European Reading Challenge #4

Visas for Life – Yukiko Sugihara

Chiune Sugihara was the Japanese Consul General in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1939 and 1940. After World War II broke out, his office was inundated with requests for visas from thousands of Polish Jews that had to escape from Nazi-occupied Poland.

With the aid of his wife Yukiko, Sugihara issued 2,000 transit visas and saved about 6,000 lives. Because he issued the visas against orders, he risked his diplomatic career and his future. After the war, with the mean-spirited cowardice of bureaucrats at their most spineless, the Japanese government did indeed fire him from the dip service. Instead of honoring a man directly responsible for saving 6,000 lives who later built families that number as many as 55,000 descendants, the Japanese government canned him and forced him to live in impoverished obscurity, eking out a living translating and interpreting.

But before he died in 1986, in 1985 he received Israel's highest honor, recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" by the Yad Vashem Martyrs Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.

Today is Showa Day

Showa no Hi (昭和の日). This Japanese national holiday marks the start of the Golden Week holiday period. It was established in 2007 as a day to reflect on the events of the Shōwa period (1926 to 1989). When I was in Japan (1986 to 1992), April 29 was the birthday of the Emperor Hirohito, officially known as Emperor Shōwa. When the Emperor passed away in 1989, the date was observed as Greenery Day. To mark that eventful period in Japanese history, let’s read a non-fiction book about Japan.

The Straitjacket Society: An Insider's Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan - Masao Miyamoto

Miyamoto, a psychiatrist, studied in the US for 11 years. He spent three years of postdoc work in psychiatry and psychoanalysis before accepting a position as an assistant professor of psychiatry at Cornell. In 1984, he became an assistant professor at New York Medical College. He had to return to Japan for family reasons.

He was hired by the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare for his technical knowledge and abilities. A typical kikokushijo (帰国子女 literally “returnee children”) - Japanese returning to Japan after a long stay abroad for work or study - he ran into trouble. For one, he was a smart guy with a subversive sense of humor. For another, he was a doctor, member of a group not known for their modesty or ability to suffer fools. Lastly, to me, he seemed rather naive about re-entry shock. Did he really think those loosely educated and rigid bureaucrats who'd never lived outside Japan long would be tolerant of his meiwaku (causing everybody trouble)?

Bosses and colleagues bullied and upbraided him but in meetings he wasn't shy about telling them he found their reasoning wanting. He was used to the adversarial give and take in US academic and professional settings (i.e. bicker pits) where defending conclusions and positions – with and without logic - generates ideas and knowledge. What deeply stung the officials he worked for was that he wrote candid essays about bureaucracy for the leftish monthly Gekkan Asahi. Both as a chronicle of his re-entry shock and castigation of bureaucrats (a popular sport in Japan), these articles were such a hit that they were collected in a book The Straitjacket Society: An Insider's Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan (1994). The book is hilarious and, to bureaucrats like me that detest red tape, disheartening.

The beginning skillfully combines background information and his experience. He relates his surprise at a weekend excursion with his co-workers. The hot spring wasn't even a real one but had piped-in hot water. The food was awful. He found dull the drinking to get shitfaced and porno parties. Sick of it all, he announced that he was going back to Tokyo on the 10:00 AM train. No fewer than five colleagues who wanted to escape too volunteered to go with him, saying that it's not right to have to travel alone.

He uses the example of compelled togetherness to discuss the orientation of messhihoko (滅私奉公). Though it looks like an ancient four-character compound that would grace a kakemono scroll, it is but a wartime slogan the powers that be wanted the Japanese to bear in mind and behave accordingly. Messhihoko literally means “extinguish the self, serve the lord” and urges people to sacrifice themselves for the goals of the group. Miyamoto says that this message is so deeply drummed into people that even if they feel stressed, exhausted, or angry, they will resign themselves to the inevitable situation and, more importantly, not complain while doing as they are directed.

This book is not all psychological and cultural explanation. He also provides more nitty-gritty reasons why the Japanese bureaucracy is on auto-pilot. This is only one of many funny-sad conversations he has with superiors:

Miyamoto: You mean that once something is provided for in a budget you can't stop doing it? Why not?

Health ministry official: In the government offices, as long as a certain amount of money has been budgeted for a certain purpose, it has to be used up.

Surely it wouldn't matter if there was a little bit left over.

It's not that easy. Returning unused money is taboo.

Why is that?

Leftover money gives the Finance Ministry the impression that the project in question is not very important, which makes it a target of budget cuts the following year. The loss of even a single project means a smaller budget for the whole department. The director is going to take a dim view of that, since it affects his career prospects.

