Last Places: A Journey in the North

Last Places: A Journey in the North - Lawrence Millman

In the late Eighties, on a boat in the water of Turkey, travel writer and novelist Lawrence Millman meets a stereotypical grizzled trawler captain from Iceland. From this unique man, Millman gets the idea of travelling in the footsteps of the Vikings, from Bergen, Norway, to far-flung “last places” like the Shetland Islands, the Faeroes (even Foua and Grimsey), Iceland, Greenland, Labrador and Newfoundland.

Millman evokes the beauty of the North and relates legends of folk beliefs of the local people. However, his meetings with locals are often less than heartwarming, especially in Greenland, where bungled social engineering has herded indigenes from traditional fishing grounds to small town enclaves where they are hammered by noon daily and have all the usual personal, medical and social problems that come out of alcohol abuse.

But overall humorous, interesting, and provocative are his descriptions of the people he met, such as a killer, a hermit, various experts as well as dive-bombing skua birds.

Somebody Owes Me Money

Somebody Owes Me Money - Donald E. Westlake

Chet Conway, a cabbie in the Big Apple, gets a tip on horse race from an appreciative fare who enjoys Chet’s conversation. The horse comes in to the tune of $900.00. At the time the story was set, 1969, that’s about $5,300.00 in our post-modern dollars. Chet, a gambler, badly needs the cash to pay off markers. But when he goes to collect his winnings, he finds his bookie dead on the floor, his chest looking as if he’d been “hit with anti-aircraft guns.”

Though he hasn’t a clue whodunit, Chet finds himself in the middle of struggles among the cops, two rival gangs of thugs, and the dead bookie’s hottie sister. Abbie’s a card mechanic in Vegas.  She has flown in from Las Vegas to avenge her brother’s murder, since she figures her cheating sister-in-law is the perp. Chet and Abbie have slapstick adventures while they avoid the bad guys and get to the bottom of the murder.

Readers looking for a comic-caper stand-alone mystery will be entertained by this novel. Since many chapters end with a cliffhanger, it keeps us readers turning the pages. Westlake is deft with twists and turns and creates interesting characters. He keeps the language simple, so this is extremely easy to read. Westlake is a master of the quip. For instance, Chet ruefully observes that impetuous Abbie has “all the self-preservation instincts of a lemming.” The author is firmly in the tradition of mystery writers poking genial fun at the conventions of mysteries.

I hadn’t read Westlake, whom fans remember fondly for his humor, since I was teenager during the Nixon regime. Clearly, I don’t read in the comic-crime genre much. The reason is that for me comedy, however refreshing witty or farcical or absurd, pales into the merely facetious over the course of a 250-page book. In a mystery, character, setting, plot and suspense have to trump burlesque and high jinks. Still, I liked this return to reading Westlake and will read another of his before another 40 years go by.

Appleby on Ararat

Appleby on Ararat - Michael Innes

In this 1941 mystery, series hero John Appleby is returning to London from The Sunburnt Country (i.e. Australia) by ocean liner with a zany bunch of passengers. After the liner is torpedoed, the plucky band washes up on a deserted island in the South Pacific which turns out to be not so deserted. One of the passengers is murdered, making the island into a classic locked room. With a few silly elements, the story is more adventure a la John Buchan than a restful whodunit.

Another attraction is among the cast is an archetypal  Australian woman, the intrepid and fearless prototype and paragon, that Innes used in other novels like The Man from the Sea. Innes taught EngLit in the U of Adelaide, in the 1930s and 1940s.

This one is fun. It isn’t too wordy or frighteningly erudite so it does not feel too long, as ones set in country houses (Death by Water) and colleges (Seven Suspects) sometimes do.

One Man Show

One Man Show - Michael Innes

This 1952 mystery is also titled Murder is an Art and the UK title is A Private View. 

Series hero Sir John Appleby, head of CID at Scotland Yard, is pressured by his wife Judith, who is a sculptor, to attend a gallery showing the work of a recently deceased young artist.  Innes makes Sir John suffer from art-babble along the lines of “A determined effort to disintegrate reality in the interest of the syncretic principle.” Plus, his paragraph describing the faces of snobbish attendees while they try to look engrossed and knowledgeable provides laughs at the expense of in-crowdism.

However, from under Sir John’s nose, the artist’s masterpiece is stolen. As the chase gets started, readers will remember the Duke of Horton from Innes’ classic Hamlet, Revenge of 1937. Another attraction is that Judith Appleby gets on the trail of the crooks. Funny are the perfect Cherman-like accent of art dealer Brown, born Braunkopf – “a pig broblem to unnerstan” – and the fight scene in a junk shop run by the Krook-like Mr. Steptoe. Braunkopf pops up in Money from Holme, too, another delightful entertainment.

Like many of Innes’ stories, the time span is very short – in this case little more than 12 hours. Highly recommended.

Other Reviews of Michael Innes’ Mysteries

Lament for a Maker (1938)

Appleby on Ararat (1941)

From London Far a.k.a. The Unsuspected Chasm (1946)

One Man Show (1952)

Silence Observed (1961)

A Connoisseur’s Case (1962)

Money from Holme (1964)

A Change of Heir (1966)

Death by Water aka Appleby at Allington (1968)

Death at the Chase (1970)

Appleby’s Answer (1973)

The Mysterious Commission (1974)

The Ampersand Papers (1978)

Lord Mullion’s Secret (1981)

Sheiks and Adders (1982)

The Ides of Perry Mason 7

The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the hell of it.

The Case of the Runaway Corpse – Erle Stanley Gardner

The hard-charging Sara Ansell hustles her kind-of-a -relative Myrna Davenport into lawyer Perry Mason’s office. Myrna explains that her husband Ed suffers poor health and may drop dead at any time. Ed has warned others that his wife knocked off two of her relatives with poison and that he too is in danger of being done to death with arsenic. Myrna has heard from Ed’s lips that he has written a letter labeled “to be opened in the event of my death and delivered to the authorities.” Sara cajoles and coerces Myrna into hiring Mason to manage the estate in the event of Ed’s demise. The first order of business, then, is for Mason to visit Ed’s office (Myrna gives him the key), find the letter, and determine its contents.

Events unfold rapidly after the first chapter. A doctor declares Ed dead, but Ed’s corpse does a bunk and is later found in a shallow grave. After hearing the report that Ed is dead, Perry opens the envelope, finds only blank pages, and re-seals it. In two excellent chapters, Mason does the fandango dodging questions from local law enforcement and exasperates a credulous young woman. In the trial sequence facing off against a Fresno DA, Perry gets hearsay into evidence in a trial sequence that throws off sparks.

Although not as delightfully convoluted as a typical Mason novel, this one has a little more depth than usual. One gets the feeling that Mason loves questioning people, doing hocus-pocus with evidence and using the law to protect his clients from  cops and DA’s that have drawn the wrong conclusions from fragmentary evidence or the inaccurate memories of witnesses. Mason also waxes philosophical, which happens only once in a blue moon:

... it's an unfortunate trait of human nature. You accept all kinds of phony tips from touts and never win, then one day a quiet, sedate individual comes along with a straight tip on a dark horse in the fifth race and you pass it up because you're too smart to fall for any more of that stuff. After the fifth race you kick yourself all over the lot.

One also feels that Gardner respected intelligent people, not only Mason’s quick-witted logic but also a DA’s clever strategies at trials and even a crook’s fiendish ingenuity in cooking up scams. Stupidity is doing the same stale stuff time after time, despite poor outcomes. It’s intelligence that makes life lively and fascinating and joyful and challenging.

