European Reading Challenge #13

I read Hercule Poirot #9 for  the 2024 European Reading Challenge.

Lord Edgware Dies aka Thirteen at Dinner – Agatha Christie

We are in London in the early 1930s.  Our narrator is Captain Arthur Hastings, sidekick to private eye extraordinaire Hercule Poirot. Hastings feels the time is right to reveal all about a case of burning interest to the general public, which calls to mind when Conan Doyle would tantalize readers with juicy titles of Holmes’ cases. The reason for such a public fascination is quickly explained: the victim is George Alfred St. Vincent Marsh, fourth baronet of Edgware, a milord so prominent as to arouse keen interest among the curious.

Before arriving at the demise of the hateful milord, however, we witness the meeting between Our Dynamic Duo and the actress Jane Wilkinson, wife of Lord Edgware. In a busy restaurant where anybody can hear, she requests Poirot’s assistance in getting rid of her husband. These indiscreet intentions of hers land her at the top of the list of suspects as soon as Lord Edgware's body is found only a couple of days later in the library.

The cast is once again made up of intriguing characters in the insular worlds of the aristocracy, actors and people who think of nothing save getting rich. Among the players, Jane Wilkinson stands out in the role of the widow who is easily consolable since she has her eyes on another peer. Other characters are the American comedian Carlotta Adams and heir to the Edgware lands goods and chattels Captain Ronald Marsh. The secondary characters that are very well-drawn are Bryan Martin (an actor); Miss Caroll (Lord Edgware’s secretary); the Dowager Duchess of Merton; Ellis (Jane Wilkinson’s Assistant); Geraldine Marsh (Lord Edgware’s daughter) and Jenny Driver (hat shop owner).

Plot and incident flow pleasantly and steadily. From the beginning the solution seems clear enough but as we’d expect of Christie not everything is as it appears and so we find ourselves in the familiar situation in which everyone seems guilty but everyone has an alibi that they wave in front of Poirot and Inspector Japp.

Poirot and Hasting play again one of the more pleasant friendships in light literature, up there with Jeeves and Wooster, since Hastings plays the Bertie part of the dimbulb gentleman. Poirot frankly tells Hastings that Hastings is most valuable when he is spouting conventional wisdom, thus indicating to Poirot what the crook is trying to make his crime look like to the mediocre mind. Poirot will tease Hastings for failing to keep up with high-level reasoning. On some occasions, unduly influenced by overly confident Inspector Japp, Hastings is even doubts that Poirot is quite in his right mind.

Hastings is an Englishman of action and cannot stand Poirot's confident inertia during the investigation. I liked the way of the English gentleman in which the novel is narrated, such has Hastings’ embarrassment at Poirot making a spectacle of himself by standing stock still in thought in the middle of a busy London street. Hastings is also scandalized at Poirot reading the letters of other people, another “not done,” or “not playing the game” thing.

Oddly enough, I had a sneaking suspicion of the reveal so I think I may have read this in the mists of adolescence 50 years ago and forgotten it. Re-read or not, I enjoyed this complex and well-articulated mystery.

European Reading Challenge #12

I read Inspector Maigret #67 the 2024 European Reading Challenge.

Maigret Hesitates – Georges Simenon (France)

This 1968 detective story is short, as is usual for a police procedural starring Chief Inspector Jules Maigret. Maigret, alerted by two anonymous letters about an impending murder, hangs around for two days questioning the residents of the sumptuous Paris mansion of a renowned maritime lawyer, Maître Parendon, who is powerless to prevent the crime. Two-thirds into the book, the inevitable murder occurs, which uncharacteristically unhinges Maigret to a certain extent. But the solution falls into place effortlessly.

The solution is so straightforward and logical that it might give the misleading impression that Inspector Maigret’s insight is no great shakes. However, the opposite is true. Maigret is portrayed as a brilliant man, whose insight has developed over 30 years of interacting with people from all walks of life. They are facing life’s dizzying changes with varying degrees of competence. 

Despite his extensive direct experience understanding the people and their motives to do crime, Maigret shuns intellectualizing, preferring to explore the world and react instinctively, experientially. His ethical default settings are clear (though never stated), yet he maintains an objectivity rooted in his public servant’s eye toward rules and procedures. Maigret senses and intuits the truth rather than deducing it with systematic logic, helping the reveal to emerge in its own time. He understands the people that he interviews, including the murderers. His understanding fascinates the mildly eccentric Maître Parendon, who is obsessed with Article 64 of the code concerning criminal responsibility versus irresistible impulse.