Full disclosure: I was the beneficiary of the custom “spend it or lose it” when I was an employee of the Ministry of Education. Near the end of the fiscal year, I would get calls from the administrators in my dean's office. They'd urge me to attend any meetings related to English education being held on mainland Japan as they would like to make resources available to me in the event that I thought it would be helpful to my professional development to attend conferences or conventions in Tokyo or Osaka or Kyoto in February and March. What a wonderful job that was.

The Japanese, weary of regulations besides skeptical of the competence of arrogant bureaucrats, avidly read Miyamoto's weekly magazine articles. They admired Miyamoto for telling the truth. But the government expressed their displeasure by assigning him to jobs with less and less responsibility and exiling him farther and farther away from Tokyo.

In April 1993 the articles were collected under the title Oyakusho no Okite (お役所の掟 Code of the Bureaucrats - a satirical reminder of the medieval guide of the same name) and became a bestseller. His bosses were angry and vindictive. Miyamoto was finally canned on the bogus ground that he was AWOL. He then made a living as a critic of the system until his untimely death. Masao Miyamoto, at the age of only 51, died of cancer at a hospital near Paris in 1999.

True Business Crime

Note: I’m not much of a reader of true crime: the motives are always the same and perps and their enablers display only slightly varying blends of cowardice, appetite, anger or thrill-seeking. When I do, I try to be selective. See Classic Crimes (William Roughhead), Small Town D.A (Robert Traver), For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (Simon Baatz), and The Spy in The Russian Club: How Glenn Souther Stole America's Nuclear War Plans & Escaped to Moscow (Ronald Kessler)

The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup – Evan Hughes

I could not put down this book about an opioid startup called Insys. They used strong techniques to market their FDA-approved drug, Sybsys, a powerful pain killer made of fentanyl. Since some of their sales techniques were illegal, the top executives were busted and went to trial. The trial was the opportunity for Hughes to take a deep dive to examine how these drugs are marketed and sold. In a tight overview of this trial, Hughes makes clear the fact the nobody gave a shit about the people addicted, harmed, and killed by the narcotic, not the drug makers or its sales agents nor the defense attorneys nor the federal prosecutors.

Readers and patients who are not aware of how drug companies influence doctors’ prescribing will find this an eye-opening book. It is an aggressive sales technique to target the top ten percent of opioid prescribing doctors in a state. It is iffy indeed to push doctors to prescribe higher dosages of any medication, much less the most powerful pain killer in the market, during an epidemic of opioid overdose deaths.

Out of their lane, sales staff urged the doctors to prescribe the medication even in cases when it was not indicated (so-called “off label”). Subsys was approved for breakthrough cancer pain, not aching joints. Going way outside the guard-rails, Insys inserted themselves into the pre-authorization process by out and out falsehoods and massaging the facts to persuade insurance companies to approve coverage.

Most egregiously, Insys paid doctors to give talks on the medication as a pretext to set up a ‘this for that.’ In other words, the company pays for presentations even to attendee-free meetings and the doctors prescribe the drug. Later federal prosecutors summed up the business model as one plus one equals two: “bribing doctors, conning insurers, making money.”

Under pressure from the market and the imperative to make money, the big bosses want all the market share. Under pressure from the bosses, the sales staff want the exhilaration of landing big accounts and money.  Under gimme-gimme pressure from sales agents and patients in pain, harried doctors write hundreds of scripts for an opioid painkiller, adverse effects on trusting naïve patients be damned. It takes courage to resist pressure.  As a humble minion a large public bureaucracy, I gently opine there have to be easier, less stressful ways of making a living.

And staying out of jail.

Also, as a part-time compliance operative myself, the other take-away I got from this book is that companies had better not be cheap like Insys when it comes to hiring in-house lawyers and compliance specialists. The federal regulations are many and convoluted. It’s very easy to make mistakes and run afoul of regs even with the best intentions. Companies need experts to navigate regulatory swamps properly.

Finally, more government oversight is needed over drug companies marketing and distributers between the drugmakers and doctors and pharmacies. Drug company bosses ought not to get coddled when it comes to fines and jail.

Was Love her Crime?

Note: The Gail Patrick film festival continues. In the movie reviewed today she gets away from her early parts as nice secretary (If I Had a Million), nice research assistant (Murders in the Zoo) and nice aspiring singer (The Phantom Broadcast) and kind of nice rich girl (Death Takes a Holiday). What the hell, the reader wonders, is forgotten actress Gail Patrick doing on what is basically a Perry Mason blog? Gail Patrick Jackson found retirement a bore in the 1950s so she became the executive producer of the greatest teevee courtroom drama in creation - there is only one correct answer - Perry Mason. She and Raymond Burr butted heads over scripts and workload, but Burr said she was the soul of the series.

