Dr. Blow & Professor Manciple #1

She Died Because… - Kenneth Hopkins

Eighty-one-year-old Doctor of English Letters William Blow looks up from his scholarly endeavors over Samuel Butler’s burlesque polemic Hudibras. Blow realizes that it is 3 o’clock – morning or afternoon, he isn’t quite sure – and decides to ask his housekeeper, Mrs. Solihull, to rustle him up some lunch. He finds her, however, in her room lying on her rug.

Lest people get the wrong idea, Blow fetches his seventy-nine-year-old friend, Professor Gideon Manciple. Gideon notes that she has a knife in her back.

Thus a professor of English and a professor of numismatology dodder their way into a murder investigation. Blow’s absent-mindedness and Manciple’s craftiness bedevil the official police including Superintendent Urry, Constable Poindexter, Inspector Elkins and Sergeant Wix. All of the characters are comic in their own unique way. English majors and readers who like the erudite mysteries of Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake will find exchanges like this a hoot:

… Blow put in, “I very often hear her singing through the wall. 

“Singing through the wall? 

“Through the wall, singing. Dear me, how pedantic you policemen are.”

The quiet ways, impracticality and unworldliness of the two unlikely sleuths afford them protection against the bad guys. Very funny are their forays into the worlds of burglary, fencing, and sex work. I recommend this comic mystery to readers looking for a break from mayhem and angst or those that need a fix of veddy hardcore Britishness. The books are violence-free, and cruelty-free (unlike Innes), and angst-free (unlike Blake).

Dr. Blow and Professor Manciple starred in two other detective novels Dead Against My Principles (1960) and Body Blow (1962). Hector Kenneth Hopkins was born in 1914 and also wrote as Christopher Adams. This forgotten classic from 1957 was one of the The Perennial Library mystery series published in 1984 by Harper & Row.

The Ides of Perry Mason 50

On the 15th of every month, we run something related to Our Favorite Lawyer. This novel was made into an episode in late 1957 and features a beautiful 1957 Ford Thunderbird.

The Case of the One-Eyed Witness – Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1950 Perry Mason mystery opens with so much antique Americana that we cynics wonder if a young author is mining notes of all the noir movies they’ve seen. Movie theaters full on week-nights, pharmacy soda fountains, nickels for a pay-phone, and an LA night club with a live orchestra, a floor show, a hat-check girl, a photograph girl, and a cigarette girl. People sport retro names like Clark, Carlton, Medford, Myrtle, and Arthman. They use retro expressions: “in a blue funk,” “thimblerig,” “look all over hell’s half acre,” and “You’ve got a lot of crust to….” Everybody smokes; in fact, Mason smokes Raleighs.

It’s not all cheesy nostalgia. Lawyer Mason and PI Paul Drake’s investigation uncovers a racket in human trafficking, a problem that has hardly gone away. They also expose a con that depends on the mark’s racism and fear of discrimination, two sides of injustice still among us. The criminal justice problems Gardner underlines plague us yet, particularly confirmation bias on the part of cops, improper police procedures, eyewitness misidentification and misinterpretation of circumstantial evidence by prosecutors.

A Perry Mason story constitutes comfort reading because though the DA appears to hold all the trumps, the reader has no doubt about the outcome. We long-time Perry fans know three things as sure as eggs. 

Perry’s clients act foolishly by sitting on facts even with their lawyer and talking to the cops without a lawyer present. However, Perry assumes they are innocent of first-degree murder so he can be counted on to fight for a fair trial, especially when the breaks are going against his clients.  Perry feels such commitment to the truth that he will not suppress, conceal, or distort any of the actual evidence. 

Gardner had his plot wheels and formulas, heaven knows, but in this one, to keep things interesting for himself and hardcore fans like us who've read them all, he prevents Mason from knowing who his client is for more than half the book. More dubious, he lets the readers keep in the dark as to who certain people are until late in the novel. Still, I have no reservations recommending this classic.

Reading Those Classics #13

Classic Abandoned. When this novel was released in 1973, the buzz it created was so loud and the cover so amazing that I, a dewy teenager, tried reading it. I got that it was about the absurdity of war, a hot topic during the Vietnam era. But I had to set it down, queasily unable to get past the part where Slothrop is fetching his harmonica which has fallen into a toilet. In the early Eighties, I took another plunge and got that is was about the obscenity of war. Only to set it down again after the coprophagia scene.

Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon

"All great literature," said Leo Tolstoy, "is one of two stories: a stranger comes to town or a man goes on a journey.” This massive novel presents both. Our hero Tyrone Slothrop is an American in Europe and he goes on a quest to find a key.

What key? Pynchon, in a rare lenient moment of lucidity, has a character speculate, “Somewhere, among the wastes of the World, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our Freedom.” I think the writer is referring to a root of suffering, the craving that believes in the existence of pure universal truth and the re-establishment of the original state in which human beings lived in accordance with nature. In the weak moments when we’ve forgotten everything that we’ve read, we kid ourselves with the nostalgia for a past in which ordinary human beings were brave, wise, and temperate and their leaders fatherly, just, and benevolent. Long ago, back in the garden, times were stable, peaceful, prosperous. This illusion is a needless cause of distress and suffering that had better be rooted out.

On a quest our hero Tyrone Slothrop is trying to find keys to unlock the pure truth concerning two big questions, one personal and one scientific and technical. His search in France and Germany near the end of WWII and the early days of the 1945 peace contradicts the notion of a quest having a destination. Slothrop covers many miles but doesn’t seem to get anywhere. The search is not straight to the center of the labyrinth, because the author adopts - not explicitly, but we realize it only as we read on and on, compelled by our fascination with the writer’s strange use of words - the technique of deliberate misdirection that defies the reader to analyze. He zig-zags the quest under an endless accumulation of content, extracted from the most disparate cultural veins - from Hollywood musicals to research in organizational behavior; from slapstick to comics; from pornography to sheer Sixties doping and sexing and yelling “War! What is it good for? Absolutely. Nothing.”

Our hero Tyrone Slothrop is not the only one on the quest to find a key to big questions. Various paranoid followers of conspiracy theories think that through their own research they will find the key that explains the convoluted operations hatched by evil-doing multi-national corporations. Titans, managers and minions are motivated exclusively by capital’s thirst for hegemonic power and ecstatic experiences fueled by exotic drugs and weird sex, neither of which, one suspicions, are salutary with prolonged use or particularly useful in finding the key.

Paranoid explanations must explain everything. They begin with the assumption that everything – everything in Creation! - is connected. Though young in the early 1970s, I remember some people being plugged into the idea that something could always stand for something else – an LSD-laced notion, that – and that the whole system is One – whatever that implies - could be explained because everything is interwoven and everything changes with everything.

Great! How does knowing everything merges from one into another help me to cajole the dog out of her snit when she realizes she’s not going a trip with me this time?

When I was a kid, a puzzle I worked on was a 1000-piece merging of Jackson Pollock’s Convergence. I remember looking at the pieces so closely that I felt dizzy and had a sense of disorientation. This is the feeling I had for about two-thirds of this novel, a really crazy mixture of history, systems and game theory, behaviorist psychology, ethnography, natural sciences, applied mathematics and a little engineering with generous doses of the surreal, the grotesque, the ironic and the erotic.

The one-third that I readily understood was his masterly descriptions of things that he makes the reader see, hear, smell, touch and taste. Pynchon must have travelled in Northern Germany to get Baltic water, light, sand, rock and pine so right. His depiction of disorder and squalor is right up there with Dickens in Bleak House. The scene of Slothrop eating the vile English candies is as funny as it is disgusting (go to an Asian food market and get a selection of candy to learn there are lots of different ways to approach “sweet,” some of them wildly implausible to a palate that grew up eating Hershey’s).

To my dismay, Pynchon uses lots of schoolboy humor relative to woman’s body as sextoy, which was very much of a time I remember, the raunchy early Seventies, the era of porn chic, lots of casual tossing around of the c-word. Feminists of the time pointed out Pynchon’s female characters were usually mere objects of male fantasy or bit players in men’s theatricals. I daresay this novel isn’t much read in our more enlightened era due to its misogyny. Just by the way, the tender narration of Roger Mexico and Jessica’s love affair - it really is beautiful - doesn’t make easier to take the pedophilia scene and the antagonism to same-sex sexuality either.

