A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route - Saidiya Hartman

African-American professor of English and Comparative Literature at Colombia, Saidiya Hartman traveled to Ghana to view sites of the transatlantic slave trade. Hartman went to Salaga, the most active nineteenth-century slave market in Ghana,  and Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle, two slave dungeons where African men and women were “warehoused” by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British before being transported to the New World to become slaves on plantations.  Hartman blends history, travel narrative, and personal memoir into a fascinating, if painful, book.

She explains, “[T]he Afro-European trade in slaves did not begin in Ghana as it did elsewhere with Africans selling slaves and Europeans buying them. It began with Europeans selling slaves and Africans buying them.” She says that African elites in empires captured commoners and strangers, Muslims enslaved animists. The strong and powerful  warriors converted vulnerable farmers and nomads into commodities. They exchanged them for "[g]old dust, copper basins, brass bracelets, bars, and pots, colored textiles, linen and Indian cloth, barrel-shaped coral beads, strings of glass beads, red beads fashioned from bones, enamel beads, felt caps, and horse tails. “ The hunger for Cowrie shells and other luxury items caused unimaginable suffering and contributed zilch to long-term prosperity.

In addition to this painful history, Hartman examines how the commerce in human beings has remained a festering wound even in the present day. She goes over problems such as the sense of belonging and not belonging, the irreparable sense of loss of a home, and the sense that one is unwanted in one’s own country. Hartman makes her sense of grief and disappointment palpable.

Which Doctor

Which Doctor – Edward Candy

The story of this 1954 mystery revolves around the kidnapping of a nine-year-old boy who witnessed the grisly murder of a disliked pediatrician. It is set in the early 1950s in the English Midlands at the fictional Bantwich-Bannister Hospital for Children, “The Fairy Land for Sick Children.”

Professor and Doctor Fabian Honeychurch, in keeping with his robust name, is a combination of Falstaff and Santa Claus who is visiting the hospital for a conference. He teams up with explosive London cockney Inspector Burnivel from Scotland Yard to unpack the mystery of which doctor dunnit.

Red herrings abound in this relatively short novel. We meet the tried and true devices such as the seemingly obvious culprit, adultery ending in a seemingly apparent suicide, the seemingly friendly and open American. To balance improbabilities in the plot, the professional rivalries and jealousies feel familiar to any reader who’s been paid to make things happen for brilliant but flawed human beings. Plus, the drug trial involving children will engage readers into the protection of human subjects in research (I know – all two of them and one of them is me).

I recommend this one. Like Edmund Crispin but not as silly, more like a lighter P.D. James (given the medical settings), if that can be imagined. Although it is short on action, Tom the nine-year-old isn’t in it much, and Honeychurch holds forth too much, the red herrings are diverse, and the language is pleasingly Dickensian. For instance, perfectionist Professor Pemberton reports the murder to the cops thusly:

One of my staff has been found dead in the grounds. He has been struck on the back of the head. .... I'd be grateful if you'd make your arrival as inconspicuous as possible. We've an important meeting here today. I shouldn't like any fuss.

Edward Candy was the pseudonym of Barbara Alison Neville (1925-1993). She was born in London and educated in Hampstead and University College, and later earned a medical degree. She practiced medicine and had a family of five children while writing about a dozen books, three of which are medical mysteries, besides this one, Bones of Contention and Words for Murder, Perhaps.

It’s Different Abroad

It’s Different Abroad – Henry Calvin

This delightful suspense novel from 1963 stars Helen McLeish, a Scottish spinster, in Normandy in her snazzy red Mini. She is on a well-deserved vacation after burying her tetchy invalid father whom she tended for ten long years. After she is passed through French customs she gets the feeling that she is being followed. After she meets her sister and brother-in-law at their vacation house, she takes her niece and nephew to beach where she has a nasty encounter with one of the stalkers. Happily, she also meets a local mechanic, the hero and love interest of the story, and they have an adventure together.

The McGuffin is rather so-so, but the draws are the brisk pace, ingenious plot twists, and the realistic interplay between characters. A vein of satire animates the observations of a certain kind of Briton overseas to whom all non-Britons are foreigners whether or not they are in their own country. Helen’s sister and brother-in-law are muggles of the worst sort. Her sister Rosemary is judgmental, self-righteous, and materialistic. The brother-in-law is a fast-talking lech, main chancer, and weakling. Both are kinda sorta parents, with the main damage being done to their 10-year-old son, an acting-out bully, coward and snot. The author’s ridicule is not heavy handed and jabs in the direction of philistines are fun.

Henry Calvin was the pen name of Clifford Hanley (1922 – 1999), a journalist, novelist, playwright and script writer from Glasgow.

The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet

Note: As the staying at home jazz continues, I find myself reading stories set in faraway places and times. 

The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet – Michael Pearce

This 1988 historical police procedural thriller was the first in a series that is still going with as many as 19 published as of 2016.