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands – Mary Seacole

This book was first published in 1857 and re-published by Penguin Classics in 2005. It brings to mind books like The Aran Islands by J.M. Synge or Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics by R.H. Blythe in the sense that it is unclassifiable. It is a travel memoir, war memoir, medical history, and issues of identity. And told in an inimitable voice, full of energy and warmth.

Mary Seacole was a Creole Jamaican woman born in Kingston.  Her father was a Scottish officer in the British Army. Her mother, a free Jamaican Creole woman, ran a house whose boarders were invalid soldiers and sailors, so it was necessary for her to employ doctoring and nursing skills to take care of people with injuries due to accidents as well as dreaded diseases like yellow fever and cholera.  Mary Seacole learned these skills from her mother.

She married young but lost her husband in 1844. Having to fend for herself, in 1851, Seacole went to Cruces, Panama to help her brother run his hotel. Her descriptions of frontier life on the isthmus are full of life and death. Prospectors for gold and the merchants who wanted to strike it rich lead busy lives filled with the activities that come natural to men on their own: drinking, gambling, brawling and killing. The place was subject to floods that took tolls on life and property. She treated victims of tropical diseases and cholera. The government of Jamaica requested that she return in 1853 to assist during an outbreak of yellow fever, which was probably brought in by travelers.

Like Caribbean blacks react even in our times, Mary Seacole was shocked at the overt, vicious racism of whites in the United States. She could not help but wonder if racism was the reason she was rejected by heads of groups of nurses going to the Crimea.

Moved by patriotism and the profit motive, she used her own resources to gather medical supplies and travelled to the Crimea in 1855. With her military connections from Jamaica, she met army officers who helped her to navigate the terrible ineffective bureaucrats that were administering the Crimean War from London.

She opened The British Hotel, which charged for its catering and restaurant services and provided medical care. She supplied alcohol but did not allow gambling. Florence Nightingale hinted that she ran something like a brothel, but any reader of Eminent Victorians may sniff and shrug at that. Seacole's stories of nursing under fire during the siege of Sebastopol and the appreciation of patients are quite moving.

The war ended suddenly in 1856, leaving Seacole with stores of provisions that nobody wanted to buy. Though she became a bankrupt, she did not regret her experience serving her country. I would recommend this book to anybody interested in the early modern era, the Crimean War, readable memoirs, or strong women.

Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans & Their History

Germania – Simon Winder

The German-American ethnicity disappeared during the war frenzy that accompanied US entry into World War I. We in the born-in-the-Fifties generation know the Germans as victims, bystanders or perps during the Hitler time. And there our knowledge stops. According to English writer Simon Winder, the British are not much more familiar with that serious presence in Middle Europe.

Winder developed his interest in the Germans and their country when he was only a child. Since then he has read widely in German history and travelled extensively to out of the way spots that have preserved pre-1914 Germany. This wonderful book is approximately 75% popular history and 25% travelogue. In chronological order, he covers the German-speaking peoples from the Holy Roman Empire to 1933 (after which he feels his “facetious anecdotes” are inappropriate). Winder discusses, among many other topics, food, castles, landscapes, writers, and mad local aristocrats. His writing is accessible and often quite funny.

However wonderful Winder’s British way with words, the only drawbacks also relate to language. He overuses adjectives, especially “disgusting,” “dopey,” and “delusive.” An editor should’ve checked his excessive use of “It’s impossible not to imagine…” and “It’s hard not to imagine ….” An attentive proofreader should’ve saved him from “interned” for “interred” and the embarrassing “bale” in “bail out,” and “overweaning” for “overweening.”

Still, any reader curious about Germany’s overall history but not up to more serious historical writing would have an entertaining and informative time with this book.

Mount TBR #43

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero – William Makepeace Thackeray

First published in 1847, Thackeray’s best-known novel starts slow. In the early going, I was confused sometimes by Becky Sharp’s bitterly cynical point of view mixed with the narrator’s gently ironic view. Some sections felt tedious because I didn’t know how long the writer was going to stretch digressions, which had varying degrees of interest to me.  Thackeray’s prose is sometimes loose, but I think a bright teenage reader could follow it easily enough, much less a reader of a certain age who, in the winter, likes a phat Victorian story.

The fact that it’s a masterpiece dawned on me as I made my way through this vivid pageant of early 19^th century life in England. Like Austen, Thackeray knows readers like surprises so three or four unexpected twists maintain interest. As usual, the urge to know what happens to the characters prevailed. For instance, though she is not always on stage, we readers pull for scheming Becky Sharp, deservedly one of fiction's great characters, because the scoundrels whose heads she neatly hands back richly merit mistreatment.

Despite the sub-title, William Dobbin is a decent character who stands in contrast to prig snot and booby George Osborne, glutton Jos Sedley, grouch Pa George Osborne, and ruffian Rawdon Crawley. The female characters are great too: simpleton Amelia Sedley-Osborne, worldly Miss Crawley, fortune-seeking Mrs. Bute Crawley, and stage Irish Mrs. Major O’Dowd (who calls to mind comic relief Costigan in Pendennis) .

Thackeray's intention was to examine Regency England during the Napoleonic wars so we readers can compare it to our own times. Have people and their heart’s desires changed? No. Desires will be disappointed; if they come true, they will sour. Disenchantment and resignation are the fate of many like Miss Jane Osborne:

… Her father swore to her that she should not have a shilling of his money if she made any match without his concurrence; and as he wanted a woman to keep his house, he did not choose that she should marry, so that she was obliged to give up all projects with which Cupid had any share. During her papa's life, then, she resigned herself to the manner of existence here described, and was content to be an old maid. Her sister, meanwhile, was having children with finer names every year and the intercourse between the two grew fainter continually. "Jane and I do not move in the same sphere of life," Mrs. Bullock said. "I regard her as a sister, of course"—which means—what does it mean when a lady says that she regards Jane as a sister?

Family ties are frail; worldly things, empty; and fate, stern. Take life as you find it. Do no harm, help others endure if your help will do any good. People are mortal so we had better be ready to comfort them in their illness and lose them in the end. The writer does like the home truth:

That second-floor arch in a London house, looking up and down the well of the staircase and commanding the main thoroughfare by which the inhabitants are passing; by which cook lurks down before daylight to scour her pots and pans in the kitchen; by which young master stealthily ascends, having left his boots in the hall, and let himself in after dawn from a jolly night at the Club; down which miss comes rustling in fresh ribbons and spreading muslins, brilliant and beautiful, and prepared for conquest and the ball; or Master Tommy slides, preferring the banisters for a mode of conveyance, and disdaining danger and the stair; down which the mother is fondly carried smiling in her strong husband's arms, as he steps steadily step by step, and followed by the monthly nurse, on the day when the medical man has pronounced that the charming patient may go downstairs; up which John lurks to bed, yawning, with a sputtering tallow candle, and to gather up before sunrise the boots which are awaiting him in the passages—that stair, up or down which babies are carried, old people are helped, guests are marshalled to the ball, the parson walks to the christening, the doctor to the sick-room, and the undertaker's men to the upper floor—what a memento of Life, Death, and Vanity it is—that arch and stair—if you choose to consider it, and sit on the landing, looking up and down the well! The doctor will come up to us too for the last time there, my friend in motley. The nurse will look in at the curtains, and you take no notice—and then she will fling open the windows for a little and let in the air. Then they will pull down all the front blinds of the house and live in the back rooms—then they will send for the lawyer and other men in black, &c. Your comedy and mine will have been played then, and we shall be removed, oh, how far, from the trumpets, and the shouting, and the posture-making. If we are gentlefolks they will put hatchments over our late domicile, with gilt cherubim, and mottoes stating that there is "Quiet in Heaven." Your son will new furnish the house, or perhaps let it, and go into a more modern quarter; your name will be among the "Members Deceased" in the lists of your clubs next year. However much you may be mourned, your widow will like to have her weeds neatly made—the cook will send or come up to ask about dinner—the survivor will soon bear to look at your picture over the mantelpiece, which will presently be deposed from the place of honour, to make way for the portrait of the son who reigns.

