The Case of the One-Eyed Witness

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

What distinguishes The Case of the One-Eyed Witness from the other 81 Perry Mason novels churned out by, in the author's own words, the Gardner Fiction Factory? This question must be answered, not for us Perry fans who will read any of them -- or heaven help us re-read them -- but for novices careful with their time and attention.

The Millennial generation, social observers assert, feels nostalgic for the Nineties. This is consistent with the tendency for us post-moderns to be nostalgic about the era just before and just after we were born. So for me, born in the Fifties, that would be what Gore Vidal called America’s Golden Age, 1939 to 1954, from WWII to the Cold War.

The Case of the One-Eyed Witness opens with so much antique Americana that we readers wonder if this is some post-modern author overdoing the period detail: movie theaters full on week-nights, drugstore 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 Medford, Myrtle, Clark, Arthman, and Carlton. They use vintage Americanisms “in a blue funk,” “thimblerig,” “look all over hell’s half acre,” and “You’ve got a lot of crust to….” As in Mad Men everybody smokes; in fact, Mason smokes Raleighs.

It’s not all cheesy nostalgia. In The Case of the One-Eyed Witness Perry and Paul’s investigation uncovers a racket engaged 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 prejudice still among us. The criminal justice issues Gardner raises plague us yet, particularly over-reaching on the part of the cops and prosecutors. Other issues that still burn include improper police procedures, mis-identifications by witnesses and incorrect understanding of circumstantial evidence. Recall, it is a system that is staffed by human beings, entities that have not reached perfection since I last checked.

Gardner was more interested in the puzzle than characterization and atmosphere. But in this one, he takes a stab at describing weather and a dispiriting room. Better – thank heaven – is that he tells a joke or two.  In Chapter 6 Perry and his PI Paul Drake are in a Turkish bath steam room, hiding from their nemesis Lt. Tragg, when the fully clothed policeman joins them. Tragg, sweaty and surly, insists that they come out to be questioned but they complain that they’ll catch their death if they go out into the cold.

Just as an aside, during her confirmation hearing to become a Supreme Court justice, Sonia Sotomayor said that the TV series starring Raymond Burr as Perry Mason awakened her to the vital role of the law in our society. Many lawyers of a certain age will cite Perry Mason and Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird) as their inspirations to become attorneys.

The Whispering Land

For most readers their gateway book to an unbreakable Gerald Durrell (NYT obit) habit is My Family and Other Animals, his memoir of growing up in Corfu between the wars with his eccentric family and native wildlife.

He also wrote accounts of animal collecting in South America, A Zoo in My Luggage and its sequel The Whispering Land. Durrell's prose is fluent and humorous. He relates his rough journey through austere Patagonia (Argentina) but we also get a sense of his respect at the diversity of wildlife: observing colonies of penguins and elephant seals, hanging out with guanaco in the wild, saving an abused ocelot, using himself as bait for vampire bats (before recalling the risk of rabies), and saving a baby peccary named Juanita.

It's not totally about animals though because unforgettable is the stout Rosa Lillipampila, his seatmate on a small plane heading for Jujuy.

I highly recommend this marvelous book.

American Indian Heritage Day, 2017

The War that Made America - Fred Anderson

The French and Indian War (1754 - 1763) is the American name for the war that the British call The Seven Years’ War. Winston Churchill called it the first world-wide war because hostilities broke out from Canada to the Caribbean, from India to the Philippines. American historians have tended to see the conflict as a mere prelude to the American Revolution and emphasized it was the war in which George Washington gained his knowledge, skills, and abilities in things military.

However, through Anderson’s chronicle, we see that in many ways the French and Indian War was the most important war of the eighteenth century.

Anderson opens this readable history by underlining the importance of Indians and French in the conflict. The two empires – the Protestant British and the Catholic French – had difficulties over Indians on the frontier. He provides much information about how British commanders failed to understand how to win colonial (and Indian) loyalty and, indeed, how they drew entirely the wrong lessons from their extended acquaintance with colonials. Anderson is especially provocative on the effect of wartime experience on alienating American colonists, especially New Englanders, from their colonial masters. About 13 years after the British victory, the British Americans would demand and, in the end win, independence. 

He writes vividly and fluidly, making this book of interest not only to grad students need who quick information as background but also to general readers, which is the target audience.

Mount TBR #56

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code – Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons

Before the sound era ushered them out, silent movies became more daring in themes and risqué in content. A couple of Hollywood scandals and high-profile OD deaths fired up the bluenoses and government at the federal, state and municipal levels started making ominous growls about censorship. To police themselves, Hollywood moguls hired General Will Hays to enforce his Motion Picture Production Code, a set of guidelines as to what content was acceptable and unacceptable in movies. The Code ruled from 1930 to about 1968, when it was replaced by the ratings system we are familiar with today.

This book is a fairly readable account of the rise and fall of the Code, with a special emphasis on the Breen era. The authors are sympathetic to Joseph Breen. He was caught between the movie makers, who naturally wanted to push the boundaries of content and theme, and the censorship boards, who naturally wanted to protect citizens from salacious content and choke off material that might provoke independent thought and subsequent social change. I think Breen sympathy is appropriate and I came away from the book with a more tolerant view of the rough row Breen and his successors had to hoe. 

