The American West

The American West: A Twentieth-century History - Michael P. Malone and Richard W. Etulain  

The thesis is that WWII was a pivotal event in the history of the 20th century West. Before the war, the West relied on the extractive industries (agriculture, mining, petroleum) and lived as a colony of the East. After the war, however, the West came to depend on a military economy based on defense installations and federal contracts.  The book also considers environmental problems, the importance of minority groups, and the role of culture and reclamation projects. The book also discusses the growth of the Republican Party and the move to the right in Western politics since WWII, which is especially interesting in this election year.  The West started many trends for the rest of the nation (car culture, suburbs, hi-tech industries etc.). Finally, this book, written for university students, is easy to read, with smooth phrasing.

Passchendaele

Passchendaele – Philip Warner

Between July and November 1917, in the small Belgian village of Passchendaele, about half a million German, French, British, and Commonwealth troops became casualties in what many a veteran recalled ever after as a  “bloody mud heap.” Such were the awful weather and ground conditions, when General Haig’s Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Sir Lancelot Kiggell, visited near the end of the campaign.  he reportedly broke down and said: "Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?"

General Haig expected to recover and occupy Passchendaele in two days and then advance in order to drive the Germans behind the Rhine in a Big Push to end the war. The author examines the factors that influenced the upsetting of these plans: the uncooperative weather, the mutinous state of the French army, and the bombardment which destroyed the drainage system of the area and turned it into a morass.

Warner skillfully blends information about strategies and tactics and personal accounts for readers who prefer one over the other. He also goes over the cold relationship between General Haig and PM Lloyd George and how it influenced the grueling course of the battle.

A Connoisseur’s Case

A Connoisseur’s Case - Michael Innes

This 1962 mystery is known as The Crabtree Case in the US. It is a late novel with series hero Sir John Appleby in his retirement. It begins with the Applebys taking a summer country walk and to Sir John’s chagrin, Judith wants to barge in on Scroop House, to look over the valuable antique furniture of a stately mansion.

Crossing an old canal and ending up at a pub run by on an obnoxious poser, they fall into conversation with Seth Crabtree, a stage rustic who seems to have walked out of Hardy’s The Woodlanders. As the former cabinet maker for mansion, he tells them of the glory days of Scoop House and its owner Mrs Coulson, a grand collector of objets d’art and antiques. Shortly after, the Applebys find Crabtree floating in the canal, shot dead. Though not as dramatic as the earlier novels, this still features tight, witty writing.

Judith looked south—which was towards what Appleby had called the secondary motor road. All she saw was a momentary glint of light.

‘I think,’ she said, `that I saw the sun reflected from the wind screen of a passing car. Right?’

‘Right as far as you go. What you saw was a silver-grey Rolls-Royce Phantom V.’

‘My dear John, it’s terribly vulgar to name cars—particularly astoundingly expensive ones. It’s only done by cheap novelists. You must just say: a very large car.’

Appleby received this with hilarity.

Take that Ian Fleming, you brand name-dropper you. If you find this kind of thing as hilarious as Sir John and I do, you should read Michael Innes.

Other Reviews of Michael Innes’ Mysteries

Lament for a Maker (1938)

Appleby on Ararat (1941)

From London Far a.k.a. The Unsuspected Chasm (1946)

One Man Show (1952)

Silence Observed (1961)

A Connoisseur’s Case (1962)

Money from Holme (1964)

A Change of Heir (1966)

Death by Water aka Appleby at Allington (1968)

Death at the Chase (1970)

Appleby’s Answer (1973)

The Mysterious Commission (1974)

The Ampersand Papers (1978)

Lord Mullion’s Secret (1981)

Sheiks and Adders (1982)

The Ides of Perry Mason 8

The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the hell of it.

The Case of the Screaming Woman - Erle Stanley Gardner

Super-lawyer Perry Mason usually avoids disputes between spouses. But in this 1957 mystery he acquires a client because the client’s wife – probably due to bitter experience - doesn't believe for a minute her husband's tale. He says he just wanted to help a stranded woman in the middle of the night and dropping her off at the Beauty Rest Motel. Well, dear,  registering as husband and wife seemed like a good idea at the time. The unamused wife asks Perry Mason to cross-examine the confident hubby in order to prove his tale is full of holes.