Obviously, I read to work out my own sense and grit so I don’t mind being addressed directly to buck the hell up with that “you.” But then maybe I’m weird – I take comfort in knowing after I check out the world will carry on as usual.

Thackeray has a tough-minded sensibility such as Smollet, Fielding, and Austen in that the outlook is pretty simple, unemotional, and skeptical of human aspirations and endeavor. When we reach a point where we might dare to think, “I’ve arrived” the ever-changing world will smirk, “Well, try this misdiagnosis – car crash – recession – transfer to a mad supervisor – on for size, kiddo.” All we can control is our response to flux.

So, Thackeray’s outlook is austere, this novel is not a sunny exercise in being all we can be and making a difference. But it’s still a lot of fun to read, at least for us hardcore readers, we of the sliver of the population that reads bleak novels for sheer pleasure.

Mount TBR #42

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

The Case of the Crimson Kiss: A Perry Mason Novelette and Other Stories  – Erle Stanley Gardner

The Big C took mystery titan Erle Stanley Gardner in early 1970. Always looking for methods to stay in the black, by late 1970 the Morrow publishers were scouring the warehouses of the Gardner Fiction Factory (his own words) and assembling forgotten novellas in little batches. They then released six collections of them in the 1970s and 1980s in order to feed the boomlet of interest in pulp fiction at that time.

In this particular bundle, Perry Mason appears only in Crimson Kiss. Unusually for a Mason story, it is an inverted mystery. The frame-up opens the story so we readers know who did the dastardly deed, but lawyer Perry Mason does not.  

This opener is a solid story, but the quality of the other tales goes down, which of course did not stop me from reading them on a Saturday afternoon whose weather was too terrible for yard work. Mercifully.

The second story Fingers of Fong is narrated by a PI retained by a Chinese gang boss. As a young lawyer, Gardner worked with Chinese clients (a gutsy thing to do in California in the early 20th century) so the characterization is not silly about the Yellow Peril as we would expect a story from 1933 to be. Not, however, that the characterization is more sparkling than Gardner’s usually is.

The Valley of Little Fears (1930) narrated by a small-town old pard who’s disgusted at the cringing ways of the Nervous Norvus Newcomer and his sad-sack dog. The heavy lady of the diner brings to mind, though, Bertha Cool and plenty of other Gardnerian hard-charging, no-nonsense females who suffer no fools. 

Crooked Lighting (1928) is a standard heist story with a tidy twist and a must for people who like mysteries set on trains. At Arm’s Length, from 1939, features a hard-boiled PI that blackmails a prospective client into hiring him. Because the story feels like Gardner dashed it off in about three hours, the only thing going for it is the gritty Dirty Thirties tone and stance.

The indisputable strength is that all the stories have a fast-pace. Gardner was writing for pulp magazines like Detective Fiction Weekly and All Detective. Their audiences wanted crackling action, full of snap and crunch and salt that compel us to read as if we were working our way to the bottom of a bag of Chex Mix. They didn’t care that the writing often smelled a little off or felt slap-dash. They nodded sagely when Gardner philosophized, “You act like a cur that expects to be kicked and you'll get kicked.” Even better: “I don't want to waste time sleeping. While I'm unconscious I can't revel in my happiness.” Gotta admire a tetchy people that weren’t going to be brought down even by the Great Depression.

Gardner fans of 2020, like their ancestors in that distant time almost a century ago, won’t mind either.

Mount TBR #41

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

The Debacle – Emile Zola

During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, two soldiers befriend each other. Jean Macquart is the personification of rural values such as frugality, caution, and cool-headedness. Maurice Levasseur is an intellectual who has been educated enough to be anxious about a coming revolution that will sweep away a corrupt world. The reader follows them through the boredom and horrors of war until the Paris Commune incident affects their friendship that has been forged during their shared ordeal of battle.

But Zola’s intention, I think, was to write an epic about ordinary people and show us an entire nation – its people, their fields and works, the ecology – murdered by idiotic leaders. He juxtaposes scenes of military and civilian life, showing unedited all the sufferings of the human body and nature. He narrates the painful chronicle which will lead to the humiliation of the Battle of Sedan. Our protagonists run for their lives through a wood of despair and death being shelled:

A venerable oak, directly in Maurice's path, had its trunk shattered by a shell, and sank, with the stately grace of a mailed paladin, carrying down all before it, and even as the young man was leaping back the top of a gigantic ash on his left, struck by another shell, came crashing to the ground like some tall cathedral spire. Where could they fly? whither bend their steps? Everywhere the branches were falling; it was as one who should endeavor to fly from some vast edifice menaced with destruction, only to find himself in each room he enters in succession confronted with crumbling walls and ceilings. And when, in order to escape being crushed by the big trees, they took refuge in a thicket of bushes, Jean came near being killed by a projectile, only it fortunately failed to explode. They could no longer make any progress now on account of the dense growth of the shrubbery; the supple branches caught them around the shoulders, the rank, tough grass held them by the ankles, impenetrable walls of brambles rose before them and blocked their way, while all the time the foliage was fluttering down about them, clipped by the gigantic scythe that was mowing down the wood.

In this 1892 story to rank with the greatest war novels, Zola’s stance is that all war, whatever the lofty justifications from canting leaders, will result in the slaughter of the innocent and the destruction of their prosperity. Killing is not only acceptable but admired and required if dehumanized enemies are killed in war. As Seneca said of war, “Deeds that would be punished by loss of life when committed in secret, are praised by us because uniformed generals have carried them out.”

Mount TBR #40

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything - Yes, Anything – Albert Ellis

I think it is reasonable to brush up on living skills so I keep and re-read self-help books by psychologist Albert Ellis (1913 - 2007) when I want to remind myself of the suggestions of cognitive behavioral therapy. With winter giving me more stress than usual, I thought it would do no harm to read this classic of self-help.

Ellis gives the ABC model. It helps me to calm down by understanding how my thoughts, feelings and behavior interact. Let’s say the activating event (A) is the onset of winter.

Next, I form B, my beliefs about winter. It’s so cold. My skin will dry out, my eyelids will itch. I gotta use extra face creams. The snow will cancel classes, breaking the rhythm of the term, and causing make-up sessions. What a hassle. Not to mention the danger of Dear Hearts and Gentle People in traffic driving too fast and too slow. Shoveling the white stuff will give me a damn coronary. The winter will last forever; February has nothing to recommend it. I get so sick of wearing all the damn clothes. It gets dark so damn early. And is grey the rest of the time.

Then, I get my C, the consequence, the result of my going over yet again my beliefs about the onset of winter. Oddly enough, I feel miserable and even panicky about this winter being the winter that will kill me.

Ellis argues that it is my own wretched beliefs about the agony of winter that leads to my distraught feelings, my agitated foreboding, my gloomy predictions about winter causing my cold, lonely death, shovel in hand, in the dark, in the middle of my long snowy driveway where nobody will discover my prostrate carcass until it is too late. Or they will resuscitate me and I will have brain damage, thank you very much.

With these pessimistic thoughts, I make myself upset, not other people crying about winter, not the climate which features winter five months in the year. Me, I'm the one responsible for my useless agitation.

