Major Yammerton: 2021

A classic by a POC author. For the first round of this challenge, I read this 18^th century Chinese magical realist novel in the one-volume abridgement from Anchor. It was so delightful I read it twice, mainly because it took me two reads to get all the characters’ names and kinship relations straight. But I was so beguiled by this story that after I won $50 in a lottery – an obvious intervention by the three lucky gods - I spent half of it on the four-volume translation by the highly respected husband-and-wife translator team Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. The 2500 pages were a joy to read.

Dream of the Red Chamber - Cao Xueqin a.k.a. Ts’ao Hsueh-ch’in

This family saga narrates the insensible but real decline of two branches of a seemingly wealthy aristocratic family in 18th century China. It’s a marvelous novel, episodic, sadly funny in the never-ending hassles and calamities the author inflicts on the characters. This Chinese author, like his moralist contemporaries such as Dr. Johnson, has the usual things to say about the vanity of human wishes. But this well-trod ground is made less tedious because the problems of growing up, love, work, conflict and destiny are filtered through Chinese templates as influenced by ancient beliefs and superstitions, Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism.

Chia Pao-yu, the hero of this family saga, is a smart, talented, loving teenage boy, but lazy and too sensitive for his own good. Extremely self-absorbed even for his age. Pao-yu is so besotted with his own feelings and responses that he does not notice the trouble his passivity and impulsive actions will bring down on the vulnerable people around him. Though the heir and the apple of the eye of the Matriarch, he never thinks about his future as head of the family and Confucian officeholder. So he doesn’t study for all-important examinations to enter the bureaucracy. As a dreamy realist myself, I was down with our teenage hero’s reluctance to become just another cog in a corrupt, harsh, and sclerotic bureaucracy.

Chia Pao-yu sometimes evinces bi-curiosity in other boys and he exchanges long looks and talks with the Prince of Peking. But generally he has zero interest in male pursuits such as cock-fighting, dog racing, gambling, drinking, and playing around with singsong girls. He would rather spend time with his affectionate maids and girl cousins his age in a Never-Never Land of visits, parties, drinking games, aesthetic pursuits, and, since they are all teenagers, personal care and fashion.

Just because the Chia family business is feudal does not mean it is exempt from the usual problems of family businesses: abuse of power, conflicts over money, favoritism leading to poor management, over-reliance on only a few talented members, disgruntlement at feeling left out of decision-making, and infighting over the succession of power from one generation to the next. Any reader with experiences involving a family will recognize the predictable testing of the lines, clashes, ambushes, battles, and ceasefires as natural in a family where privacy – as the western world understands it - does not exist.

Family relationships are also constantly strained by unsuitable sexual attraction, squabbling among concubines and the first wife, and friction between in-laws. The social chasm between first and second wives—who were usually bought from lower social classes — lead to much conflict and so did the jockeying for promotions and wage boosts among the domestic servants.

Other curious ethnological topics include:

· the influence of hierarchal kinship relations on etiquette and polite language;

· beliefs about propitious days (e.g., best days for travelling, moving, and getting haircuts);

· celebrations of holidays like the Lantern Festival, Tomb Sweeping Day, and New Year’s;

· food and more food and gawd so much food: braised eggplant, yam cake with dates, chicken marrow shoots, tofu skin buns, shrimp balls, chicken skin soup, pigeon eggs, ham stewed elbow, pheasant soup, bird's nest porridge, and – yum yum - fried dough fritters, to name only a few of the 200 hundred dishes mentioned in this novel.

· the use of proverbs in everyday conversation, like the obvious ‘no use crying over rice already cooked’ to the obscure ‘a lean camel is bigger than a horse’ to the very Chinese ‘If the King of Hell tells you to die, who dares to keep you here?’

· funeral customs of the rich and prestige-seeking.

I’m into the history of medicine and pharmacy so of special note to me, the writer gives examples of the interest pampered people had in shopping for doctors, talking about their ailments, and taking elaborate medications for what ails them. A doctor gives a diagnosis:

From my diagnosis, your lady is a person, gifted with a preëminently excellent, and intelligent disposition; but an excessive degree of intelligence is the cause of frequent contrarieties; and frequent contrarieties give origin to an excessive amount of anxious cares. This illness arises from the injury done, by worrying and fretting, to the spleen, and from the inordinate vigour of the liver; hence it is that the relief cannot come at the proper time and season.

