Trapped in the Maze of a Murderous Racket

Jigsaw
1949 / black and white / 77 minutes
Tagline: “Trapped in the Maze of a Murderous Racket”
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In this movie from 1949, Franchot Tone plays an assistant district attorney in New York City. The mysterious death of a print shop owner prompts him and a newspaper columnist to investigate The Mohawk Political Club. It is ostensibly a patriotic league fueled by membership fees, drives, and sales of buttons, badges, and patriotic apparel. It looks like an old-school political machine that provides holiday turkeys, charity assistance, and consultations for navigating city government.

The club could also be a criminal enterprise that uses illegal methods to dispose of people who present problems. As Stalin used to say, “No man, no problem.” They shoot the printer because of a business dispute (I think – many points in this movie are obscure). They defenestrate the columnist. They shoot a good-time girl who is turning informer. They attempt to kill Franchot Tone and when that fails they try to frame him for the murder of the party girl.

The acting is persuasive and the dialogue is smart (if silly in spots) even though the unfolding of action seems inexplicable at times. Franchot Tone is just okay, in a rather subdued performance as a user with honest intentions. Jean Wallace of the luminous smile is delightfully over the top in the scene where she gets overwrought and knocks out Tone by the fireplace. Marc Lawrence as Mr. Angel, the club’s general manager, has picture-perfect the oily, furtive look of a crook. He seems to fill his clothes like Uncle Fester. Yuck. Winifred Lenihan mixes charm and menace as society matron Mrs. Grace Hartley. She also gets to wear some outlandish late Forties fashion too (sadly, clothes have to be unusual and startling for me to notice them).

Two visually striking aspects stand out. Filmed in late spring in New York City, the best thing about it is the location shooting. The noirish settings are desolate streets, a swanky night club, and a low-ceilinged warehouse. As the setting for the climax, the Brooklyn Museum has an open, spacious lobby, also featuring eerie light and shadows. If the huge statue of a brooding god notices the climactic shoot-out, he gives no indication divine intervention is in the offing.

Plus, in a cocktail party scene the camera shoots from Tone’s first-person position, just like in The Lady in the Lake with Robert Montgomery. From the subjective camera, as we survey hollow clowns spouting their reactionary nonsense, we also hear Tone’s voice-over as he gives his take on the subject: “A fool but dangerous.” 

The director Fletcher Markle worked with Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater right after WWII. So Markle must have been a creative person, not just some hack. If he made missteps in this movie, his second directing job, so what? Short, undeveloped and uneven in spots, the movie provides entertainment for an hour and change on a Saturday night in winter.

The Vietnam War in the Villages

Stalking the Vietcong: Inside Operation Phoenix - Stuart Herrington

 After majoring in English at Duquesne University, Herrington landed the right job for somebody trained to read closely, listen attentively, analyze logically, and argue forcefully: an Army career in counterintelligence during the Vietnam era.

He was assigned to the Phoenix Program which has suffered a reputation for being an alleged Murder Incorporated, terminating with extreme prejudice inconvenient or suspect Vietnamese. In fact Phoenix's crucial task was at the district level. In 1971-72 Captain Herrington's job involved helping Republic of Vietnam officials in Hau Nghia province. This strategically vital spot was 45 kilometers northwest of Saigon and close to Cambodian locations to which the adversary typically retreated.

Herrington's task was to eliminate cadres of the Provisional Revolutionary Government who made up the shadow government of the VC. Unlike other spy masters and his RVN colleagues, he did not use brutality, abuse or torture. He insisted on providing prisoners - that is, prospective defectors - with unconditional humane treatment, new clothes, medical attention, and home cooked North Vietnamese dishes. Basically he used the truth to persuade POW's that they have been lied to and their idealism exploited.

 His methods achieved results despite the villagers’ silence and the relentless enemy totally convinced their inhuman and corrupt cause was just. Herrington points out that some VC's were determined and creative in bouncing back even when they had suffered major setbacks. Herrington also mentions corrupt and incompetent local officials who became more fatalistic and greedy to get while the getting was good as the US drew down. Near the end in April 1975, four North Vietnamese divisions easily overran Hau Nghia's defenses en route to Saigon.