Ellis would advise that I use D, disputing my irrational thoughts, by asking myself, Just what is the evidence that Mother Nature is planning to kill you this winter. There is no such evidence. I do not fit into the group that is at greatest risk of dying while shoveling snow. I am not habitually sedentary and I have no known or suspected coronary disease. Keep exercising. Resist sugar and carb cravings. Keep up the fish oil and Vitamin D.  I use reason (or what is reasonable to me) to develop and support my disputing ideas. And I focus on what I can control: my own responses, my own will, the one thing that I have power over, the one thing that cannot be taken from me.

Finally, E are the cognitive and emotional effects of my revised beliefs. By being rational, by thinking things through, I feel better. Quit plaguing myself with the gloomy thoughts, idiotic inventions of fear, hobgoblins of anxiety. Shake my head, clear the cobwebs and move on.

Ellis’ advice is that I had better replace irrational self-talk with more realistic and evidence-based self-talk. A statement like "I’m stressed about winter " can be acknowledged as true enough, but I can follow this up with, "But I will nevertheless deal with it and I will probably do OK. I've done so in past." This leads to a calmer, more rational assessment of the situation and a healthier response to what happens.

Mount TBR #39

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

French Title: Trois chambres à Manhattan

Year: 1946

Englished: 1964

Three Beds in Manhattan – Georges Simenon

He is a middle-aged male whose life has come to a halt after a painful divorce. Nothing like a wife deserting with a younger gigolo to force a forty-nine-year-old into painful introspection and an existential tailspin.  She has become homeless because the marriage of the friends she had been living with got stormy. They are French-speaking Europeans adrift in a grey New York City just after WWII. They meet in a creepy bar:

On the corner, its high windows lit violently, aggressively, with boastful vulgarity, was a sort of long glass cage where people could be seen as dark smudges and where he went in just so as not to be alone.

… The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn’t go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.

They will cling to each other, hang out in bars, wander Manhattan to repel loneliness. They find a hotel, spend a night in desperate love-making, then another. They will discover each other and themselves with an aching lucidness, with no illusions.

However, though neither of them seems to be able to move away, the past steals up and taps them on the shoulder, forcing them to separate and threatening the frail balance that had been established between them. He feels jealousy, she likes to tell him dubious adventures riddled with contradictions in time and logic.

He goes to a hang-out of expatriate Frenchmen to tangle with a cynical old friend, a hollow worldling  who throws a temptation in our hero’s way. On her trip, she will be confronted with her relatives, with her old life. However, each of their mistakes will eventually bring them closer.

Like The Little Saint, this existential novel stands alone in its tender description of the discovery of middle-aged love and the fear of losing it. Not to mention the fear of oneself too, one’s own cowardly backsliding. If the psychological probing doesn’t sound appealing, read it for the snapshot of New York City right after WWII. Simenon is always good with place and atmosphere.

The Ides of Perry Mason 6

The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the hell of it.

The Case of the Daring Decoy – Erle Stanley Gardner

It is 1957. Oil Man Jerry Conway is embroiled in a proxy fight with an ex-employee Gifford Farrell. We know Farrell is a cad because he has a debonair manner and a pencil-thin moustache. Jerry stumbles into a trap involving a room in a threadbare hotel, a beautiful woman dressed in not much more than a mudpack. Hubba - as they used to say - hubba.

She coughs up a recently fired .38 to Conway before he hustles the heck out of there. Later in the same room Perry and Paul Drake discover the body of another comely woman with a bullet in her chest, fired – of course - by the same gun.

Is the frame-up of Jerry perfectamundo? Will DA Hamilton Burger hang a rap of accessory to murder on Perry?

One distinguishing point is that Della Street appears in only a couple of scenes but one with a chivalrous Perry is a humdinger.

Mount TBR #38

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

More Work for the Undertaker  – Margery Allingham

I had to put down Stuart Kaminsky’s mystery The Fala Factor because the mood and period touches of the 1940s didn’t work for me at all. I impatiently wondered when the frickin’ plot was going to get any forwarder despite all the “it was a simpler more innocent time” jazz. This quitting concerned me because for me lots of mystery writers – Nicholas Blake, Michael Innes, to name just two – atmosphere is the draw. If for me as a mystery reader briskness of plot trumps atmosphere, I’m cooked.

Thank heaven for this whodunit from 1948.

Taking a page out of Dickens, Allingham describes Apron Street. Though the blitz has left its scars, Apron Street still features street arabs, poky shops purveying archaic products, and horse-drawn hearses.

Too, the characters are Dickensy in their comicalness and over-the-topitude. Charlie Luke, a new young policeman, is a human dynamo. The Palionode family, though on hard times, pursue obscure scholarly interests as if it were still the wealthy indolent 1890s. The fawning yet sinister funeral director Jas Bowels has the motto “Courtesy, Sympathy, Comfort in Transit.”

The suspicious death of Ruth Palinode brings in series hero Albert Campion to investigate poison pen letters and an elaborate criminal enterprise. The story borders on a parody of a whodunit with nutty wills, an enormous coffin, young misunderstood lovers, shares in a defunct mine, and the government anxious to squelch public knowledge of dodgy business.

Highly recommended. For me the professional finesse of her writing, her delicate wit, her lively imagination put Allingham in the first rank of mystery writers.

Veteran's Day 2019

“I have been in Jerusalem and was at the place where Christ was born. . .. I sure do wish I was in North Carolina where I was born.” (from a WWII enlisted man's letter in Letters Home by Mina Curtis, 1944)

Mount TBR #37

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

French title: L’Ours en peluche

Year: 1960

Englished: 1972, tr. Henry Clay

Teddy Bear – Georges Simenon

Our parents and society impose three rules on us. Be sane. Be heterosexual. Be gainfully employed. Hardcore readers like us, because reading has turned our brains, have long had suspicions that the world did not in fact work the way adults would have it and doubting most things we had better be ready for anything. And we always knew that most people go through life following the basic rules not mindfully. And when they have a crisis, they have no answer.  Life questions them when somebody dies, a relationship blows up, or something terrible happens and they stamp their foot. “I followed the damn rules. Why is this happening to me? This! To me!”

And this foot-stamping is what most of Simenon’s non-Maigret existential novels are about.

In this short novel, Professor Chabot, a renowned gynecologist who runs his own obstetrics clinic, is a pillar of Parisian society, counting among his patients the rich and famous. Loyal women return to him confinement after confinement for support.

Yet this doctor, at forty-nine years old, has become weary of an exhausting existence. Life has come to a halt. Both family and professional life are nothing but routine, as he feels lonely and isolated all the while constantly surrounded by patients, colleagues, nurses, and clerks who are depending on him for a stream of opinions and decisions. The doctor is being questioned by life - daily and hourly – how’s this endless work for things you don’t even want working out for you? In what sense is being on automatic all the time showing fairness and respect to people? How is it you have no relationship with your own kids? What's with this secret drinking of copious amounts of brandy?

And he is doing his damnedest to avoid the responsibility of identifying how he feels about those questions. Distracting himself with work and affairs and dopey parties.

His love affair with a simple country girl, the Alsatian Emma, is sabotaged by his mistress. After Emma is fished out of the Seine, the miserable Chabot starts to feel alarming symptoms like anxiety, irritability, confusion, and a loss of sharpness in his professional focus and powers. The eagle-eyed patients and nurses see the cracks in his professional mask. But he feels the need to escape his duties, while, however, remaining the all-powerful decision-maker, the center of attention. He feels aggrieved that he is the one that is always giving care and never getting anything in return from all the voracious takers around him. Anger sometimes drives people to reform – but it also gets them to foot-stamping, making irrational demands of other people, of the world, of himself. 

Simenon shows his usual power in evoking backdrops: Chabot’s too-large apartment and the luxury clinic are described superbly. He also includes a great party scene of soulless wealthy people and idle celebrities and an aside in which Chabot’s mother expresses her contempt for the rich and all their pretentious trappings.

But central to the story, as usual, is his depiction of the psychology of a middle-aged guy - provoked by an accident, illness, or chance human encounter - who realizes he’s been living all wrong, evading the duty to answer life’s hard questions, and feeling he has to escape his shame, self-disgust, and hopelessness.

Mount TBR #36

I bought this book in October 1979 in the Umeda branch of the Kinokuniya Bookstore in Osaka. In the last 40 years, I moved it and stored it over three residences in three cities and have been looking at it on a shelf since 1998. I guess I didn’t read it because I figured it would always be there to finally get to one of these days.

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

The Western World and Japan: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures  – George Sansom

This history covers from the 17^th century to the late 19^th century. The first part is an examination of the contact the influences between Europe and India and China. The Portuguese, for example, were determined to disrupt the trading relationships between what is now known as the Arab world and India. Through superior technology, drive, and ruthlessness, they did so, but cultural influences tended to flow in only one direction: from Asia to Europe. Members of ancient cultures saw no need for European products and held European ideas in low esteem.

The second, greater part of the history covers the waning days of the closed country policy of the Tokugawa regime and the Meiji era from its inception in 1868 to about 1894, the year of the First Chino-Japanese War. Sansom judiciously covers the political ideas and machinations of the major factions of the time, giving the reader the sense that Japan was lucky to avoided a bloody civil war. The examination of trends in journalism and literature is masterly in content and style.

Sansom is writing for specialists, but his writing is pleasant in tone and pace for the thinking reader that is committed to the topic. Granted, there are statements that make one’s teeth grind. For example, in discussing what distinguishes East from West in the late 1940s, Sansom writes of “the restless energy that impelled Hellenic culture to expand. . . . There are dark and silent intervals, and sometimes the Hellenic spirit seems to be in danger of extinction; but it reasserts itself and continues to exert upon the Eastern as well as the Western world an influence that cannot be permanently resisted.” 

We shall see. It's not like the Hellenic Spirit is exactly thriving in the Western World these days.

Mount TBR #35

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

Lennon Remembers - Jann Wenner

I listened to a recording while reading the text of the long interview John Lennon gave to the founder and chief editor the counter-culture weekly Rolling Stone in 1970. The Beatles were breaking up and the future of the Beatles as a business enterprise was unclear.

Generally speaking, Lennon expresses his feeling stuck. He’s exasperated at being tethered to weird expectations about what the four hard-pressed members of the Beatles should be. He feels angry at the racist and misogynist attacks on his Japanese wife Yoko Ono from business associates, fans, and reporters. He’s condescending and hurtful about George Harrison, aims thrusts at Paul McCartney, and get in digs at George Martin. And other times he just goes off against the whole obtuse unappreciative world:

John: That’s what makes me what I am. It comes out, the people I meet have to say it themselves, because we get fuckin’ kicked. Nobody says it, so you scream it: look at me, a genius, for fuck’s sake! What do I have to do to prove to you son-of-a-bitches what I can do, and who I am? Don’t dare, don’t you dare fuckin’ dare criticize my work like that. You, who don’t know anything about it.

Fuckin’ bullshit!

I know what Zappa is going through, and a half. I’m just coming out of it. I just have been in school again. I’ve had teachers ticking me off and marking my work. If nobody can recognize what I am then fuck ’em, it’s the same for Yoko . . .

Yoko: That’s why it’s an amazing thing: after somebody has done something like the Beatles, they think that he’s sort of satisfied, where actually the Beatles . . .

John: The Beatles was nothing.

Yoko: It was like cutting him down to a smaller size than he is.

John: I learned lots from Paul and George, in many ways, but they learned a damned sight lot from me – they learned a fucking lot from me.

It’s not reasonable to expect that he would provide insights into his own experience. Do any of us have the tools to examine our lives coolly ad objectively, especially in the midst of trying times and transitions? We need hindsight to realize what felt like failure turned into a bullet dodged; what looked like a golden opportunity became a calamity.

Lennon had a fatherless childhood filled with adversity. Maybe all of us carry around that inner kid that is still miffed at the adult world not being more caring and supportive than it was. Till we remember that it’s irrational to demand of a fickle world patience and indulgence. And that the adults at the time had their own foibles, troubles and torments to deal with, of which we kids only had hints or if we were unlucky had to bear the brunt of.

Lennon had brought in Phil Spector to overhaul George Martin's production on Let It Be and then continued to work with Spector on projects such as the album with the now-neglected Jealous Guy and  the Christmas single which we are still hearing today at the end of the year. So, Lennon and Martin were estranged in the 1970s, meeting each other face to face only once before Lennon’s killing in late 1980. Legend has it Martin asked about the interview, “What was all that shit about, John,” and Lennon replied “Out of me head, wasn’t I?”

Mount TBR #34

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

WWII: A Chronicle of Soldiering – James Jones

When I was teenager in the early Seventies, I read and enjoyed Jones’ From Here to Eternity, a novel about the peacetime army in Hawaii just prior to WWII. It was compelling in its gritty realism even though its faraway exotic locale and love/adultery stories made it hard for an untraveled and inexperienced teenage boy like me to connect with. In 1975 Jones was hired to the write the text for a coffee-table book of WWII war art.

Jones interweaves autobiographical material with a chronological narrative of the major battles of the war. Jones is best, as we would expect, on the materials with which that he has had direct experience as an enlisted man at war: the boredom of walking and waiting punctuated with the terror of battle and the disgust at sights and smells that would make a demon puke. His description of the “Evolution of a Soldier” gives insight into the process of moving  from civilian to raw recruit, raw recruit to garrison soldier, garrison soldier into combat, and his transformation into a veteran (given the knowledge, experience and luck). The acceptance of death is key.

Every combat soldier, if he follows far enough along the path that began with his induction, must, I think, be led inexorably to that awareness. He must make a compact with himself or with Fate that he is lost. Only then can he function as he ought to function, under fire. He knows and accepts beforehand that he’s dead, although he may still be walking around for a while. That soldier you have walking around there with this awareness in him is the final end product of the Evolution of a Soldier.

So Army puts people into a situation where acceptance and resignation are needed. But Jones underscores the fact that “the government had never set up any De-Evolution of a Soldier center, to match its induction centers. When you went in, they had the techniques and would ride you all the way to becoming a soldier. They had no comparable system when you came out. That you had to do on your own.”

The coffee-table book was such a best-seller that the publisher Ballantine got the cockamamie idea of issuing the book in pocket-paperback size, thus reducing the impact of the art. That’s the version I read, depending on the web to view the art (here and here) lest I tear the 40-year-old spine to pieces.

Mount TBR #33

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

The Riddle of the Sands - Erskine Childers

This early 20^th century spy thriller starts with Charles Carruthers plodding away in the British Foreign Office, marking time on dull reports and doing the social whirl at balls and dinners. For a change, he accepts an offer of a vacation from an old Oxford buddy, Arthur Davies. The stolid quiet Davies proposes duck shooting in the Frisian Islands on his yacht the Dulcibella. In fact, to make up for being turned down by the Royal Navy, Davies has taken to freelance espionage. He is investigating German plans to invade that royal throne of kings, that sceptered isle.