Now that I’ve experienced both I can say with confidence, like the Seventies itself, Pynchon’s technique has with long and short stretches where nearly nothing makes any sense. Lots of readers will find the unintelligibility off-putting. Me, I used to provide grammatical make-overs to technical articles in English written by non-native speakers of English so I'm used to not getting meaning out of texts. And I lived through the Seventies, such a nutty time that Americans decided to sleepwalk through the Eighties. 

The novel, therefore, is not really something where I’m going to read it and note down my analytical observations and even venture to detail the footprints on my soul Pynchon has left, as if you would understand or even be interested. This novel is a unique reading experience, like The Sound and the Fury or Manhattan Transfer. What will stick to a reader’s imagination and memory and intellect is decidedly subjective, impossible to predict. The reader just has to dive in, focus, engage the little grey cells, and let herself take her own personal mental tour, coming across passages shining like stars or smelling like turds from a dog on cheap chow.

At the least I know, after abandoning this classic twice, older now, with the literal scars to prove it, I’m tough enough to finish it. Nothing good comes easy.

Click on the title to go to the review.

Prize Winning Classic: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

Classic Novella: Old Man – William Faulkner

Classic Epistolary Novel: Augustus – John Williams

Classic Comic Novel: Thank you, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

Classic Short Stories: New York Stories – John O’Hara

Classic Air Pilot Memoir: Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic Set in the Big Apple: Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos

Classic 19th Century Novel: Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite – Anthony Trollope

Classic Police Procedural: Wolf to Slaughter – Ruth Rendell

Classic War Memoir: Flight to Arras - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic American Mystery: Might as Well Be Dead - Rex Stout

Classic Courtroom Drama: A Woman Named Anne – Henry Cecil

John Putnam Thatcher #24

A Shark out of Water – Emma Lathen

This mystery has a unique setting: Gdansk, Poland, in the in the post-Soviet 1990s. It also has a unique victim: a terror technocrat.

Stefan Zebriski wields expert knowledge of all things shipping in the Baltic. He provides useful information for his superiors in BADA, the Baltic Area Development Association, a grouping of the 10 countries on the Baltic Sea. But he’s a terror in that he gives advice on policy to the policy-makers. The idealistic advice is unwelcome and so is his stepping out of his lane to give it.  He’s also passionate so when he finds out about fraud going in his beloved BADA, he lets people know his suspicions. But before he can provide any details, he is battered to death with a tire iron in the BADA parking lot.

Colonel Oblonski, a Polish police detective, investigates the murder. Oblonski is out of his comfort zone when it comes to dealing with bureaucrats and diplomats in non-governmental organizations. So he comes to depend on consultations with series hero John Putnam Thatcher of Sloan Guaranty Trust, the third largest bank in the world. Thatcher is joined in Poland by his Sloan colleague Everett Gabler, who is satirized as a detail-obsessed Puritan who enjoys funerals.

Emma Lathen was the pen name of Mary Jane Latsis (1927-97), an economist, and Martha Hennisart (1929 - ), a lawyer. They co-wrote 24 novels featuring John Putnam Thatcher and seven novels starring a Congressman-sleuth under the pseudonym R.B. Dominic. Each Thatcher story is set in an industry providing a unique product or service such as fast food, nursery plants, clothing, cars, or Catholic schools. This novel in fact was last novel because no more books came after Latsis’ passing in 1997. Though the business environment has changed in the last 30 years, their message that good managers must combine knowledge of money with people skills is still as true as ever.

It's Worse than Forty Fights

Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond - Sonia Shah

The author takes cholera, an acute diarrheal illness, as her starting point because, like the bubonic plague, influenza, smallpox, HIV and you-know, it has caused pandemics. Writing this book in 2017 – i.e., before our first-hand experience - she points out in the recent past we have seen over 300 infectious pathogens emerge or re-emerge, like ebola, dengue fever, middle east respiratory syndrome, and – surprise! - novel coronaviruses.

Cholera really messes us people up by drawing fluid out of us. We dehydrate to death. About 1 in 10 people whom cholera sickens will develop the severe symptoms of watery diarrhea, vomiting, and leg cramps. In these people, the rapid loss of body fluids leads to dehydration and shock. Without treatment, death can occur within hours. As in the 1918 influenza, a person can be fine in the morning and dead by the evening. If not treated right away, it will kill half the people who catch it.  Cholera caused seven pandemics in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

How does a microbe become a pathogen that causes pandemics? When we enter wildlife habitats, we come into contact with novel viruses. The viruses jump into our bodies where they become pathogenic. The history of cholera illustrates this path. A marine bacterium, it lived peacefully in estuaries, swamps and wetlands, perfect to grow alongside planktons. When these environments were disturbed in India in the 19^th century, people had contact with the cholera in the environment. People using modern transport – ships, canals, trains – then spread it all over the world.