The Crime of Helen Stanley
1934 / 58 minutes
Tagline: “Make-believe drama that changed to grim tragedy!”
[internet archive]

In this production Gail Patrick plays a spoiled movie star of whom a studio executive says, “She never gave reasons. She made demands.” When she finds out that her sister and her ex-BF plan to marry, in a rage of jealousy she warns them to break it off, telling her favorite cameraman in classic diva style, “I made you and I'll break you just as easily.” It seems she has something on everybody so that she can coerce them to do her will. Nobody likes her intimidating ways. Nobody seems especially broken up when she is shot dead on set during the shooting of a scene in a nightclub, except movie-goers that would find easy to take more scenes of Gail Patrick in her drawers, in racy scenes typical of Pre-Code Hollywood.

But alas.

The main attraction is that Inspector Trent (Ralph Bellamy) takes us movie-goers behind the scenes of Columbia studios during the early days of sound. Imparting a feeling of unreality is the Thirties technology such as sets, lights, lifts, dollies, and other equipment so antique as to be unidentifiable. Also putting us off balance are the elaborate catwalks that the lighting guys have to navigate. The images are shot beautifully.                                                                                               

The camera work shows care and craft. Cutting from face to face for reactions was cool. Fascinating is the subjective camera on a trio of faces. As for the acting, Gail Patrick does domineering and spiteful skillfully, as she was to do as mean Cornelia in My Man Godfrey a couple years later. Bellamy uses his great voice to make weakish lines sound genuine.  But that’s about it. Shirley Grey has a kind of mature sensuality but muffs lines too.

Bellamy is adept at giving long looks that make persons of interest squirm. “Suspect: I didn’t do it. Bellamy: Then you have nothing to be afraid of” seems profoundly unsatisfying, but maybe we movie-goers have seen too many innocents railroaded in noir movies. The interrogation scene was well-composed throughout with four hostile detectives browbeating and tormenting one hapless thief. The po-faced perfectionistic European director being blackmailed by Gail over immigration ambiguities had to have been a take-off on tyrants like Fritz Lang, Josef von Sternberg and Erich Von Stroheim.

A genuine B-movie, of interest only to hardcore movie-goers or buffs of the 1930s.

Tim Simpson #1

A Back Room in Somers Town – John Malcolm

The debut of the Tim Simpson series was published in 1984. An ex-rugby player, Simpson brings a lot of macho to his job as an investment and management consultant in a London merchant bank. One of his specialties is providing advice on art investments, especially modern British art. Bubbly and generous, his boss Jeremy is a refreshing change from the stereotypical cold-hearted conniving banker.

John Malcolm worked as antiques expert, engineer, and journalist. So his writing style is concise, well-paced, and reader-friendly, especially to those who like mysteries to be a little different. In this one, the action centers around a murder and the theft of work by Mary Godwin and Walter Sickert, two British modernists known for their edgy work in many genres.

On one hand, it is nice that it's free of the stereotype that jocks have to be lunkheads that know as much about banking as they don't know about art. On the other, its age spots are less than pretty, especially the male chauvinism. 

But readers who like old-school mysteries set in the business world (P.D. James, Sara Paretsky, Emma Lathen) would probably like this one.

It's a Real Mash when They Clash!

Sherlock Holmes versus Dracula - Loren D. Estleman

The world’s greatest consulting detective meets the scariest monster in an epic clash of two of the most famous characters in modern fiction. The Baker Street detective's brilliant deductions confront the determined wickedness of the most terrible enemy of his investigative career.

From the powerful first chapter of the ghost ship winding up in Whitby harbor, Estleman manages to capture the attention of the reader with a dead captain lashed to the wheel, the crew missing, and eyewitness reports of a huge dog running from the vessel. Estleman is a master of the late-Victorian idiom: the prose sounds like 1890, sentences overstuffed with phrases and clauses though always easy to read. He also imitates Watson’s idiosyncratic voice, especially the ironic contrast between Watson’s self-image as skeptical, rational, and composed and his frequent overwrought melodrama and susceptibility to gloomy settings.

However, Estleman gives the stories his own imaginative stamp by every now and then making an allusion that all of us readers of Holmes stories will understand. For example, Holmes and Watson discuss the case that many remember, The Adventure of Speckled Band. In this, Inspector Lestrade rather comes off like a jaded copper in a hard-boiled story. Dog fans will like Toby showing up too. I’ve never read Bram Stoker’s vampire novel, so any allusions to it were lost on me, but that lack didn’t hurt my enjoyment of this thriller.

