Back to the Classics 2021 #6

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

A children’s classic. I like them well enough when I read them, so I don’t know why I need this challenge to push me to read classics like Oz books or Peter Pan.

The Five Children and It – E. Nesbit

The setting is the Kent countryside in 1902. Four brothers and sisters - Cyril, Robert, Anthea, Jane, and the two-year-old Lamb who is otherwise unnamed - are left in the care of a young housekeeper while their parents go away to care for a sick granny. While playing in a deserted gravel pit, the kids stumble across a Psammead, or sand-fairy. Homely and grumpy as we’d expect an ancient being to be, it grants them a wish a day with the stipulation that the effects of the wish wear off promptly at sunset.

I hate spoilers so I will not describe any wishes or their effects. Leastways, the kids wish for predictable things but also make unintentional wishes that the literal sand-fairy grants with a gruff “A nice thing you've let yourselves in for!” Suffice to say, the kids and sometimes Lamb get into high adventures and hilarious difficulties. Nesbit deftly pulls off the juxtaposition of magic right in the midst of our mundane plane.

Also interesting is that Nesbit assumes a cool aunt tone when addressing the kiddish reader. She never condescends, her wording is perfect as to pitch and vocabulary. She assures readers she’s just for fun, not improving: “Lending ears was common in Roman times, as we learn from Shakespeare; but I fear I am getting too instructive.” What lessons there are often about ‘knowing thyself’ a.k.a. emotional regulation and are woven seamlessly into the action. On consequences after Anthea has raised money in an unethical way: 

She was feeling very cross. She knew she had acted with nobility and discretion, and after that it was very hard to be called a little silly, especially when she had the weight of a burglared missionary-box and about seven-and-fourpence, mostly in coppers, lying like lead upon her conscience.

Nesbit, in fact, often underlines that kids have a conscience, even if at times that integrity is a fortress besieged:

'Shut up, can't you?' said Robert; but Cyril couldn't. You see, he felt in his heart that if there SHOULD be Indians they would be entirely his own fault, so he did not wish to believe in them. And trying not to believe things when in your heart you are almost sure they are true, is as bad for the temper as anything I know.

She assumes her audience are great readers, with nods to “dear” Mr. Kipling and F. Anstey’s The Brass Bottle (1900). There’s a keen Huck Finn-type send up of certain books for young readers:

Robert felt pleased at being CALLED brave, and somehow it made him FEEL brave. He passed over the 'varlet'. It was the way people talked in historical romances for the young, he knew, and it was evidently not meant for rudeness. He only hoped he would be able to understand what they said to him. He had not always been able quite to follow the conversations in the historical romances for the young.

The children try to be courageous, courteous, valiant, and gallant, but they talk and act like kids. The older brother argues against coming clean to their mother, thus:

'Do you think so?' said Cyril slowly. 'Do you think She'll believe us? Could anyone believe about a Sammyadd unless they'd seen it? She'll think we're pretending. Or else she'll think we're raving mad, and then we shall be sent to Bedlam. How would you like it?' - he turned suddenly on the miserable Jane - 'how would you like it, to be shut up in an iron cage with bars and padded walls, and nothing to do but stick straws in your hair all day, and listen to the howlings and ravings of the other maniacs? Make up your minds to it, all of you. It's no use telling mother.'

As a big brother who used to impart a great deal of dubious information – if for no other reason that it is simply amusing to do so - I have to give it to Cyril for an admirable line of alarming patter.

I recommend this highly to hardcore readers that are looking for something different, after escaping the howlings and ravings of the other maniacs at work. I haven’t the foggiest notion if the magic would pass the rigid standards of today’s fantasy fans. Nor do I know whether the hip minors of today who are also readers would like this. I do gather that Nesbit is not nearly as popular in the US as she seems to be in the UK. Strangely, Disney has not made franchises out of the many books Nesbit wrote, but there are many TV and movie adaptations listed in IMDB.

Note: Another advantage of this challenge is finding out about writers one has never heard of and their curious lives. For a brief overview of Nesbit’s unconventional and tumultuous married life with a serial philanderer who had about 15 affairs and her own romantic dalliances in her bohemian literary set, see the article in JSTOR E. Nesbit and the Happy Moralist by Gloria G. Fromm. It’s so shocking it’s funny but one also feels how awful it must have been for their kids.

