Dr. Mary Finney #4

Murder at the Flea Club – Mathew Head

By the year 1957 The Flea Club has found itself a hot Paris night spot. This story isn’t more crowded than the usual country-house mystery. Despite the large cast, I had no problem keeping who’s who straight.

Still, I got the feeling yet that this is an over-crowded mystery because the characters don’t have a lot to do except talk. And talk. And talk some more. For instance, an American “confirmed bachelor,” probably with his hand stereotypically on his hip, artlessly prattles like this:

Have you been downstairs, Hoopy? .... Well do go! I mean the place is simply fantastic, these utterly tremendous holes, right in the middle of the clubroom, and the most tremendous piles of dirt. Really quite picturesque and too too archaeological! So intellectual, is the way I feel about it, so un-Flea Club. But good, you know, really good. The Institute's been taking pictures, if you can imagine. I mean it - the Institute! Ninth century if it's a day, Professor Johnson says. Can you imagine?

This tedium is worsened by Head’s choice to narrate half the novel as Hooper’s recounting the last couple days’ action to Dr. Mary Finney. Like the flamboyant bachelor above, the reporting seems to go on and on. Besides it’s too unbelievable that Hooper would remember conversations word for word, like Archie Goodwin does the verbatim thing for Nero Wolfe. By the scene in which they plan to gather all the suspects in a room, I was relieved and grateful.

On the positive side, Head uses language skillfully. He’s memorable at describing sounds (“She put both hands in front of her face and made unlovely burbling sounds”) and colors (“Freddy’s face turned into shrimp-colored blubber and began to vibrate”). Better, he’s funny as when Hooper and the teenager go on a date, the girl acts abstractedly: "I was proud to be with such a pretty girl, but if anybody tried to figure us out they must have thought either that we had had a lovers' quarrel, or been married a little too long. Or maybe they just thought we were English."

I gather that four-book series hero Dr. Mary Finney’s usual locale was the Congo. So maybe the writer felt wobbly away from the familiar setting. Plus, this was the last novel in the series so maybe the earlier ones are better. Head is a good enough writer that I will try an earlier book in the series if it falls in my lap.

Reading Those Classics #16

Classic Short Stories set in The Middle Ground. 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 Wasteland, etc.

The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

The reviews below cover the first half of the fifth section, The Middle Ground. These stories star characters managing the liminal spaces, dealing with life’s transitions, adapting or not. Mostly not.

Wash. The title character is a poor white handy-man that feels connection with the cavaliers who “set the order and the rule of living” and went to war in the North to preserve their way of life. Not going to the war himself because he felt he had to take care of his own family, Wash put up with derision and mockery even from the enslaved. Wash had accepted as given that his white superiors really were gallant, proud, and brave. But Wash discovers that "the chosen best among them" were just evil braggarts who saw Wash and his kind – and Wash’s own family - as less than human. So disabused of his old meanings Wash decides that life makes no sense and does the old ultra-violence for which Faulkner is notorious. A powerful story of loss.

Honor. In this ironically titled tale, the WWI pilot that we met in Ad Astra, Buck Monaghan, is having a rocky post-war career, never holding a job for more than three weeks. He has ended up in the silly entertainment job of barnstorming. You would also think that the simple rule of honor says, “Don’t take up with anybody else’s wife” would be easy enough to follow. But, no. You would also think that a wing-walker would not take up with the wife of his pilot since the pilot could easily fix the wing-walker’s wagon but good. But, no. I mean, where would literature be if everybody acted sensibly, honorably? We’d have a literature of uplifting stories. Yuck.

Dr. Martino. A widow and her daughter meet an ailing doctor every summer at a spa in northern Mississippi. The doctor takes an interest in the fatherless girl and wants to get across to her the idea, "When you are afraid to do something you know that you are alive. But when you are afraid to do what you are afraid of you are dead." To beat fear, she does things like swim in snake-infested rivers, which of course scares her mom brickless. The story is narrated by a young man still too conceited to be sensible that even an alluring girl may have plans for herself that don’t revolve around oil-rich Yale men. He wants to marry the girl so he forms an alliance with the fearful mother to pull the reins in on the girl. Another story about the trapped female, like the shuttlecock girl in The Good Soldier, powerless to escape other people who are oblivious as to what the trapped female might want for herself.

Fox Hunt. This 1931 story is not connected to the world of Yoknapatawpha and is a Post-Depression acerbic look at the Roaring 1920s. It’s an examination of the degenerate ways of rich people from the point of view of their minions and hangers-on. Nobody remains unsullied by money, power, property, flattery, attention, the best tables. Harrison Blair is an Oklahoma Osage, a member of the band who were in the 1920s the richest group of people per capita in the world. Oil that is, black gold. Made rich by Texas tea, he is so fallen, so without values of either culture he’s between, that he brutally dispatches a fox just because his redheaded wife (another trapped female) is attracting attention from another man.

Pennsylvania Station. What could be ground more central than the majestic railroad station in New York City? And what more ironic than two homeless men soon to be driven from a warm waiting room in the majestic symbol of the city of business? The two down and out men, one young and one old, talk about the older man’s nephew. The uncle is an unrelatable narrator in the sense that he seems not to have tumbled to the fact that his nephew (“not bad, just wild as young men are”) is an unfilial son to his trusting mother. The uncle covers for the thieving shit by saying he was “confused” by shady actions that are all too clear to the reader. Besides the cruelty of children, death skulks in the background of this bleak story. The uncle is the last of a big family, though he was not expected to live beyond 20 years of age. He says, “But sometimes it looks like a man can stand just about anything if he don't believe he can stand it.”

Today is Autumnal Equinox Day

秋分の日 Shūbun no Hi. This Japanese public holiday was established in 1948 as a day on which to honor one's ancestors and remember the dead. Before 1948, the autumnal equinox was an imperial ancestor worship festival called Shūki kōreisai (秋季皇霊祭). Let’s celebrate by reading a non-fiction book about Japan.

Underground in Japan - Ray Ventura

This 1992 memoir offers a unique perspective on the expatriate experience in Japan, focusing on workers from countries like Iran, Malaysia, Taiwan, and the Philippines, rather than the more common narratives from North American and Western European language teachers and Zen seekers.

Ray Ventura, a Filipino university student active in politics during Corazon Aquino’s rise to power, decided to study labor realities by moving to Japan on a student visa. After his visa expired, he went underground, working in harsh conditions in Yokohama’s labor center, Kotobuki. Ventura vividly describes the difficult lives of Filipino laborers, who live in poor conditions and work grueling jobs while constantly fearing police and immigration officials.

Despite the hardships, Ventura highlights how these workers find freedom from familial obligations and build community through shared social values like hiya (shame), amor-proprio (self-respect), utang na loob (reciprocity), and pakikisama (camaraderie). He also discusses the motivations behind Filipinos moving to Japan, challenging stereotypes about their economic backgrounds.

Ventura notes that Filipino underground in Japan carry family and religious images for emotional support and to elicit sympathy if stopped by authorities. Religion plays a significant role in their identity, despite their engagement in activities like drinking and gambling. 

Ventura’s sequel, Into the Country of Standing Men, published in 2007, received the Global Filipino Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 2008.

Expatriates in Trouble

Note: I am always up for a novel about expatriates in trouble (my favorite genre), especially set in China in the Twenties. See The Sand Pebbles and The Painted Veil.

Julia Paradise: A Novel - Rod Jones

This 1986 book was the first novel of this Australian writer, short at about 120 pages. It is set in Shanghai in the months running up to the massacres of Communists by the Kuomintang in 1927.

A Scottish doctor and Freudian psychotherapist Dr. Kenneth Ayers treats a woman who's an agitated insomniac and having hallucinations of pests and critters, and little girls jumping out of burning buildings. The patient, the title character, is the wife of a missionary and begins an adulterous Tuesday afternoon with the therapist. Describing disturbing scenes of incestuous rape, she tells him her case history as a victim of her father, a famous explorer and insatiable pervert.

The dry detached tone brings to mind Maugham and his stories of expatriates in trouble in Asia. Thematically it reminded me of The Year of Living Dangerously in the sense of centering on a complacent man who is tested by the pressures of social and political unrest in a foreign setting.  

Here the flabby hedonistic apathetic doctor has had it pretty easy in his life. He casually exploits local people and fellow expatriates, robotically breaking simple rules such as never with minors, never with force, don't treat people like objects. Through some twists and turns he sees the light and devotes the next 20 years to healing the sick in northern China. It is not a likely outcome but there is some fine prose in this even if the exploitation and harm of children and examples of sexual obsession get really hard to take.

If awards mean anything, this book won the fiction prize at the 1988 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and was runner-up for France's Femina Etranger prize in Paris. It could be one of those novels that reveals more complexity and artistic power on re-readings but I don't think re-reading is happening for me in this case.

The Ides of Perry Mason 64

Note: The 15^th of the month features a piece about Our Favorite Lawyer in the novels or on the tube. This novel was made into the second episode of the series, aired September 28, 1957. Darryl Hickman plays Steve Harris. He looks familiar because as a kid actor he was in The Grapes of Wrath, among others. His little brother Dwayne played Dobie Gillis on The Many Loves of ~, a show I liked when I was around ten for Bob Denver as Maynard Krebs (Work!! still sums up my attitude) and Sheila James as Zelda Gilroy (even as a boy I knew the best girls were the smart kind loyal girls).