Also known as The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count, this 1978 thriller was the first of Estleman’s Sherlock Holmes pastiches. This tribute was followed in 1979 by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes. I think neither of these set the critical world on fire and Estleman found his own voice with the Amos Walker series of noir novels set in Detroit in the 1980s. After a long hiatus, came The Perils ofSherlock Holmes (2012) and Sons of Moriarty and More Stories of Sherlock Holmes (2013).

These books were authorized and licensed by the estate Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the detective fiction that introduced many of us hardcore readers to mystery fiction or for that matter fiction written not just for kids but for general readers. A discerning reader need not be wary, fearing a faded imitation written by a hack. The author of 70-some mysteries and historical westerns, Estleman has been a hardcore Holmes fan and re-reader of the stories since his adolescence in the Seventies.

Inspector Montalbano #12

The Track of Sand – Andrea Camilleri

This 2008 mystery stars a Sicilian police inspector. The recurring themes of this series – Salvo’s rocky romance with Livia, globalization as criminal enterprise – felt stale, so I wondered if the series, like The Big Bang Theory, was just going through the motions.

I was pleasantly surprised that international crooks play no part in The Track of Sand. The series hero Salvo Montalbano wakes up one morning to find in his yard the battered carcass of a horse that was beaten to death. Salvo feels admirable grief for the horse and rage at the evil-doing perps. His half-official investigation delves in Mafia schemes and the lifestyles of the filthy rich. A new character, the lovely Rachele Esterman, adds to Salvo’s diversions.

The sense of place still feels authentic and familiar, with Salvo walking on his jetty and sitting on his rock. He still eats local cuisine at Enzo’s trattoria. The translation is extremely smooth and readable, with helpful cultural notes at the end. Camilleri handles skillfully the spectrum of life, from the funny to the horrible, often following each other only in minutes.

I advise readers new to Camillieri to read – in order, please. Camilleri has a clear, decisive, essential style. He envelops you with his particular vocabulary; captures you with the stubborn, ironic and sensitive character of Montalbano.

The Ides of Perry Mason 78

Note: Three times a month, we turn to the works of Erle Stanley Gardner, either the novels or the classic TV series that sent us hardcore readers to the novels. The first three seasons on CBS (1957-58-59) have a noir look and a delightfully lurid handling of stories of folly and murder. The motives are classic: overweening ambition; wishful thinking; irresistible desires and aversions; cowardice and cupidity; and wanting to speed blackmailers into the scalding hells they deserve. Because the Sixties zeitgeist prized “relevance,” the stories became less sensational and more topical, from corporate espionage to folk singing to the JD problem to open-wheel race cars to Playboy clubs to the space program to Vic Tanny-type health clubs. Ironic that the emphasis on “ripped from the headlines,” along with the corny soundtrack of Sixties teevee crime drama, makes the Sixties episodes feel more dated than the timeless Fifties fables of ambition, anxiety, and anger crowding out good sense, moderation and caution.

The Singular Episode in Color

The original Perry Mason TV series (1957 - 1966) was shot in black and white. In the first three seasons, the designers and crew worked their magic with grayscale and composition to achieve the noir vision. The high-contrast visuals and low-key lighting, for example, make Evelyn’s troubles more nightmarish in The Case of the Restless Redhead and make sleazier the civic corruption in the stylish The Case of the Fraudulent Foto.

Only one episode of the 271 was filmed in color. CBS execs had decreed that all shows would be in color for the 1966-67 season. President Wiliam S. Paley wanted to see what full-spectrum Perry Mason looked like so in Season 9, the experiment entitled The Case of the Twice-Told Twist was broadcast* on February 27, 1966**.

Designers took the color bit and ran, which was what designers did in the early days of color TV. They used red and orange for walls, linen, and cars. As for clothes, though Barbara Hale*** pops against the pecky cypress paneling in the office and looks stunning in red silk, not well served by colorful attire are  Victor Buono, Beverly Powers, and Lisa Pera (with the blue blue really blue eyes that some Russian women have). I gape, gawking at the yellow mohair sweater. One scene has Paul chasing a suspect down on L.A.’s Olvera Street (shot for Mexico), with its merchant stalls, craft shops, and restaurants. The pedestrian marketplace flashes with so much bright stuff that it looks as cluttered and fussy as an interior on Murder, She Wrote.