Simenon cleverly links Parendon’s name to Pardon, a doctor friend of Maigret, who is a recurring character the novels. Simenon introduces a Miss Vague, highlighting the significance of names. The theme of forgiveness is central, acknowledging murder as a reality not easily forgiven though that forgiveness is good for the soul of the survivors. In the end, Maigret stages a scene for the press to conceal the arrest of the guilty party, not to protect upper-bourgeois respectability but for other reasons. 

Simenon’s art shines through in his ability to suggest personality, tension, and social context with subtle details.

Reading Those Classics #14

Classic Academic Mystery. This 1937 mystery fits the criteria for genre: set in a university department, professor as detective, an international cast, erudite dialogue, recondite digressions, and mild gibes at scholarly manners and ways.

The Case of the Seven of Calvary – Anthony Boucher

In his first mystery, the author takes pleasure is satirizing the conventions of the Golden Age mystery. For instance, the professor-detective, like Nero Wolfe, never stirs out of his rooms to investigate the crime. In fact, he has a graduate student be his ArchieGoodwin, getting out and talking to persons of interest.

The grad student narrates the story in a faux-sophisticated tone, brash like Archie Goodwin too. In an outrageous post-modern technique, the grad student and Boucher meet in a chinwag to confirm with each other that fair-play has been the byword, that clues needed to solve the mystery have indeed be given to the reader.

The story moves steadily through plenty of action. Boucher misdirects too but the long-time mystery reader, while alert to being fooled, will not be cheated out of a good surprise either. It’s impressive that Boucher developed such a crackerjack story his first time out.

This book well deserves its classic status. Although he did not return to a campus setting, Boucher (rhymes with voucher, I think, not bouquet) wrote many more mysteries and short stories, even producing science fiction. For many years he was the mystery reviewer for the New York Times. He has a world convention of mystery fandom named after him, Bouchercon.

Nigel Strangeways #12

End of Chapter – Nicholas Blake

It is 1957. Wenham & Geraldine is a long-established, well-regarded – read: stuffy and stuck-up - London publishing firm. To the shock of the second-generation owner-operators, the firm is facing derision, scandal and a financial kick in the pants in the form of a libel suit.

High class and bookish private eye Nigel Strangeways is hired by the firm to identify who tampered with the memoirs of General Richard Thoresby so as to re-insert passages publisher and author agreed to delete, passages that peed on the reputation of Thoresby’s superior, Major General Sir Charles Blair-Chatterley. Strangeways’ cover is that he is a temp, hired to do specialized consultations. The cover is, as usual, short-lived; his stint as a parapsychologist didn’t last long in The Corpse in the Snowman (1941) either.

Strangeways interviews Blake's always interesting characters. Stephen Protheroe wrote one poetic masterpiece in his youth and then burned out. He ended up reading books every single workday, eight hours a day, for 25 years, an activity that would drive anybody to anxiety, depression, and rage. Millicent Miles is writer of paperback romances, who is in the office only because eager to goose sales, the young member of firm hired her to write her hot memoirs.

After World War II mystery writers like Margery Allingham and Desmond Begley often deplored in passing These Kids Today. Blake is no exception. Dealing with a very serious young woman, Nigel bemoans to himself “How very stern the young are.” But another girl reveals her taste-free giddiness by recognizing Johnny Ray "The Prince of Wails" as her heart-throb.* Cyprian Gleed, son of Millicent Miles, is a spoiled creep not above committing felonies out of pique, wearing silk pajamas and letting hamsters have the run of his apartment as if he’s Count Fosco. When she hears that her secretary is sleeping with her BF, the senior member of the firm says, “‘Miriam?’ exclaimed Liz Wenham. ‘But she’s a First in History.’”

Call it coincidence or living in a small society but Strangeways finds that these people have connections with each other that extend into the past. In a great scene, General Thoresby recalls how he and his officers embarrassed a snooty Millicent Miles when they demonstrated they knew more about Henry James and the modernists than she did. Blake is always worth reading for the characterization and solid plotting, even if Strangeways isn’t a quirk of nature and the story may move a little less than briskly. As in another Strangeways mystery Minute for Murder (1947), Blake captures office life for brain workers, with unruly passions mostly covered up by badinage or distant professional coolness.

Cecil Day-Lewis, poet and translator of Latin classics, added to his probably low income as a prof by writing detective novels under this pen-name. As we’d expect from a professor of classics, his writing is erudite, witty, and lucid enough to put up with the usual British whodunit machinery of red herrings, giddy girls, and victims that needed killing.

