Day... titled with dates, beginning with April 4, Tuesday (which in 1950 belonged to the Holy Week).
I guess it's not casual, as there are many 4 and letters D in this novel, which is the 4th investigation in Wrightsville. Quaternity shows its nose with the murderer's plan, killing a richman, poor man, a beggarman, a thief, in order to frighten Dr Dodd, a very superstitious man, and to make him write his last wills.
Synchronicity might be there too, as this Dr Dodd has a private room in his attic, and he keeps its key with him all the time, like the Teacher 6 years ago (or rather 14 years later considering the writing of the books).

Talking of square towers reminds me of The Player on the Other Side, where 4 cousins live in 4 tower-like houses at the four angles of a square, symbolizing a chessboard and the 4 rooks.

I have previously given several links to my friend Kurt Sercu's marvelous site dedicated to Ellery Queen, here is another entry to the writers' lifes.

4: quite sensible

In July 2008 I read a novel by Stona Fitch, Senseless (2001), that I found previous month in a secondhand bookshop. It was translated in French in 2002, but I missed it and missed too the paperback edition in 2004, although the title as well as the story should have looked attractive to me.
Eliott Gast, a middle-aged American economist, is abducted in Brussels by a shadowy anti-globalization group. He spends forty days in a white apartment, questioned and tortured by his captors, every moment broadcast on the Internet. The torture consists in chirurgically removing his five senses, one after the other, beginning with Taste, then Smell, Touch, Hearing and Sight.

A few months ago, in March, I became interested in Percy Kemp, a British author writing in French. His two first novels were about the loss of a sense, Smell in Musc (2000, 'Musk'), and Touch in Moore le Maure (2001, 'Moore the Moor').
It echoed to me as Gast is abducted because he is an agent of a shadow agency, ruled by a man named Alec Moore (Why don't you take Alec Moore in my stead?, asks Gast). About all what we know about previous Gast's life is that he has a wife, Maura.
Leslie Moore, main character of Moore le Maure, is too a secret agent, and someone who loses Touch, little by little, up to a complete loss as expressed in the last sentence of the novel:

Il était devenu, dans le sens premier du mot, un être insensé.

I would translate 'He had become, in the first sense of the word, a senseless being.', and I suppose any translator would not miss this last joke, quite equivalent in French, used too in Fitch's title, Senseless.
Alec Moore made me think too of a French crime novel, Abel Brigand by Jean-Marie Villemot (2001), which interested me much for its quaternity side. Its geometric aspect reminded me of Queen's The Player on the Other Side, where murders are committed at the four corners of a square; in each case a letter is involved, with a double meaning.
Abel Brigand is a Catholic priest investigating the disappearance of Alice. There are two suspects, Alice's uncles Alec Cooper and Alain Vogt, and important clues are given in letters written by Alice to her uncle, in which she fixes dates with him, in four places at the corners of a rectangle on a map.
The initials of the places give ALEC, while in each meeting only one sense is involved, with successive initials in French giving VOGT. At last neither Alec nor Vogt is the culprit, the letters being faked clues.

So I knew of three novels closely related to the five senses, one with an ALEC MOORE, one with an ALEC, and one with a MOORE, and the original books were published the same year, in October, December, and July 01.
I won't explore how striking is this coincidence as I only mentioned it  to explain how I met my third 'Book of the Week'.
So when it puzzled me in July 08 I suddenly thought I had somewhere among my books (several thousands) a collection of short stories about the five senses, and wondered when it was published. I was lucky enough to find it easily, and it was published in November 01!
Its title is just 5, and it was the result of a 2001 literary contest on 'five senses' theme: everybody could write a short, a jury chose 5 of them, to be published along with 5 shorts by known writers.
I cannot remember how exactly I got this book, it was probably given to me by one friend as I published several books with the same publisher (actually 5, 1 whole novel, and I was involved with shorts and articles in 4 other books, so that's another 4-1 pattern). This allowed me to know it was published in 2000 copies, with many unsold.

So I took another look at it, and was puzzled by the 4th short, Little green apples by Sébastien Fevry, elected by the jury. It's divided in eight sections, titled from Sunday, April 8 to Sunday, April 15, and this was the Holy Week in 2001.