With an example of only one episode, it is hard to judge if Perry Mason in color packs the punch of the other 270 B&W shows.  As hinted above, the visual fatigue drains us viewers with 2025 eyes. On the positive side, Victor Buono puts in his usual skillful performance as a corrupter of youth. The confession scene is pretty cool. The deal-breaker that in the end drags the episode into Meh territory: campy and unbelievable are the juvenile delinquents playing Artful Dodgers to Buono’s Fagin. They dress like the Young Engineers Club at Beverly Hills 90210 High School.

I am of two minds about colorizing the original Perry Mason. My objection is whatever effects the original designers intended cannot be captured by the AI colorizing process as it stands today. What if training images to prime the AI were all based on color TV shows in the early days of color - bright and saturated and exhausting? AI-generated color and design tends to look garish anyway probably because of the taste of the IT bros who don’t know kitsch when they see it.  I can’t imagine what the process would do to the red highlights Hale sometimes put in her hair, but I suspect the reds would be, like Agent Scully’s, “a little too red.” How would an AI know how to use color to add emotion to the scene?  Colorizing from AI algorithms would inevitably distract from the mood, atmosphere, and drama conveyed by images and design originally conceived and captured for black and white.

But the realistic part of me grants a colorized classic Perry Mason will attract audiences. Black and white alienates many people, especially those that can’t bring themselves to believe in the distant past of 60 years ago we lived our lives in color. It would be great if colorizing Perry Mason would make the youngs put down the mobile and pay attention to the greatest courtroom series ever and its depth, creativity, convoluted plots, and high-minded morality (In The Case of the Impatient Partner, Perry says, “I always have faith, Mr. Fallon. Faith in what Judge Learned Hand called ‘the eventual supremacy of reason.’”).

By paying undivided attention, youth would learn to live with the bending of time and space. Like in The Case of the Sulky Girl, a scene supposedly taking place at 11:00 p.m. was obviously shot during the day. As for space, in The Case of the Crooked Candle, the inside of a sailboat is larger than its outside indicates, making us wonder if Perry and Della have wandered into Interstellar’s tesseract. At times out and out magic occurs as when in The Case of the Silent Partner, Lt. Tragg is driven to an apartment in a black 1957 Buick Roadmaster Riviera, but when he arrives moments later it is in a black 1957 Buick Special.

 

*CBS later cancelled the show due to low ratings ("Who wants to go up against Bonanza," asks a TV actor in the last episode TCOT Final Fade-out). Producer Gail Patrick Jackson told The New York Times that the network assumed everybody connected to the show was exhausted due to its grueling shooting schedule. Too true, Burr, obviously tired, frankly discussed burnout as early as 1963.

** I was not quite 10 years of age at the time and I don't recall public reaction to the color episode. I do remember, however, the high media interest and public semi-hysteria when Mia Farrow cut off her hair in late February 1966. Farrow said in her memoir you'd think nothing else was happening in the world. 

*** At 19, in 1941, she began fashion modelling to pay for her education at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Besides that wonderful smile, she looked amazing in anything she wore.

Epic Historical Fiction

Creation – Gore Vidal

This historical novel is set in the 4th century BC, from the Persia of Darius and Xerxes to ancient India and China before Qin Shi Huang. The narrator is old and blind Cyrus Spitama who dictating his memoirs to his distant relative, the future laughing philosopher Democritus.

The story is Spitama’s life as an ambassador and traveler throughout the East and chronicles his meetings with Buddha, Confucius, Anaxagoras, and Herodotus. He even hires Socrates the mason, who botches getting a wall up, perhaps because of being distracted by musings about whether virtue can be taught.

As in Julian and Lincoln, Vidal pushes the reader to review many of their pious certainties soaked up in school and not really examined since. For instance, Vidal is acerbic about the glory that was Greece. “Democritus thinks Athens is wonderful,” our narrator observes. “The fact is, son, you haven't seen the rest of the world. I hope one day you can travel and go beyond your Greekness.” Cyrus entertains doubts: “wisdom was not born in Attica, Democritus, but maybe that's where it will die.”

As in the Narratives of Empire, Vidal loves these large frescoes, where he can allow himself to recast a familiar or dimly recalled story as he sees it, such as the Greek wars from the viewpoint of the Persians. But the real preoccupation of the novel is that of the narrator, the grandson of Zoroaster, as to how the universe arose and who or what created it, with the answers of the various wise men and philosophers of the time. Confucius, a practical scholar, shrugged at inquiries into first causes, figuring that it was a waste to time discussing unanswerable questions and that our life, right here, right now, wasn’t affected whether the origin of Creation was divine or natural forces.

A good novel for those times when the reader that wants an evocation of the remote past, with endless court and harem intrigues, regicide, parricide, fratricide, witches and sorcerers, bloodthirsty leaders and impalements of 15,000 soldiers on the losing side of a battle. Feel for a little time the world when it was either new relative to urbanization or philosophy or really old due to the intrigues of politicians, ministers, and merchants that thought they are going to build systems that would last forever only to have them survive founders by mere decades.

A Novel of Detroit

Note: The greatest TV courtroom drama series in the history of creation (Perry Mason) had deals with car-makers to provide vehicles for the show. Ford was hot to promote the Edsel whose sales were hurting from bad press, doubts about its workmanship, and baffled public derision due to its oddly beautiful or beautifully odd appearance. In The Case of the Buried Clock (1958) a beautiful top-of-the-line Edsel Citation appears all too briefly. And The Case of the Bedeviled Doctor (1959) features a 1959 Edsel convertible, white interior, with its top down. In The Case of the Spurious Sister is seen a white 1959 Edsel Corsair four-door hard top. The Case of the Watery Witness (1959) has two Edsels: a convertible and perhaps the same Edsel Corsair as in the previous episode Spurious Sister.

Edsel: A Novel of Detroit – Loren D. Estleman

Our narrator-protagonist is Connie Minor. His glory days as a crime reporter for the Prohibition-era Detroit Banner are but a dim memory by the time his story opens in 1954. Connie is working where old writers go to curl up and die: an advertising agency.

But Connie is adept at creating advertising copy and campaigns. Because of his marketing prowess, he is hired by Ford executive Israel Zed to plan strategy on the campaign to sell the still secret E-car, later known as the Edsel. To get a feeling for the auto business in terms of manufacturing, Connie interviews the guys on the line in the plant at River Rouge*

Nothing happens in the plants that UAW leader Walter Reuther doesn’t know about. Resenting Connie’s “spying” activities, Reuther pressures Connie to use his underworld connections to find out the who and why behind the attempted murder of Reuther and his brother in 1948.

To get an in with mobsters, Connie approaches pro wrestler Anthony Battle, who hangs out with people dear to the hearts of people from SE Michigan who were Born in the Fifties: Leaping Larry Shane, Bobo Brazil, Haystack Calhoun and The Shiek. Anthony, however, says he will approach the mobsters with Connie’s request for an interview only if Connie intervenes with Stuart Leadbeater, an ambitious politician who is threating to paint Anthony as a pinko, which is the kiss of death in the commie-nervous USA of 1954.

Connie cuts a deal with Stuart Leadbeater to save Anthony by promising the goods on Albert Brock, tough head of Steelhaulers' Union who may have ordered the shotgun blast through the Reuthers’ kitchen window. Connie also talks to twin mobsters, the Ballista brothers, to little avail in his cause, but some very fine set pieces for the reader. Estleman’s evocation of hospitals, especially cancer wards, will stir readers who remember visiting patients in old Harper Hospital, demolished in 1977.

And remember gold shag carpeting, license plate keychains, jelly glasses, and the “table lamp with a revolving shade that simulated a forest fire when it was switched on” that grandmother used to have. Readers that know what a Kelvinator is will indeed get a kick or two. Besides nostalgia that isn’t sick-making, bonus points for mentioning places like Port Huron and Melvindale. Estleman’s tone is caustic but never dark and cynical. Interesting is his claim that the failure of the Edsel was both cause and symptom of cultural malaise that would be exacerbated by Vietnam and Watergate.

*Rouge Steel was a five-minute walk from the house I grew up in. Nothing says home to me like the smell of industrial pollution.

The Nones of Perry Mason 77

Note: I’ve read so many goddamn Perry Masons. ESG uses a recipe with different ingredients, but a constant element is Mason's sympathy. He is never so hard-boiled that he doesn't feel sympathy for a client in trouble deep through malice, poor judgement or sheer bad luck. Mason is often attracted by the prospect of examining an unusual wrinkle in a case.

The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom - Erle Stanley Gardner

Michael Garvin spins money in mining businesses like Rumpelstiltskin spins straw into gold. Outside of the boardroom, however, the one-trick pony stumbles into one personal mess after another. He gets married to red-headed Lorraine even though he has not confirmed that his first wife has really divorced him. 

Garvin belatedly comes to the decision to consult Perry Mason to check if his quicky Mexican divorce will hold up in the Home of the Brave. Then, wanting a romantic get-away despite a looming stockholders meeting, he traipses off on a second honeymoon without letting anybody know where he’s going. Finally, in the crisis following the shooting death of his first wife, Garvin lies to Mason about his movements on the night of the killing.