Such a combination of hard-headed sense and scary dangerous nonsense, like Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1721). Traditional Chinese medicine is filled with humors out of balance and evil spirits, but wisdom and insight too — prolonged anxiety damages health; happiness can be a sure sign of stupidity; smart creative people are more excitable and less likely to be content.

Reading history and cultural anthropology about traditional ways of life provides descriptions and plausible explanations as to what people thought and did. It's important to understand the challenge that the Confucians faced when they sought to balance austere values with warmer values. That is, a benevolent gentleman moderated the emphasis on harmony, hierarchy, continuity of the family, and subordination of the individual to the group with kindness, loyalty, friendship, individual expression, enjoyment of the arts, and the duty of telling truth to power. This novel also breathes life into the strain between Taoism (which teaches love of money, love of fame, love of romantic and erotic desire, love of family will impede enlightenment) and Confucianism (which says men have a duty to contribute to society and build material wealth and good reputation for their family).

But it’s also important to read fiction to get a sense of what it felt like to live in 18^th century China. Young people feel stifled and bored, certain they have a narrow lean future. The sly adults are so irresponsible, willful and incorrigible, such Un-Confucian role models, the reader starts to wonder. Was the author hinting Confucianism under Manchu rule was a dead letter? That it was defunct in theory and ineffectual in practice, a teaching to be taken no more seriously than the prospect of a career in an authoritarian surveillance state, totally dismaying to and unfitting for an intelligent subtle man with any sense of integrity?

Basically, I was enchanted by this novel. I see it as up there with Tale of Genji and Anna Karenin and Dirty Snow as a masterpiece of literature. I look forward to re-reading its entertaining 2800 pages. But I readily admit it’s an acquired taste. Getting the names and family relationships straight takes focus. It may be difficult to picture the scenes if one is unfamiliar with a family compound – rooms, halls, studios, gardens, and, never forget, walls - in traditional China. The moral and ethical foundations for behavior have no familiar basis or if familiar are out of date, laughably archaic, in our post-modern money-mad world.

Thursday, December 23, 2021

Tell the Truth, Wretch

The Chinese Maze Murders – Robert van Gulik

As soon as the judge, his family, his servants, and his subordinates arrive at his new post in Lan-fang, the cases begin to pile up. His predecessor has fled without so much as a greeting, a gross breach of manners in Tang era China. The judge finds out the magistrate before his predecessor was murdered in mysterious circumstances. Besides administrative troubles, he finds that a local tyrant dominates the village with protection rackets and strong-arm tactics. Hordes of Uighurs – barbarians or freedom-fighters, depending on your point of view – make battle plans and recruit seditious Chinese as a fifth column. The messy situation worsens when a well-known ex-general is found murdered, the daughter of a blacksmith disappears and an inheritance dispute escalates.

Because the setting is seventh-century China, women are severely oppressed and therefore vulnerable to exploitation of all kinds. The author portrays Judge Dee as an ideal Confucian official. He resolves cases through his incorruptible spirit and benevolent intelligence, besides the permission he gives subordinates to beat and torture information out of suspects and witnesses.

In an afterward, van Gulik openly says that the ideas for the criminal cases come straight from old literary sources, which he then wove together. The progress of the narrative is that of the western detective novel. All the characters play clear parts. The account follows that of a police procedural with a shocking crime followed by careful questioning and following clues on the part of the forces of order. The lengthy reveal and ingenious engines of murder will call to mind mysteries of the 1920s.

Van Gulik's writing style is a bit simple and uneven. His pages look like Lee Child’s: lists of single sentences, no paragraphs that might scare the reader who doesn’t like to read or reads only in extreme circumstances like the waiting lobbies of urologists. The author's own illustrations can be safely regarded as amateurish and featuring too many topless females. For some readers it might seem like the writer likes dwelling on gruesome violence a little too much. It will depend on the individual reader if the downsides outweigh the intriguing atmosphere and unfamiliar settings of this unique historical mystery.

I myself have a couple more Judge Dee mysteries in the to-be-read stack and I will take the time to read them. But I have no plan to read all 17 of the Judge Dee collections.

