Back to the Classics #24

I read this book for reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

19^th Century Classic. I always thought Bulfinch was English. Turns out Thomas Bulfinch was born in Massachusetts in 1796.

The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes - Thomas Bulfinch

This collection of popularized mythology was first published in 1855. Bulfinch saw his audience as young people and adults who wanted to improve their cultural knowledge of western civilization. His intention was to educate readers of English literature “who [wish] to comprehend the allusions so frequently made by public speakers, lecturers, essayists, and poets, and those which occur in polite conversation.” He quotes from Byron, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge to show when they are alluding to old myths.

So as a collection of Greek and Roman myths, this is not a book to be read through. I read this throughout the year 2022, between other books, before bed, when in a mood for palm-of-the-hand stories. I liked the change of pace when reading Bulfinch’s stately 19^th century diction, earnest style, and words used in old ways, “Her parents ratified her wish, the gods also ratified it.”

I learned that various person names – Damon, Ione, Pamona – were from Greek mythology. I enjoyed the stories that were new to me and novel twists to familiar stories. I was surprised for example to find the hero Hercules put in an unexpected position:

Hercules in a fit of madness killed his friend Iphitus, and was condemned for this offence to become the slave of Queen Omphale for three years. While in this service the hero's nature seemed changed. He lived effeminately, wearing at times the dress of a woman, and spinning wool with the hand-maidens of Omphale, while the queen wore his lion's skin.

Crossdressing is about as close as we get to alternative lifestyles in Bulfinch. After all, he was writing for Americans, a touchy prudish people easily shocked then and now. A book for dipping into or as reference.

Inspector Montalbano #21

A Nest of Vipers - Andrea Camilleri

The 21^st mystery starring Inspector Salvo Montalbano is set in the town of Vigata, Sicily in 2008.  Wealthy businessman Cosimo Barletta is found dead of a shot to the head. He has been ushered from this vale of tears by two culprits. We know this because when cranky Medical Examiner Pasquano did the autopsy, he found that Barletta was killed with a paralyzing poison put in his Sunday morning coffee. Frozen in his kitchen chair, he was then shot from behind, presumably by a second party that didn’t realize Barletta was already with his ancestors.

Montalbano has his two subordinates, Fazio and Augello, investigate Barletta and his background. They discover that the signor was a businessman with sharp elbows and no ethics, not above running a lucrative loan sharking operation that has deprived victims of their businesses, marriages, and sanity. Barletta paid for good times but also lured young girls into affairs with money and presents. He preyed on other girls with pictures of them in compromising positions. Barletta’s son Arturo and daughter Giovanna are a fine pair, because both want to cast aspersions on the other in the dispute over Barletta’s will, which has gone missing.

This is definitely not the strongest blend of mystery, comedy and drama that Camilleri has produced in this long-running series (see The Voice of the Violin or The Potter’s Field). It is easy to figure out who is behind the murders. In his middle fifties, Montalbano is getting slow-witted, but he usually sees through things quite well in the fullness of time, although it was clear to the reader what was going on for at least half of the story.

But reading Camilleri is like settling down into a familiar sofa. The story mixes scenes of slapstick comedy, sharp wit, and a harsh drama of family dysfunction. At work, we meet the usual parade of ladies man Mimi, detail-obsessed Fazio, bumbling Cantarella, and twisted prosecutor Tommaseo. Salvo’s GF Livia shows up from Genoa and Montalbano clashes with her over a mysterious hobo who lives in cave near Salvo’s beach front house.  For foodies, the culinary excursions at Enzo’s trattoria and warm-up meals  by housekeeper Adelina at home on the terrace when the weather is nice add to the usual beautiful atmosphere of Sicily and take some of the heaviness of the story away.

Very Lite Comic Novel

Daughters-in-Law - Henry Cecil

In this 1961 comic novel, retired army major Claude Buttonstep comes from a long line of losing litigants. He accordingly detests lawyers and judges. His two sons, justifiably, worry about breaking the news that they have fallen in love with twin sisters Jane and Prunella. The brothers fret that their lady-loves being kind, intelligent, and attractive will fail to balance the fact that Prunella is a barrister and Jane a solicitor.

Provoking a legal crisis is Mr. Trotter, a new neighbor. He borrows the major’s power mower – a high end item in the Fifties in England. Trotter refuses to return it despite the major’s increasingly heated demands.  Against his instincts, the major goes to law. Jane and Prunella take up the cudgels in order to get in good with their prospective father-in-law.

If this mystery sounds all homey and fluffy, that’s because it most definitely is domestic and light. After all, not for nothing is author Henry Cecil listed on Cozy-Mystery.com. A lawyer and judge, Cecil used his professional life as the foundation of his writing. This cozy courtroom drama is full of comic touches and curious plot twists. 