The book was first published in 1982 as Silence was a Weapon: The Vietnam War in the Villages. This book is a must-read for people interested in counter-insurgency operations.

Reading Those Classics #22

Classic Short Stories set in Beyond. A collection of 42 stories, it won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1951. The stories were first published in weekly magazines such as The American Mercury, Forum, Harper’s Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner’s Magazine, and The Sewanee Review. Faulkner came up with the themed section headings, such The Country, The Village, The Wilderness, The Waste Land, The Middle Ground One & Two. 

The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

This is the sixth section, in which the tales have an other-worldly feel, wandering less-trod byways of the mind, anomalous in Faulkner’s body of work.

Beyond. Beyond this mundane plane and into the bardo goes a recently deceased judge where he meets an angry acquaintance who snuffed himself, famed agnostic Robert Ingersoll, and the gentle female minder of the Christ Child who is literally a toddler in this liminal state between death and the higher reaches of Heaven. A genuinely odd story in which Faulkner mines a sourcebook of Western Civilization.

Black Music. A mild-mannered architect’s assistant from Brooklyn is drafted by extramundane forces to thwart the plans of tasteless rich people to “develop” an old, old vineyard in Mississippi. It is a comic story within a story as Faulkner has an unnamed narrator hand over the narration to the architect’s assistant. Faulkner also gives a glancing and mildly disparaging look at down-and-out expatriate Americans in Mexico as well as the mania of greedheads that run extraction industries.

The Leg. The story opens relating the carefree boating antics of two Oxonians just before WWI. Then it shifts to the war, which kills the one and takes the leg of the other. But the disabled soldier is visited by the ghost of his boating buddy. The disabled one tasks the spook with finding the lost leg and making sure it is dead. The leg, however, has other ideas and begins to kick over the traces, so to speak. A weird unsettling story which makes the reader wonder what raging and rebellious wells Faulkner was tapping in order to write it.

Mistral. Readers of Ross Macdonald’s Archer novels will recall how he used the Santa Ana winds to stir raging wildfires and dark passions. In this story Faulkner uses as a metaphor for pervasive evil the mistral, the strong cold dry wind that blows through Italy and France in winter. Set in the early Twenties in the Italian Alps, two young American hikers find out how wicked Wicked Old Yurrup can be. Faulkner says in the story, "Maybe in any natural exaggerated situation - wind, rain, drouth - man is always alone." See his novella Old Man in which a guy fights a hundred-year flood on his own.

Divorce in Naples. Two sailors George and Carl dance on deck of their cargo ship plying the Atlantic, to the bemusement of their fellow crew members who demonstrate a tolerance for alternative sexualities we don’t expect in American working men in the 1920s. But their relationship is disturbed when Carl disappears for three days with an Italian sex worker. A female one, no less. That this story told frankly, matter-of-factly, without sniggering, is as unexpected as the subject matter. Until the reader remembers that in the novels too Faulkner saw sexuality, as Derek Jarman said, “as wide as the sea.”

Carcassonne. Faulkner the poet pens in florid prose a fantasy concerning the musings of a skeleton. Just bones are left of a fighter’s thoughts, feelings and actions. But this is not excuse for giving up the fight or worse avoiding the fight altogether. A short short story to return to for some inspiration, it is fitting to end the collection of 42 stories.

Getting Docs on Track

How Doctors Think – Jerome Groopman

During daily rounds, the author, an oncologist and hematologist, became concerned that members of his medical staff were not thinking deeply or broadly, running to their mobile to consult decision trees and lists of symptoms. Like an old guy would, he first thought that These Kids Today weren’t up to the high diagnostic skills levels of The Days of the Giants, when he was an intern. But being a smart guy, he got over that knee-jerk nostalgia and started looking at the research on different ways of thinking among doctors.

Linear thinking is when step by step we go through data and draw a conclusion. This is not the method in medicine. Research among physicians indicate they think while they do. From their first step into an exam room, doctors blend observations of the patient, the history, the risk factors, and the exam. Their minds draw a conclusion from all this data. Doctors create a pattern in their mind and superimpose on the individual patient the template of a typical case of whatever disease they think they are encountering. This process comes up with the correct diagnosis in 80% of cases.

This means in 10 to 20% of cases diagnoses are delayed or incorrect. A 2023 study concluded because of diagnostic errors, total serious harms annually in the USA add up to about 795,000 people permanently disabled or dead in a year.

The vast majority of medical errors are thinking errors. Research in cognitive psychology indicates that heuristics – using shortcuts or rules of thumb as decision strategies – are a major source of error.

Anchoring is when the human brain anchors itself on the first bit of data it meets. This could be related to our human nature, hardwired into us from eons ago: sense movement in bush, assume snake not sparrow, run, escape. In a modern hospital far from the savannah, however, doctors fixate on certain features of the patient’s presentation too early in the workup.

Availability is another source of error. It is a bias that relies on what immediately comes to mind to make quick decisions and hasty judgements. For instance, the doctor sees 12 cases of flu in two days and figures the 13^th person he sees with the same symptoms is the flu. But really it is a something less frequent, for example aspirin toxicity which has similar symptoms to flu.

Attribution. Our culture teaches us stereotypes as a short-cut to sizing people up. Unshaven dude in the ER shows up in smelly clothes, griping his belly has swollen up, and claims he has only one drink a day. The intern can’t believe this old rummy has only one drink a day. But the attending says, Check for Wilson’s disease. And that is what it is. And the family confirms he has only one drink a day.

Confirmation bias is when we selectively gather and interpret information to conform with our beliefs. A type of confirmation bias in medical settings is called diagnostic momentum, the tendency of a diagnosis to be accepted and passed on, with little or no examination of the underlying evidence for its validity. 

How then do we answer, “When you hear the hoofbeats, it’s horses, not zebras?” Patients should ask doctors open-ended questions, such as “What else could explain the cause of my problem,” or “What does not fit the initial diagnosis,” or “What might be another problem in addition to this symptom.” Help the doctor think outside the box and out of the course of day to day routine.

The Ides of Perry Mason 67

Note: Epictetus, Seneca, and Aurelius analyzed fictional characters like Medea and Achilles from the Stoic point of view. So this month I apply the Stoic mindset to the crooked thinking of fictional characters in the TV stories of the original Perry Mason (1957 - 1966).  Perry Mason quoted Justice Learned Hand about “faith in the eventual supremacy of reason.” 

The Case of the Wintry Wife (Season 4, Episode 17, 1961)

Laura’s Impressions: Tyrant, thy name is Laura. Domestic despot Laura domineers over her family not only by keeping a tight fist on the purse strings but also by playing up her disability. Laura blackmails her accountant Roger into blowing up her husband Walter’s workshop. The sabotage would destroy Walter’s invention whose success would enable him to become financially independent and thus get shut of Laura and marry his lady love Phyllis. Laura’s diabolical scheme will also blow poor Phyllis to kingdom come.

My Stoickal Take: First, we had better get off our high horse about Laura the Terrible. How can we indict tyrants, says Musonius Rufus, when we are worse than they are? We have the same impulses but not the same opportunity to indulge our worst will to dominate and control other people. 

Second, recall Socrates saying somewhere that the tyrant is the most miserable of specimens. Sullen over being feared, grumpy over being hated, ever suspicious of plot and conspiracy, always keeping an ear cocked for grumbling in the ranks. How unhappy it must be to know everybody will exhale with relief upon one’s death and exchange high fives in the parking lot of the funeral parlor! 

Third, as for Laura’s vassals: they choose to be tyrannized. They all had the wherewithal to support themselves with jobs and get out from under Laura’s yoke. They could have voted with their feet a long time ago. 

Frances Pettigrew #3

The Wind Blows Death - Cyril Hare

Amateur sleuth Frances Pettigrew appeared in five of Cyril Hare’s mysteries, sometimes with Inspector Mallet, sometimes by himself.  Pettigrew is a remarkable character in that he explicitly rejects seeing murder as a parlor game. Such is his desire “to leave the business of detection to my betters” that he never offers help to the investigation, but always waits to be asked. Or dragged in.