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Poor Son of a Bitch

Note: F. Scott Fitzgerald died, today, the shortest day of the year, in Hollywood, in the apartment of Sheilah Graham "who was good to Scott but he was never nice enough to her - ever (Helen Hayes)." In 1940 Fitzgerald was only 44 years old when a fatal heart did him in, after years of late nights, alcohol abuse, nephritis and TB, and too much stress over work, family, friends, disrespect, debt.

Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood - Aaron Latham

When I went to teach in Okinawa in the middle 1980s, I took a dittybag of used paperbacks, one of which was Budd Schulberg’s novel The Disenchanted. It tells the story of a lost weekend suffered by Manley Halliday, a writer of celebrity status during the 1920s but who was forgotten by the late 1930s among the critics and the reading pubic. Schulberg based this novel on his own unhappy experience with F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1939 while working on a picture called Winter Carnival on location at Dartmouth. Though I understand that readers have reasonable qualms about fictionalized memoirs, I think it’s a remarkable novel that has stayed with me even after 35 years.

So, after all this time still curious about Fitzgerald's shifts in Hollywood screenwriting mills, I read this example of the spate of books about classic Hollywood released during the nostalgia boom of the early 1970s. Latham was a respected long-form journalist in that bygone time, writing for magazines, such as Esquire, Harper's, New York, Texas Monthly and Rolling Stone, publications for hip smart people like I knew I was though just a college student.

Besides conducting interviews with Fitzgerald’s agent H.N. Swanson, Fitzgerald’s nemesis producer Joseph Mankiewicz and many others, Latham in fact went to MGM and dug up from the archives the screenplays Fitzgerald wrote. He also mined Miss Graham's memoir Beloved Infidel (which shameless Tinsel Town made into a mawkish fairy tale of a movie[1]).

A professional writer, Latham skillfully tells the story, though sometimes being too inventive in handling chronology, which makes it a little hard to follow sometimes. Also jarringly nostalgic were weekly-magaziney sentences like “Zelda was teaching Scott lessons about tragedy which Aristotle had left out.” Finally, in books about classic Hollywood there are always examples of stories "interesting if true." For instance, we hear of Ernest Hemingway, on a tour of MGM, saying to powerful producer Bernard Hyman, "You're doing well for Heeb, aren't you?" Much as we detest old Ern as a guy, this seems far-fetched.

Fitzgerald was facing pressure on the personal and medical fronts. He faced crushing expenses and debts. While his wife Zelda was living in a mental hospital to treat what sounds like bipolar disorder, he was having an affair with young gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. Though he stayed with Coke most of the time, when he got into the gin, it was about as “sick drunk” as it could be without, at least, attracting the attention of the authorities with drunk & disorderly arrests (pure luck). Fitzgerald was also fighting tuberculosis which compounded the chronic nephritis (swelling of the kidneys) until his heart said, "I'm not doing this anymore."

But the book focuses on the professional front so we get a unique tale of work woes in the one of the most brutal company towns ever. Ironically, Fitzgerald learned how to write effectively for the screen, but the movies never got produced. Latham provides interesting tidbits about screenwriters Budd Schulberg Nunnally Johnson, Frances and Albert Hackett, Dorothy Parker and Anita Loos, and Fitzgerald's friends like actress Helen Hayes and director George Cukor.

Worth reading for fans into classic Hollywood and hardcore reading.

[1] Eddie Albert cast as Robert Benchley – I’m shuffling off now for a belt of Heaven Hill bourbon. Or three.

Sunday, December 19, 2021

John Putnam Thatcher #21

East is East – Emma Lathen

This mystery is set in the Japan of the early 1990s. It was a country beset by a big insider trading scandal called Recruit that shook up big business and bumpkin politicians that thought they were big shots.

Carl Kruger is trying to turn around Lackawanna, a huge company that sounds suspiciously like lead-footed, heavy-handed GE. Our series hero, banker John Putnam Thatcher, heads the credit committee that is supervising Lackawanna’s move into robotics. The murder of a functionary of the Ministry of International Trade and Investment (MITI) occurs in Tokyo at a meeting among MITI, Lackawanna, an English robotics subsidiary of Lackawanna, and two Japanese trading companies. Documents indicate that bribery was playing an ugly part in keeping foreign companies out of the Japanese market.

Thatcher of course becomes involved in tracking down the culprit. One would expect to miss the other series regulars like Charlie Trinkam, Ev Gabler and the formidable Miss Corsa. But in fact the plot and incident are satisfying. The asides about changing business mores and ‘three men in a room’ inner circles give the reader a sense of being privy to the inside skinny but at the same time the author resists the temptation to explain Japanese business culture. The 21st book in the series was the first after a three-year break, taken after 1988’s Something in the Air.

