European Reading Challenge #7

 I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia - Orlando Figes

This monumental study of Stalin’s Russia is more than a chronicle of the Soviet era; it is a social history of the entire twentieth century in Russia. Orlando Figes reconstructs decades of deprivation, hunger, fear, and state terror through archival documents and the voices of ordinary people. His narrative captures how politics and economics penetrated private life, shaping families and identities under relentless pressure.

The book’s title refers to those who learned to “whisper” in order to survive - a metaphor for lives lived in secrecy and fear. Figes animates these lives with vivid detail, showing how repression seeped into kitchens, bedrooms, and even thoughts. Communal apartments, for example, were not merely a solution to housing shortages but instruments of surveillance. In shared kitchens, “even the tea kettles have ears.” A careless joke could lead to denunciation, interrogation, torture, and exile to the Gulag - or worse. Under such conditions, silence became a survival strategy, and public declarations of loyalty masked private despair.

My own understanding of these stories is sharpened by time spent in Riga in the early 1990s, where I met survivors of deportation and exile. They spoke of friends thrown from trains into the Siberian wilderness; of years spent forgetting their native tongue; of relatives killed in ways too brutal to repeat. These encounters echo Figes’s portraits of resilience and resignation.

One of the book’s most unsettling themes is complicity. Terror made nearly every citizen feel like both victim and accomplice. Denunciation could eliminate a rival or secure a coveted apartment. Ideological zeal - fueled by class hatred and fear - turned neighbors into informants. Yet, paradoxically, many victims continued to venerate Stalin, writing poems of devotion even after losing loved ones to his bloody regime. Figes probes this contradiction but admits its mystery: why do people cling to the author of their suffering? One survivor offers a grim rationale: “We would have fought the same way anyway… because it’s easier to tolerate violence from our own people than from foreigners.”

The book’s first half - covering collectivization, the liquidation of kulaks, and the Great Terror - feels deeper and more cohesive than the postwar chapters. Still, Figes’s attempt to frame the war as a dividing line is compelling. Postwar society, he argues, remembered not the suffering but the unity forged against Hitler, even as repression persisted in subtler forms.

The final chapters examine reactions to Stalin’s death: hope tempered by dread, as no one knew what would follow. Survivors had adapted to fear so thoroughly that its absence was disorienting. This is perhaps the book’s most chilling insight - that human beings can grow accustomed to any cruelty. State terror, given time, becomes ordinary.

The Whisperers is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Russian society and the psychology of survival under totalitarianism. Its absence in Russian translation - and Figes’s status as an “un-person” there - speaks volumes about its power. Like his earlier Natasha’s Dance, this work combines scholarly rigor with narrative grace, but here the tone is darker, the questions more haunting. How does a society endure decades of violence and still whisper words of love to its oppressor? Figes does not offer easy answers.

Perry Mason 157: Cool & Lam and Connoisseurs

Note: As a child of the Sixties, I’ve always believed that what’s neglected or off the beaten path is cool. If something becomes wildly popular, I suspect it must have lost some of its edge - though I admit there are exceptions, like The Name of the Rose, a work of philosophy that somehow managed to be a best-selling novel.

Cool & Lam and Us Connoisseurs

Erle Stanley Gardner’s Cool and Lam books? They’re the B-side of his career, the deep cut we hardcore readers brag about knowing while everyone else hums the Perry Mason theme. Mason was Gardner’s platinum-selling run of singles: courtroom pyrotechnics, nice clothes, and a TV franchise that ran longer than many marriages. Radio, comic strips, articles in TV Guide - Mason was the brand, the icon, the guy who made courtroom pyrotechnics look like a well-tailored suit. America ate it up because America loves a hero who wins on logic and showbiz and never sweats saving the innocent from The Combine.

Cool and Lam? Forget it. No TV blitz, no radio soap, no Hollywood movies however bad. Just two oddballs in print: Bertha Cool, a bulldozer dripping in diamonds, and Donald Lam, a bantamweight disbarred lawyer who solves cases by seeing the legalities sideways. Try dumping that into mid-century American living rooms on Sunday night versus Bonanza. In the late Fifties and early Sixties America wanted its morality without nuance and its courtroom drama reassuring. Cool and Lam were built for laughs, for folks who grokked Catch-22 and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Cool and Lam lived where ethics fray and human folly struts buck naked. That’s not prime-time material; that’s cult territory.