*The Nabob of Sob was arguably more popular in the UK and Australia than in his native US

Others by the Same Author: Click on the title to go to the review

•         A Question of Proof (1935)
•         The Beast Must Die (1938)
•         The Smiler with the Knife (1939)
•         The Corpse in the Snowman (1941)
•         Minute for Murder (1947)
•         The Dreadful Hollow (1953)
•         Whisper in the Gloom (1957)
•         The Widow’s Cruise (1959)
•         The Worm of Death  (1961)
•         The Private Wound (1968)

The Ides of Perry Mason 63

Note: On the 15th of every month we take a trip to the Perryverse. Reviewed below are the best episodes from the eighth season of that great legal drama TV series. It's clear that, by the next to the last season, the writers were gasping and panting. Actor Richard Erdman (victim once, perp thrice) praised the professionalism of the whole Mason operation. Sometimes, however, the plots were obscure: “I told Ray Burr that the script didn’t make any sense and I couldn’t understand it.”  And Burr replied, “Neither can I.  Let’s just say the lines so we can get paid and go home.” By 1964, besides dissatisfaction with the scripts, Burr was feeling under pressure due to his arduous work schedule, battle against weight, health issues, and the closet. But he kept it private and put himself through the wringer of work because he felt responsible for the show's people who would be out of work if he revealed all and thus tanked his career and the show.

The Best Episodes of Season 8 (1964 - 65)

The Case of the Frustrated Folksinger (January 7, 1965). Not a whole lot recommends this episode. The writers return to their same-old same-old theme of the heartlessness and greed of the entertainment industry. This episode is dated by the quaint topic of Sixties folk singing and marred by fake Southern accents, an exasperating client and a confusing ending. But I'm one of three fans in Perry Fandom who like this episode because I'm an admirer of Bonnie Jones. In her first of two turns as the damsel in distress, she acts up a storm as the naïve mark from Armpit, West Virginia. And so do Joyce Meadows (hard-drinking egomaniac) and Lee Meriwether (cold-hearted minion) in a larger than usual cast of meanies and connivers bent on cheating Our Girl Bonnie. 

The Case of the Reckless Rockhound (November 26, 1964). So many familiar faces from noir, westerns and Sixties teevee make this a comforting watch. Bruce "Treasure of Sierra Madre" Bennett. Elisha "The Maltese Falcon" Cook Jr. Ted "The Lady from Shanghai" de Corsia. Ben "Shane" Johnson. Audrey "The Postman Always Rings Twice" Totter plays a widow who had to make a living from mining, traditionally a male preserve. Jeff "The Killers" Corey plays con-man Bascom as a nerve-wracking combination of genial, greedy, nervous, and dangerous. Somehow the veteran actors make the small mining town feel like a Simenon examination of a narrow milieu in which people who’ve known each other a long time all have interests in keeping each other’s secrets. The ironic ending is in the tradition of both O. Henry and noir.

The Case of the Lover's Gamble (February 18, 1965). Poor little fool Betty Kaster goes to live with her art professor and his wife, who is recovering from a car wreck and dealing with PTSD. Betty finds out the prof is carrying on an affair. She is alarmed enough to consult Perry Mason after she discovers that her art prof has a motive for knocking off his wife - the inheritance would be in the neighborhood of $2 million. When the cheating prof is murdered – Betty discovering his corpse is in the Hitchcockian manner -  she is charged. The ill-starred couple are well played by Donald Murphy and June Dayton, with Margaret Blye as the naïve graduate student. Hal Peary, aka The Great Gildersleeve of radio fame, yuks it up as the goofy uncle type.

The Case of the Murderous Mermaid (March 18, 1965). Pretty and athletic Reggie Lansfield (Jean Hale) wants to make it big in the entertainment industry. Her agent man Ben Lucas (Richard Erdman) has arranged for her to do dangerous feats to draw media attention. Though a daredevil, Reggie feels in a rut and tells Lucas, “Go ahead and find yourself some other little crazy mixed-up girl because me - me, I'm turning square.” But the owner of a chain of swimming schools entices Reggie into a lucrative publicity stunt: impersonating the ageing pool celeb in swimming the Catalina Channel. Reggie valiantly fights exhaustion and discouragement during the 26-mile swim, being alternately berated and comforted by a coach played by Bill Williams (real-life husband of Barbara Hale and as an ex-swim champ himself he suffered at the hands of coaches). Jean Hale plays a likeable mix of guilelessness and gumption, and Richard Erdman is persuasive as the agent who is bungling but confident.