Click the title to go to the review:

Banking on Death (1961)

A Place for Murder (1963)

Accounting for Murder (1964); Silver Dagger Award

Murder Makes the Wheels Go Round (1966)

Death Shall Overcome (1966)

Murder Against the Grain (1967); Gold Dagger Award

A Stitch in Time (1968)

Come to Dust (1968)

When in Greece (1969); shortlisted for Edgar Award

Murder to Go (1969)

Pick Up Sticks (1970)

Ashes to Ashes (1971)

The Longer the Thread (1971)

Murder Without Icing (1972)

Sweet and Low (1974)

By Hook or by Crook (1975)

Double, Double, Oil and Trouble (1978)

Going for the Gold (1981)

Green Grow the Dollars (1982)

Something in the Air (1988)

East is East (1991)

Wednesday, December 15, 2021

The Ides of Perry Mason 31

Note: A shorter review of this mystery was published for a more general audience right here. The review below is for the hard-core readers, readers that need a tutorial on topics of 1959, and ESL students.

The Case of the Mythical Monkeys - Erle Stanley Gardner

A professional all the way down to the ground, Gardner was conscious of keeping his long-time readers engaged with a blend of familiar characters and new twists and digressions. In this 1959 outing, the love interest between plucky heroine Gladys and mysterious but unwolfish John has some sexy talk more typical in a Cool and Lam novel than a prim Mason novel.

Also untypically, the climax does not occur in the courtroom but in the judge’s chambers. The judge – who has the Gardnerian impressive name of Arvis Bagby -- has many more lines than usual and this a bigger chance to express a little personality.

Really strangely, DA Hamilton Burger does not want to play the part of a poodle lap dog to another government entity, so much so that the judge has to admonish the DA to be more cooperative, as a representative of the highest ideals of justice. But driven by memories of past bitter experience, Burger still doesn’t want to because of his animus toward Mason.

Hamilton Burger, his lips clamped in a tight line of anger, jerked his head at Perry Mason and said, “Not when you’re dealing with Mason – we’re not even dealing. He’s handing us out the cards he wants us to have, some of them from the top of the deck, some of them from the middle of the deck, some of them from the bottom of the deck, and some of them he’s keeping up his sleeve.”

Later, Mason demonstrates more confidence in Lt. Tragg’s ability as a detective than the DA does. Burger worries about a bad effect on public relations due to newspaper criticism, and tells the judge he doesn’t have the right to proceed, for which the judge lambastes him. Hey, some people read fantasy with orks, I read fantasy about the criminal justice system.

Finally, in a curious digression Gardner expresses a theory of factors that makes best-sellers fly off the shelf, at least in the late 1950s. The writer in this novel, Miss Mauvis Niles Meade, has carefully cultivated a bad girl image to become one of the hottest three-named writers on the scene. Her lurid best-selling novel Chop the Man Down was fueled by her cynical sizing up of the literary market and the public taste. She confesses to Mason:

….I’m under no illusions as to the literary quality of my book. You know, people are essentially hypocrites. They love to lecture about morality but they love to read about immorality.

An attractive young woman can write the story about a heroine whose clothes keep coming off and describe the resultant consequences in detail. People are shocked. But people love to be shocked

If you’ll notice the bestsellers and analyze them carefully you’ll find that most of the sex books written by attractive women whose photographs look very seductive on the dust jackets are the stories that sell in big figures.

Women readers love to read about sex from the standpoint of a woman. Men like to look at the dish pictured on the cover and wonder just how it happened that she learned learn all those details about the things which are described in the book and which nice girls aren’t supposed to know. It makes for speculation -- and sales.

Gardner is clearly talking about the influence of the 1956 novel Peyton Place by Grace Metalious. It was not only a best-seller – selling 30 million copies, it was a cultural phenomenon. I wonder if Peyton Place would be a good choice to read for a reading challenge. Here’re the opening lines:

Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay.

I'm now going to take myself somewhere quiet and isolated. And suffer a cerebrovascular insult.

