Lotte in Weimar

Lotte in Weimar - Thomas Mann

Mann portrays Goethe as coldly indifferent to the wishes and happiness of those around him. Lotte travels from Hanover to Weimar in 1816 to re-visit Goethe, who wrote a famous novel about his love for her.

For 40 years, she has wanted to settle accounts with him for using her and her now-deceased husband as the mere grist for literature. She is disappointed to find that she doesn't exist as a living breathing person to Goethe and her criticisms have no meaning to him either.

Before she actually meets Goethe, she talks to three people whose lives and chance for happiness have been irreparably damaged by Goethe. Their long monologues make up the bulk of this book. It's thus not really a novel, but linked monologues and dialogue that soberly, slowly examine of the relationship of art to life.

A prerequisite to this novel is reading The Sorrows of Werther and having a strong interest in the psychology of genius and creativity. Mann, who was in exile when he wrote this novel in the late 1930s, takes some swipes at the Germans of the time for their proneness to hero worship.

Murder in South East England

Bat Out of Hell – Francis Durbridge

Set in Sussex in 1972, Geoffrey Stewart, a wealthy real estate agent, has it all. The well-appointed house. The Aston Martin. Diana, the trophy wife, twenty years younger and gorgeous.  But there’s always a “but.”

Geoffrey didn’t get rich by spending money. So he gripes and moans about her “foolish” spending. Diana thinks this unreasonable, since the point in marrying a rich guy is to use his money for the important things in life. Like shopping. She sees him as a cranky old tightwad, with emphasis on “old.”

Mark Paxton has been working for Geoffrey as second in command. About the same age, it is only natural that Mark and Diana start to hit it off. But, no, Diana just leaving Geoffrey would be too hard. Murder seems a lot easier. But as Perry Mason once observed, “Murder is easy. It’s the getting away with it that’s really complicated.”

Telling anything more would be mere spoiler such is the sheer reading pleasure in the surprises in this exceptional mystery. The writing is lucid, the characterization just right, but it is the detonation of multiple surprises in this story that is the main attraction here.

Inspector Clay is an imperturbable head of the investigation, but he’s no series hero. A prolific writer, mainly for TV and radio, Durbridge never starred Clay in another book.

The Ides of Perry Mason 16

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.

Note: With HBO reboot of Perry Mason, cable TV has been airing the vintage show. Sundance shows two episodes on Thursday and Friday from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. MeTV shows an episode weekdays at 9 a.m. FETV shows on weekdays two episodes from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. and another two from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. Don't ask me why I know these things..

In Praise of Patricia Barry

This prolific actress played a femme fatale in three episodes of the Perry Mason TV series (1957 - 1966). After she graduated with a theater degree, she won a Rita Hayworth look-alike contest and landed a Hollywood contract in 1946, at the age of 23. With her little frame, glamorous poise, and saucy face, she played parts that called for a siren that lured men into awkward situations. A professional who loved acting, she never lacked for work on the silver screen and then television for about 50 years.

The Case of the Frantic Flyer (1960) ... Janice Atkins

Barry convincingly plays a schemer who connives with her lover to double-cross a louse she'd being leading on. Said double-cross would make them richer to the tune of $130K, which is about $1.1 million today. The aftermath of the theft also involves the murder of one guy whose wife is framed for the crime by Barry and her lover. These are not nice people.

But Barry’s Janice is the most not nice of the bunch. In every scene, she seems to be skulking behind her eyes, sizing up the situation in order cook up the most plausible whopper. When her louse unexpectedly re-appears after everybody thinks he’s been killed, you can see her adding machine brain calculating the best way to deal him out. Chaka chaka chaka ding! In an interview with a wily old prospector, she guardedly responds to all his questions with flat one-word questions. On the stand, under oath, she tells bald-faced lies, such that the viewer, having only experience telling white lies, is amazed at her audacity. 

The Case of the Grumbling Grandfather (1961) ... Dorine Hopkins

Barry's Dorine is married to a gambling junkie who extorts money out of her to feed his mania for the tables. To raise funds for him to meet his debts, she has helped herself to the money of two men of the Gideon family, Lucius (dead by his own hand at the start) and his nephew David, who’s no kid but not wise about avoiding married females. Dorine is alternately deceitful and vulnerable. She is abused by the chizzler hubby to the point that the viewer feels sorry for her and her black eye. But when the during the trial Mason gets to the truth. Dorine, taken by surprise at the revelation out of left field, stands up and screams like a fox desperate with pain and fear. It’s an incredible TV moment.

The Case of the Velvet Claws (1963) ... Eva Belter

The adaptation of the very first Perry Mason novel is a treat for the kind of discriminating Mason fans who read this blog. A freelance photographer gets a snap of would-be reformer Harrison Burke and a married woman, Eva Belter, as they escape a blind pig through an open window. In a tizzy, Eva tells Perry Mason that a scandal sheet called Spicy Bits is blackmailing her, which would probably cause her brute of husband to kill her. Because of the Spicy Bits angle, Perry is loaded for bear. It seems one of its scurrilous stories drove a friend of Mason’s to suicide after his reputation was besmirched. Perry wants to put them out of their dirty business.