The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece – Erle Stanley Gardner

Perry Mason’s would-be client, Peter B. Kent, has psychological, marital and commercial anxieties so severe that he is driven to walking in his sleep. The titular niece, Edna Hammer, tells a weird story as she seeks lawyer Mason's advice.

While sleepwalking, Uncle Pete took up a carving knife and wandered about his mansion. He was found by the police outside the bedroom door, which his alimony hound of a wife, Doris, had locked against his attack. Although Doris is making lovey-dovey noises about a reconciliation to support her disturbed husband, she wants big bucks. She might try to get Uncle Pete declared incompetent, warehouse him in a nursing home, and take charge of his sizeable estate and holdings. Edna Hammer wants Mason to facilitate Uncle Pete’s divorce so that he can marry his selfless nurse Lucille Mays.

As if the personal front didn’t provide enough anxiety to provoke midnight strolls, his iffy business partner Frank Maddox and Maddox’s niggling lawyer, John Duncan, are being difficult about contracts and settlements. Holed up in Uncle Pete’s mansion for negotiations, Mason makes no secret of his disgust quibbling about the verbiage of contracts instead of making a fool of DA Hamilton Burger in open court during a murder trial.

In an Agatha Christie move, Gardner has the characters spend the night in Uncle Pete’s old dark mansion. The next morning all hell breaks loose with a corpse found in the guest room and a bloodstained carving knife found under Uncle Pete’s pillow.

At the levers of the criminal justice mincing machine is Lt. Tragg’s brutish predecessor Sgt. Holcombe. He sensibly concludes that Uncle Pete is the culprit, in light of previous history of a sleep disorder, prolonged stress, and the carving knife incident. It’s up to Mason and his team to determine if Uncle Pete committed the murder at all and if he did, his culpability given he was sleepwalking during the commission of the crime.

The courtroom scene in the last third of the book is not too slow or too complicated.

In the early novels such as this 1936 mystery (the eighth of about 80), Mason is blunt and outspoken, not the gallant suave Mason of the Fifties. True to smirking, sarcastic pulp heroes, Mason is a hardboiled tough guy for the low-brows and a quick-witted professional for the high-brows. He smiles “fiendishly” and calls women “sister.” He expresses outrageous opinions, like advocating blackmail as a way for a woman to get her money back from a man who squeezed cash out of her by pretending to love her. A self-confident and bold Leo, Mason brusquely disbelieves Edna’s astrological analysis of Uncle Pete’s character.   

Typical of the style of pulp magazines, the writing is so concise as to be terse, with dialogue briskly moving the plot.  Gardner catered to the male readers of Black Mask with lots of action, surprises, wisecracks and banter, and good old American scorn for and resistance to authority. Joy in foiling The Man’s determination to put an innocent person in the gas chamber may be an expression of defiance sharpened by the Depression. Also pulpy is the rapidly sketched out parade of characters:  a hypochondriac, a gold digger, a crackpot inventor, and a New Age niece before woo-woo really took off during the Age of Aquarius.

It’s odd that though Gardner assumed readers craved action over characters, we loyal Mason fans like not only the page-turning narrative magic but also the interaction among Perry, Della, and Paul. 

John Putnam Thatcher #22

Right on the Money - Emma Lathen

Given the background of this mystery is a corporate merger in 1993, I wouldn’t blame a reader to label "not likely to read" a mystery set in a business environment as dead as the dodo. In fact the author makes the merger the focus of good old American drive, pride, optimism, but also the stuff of Greek drama, with fatal flaws bringing about tragedy.

In the 22^nd mystery starring John Putnam Thatcher, the banker and amateur detective has to get to the bottom of the murder of a loudmouth so ambitious for attention and promotions that an insurance adjustor expresses surprise that the victim made it as far as 32 years of age.

Aqua Supplies, Inc. (ASI) is too big, too bureaucratic, and too complacent to fire anybody and so not able to develop new countertop appliances that middle-class consumers might actually want to buy. So it fixes to merge – that is, gobble up whole without so much as a belch – with Ecker, a small family owned and operated designer and maker of nifty percolators and such. Since the disability retirement of the Ecker heir, its main assets are its inventive but ageing founder and its highly talented female CFO.

ASI assistant division manager Victor Hunnicut rolls his eyes at the kool-aid stand ways of Ecker. His skill set, he realizes, would not make him a candidate for running Ecker so he puts his ambition above the interests of employer and makes plans to quash the merger plans. He fears that other middle managers will leapfrog over him, thus cutting him off from chances to shine for his superiors. While giving Ecker a get-acquainted tour, the hotshot comes off a snot and intimates to Ken Nicholls that factions in both companies are duking it out over the merger plans. Ken Nicholls is a junior banking exec who’s often sent by hero John Putnam Thatcher to gather information.