Glossary: The pandemic killed dead my part-time job of teaching ESL so my teacherly inclinations and ways have to come out somehow. Following is a glossary of terms used in this novel for people under 50 and non-native speakers of English. Both groups lack knowledge of 1959 and its idioms and its cultural touchstones and assumptions. Glossing was for my own amusement but done in the larger hope that old-school mysteries won’t become inaccessible simply because their vocabulary becomes quaint, opaque, embarrassing or obsolete.

· Something of a wolf: Other retro words for men who mask bad sexual intentions and behaviors towards women with smooth politeness are Casanova, Don Juan, lecher, lothario, lounge lizard, masher, philanderer, and womanizer. Youth says wolf but also uses player or cheater.

· Road patrol was strict that chains were required: Snow chains, or tire chains, are devices fitted to the tires of vehicles to provide maximum traction when driving through snow and ice.

· The night was as dark as velvet: Velvet is a type of woven tufted fabric in which the cut threads are evenly distributed, with a short dense pile, giving it a unique soft feel

· log cabin: a small house made of logs, usually in a rural area or wilderness

· I can’t stay here tonight: In 1959, single women did not spend the night in log cabins with men. Note she warns him if he makes any unwelcome advances, he’ll get the surprise of his life.

· It’s a free country. We sometimes say this to people who tell us they are going to do something that we think is inappropriate or crazy. We also say this to people who tell us we can’t do something.

· It would be just like him. It would be typical of him. Nowadays the hip say, “That’s so you.”

· Sleepy head: An informal word for someone, usually a child, who looks tired and ready to sleep

· Working girl: An old-fashioned expression for a young girl who has a job. Because it may also mean “prostitute,” it’s not too safe to use in conversation nowadays.

· I really wanted him to make a pass. To do or say something that clearly shows one wants to begin a romantic or sexual relationship with someone. In Perry Mason novels, it’s highly unusual for goody-goody heroines to be talking like this.

· Draw my right forefinger across my throat when you say cooperation. This gesture means that the person is angry or that you should stop what you are doing immediately

· Gladys, Mauvis, Dorothy. Gladys was a popular name in the early 20^th century. Dorothy was popular in the 1920s. Mauvis is a highly unusual name that was never popular, but sounds very glamorous and stylish.

· Dartley B. Irwin, Judge Arvis Bagby, Wendell Parnell Jarvis. All of these names for men are impressive and ornate. Gardner liked to name his male professionals these pompous names. Dukes Lawton is a good name for a boxer because dukes is boxing slang for hands.

· Swell. An old-fashioned slang word for cool.

· The fat’s in the fire. This idiom is said when something has been said or done that will cause a lot of trouble. Though it dates from the 16^th century it is still used nowadays.

· Sex, sophistication, mystery and melodrama. Gardner goes meta. He injects these in this novel while making genial fun of writers who inject these elements into would-be best-sellers.

· Make up out of whole cloth: Lie, tell falsehoods.

· Big shot: an important, successful, influential person

· Mouthpiece: spokesperson, representative. Still used, but I think it sounds harsh.

· It’s the story of a woman who got around. Get around means have sex with many different partners

· Razzle-dazzle: excitement, attention

· Dough: money

· A man who makes a million doesn’t want to turn around and give $900,000 to the government. Though this sounds unbelievable today, in 1959, in the United States, the tax rate on such a sum would be in fact 90%.

· Patsy: a victim of a scam or an innocent person made to seem guilty of a crime.

· I’ll have to think that over: Polite way to say No.

· Lounging pajamas: These must be seen to be believed

· Cover ground: discuss a certain number of topics

· Easy on the eye: good-looking, attractive

· Deadly (traffic): boring, deadly dull.

· My crystal ball is no bigger than yours. Fortunetellers use crystal balls to tell the future. The speaker means that she can’t predict the future any more accurately than anybody else.

· Spicy (story, romance, talk): Slightly scandalous, risqué, racy, blue

· Apple pie order: a very organized and tidy state. This is New England expression – housewives there had a great reputation for order and neatness.

· The devil! Expression of confusion, surprise, anger

· Get hung up in (traffic, red tape, endless discussion): be slowed down by something

· Get the corpse tagged: Tag means identify in this case.

· Give a once over: To review, inspect, or examine something in a quick or cursory fashion.