In this 1949 mystery, Pettigrew is pressured by Chief Constable MacWillams to assist without the knowledge of Inspector Trimble of the City Division of the Markshire County Constabulary. A greenhorn, Trimble is in over his head as he runs the investigation of the strangulation of a visiting professional violinist who was hired to play a solo with the Markhampton County Orchestral Society. Since Pettigrew’s wife plays the fiddle with other enthusiastic amateurs, Pettigrew, who practices at the bar and has an unfounded reputation as a practical man, has been deputized to be the society’s treasurer.

 Cyril Hare was only 57 when he died, so the legacy is limited – nine novels and a handful of short stories. Hare’s mysteries are skillfully written, with sophisticated yet amiable humor, and often using a twist in the law in his reveals.

 This novel, whose UK title is When the Wind Blows, was considered by critics Barzun and Taylor to be “a masterpiece by any standards” on their classics of crime list.

Reading Those Classics #21

English Mystery Classic with a Series Character. This 1927 tale of espionage and international intrigue is a far cry from the rest of her work, which is often set in quaint villages and features the shocking motives and dark doings of seemingly normal people. I don’t get readers who say Christie is a cozy writer. In the last one I read of hers, Hallowe’en Party, she caused two children to be knocked off, both pretty gruesomely.

The Big Four – Agatha Christie

In the fifth outing of series hero Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective takes on an international quartet of super-crooks who are bent on ruling the world. The mastermind is sinister Li Chang Yen, doing the yellow peril schtick that pulp writers were so fond of in the 1920s. Perhaps driven off the rails by loneliness at losing her scientist husband, Madame Olivier is building on his work in advanced physics and chemistry in order to build a death ray in aid of Li’s fiendish plans for world take-over. Bankrolling their awful projects is American millionaire, Mr. Ryland, a Soap King whose first name is Abe, in the manner of the anti-Semitism that we also expect in the golden age of the pulps. The fourth member of the gang, an Englishman, is The Destroyer, a hitman who is – you guessed it in one, pulp fans –  a master of disguise.

And from what fortress will the gang rule the world? From a stronghold, dug in the side of a mountain in the Dolomite Alps in northeastern Italy. One marvels at Christie’s prescience, her ability to anticipate Sixties stand-bys of super-genius villains, wielding ultra-weapons, bent on world domination, from remote mountain fastnesses. It is inconceivable, mon ami, that Ian Fleming never read Agatha Christie. At least, Li Chang Yen does not wear an eyepatch like Emilio Largo in Thunderball. Pal Abe doesn’t plague a cat like Blofeld in You Only Live Twice. The Destroyer doesn’t destroy people with his bowler like Oddjob in Goldfinger. Nor does Madame Olivier squeeze dudes to death between her thighs like Xenia Onatopp in Golden Eye.

So, thank your lucky stars.

I can understand why reader-reviewers all over the interwebs regard this one with surprise and disappointment. The narrative seems cobbled together, with short stories stitched together less than seamlessly. And in the last quarter or so, it seems as if Poirot is lying doggo, while in his staunch loyalty Hastings is killing time in London, confident that it’ll be fine leaving his wife Dulcie Duveen, the self-styled ‘Cinderella,’ all alone for a year to run the ranch back in the Argentine.

I thought Christie connects set pieces well enough to make them fit into the story, even if the basting threads are showing rather. Dapper Poirot is still maddeningly conceited and Hastings brave and endearingly clueless. When Hastings observes that some frozen lamb (an important clue) comes from Kiwiland, Poirot says, “He knows everything – but everything. How do they say – Enquire Within Upon Everything. That is my friend Hastings.” “Enquire Within Upon Everything” was one-volume encyclopedia for domestic life, first published in 1856, and annually updated and reissued up to 1990s.

    ‘I suppose the Big Four couldn’t have had some diabolical contrivance concealed in the ceiling – something which descended automatically and cut the old man’s throat and was afterwards drawn up again?’

    ‘Like Jacob’s ladder? I know, Hastings, that you have an imagination of the most fertile – but I implore of you to keep it within bounds.’