After the tour, things start to get criminous. The quaint old mill that stored Ecker’s financial computers and files for research and development is torched by an arsonist. Go-getter Vic Hunnicut is murdered at the annual trade show.

Emma Lathen was the pen name of Mary Latsis (economic analyst) and Martha Hennissart (attorney). Both knew the worlds of business at all levels from clerks to CEOs, so they felt at home in a constantly changing business environment and the variety of personalities to be found in the private sector. Sure the business environment has changed in the last 35 years, but human nature has not. As old-school feminists, they have acerbic fun satirizing businessmen who are buoyed up by secretaries and female middle-managers but attribute their success to their own intelligence and diligence. This is hardly a phenomenon unknown in 2024.

Click on the title to see the review.

• Banking on Death (1961)
• A Place for Murder (1963)
• Accounting for Murder (1964); Silver Dagger Award
• Murder Makes the Wheels Go Round (1966)
• Death Shall Overcome (1966)
• Murder Against the Grain (1967); Gold Dagger Award
• A Stitch in Time (1968)
• Come to Dust (1968)
• When in Greece (1969); shortlisted for the Edgar Award
• Murder to Go (1969)
• Pick Up Sticks (1970)
• Ashes to Ashes (1971)
• The Longer the Thread (1971)
• Murder Without Icing (1972)
• Sweet and Low (1974)
• By Hook or by Crook (1975)
• Double, Double, Oil and Trouble (1978)
• Going for Gold (1981)
• Green Grow the Dollars (1982)
• Something in the Air (1988)
• East is East (1991)
• Right on the Money (1993)
• Brewing Up a Storm (1996)
• A Shark Out of Water (1997)

 

Reading Those Classics #15

Modernist Classic set in Japan. The writer was so revered in Japan that his portrait appeared on the ¥1000 bill from 1984 to 2007. He is best known for his serio-comic novels Botchan and I am a Cat, both observations of early 20^th century intellectuals, neurotic, aimless, and stuck from not adjusting to modernization during the Meiji era. Besides, fall is coming. In Japan, everybody from esoteric philosophers to pop culture mavens values 読書の秋 Dokusho no Aki. This expression means that autumn is the season for reading books. Come fall, people ought to read, think and reflect on the transience of life in order to savor daily life. Like Aurelius said, “In a little while you will have forgotten everything; in a little while everything will have forgotten you.”

The Three-Cornered World - Natsume Soseki

This novel, which is also known in English as The Grass Pillow (草枕 Kusamakura), has comic relief in which the narrator is being roughly shaved by a Tokyo barber who ended up in a country barbershop. But mainly the tone is quiet, somber, and a little stoned and dreamy. More a travel diary, the book takes the reader along the itinerary of the narrator, on a journey in search of himself. A young artist is a painter which inevitably means a poet as well. On turning thirty, he ventures down a narrow road into a small Japanese village. He feels the need to leave behind the impurity of desire and aversions, and to become an artist in the fullest sense.

You may feel the human realm is a difficult place, but there is surely no better world to live in. You will find another only by going to the nonhuman; and the nonhuman realm would surely be a far more difficult place to inhabit than the human.

So if this best of worlds proves a hard one for you, you must simply do your best to settle in and relax as you can, and make this short life of ours, if only briefly, an easier place in which to make your home. Herein lies the poet's true calling, the artist's vocation. We owe our humble gratitude to all practitioners of the arts, for they mellow the harshness of our human world and enrich the human heart.

Yes, a poem, a painting, can draw the sting of troubles from a troubled world and lay in its place a blessed realm before our grateful eyes.

Disguised as the story of an artist who travels to a mountain resort to look for subjects and meditate, it's an extended essay about mono no aware, the empathy and sensitivity to the ephemeral nature of life, the wistful sadness of its rapid passing, and the wisdom of savoring every single day. So, it is the perfect book for autumn as the leaves fall and plants, animals and people in a Northern place brace for another winter.

Soseki grants that Japanese artists do not have a monopoly on 'melancholy of things' as R.H. Blythe showed in Zen and English Literature and Oriental Classics. A reader may have reservations about detachment in art or the tendency of the artist to handle other people as mere source material for art or as the servants of artists who need to be fed and whose dishes have to be done by somebody. See The Children's Book and The Moon and Sixpence.

Delicate, magical, evocative, a little slow, this is a must-read for readers who feel ready for a short dip in the cement pond of Japanese aesthetics as typified by modern novels that are somehow not novels.