Trust Gardner to treat us to a relatable defendant. Lots of readers fantasize about retaining a supportive lawyer who will fight for us no matter how lame our excuses sound or how many silly decisions we’ve made. Even, in our surprise and shock, when we’ve picked up the murder weapon at the scene of the crime.

Not so relatable is Virginia Colfax, the kind of smart devious active woman we quiet guys are scared of at work. While working late in his office, Mason spies a comely woman on the fire escape. When Mason queries her as to what she’s up to, the hottie says she works upstairs for Garvin’s extraction companies. Mason notes she’s carrying something that glints, which she tosses away, saying it was a flashlight.

He wants to confirm her identity by checking out her car registration, but out on the street she lays a mitten on him (translating 1949ese: slaps him), making onlookers think she’s a pretty baa-lamb fending off a wolf. In celeb-addled LA, this spectacle is noted and thus appears in the gossip column in the paper the next morning. His secretary Della Street rags Perry, but stoical Mason shrugs it off as one of those things that just happen.

But things get complicated mighty quick when Perry finds himself enmeshed in a case that involves two convoluted situations. One is bigamy involving a Mexican divorce that may or may not be legal. The other is a proxy fight looming at a stockholders meeting.

As usual, Gardner paints an unflattering portrait of the guardians of our criminal justice system. The cops arrest their person of interest by using trickery. At the trial two bumbling prosecutors are more intent on puffing themselves up by making Perry look bad than on building a strong case. They are helped out by Perry’s client, who lies to Perry. Like I tell my ESL students, tell the whole truth to your doctor, your lawyer, and your English teacher.

A good, not great, Mason mystery.

No Woman Ever had Such a Lover

Note: The Gail Patrick film festival continues. Some of her previous movies have been reviewed: If I Had a Million, Murders in the Zoo, and The Phantom Broadcast. In this movie she plays an American rich girl. She sets her cap on Death. She plays the part as frank, direct, and open, not a haughty rich at all, as she was destined to be typed after she played mean sister Cornelia in My Man Godfrey a couple of years later. To readers wondering why a forgotten actress is appearing in what could be taken for a Perry Mason blog, she was the executive producer of the greatest courtroom drama of teevee's first century - you guessed it in one - Perry Mason.

Death Takes a Holiday
1934 / 1:19
Tagline: “No one can die - while he makes love!”
[internet archive]

A rich English family and their American friends are enjoying a festival while the intended of the family’s son prays in church. Her piety and seeking of the illimitable contrast with the frivolity, heedlessness, and worldliness of the family she will marry into. Speeding back to their villa they escape being killed only because Death decides to take a three-day vakay at their Italian villa.

Death feels curious as to why mortals have such terror and revulsion regarding his reality. Death desires to know the reasons few people can think straight about death, taking their individual extinction personally indeed. Shunned, Death feels lonely. At first, only the host knows Death’s true identity. Death impersonates charming Count Sirki.

Frederic March plays the title role. His Death is stern and preemptory but also stiff and pompous as if unused to having a body of flesh and blood and wearing clothes. March does not overdo Death being taken with sensual pleasures like wine; after a sip, he says wonderingly but not too, “Already I have learned a fact of importance.” His lines are delivered deadpan, heavy with meanings given his identity. Meeting an experienced diplomat, he says, “Given your age, it’s a surprise we have not met before.”

Much of the humor is nonverbal. Death looks ever so slightly bemused as if just struck by the fact when he says, “I have something in common with doctors” and “They were such heavy drinkers that they weren’t afraid even of me.” He looks earnest and reassuring when he says of war, “Your sacred privilege of blowing each other to bits is quite safe.”

Gail Patrick glares at her rival for the Count’s attentions. She plays an engaging American rich girl, disarmingly direct. Death naively insults her, saying the wrong thing in the wrong way. Seeing he’s blown it somehow, he observes, “The Baron will be disappointed,” because the Baron taught him the main game in life was love.

One gets the feeling the budget for this movie was not all that generous. Although shot on only a couple of sets, the production avoids feeling stagey. Considering the script is based on a play, it is a little talky but not oppressively so. There’s much movement and the story goes straight and true.

I suppose with regard to theme, movie-goers could see this movie as an example of Pre-Code risk-taking. Examining issues concerning death in a buoyant fashion is not exactly an enterprise people-pleasing Hollywood is famous for. Messages are delivered, I think, indirectly, to avoid singeing movie-goers who think a frank treatment of death is tantamount to taking their granny’s death lightly. While the lessons here don’t depart from what wise people have been saying about Death for centuries, they are not on the level of greeting cards either. Only connect. Love one another. Relish the time you have, here and now.

The Kalends of Perry Mason 76

Note: Vintage mysteries can often be read as snapshots of life as it really felt to the people living it. Astute readers will find things not mentioned even in popular histories. The background to the story reviewed this month is an example of Gardner unwittingly writing the first draft of the history of the home front during WWII. The backdrop of the war adds credibility and depth to this forgotten mystery.

The Case of the Smoking Chimney  - Erle Stanley Gardner

In the early 1940s, the creator of Perry Mason wrote a pair of mysteries starring Gramps Wiggins. The first was The Case of the Turning Tide (1941) and this novel was the sequel. Gramps must have been psychic, able to anticipate the trend of the American retiree to live on the move in a trailer. Gramps is apt to show up in the driveway of his grand-daughter Milred’s house in a swanky neighborhood of a Californian small city. Milred is married to Frank Duryea, who’s the DA for Santa Delbarra County, which may be a pun on Santa Barbara.

Gardner opens the mystery by introducing the rum characters. Ralph Pressman, with sharp elbows in the oil business, is buying up leases in Santa Delbarra County. Due to the human tendency to assume the future will not be so terribly different from the present, the local farmers have figured that nobody was ever going to use the leases to extract oil. So when Pressman sinks a test well, they remember what happened to their ancestors and accordingly get nervous about being tricked and exploited and robbed of their land and livelihoods. Not above working with main-chancers as bad as Pressman, Hugh Sonders, the leader of the farmers, works with George Karper, another hardhearted opportunist in development and extraction.

Harvey Stanford is Pressman’s auditor. Young and so dumb he thinks he’s smart, he plays the casino game with a mean house edge: roulette. Inevitably he finds himself in debt to the tune of $17,000, about $300K in today’s money. His girlfriend is a “gifted amateur with commercial tendencies” Eva Raymond, who likes excitement too much for her own good (how she puts up with sitting at Harv’s side at the slow-paced roulette table is a poser; she sounds more like a gal for the craps table).

Pressman has a wife Sophie that is twenty years younger than him and feeling unloved because Pressman is cold, austere, undemonstrative, and dedicated to the pursuit of wealth and property. Pressman’s loyal secretary Jane Graven tries to hide a private eye’s report about Sophie’s cheating with young rich guy Pelly Baxter but Sophie is too ruthless for Jane and gets her mitts on the reports and the negatives of her and her Pelly doing stuff to make poor Jane blush.

Basically, the verisimilitude comes out of many believable characters having believable personal and professional agendas. Also feeling true to this scheming world is the business background of outside interests in the extraction business catching small-town folks unawares. Gardner was from a mining family and lawyered in small-town California so he was familiar with thorny legal and social issues connected with mining and oil drilling ventures.

As a character, Gramp Wiggins is as American as hot dogs in his frank manner, independent ways, humor, warmth, and friendliness. In his seventies, he’s a ball of energy, always into new enthusiasms. He’s friendly, talkative, sociable and milks information out of people in spite of their initial suspicion of his interest in the inevitable murder. Gramps treads warily, never exploiting his in-law relationship with Frank the DA.

But Frank has to be patient when Gramps horns in on the murder investigation by possibly fabricating evidence to protect somebody he likes and point Frank and the cops in the direction he thinks they should look. After all, at the next election half of the public will trash him for disloyalty if he puts a relative in jail. And the other half will trash him if he shows nepotism by not putting a relative in jail. Gardner had a good feeling for the political and social pressures small-town DA’s had to face. It’s also a change from the Mason novels to view the murder investigation from the DA/cop point of view.

In the Mason and Cool & Lam novels of the 1940s, Gardner, to my mind, was at the top of his game. But I thought without the familiar characters this would be mediocre. But this was way better than middling. The story, setting, and characterization are utterly plausible.  The humor moves the story along and Gramps provide comic relief in funny dialogues. The third-person omniscient narrator causes us to hear conversations among persons of interest, handling each other with antsy mistrust and fearing that they are being set up to be the fall guy.

Gardner was careful not to date his novels with topical references, but uncharacteristically, he dates this 1942 story by referring to wartime austerities. In the shadow of tire rationing, Gramps offers his grandson-in-law a ride to “save rubber.” To spit in the eye of rationing, foodie Gardner gives suggestions for eating magnificently. No sugar? Hotcakes with maple syrup. No flour or eggs? Strawberry shortcake. No meat? Make hash more palatable with lots of garlic.