Though raised near Great Lakes, having lived on an island for six years, and living now in a place ridden by lake effect snow, I’m not really a water guy. I just read lots of nautical stories, in memoirs, serious fiction, mysteries and thrillers. In this novel, the technical information about navigation, sailing and naval dispositions is balanced by expressive narrative like this:

… A sort of buoyant fatalism possessed me as I finished my notes and pored over the stove. It upheld me, too, when I went on deck and watched the 'pretty beat', whose prettiness was mainly due to the crowd of fog-bound shipping—steamers, smacks, and sailing-vessels—now once more on the move in the confined fairway of the fiord, their baleful eyes of red, green, or yellow, opening and shutting, brightening and fading; while shore-lights and anchor-lights added to my bewilderment, and a throbbing of screws filled the air like the distant roar of London streets. In fact, every time we spun round for our dart across the fiord I felt like a rustic matron gathering her skirts for the transit of the Strand on a busy night. Davies, however, was the street arab who zigzags under the horses' feet unscathed; and all the time he discoursed placidly on the simplicity and safety of night-sailing if only you are careful, obeying rules, and burnt good lights. As we were nearing the hot glow in the sky that denoted Kiel we passed a huge scintillating bulk moored in mid-stream. 'Warships,' he murmured, ecstatically.

That second 80-word sentence is, well, something, though the ~ing verbs make movement, sights, and sounds realistic and vivid.

Historians tell us that the book was a best-seller when it was published. Public outcry stirred by the book was such that the UK shored up its coastal defense system. Critics say the book was an influence on John Buchan, whose man-child hero Richard Hannay calls to mind Davies in this one. This was Childers’ only novel. He became a stringent Irish Nationalist (his mother was Irish) and had an unfortunate end after the Great War. His son was President of Ireland in the early Seventies.

Mount TBR #32

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

Kokoro – Natsume Sōseki

The first two parts of this modernist novel in three parts are narrated by a young Japanese student, circa 1914. The collegian meets a man in early middle age by chance at a seaside resort at Kamakura. As young people sometimes do with strangers, he feels an affinity for the elder, feeling admiration and curiosity.  He rather forces his company on this private and enigmatic man, calling him Sensei (teacher). The young student, from the country, has been influenced by city life and feels estranged from the customs and ways of thinking of his rustic parents. So seeking connection and wisdom to navigate a rapidly changing urban world, the student sends hints in Sensei’s direction that he wants deep insights into life from the teacher.

Sensei seems hesitant to do this at first. But eventually he writes a long letter to the student, explaining what conclusions he has drawn from life.

And we readers feel a similar pity for Sensei that we felt for the narrator John Dowell in The Good Soldier and Marlow in Heart of Darkness, who both learned life lessons that they would just as soon have gone without. Sensei tells a story on himself that reveals him to be prejudiced, malicious, rude, insincere, dishonorable, and disloyal, all of which stem from his inability to control his own emotions and tongue and his own cowardice to take what he wants, what other people would think is reasonable and fit to take. Truly a modernist novel that brings to mind Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford – deeply sad and wise.

So, it’s a great novel for fall.

Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石 became popular with his novel Botchan, which the Japanese still love today. Also, funny were the three I am a Cat books, which satirized human foibles in general and Japanese intellectuals dealing with modernization in particular. But like a lot of funny guys, Sōseki (“gargling with stones” as the Japanese call him) was beautifully melancholy and in Japan this novel and The Gate are still read today and enjoyed, if that is the right word.

He was sad and shy and peevish because that was his temperament but also because smallpox scarred him at age six and he had problems with peptic ulcers in adulthood. He died, probably of GI bleeding, on  December 9, 1916 at the age of 49. Forty-nine – just a kid!

Mount TBR #31

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

Put on by Cunning – Ruth Rendell

The US title is Death Notes, maybe because publishers thought that American readers would not connect with the Hamlet allusion and Death Notes evokes Agatha Christie, queen of the mystery of misdirection, red herrings, and doubtful identities. This 1981 mystery is the 11th of 24 crime novels, released from 1964 to 2013, starring the crime-solving Chief Inspector Reg Wexford and his sidekick Mike Burden, set in the fictional Sussex town of Kingsmarkham.

Old, deaf, and fragile, Sir Manuel Camargue slips on a snowy bank, falls into a cold river and dies under the ice. So it's ruled by the coroner a death by misadventure. Or was there something more going on? Because it turns out that the celebrity flautist was about to get married to a woman young enough to be his daughter, young enough to be a contemporary of Sheila, the TV star daughter of Reg Wexford. Inspector Wexford wonders why Carmague’s daughter Natalie Arno, who had been estranged from her father for almost twenty years, had suddenly returned to England from LA to visit her father.

Carmague’s fiancé appeals to Wexford for help, believing that Natalie is using a fake identity, because Carmague believed the woman who visited him was an impostor. It does not take long for Reg to hit a dead end.  In fact, his superior tells him bluntly to drop the case. Because his TV star daughter doesn’t let him use his nest egg to pay for her wedding, Reg takes his wife Dora to California to investigate Natalie’s tracks there.

Not the strongest story of Rendell. Too often coincidence determines the events, too many strange turns occur in the story. The denouement is also not too strong. But so be it. Nobody wrote mysteries like Ruth Rendell, who balanced foreboding and menace with humanity, common sense, and a dash of humor. The reader can tell she was a dog lover.

The Ides of Perry Mason 5

The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the hell of it.

The Case of the Rolling Bones – Erle Stanley Gardner

In the waning days of the Klondike Gold Rush, Alden Leeds and his partner Bill Hogarty mined a pocket of gold. In lawless country and murky circumstances, the partnership dissolved like the hungry dreams of busted prospectors.

In noir fashion, however, the past exerts a baleful sway over the present.  In 1939, 33 years later, Leeds’ avaricious relatives worry that Leeds is bent on marrying former taxi dancer Emily Millicant and cutting them out of the will. In a desperate attempt to prevent this, they kidnap and commit Leeds with the connivance of a greedy doctor. 

As Mason works to get Leeds sprung from the sanitarium, Leeds escapes with the help of an old crony. Emily's black sheep brother, John, later ends up with a carving knife in his back with Leeds’ prints all over the apartment.

Readable as usual albeit mildly confusing. A highlight for hardcore Masonites is the first appearance of Gertie the Office Switchboard Girl. Uncharacteristically since he was not great at characterization, Gardner makes vivid the ole pard relationship between Leeds and Hogarty.

Mount TBR #30

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

French title: Le petit docteur

Year: 1943

Year Englished: 1981, tr. Jean Stewart

The Little Doctor – Georges Simenon

Jean Dollent, a.k.a. The Little Doctor, has little in common with Simenon’s other master detective, Maigret. They both like to knock back any old alcohol at all, from beer to brandy and both trust their intuition to get to the heart of the matter. But Jean is short in stature and slim compared to Maigret’s height and bulk; silly and youthful Jean contrasts with Maigret’s gravity and middle-age; and single Jean always loses his balance around pretty young women while Maigret is the exemplar of a faithful husband.

These thirteen short stories, about 25 pages long, were probably published in magazines in the late Thirties. Considering that everybody with any sense knew that war was coming with Nazi Germany, it is no wonder people turned to escapist mystery and crime stories for a little relief. The stories often take place in the summer time and Simenon is as usual just right with weather and scenery. The stories are set all over France but often in the country in Marsilly, not far from La Rochelle and the Charente countryside. The scenes are places quaint even in the late 1930s – a France where not everybody is “on the telephone,” a France that doesn’t exist anymore.

Simenon is not Agatha Christie, so the puzzles are not intricate and their resolutions are very simplistic -  even downright improbable. The riddles are not the point, with the focus more on the portraits of the characters, developed in a few words succinctly but effectively. And what characters! Right out of Balzac – the corrupt but prudish bourgeois, the avaricious peasant, the sad spinster, etc. Simenon is lighter and more facetious than usual. He gives a wink to fans by having The Little Doctor interact with Maigret’s subordinates Lucas and Torrence when cases take him Paris.

An obscure thing to read, sure, but may be of interest to fans of Simenon and light old timey crime stories.

Mount TBR #29

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

French title: Le Confessional

Year: 1966

Year Englished: 1968, tr. Jean Stewart

The Confessional – Georges Simenon

A reunion between two former fellow students – Dr. Bar, who practices dentistry in Cannes and Dr. Boisdieu, who does medicine in Nice - allows their respective adolescent children to get to know and commiserate with each other. Sixteen-year-old André Bar is an only child, and thus stereotypically lonely, selfish, impatient, introspective and only slowly waking out of the self-centered dreaminess of childhood. Francine Boisdieu, slightly older than him, compares her younger brothers and André. But she's an open and spontaneous girl that intuits André needs a friend. She comes from a loving family, which is not the case of Andrew, whose parents are having the marriage problems of discontented middle-aged people.

One day in Nice, while André escorts Francine home, André spots his mother coming out of a house and they quickly go the other way. The young man conducts a little investigation and discovers that his mother is carrying on an extramarital relationship.

Although he does not tell his parents, they understand that André is hiding something from them. They realize that he is finally awake enough to notice other people have feelings too and see something is not right in the marriage of his parents. They, in fact, dislike each other intensely. His parents try to put an end to the distress of their son by confiding their problems through hesitant and self-serving confessions to him. It’s a lot to ask of a man-child, to assume such a burden.

Lucien Bar is a mild man, but without much scope. Like other Simenonian jewelers, watchmakers, proofreaders, and bookkeepers, he’s better with exacting detail and standard protocol while the overarching and unique are outside his range. He tries to comfort his son as best he can, including taking some of the blame for the loveless marriage. As for Josée Bar, she feels more guilty towards her son than her husband. She is ashamed at her inability to provide an atmosphere of love, trust, and harmony at home. The Bar cook and housekeeper calls it a “madhouse” and yearns to go live with “real people” like her daughter and Italian son-in-law.

André feels disappointment as his parents struggle with their marriage. He talks about his problems to Francine, without explaining to her the exact nature of his worries. The girl shows him friendship and support. The trust they have for each other, however, will not lead to any love. André is not nearly ready to handle added intense complicated feelings.

In the Bar family, the atmosphere is deteriorating day by day. André's mother, in addition to her infidelity towards her husband, has a female friend Natasha who is a bad influence. Josée goes out at night as often as possible and drinks herself sick until the other patrons in the bar start giving her the disapproving looks Europeans are so good at.

Josée Bar can’t stand the feeling that that her son is judging her behavior (a constant anxiety for Simenon’s characters: being judged) and decides to leave. Her husband only narrowly manages to persuade her to stay, mainly by encouraging André to be more tender with her. Part of growing up, Simenon seems to imply, is detecting the faults of parents, understanding them as imperfect people, and forgiving them anyway.

André feels helpless in the face of family problems in which each member is a victim. He also takes the cool stance that the marriage is not his responsibility to fix. He has his own integrity and sanity to maintain.

Rather a slice of life tale, but rendered well. Simenon is sympathetic toward youth surrounded by nutty adults who are too conceited to age gracefully. For Simenon, the individual’s basic task is to be responsible for her own life; the groups that society constructs are liable to breakdown and dysfunction so we have to have inner strength to focus on what we can control – our responses to everything that happens in life, lucky and not – and rid ourselves of the illusion that we have control over our health, property, reputation, or positions of authority.

Mount TBR #28

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

The Pendergast Machine – Lyle W. Dorsett

Kansas City Swing – blues-based, fluid with extended solos and riffing - is my favorite kind of jazz (if you care). In the 1920s and 1930s, The Jazz Capital of the World was full of nightclubs where musicians could jam and have cutting contests where two or more musicians would alternately play parts of solo choruses. The reason is that KC was so wide-open to nightlife pleasures such as drinking, gambling, and prostitution, all of whose sensations are heightened by hard-driving music.

Collecting protection from the vice lords, the politicians – mostly Democratic – provided welfare services to their underprivileged African American, Italian, and Irish constituents. The voters rewarded this charity at election time so politicians could deliver majorities and thus dominate politics in the city, country, state, and influence federal pork to come their way.

This slim volume examines the Democratic machine that grew to dominate KC and Missouri politics from 1890 to 1940. The founder was Jim Pendergast who used his saloon as a base to appeal to voters in the working class sections of town. After Jim died in 1911 his younger brother Tom took command.

He extended favors to middle class people who needed influence to cut red tape and land lucrative contracts, not help with jobs, housing, and health care the working, the poor, and the working poor did. Gradually, with sometime setbacks delivered by reformers, Tom Pendergast was able to exert political power in all of Cowtown and Jackson County. When the New Deal came to town, the machine's leading position in Missouri’s Democratic party made it the natural canal for the diffusion of federal largess to Missourians.

The downfall of the Pendergast machine came through nepotism, cupidity and electoral chicanery that was so conspicuously bad that that it outraged even the endless tolerance that Americans have for bosses and strong men. I grow tolerant with age and don’t see as outrageous one boss controlling the financing of campaigns and influence by way of owing of favors to arrange patronage of jobs in the public sector. Let the bastards flourish as long as they are not shutting out ordinary people, probably of different colors and religions, from getting ahead.

But of course it doesn't work that way. Inevitably bossism falls due to favoritism, avarice, and narrow-mindedness because human beings, being fallible and unimaginative, lose their heads when the money and power get too good. They optimistically think the party is going to last forever and get sloppy. And mean about cutting up the pie. Furthermore, bosses and their long time minions become temperamentally unfit to be leader. They age and become erratic and unstable, besides their natural lack of principles and obsessiveness about money and power.

That’s why it’s important to fight local, state, and national  oligarchies – because they are predictably, unavoidably corrupt and their decay causes a lot of damage.

Mount TBR #27

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

Antic Hay – Aldous Huxley

Huxley's second novel, published in 1923, is organized around a group of Lost Generation types that we hardcore readers know best probably through The Sun Also Rises. Gumbril Jr. throws over his tedious job as a composition teacher and tries to sell special pants with an inner tube in the seat to serve the market of thin guys whose bottoms are pained sitting too long on hard benches and chairs. Myra Viveash calls to mind Lady Brett Ashley with her debilitating line “Tomorrow will be as awful as today.” Coleman is an out of control devil, cynically convinced sinning largely is a big bore anyway. The biologist and exercise scientist Shearwater has lived an entirely intellectual life so when he falls for Myra, as all men do, he falls absurdly hard. His wife Rosie pathetically tries to play the woman of the world and pays a high price when she meets Coleman. Lypiatt has lofty artistic ambitions but only mediocre results as the mean critic and bon-vivant Mercaptan tirelessly points out.

I think it’s worth reading, but then I like Huxley’s novels of ideas. In this one, the characterization is more convincing than in his other novels that I’ve read – yes, especially Brave New World. The lost souls are presented vividly and come out of their post-WWI historical background persuasively. They are themselves, not just dummies to mouth Huxley’s social and mystical views. Sure, his tone is ironic but touching are the pages about Gumbril Jr.’s mindless rejection of genuine romantic contact with Emily.