The Lively Corpse

Rose’s Last Summer aka The Lively Corpse - Margaret Millar

In this 1952 mystery, a long-forgotten actress is found dead in a family's garden. The sudden death is officially ruled natural causes, but a small town police chief and a psychiatric social worker feel reservations. The reader, thanks to Millar’s subtle skill in inducing misgivings, feels that something is not quite right. Anyway, our qualms focus on the odd personalities and behaviors of the family in whose garden the remains were found. As the detective pair ask around discreetly, they meet a range of odd people.

Millar is enjoyable to read because her writing - especially the dialogue - is beautiful. Her carefully plotted stories have lots of incidents and surprises. Millar draws characters sharply. She gives nods to social issues and problems in abnormal psychology, such as the psychopathic personality. But she’s skilled at ordinary everyday zaniness too:

. . . Mrs. Cushman, who had arrived late and taken a seat in the back row, assumed she had somehow come to the wrong funeral and she immediately rustled out again to look for the right one.

Malgradi could stand the agony no longer. He slipped out into the corridor. Here he met Mrs. Cushman who had been wandering in and out of rooms finding out a good deal about the embalming business. The experience had unnerved her and left her quite unprepared to cope with this sudden meeting.

'Eeeee,' Mrs. Cushman said, and made a frantic beeline for the nearest door, which happened to be that of the chapel. So she didn’t miss Rose’s funeral after all.

In the early 1940s Millar n wrote Craig Rice-type comic mysteries. But by the early 1950s, her humor became less clowning and more witty, coming out of genuine characters and outlandish situations. So, the analogy would be Craig Rice is to The Lucy Show as Margaret Millar is to The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Readers that enjoy Patricia Highsmith and Dorothy B. Hughes should try novels by Margaret Millar.

Update: In case you don't know the allusion in the title, listen to a version of The Last Rose of Summer.

Hollywood in the Fifties

The Bad and the Beautiful: Hollywood in the Fifties  - Sam Kashner and Jennifer Macnair

I like books about Hollywood from the silent era to the late 1970s. I don’t mind gossipy material unless it’s too snarky like Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. I mean, stars were only human, not equipped by nature, upbringing or education to endure the pressures of money and fame, not to mention anxiety and depression in the gilded cage of the meanest company town ever. Who the hell is Kenneth Anger to bag on these ordinary people under extraordinary pressures?

While this book avoids excessive snark, there are, however, lapses of care and sense.  Twice the word “murder” is used to describe the justifiable homicide of Johnny Stomp, for instance. But generally speaking, this is worth reading for the inside information on Confidential Magazine, Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper and Sheilah Graham. Well-told are the production stories of Rebel without a Cause and The Sweet Smell of Success. Really interesting, too, were the sad stories of Hollywood treating like dirt the vulnerable Sandra Dee, Grace Metalious, and William Inge. Also you would have thought that intellectuals would have protected themselves more effectively but Ernest Lehman, Charles Laughton, and Alvah Bessie were chewed up too.

The writers acknowledge a debt to Otto Friedrich's City of Nets, a narrative of Hollywood history and culture in the Forties. But this book does not have the hard-eyed intelligence of that one and lacks the digressions that made City of Nets such a fascinating read.

The Last Cool & Lam Mystery

All Grass Isn’t Green - A A. Fair aka Erle Stanley Gardner

Milton Carling Calhoun hires the PI team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam to find the missing writer Colburn Hale. Calhoun acts cagey about the reasons why he wants to find Hale. As a result, Lam suspects funny business is afoot.

Lam easily uncovers the fact that Colhoun is a scion of a wealthy family. Lam starts tracking Hale and finds out another struggling writer, Nanncie Beaver, has gone missing too.  The trail leads to Mexico’s porous border with Calexico, CA, across which tourists casually stroll (it’s 1970 in the novel) and crooks, aided by the high tech of CB radios, smuggle marijuana.  A smuggler is knocked off with Calhoun’s pistol. Lam’s series nemesis, Lt. Sellers of the LAPD, starts measuring Calhoun’s neck for the noose.