It's cutely written, and not quite clear. Henri is the guardian of a private rubbish dump. From April 8 to April 11 he gets aware he hates the dump and its stinky smell. On April 12 he allows no more trucks to bring rubbish there. On next day he plants there 50 little appletrees, dreaming of their nice smell when they will grow. This same day, Good Friday, Henri's boss comes to tell him he's fired, and Henri kills him. On Sunday the police gives the assault...

With this text came the idea of the Book of the Week. Before that I knew of many books in which Easter dates appeared, on purpose or not, but if I thought of this pattern, only two books were involved.
The parallel is absolute with And on the Eighth Day..., in which 8 chapters are titled with the 8 days of the Holy Week 44, while no explicite allusion to Easter is given.
Yet Queen gave many implicite allusions, while Fevry's text is far from this, except maybe for the killing of the boss, said to be a bit like Henri's father, on Holy Friday, and it seems that Henri will die on Easter Sunday. The appletrees made me think of the Garden of Eden, and of the tree of Knowledge supposed to be an appletree. The Christian tradition sees a parallel between man's creation on Friday and the Crucifixion, Jesus' cross being thought to have been made with the wood of the Tree of Life.
I thought the number of appletrees, 50, was not there by chance, as it's a sacred number for Queen's Quenanites, clearly because Millar Burrows (or another book like The Dead Sea Scrolls) mentions 50 to have been a sacred number for Qumran's Essenians.

I contacted Fevry, who was 25 when he wrote this short story. He easily admitted he chose on purpose the dates of the Holy Week, and that he was thinking of the Garden of Eden, yet his title and the appletrees were inspired by a Tom Jones' song, created by Bobby Russel.
He did not think of Ellery Queen's novel, although he had read it years ago, and had not seen then that its dates followed the 1944 Holy Week.

There was a striking point in common between my three first Books of the Week. Fevry's short was written after the sense of Smell, and Leroux's title is The Perfume of the Lady in Black. Now the first sentence of And on the Eighth Day..., just after the title of the chapter, Sunday, April 2, is

There is a smell of burning sagebrush, but Ellery just smells it and doesn't know where it comes from...

Now I see a funny thing considering Queen's and Fevry's, that have so much in common. The concerned Easter years are 1944 and 2001, adding up to 3945, a number strongly echoing to WWII (39-45). As a direct consequence of my discovery of the exact pattern 4-1 in Jung's life, around 4/4/44, I found another exact pattern 4-1 in WWII duration, around 6/6/44, D-Day.

Another coincidence is quite personal. I happen to participate to literary contests, I did it 4 times up to now, and had 2 shorts published this way.
The first one was in 2001, in a contest where it was asked to write new adventures of Arsène Lupin.
I chose to write an unwritten adventure alluded to in The Sign of the Shadow (a short that is online here), where Lupin is said to have struggled against a Red Sultan in Armenia. As Leblanc's short is about a treasury which can only be discovered on an April 15, I imagined in my story another treasury which could only be found on a 4/15, but in the Islamic calendar. It can be read there, in French.
Then in the beginning of 2001 Fevry and I participated to writing contests, and we both wrote a story in which the important date was 4/15...

Actually 15th of April is an interesting date, as in the lunar Hebraic calendar Pessah always falls on 15th of Nissan, on the full moon.
As I told in my first approach, 1944 was a very special year, the first one in the Gregorian calendar repeating the exact conditions of 30, supposed to be the original Crucifixion year.
2001 is too a special year, not so unique as this happens about one time against ten: Jewish Pessah lasts eight days, as Christian Holy Week, and in 2001 these eight days were from April 8 to 15, in a perfect match with Christian Holy Week.

5: CH & BA

On Sep 8, 2008 I woke up with the strange idea that there was an exact pattern 4-1 in Jung's life around 4/4/44, then I could check it was true.
In the following days and weeks I discovered other patterns 4-1, some concerning French works, some not. On Sep 30 I was in Marseilles, where I found in a second-hand bookshop Les quatre coins de la nuit, by Craig Holden (2000, French translation of Four corners of night, 1999).
I read it on next days, and found it began on March 31, 1996, which is precised to be Palm Sunday (and I checked it was).

It looks like a free precision, but it awaked my attention. So on this Palm Sunday disappears a girl, Tamara, in an unnamed Midwestern city, and two cops investigate the case, Bank Arbaugh and his friend Mack Steiner, both without any religious belief.
Still looking like a contingent circumstance, it takes Bank just one week to find where is the girl, and in the night from Apr 6 to 7 Bank and Mack have to fight against a gang of dealers to free her. During this night of the Resurrection, Bank sacrifies his life to save Tamara and Mack.
After his death, there are just a few concluding paragraphs:

Well that was quite enough to make of Four Corners of Night my fourth Book of the Week, even if this Holy Week was fortuitous, but I don't think at all it was.
We learn through the book that Bank had a terrible fault to repair, and his sacrifice during this sacred night looks like a redemption.
This novel is very subtle, but I read another Craig Holden's some years earlier, The Last Sanctuary (1996), which was quite clearer. It begins in New Salem, N. Dakota, where we meet the hero, Joseph Curtis, who's got stigmatas from the first War in the Gulf, at times his feet bleed... He has to deal with a sect run by Father Amon. In the end the Father dies, and so seems to do Joe Curtis, but he comes back to life and takes the place of the Father to lead the sect.
Well it's a JC like Jesus Christ, and Curtis is much alike Christ or Cristus...

After Four corners I read three other Holden's, and found all his novels conceal a deep Catholic moral, as well as numerologic patterns in their structure, so The Last Sanctuary has 3 parts with 14 chapters in each one, The Jazz Bird 5 parts with 8 chapters in each one..
Four Corners of Night is in 4 parts, with 38 chapters in all. I thought the author's initials, C-H, had ranks 3-8 in the alphabet.
It's useful now to know one of my main obsessions is numeric patterns in JS Bach's works. I've more than 20 pages in French on my site about it, and at least one in English. One of this page is dedicated to the signature 21-38, seen as letters BA-CH. For example Bach's opus 1 is the Clavier Partitas, beginning with BWV 825, Partita in B (like Bach, in the German system where B is B flat in English system), in which the 2 first pieces are a Prelude and an Allemande counting 21 and 38 bars.
As I do not like the Menuet II in this partita, I wrote another one with in each part 21 notes for left hand and 38 for right one, and recorded it with a very cheap camera for YouTube:

Well I never learnt to play piano... This was just to explain how, after having found a book in 38 chapters by a CH, I wondered if I could find one in 21 chapters by a BA.
On Oct 10, 2008, I went to a public library and looked among the authors names in A the ones that had a forname in B. I'll forget here a few dead ends to come directly to Boris Akunin. Of course I knew his name, but I never felt like opening one of his books, as I don't like historical novels.
Yet there was some 8 Akunin's books on a shelf, and a good chance to find 21 chapters in one of them, so I looked at each book, beginning by the end to find last chapter's number.
No ending chapter 21, but last one of Special Assignments was:

I looked before and found the book was composed of two novellas, The Jack of Spades, and The Decorator, in which action is set in Moscow, during the 1889 Holy Week, in nine chapters giving all a reference to it, beginning with

If it started on Tuesday rather than Palm Sunday, I accepted it as my 5th Book of the Week.
I hardly believed it as when I found the 1996 Holy Week ruling Four Corners of Night I immediately thought a fifth Book of the Week would complete the prominent pattern 4-1 I met in Jung's life around 4/4/44, a Holy Week Tuesday. Yet I had only found 4 such books in 12 years, and the odds seemed against me to find another one soon, so on Oct 9 I put the question on a literary forum I belong to, mentioning the four books I already knew.
This had no result, but on next day 10/10 I found by myself Akunin's, because of Four Corners of Night, 10 days after I found it in Marseilles.

An amazing coincidence is that this frontcover of an English edition (2007) shows a Moscow nightscape with card symbols at the four corners. Actually the original Russian edition was published in 1999, as Four Corners of Night.

I was puzzled too to see this story beginning on a Tuesday 4/4, as the switch between Jung and Haemmerli happened on (Holy) Tuesday 4/4/44, but in this Russian book the dates are given in the Julian calendar, where Gregorian Holy Week from 4/14 to 4/21 becomes 4/2 to 4/9 (I checked the Holy Week was this year the same in Gregorian and Julian calendars).
I happened to know that Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, the eve of Easter, as I suspect this fact led Dannay to write his 63-64 novels, The Player on the Other Side, in which a godlike killer was born on April 20, 1924, and And on the Eighth Day..., in which an Essenian community worships Mein Kampf.
The Hitler trail might be considered too here, as The Decorator is about Jack the Ripper, committing another sequence of crimes in Moscow, and this irresponsible fool is killed in cold blood by Akunin's hero during Easter night, a few hours after Hitler's birth.
There is a common question: 'What would you do if you met Hitler when he was an innocent boy, knowing what he would do later?' Killing an innocent boy might avoid millions of dead... This is a classic Sci-Fi theme, and Akunin might have stretched it to an extreme, killing a newborn baby.

