Classic with a Color in the Title: A Study in Scarlet

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

A Study in Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle

A former army doctor returns to Victorian London from the war in Afghanistan. Instead of decorations and commendations, the war has given the medical man “nothing but misfortune and disaster.” He was wounded in the shoulder at Maiwand and suffers chronic pain from it. He caught a case of enteric fever so terrible the doctors gave up hope he would live. But, in his mid-twenties, he drew upon the resources of youth and did not die.

Back in London he must live on a small disability pension while he recovers his health. He desperately needs an affordable apartment. Another man has just rented an apartment in Baker Street and is looking for a roommate. Out of the blue to the doc’s amazement the man says , “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” The veteran warns of his eccentricities: “My nerves are shaken, and I get up at all sorts of ungodly hours, and I am extremely lazy,” thus listing the symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, insomnia, and fatigue.

Their meeting marks the beginning of the most famous partnership in detective fiction, Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes. The new roomies are still getting used to each other's eccentricities when a letter arrives from Inspector Gregson of Scotland Yard about a killing near Brixton Road.  An American named Enoch J. Drebber – now there’s a Englishman’s idea of a typical American name - was murdered, and there are no clues but for the German word “revenge” smeared on the wall with blood.

Holmes invites Watson to accompany him on his work as a consulting detective. Holmes, a brilliant quirky loner, is still human enough to get a kick out of astounding us ordinary people. Watson joins readers, clients and the cops Gregson and Lestrade as an appreciative audience when Holmes explains how he uses his knowledge and skill to "read" a crime scene and deduce the commission of a crime.

This was the first Holmes story, published as a novelette in the 1887 Beeton’s Christmas Annual. It’s not hard to understand why it was rejected many times before the 27-year-old author finally sold it. The successful first part introduces Holmes and Watson in a captivating style familiar from the later stories – it’s amazing Conan Doyle seems to have found his voice for these stories on the very first try. But the second part, set in the United States, fails as a western or an adventure tale, though it reads smoothly enough. It also says rude things about the Church of LDS and Native Americans. Conan Doyle should have just made up a religion, not pandered to anti-Mormon prejudices of his day.

Mount TBR #24

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

Women Sleuths - Various

In the middle 1980s, Reader’s Digest issued a series titled Academy Mystery Novellas. Women Sleuths was the first, followed by Police Procedurals and Locked Room Puzzles. Ever mindful of costs Reader’s Digest kept the covers simple. In their favor, they hired noted editors, Martin Greenberg and Bill Pronzini (a mystery writer himself), who deliberately choose relatively obscure stories, too long for short story anthologies and too short to be published on their own between paperback covers. Another plus is that they included capsule biographies of the authors.

The Toys of Death (1939): G. D. H. and Margaret Cole wrote almost 30 detective novels. They went along with the Golden Age conventions of complicated engines of death, English country house setting, a plethora of suspects, the intuitive amateur detective, obscure knowledge and the long reveal, this time in a letter written by the perp who has fled to Patagonia or some such remote wilderness. The rural setting is quite evocative in this, with an overall attractive writing style that is concise and vivid.  

The Calico Dog (1934): It is odd indeed that Mignon Eberhart (sounds like a character in a Perry Mason mystery) is a neglected writer now, since she had about the longest career of any American mystery writer (from the 1920s to the 1980s) and was known as the “American Agatha Christie.” This Golden Age story has a unique plot: two young men claim to be the same nephew who was kidnapped as a child. The sleuth, Miss Susan Dare, is hired by the aunt who must decide which one is the real one and thus inherit about 30 million mid-1930s dollars, about a bazillion dollars in today’s money. The story moves along briskly, has very fine settings, and is worth reading as a high society mystery.

The Book That Squealed (1939): Cornell Woolrich pokes genial fun at his heroine Prudence Roberts. She’s a young librarian who’s kind of a blur to men until she takes off her glasses. Then even hard-bitten police detectives start to feel all funny inside.  Prudence gets involved in a serious crime with unhinged crooks during her own investigation after the police hoot at her warning that something bad is happening, or will happen. Woolrich, to my mind, is much better in short stories than in novels, which I find overwrought and shrill.