When he wrote as A.A. Fair, Erle Stanley Gardner let himself relax a little. For instance, he is more apt to go off on tangents. He spends time describing the desert country, which he loved and wanted conserved. As in other Cool and Lam books, he supports the cause of women forced into jobs such as exotic dancers, clerical staff, retail supervisors and clerks, and other hard-pressed poorly-paid workers. Gardner, a successful writer, is surprisingly sympathetic to struggling writers who toil for peanuts from money-grubbing publishers 

Published in 1971, this was the last Cool and Lam novel. The book is still readable because Lam is narrating in first-person and in the courtroom scene a young DA gets his comeuppance. Bertha Cool, the comic miser, puts in a mere walk-on in the first and last chapters. The dialogue recapitulates information we readers already know. 

Novices or non-fans may want to give this one a pass.  But at the end fans will admire the fireworks Gardner could still light and feel gratitude at the hours of sheer reading pleasure that he provided. 

The Ides of Perry Mason 22

We are nearing the second anniversary of this custom, which features a review of a mystery with our favorite lawyer on the 15th of the month. It's hard to believe the last year really happened. Or is still happening with about 1500 deaths a day in the US.... 

The Case of the Daring Divorcee - Erle Stanley Gardner

The 72^nd Perry Mason novel (1964) has its funny moments and the usual two-guns shenanigans. But you can hear the gears grinding. It’s too complicated for ready understanding, the dialogue is stiff, it hides crucial information, and it recapitulates a minor sequence of events three times.

A woman wearing big sunglasses leaves in Mason’s office Adelle Hastings’ purse with $3,000 and a recently fired .38 with two spent shells. When Mason tracks Adelle down she explains that her purse was stolen from her car. Adelle explains that she, the third wife of Garvin Hastings, is in the process of obtaining a divorce. Garvin wants to keep things amicable even to the point of acting in such a way that it seems he’s having second thoughts about asking Adelle to go to Las Vegas for the divorce.

The bullets from those two shells are found, one in poor Garvin’s brain pan, and the other having passed through his skull into the bed where he was sleeping. In the exposition and through a character, Gardner explains the premeditation and cold-bloodedness it takes to murder a sleeping man. The double harangue is odd for Gardner, who didn’t usually repeat himself, especially with points the reader already knows.

The fun highlights are two. Detective Tragg wants Mason’s receptionist Gertie to identify Adelle. Mason has her put on her big dark glasses while Della ushers in six women also with dark glasses for a surprise line-up. Tragg is sore at Mason’s tactic. In another scene a shyster lawyer tells Mason that he values the good opinion of Mason. To which Perry replies, “Don’t value what you can’t have” like the stoic role model that Mason is. 

Indeed, if our pandemical year has taught me anything, it's "Don’t make your happiness depend on things that are not up to you; if you want something good get it from inside yourself." Anyway....

As is his wont, Gardner takes aim at The System. That is, he criticizes the practice of overcharging, i.e. when a prosecutor multiplies the number of crimes a defendant allegedly committed.

“If it [a stolen gun] should appear,” Mason said, “that the defendant and this witness conspired to get some evidence from my office, then the taking of the gun would be an overt act which would make him guilty of a separate crime, the crime of criminal conspiracy. Taking the gun is one thing, conspiring to take it is another. They are both crimes.”

“That’s splitting hairs,” [Prosecutor] Ellis said.

“No, it isn’t,” Mason said. “Whenever you people draw up an information or a complaint against a person you put in just as many counts as you can think of. You put in a count of criminal conspiracy and you put in a count of the criminal act. Then you try to talk a jury into returning a verdict of guilty on every count in the indictment. You claim each count is a separate crime, that you don’t make the law, you only enforce it, that if the legislature has chosen to make it a crime to conspire to commit an unlawful act and a defendant conspires to commit such an act and then does commit the act, he’s guilty of two separate crimes.”

Needless to say, this is a problem that has by no means gone away, prosecutorial discretion being what it is in our year 2021. And prosecutors enjoy complete immunity. For the sake of St Paddy's Day, let's paraphrase the Irish blessing, "Heaven between us and the criminal justice system." 

In short, a Mason novel, like numerous late-career Mason novels from the 1960s, that would be of interest only to hardcore Mason fanatics.

Back to the Classics 2021 #5

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

A Humorous Classic.  George Orwell recommended the two Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody as a comic masterpiece. Maybe in the next round – my main goal is to read the books I already have. And I was wondering if Diary of a Nobody was anything like Three Men in a Boat, which I didn’t find funny in the least. Other funny things everybody likes but me: Chevy Chase, Adam Sandler, Big Bang Theory, and Disney though Zootopia had its moments. Sloths. Ha………Ha.