The husband is a sales manager and trainer who has excessive confidence in his ability to overcome sales resistance and make people relish anything he wants them to swallow. During the interrogation, Mason finds the client is so up to his keister in suspicious circumstances that his lame story won’t wash.

Soon enough the relentless tentacles of the police tighten around the sales guy. Mason too finds himself in legal quicksand. Though he protests legal mires and more challenging and interesting, even his loyal confidential secretary Della Street wonders aloud if he can avoid being disbarred this time.

Follow Mason as he blazes a trail to uncover black market adoptions, narcotics abuse and blackmail until he plays one last gambit in the climactic court-room scene. 

Fragment of Fear

Fragment of Fear - John Bingham

Mystery writer James Compton vacations in Italy in order to follow his doctor’s orders to rest after an auto accident. At Pompeii, the strangulation death of an elderly Englishwoman, Lucy Dawson, draws his attention as a subject for an article or story. During the course of his researches, he receives telephone calls in which a cultured voice urbanely warns him off. When Compton persists in his amateur sleuthing, the threats become more overt and frightening. Like Ruth Rendall writing as Barbara Vine, Bingham creates an atmosphere of menace that slowly but surely becomes suffocating.

In contrast to the plucky amateurs in Eric Ambler or Andrew Garve’s novels, Compton is no match for the villains that want to stop his poking his proboscis into matters that don’t concern him. Bingham liked a little too much to explain behavior with so-called “national characteristics” so he has Compton, who tells the story in first-person, explain his stubbornness with “Irish bloody-mindedness and combativeness.” The irony, too, is that though Compton is a mystery writer, he can handle neither the bad guys nor the cops, who attribute his paranoia to the trauma of the car accident.

Like William Haggard’s gladiatorial arenas of board rooms, swanky clubs, and bureaus of espionage, Bingham’s world – that is, the Hobbesian state of nature -- is fraught with danger. Bingham’s day job was, after, in counter-intelligence, where they are paid to anticipate the worst case threats to the realm. 

Near the end Bingham has Compton reflect, “the peasant is surrounded by more than he imagines. Behind the eyes which observe him are yet others, which observe those eyes in their turn, and behind the predators slithering in the undergrowth are yet others, stalking the predators …. We live in dangerous times. All one can do is to keep the spear ready…touch the amulet, and hope for the best, and trust that, as in my case, the tribe can after all protect not only the tribe but the individual.”

The Graves of Academe

The Graves of Academe – Richard Mitchell

Richard Mitchell (1929 - 2002) was an English and classics prof at Glassboro State College, now Rowan University. He was well-known in the early days of zines as The Underground Grammarian, who scolded the users of unclear English. A publisher persuaded him to collect the best articles for a book. While contemplating which pieces to include, he realized that many examples of illogical English and “mendacious gobbledygook” were from administrators, professor-advisors, and graduates of teachers' colleges.

The resulting book is an attack on American schools of education. His thesis was that the teacher training institutions were so focused on faddish educational theories and “student outcomes” such as “the fulfillment of human potentialities” that they didn’t care if its graduates could read or write or cipher much less show a mastery of their “subject areas” of arithmetic or physics or what we now call "language arts."

Mitchell argues that “As long as we remain a constitutional republic, we cannot ever be both educated and unfree,”  assuming that “educated” means knowledgeable and thoughtful enough to apply the “informed discretion” of Thomas Jefferson. These days not only do our state and federal governments “reflect the ignorance and unreason of the popular will” but we may not even be able to defend ourselves. This from a Thomas Ricks piece, “I'm talking about contractors, some of whom were literally paid ten-fold the salary of my junior Marines, who were incapable of performing basic tasks and functionally illiterate.”

Mitchell writes with skeptical wit, dash, and scorn for the educationists who are quick to call themselves "professionals." Though this book was published in 1981 – I was a kinda sorta a grad student then – it still has relevant things to say as American education deals with violence, religion, and technology in the classroom, to name just a few.