Branding killed them, too. Mason was marketed as the lawyer-detective supreme, a beacon of brilliance and virtue. Cool and Lam? They were the cool older cousins who unexpectedly show up at the family Christmas party and show signs of having an anarchic sense of humor fueled by psychedelics. Publishers and studios pumped Mason like he was the cure for polio, leaving Cool and Lam to hustle on their own dime. Result: Mason becomes a household deity; Cool and Lam roam the shadows.

And yet - here’s the kicker - the cognoscenti know better. We dig Cool and Lam because they punk the hard-boiled formula. Lam’s wiry intellect jousts with Cool’s blunt-force pragmatism. These books don’t have a narrative arc like Mason novels; they riff on ambiguity, nothing stays still for long. Writer Scott Bradfield brilliantly nails it:

Mason bends the law (within limits that the law allows), but he doesn’t break it. Cool and Lam, on the other hand, treat the law with almost brutal disregard: they lie to the cops and their clients and disturb crime scenes by removing (sometimes destroying) significant evidence and planting fake evidence and alibis. They seem to assume that the law  -  like the many grifters and con games they encounter, from salted gold mines to rigged slot machines, automobile insurance fraudsters, and insider trading - is just a game. And that whatever laws they don’t break were probably broken to begin with.

Families implode, business ethics wobble, and Gardner implies "A free mind, my friend, doesn’t get tangled up in nonsense not in its power. Be the Lam: see clearly, act kindly, and don’t let prejudice or anger drive the bus. Pack four virtues in your pocket and don a calm expression that says, ‘I’ve seen worse.’" If Mason is unpredictable but trustworthy Brubeck, Cool and Lam are bebop - fast, crooked, and sly while being kinda dumb. 

Bottom line: if you crave complexity, irony, and a worldview that doesn’t come shrink-wrapped in excellence, Cool and Lam are your jam. Mason may own the marquee, but Cool and Lam own the underground. And that’s where the real music plays, for we happy few anyway.

Perry Mason 156: TCOT Postponed Murder

Note: The manuscripts for two full-length Perry Mason novels were discovered in Erle Stanley Gardner's papers after his death in 1970:  The Case of the Fenced-In Woman and the story reviewed below. It’s hard to date when he wrote this, since Gardner carefully avoided topical references, but he does mention a yacht auto-pilot system which was probably available to the filthy rich after WWII, in the 1950s.

Perryisms to Live by: When I start unraveling a mystery, I can’t seem to find a brake. Every time I put my foot down, it hits the throttle.

The Case of the Postponed Murder – Erle Stanley Gardner

Mae Farr walks into Perry Mason’s office with a story as thin as a dime. She says she’s her sister, a candy-shop girl in a Northern California burg. Mason knows she’s fibbing. But she’s in a jam, and Mason likes jams - especially when they come with good eggs who’ve made bad choices. Her plea? Stop Penn Wentworth, a wealthy playboy with a yacht and a hobby of stalking “her sister” (herself).

Paul Drake, Mason’s gumshoe, digs up the dirt: Mae’s wanted for forging a fat check. The check bore Penn’s signature. Penn, a bookie with champagne tastes, throws parties on his yacht. Did Mae forge his name - or did someone forge hers? Mason files that under “Things to Ponder.”

Penn barges in, full of indignation and cologne, claiming Mae forged his name. Enter Harold Anders, a rancher with muck on his boots and love in his heart, ready to shake Penn’s tree for pestering Mae.

Soon Mason is summoned to Della Street’s apartment, where Mae and Harold are holed up. Mae spins a yarn: aboard Penn’s yacht, she fought off his advances when - blam! - Penn was shot through the skylight. Harold, conveniently on the dock with a gun, slipped and took a swim. Mason ferries Mae back to the yacht, only to find it missing.

Harold tossed his gun near a hot-dog stand in the rain. Mason and Della hunt for it, fail. The police hunt for it, fail harder. Meanwhile, the yacht resurfaces, cruising on auto-pilot. Penn, once in his underwear, now fully dressed and very dead, sports a bullet hole and a fatal case of inter-cranial bleeding. How did he get there? Add his soon-to-be ex-wife Juanita -temperamental as a teapot - and her rich beau Sid Eversel, a pilot with a camera and a country mansion. Stir well.

The legal fireworks? A preliminary hearing before Justice Scanlon, a Justice of the Peace who never finished high school and thinks “due process” is a plumbing term. He hates long cross-examinations and technical twaddle. The case doesn’t hit a courtroom until the last ten pages, where Scanlon steals the show with his homespun rulings. Watching Mason steer him without Scanlon noticing is like watching a cat teach a dog to climb trees. Scanlon may be the most colorful judge Gardner ever minted.

Now, about Gardner: his descriptions are perfunctory, his character sketches thinner than a weasel. Nearly every word outside quotation marks could vanish without harm. Editing? It’s unknown if Gardner did his usual final checking and polishing on this late manuscript. But I doubt it. “Swell” pops up like dandelions and so does the antique Americanism “It suits me down to the ground.” Chapter breaks are as awkward as a drunk at a wedding: 40-page Chapter 11 and Chapter 12 with its weird break should’ve been sliced into four chapters. And strong-minded Mae’s sudden lifestyle switch at the end? Explained by the traditional notion that women are prone to change their minds for purely emotional reasons. Quaint, if you like your gender stereotypes smelling of trunks stored under basement steps.

Yet - yet! – Gardner’s novels race like a greyhound at Derby Lane: breakneck plots, courtroom pyrotechnics, two women that want to do it their way, dialogue that jabs and feints like prizefighters. Gardner’s magic lies not in polish but in pace. And that, dear reader, is swell.

Perry Mason 155: You Can Die Laughing

Note: We fans read Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason novels for his intricate plots and his magic at moving a story along. In contrast, we read the Cool and Lam novels for the energetic and engaging characters of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. This outing, the 17^th in a body of work that can be read in any order, was released in 1957.

You Can Die Laughing – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

The PI team of Cool & Lam do their tango in this not quite hard-boiled kaleidoscope of L.A. Though the city does not quite become a character like Ross Macdonald’s Southern California, happily, all the usual elements are shoved back onstage wearing a louder neckties and sillier shoes: redheads that glow like neon beer signs, clients with the moral steadiness of politicians, property beefs, and the old standby, fear of scandal. But in this one, which feels more tightly packed than usual, the story is not so convoluted and the pace seems faster.

The book kicks off with Texan Lawton C. Corning: a raw‑boned pomade‑scented mogul with manure boots, latent motives, and a story that shifts faster than jukebox 45’s. He wants a woman found. Definitely no oil leases involved - pay no attention to that desolate parcel I want to buy. Lam buys none of it but takes the case anyway because the Cool & Lam business model is 1) get lied to, 2) get confused, 3) get in dutch with the cops, 4) get to the bottom of things, 5) get paid.

They find the woman before you can say “wait, what,” and she’s a comic‑strip bombshell straight from a teenage boy’s dingy backroom of a subconscious: red hair, blue eyes, a figure like Daisy Mae in Dogpatch. She speaks exclusively in Babe-speak. Suddenly her husband wants to sue Cool & Lam for defamation, the nosy neighbor forgets everything she claimed, and Lam smells something rotten.

Bertha Cool, owner-operator of a PI agency is not a feminist by ideology, politics, or inclination. She's not advocating equality and she’s certainly not mentoring other women. She’s too busy bulldozing through everyone - men, women, clients, cops, and her partner poor Donald Lam.

Bertha's temper visibly began to rise. "There are times when I could take this paper knife and cut your throat from ear to ear, Donald Lam! What the hell do you mean you rented her?"