Much in Evidence – Henry Cecil

Taking £100,000 in cash out of the bank to play the ponies at a later date, bald and lame Mr. Richmond is persuaded to insure it by his banker.  Luckily. That same night he is robbed of the entire treasure and conked on the head by two house-breakers disguised in the red noses and long white beards of Santa Claus – or Father Christmas, as the British say.

His insurance company, though grumpy over the whole matter, pays out the claim. But their investigator, Miss Clinch, remains highly skeptical – or sceptical, as the British spell it - of Richmond’s version of events.

She makes deep dives into the records of past claims, not as easy a task in back in paper-ridden 1957 as it is nowadays with our complete and accurate in every way banks of data. Three different insurance companies say they dealt with a lame and bald man on three smelly claims. Miss Clinch finds that Mr. Richmond’s typewriter wrote letters to the scammed insurance companies. Mr. Richmond ends up in the dock, with the two coincidences of appearance and typewriter as damning circumstantial evidence against him.

As is usual with Cecil, the plot does not involve a murder, which makes a nice change from the usual crime novel. The dialogue is clever and clear. The characters have a lot of variety from the quietly competent defense lawyer Stanhope to the barrow boy Mr. Brown to the coolly professional home invaders educated at a tony private school – or public school, as the British would have it. The alcoholic solicitor Mr. Tewkesbury makes a re-appearance from The Painswick Line; I don’t usually like alky humor but he’s pretty funny in a ‘W.C. Fields as Mr. Micawber’ way. Full of twists that are impossible to predict, the plot hinges on coincidences, all piled high until the whole edifice comes tumbling down in a rousing climax that borders on fantasy.

Henry James said that Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs had a “hard lucidity.” Cecil’s lucidity is light, with plain prose, graceful dialogue, and difficult legal points explained comprehensibly. Fans of comic novels, courtroom fiction, and dry English humor will enjoy this short novel during short plane trips or hospital stays. The acceptance of human beings as they are is cheerfully stoic.

Mystery in Manhattan

The Rubber Band – Rex Stout

First serialized in six issues of the weekly Saturday Evening Post in 1936, The Rubber Band aka To Kill Again is the third novel featuring the heavy agoraphobic PI Nero Wolfe and his active wise guy of a personal assistant  Archie Goodwin.

The story begins with a highly successful businessman trying to persuade the indolent Wolfe to investigate the apparent theft of $30,000 from his office suite. Coincidentally enough, the woman that his colleagues are convinced is guilty of the theft, aptly named Clara Fox, visits Wolfe’s office. She tries to persuade Wolfe to take up the case of collecting an old, undocumented debt.

Given the debt, the theft, and the inevitable murder, the plot becomes complex. Count on Stout to keep the balls in the air, play fair, and end with a surprising reveal. On top of the story, though, is the attraction of being the fly on the walls of Wolfe’s brownstone on West 35th Street.  As J. Kenneth Van Dover wrote in At Wolfe's Door, “It is the center from which moral order emanates, and the details of its layout and its operations are signs of its stability.”

Though populated by four males, nothing brings to the mind the locker room as the place is tidy and gourmet meals are served on a rigid schedule. The place becomes a madhouse, however, because Wolfe allows Clara Fox to hide from the cops in the brownstone. Though his default setting are misogynistic, Wolfe falls for her, while Archie looks askance and ribs him about reading her Hungarian poetry.

With such a safe domestic interior as the brownstone, I can’t describe the Wolfe novels as hard-boiled. Archie is tough and ready with weapons, but he’s too funny and uncomplicated a guy to be compared with Sam Spade or Lew Archer. Liking Goodwin’s genial soul, in the early Sixties, a cousin of mine – a reader down to her toes  -  named her basset hound Archie in his honor.

Plus, Stout hit on something with the character of Wolfe. Wolfe is the thinking device, the heir of Sherlock Holmes, but his conceits and pompousness are a hoot. “Confound it, Archie. I have you to thank for this acarpous entanglement.” Stout, a lover of big words, reverses the roles when he has Archie complain about Wolfe’s eccentric ways: “I exploded, ‘If this keeps up another ten minutes I'll get Weltschmerz!’”

The League of Frightened Men and Fer de lance were the first two Wolfe novels. Both were too long, nearly painfully so. The Rubber Band is long also but it never feels long.  I think I would recommend The Rubber Band to a reader new to Wolfe, but tell them an even better place to start would be with the post-WWII outings such as The Silent Speaker. Then read Black Orchid and Some Buried Caesar. The novellas, which number about 50, are, in a word, perfect; see Trouble in Triplicate.