The clues to this might be quite subtle, and I will rather tell of another Akunin's, Leviathan (1998), in which most important events happen during the 1878 Holy Week, strangely from Palm Sunday to Good Friday, with two missing days as in The Decorator, but not the same ones.
As the adventure is aboard an ocean liner, the dates are given in the Gregorian calendar, and again strangely the Holy Week period was the same in 1878 and 1889, year of The Decorator. The story doesn't give any allusion to these special days.
Anyhow this cannot be a Book of the Week, as there are many days and chapters of suspicions before the main events.
So on April 14 (Palm Sunday) there is a murder on board.
On April 16 it's the turn of the captain, Joshua Cliff. Note the initials of this only master after God, JC, and Joshua is Hebrew name Jesus.
On April 19 (Good Friday) the owner of a treasure secret changes brutally two times:
- The Chief Officer Charles Reynier is killed by French inspector Gustave Gauche;
- Gustave Gauche is killed by a young woman, Marie Sanfon;
- Then Marie is badly hurt, yet she survives and Erast Fandorin predicts this twice criminal will easily fool the jury; he will not leave that opportunity to Jack the Ripper 11 years later.
I notice the synchronistic fornames of the two victims, Charles Gustave, as Carl Gustav, and the surviving lady is young, Jung...

This leads me to a last exploration in Queen's work. As told before Dannay felt in 1963 free to publish the mystical plots he couldn't write with his cousin Lee. He first wrote The Player on the Other Side, and And on the Eighth Day..., with in both of them the Passion concerned, then from 65 to 71 were published four seemingly more traditional crimebooks, with 'crime of passion' as main theme...
Kurt Sercu and Dale Andrews translated a bit of my comments on these 4 books here, but now comes something new about a last plot Dannay had written and did not publish. Lee died on Apr 3, 1971, and Dannay didn't want to break the legend that Lee and himself were the only 'Ellery Queen'.
Yet the full synopsis written by Dannay was published in 1999 (same year as Four Corners and The Decorator). Dannay imagined five acts for this Tragedy of Errors, and each act ends with a new truth, a new culprit for the murder of actress Morna Richmond on Apr 23, 1967.
In ACT FOUR Ellery gives a long and perfect reasonment to conclude that the only possible culprit should be Theodore Curtis, Morna's lawyer.
That was another error, and ACT FIVE shows the real culprit is Dr Rago, Morna's psy.
I recall that the switch of 4/4/44 is between Dr Theodor Haemmerli and famous psy Carl Jung. In a certain way Theodor sacrified his life to save the old psy (68 years) and give him another 17 years to live.
68-17 is a pattern 4-1, and we have too a pattern 4-1 between the 4 published books and the unpublished one, as well as in the five acts, 4 errors and 1 truth.
Still only from a synchronistic point of view of course, it's fascinating to have acts 4 & 5 of this tragedy deciding between a Theodore and a psy. After seeing Joe Curtis and Joshua Cliff in Holden's and Akunin's, one could wonder in front of Theodore Curtis. It has to be thought that Greek Theodoros means 'gift of God', which is too the meaning of Hebrew names Nathan and Nathaniel. In The Player on the Other Side, the murderer identifies himself with a Nathaniel, born on April 20, 1924, Easter Sunday. Dannay's birth name was Daniel Nathan, and that was Theodore Sturgeon, the famous Sci-Fi author, who transformed the complete script written by Dannay into a novel.

B.Akunin made me curious of Easter dates in the Julian calendar, and the Russian Holy Weak 1967 was from April 10 to 17, in Gregorian calendar from April 23 to 30.
So Morna Richmond was killed on Russian Palm Sunday. This might look meaningless, until thinking Russian Easter was on April 30, 22th anniversary of the suicide of Adolf Hitler, in Berlin invaded by the Russian troops.