The prose is wordy in places, so much so that even a hard-core reader wonders if the point is coming any time soon. This is off-putting to the general reader and probably maddening to film / media studies students. With the student market in mind, what is probably more frustrating to youth is that the authors make the expert’s error because they seem to assume the reader knows more than she really does. Fatty who scandal?!.

Mount TBR #55

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Light Your Torches and Pull Up Your Tights - Tay Garnett

Garnett (1894-1977) was a director during the golden age of Hollywood and he worked in television as movie theaters pretty much went the way of the videostore, bookstore, and department store have gone in our own day. He is especially famous for his adaptation in 1944 of The Postman Always Rings Twice with Lana Turner and John Garfield. He made his film debut in 1920 as screenwriter and gagman at Mack Sennett and Hal Roach (the producer Laurel and Hardy, among others). His seemingly versatile filmography includes, among other things, an astonishing denunciation of corruption (Okay America!, 1932), a legendary melodrama (One Way Passage, 1932), an exotic adventure film starring Marlène Dietrich (Seven Sinners, 1940), and a harsh war movie (Bataan, 1943). Having always wanted to keep a maximum of control over his films, Garnett would often clash with producers.

Unlike the reflective autobiography by King Vidor, this book is a boisterous string of anecdotes. Many of them hinge on wacky behavior brought on by large quantities of alcohol. To quote Lana Turner, during the filming of Postman, the author was a "roaring, mean, furniture-smashing drunk." A few stories are somber. Garnett was in in Berlin, for instance, when Hitler was named chancellor in early 1933. He asked a German aristocrat why so many people seemed glum. The reply was Americans would feel the same way if populist Huey Long had been elected President.

As a collection of lively stories, this had better be read in small chunks to avoid tedium and prudish sighing that intelligent creative adults with copious amounts money can’t do any better than yachts, travel, gambling, guzzling and gorging. He studiously avoids discussing at length any topic that would smack of auteurism.  He never tells the reader what year it is. But any fan of classic Hollywood will surely enjoy these memoirs of a man who obviously enjoyed his job and all the travel and discretionary time for partying that one could wish for.

Widow’s Web

Widow’s Web – Ursula Curtsis

Ursula Curtiss, like her sister Mary McMullen, wrote stand-alone mysteries and suspense stories. They often featured a dash of romance and the setting of a New England town. In Widow’s Web, the main character is a male reporter who suspects that his partner in journalistic exploits was done in by a wicked woman.

Curtiss grabs us in the first 30 pages, with a gothic atmosphere of suspicion, disbelief, and tension. She’s especially good with the noisy crashes and bangs of everyday life that scare the ever-lovin’ bejesus out of the reader. Like Victor Canning in The Rainbird Pattern, Curtiss contrasts decent people who want to earn what they get with psychopathic predators that unobtrusively exploit, steal, and kill.

She won the Red Badge Mystery Award in 1948 for Voice Out of Darkness. The Forbidden Garden was filmed as What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? by Palomar Pictures in 1969. Other books by Curtiss are creepily titled The Stairway, Out of the Dark, The Deadly Climate and The Noonday Devil.

Mount TBR #54

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Silent Stars – Jeanine Basinger

Even people who consider themselves buffs of Hollywood from Edison to the death of the studio system – that would be readers like yours truly – carry around lots of conventional wisdom that they never question. Rudolf “The Sheik” Valentino – kind of dumb, exploiter of the fantasies of silly females. Mary Pickford and her sick-making Goody Twoshoes image. Marion Davies, the real-life model for bitter lush Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane. Lon Chaney as one trick pony with the monster makeup and all. Pola Negri as the Mad Hungarian, Clara Bow as the giddy party girl. Gloria Swanson the real life model for her own Norma Desmond in the immortal Sunset Boulevard. William S. Hart, the first in a line of tedious stone-faces a la Robert Stack. John Gilbert of the squeaky silly voice that sound movies made ridiculous.

Film scholar Jeanine Basinger explodes all these cliché misrepresentations. This is a highly readable book that blends biography, film criticism, and personal observations. She also provides deeply sympathetic portraits of Mabel Normand and the Keystone Kops; the archetypal he-man Douglas Fairbanks, and the unexpectedly interesting Rin-Tin-Tin (I had no idea that canine heroes were so popular in the silent era).

In about 500 pages, which never feel too long, Basinger provides plenty of non-academic-sounding arguments to support her basic arguments. She’s forthright about being unable to really comprehend how audience felt about such and such a star or movie because the past really is another country. Because this book is for the general reader, not her colleagues at other universities, it is written clearly, with humor and light-heartedness. I highly recommend this book to fans of classic Hollywood, the same readers who liked her other fine book A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960.

Veteran's Day, 2017

Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America  - Sarah J. Purcell

John Adams, writing in 1815, said that he thought the Revolution began “in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.” So Adams concludes that the war, “was no part of the Revolution.” In contrast to this example of Adamsian hyperbole, by examining the military memory of the war for independence in the early republic, Sarah J. Purcell shows how selective memory of the war contributed to the emergence of our national identity.