Unlike Christie’s incomprehensible Postern of Fate, I didn’t just bail out. I actually finished this, enjoying the goofy incidents and enjoying the vein of humor in Poirot and Hastings’ conversations. Pulpy spy thriller was not really the artist’s forte but with her plain style, copious dialogue, steady action, and surprising twists, Christie was talented enough to entertain even when not putting her strengths to the test.

Albert Campion #19

Cargo of Eagles – Margery Allingham

Though finished by her husband after Allingham passed in 1966, the last Albert Campion mystery shows no falling off of powers.

Allingham observed changing times, but she loved the old England of out-of-the-way places with insular cultures as portrayed in her 1948 mystery More Work for the Undertaker. In this one she includes two youth gangs, the Mods and the Rockers. They were past their 15 minutes of fame by 1965, but their being out of place is balanced by the excellent portraits of the secretive inhabitants of Saltey and its long history of smuggling.

PI Campion has been asked by the Yard to look into a killing that may or may not be linked to the release of a prisoner. The ex-inmate may know the whereabouts of stuff of great interest to the government. The murder victim left her house to a woman doctor who was an outsider to Saltey. The old whodunit stand-by of poison pen letters adds to familiarity.

The wrap-up is based on notes that Alingham had made until she could not write anymore. I thought the ending worked quite well and could not identify where another author had to take the reins.

Recommended especially to readers who put Allingham in their Top 5 of Fave Mystery Writers.

Rosie the Epicurean

Note: I think his didactic use of ethics-lite is why Maugham has been popular with middle-brow readers (like me!) for going on a century now. In the parables The Razor's Edge, The Painted Veil, and The Moon and Sixpence, he's giving implicit advice on how to live a flourishing life.  Where else will busy people be exposed to Epicureanism? Life is short, so live and let live, and seek out delight as often as you can. 

Cakes and Ale - W. Somerset Maugham 

I looked at Rosie now, with angry, hurt, resentful eyes; she smiled at me, and I wish I knew how to describe the sweet kindliness of her beautiful smile; her voice was exquisitely gentle. 

‘Oh, my dear, why d’you bother your head about any others? What harm does it do to you? Don’t I give you a good time! Aren’t you happy when you’re with me?’

‘Awfully.’

‘Well, then. It’s so silly to be fussy and jealous. Why not be happy with what you can get? Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say; we shall all be dead in a hundred years, and what will anything matter then? Let’s have a good time while we can.’

She put her arms around my neck and pressed her lips against mine. I forgot my wrath. I only thought of her beauty and her enveloping kindness.

‘You must take me as I am, you know.’ she whispered.

‘All right,’ I said.

The narrator Willie is a young man. So in his inexperience he is angry, hurt, and resentful that Rosie is having sex with other men. She simply likes luxury, going out, good food, good sex.  In the conceit of youth, he's mortified that beautiful Rosie is sleeping with ugly old coots. Willie feels insecure and inadequate that he might be compared to richer, better-looking, more powerful men. Willie has yet to con that the best sex ever will make you unhappy if you hope to possess your lover, body and soul, forever and always.

Pleasure-seeker Rosie reasons with his irrational jealousy. She urges him to not give any thought to her sexing with other men since he’s just making himself miserable by obsessing about her other affairs. He himself undermines the contentment he can get in the here and now by focusing on what is utterly out of his sphere. He can’t control anybody’s feelings, thoughts, or actions but his own so he had better not give them a second thought. What’s is up to him is the stance that he takes toward everything, what is not up to him is better ignored.

Her affairs don’t offer him any harms or threats. He would do well to live in the moment and just enjoy the time he spends with her, clothed and not. 

Take the long view. Sooner than a hundred years from now, everybody we know will be gone and the things we thought so important will be yesterday's quaint tantrums (waltzing? D&D? wilding? QAnon?). Nothing is so important that we need to make ourselves miserable and unhappy and discontented by fretting and stewing about it. Nothing.

Take other people as they are, Rosie advises Willie, take life as it really is. The eager acceptance of reality, both good and bad, will inspire you and set you free. 

Maugham continues to be read, I think, because lots of hardcore readers in 2025 still think about the questions life asks and feel the need to, or simply like to, be reminded of things they already know.