Honorable Mention: The Case of the Golden Venom. Francis Reid’s performance as an angry mother whose son was murdered makes this episode exceptional. Other fine performances are by Noah Beery, Jr. as gruff Tony and Carole Wells as the little town flirt who does the watusi. The Case of the Careless Kitten Louise Latham plays Aunt Matilda Shore, whose husband Franklin disappeared. And, Son, is she still pissed. One of the best episodes of the series due to the performances of Latham, the ubiquitous Allan Melvin, and the Persian named Monkey. The Case of the Grinning Gorilla has Victor Buono and Gavin McLeod tearing up the scenery as well as a gorilla menacing Lureen Tuttle and Our Favorite Lawyer. In The Case of the Mischievous Doll, lots of members of Perry fandom dislike the society madcap in a dual role, but always convincing Paul Lambert plays a dour, dodgy private eye.

WTF: The Case of the Scandalous Sculptor and The Case of the Betrayed Bride really grate because the camp is set at an especially high pitch. Also loud is The Case of the Sad Sicilian with its stereotypically noisy Italians and a victim so unsympathetic you want to give the murderer a medal; sadly, it counts as the worst episode of all 271. Too bad the clinkers outnumber the good ones in Season 8.

Today is Mountain Day

山の日 Yama no Hi. Though Japan has had mountains for as long as anybody living can recall, they didn't have a public holiday to celebrate them until 2016. This new public holiday is intended to coincide with the vacation time usually given during the Bon Festival held in mid-August. To celebrate, let's read a nonfiction book about Japan.

Learning to Bow: An American Teacher in a Japanese School - Bruce Feiler

In the late 1980s, the Japanese government made efforts toward what it termed kokusaika (internationalization), the encouragement of Japanese people to become less insular and more open-minded about intercultural give-and-take. In 1987 the Ministry of Education started the JET program. The Japan Exchange and Teaching program brought in hundreds of native speakers of English and assigned them to team-teach in public schools all over the country. The goals were to motivate Japanese English teachers to modernize old teaching methods and provide concrete evidence to kids that foreigners were actual living and breathing human beings.

Feiler was in one of the first JET cohorts so he was working in Japan at the same I was. Masters degree in ESL/EFL in hand, I was employed at a national university and even in our 2024, I was ready to be smug and snooty reading his JET memoir of his time in-country. I assumed he was a fresh college graduate that would make up in energy, smiles and height for what he didn’t know about articulatory phonetics (I staunchly taught pronunciation, the jester in the English court of Reading, Grammar, Writing, and Speaking & Listening). But Feiler graduated from Yale and seems to be widely read, with a keen sense of humor. I got no sense of superiority or condescension in his views of the Japanese in the late Eighties. I was wrong and petty to assume he was but a walking tape recorder.

I spent a little time doing team-teaching in a junior high school and didn’t much like the loss of autonomy so I had to take my hat off to his good-natured response to such teaching in a junior high in Tochigi, a country prefecture forty miles outside Tokyo. Classes have 45 kiddoes in a room so getting everybody in synch so teaching and learning can occur is the first order of business. Command and control is the long and short of junior high school in Japan, so it’s not a comfortable place for people who think school ought to be a place where gentle educators help students find themselves. Japanese middle school principals have little truck with the notion that the system prepares students to live as productive members of society by creating a non-judgmental inclusive environment where children are free to identify their own joy, value, and self-worth.

Feiler covers all important topics from the roles of teachers to the informal leaders among the students who enforce conformity. Feiler does not turn away from hard topics such a bullying and buraku discrimination. He has chapters on the lives of single people in the country and in Tokyo. He messed up an ankle and had to spend days in the hospital, an experience that showed him all about the authority of doctors and group cohesion in concern for a member. He uses his lengthy stay there to remind us of the importance of the change of seasons in Japan and the sense of transition (transience) the Japanese have.

As usual, the question is, now that we are 30 some years down the pike, is this memoir still worth reading? I think so, for two reasons. The first is nostalgia. I can’t be the only English teacher who was there during the Bubble Economy to get a kick out of being reminded of, say, the Recruit Scandal or Hikaru Genji, both reminding us that every culture comes up with its own unique mediocrity. Anybody who has been to a wedding in a hotel will smile knowingly, in wonder too, when Feiler describes the big show. The second is that Feiler’s Japanese language ability seems to have been at least at the intermediate level. So although he does not tell us why he went to Japan and was committed enough to learn the language, he could talk to ordinary people directly and get their unvarnished views. This is always a plus in my book. His story of coming to grips with a different culture makes for a classic expatriate memoir.