The Broken Men (1985): I’d not read a Sharon McCone story by Marcia Muller in about 25 years so this really brought back the 1980s for me: Chambray pants, Adidas running shoes, and overflowing ashtrays. McCone is hired as a bodyguard for two clowns at a show at a pavilion. It’s an easy job, of course, until the killing. Good use of flashback and past sins, a lazy horse named Whitefoot is funny, clowns are usually fun, and her cat gives her the idea for the solution. Highly recommended.

Classic in Translation: Unforgiving Years

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Unforgiving Years – Victor Serge, tr. Richard Greeman

An apocalyptic evocation of the Second World War, this posthumous novel finished in 1946 had to wait until 2008 before being published in English by the New York Review of Books. Four narratives evoke the unreal Paris of the last days of the pre-war period; the thousand days of Leningrad, besieged by the Nazis; the Gotterdämmerung of the last days of devastated Berlin; and a Mexican backwater where life and death merge. In this world of catastrophe, the protagonists - Old Bolsheviks without illusions stifled by Stalinist totalitarianism and gangsterism - fight against fascism, try to save their loves and try to “escape from a world without possible escape.”

The Unforgiving Years focuses on two Soviet secret agents D. and Daria. They are not only living through their own inner chaos but are also seeking a possible escape from their employers. Through these two characters and many others, Serge wonders, as he did in other novels, about this process and moment of the "inner break" where doubt and skepticism gradually lead the agent who had abandoned himself to the imperatives of the "cadaveric discipline" imposed by "services" to the rejection of that discipline. Soviet intelligence did a lot of dirty work during the Spanish civil war and this novel chronicles the fallout of anxiety and paranoia among agents that didn’t want to do dirty work anymore but knew leaving the “services” was as easy as leaving the mafia.

This climate where prison, exile, torture, and death threaten all the time, Serge knew personally, not as a spy but as a dissident in the USSR in the 1930s. It was his daily lot in those pre-WWII years when the assassinations and disappearances of Stalin’s opponents were warning signs to a lost generation with blood on its hands but hopeful enough not to despair of the idea of genuine​​ revolution to help the workers and peasants, to protect the revolution from reactionaries, and to defend it from authoritarianism within the revolution itself.

For twenty years, Victor Serge devoted himself to the task of giving us powerful political novels. Conquered City, set in Petrograd in 1919, is about the betrayal of democratic socialists (the Old Bolsheviks) by the Stalinists, though they betrayed their own ideals by going along with savage repression too. The Case of Comrade Tulayev, a remarkable examination of the Stalinist purge in the late 1930s, stands as a must-read for any serious student of the Europe between the wars and revolution betrayed.

Constitution Day 9/17

This day commemorates the formation and signing of the Constitution of the United States on September 17, 1787. 

American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic – Joseph J. Ellis

The author is best-known for his Pulitzer and National Book Award winner, Founding Brothers. Like that book, American Creation is a collection of six essays. The topics focus on short periods when success and failure hung in the balance. 

For instance, in "The Winter," Ellis narrates George Washington and his army's starving, half-clad experience at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78. Most interesting to me was the chapter "The Conspiracy" in which James Madison, in an abrupt about-face from supporting a strong federal government, teams up with Thomas Jefferson after they concluded that a strong central government would be a threat to the institution of race-based chattel slavery. 

Ellis is a coherent writer, blending research, analysis, and storytelling. Another trustworthy indicator that Ellis is worth reading is that the people who think the Founding Fathers are demigods give his books one star in Amazon reviews.

Mount TBR #23

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

The Simple Art of Murder – Raymond Chandler

I read the Ballantine Books paperback, published in February, 1972 that featured the 1944 essay of the title and four stories: “Spanish Blood,” “I’ll Be Waiting,” “The King in Yellow,” and “Pearls are a Nuisance.” The stories are about small-town gangsters, grumpy policemen, ragged show girls, corrupt politicians, greedy lawyers, aging lawbreakers, tough detectives, cheap gunsels, insane killers, crazy musicians, mysterious women, seedy janitors and many others. Chandler convincingly describes the milieu in which the stories are based, and three of the stories are the length of a novella.

