Nigel Strangeways #14

The Worm of Death – Nicholas Blake

Cecil Day-Lewis, classics professor and poet laureate, didn't take seriously the 20 or so detective novels he wrote as Nicholas Blake. This doesn't mean they deserve their neglected status nowadays.

In this 1961 story Blake gives detailed descriptions of scene and characters. The murder story is set in Greenwich, a shabby sinister part of London at the time and we readers walk in the chill and fog along the banks of the River Thames. 

Setting up this gloomy backdrop, he also describes the melancholy Loudron family. Father Piers, a doctor, goes missing and his corpse is discovered. Devastated yet relieved by his demise are his younger daughter Rebecca who's now free to marry her boyfriend, the low class painter Walter; his son James, also a doctor, who's worried how the death will disturb his current clientele; his other son Harold, pushing businessmen with his trophy wife Sharon; and his adopted son Graham who was seen as an “old lag” (convict) by series hero PI Nigel Strangeways and his counterpart Superintendent Blount of the Yard.

Blake's realism is pretty dark in this outing. The representation of the perp chills us readers in its plausibility. Blake implies World War II still claimed victims after the cessation of hostilities in 1945.

Others by the Same Author: Click on the title to go to the review

·         A Question of Proof (1935): well-done kids

·         The Beast Must Die (1938)

·         The Smiler with the Knife (1939)

·         The Corpse in the Snowman (1941): two spontaneous kids play bit parts

·         The Dreadful Hollow (1953)

·         The Widow’s Cruise (1959): well-done kids again

·         The Private Wound (1968)

 

 

 

Seven Neurological Tales

An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales – Oliver Sacks

These essays were published in the early 1990s in magazines like The New Yorker which feature long journalism. Dr. Sacks describes strange cases of neurological problems. He investigates the history, psychology, and emotions of the patients he follows, shadowing them in the course of their everyday lives but also in extraordinary contexts like rock concerts and presentations. The paradox is that their disease, or impairment, or continuum of traits, became a piece of their identity, often benefitting their lives.

“The Case of the Colorblind Painter” tells the story of a painter who lost his ability to perceive color due to a car accident which injured the parts of the cortex that enable us to make color when we observe the world. The artist saw everything in shades of black, white, and grey. The artist reports that it took a long time for him to adjust but that he feels he can still make art in fine gradations of black, white, and grey. If nothing else, this is a story that illustrates our wonderful ability to make silk purses out of a sow’s ears.

“The Last Hippie” describes the case of Greg F. Dr. Sacks first heard of his case In 1977 when the patient  was 25 years old, living with profound memory loss. He had been heavily into LSD during the Flower Power Era but drifted in the Hare Krishna movement. The other monks thought his staring and blissed out demeanor was a sign of spiritual development but in fact Greg F. had a brain tumor that made him bland, indifferent, and incapable of conversation. He was also blind. He was unable to remember anything in detail of things that happened after 1966. He became animated when he listened to the Grateful Dead but he did not remember the next day after Sacks had taken him to a Dead concert. This story also shows the important work of music therapists.

“A Surgeon's Life” describes Dr. Carl Bennett, a Canadian general surgeon who was living with Tourette syndrome. The surgeon was able to have an outstanding career despite his tics, involuntary lunging, and testing of physical and behavioral boundaries.  However, his manifestations vanish when he is working in the OR. This story was quite astonishing, that a person could achieve so much with such a syndrome.

In “To See and Not See” Virgil is pressured by his finance to have a surgery which will restore his sight, which he lost in early childhood. He recovers his sight but he found the new sense to be deeply disconcerting because he had to learn how to relate to the world in a visual way, not the tactile, olfactory, and auditory ways he used before. Perception of distances was very hard and shadows were utterly weird for him. The emotional toll was unimaginable.

“The Landscape of His Dreams” is a biography of Franco Magnani and his fixation on his home village of Pontito in Tuscany. He seems to be able to remember down to the finest details scenes and buildings in his natal village though he was not able to visit it in many years. And when he did, boy, was he disappointed.

“Prodigies” tells about the extremely successful Stephen Wiltshire, who has lived with autism since he was about three and drawing since age five. Sacks met Wilshsire when he was but a teen, painting complex cityscapes with his photographic memory.