Most of the characters in this one are as sleazy as buzzards. But Eva lies, boy does she lie. She lies with the sheer bravado of somebody well-practiced in lying about everything all the time. She even tries to frame Perry for the murder of her brute of a husband (an exercise fanatic before being one was cool). Della Street, Perry’s skeptical secretary, does not have many lines but her looking askance (a la Myrna Loy) speaks volumes. Perry puts up with Eva’s deceit because he wants to shut down Spicy Bits.

Perry Mason: Eva, some things a lawyer has to do aren't very pleasant. He takes his clients as they come. They're in trouble, so he can't always expect them to tell the truth.

Eva Belter: Oh! Oh, that. Perry, darling, I told you the other day I was terribly sorry about any untruths that I...

Perry Mason: He's a fool if he completely trusts any client, but that's beside the point. His job is to believe and to help them as best he can. The only times when he's really a fool is when he sticks by a client who won't trust him.

Lots of fans in Mason fandom detest this episode because they dislike the Eva character. But her over-the-top quality is just what they doctor ordered for Season 6, when the gears were starting to grind after 174 episodes. Eva’s oft-repeated “Perry, darling” is a hoot. Eva is decidedly not the usual Perry protagonist, such as the plucky working girl or dutiful daughter or drab wallflower or demure deb or stolid workingman in a jam. Eva is a force of nature, a monster of mendacity.

It's not like Barry ever hung up her Bad Girl shoes. Later in her career, at the age of 58, Barry played a mom who selflessly raised her adopted daughter while running an international drug cartel under the alias The Cobra on ABC's All My Children from 1980-81. On CBS' Guiding Light from 1984-87, Barry excelled as a conniving Southern belle. Barry lost her husband of 48 years when he died in 1998. They had two daughters. Patricia Barry passed away in 2016, at the age of 94.

Back to the Classics #20

I read this book for my second round of the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2020.

20^th Century Classic. My justification as to why Simenon’s non-Maigret novels are “classics” is that they are examples of the genre post-WWII existential novels a la The Plague, The Woman in the Dunes, and Slaughterhouse-5. Simenon, though he is not as explicit about it as Camus and Sartre, treats people as agents, with accountability for their choices. We are responsible for our decisions, the directions our lives take.

Sunday  – Georges Simenon

Simenon wrote 75 Maigret mysteries and about 200 "hard novels," psychological novels that ran characters through existential hoops. Usually a bit under 200 pages in length, the hard novels revolve around a handful of themes: remorse, escape, alienation, jealousy, desire, irresponsibility, humiliation, and fear of ostracism, poverty, and embarrassment.

Simenon often examines these themes by scrutinizing an unhappily married couple. From Three Bedrooms in Manhattan to The Truth about Bébé Donge, Simenon coolly dissected marriage – young/old, Paris/province, artisan/farmer, same class/mixed class - and the ways people grow disenchanted with and alienated from each other.

This novel opens on a typical summer Sunday morning on the Côte d'Azur. A successful restaurateur in the Cannes hinterland, Emile has decided Sunday is the day to carry out the long-planned murder of his wife. As the morning passes, our main character takes to unaccustomed introspection, going over stage by stage the process which led him to decide in the dilemma of "it's her or me" that murder was his sure bet.

At the age of 25, Emile, son of a hotelier from cold rainy Champagne, near Luçon, went to help family friends, the Harnauds, who fulfilled the dream of a lifetime when they took over a small inn on the Côte d'Azur. But as in the case of many transplants who opened restaurants, inns, and other touristy businesses in the south, the business never took off and they felt like strangers in the south. Mr. Harnaud was more than pleased, in fact, when a stroke made it impossible for him to stay in the game. His widow, eager to return to more congenial Luçon, pushed hard for the marriage of her daughter Berthe with Emile. The latter, intelligent and daring with novel recipes, made “La Bastide” into a prosperous and popular inn.

Right or wrong, Emile feels that he was sold to Berthe who acts as the real boss, from whom nothing escapes. Berthe tells him at the outset that they are to have nothing but truth between them, which he takes to mean that he is denied the autonomy that he believes is the due of a real man. Believing in the iffy claim that he is a prisoner of an unhappy, wobbly, humiliating marriage, Emile sees no other way out than murder to get out of the humiliating trap he finds himself in. Raised by loveless parents, bossed about by siblings, with no education or reading, Emile hasn't near enough principle or enough conscience to restrain him from doing wrong.  But will he dare to poison his wife?

Intelligently constructed, steeped in truth, served up in a plain style, this intimate thriller is a success on all levels.

Cool & Lam #8

Cats Prowl at Night – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair

Though enlisted in the Navy to fight in World War II in an earlier book in the series, PI Donald Lam is reportedly away vacationing in Europe. Which, in 1943, I would have thought problematic, since there was a huge war going on and many countries were occupied by despotic regimes. Anyway, the other partner in the PI service, Bertha Cool, takes her turn alone in the limelight, as she did in Bats Fly at Dusk.