“The Simple Art of Murder” is a 1944 essay that dismisses classic whodunnits in the British manner as fantastic, calls for detective fiction to be more realistic, and lists the attributes of his ideal detective hero. The early pulp story “Spanish Blood” is one violent scene after another, giving readers of Black Mask what they wanted.  “I’ll Be Waiting,” at 20 pages in length, is the only true short story and has evocative descriptions and a bleak ending if not much more. “The King in Yellow” is a fast-moving tale of a house detective who never says “Die.” “Pearls are a Nuisance” is a satire on the stereotypical character of the drunken society playboy who plays at being a detective.

Chandler admired Dashiell Hammett and imitated him so deftly that at first reading it is hard to distinguish them. They write in the same hard-hitting, sober style, and they feature the same hard boiled heroes, taciturn, impervious to sentimentalism, without illusion about oneself and others, with enough conscience to be obsessed with persisting and resisting in a world where two out of three people act as if they thought ethics is for ninnies and chumps.

But upon comparing short stories, at least, there are some differences. In The Big Knockover and Nightmare Town, Hammett constructed stories based on his own detective work with the Pinkertons while Chandler, with experience in the insurance business, had to rely primarily on his imagination. And it shows. The mood in Hammett's tales is more sinister and goes with the corrupt world around him, while with Chandler, who has had to imagine everything, the violence seems cartoonish, the characters flimsy, even if the mood is persuasive. In Hammett, the plot becomes complex but the incidents follow their logic (the things people do have their own reasoning), but in Chandler, one damn thing happens after another and there is only mucilage and spirit gum to hold things together. 

In the four stories, the best I can say is that Chandler knows how to describe a scene or a character economically. The metaphors are not as flashy or vulnerable to parody in the stories as they are in the novels. The other attraction is the escapism, with the dingy hotel rooms and the sham fancy nightclubs contrasting with the California sunshine, Pacific sunsets, snazzy Packards, spiced with non-stop intake of nicotine and rye. Just as great as foggy London and snug clubs in Holmes stories.

A 19th Century Classic: Mansfield Park

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Mansfield Park – Jane Austen

Ten-year-old Fannie Price leaves her large family in a squalid household in Portsmouth to go live with rich relatives in the country hamlet of Mansfield. Though with the good things of the world at their fingertips, her affluenza-ridden relatives are a motley crew of the stupid, lazy, thoughtless and vain. As Fannie grows into adolescence, she hears daily the reasons why, as the last and least among them, she ought to be grateful for being allowed to stay in such comfy circumstances. She sleeps in an unheated attic and is provided with meagre rations. It is no wonder she is weak, sickly, and fragile. She is also prone to high emotional reactivity and social anxiety (shyness, speechlessness, uneasiness) when confronted with stressors in the form of thrusts and jabs from her cruel selfish family members.

Fannie is patronized – in the multiple senses of the word - by her cousin Edmund who is about six years older than her. Bound for the clergy, he is solemn and tries to urge her on the right path, in other words, getting reconciled to her mediocre station in life. She keeps Dr. Johnson’s Idler essays in her room. Her reading of such moral texts has equipped her with a way of approaching problems with impartiality, wisdom, bravery. And kindness, since Dr. Johnson said, “Kindness is in our power even if fondness is not.”

Thanks to Edmund’s earnest instruction and her own reading, Fannie develops self-command, a handy orientation in any station in life and one sorely lacking among Austen’s cast of characters. Fannie never complains because she knows it will only draw derision and shock at her temerity. As for consideration for others, Fannie is fair, polite and gentle with everybody, even those that don’t deserve impartiality and return gentleness with thoughtlessness. When she is not faint or overcome with the heebie-jeebies, Fannie bases her decisions on rationality, not prejudice or pride.

Part of me wonders how much good integrity does the powerless though at least they don’t do as much harm as the powerful with no integrity. But count me a fan of Fannie – there are plenty worse orientations than accepting stern realities you can’t change (other people, money, property, your health, etc.) and cultivating control over what is indeed in your power to command (your attitude toward everything).  Fannie, after all, is only 18 years old in most of the book, so we can’t expect her road to self-knowledge, rational self-control, and common sense to be without potholes. But through her reading and thinking and her relationship with Edmund, she’s able to deal with the peevishness, jealousy, and disharmony that plague the inner worlds and relationships of her cousins and the Crawfords.

Still, as laughable as ninnyish Edmund and Fanny are for their sincerity and depth, Austen makes the reader feel that they are much more likely to face life’s inevitable troubles with bravery and resilience than Henry or Mary Crawford or Fanny’s cousins Maria or Julia. In short, I’m totally with Austen being all judgey about Julia’s lacks being the cause of Julia’s inability to be content:

…the want of that higher species of self-command, that just consideration of others, that knowledge of her own heart, that principle of right, which had not formed any essential part of her education, made her miserable…

So like a parent. “If you want to be happy, work on your own self-control, respect for people, self-knowledge, and wisdom.” Austen makes her moral points through the moral well-being - or, frequently, lack of moral fortitude - of her characters. Edmund, being a human being, stumbles – letting down both the horse and Fannie by letting flighty Mary ride the horse too hard for too long; letting himself down by agreeing to be in their play, the construction of scenery for which leads to the tearing up of his father’s favorite room; encouraging Fannie to marry the worthless Henry Crawford. The heir Tom experiences the salutary effects of a drunken accident and illness, coming out the other side of a long convalescence a more sober and steady heir (see Sense and Sensibility for illness changing Marianne Dashwood). Sir Thomas survives daughter troubles, a lucky thing since he was as neglectful a father as Mr. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice.

This is well-worth reading. It gives much to think about, in terms of living a flourishing life, a life worth living, but it is not heavy like Middlemarch. In fact, the comic characters of indolent Lady Bertram and busybody Mrs. Norris are excellently drawn. Austen uses half-a-dozen deaths to move the action along. She also unleashes wonderful surprises, like an enchanter should. I’ve been worried lately about reading too superficially and read this novel primarily to immerse myself in reading. This novel fit the bill – I read in long sections, deeply I presume to think, over the course of about five days. Plus, I look forward to re-reading it. What higher praise?

Mount TBR #22

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

Freak – Michael Collins

The title warns us that this mystery from the early 1980s will be in the Elmore Leonard/Loren Estleman mode of hard-boiled PI fiction. That is, besides the loner PI hero and the lying client and razor-sharp dialogue, featured are ultra-violence committed by disturbed perps and world-weary cynicism. Though about 40 years have passed since those palmy Magnum PI / Miami Vice days, the skepticism and disdain about the ways of our scheming world still feel familiarr. Plus, the stark violence  still impresses us delicate reader-introverts powerfully. The night I finished this mystery, I had an intense dream that did not relax my nerves.

Out of my head and into the book, however.  

One-armed PI Dan Fortune in New York City is hired by Ian Campbell, owner of a successful software company, to find his son, who has taken a powder. The 26-year-old Alan, who worked for the company, inveigled a large sum of cash from his father and sold a house that pop had given to him as a wedding present. Shortly before, the son had married party-girl Helen Kay, 18 years old and, as the Sir Paul song goes, hell on wheels. 

Fortune begins to investigate. He picks up their track and soon finds two people he wants to question murdered. In the second case Fortune is even in the same motel room as the bloody deed is committed, but is beaten by the perpetrator and locked in a bathroom. This scene is pretty scary.

Always loyal to worthless clients, however, Fortune continues the search. He finds a friend of Helen Kay who willingly informs him of the happy couple's whereabouts and he locates them. Alan and Helen Kay pretend to have broken out of a boring life in suburban New Jersey. Then they trick Fortune and escape, confirming to the detective that those little rascals have somehow not told him the whole truth. Before he can face his client again, however, four criminals confront Fortune

As for the idea behind the "freak" of the title, it seems clear as soon as the head crook, Jasper “J.J.” Murdoch, enters the scene. J.J. is a toddler time bomb. His actions can never be predicted which makes him creepy, dangerous and familiar in that it’s a stock character: completely crazy with a brain clogged with half-understood reading, half-digested knowledge, emotions stirred only by rousing music by Mahler, Sibelius, and Vaughn Williams.