The book opens with evidence showing that from the very start of the war, opinion leaders such as journalists, public speakers, politicians, and pastors extolled the patriotism of fallen heroes such as Joseph Warren and Robert Montgomery. Recall that because of many battlefield defeats, the emphasis on heroes bolstered people’s morale and fired up patriotism. Sacrifice made the cause legitimate and glorious.

After the war, the leaders emphasized that patriotism ought to be rooted in gratitude toward those who made the ultimate sacrifice. The concept of gratitude is a guiding theme of this book. It is made clear that public memory discouraged alternative, skeptical views of the war for independence and generally made one’s attitude toward the war an acid test for one’s patriotism.

This book is also about how Americans remembered the war for independence with celebrations, commemorations and other ceremonies. Purcell details how different groups in society – women, African Americans, the poor, war veterans – gradually demanded to be included in commemorations, to the discomfort of elites who wanted to shove back into the bottle the democratic genies  that had been released by the war. For instance, during the war, the franchise in Pennsylvania had been extended beyond property-owning males. After the war, the property owners tried to pass legislation restricting it again. Protesters used commemorations of the war to publicize their point of view.

Citing sermons, almanacs, paintings, plays, memoirs, and biographies, Purcell employs many interesting examples of the uses of public memory for partisan purposes. She discusses  Shay’s Rebellion and efforts to establish the independent state of Franklin as example of efforts to use the history of the war as justifications for their claims.

Purcell also looks at the resounding silences. Postwar writers avoided the topics of guerilla war in the New York, New Jersey, and South Carolina. She points out that loyalists maintained such a low profile after the war (probably afraid of harassment and intimidation from neighbors) that they wrote no books or pamphlets and thus created no alternative public memory of their own.  As Charles Royster has pointed out, “[O]vert loyalism vanished after the Revolution, surviving in politics only as an accusation and an insult.”

A historian at Yale, Joanne Freeman, asserts in her course that isn't only the ideas and events leading up to the Revolution or the war for independence or the Constitutional debates that mattered, but in fact how we remember them also matters, to us and to our posterity. The reason is that the way that we remember history constructs its meanings and its impacts. History – what happened and how we understand what happened - can thus have a profound effect on our country that we live in now.

Mount TBR #53

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

A Tree is a Tree: An Autobiography – King Vidor

To my regret, I’ve never seen this director’s most notable works: "Show People," "Hallelujah," and "The Big Parade," "The Champ," "Our Daily Bread," "The Citadel," "Duel in the Sun," ". I’ve never see his version of Ayn Rand’s "The Fountainhead," mainly because I can’t stand Gary Cooper. Nor I have seen Bette Davis say her immortal line “What a dump” in "Beyond the Forest."

However, when I lived in Saudi Arabia, a TV station used to play “Stella Dallas” over and over. I’ve seen the birthday party scene a half-dozen times. I remain impressed. And everybody has seen multiple times the Kansas scenes that open “the Wizard of Oz” in which Judy Garland sings her signature song. Vidor took over for Victor Fleming for “Oz" when Fleming was tapped to do "Gone With the Wind." "Every time I see 'Over the Rainbow,' I get a thrill,” said Vidor, “because I directed that.” Vidor, from Texas, had great feeling for the natural world.

Anyway, this 1952 autobiography is worth reading for fans of classic Hollywood. Vidor witnessed the very beginning of the silent era. A true artist, he was always looking for something new and original to do and say. An early adaptor, he always took up new technology and techniques before they were forced upon him. 

He’s a man of his generation and therefore reticent about the personal side. This does not mean that he doesn’t tell moving stories. The story about Mabel Normand’s funeral – where he saw the clowns of the silent era all beside themselves crying – is one of the saddest things I’ve ever read.

Mount TBR #52

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Hide My Eyes a.k.a Tether’s End – Margery Allingham

Allingham started the series starring eccentric PI Albert Campion in the early 1930s and kept developing as a writer of genre fiction until her early death of breast cancer at 62 in 1966. By the time she wrote The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) and this one in 1958, she was exploring suspense and character studies a la Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell (Barbara Vine).

Hide My Eyes is an inverted mystery. Allingham examines the personality of the culprit: methodical, logical, cautious, manipulative, emotionless but charming and ever so ruthless to anybody who stands in his way. Campion’s cop buddy Sergeant Luke has a hunch as to the location of the killer’s stomping grounds. Campion plays barely more than a cameo role in this novel. Luke is less exuberant and Campion less silly, both of which are mercies.

Allingham’s ability to set a scene is on display. Masterful are the descriptions of the eccentric museum in west London and the scrapyard in the East End. She’s excellent with the natural world (London rain) and artifacts (leather gloves and a lizard-skin letter case). We can also learn antique similes like “as close as a rock” for “taciturn.”

All in all, well worth reading for mystery fans who like hard-boiled novels, suspense novels, or urban crime novels but without any violence or bad words.