· A cord of wood: One cord is generally equivalent to a stack 4 × 4 × 8 feet (128 cubic feet/3.6 cubic meters)

· So far so good. (Everything is) satisfactory or developing as planned up to the current point or moment in time. This is an often used expression

· We don’t have a social life, to speak of. To speak of means worth mentioning, or having any practical significance.

· He’s a live wire. An energetic person.

· Draw a blank. To be unable to find something.

· If he’s 32, he’s done military duty somewhere. If he is 32 in 1959, he was born in 1927, which would make him a little young for WWII when the draft swept up thousands more young men than usual. So I wonder if Paul Drake is a better detective than mathematician.

· Love nest: A place where two people meet secretly to have a romantic affair.

· “Tonight knowing that I’m eating on an expense account, I’m going to give my stomach the surprise of its life. I’m going to have a jumbo shrimp cocktail, consommé, a salad with anchovies across the top, a New York cut, medium rare, Lyonnaise potatoes, the best red wine they have in the house, a side dish of creamed onions and some hot apple pie alamode.” Paul Drake’s dream meal features no bread but plenty of onions.

· Shucks: A mild exclamation of anger, annoyance, regret, or disgust. Often preceded by the interjections "ah" or "aw."

· Hang it! Another mild exclamation of anger, annoyance

· In the worst way: very much. “I want a new car in the worst way.” This is still often used today.

· Cheesecake picture: images of attractive women wearing little or no clothing.

· Buy on a hand to mouth basis: The purchase by a business in the smallest feasible quantities for immediate requirements. Nowadays we say “just in time.”

· This is all news to me. This is something I did not know.

· Have an understanding with: have an agreement with, make a compromise with

· A whale of: a lot of

· Carbon paper: thin paper coated with carbon or another pigmented substance, used for making copies of written or typed documents. Nobody that was an office worker back in the day misses the carbon getting on their hands, clothes, face, lap.

· I won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. I do not want to become in any way involved in or with something or someone. A deeply American expression.

· Make headway: make progress

· Be a vamp: be a woman who uses her looks and charm to seduce and exploit men. This is a very old-fashioned word.

· Monkey with: adjust in an ignorant way (monkey with computer settings); waste time with (quit monkeying with the cat and wash the dishes!)

· Know all the angles: To know every way or opportunity one can use in order to reach one's goal.

· Daring (book): new and original in a brave way

· Jumpy: nervous, jittery

· Cauliflower ear: An ear permanently swollen and deformed by repeated blows.

· Sounding board: A person or group whose reactions to an idea, opinion, or point of view serve as a measure of its effectiveness or acceptability.

· Get a line on: To have or obtain helpful information about somebody or something

· Sob sister: A writer or journalist – often female - who focuses on or specializes in overly emotional, dramatic, or sentimental articles. This American expression from the 1920s is not used much anymore, since nearly nobody reads newspapers.

· Hit paydirt: to discover something especially after long hours of research

· Sit tight: To wait patiently without taking any immediate action.

· Play dumb: To act ignorant or uninformed (about something). At work people often play dumb to get help

· Be as snug as a bug in a rug: To be warm and cozy, typically while wrapped in blankets.

· Hang crepe: Be pessimistic about an outcome. Nobody uses this expression anymore, because the custom has died out. Crepe is a lightweight fabric. A century or so ago, people used to hang black crepe above their front door as a sign of mourning when a family member died. The custom has almost completely died out in the United States, but fire houses hang black crepe above the doors when a company member dies.

· Rental $100 a month (in 1960 dollars): This is about $900 in 2021 money, not a small amount of dough in 1960 or 2021.

· My word is good. I am trustworthy, reliable.

· Throwing money to the birds. Wasting money

· Personalities: An offensive or disapproving personal remark. Still used in formal settings like meetings, this idiom is almost always used in the negative or a negative sense: Let’s refrain from personalities. Let’s not engage in personalities.

· Car hop: A server – usually female – in a drive-in restaurant.

· Lush: A person who is habitually drunk, a heavy drinker

· Decorate the mahogany: When someone buys a round a pub or bar, they decorate the mahogany; putting cash on the bar. I doubt if anybody uses this expression anymore, though, heaven knows, never say never.

· Roll with the punch: adapt yourself to unfortunate circumstances

· Clutch at straws: To make a desperate attempt to repair a bad situation.