I’m not saying it’s laugh out loud hilarious (rolling on the floor laughing isn’t healthy for middle-aged backs anyway).  But the amusement naturally comes out of the characters and incidents. The writing is pristine, especially in the climactic courtroom scenes.

 

The Ides of Perry Mason 43

 

On the 15^th of every month, we deal with a topic related to Our Favorite Lawyer.

It is better to be hated for who you are, than to be loved for someone you are not.

The Perry Mason show often presented talented actresses playing difficult women, hard to like but making us consider the perspectives of others and improving our emotional intelligence and empathy.

Francis Reid’s career did not take off until she was at the age – her mid-thirties -when most actresses retire. When she played Lucille Forrest in The Case of Golden Venom (1965), she was well-cast a woman in her 50s who had seen a thing or two, not all of them sweet and light. After a year in Europe she returns to her native California burg, where her son had been killed in what the authorities determined was a hunting accident. She believes her son was murdered by somebody still living in town. She wants revenge, but the bitter desire to mete out payback is eating her up. She keeps her anger stoked and hot. Her anxiety worsens her sciatica to the point where she’s taking a folk remedy (snake venom) to relieve it. Her hardness makes her all too willing to alienate her neighbors, which in a small town is big deal because you can’t find other people your age to hang with. She even lashes out at Paul Drake who is trying to help her. Of course, she ends up defended by Perry Mason when somebody is killed with snake venom. Later in her career Francis Reid spent about 30 years on the daytime drama Days of our Lives, winning some Emmys too.

With her natural auburn hair and light blue eyes, the young drama student Lee Meriwether was crowned Miss America in 1954. In 1965, she appears in two episodes The Case of the Frustrated Folk Singer (1965) as secretary Natalie Graham and The Case of the Cheating Chancellor (1965) as artist Evelyn Wilcox. As secretary Natalie, she was cast against type, playing a small part as a cold-hearted assistant in a greedy fraud perpetrated against our girlfriend Bonnie Jones. As artist Evelyn, the part gives her a chance to stretch out as the smart but dumb other woman who believed the cheating dog when he promised he'd divorce his current wife. Evelyn lashes out at Perry and Paul in a memorable scene. After they leave, she yanks a sheet off a bust she sculpted of the cheating dog, caresses it, and cries. It’s really pitiful; we wonder what a smart, talented woman would see in a cheating cur that was an academic bully and cheating husband. “Love has no pride when there's no one but myself to blame,” indeed.

Stage-trained Louise Latham always looked a little tired, as if burdened with problems ranging from cats that wouldn’t mind their manners to husbands that were away cheating every weekend. In fact, she played the haggard wife Shirley in The Case of the Cheating Chancellor mentioned above. The scene where she blames herself for his adultery provides a poignant moment. In The Case of the Careless Kitten (1965), she plays Aunt Matilda Shore, whose husband Franklin disappeared with a floozy of a secretary. And Matilda is still sorely pissed, so much so that she makes herself and everybody else miserable. The scene where, in her unappeasable anger against fate, she is voicing the objections that all cat detesters feel but never dare express is pure gold. This probably one of the best episodes of the series for the performances of Latham, the ubiquitous Allan Melvin, and the Persian named Monkey.

Back to the Classics #23

I read this book for reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic Mystery. This 1947 crime novel was made into a classic film noir under the same title, starring Humphrey Bogart (too old, alas) and Gloria Grahame (perfect) in 1950. The problem, of course, as usual, is that the movie was not faithful to the book. This novel would make a good streaming mini-series, maybe five or six hours long.

In a Lonely Place – Dorothy Hughes

This is the city. Los Angeles, California. The year is 1946.

Dix Steele, a young veteran of good looks and no scruples, has had a pretty good war. Before the hostilities, he was a mere Princeton parasite, sponging tuition from a wealthy uncle and freeloading good times from rich friends. During the war, he was an ace in the Air Corps and ended up colonel in a cushy posting in London.

But postwar, he misses the excitement of flying and dogfights. He bored and sickened at the idea of work, family life, and contentment in a normal adult life. His case of the blues manifests in a constellation of symptoms like anxiety, depression, irascibility, willful isolation, mood swings, and insomnia. He seeks no help, not recognizing his sulks and bad feelings as warning signs.

Combined with his lust and women-hating, this disgruntled alienated male is the perfect subject for a novel that examines the mind of a monster, never more dangerous than when feeling hopeless or weak or embattled. Proving that classic crime literature can be relevant to today’s headlines, this brilliant noir story, vintage 1947, seems to have been written last week.

I highly recommend it to readers that like suspense, that like writers like Charles Willeford, Patricia Highsmith or Megan Abbott who wrote the afterword to the edition of this novel that I read. 