“An Anthropologist on Mars” is a phrase coined by Temple Grandin, an autistic woman who has found social life a real trial. She was still able to become who is a respected professor and an expert designer of humane livestock facilities and a professor at Colorado State University. The title of this essay comes from a phrase Grandin uses to describe how she often feels in social interactions. Since this article she became a celebrated figure, known for her educational efforts to open up people’s minds about those who think in different ways.

An amazing book, probably Sacks at his very best in writing up case studies.

Movie: The Flaming Urge

The Flaming Urge: 1953 – B&W – 68 minutes

After a middle-aged narrator opens the movie with a stern admonition to not judge by appearances alone, the 20-year-old main character, Tom Smith (Harold Lloyd, Jr.) pipes up with his voice-over.  He says of himself, “I never seem to have a choice.” Born that way, he is a pyrophiliac, or in the expression used by the chasers themselves, a sparker – a person who derives gratification from burning buildings and the action of putting fires out. Compelled to chase fires whenever he hears sirens, he describes the condition as a curse since fire-chasing interferes with work and social life. Being suspected in a series of arson fires would mess daily life up too, one imagines.

But wait a minute. His clothes are especially neat and tidy. He wears flamboyant bowties – so conspicuous that an older man doodles them.  He has a flair for design and uses fabric creatively. His manners are very smooth and polished. He fawns over dogs, almost embarrassing them. He gets along swimmingly with older women.  He doesn’t pick up that young women are interested in him. He is awkward with the guys in the pool hall. His compulsion has forced him to move from town to town. An older man – the doodler – recognizes somebody else born that way and together they indulge their impulses to rush to fires.  Wait a darn minute – this movie is about what they used to call “The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.”

So as a period piece, the film is worth watching for the reaction of the townspeople to Tom's, uh, flaming urge.  When people find out, they feel only mildly nonplussed and want to help him with advice.  The older women, of course, want to fix him up with a girlfriend. The would-be girlfriend (Cathy Downs, hubba hubba) seeks suggestions to help Tom from a psych major who works in a stockroom. He says responsibility – i.e., marriage between a man and a woman – usually breaks the hold compulsive fancies exert over the sensitive and shilly-shallying.

Other touches make this forgotten movie exceptionally curious. It was shot in Monroe, Michigan, which can’t get more authentically small town (Toledo is the next stop of the bus that drops him off, another genuine touch).  The townspeople are types: the motherly middle-aged women, the gruff older men, the boisterous guys, the jaunty suitors, the smart girls that want to get the hell out of town before it buries them.

All in all, a movie worth watching for its unusual treatment of a topic from which movies usually stayed away.

The Ides of Perry Mason 53

Note: On the 15^th of every month for way too many years now this space has presented an article related to Our Favorite Lawyer. But I have resolved to run reviews of the Cool and Lam novels that Erle Stanley Gardner wrote under his pen name.

The Bigger They Come - A. A. Fair

This smart, fast-paced mystery from 1939 was the first of 30 novels starting the private eye team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. They are a study in contrasts. Bertha is large, loud, abrasive, and shrewd. Donald is small, subtle, and quick-witted. Bertha is a hard-charging penny-pincher and doesn’t care she’s in a business chock full of male lunkheads on both sides of the law. Donald is an ex-lawyer, disbarred for ethical violations by the persnickety bar association in California. Bertha and Donald are both devious and mean. As for unscrupulous, Donald is, a little, and Bertha is too, a whole lot.

With no qualifications except knowledge of the law, a way with people, and cleverness, Donald is hired by Bertha as an operative. His first assignment seems straight-forward enough: locate a missing husband and serve divorce papers on him. Going beyond the call of duty, however, he gets that job done by disguising himself as a bellboy. Though Bertha warns him not to obtain a gun, he gets one anyway but the weapon ends up being the gun that killed a police detective in Kansas City. A brunette falls in love with him and we read a hot make-out scene we’d never find in a Perry Mason novel. It’s a busy first-day at work indeed.

There are two set-pieces that the reader feels Gardner wanted to get off his chest. After he serves the papers, Donald is kidnapped by gangsters and worked over brutally though they are careful not to break anything in the way of teeth or bones. Donald impresses them with his courageous refusal to spill. As the beating was only business, nothing personal, they help him clean up, give him some clean clothes, and give him a ride to his rooming house. A mug gives him advice on how to fight in a “voice holding a note of impersonal boredom as though he’d been softening people until it had become a routine chore, and he felt aggrieved about being called upon to perform it after five o’clock.” Gardner wrote for pulps so one feels in a novel he had the urge to stretch out and portray gangsters less as ravening beasts in human guise and more as professionals just getting on with a job.

Gardner may have been consciously blowing up stereotypes with the characterization of Bertha Cool. For instance, our heroes locate the house where Donald was beaten. The crime boss figures they show up to exact revenge. Bertha demonstrates her unladylike callousness:

“Nuts,” Mrs. Cool said. “We’re not wasting time over that. You beat him up — it’s good for him — toughen him up some. Beat him up again if you want to, only don’t leave him so he can’t go to work at eight-thirty in the morning. I don’t give a damn how he spends his evenings.”

Another set piece the reader feels Gardner felt impelled to write involves Donald’s run-in with the police and a deputy district attorney which results in him being jailed for a couple of days. Suffice to say, while Gardner felt that citizens should cooperate with the police when the situation calls for collaboration, he also thought that taxpayers ought to have no illusions about overbearing cops, police abuses, interrogators’ fatherly tones, prosecutorial misconduct, and civic corruption. In many of his novels he reminds us not to talk to the police without legal representation. The minders of the criminal justice system have done what they do with persons of interest hundreds of times; the little guy like us persons of interest has never mixed with the cops. Who holds the winning cards in this situation?

Anyway, in the somewhat breathless final third of the novel Lam dramatically proves his original hypothesis that it is possible to legally get away with murder by using himself as an experimental subject and the guardians of the criminal justice system as research assistants. This true-to-life loophole in California law was not shut tight until 1966.

Told in Donald’s lively first-person voice, this story has the elements of pulp fiction but not noir fiction. Noir fiction has psychological elements of distress and self-loathing which are not in evidence in this story. It took World War II, the most destructive war in history, for noir to get as jittery and alienated as In a Lonely Place. The violence of the beating scene in this novel is not sociopathic, but played very dryly, as all in a day’s work.

More than in the manner of Perry Mason tales, the tone of Cool and Lam novels is hard-boiled in the sense that characters and readers too are assumed to be tough-minded, clear-eyed, unsentimental and cynical, wise to the world of hard knocks the Depression made, one where you had to be thick-skinned and mean.

Reading Those Classics #19

Classic Action Thriller: Desmond Bagley was only 59 when he passed away in 1983. Trained as a journalist, his lucid writing and meticulous research made his action novels best-sellers in the twenty years after 1963. Readers that like Hammond Innes and Victor Canning will like Bagley.

Landslide - Desmond Bagley

Bob Boyd wakes up after a car accident in 1957. He can’t remember anything personal. The little he is told indicates that he was hardly a model citizen. Boyd, whose cosmetic surgery gave him a new face, is keeping himself to himself, so to speak.

Luckily, he can remember knowledge and skill in his field of geology. So for the next 10 years he is able to make a living working temp consultant jobs in British Columbia in order to finance his solo trips into the Northwest Territory to go prospecting. Living on little money with few possessions has helped him forge an identity that readers like in an action hero:  resourceful, disciplined, and confident.

In 1967, he returns to the little town of Fort Farrell, in northeastern British Columbia. It is located near the scene of the crash that caused his memory loss. Fort Farrell is run by the Matterson Corporation, founded by father Bull who provides guidance that can’t be ignored and managed day to day by his heir Howard. They hire our hero Boyd to survey a valley soon to be inundated by a new dam. The Matterson Corporation wants to make sure they are not covering any opportunities for mineral extraction.

The more Boyd finds out about the Matterson father and son, the less he likes them. He doesn’t cotton to the unjust way they run Fort Farrell. And he is troubled by their ruthless erasing of the memory of their business partner John Trinavant and his family who were killed in the crash that cost Boyd his memory.

Readers that like the age-old story in which a stranger comes to town and shakes things up in the name of fairness and keeping faith with the past will find much to like as Boyd gives a kick to the shaky foundations of the Matterson empire. Boyd strikes up an alliance with the comely Claire Trinavant, niece of nearly forgotten John, which is lucky since it gives Boyd a more plausible motive for shaking things up than truth and justice. Rich, attractive, kind, smart and liking the outdoor life – what more could a hero in an action novel ask of a romantic partner?

Don’t let the iffy plot device of amnesia put you off. I assure the prospective reader that amnesia really works, unlike a coma, a bumbling police chief or an Evil Twin. The plot twists unfold at a brisk pace. The action is gripping. There are excellent surprises. This is not the best-known of Bagley’s many novels but I think it is well-worth reading. And how often do we read a thriller set in remote Canada?

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
Classic Abandoned: Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
Classic Set in France: Maigret’s Patience – Georges Simenon
Classic English Mystery: Hallowe’en Party – Agatha Christie
Classic Set in Ye Olde Teashoppe Englande: Road to Rhuine - Simon Troy
Classic Set in Working Class England: Living - Henry Green
Very Long Classic: Moment in Peking - Lin Yutang

Inspector Montalbano #15

The Dance of the Seagull – Andrea Camilleri

A police procedural, like a well-worn Sicilian trattoria, thrives on familiarity: the same harbor, the same voices, the same ritual gestures. But longevity breeds a peculiar challenge - how to keep the wine from turning flat. In his latest outing, Andrea Camilleri doesn’t quite conjure rabbits from the hat, though the story hums with tension.

Giuseppe Fazio, Montalbano’s taciturn lieutenant, goes semi-undercover, burrowing into a smuggling ring at Vigata’s port. The plot leans hardboiled, its criminal machinery powered by an improbable alliance of sworn enemies. A single scene - a coercive exchange with a nurse - lands with a thud, a lapse of taste in an otherwise taut narrative. And, as often in thrillers, the ending sprints past plausibility.

After a decade of reading these novels, I wonder if the series now exists partly in my imagination - its cadences, its comforting refrains (“Chief, Chief!”) mingling with my own moods. Sometimes I crave Camilleri the craftsman of puzzles; sometimes Camilleri the sly metafictionist. Here, he tips his hand: Salvo and Livia debate whether the TV actor resembles the “real” inspector, a wink across the fourth wall.

But the most resonant theme is age. At fifty-seven, Montalbano feels the undertow of time. His emotions, once buttoned-down, surge closer to the surface. The book opens with a dying seagull staggering on the beach - a tableau that pitches him into melancholy - and closes with a murder so brutal it leaves him gutted. Yet his shrewdness endures; reason and passion still fuse in the hunt, exposing the usual brutes to daylight.

Across twenty-eight novels, Camilleri has kept the series supple without betraying its essence. This time, originality falters. Still, I’ll keep reading. Because in Vigata, even predictability tastes of salt and sun - and of something like home.

Movie: Kung Fu Arts

Kung Fu Arts: 1980 / Color / 88 minutes

The generic title gives no sense that this Taiwan movie has elements of Chinese traditional fairy tale, historical costume drama, and jungle movie. It’s also misleading since it has precious little kung fu and what little there is is ho-hum. Does anything recommend it? Well, as a guy who sees redeeming features in movies everybody seems to dislike – Robert Altman’s Popeye and Donny DeVito’s Death to Smoochy spring to mind --  I will give it a try.

The female lead, who plays a princess, is wonderful to look it. Her face is loving, tender, determined, smart, patient – a face one could look at all day. Too bad I can’t figure out what her stage name is. After a series of untoward events, decreed of course by fate, the princess is compelled to marry a monkey. The scene of the wedding between the princess and the monkey is played straight but is so achingly silly I laughed so much I like to broke a rib.

The scene where she and the lucky chimp-husband leave town on a boat is nicely shot, with vibrant colors and costumes, and is wonderfully sad and moving. Really, far beyond the usual melodramatic, operatic treatment of emotion in a kung fu movie. If about thirty seconds of film is persuasive enough and beautiful enough to see it, go for it.

Anyway, time goes by and the princess bears a man-child. The implications are staggering enough – the wedding night doesn’t bear thinking about. You can’t imagine any father anywhere bringing himself to even ask the question but the father of the boy asks, “He moves and climbs like a monkey. Am I the father of the boy or is it the monkey?”

High tolerance for slapstick will be a must. In an outhouse, a guard’s bare butt is bitten by a monkey, which causes him to flee in terror, yelling, “He’s bitten off my wedding tackle.” Noting the Australian slang, I should add that the voices of the various guards and hangers-on talk working-class Australian, which seem riotously appropriate to the characters.

Another funny scene is when the king’s men are begging on their knees, imploring an escaping monkey to return a banner. The monkey is billed as “Sida, the French Monkey Star.” I can only figure that it’s a sordid world where we can figure out the real name of Uncle Monkey, but not that of the human female lead.

So, the lack of fighting will not please fans of real kung fu movies. The lack of good acting and sensible story will not please movie fans with standards. I liked it for the princess, the lame jokes, the costuming, the sets, and the spirit of fantastical nonsense that permeates the production.