One‑hundred‑sixty‑five pounds of managerial black hole, attracting trouble of all kinds inexorably toward her office. She’s insulted professionally and cosmically when clients assume B. Cool is a man, and she gets back by being tougher than any three Texan lunkheads. Meanwhile little Donald Lam, bantam sleuth and disbarred lawyer, skates on the edge of legality like a kid doing figure‑eights on late March ice. A real “brainy little bastard” - Bertha’s words - who irritates her into doing the right thing.

Granted this outing feels a little lightweight and more straightforward than we like, almost like an extended short story, but it is well worth reading for the interplay not only between Bertha and Donald but Donald and persons of interest.

Matinee Musings: The Devil's Holiday

Note: A good date movie if your sweetie has a demonstrated liking for Depression‑era morality plays.* It’s short, talky, and sincere. Nancy Carroll’s charm sparks conversation, and debating mercy and forgiveness afterward beats potentially explosive topics like who gets the dog if you break up.  “Do you think redemption should come from love, honesty … or just admitting everything before Act Three?”

The Devil's Holiday
1930 / 1:18
Tagline: “A fast and furious modern merry-go-round of falsehood and frame-ups romance and realism”
[youtube]

Directed by Edmund Goulding, this Pre-Code curio begins like yet another cynical take on The Way We Live Now circa the slough of the Depression. Nancy Carroll’s Hallie Hobart is a professional “nice girl,” a city-wise operator who parades as a respectable manicurist while at night sweet-talking prospects into the arms of salesmen hawking high-priced goods and services. She takes her tidy three percent, thank you, for social engineering with a smile. Under the gimlet eye of Ned Sparks’ middle-man Charlie - every line a staccato calculation - Hallie meets Phillips Holmes’ David Stone, a hayseed innocent with a backbone stiffened by a sanctimonious papa (Hobart Bosworth, who outdoes Raymond Massey in East of Eden for granite-faced and unyielding, yet vulnerable).

Carroll is the picture - full stop. There’s wit in her eyes and fatigue behind it, a practiced brightness giving way to something close to conscience. It’s that flicker - call it soul, call it wise mind - that keeps Hallie from becoming just another fast-talking moll in a coarse-talking picture. Holmes is earnest and serviceable, with Carroll in the first of three pairings (Stolen Heaven, Broken Lullaby). Bosworth brings the heavy furniture of morality - the kind that includes being tolerant but not too. And terrific Sparks, of course, clicks and clacks with stone-hearted efficiency, a business shark whose pulse can be read on the Dow.

What Goulding serves up, beneath the fancy duds and eternal hustling, is a moral melodrama that refuses to be priggish even as it inches toward repentance. Sin here isn’t a single slip; corner cutting becomes a habit. Hallie’s mistake isn’t merely the masquerade of manicurist for escort - it’s the gradual giving up of her own Iowa standards and how imperceptibly she’s learned to keep feeling and thinking severely apart. The film’s shrewder than its plot suggests. The movie understands that normalization of deviance - a.k.a. losing your ethical way - rarely arrives all at once; it creeps in through small compromises, each one nudging the next, until a single, grotesque transgression begins to look reasonable. Like love, self-deception and destructive habits have a way of stealing up on you.

Redemption, when it arrives, is coaxed out - painfully - through recognition of guilt. Hallie, ashamed, realizes she can’t leave David. But Goulding doesn’t kid us movie-goers. Reconciliation is messy, shame is paralyzing. The film gets across that atonement isn’t a solo act, it happens in a web of human connections - someone else has to listen, with an open heart, and forgive. 

So, it is worth seeing even though the wonderful ZaSu Pitts is only in the opening scene, playing her usual switchboard operator. Black actor Oscar Smith plays a bellhop in a brief scene but he is given no lines so his dysfluency isn’t used for outdated comic relief. The movie is worth seeing for Nancy Carrol’s Oscar-nominated performance, a quiet triumph. She lost the Best Actress award to Norma Shearer, who was phenomenal in The Divorcee.

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* What do you mean this population numbers about a dozen movie-goers? Picture me looking as dumb-founded as Philip Seymour Hoffman in Twister when hysterical Jamie Gertz was castigating the storm chasers, “You people are all crazy!”

Perry Mason 154: Happy Birthday Erle Stanley Gardner

Erle Stanley Gardner, July 17, 1889 – March 11, 1970

Let’s not pretend Erle Stanley Gardner was a stylist. He wasn’t, and - God bless him - he knew it. Gardner said the trick was to keep writing and learn from the lumps you take from the critics. That’s not artful, but it’s honest, and honesty is a fair beginning for a man who made his living by putting fictional clients in dutch with the law and getting them off.

Gardner is kin to the popular mystery writers who sell by the carload. He shares their thrift with words. His vocabulary sometimes looks like a pantry half-stocked: two trusty adverbs - “abruptly” and “evidently” - like salt and pepper, forever at hand. Faces turn into “masks,” eyes “twinkle” on cue, and the prose keeps time about as well as a drummer with mittens. If you’re waiting for rhythm or atmosphere, you’ll miss your train. Gardner isn’t painting Hawaiian moonlight like Biggers; he’s pouring clues and stuff like “law of agency,” one after another, and trusting hardcore readers will keep up.

Characterization? He pares it to the rind. Folks in these books are not so much people as types with mannerisms. Perry Mason, thinking hard, jams his thumbs into the armholes of his vest and paces. Paul Drake, taking ease, slings both legs over the chair arm like a man born in a furniture warehouse. And Los Angeles - though it’s nearly always the scene - is more Zoom background than character. It doesn’t sweat, menace, or sing the way Simenon’s Paris does, or push the plot like Ross Macdonald’s Southern California. It’s a set with a fine supply of doors for suspects to enter and exit.

The books have grown quaint, which is a polite way to say they creak. A modern reader bumps into the museum pieces: cuspidors, carbon paper, hat boxes, gladstone bags, and a hunt for telephones that would make a millennial wonder. The idioms (as right as a rivet) smell of attic trunks; the jobs and fashions arrive with a grin and a question mark. You can laugh; Gardner will not be offended. He didn’t come to win the Pulitzer. He came to keep the plot moving.

Even the names have dust on them. In The Case of the Daring Decoy the roll call sounds like a high-toned tea: Gifford, Rosalind, Mildred, Evangeline, Norton, Ruth. Call me a lumbering oaf of the old school, but I find it easier to make a Phyllis an aunt than a siren.

Why read Gardner, then? Because the man built something solid where it matters. Perry Mason is a lunch‑pail champion in a sharp suit. He is the lawyer as fighter, not functionary. He doesn’t let the chips fall; he kicks them back onto the table and argues the dealer into a new shuffle. Judges, district attorneys, cops - good, bad, and indifferent - stand between the client and daylight, and Mason shouldered through on behalf of folks without friends in high places. He’s a private man pitched against public machinery, and he keeps his elbows out.

There’s a nostalgia in it, and not only for hat closets. When I was little kid in the Sixties, Americans had a talent for Hell, No. They argued, they balked, they took a dim view of orders barked by any overbearing blowhard in a uniform. The fashion now is for agreeable virtues - tolerant, sensitive, flexible, mindful - which often read, in office life, as polite ways to be steamrolled by The Combine. Mason is tonic against that. He reminds you that somebody can still put up a fight without being all resilient about it.

Make no mistake: Gardner’s world is not polite society with the silver laid. But while the blackmail and murder are grimy and the motives are sharp - greed, jealousy, desire - the tone generally refuses the abyss. There’s less sadism than sweat. If the rooms reek with cigarette smoke, the moral air is still breathable. Gardner worked a long time in the real world - law offices, boxing gyms, vacationed in auto camps to keep in touch with the folks - and he knew how mines and banks operate. That knowledge gives the stories their ballast. The world is tough as taxes and, in some corners, gone to seed.

Where Gardner shines is the old practical magic: plotting. He hustles. He stacks incidents like plates in a diner rush, and somehow gets them all to the right table in time for the courtroom fireworks. If you’re after escape, he’s company to keep. Say what you will about Kipling, Maugham, Simenon, Ian Fleming - these are the writers you blushingly confess to enjoying, writing what Orwell called “good bad books.”