We are still invading wild habitat with farms, mines, and suburban development. Deforestation in West Africa lead directly to an outbreak of ebola in 2014. We have lost diverse bird species in North America because of loss of habitat. Robins and crows have taken over. Unfortunately they are efficient carriers of West Nile virus. In 1999 in New York City, we had the first big outbreak when it spilled over into humans. The loss of opossum and chipmunks, who eat the ticks that try to feed of them, due to suburbanization has lead to the increase of tick-borne diseases like Lyme disease.

Modern transportation increases the risk of pandemics. The Erie Canal, in fact, helped spread cholera by connecting waterways into a highway of infection. In the 19^th century prosperous cities like New York City and Paris had no sewage system. So cholera entered the ground water and made thousands of people sick. Her narrative of the filth of New York City in the 1830s beggars description. Though I have no idea how such a thing can be measured, historians claim that the average New Yorker of the time ingested about two teaspoons of fecal matter.

A day.

The crowding of modern urbanization too helps spread epidemics. In the 1830s the crowding in cities created a huge sanitary crisis. People coming off the land to New York City just used their traditional pooping practices. Cesspools and outhouses were untreated and there were no rules as to how they were cleaned or maintained. Cholera exploded over and over again in New York City. Terrible things happened in the early 1830s as mobs went crazy against Irish workers and doctors were stoned in the street. But the rich and powerful lobbied against measures to combat cholera.

What do we do to contain these outbreaks? Before vaccines and medications were developed to deal with infectious disease, we changed land use policies, dam construction, housing practices, and moved rural people out of poverty. People put screens on their windows. Cities had campaigns to get people to mop up or drain standing water so malaria mosquitoes could not breed.

But from around 1940 when drugs were developed the establishment went over to a biomedical model of fighting contagion.  We figured we would throw drugs at diseases to make them go away when people got sick. But vaccines are not sufficient. Dengue fever broke out in Florida because the foreclosure crisis had lead to many abandoned houses which meant swimming pools and gardens filled with standing water. They become giant breeding grounds for mosquitoes which spread dengue. The biomedical approach failed and now dengue fever in endemic in Florida.

So now we are looking a growth of new pathogens, spreading quickly, untreatable diseases. Most of human beings will live in cities in about 10 years. Millions will live in slums in impoverished parts of the world. Ebola will tear through cities with millions of people. Zika will take advantage of huge populations in dense conditions too.

The author says we need to engage in political and social causes for pandemics. Reading this book’s dark predictions about the future is scary, especially in light of our recent sad bitter experience and how it contributed to our environment filled with our otherwise smart relatives, co-workers, and neighbors that “believe in” the “plandemic hidden agendas” and “rushed through vaccines” on account of they did “their own research.”

 

Reading Those Classics #12

Classic Courtroom Drama. The legal drama a.k.a courtroom drama can be a classic involving moral questions such To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Compulsion (1956), or Inherit the Wind (1960). But elements of the courtroom drama can also be more sensational as in a mystery such as Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Gardner’s Perry Mason novels.

A Woman Named Anne – Henry Cecil

This 1967 mystery hinges not on murder but on adultery. In a divorce case, the title character is accused of consensual sex with Michael Amberley, the husband of unhappy wife Jane. The main thread of the novel narrates the cross-examination between widow Mrs. Anne Preston and the barrister Mr. Coventry, conducted to ascertain whether or not she engaged in amatory pleasures in a hotel room and in a parked car with Mr. Amberley.

This is always entertaining even though the reader might doubt that a single cross-examination will sustain a full-length novel. Cecil’s crystal-clear prose uses everyday vocabulary and grammar so smoothly that the book is a pleasure to read. His humor is gently cynical as if his years of observing the antics ordinary people get up to have taught him to be skeptical and tolerant. Cecil has the ability to surprise in abundance, making his plot twists wonderful. For these reasons, the story is un-put-down-able.