· “The judge’s eyes twinkled.” “His face a perfectly expressionless mask.” “His eyes narrowing.” These expressions of Gardner are his favorites and can be found in almost all of his books

· Smith Corona: This company made typewriters and their supplies from 1886 to 2013. Now they make thermal labels for barcodes. It is very unusual for Gardner to mention brand names, even of cars. Perhaps it was against the rules of magazines who first printed the novels as serials.

· What’s your line? Old-fashioned expression for What do you do?

· Bring out your big guns: Use your most talented players or employees

· Tip your hand. To reveal one's intentions, plans, secrets, or resources. This is from the card game poker if you let someone else see the cards you’re currently holding (one's "hand").

· I’m in his hands. Under his control or influence.

· Tax dodging. Illegal methods to avoid paying taxes

· Stake out: Watch a location to identify who comes and goes

· Juggle funds: Handle and move money to and from various accounts for dishonest reasons

· Put a shadow on somebody: Covertly follow somebody wherever they go

· On the high road: In the easiest possible way

· Force one’s hand: Make someone do something

· Know the lay of the land. Be familiar with where things (roads, trees, landmarks, etc.) are located in a place

· Percolator: a device for making coffee, consisting of a pot in which boiling water is circulated through a small chamber that holds the ground beans. If you want to start a fight, start an argument between people whose use a percolator and people who use a cone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjaXBqJA-bs

Monday, December 13, 2021

Back to the Classics Challenge 2021 #23

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

Classic with an Animal in the Title. The creator of Perry Mason was a conservationist and outdoorsman who loved the rugged landscape of the American West and the variety of countryside in Southern California. He also liked animals. A reader gets the feeling that Gardner felt a normal and natural part of the family was a dog and that he had a special affinity for cats. The Mason mysteries with an animal in the title are TCof the Howling Dog, TCof the Caretaker's Cat, TCof the Lame Canary, TCof the Perjured Parrot, TCof the Careless Kitten, TCof the Fan Dancer's Horse, and TCof the Grinning Gorilla. The Cool and Lam mysteries with a nod to beasts are Owls Don't Blink, Bats Fly at Dusk, Cats Prowl at Night and Crows Can't Count.

The Case of the Mythical Monkeys - Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1959 mystery opens with a profile of a cynical writer. Mauvis Niles Meade has produced a best-seller of which one reviewer says “while fueled by a juvenile imagination also reeks of reality.” She hires pretty 22-year-old Gladys Doyle as a PA. Like all Gardnerian heroines from Della Street down, Gladys is smart, confident, and resourceful. But she can’t figure out her mysterious employer, who sends her on weird errands at all hours of the day and night. Gladys figures, it’s still better than working nine-to-five in a humdrum office. Young and innocent Gladys never dreams that anybody would use her for nefarious ends.

One dark stormy night, on a particularly odd errand, Gladys gets her station wagon bogged down in a mud hole on a lonely mountain road. She tries to get help from a cute but curt guy in remote log cabin. Smugly superior and maddeningly ignoring her charms, John refuses to help her extricate her car and only grudgingly allows her to spend the night in the cabin. She informs him that if tries any funny stuff in the unwelcome advances line, he’ll get the surprise of his life. Gladys respects herself and it is 1959, after all.

Looking for John the next morning, she discovers in another bedroom a corpus delicti next to a small caliber rifle, which, of course, she picks up, thinking the intruder-killer might be still lurking about. She flees the scene, to her employer’s office cum apartment which she finds a ransacked mess. Remembering her employer’s advice, she runs to see Perry Mason about a matter of the gravest importance – not ending up in the gas chamber.

Having read around 60 of the 70 Perry Mason mysteries, I’m at the point of looking beyond the formula to see what Gardner does to keep things interesting for himself as a writer and loyal readers whose patience he knows better not to tax. In this one, he makes a major departure from custom when he eschews the usual courtroom fireworks scene. Instead the climax occurs in the judge’s chambers. Judge Arvis Bagby, in fact, has a much larger role and gets many more lines than judges usually do. The judge lambastes DA Hamilton Burger for not wanting to cooperate with another branch of government and having excessive animus for Perry Mason. Finally, the plucky heroine talks in a racy way that will call to mind the semi-risque Cool and Lam novels.

PS: For more information than a less than hardcore reader needs see this link. For an audio version of this mystery see this Youtube link.

Major Yammerton

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Back to the Classics 2021 Wrap-up

Monday, December 27, 2021

Back to the Classics Challenge #24