Inspector Montalbano #13

The Potter's Field - Andrea Camilleri

This 2008 mystery is 13^th of the series that stars Inspector Montalbano, of the Vigata (Sicily) Police. It’s a satisfying mix of familiar elements, starting with the setting. Author Camilleri has said that the town of Vigata is based is his home town of Porto Empedocle, near Agrigento. After reading the alluring descriptions of Sicilian cuisine and landscapes, the reader wants to book tours to Modica and Ragusa.

Another familiar element is the unfolding of different plots. The cops and the readers assume various elements are not related. But gradually we realize that Sicily, an island with only 5 million people, is bound to have lots of intersections of people in love, people in lust, people feeling obligation, bad people doing virtuous things out of guilt, and people committing the everyday sins like lying and betraying.

A third stand-by is Montalbano’s subordinates. Fazio drives Salvo crazy by either collecting too much information or not passing on the information he’s collected. Lady’s man Mimi seems to be off the rails with a Spanish beauty in spite of the fact that his wife Beba just had a baby. And holy fool Catarella provides hilarious malaprops. There’s a slapstick scene with Cat near the beginning that will make readers laugh who think they despise slapstick.

Salvo Montalbano himself has much appeal. Getting older, he realizes that his bad temper and popping off at people are no longer leading him astray so much as a failing memory and erratic concentration. In this novel, he has to re-define himself as a boss and friend to his subordinates and come to terms with his own conscience and cognitive decline. Besides the challenges of getting older, Salvo realizes that the world is changing and the values he cherishes are no longer considered essential by the dominant culture. As Elizabeth Bowen once bleakly observed (Death of the Heart, maybe?), models of cars become outmoded but so do models of men.

The novel impressed me a bit more than the other Camilleri stories. The dream that Montalbano has in the first pages and the deluge that accompanies him to the discovery of the body are wonderful narration and plot development. Salvo is a true reader when he deeply reads the Gospel of Matthew and gets a clue out of the place where Judas committed suicide. The theme of betrayal focuses on the various forms of unfaithfulness and the desire for avenging disloyalty. In addition there is a game of fun house mirrors between Montalbano and Camilleri, subtle and ironic … who is observing whom?

Highly recommended.

Other Montalbano Mysteries: click on the title to read a review:

·         The Terracotta Dog — 2002 (Il cane di terracotta — 1996)

·         The Voice of the Violin — 2003 (La voce del violino — 1997)

·         The Scent of the Night — 2005 (L’odore della notte — 2001)

·         Rounding the Mark — 2006 (Il giro di boa — 2003)

·         The Paper Moon — 2008 (La luna di carta — 2005)

·         August Heat — 2009 (La vampa d'agosto — 2006)

·         The Wings of the Sphinx — 2009 (Le ali della sfinge — 2006)

·         The Track of Sand — 2010 (La pista di sabbia — 2007)

·         The Potters Field — 2011 (Il campo del vasaio — 2008)

·         A Beam of Light — 2015 (Una lama di luce — 2012)

King of Comedy

King of Comedy – Mack Sennett

I like Hollywood autobiographies, ghostwritten or not, because the funny stories are easy to read. The stories might even be true, but I don’t care as long as they make me laugh. Sometimes, however, there are provocative nuggets such as this, slapstick king Sennett quoting James Cagney:

It’s the naïve people who become the true artists. First, they have to be naïve enough to believe in themselves. Then, a performer – especially an actor or an actress – must be naïve enough to keep on trying, using his talent, in spite of any kind of discouragement or double-cross. He doesn’t pay attention to setbacks. In his ingenuousness he doesn’t know a setback when it smites him. Money doesn’t concern him.

Cagney was a college man for a semester, but he probably got his vocabulary – ingenuous, setback, smite – from reading.

Anyway, movie buffs, historians of comedy, and Hollywood mavens would enjoy this book, first published in 1954. It’s coarse in places, rubbing our 2013 sensibilities a bit raw, but then so are the transcendent shorts of Roscoe Arbuckle. What would be really be interesting is an edited version of this book, telling us where Sennett is misremembering, misrepresenting, mischaracterizing, and getting it plain wrong, for whatever reason.

Sad the eyewitnesses are all gone.