Other Reviews

After Many a Summer

Time Must Have a Stop

The Genius and the Goddess

Brave New World

Mount TBR #26

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

You Know Me Al: A Busher’s Letters – Ring Lardner

This classic of American humor features our old pal, the unreliable narrator. Each chapter is a bundle of letters to the hometown friend Al, written by Jack Keefe, a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox in the years just before the US entry into World War I.

FRIEND AL: Coming out of Amarillo last night I and Lord and Weaver was sitting at a table in the dining car with a old lady. None of us was talking to her but she looked me over pretty careful and seemed to kind of like my looks. Finally she says Are you boys with some football club? Lord nor Weaver didn't say nothing so I thought it was up to me and I says No mam this is the Chicago White Sox Ball Club. She says I knew you were athaletes. I says Yes I guess you could spot us for athaletes. She says Yes indeed and specially you. You certainly look healthy. I says You ought to see me stripped. I didn't see nothing funny about that but I thought Lord and Weaver would die laughing. Lord had to get up and leave the table and he told everybody what I said.

No, Jack, clueless as he is, wouldn’t see anything funny about that. He has skill as pitcher but is too lazy and arrogant to practice and learn. A shameless braggart, he inflates his accomplishments. He is the worst teammate in the world.

This should ought to of gave me a record of 16 wins and 0 defeats because the only games I lost was throwed away behind me but instead of that my record is 10 games win and 6 defeats and that don't include the games I finished up and helped the other boys win which is about 6 more alltogether but what do I care about my record Al? because I am not the kind of man that is allways thinking about there record and playing for there record while I am satisfied if I give the club the best I got and if I win all O.K. And if I lose who's fault is it. Not mine Al.

Jack has a pathetic need for admiration. So susceptible to flattery, he is easily suckered by owners, managers, and husband hunters who all soft-soap him in order to manipulate him. He is hypersensitive to criticism and envious to the bone. He uses chicanery, exploits others’ emotions and weaknesses, walks away from debts like a skinflint, and lacks any sense of business or ethics. Don’t forget gullible, as managers try to persuade him to go on a round the world exhibition trip.

While we was still in that there Medford yesterday Mcgraw and Callahan come up to me and says was they not no chance of me changeing my mind a bout makeing the hole trip. I says No they was not. Then Callahan says Well I dont know what we are going to do then and I says Why and he says Comiskey just got a letter from president Wilson the President of the united states and in the letter president Wilson says he had got an other letter from the king of Japan who says that they would not stand for the White Sox and giants comeing to Japan un less they brought all there stars a long and president Wilson says they would have to take there stars a long because he was a scared if they did not take there stars a long Japan would get mad at the united states and start a war and then where would we be at. So Comiskey wired a telegram to president Wilson and says Mathewson could not make the trip because he was so old but would everything be all O.K. if I was to go a long and president Wilson wired a telegram back and says Yes he had been talking to the priest from Japan and he says Yes it would be all O.K.

Indeed, Jack’s lack of character and competence reminds us post-moderns of somebody and our own wacky reality. The consummate American con-artist’s first mark is always his own self.  My vague impression is that the writer had more sympathy for team owners than players. So Lardner was inclined to paint baseball players in less than heroic colors and thus indirectly caution us fans from idolizing lugs and lummoxes, the ancestors of guys who take gas station boner pills.

Moral advice aside, the stories are very funny but we should read them spaced out over weeks just like the first readers read them as they were serialized in the Saturday Evening Post during the Golden Age of Weekly Magazine Fiction. As a classic epistolary story and American colloquial speech, this book can be found at Gutenberg and Libravox.

Paul Newman

On September 26, 2008, Paul Newman died at the age of 83 at home with his wife of 50 years, Joanne Woodward. Blessed with looks and acting ability, he made his name on stage and then in Hollywood. Many of his movies were based on novels and plays so a book review blog should take a look at them.

As the 30-year-old teenager Brick Pollitt, Newman puts in a restrained but memorable performance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958, Tennessee Williams). The scene in which Newman and Burl Ives go at it about mendacity stands as one of my favorite scenes in a movie. Restraint on Newman’s part was a good strategy in contrast to the larger than life performances by the imposing Ives and the sometimes too earnest Elizabeth Taylor. While we’re on the topic of the great cast, Jack Carson and Madeleine Sherwood did fine jobs as did Judith Anderson as Big Mama. Yeah, I know the movie version punks out on the examination of the relationship between Brick and his dead friend Skipper.

The best seller by John O’Hara From the Terrace was a portrait of a medium-sized town like Scranton, PA in the first part of the 20th century. The movie with Newman and Joanne Woodward follows the theme of the emptiness at the core of an American success, but like the movie version of Sometimes a GreatNotion, it’s a noble failure, not capturing the richness of the novel. I read the novel when I was overseas in the late 1980s; I had bought all of O’Hara’s novels in used bookstores before we left the US.

Newman plays Fast Eddie in 1961 movie version of Walter Tevis’ The Hustler. A must-see movie from a must-read novel for those into existential works concerning an ordinary man’s struggle with himself in world that could care less if he lives or dies. I read this as a teenager  - about the same time as I read Hud and the baddest sports novel ever Fat City by Leonard Gardner.

Hud (1963) was a good movie, though admittedly it wussed out on the black-white conflicts in the novel. Based on Larry McMurtry’s debut novel Horseman Pass By, the movie touches on the theme of the Passing of the West (a genre on its own) in that we have moved from hard-working cowboys to the callous thugs, as personified in Newman’s character Hud.

In the revisionist western mold of Little Big Man by Thomas Berger, Newman plays the title role in the version of Elmore Leonard’s fine short novel Hombre. Though it is hard to get one’s head around the idea of the blue-eyed Newman playing an Indian, he does a good job. He doesn’t talk but lets his actions speak for him.

Newman directed Never Give a Inch (1971) which is based on the incredible novel by Ken Kesey Sometimes a Great Notion. It’s about a family in the logging business that keeps cutting despite the union’s strike against big companies. An okay movie from The Great American Novel about big themes: individualism vs. collectivism, jock vs. hippie, men vs. women, old vs. young.

WUSA (1970). Newman served as co-producer of this adaptation of Robert Stone’s kick-ass but now neglected novel A Hall of Mirrors, which I read in the early Seventies in college when I should have been studying. Rheinhardt is a nihilistic crap that has thrown away every chance that came his way. A seedy Laurence Harvey (is that redundant?) gets him job as on-air gabber for a radio station that broadcasts hatred and stupidity to validate the racism of its chump listenership. Yeh, still relevant today.

I never read the novels for these movies and don’t plan to but they are worth a mention to balance out the blather about Butch, just a buddy movie.

Cool Hand Luke (1967) is the powerful story of the conflict of the two great forces in our scheming world: Mindless Authority versus Mindless Resistance. Newman was nominated for Best Actor in this one but lost to Steiger’s performance in In the Heat of the Night.

Slap Shot (1977) is the best sports movie ever made, after Raging Bull. Newman plays a coach on two missions: win back his wife, who has discovered lesbianism, and turn his hapless semi-pro hockey team into a winner. Hilarious, with salty enough language to shock us even today: “They brought their f*****g TOYS with 'em!”

Being a guy and all, I remember the incandescent Lolita Davidovich in the title role of Blaze (1989). Nobody who’s seen it would forget the scenes when the dude yells out “Good Gawd Amighy” or when the title character eats watermelon. But Newman excellently plays Gov. of Louisiana Earl K. Long as a flamboyant scamp. Great to look at for its 1950s Big Easy mise-en-scene too. A movie for adults, for romantics, because the stripper and the gov really seem crazy about each other.