Tho the Subtitle is Wrong

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History - John M. Barry

In 2004 the National Academies of Sciences awarded this history the prize for Outstanding Book on Science and Medicine. It is impossible to read it and not make comparisons with our experience since 2020.

The Great Influenza and covid have points in common. Both viruses originated in animals and made the leap to humans. Their mode of transmission is primarily airborne droplets. Both are primarily respiratory viruses, but infect practically every organ, with neurological impacts like brain fog, unfortunate cardiovascular outcomes, and peculiar symptoms like nose bleeds, pink eye and swollen testicles.

But there are differences as well. Covid killed the elderly, but the median age of influenza deaths was in the mid to late twenties. When we are younger, our immune systems are powerful – so powerful that it over-reacts with cytokine storm, which causes autoimmune problems. About 30-40% died directly from influenza while the other 60-70% died from secondary bacterial pneumonia.

Also, in 1918, ordinary people saw horrible disgusting deaths from influenza all around them. It was clear to most people that influenza was not “just the flu,” the refrain that dummies who never had the flu kept saying about covid. People in 1918 didn’t believe the lies the government and newspapers were putting out, unlike the 40% that relished down the nonsense and bilge Trump and his supporters coughed up.

Influenza was probably less transmissible than covid but much more virulent and its progress was much faster. That is, quicker than covid was influenza’s incubation period, how long the patient was sick, and how long an infected person shed virus. A person could feel fine in the morning and be dead of influenza that same evening.

A major factor in the high death toll for influenza was the fear and chaos created by the way the government handled influenza. Because the USA had just entered WWI, the government was determined to control the narrative and not let the country get depressed by the pandemic and then distracted from the war effort. With the hope of bolstering morale on the home front, Arthur Bullard, one of President Wilson’s publicists, wrote at the time, “Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms. The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little whether it is true or false.”

The press of 1918 was extremely complicit with the government telling falsehoods about and down-playing the pandemic. Nor did the country have a truth-teller like Anthony Fauci at the national level. Barry notes that when people feel they are being lied to, society starts to fray. Governments at all levels must tell the truth, and make guidance on masking, social distancing, lockdowns, etc. crystal clear. People can deal with reality a lot better than their terrible anxieties which their feverish imaginations and twitter can come up with.

The book is fascinating about the social and political issues key to the 1918 pandemic and the effect of WWI on American life in general. We were never the same country after WWI. Woe to the republic. The lesson we can draw on, I suppose, is the obvious one: it’s important to elect competent people of character to office. George W. Bush had the vision to invest millions in vaccine technology, a national stockpile, and plans for a pandemic. Barak Obama also devised plans for dealing with a pandemic (which Orange’s enablers and henchmen never consulted).

Thousand-Yard Stare

The Goodbye Look - Ross Macdonald

The title refers to the thousand-yard stare that soldiers, too long in combat, have when they have a bad feeling about the next fight. Lew Archer, private investigator, recalls the goodbye look among he and other Marines when they fought on Okinawa in April of 1945, 23 years before the events in this novel take place.

The plot is the most complex Macdonald ever wrote, an even tighter knot than The Chill. Just a few of the skeins in the tangle: a troubled college boy, a mixed-up teenaged girl, hundreds of letters written from the forward areas of the Pacific War, and the killing of supposed child molester in a railroad yard in the early Fifties. I think reading attentively shows respect to a writer with high standards of craft, but I never detected goofs of time or slips of logic.

Besides returning to the theme of the traumatizing effects of war even years after hostilities end, Macdonald was never hesitant about making family dysfunctions the pivot of his plot. Family connections are intricate and surprises about who is related to whom are gradually revealed as the novel moves at a steady pace. Archer investigates the theft of a gold box. Showing his classical education at the University of Michigan, Macdonald twice compares Pandora’s Box  to the stolen box, from which spring three murders, an attempted suicide and a successful suicide, to mention only a couple of unfortunate behaviors in this novel.

Macdonald’s prose, as usual, is a mixed bag. We get the strained: “Pacific Street rose like a slope in purgatory from the poor lower town to a hilltop section of fine old homes.” We get the showy: “His eyes were black and glistening like asphalt squeezed from a crevice.” But we also get just the right note: “The girl was wan with jealousy.”

Soon after this novel was released in 1969, high powered critic of the New York Times John Leonard and popular novelists like William Goldman praised it. It became a best-seller. Macdonald regarded this one, his fifteenth Archer novel, as his jump from genre fiction to mainstream fiction. His implied claim that this novel is more high art than mystery is fair, considering that Archer does little interviewing and less detecting in this one.

Reading it in 2021, we can’t help feeling the novel is an artifact, a piece of evidence in the social history of the end of World War II to the oil shocks in the United States. For hard-boiled writing, Macdonald always gets compared to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but I think he was more interesting than both in terms of psychological, moral and social insight.