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.