As to the grand judgment, Raymond Chandler, in his letters, tipped his hat to Gardner’s knack for building a case you had to turn the pages to resolve.

That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea. ... It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball. That is to me what you have more than anything else and more than anyone else. ... Every page throws the hook for the next. I call this a kind of genius.

 

The Ides of Robert Florey: Meet Boston Blackie

Note: Chester Morris said the character Boston Blackie wrecked his career but it was also a comeback vehicle for him. Possessing an effortless urbanity, a sly wit, and the sort of raffish charm that no studio publicity department could manufacture, Morris transformed a dependable series of B-picture programmers into something far more enduring. His Blackie moved through the criminal underworld with the confidence of a man who knew all its angles, yet retained the likability that kept audiences firmly in his corner. 

Meet Boston Blackie
1941 / 1:00
Tagline: “SPIES STALK CONEY ISLAND!”
[internet archive]

Boston Blackie is one of those distinctly American creations who could only flourish in the movies: a gentleman crook who violates the law with enthusiasm while remaining, somehow, more trustworthy than many of the men charged with enforcing it. Safecracker, magician, improvisational escape artist, and amateur criminologist, Blackie occupies that narrow strip of moral real estate between outlaw and civic benefactor. He steals when necessary, lies when convenient, and yet remains possessed of a code that makes him more honorable than the respectable citizens forever trying to pin something on him.

Like all great pulp heroes, he survives less by brute force than by velocity of thought. Problems arise, policemen bluster, villains scheme, and Blackie simply moves faster than everyone else. He treats danger as an irritating interruption and authority as a puzzle to be solved. One gets the sense that if locked in a bank vault, handcuffed to a radiator, and guarded by a platoon of armed men, he would emerge ten minutes later carrying the guard captain's wallet and offering instructions on improving workplace efficiency.

Director Robert Florey, that French stylist who brought visual sophistication to even the most modest productions, attacks the material with energy bordering on mischief. The camera rarely sits still when it can climb, lean, peek, or swoop instead. It observes the action from improbable angles, transforming ordinary fairground attractions into looming structures of menace. The midway becomes a maze. The carnival rides become mechanical monsters. Even a simple walkway seems laden with threat when filtered through Florey's restless imagination.

The amusement park itself emerges as the film's true star. By daylight these places promise cotton candy, first romances, and indigestion from regrettable food choices. By night they become dreamscapes of blinking lights and distorted shadows. The Tunnel of Love, ordinarily the setting for awkward courtship, is repurposed into a stage for pursuit and violence. Murder lurks behind painted scenery. Romance and danger occupy neighboring compartments in the same little boat.

Naturally there are chases, because a crime picture without a chase is rather like a circus without elephants. Massive automobiles thunder across the screen with the invulnerability enjoyed only by vehicles in 1940s motion pictures. Fire hydrants explode into geysers. Tires squeal. Nobody ever seems concerned about insurance claims. The laws of physics are suspended in favor of spectacle, and the audience is all the happier for it.

The police fare less well. They are not corrupt so much as chronically exasperated. Their threats are colorful, their patience limited, and their investigative methods frequently eclipsed by Blackie's intuition. Once again the hero finds himself trapped in that familiar predicament of knowing more than the authorities while simultaneously being suspected by them. It is a formula as old as the series itself, but like a favorite tune, its familiarity is part of the pleasure.

Comic relief arrives in the form of The Runt, who functions somewhere between valet, sidekick, accomplice, and mobile source of confusion. Mercifully, the humor supports rather than derails the narrative. No one behaves like a refugee from a different movie. The jokes emerge naturally from character and situation, allowing the suspense to remain intact.

What ultimately makes the picture work is its breezy faith in intelligence, adaptability, and personal freedom. Blackie wins not because he possesses official authority but because he possesses ingenuity. In a world crowded with crooks, bureaucrats, and blunderers, he survives through wit, nerve, and optimism. The result is an entertaining little thriller that moves briskly, looks splendid, and offers a reminder that sometimes the fox is more admirable than either the hounds pursuing him or the wolves he is hunting.