In fact, however, Cecil does introduce a few diverting digressions. The omniscient narrator gives interesting and funny backstory on the unhappy couple and the barrister Coventry who finds Anne’s beauty distracting. The characterization of the titular character is the glue that holds the story together; he makes us feel sorry for her though, along with most of the other characters, we doubt her veracity.

A county court judge himself, Cecil gives insight into how judges think and why they “win" virtually every exchange with attorneys. Cecil also explains aspects of the British legal system that may confuse lay observers. He discusses why, given the vagaries of the legal system and its practitioners, we should expect justice only about 75% of the time. In curious aside we can apply generally, he discusses the necessity of not being a worrier for judges and legal professionals.

So, while this is not a conventional mystery novel, it still has the elements of a courtroom thriller and keeps our attention till the very last page. Highly recommended for vacations or situations where light but engaging stories are needed.

Click on the title to go to the review.

Prize Winning Classic: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

Classic Novella: Old Man – William Faulkner

Classic Epistolary Novel: Augustus – John Williams

Classic Comic Novel: Thank you, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

Classic Short Stories: New York Stories – John O’Hara

Classic Air Pilot Memoir: Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic Set in the Big Apple: Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos

Classic 19th Century Novel: Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite – Anthony Trollope

Classic Police Procedural: Wolf to Slaughter – Ruth Rendell

Classic War Memoir: Flight to Arras - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Classic American Mystery: Might as Well Be Dead - Rex Stout

Movie: My Brain was Handcuffed

Fear in the Night

1947 / 73 minutes

Tagline: Last night I dreamed I KILLED a man!...I DIDN'T WANT TO DO IT, BUT...MY BRAIN WAS HANDCUFFED!

The screenwriter based this early noir movie on a short story by William Irish, the pen-name of Cornell Woolrich, of Rear Window and The Bride Wore Black fame. Woolrich had a knack for writing strange, scary crime stories set in a world of cruelty, revenge, greed, and violence.

So, a young DeForrest Kelly (Bones on Star Trek 20 years later) has a bad dream in which he kills a guy with an awl. The next morning, he freaks out when he notices thumb marks on his throat, blood on his wrist and in his pocket a key that he doesn’t recognize. He takes his story and evidence to his homicide detective brother-in-law, played by Paul Kelly. The down-to-earth in-law snarls and scoffs and warns him not to tell goofy stories and upset his pregnant sister.

However, as events unfold, we find the nightmare comes true. I’ve not read much Woolrich, but my impression is that Woolrich has knack for making the outlandish all too plausible in his fiction. Recall the scene in Rear Window when Jeff (James Stewart) persuades Lisa (Grace Kelly) that Thorwald (Raymond Burr) has probably knocked off his wife. Once Lisa opens her mind, the possibility that what happens only to other people is happening right across the courtyard grows into a frightening probability. This movie has a plot device that requires us to suspend much belief, but once we do, it makes sense. Kinda sorta.

For me, in noir, the voice-overs rarely satisfy, but I like the lack of polish that comes with the territory in B movies. Produced on a very low-budget, the movie has a technical crudeness that hard-core fans of early noir – like me -- will savor.

In his first movie role, Kelly is just okay, somewhat histrionic. This is probably just confirmation bias on my part, but I thought it odd how his Bones McCoy persona already seems in place. That is, his character is smart, warm, compassionate but impressionable and tightly strung. Easy to influence, his character finds himself, like a typical noir character, doing things totally against his own best interests, for reasons he can’t understand himself, much less control.

The older and more experienced actor Paul Kelly was much more impressive. The scene of him reading Bones the riot act has a lot of power; his character’s latent angry aggression bursts out in a genuinely menacing way. Born in 1911 in Brooklyn, Kelly was a movie actor from the age of 11, a silent-era child-star even before Jackie Coogan. In the late Twenties, he did two years and a month in Q on a manslaughter conviction; Kelly, six-foot and a light heavyweight, “put [another actor] in a headlock and bashed him in the face six or seven times” so the victim later died of a brain hemorrhage. The year after he made this movie he won a Tony Award for Best Actor in Command Decision. 

I’d recommend this one only to serious fans of noir or people who still get that kiddish thrill out of watching shoddy old movies on a black and white TV.