Travels in Arabia Deserta

Travels in Arabia Deserta – Charles Montague Doughty

I read the 1908 abridgment by Edward Garnett, the leading editor of the time. I confess I was not up to 1200 pages of the original travel classic. Because of language like this:

The desert day returning from the east, warns the Beduin awake, who rises to his prayers; or it may be, unwitting of the form, he will but murmur toward heaven the supplication of his fearful human nature and say, "Ah Lord my God!" and, "Oh that this day may be fortunate; give Thou that we see not the evil!" Of daily food they have not half enough, and if any head of the cattle be taken! - how may his household yet live? Bye and bye the herdsman is ready and his beasts are driven far from his sight. No sweet chittering of birds greets the coming of the desert life, besides man there is no voice in this waste drought. The Beduins, that lay down in their cloaks upon the sandy mother-earth in the open tents, hardly before the middle night, are already up and bestirring themselves. In every coffee-sheykh's tent there is new fire blown in the hearth, and he sets on his coffee pots, then snatching a coal in his fingers he will lay it in his tobacco pipe.

Before I down-shifted, reading much more deliberately than usual, I found the mannered and sophisticated language nearly incomprehensible. It took me about 70 or 90 pages to navigate language that would-be publishers called “hardly intelligible,” “too long and obscure,” and “must be put into shape by some competent man.” After it was published, baffled critics damned it as “unreadable.”

Okay, here’s background to one of the strangest books in our native language. In 1876, at the age of 33, Doughty began his travels in Arabia. For two years, he wandered the northwest desert, always being candid that he was a Christian.  The refusal to pose as a Muslim must have taken considerable character, considering the prejudices of the isolated Beduins.

One theme is exploration. Doughty had an interest in cartography, archeology, epigraphy, geology and hydrography. He collected data that was later used by T.E. Lawrence and army engineers during the Arab Revolt. He writes with needless yet endearing upper case letters: “Of surpassing interest to those many minds, which seek after philosophic knowledge and instruction, is the Story of the Earth, Her manifold living creatures, the human generations, and Her ancient rocks.”

Another theme is conflict, of all kinds, at all levels. Doughty has the sanctimonious opinions that we would expect from a Victorian traveler. He labels Islam “hostile” and “barbarous.” Sometimes as he criticizes the Beduw as an outsider, he reveals his Western biases, for instance, against excessive corporal punishment. Sometimes he scolds irritable, inhospitable antagonists with criticism from the inside: “It is not meet to treat a stranger, tired and afflicted, so harshly!” and “We’ve eaten together! How can you mistreat me so meanly?” But sometimes his criticism is based on lofty disparagements of the human condition, such as the cutting observation that even rustics have to have somebody to look down on: “The Fehjies eat the owl: for which they are laughed to scorn by the Beduw, that are devourers of some other vermin.”

Doughty’s outbursts of sarcasm, fury and exasperation with so-called superstition, ignorance and hypocrisy are familiar responses to readers who have been long-term expatriates. I lived for ten years abroad. I understand the useless impatience that the foreigner feels when he thinks the locals are behaving badly. It’s an unreasonable frustration that later makes the foreigner shrug and smile at himself, mentally apologizing and hoping he didn’t made too much of an ass of himself.

But then I’ve never been abroad in menacing situations full of impending violence. In the second year, Doughty was often robbed and cuffed around. During his stay in Kheybar, where the governor and villagers had much less tolerance than his Beduw companions, locals roughed him up and threatened his life. He was sucker-punched. He had knives waved in his face. During the last encounter with a frenzied bully, he came close to being done in with a sword. He escaped without grievous injury but a cautious sheriff sent him to Jedda to be transported out of the country. So, I cut slack for Doughty’s Euro-centrism, as I imagine that it’s not easy to be tolerant and magnanimous toward the perps after one has been manhandled like an object.

Because of the emphatic, bombastic, “vaunted Elizabethan” language, only we reading gluttons – readers who can read anything – need apply. But it’s worth it for we readers that are seriously into classic travel writing. After Arabia Deserta, Doughty left travel writing for poetry. He wrote an epic – it seems too small a word, epic  -  six-volume poem about the origins of his nation. The work The Dawn of Britain, was called “the worst poetry of the 19th century” by critic William Blunt. I think I pass on that one.