Anyway, the crooks tell Fortune that they have kidnapped Alan and Helen Kay and will release them for a ransom of a quarter-mill. The chase takes the cast to a canyon outside of Flagstaff, Arizona, where a showdown occurs in the Wild West-era brothel, the only preserved location in a ghost town. Collins comes up with a grisly post-modern surprise that explains J.J.’s psychopathology.

Worth-reading, for fans of the bleeding-edge hard-boiled noir of the 1980s and retro stuff like pay phones and tape decks. Dennis Lynds (1924 - 2005) wrote about 20 Fortune novels from 1968 to 1995. The first Fortune novel Act of Fear won a 1968 Edgar Award for best first novel. 

Last Post: A Classic that Scares You

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Modernist novels are hard, what with time shifts, dissembling narrators, stream of consciousness, and themes forlorn and bleak. But I felt I had better re-read the Parade’s End tetralogy in order to understand more deeply Ford’s points of view and way of writing. Plus, this summer I was possessed by the same humid urge that drove me in 2015 to read all six Chronicles of Barsetshire one after the other.

Last Post – Ford Madox Ford

Motionless and mute, Mark Tietjens lies on a covered couch in front of Groby Hall, the Yorkshire manor of his time-honored English family. The blow hit him when, on the day of the armistice, he learned that the Allies were refraining from invading Germany to defeat the enemy and occupy his lands. Like William Tecumseh Sherman’s stomping on the South to wreck their morale forever, Mark figures, “It was the worst disservice you could do your foes not to let them know that remorseless consequences follow determined actions.”

But Mark does not find peace and tranquility - his much younger brother Christopher's wife Sylvia wants to rent the family home to a rich and vulgar American (who thinks she is the reincarnation of Louis XVI aristocrat) for the simple reason that Sylvia wants to annoy him and humiliate the family. For years, she has fought a fierce war against her husband, now impoverished and seeking peace the arms of a lover.

Reading Last Post, I missed Christopher Tietjens, but I did like Marie Léonie, Mark's girlfriend, a former toe dancer from France. She takes care of him with loving affection and never speaks English.She has the odd prejudice that the Britons lost only “a few hundreds” in the First World War.  In fact, it was a million dead and two million wounded. How little people know what other people go through.

We also receive more insight into Sylvia. Her malice toward Christopher has driven her off her dot. The previous novel A Man Could Stand Up ended with a wonderful scene of celebration on Armistice Day, but it is revealed in this one that during that scene inventive Sylvia managed to come between Christopher and his girlfriend Valentine once again. I mustn’t reveal how, and can only hint that the stratagem was pure Sylvia. After four novels with her, we readers are prone to have a grudging regard for the degree to which, in Father Consett’s words in the first volume, she wants to make the world “echo with her wrongs.” We feel sad that her spite has made her unstable and strange.

Comparisons with Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway and many others pervade the literary criticism of Ford's work. He has his own style. This one is sober and melancholy, serious and ironic. The end of the First World War brought an end to many illusions and complacencies, especially among artists, readers and other rebellious types. With his poetically rich vision, Ford represents middle period modernism (1920s and 1930s) in England which, with its atmospheric precision and at the same time soft-focus, makes us see, as in Impressionist pictures. 

Last Post has divided critics and readers since it was published in 1928. Taking a cue from misgivings about the novel in Ford’s own letters, Graham Greene omitted it from an edition of Parade's End, making it a trilogy. But I think this novel is worth reading. Last Post is a novel of elegy, like a lot of British novels in the 1920s and 1930s. Women in Love and Mrs. Dalloway don’t mention the war but, like Last Post, they are about the effects of the First World War and about remembering and working through loss and upheaval.