Inspector Montalbano #14

The Age of Doubt – Andrea Camilleri

After the masterpiece The Potter's Field (2008), by the fourteenth installment even a loyal reader of the Inspector Montalbano series set in Vigata, Sicily would expect their hero Salvo to start losing his luster. But this 2012 translation of L'età del dubbio is an entertaining whodunnit complete with international intrigue.

Camilleri details a complex case, cleverly scatters the clues and introduces curious personalities in the inspector's investigation into the killing of man whose corpse was found in a dinghy in Vigata’s harbor. Montalbano meets a young woman who’s in the Navy. She sends him into an adolescent tizzy. He spends the novel wondering if what he feels is a genuine emotion or a mere desire to recapture the sensational excitements of a sixteen-year-old kid. Or worse, just an ego boost that he still has appeal enough to attract a woman about half his age. Or worst, only as a hunter he wants to possess her and wield control over her emotions and behavior.

We constant readers of the series are not drawn so much by the development of action and intrigue but by the series hero Salvo Montalbano, tired, less eager, who dreams of his own funeral to which his long-time GF Livia doesn't even show up. Plus, as comic relief, to get out of doing paperwork, Montalbano tells his superior Lattes a crazy lie about the death of his non-existent son.

Montalbano is a masterfully drawn character. As he turns 58 years of age he becomes more interesting. Montalbano is dealing – not philosophically, with zero wisdom  - with what scares any sensible male reader as he enters late middle-age and early old-age: losing mental sharpness and deteriorating health and throwing in the sponge in the bout against weight gain and wondering who’s going to have the brass to skip his funeral. His progress in the investigation is affected by these ructions of his soul, but that's fine since I like the blend of the stories of the cop and the middle-aged guy.

An exciting novel albeit not as much a master work as the previous one. It’s inspiring to remember that Camilleri was 83 years old when he wrote it. Incredible.

 

Click on the title to read the review
The Shape of Water (1994)          The Terra-Cotta Dog (1996)         The Snack Thief  (1996) Voice of the Violin (1997)             Excursion to Tindari (2000)          The Smell of the Night (2001)     Rounding the Mark (2003)           The Patience of the Spider (2004)             The Paper Moon (2005) The Wings of the Sphinx (2006) August Heat  (2009)        The Track of Sand (2010)	The Potter's Field (2011)               The Age of Doubt (2012)              The Dance of the Seagull (2013) Treasure Hunt (2013)     Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories (2013) Angelica's Smile (2014) Game of Mirrors (2015) A Beam of Light (2015)  A Voice in the Night  (2016)         A Nest of Vipers (2017) The Pyramid of Mud (2018)         Death at Sea (2018)

 

 

               

               

Reading Those Classics #13

Classic War Memoir. Author Hood was an English major and instructor at the University of Edinburgh from 1924 to 1938, and so received training in close reading, creativity, problem-solving, writing skills, logic and rhetoric, critical thinking and how to research and analyze information. He also studied Italian. With that skill set, he ended up in espionage during WWII. Naturally.

Pebbles in My Skull - Stuart Hood

He served in the 8th Army as an intelligence officer near Cairo. But in 1942, about the worst year of the war for the Allies, he was captured at Mersa Matruh as the hard-pressed British armies retreated across El-Alamein.

Hood was transferred to an Italian POW camp for British officers at Fontanellato near Parma. Hood escaped in September of 1943 into the nearby Emilian Apennines, then southward into Tuscany. Luckily he was a quick study, able to get along in the many different dialects he met. He could communicate with all the people he met during his year on the run in Italy

Instead of organizing the other escaped POW's into partisan units, he laid low in Lombardy and Tuscany He asks himself, partly in shame, “Why did it take me from September 8th 1943 to August 15th 1944 to recross the line to reassume my identity, step out of limbo?”

This account is singularly unromantic. No allure of combat between worthy foes. The Germans take monstrous reprisals against villagers. The peasants who helped Hood and the partisans were running risks of arrest, imprisonment, torture and execution. The peasant partisans helped him mainly because they wanted the Germans out of their country. They had only vague notions of what countries made up the Allies and what their beef with Germany was.

The partisans were bitterly divided because of political and personal differences. There are no heroes and in the fighting Hood sees little reason. This book is a meditation on war’s bad choices and their effect on individuals. Near the end of the book he wonders about the future with the German priest who gives some general advice about dealing with people, “You must be prepared for disappointment, not expect too much and accept goodness, when you meet it, as a manifestation of Grace.”