The Mamur Zapt is a title for the head of the secret political police in Cairo, capital of an Egypt indirectly run by the British in the early 20^th century. Gareth Cadwallader Owen, a Welsh army captain, is young to have such an important job but he has two important qualifications. He’s a member of a ethnic group with a romantic past so he’s canny about the ways of thinking of embattled minorities. He’s also smarter than the bureaucrats and military types he works with, both of whom depend much on obfuscation and force respectively.

The author was born in the Sudan so his details about the heat and environment come from real life observation. His line about the smell of wet sand in 120-degree heat brought back Saudi Arabia for me. Pearce skillfully evokes settings such as crowded cafes, interrogation rooms, and busy street life. Pearce wonderfully describes a bath house (hammam) when Owen and his faithful counterpart Mahmoud tail a crook. This scene took me back to hot springs in Japan: the ritual of washing before entering the bath, the talking with other patrons, enjoying snacks and beer.

Indeed, readers may object that the book is long on scene setting and cross-cultural interaction but short on action. I will grant the climax was a lot less rip-roaring than I like in a thriller, but I’m told low-key climaxes and subdued endings are not unusual with this writer.

I think that readers will like this novel who like historical mysteries, terrorist intrigues, and Middle Eastern settings.  Similar authors are Michael Gilbert, Eric Ambler, and John le Carré.

The Ides of Perry Mason 13

The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the hell of it.

Topical Note. With the police in the news so much lately, I feel it relevant to point out that in both the Mason and Cool/Lam novels, ex-lawyer for underdogs Gardner often points out improper police procedures such as witness priming that lead to wrongful convictions. Misconduct on the part of the police happens so often in Gardner's novels that any reader will take to heart the advice, "Say nothing without your lawyer present."

The Case of the Terrified Typist - Erle Stanley Gardner

A sharp mind with the speed of light, a cloud of flim-flim and a hearty "Objection." Perry Mason. "Incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial!" With his faithful helping companions Della and Paul, the daring and resourceful attorney for the common guy, leads the fight for justice in the middle part of the twentieth century. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear.

If you recognize the allusion, you’re old enough to like Perry Mason novels. If you don’t, read them anyway for the fast-paced narrative and the good guys winning.

Della and Perry hire a temp from an agency to type briefs. An woman with the symptoms of high anxiety appears in the office and types “like a house afire.” But she disappears even before collecting her pay. Perry and Company are nonplussed as they find that another office in their building – a diamond importer - has been ransacked and that in their office stuck on the underside the temp typist’s desk is a wad of chewing gum with two diamonds. Yuck.

Perry is hired by a large diamond company to defend one of its employees in the local office, Duane Jefferson, who has been  accused of killing the smuggler who smuggled the gems into the country but whose corpse has never been found. With a client that’s economical with the truth Mason doesn’t know how to proceed.

Featuring many twists and turns, this 1956 puzzler will satisfy both fans of the Mason stories and readers wondering which Mason novel would be representative of the 80-some book canon. Highly recommended.

Ian Fleming's Older Smarter Brother

Brazilian Adventure –Peter Fleming

The 1933 narrative is among the classics of between the wars travel writing, up there with The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron. It is one of the few from that golden era still in print.

The narrator Peter Fleming was Ian”007” Fleming’s older smarter more debonair brother. In April 1932 Peter answered a recruitment listing in the agony column of The Times for an expedition to Brazil to locate a missing explorer.

The expedition traveled to São Paulo, then overland to the rivers Aragauaia and Tapirapé, heading towards the last-known whereabouts of the missing expedition. Arguments broke up the expedition and so Fleming and Roger Pettiward (a university chum) went up the Tapirapé to São Domingo.

This not working out real well makes up most of the book, which was a best-seller when it was first released. Modern readers may be put off the red-blooded English love of the hunt (they shot dead about 100 alligators).

Roger was killed in a commando raid on Dieppe in 1942 and Peter himself died while on a shooting expedition in Scotland in 1971.

Train of Powder

Train of Powder - Rebecca West

For those into long-form journalism made famous by the New Yorker, Train of Powder is a collection of six of Rebecca West’s best post-WWII essays. West is best-known as the author of one of the great books of the 20th century, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

The subjects vary: white South Carolinians on trial for lynching an African-American; a British murder trial in which the defendant was shown to have been an accessory after the fact but not killer as the prosecution had charged; an account of the trial and conviction of a British FSO clerk for handing secrets over to the Soviets; and three reports about the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leaders and the situation of occupied Germany.

West’s power of observation was keen and her descriptions of places have few equals. She brought imagination and sympathy to psychological studies of people who are so empty and forlorn inside, so unconnected with reality, that they grasp onto whatever or whoever will make them feel whole.

Her wit and common sense add to a style unique in 20th century literature.