Businessman Everett Belder hires Bertha to act as a proxy to pay off a judgement to his advantage. Due to losing a lawsuit, he placed his assets in his wife's name to avoid paying the judgement. The winner of the lawsuit finds himself in financial dutch and needs quick money. So Belder then hires Bertha to settle the judgment for about 10% of the original amount. Belder wants control over his own assets so he is hot to settle the case.

Belder’s domestic life is far from happy since he is so grossly out-numbered: his greedy mother-in-law and sister-in-law are working on his wife to divorce him. Him being one of those weak-kneed womanizers does not help him. Somebody has been sending poison-pen letters to his wife, accusing him of cheating with the maid and an old girlfriend.

With this muddle of a home life, Belder and us readers ought not to be too surprised when a couple of murders occur in complicated circumstances. Not content with the usual convolutions of plot, Gardner rises to comic scenes that the reader of “Just the plot, M’am, just the plot” tendency of the Perry Mason novels would have thought beyond him. Bertha Cool and her nemesis Sgt. Sellars have some sharp, funny exchanges. Bertha also has a hilarious scene with her attorney. She is scandalized that being charged for services that won’t do her any good.

As usual in the Cool and Lam books, once gets the feeling that Gardner wants to do something different from formulaic Perry Mason novels. I think the anarchic comedy balances out the confused ending; perhaps Gardner himself thought the ending needed clearing since in the last chapter he has Bertha run through the reveal in a long letter to Donald Lam.

In Gardner fandom, the general consensus sees Bertha as an interesting character, but the fans miss the cleverness of Donald Lam in the two novels without him. Fans, their secretary Elise Brand and Bertha herself all know that the real detective – the brainy one, as Bertha would say - on the team is Donald Lam.

Fans see Bertha as thick-headed, ham-fisted, money-hungry, and trash-talking. To my mind, however, all her faults make Bertha Cool a more convincing character. She is relatable because she thinks on her feet just about as fast as the average reader. Plus, she allows her emotions – anger, frustration, and impatience, especially –to cloud her judgement, which is extremely relatable for us readers who aren’t kidding ourselves.

For these reasons, Gardner’s two novels with Bertha but without Donald are interesting experiments well worth reading for readers skeptical of conventional wisdom.

The Shooting Gallery

The Shooting Gallery - Yuko Tsushima

This is a collection of eight short stories. The heroines are women dealing with raising kids on their own and being single and lonely and jealous and angry.

It’s not so much that they women don’t know who they are but that their future is uncertain.  The Japanese expectations of duty to others and not living for one’s self are still there, but are in conflict with new social realities like sexual freedom, single motherhood, the ability to abandon partners spouses and kids, and a sense of responsibility to one's own self.

I also got a gritty sense of life in Tokyo because she mentioins construction noise and dust in almost every story. The stories were written about 30 years ago, but I think they can provide enjoyment to people into modern Japanese literature, women’s fiction, or artifacts that give us a sense of what social life in Japan feels like.

Back to the Classics #19

I read this book for my round two of the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

Classic by a Person of Color. In 1852 famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass delivered the searing speech "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" 168 years later in Rochester, NY, where Douglass lived from 1847 to 1872 and where he’s buried, iconoclasts toppled a statue of Douglass from its base and left it near the Genesee River gorge.

The Heroic Slave  – Frederick Douglass

This 1853 novella was the writer’s only fictional work. It is based on the true story of Madison Washington. He was, in 1841, the leader of a group of 134 enslaved men, women, and children that commandeered a slave ship bound for New Orleans and took it to Nassau where they could be free.

The novella has four sections. In the first, a white Ohioan, Mr. Listwell, overhears Madison lamenting his burden. Listwell sees the sin of his previous indifference to the system of chattel slavery and is converted to abolitionism. In section two, in an amazing coincidence that we expect in 19^th century fiction, it is five years later and Madison, who has escaped the south, finds himself at the house of Mr. Listwell. Listwell gets him to Cleveland where Madison takes a boat across to Canada and freedom.

In section three Listwell is on the road again in Virginia. In another amazing coincidence, he finds Madison enslaved again. Madison said his body could be free but not his spirit as long as his wife and two children remained property. When he returned to help her escape, he was captured. Part three ends with Listwell smuggling three stout files to Madison.

In part four, Madison leads the fight that ends up with the enslaved people finally free in British-held Nassau. The narrative is told from the point of view of Grant, a racist white hireling, deeply implicated in the abomination of slavery by being a member of the class of guards, jailers, overseers, slave breakers, and slave hunters that supported the system.

Grant says, “I forgot his blackness in the dignity of his manner, and the eloquence of his speech.” Madison’s bravery and lack of hesitation to use violence for his freedom reminds Grant the slaver of the spirit of 1776.

So Douglass' message seems to be that through their own efforts – intelligence, planning, cooperation, bravery, armed action – black people can rise up and gain their freedom. There’s hope for white people too.They will be persuaded by action. Even the old slaver Grant reconsiders his vicious prejudice – somewhat - when he himself witnesses black intelligence, tactics, determination, and violence for the cause of freedom.

Other books by Douglass:

My Bondage and Freedom

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass