Jos Banks

Joseph Banks: A Life  – Patrick O’Brian

In this biography for the general reader, the author of the beloved Aubrey-Maturin novels examines the life and times of probably the foremost intellectual of 18th century Britain. Banks’ influence on the scientific life of the day was so deep that he knew everybody, from King George III to Benjamin Franklin, with scores of giants in the natural sciences like Lavoisier, Linnaeus, and Cuvier in between.

The most interesting part of the book covers his voyage to Tahiti with Cook. Banks was involved in obtaining Merino sheep in Spain, influencing the settlement of Australia as a place to relieve the over-population of prisons, supervising spying networks, founding the gardens at Kew, running the Royal Society of peevish scientists, and draining the fens of Lincolnshire.

O’Brian likes his subject, which a biographer had better feel since they’re going to spend so much time writing about them. O’Brian wants to the give the reader first-hand impressions of Banks so O’Brian provides long passages from Banks' journals. O'Brian provides just the right amount of digressions to give depth to the people and issues he discusses. Students looking for post-modern examinations of the subject will have to look elsewhere.

Vagaries of Juries

Hand of Fate – Michael Underwood

Frank Wimple made three million pounds from three hundred with ability, drive, confidence and, he said with a wolfish smile, ruthlessness. His forceful ways have made him no friends in the village. So when his wife Elspeth disappears, dark rumors fly such that the police have to ask questions about murder most foul. But with no corpus delicti they can’t be sure that Frank’s explanation – “she left me” – is a falsehood. But the hand of fate intervenes when it places in a black lab’s mouth Elspeth’s skeletal left hand.

On the fleshless finger, a wedding ring – inscription and all.

So Frank ends up in the dock, accused of murder. Though aggrieved he is not allowed out on bail and a woman judge is presiding, he’s confident no evidence connects him to Elspeth’s demise.

The trial is generally what this 1981 crime novel is about, though Underwood – for no apparent reason except that it’s diverting and fun – examines aspects of the ordinary lives of the woman judge and members of the jury. This doesn’t advance the story but it gives a striking depth to the characters. It might be that he wants us to remember that people are like icebergs, showing the public about 10% of what they are really about, wisely keeping information to themselves that would startle others.

I recommend this stand-alone novel because the craft is so effortless and unobtrusive. From the get-go, Underwood concisely builds well-done characters and makes action flow smoothly. The other appeal of this novel is that it’s not too long, as mysteries tended to become as the 1980s went on. Underwood carries on the “short crime novel” tradition of the 1960s and 1970s in the manner of Michael Gilbert, Andrew Garve, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell.

Michael Underwood was the penname for John Michael Evelyn (1916-1992). He was called to the Bar in 1939 and after WWII he worked in the Department of Public Prosecution. Perhaps one of those lucky people that don’t need much sleep, he wrote 48 crime novels, starring, series heroes such as Martin Ainsworth (barrister spy) and Simon Manton (police inspector). Nine of this novels were stand-alones and this 1981 effort was his last stand-alone, after which he turned his attention to his successful series with the heroine Rosa Epton (lawyer) until he passed away in 1992.

The Grippe

Flu: The Story of The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It - Gina Kolata

The author has been on the science and medicine beat for the New York Times since the year 2000. She wrote this book in 2001. 

After a brief examination of the 1918 flu pandemic in the US, Kolata introduces readers to the subsequent research conducted concerning the various strains of flu. She covers the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, the swine flu of 1976, and the avian flu of 1997. Her examination of the swine flu mass vaccination debacle during the Ford administration in 1976 was especially informative about the collision of scientists that pushed the panic button, leaders driven by political expediency, and irresponsible reporters in the mass media.

Lending a travel narrative aspect to the book, she spends much space telling about the two expeditions to exhume frozen flu victims in order to harvest samples of the 1918 virus. Generally, I skimmed a great deal on the human interest side, with copious profiles of researchers. I mean, the stories of researchers butting heads with each other over trivial stuff may interest the general thinking reader – in a grim, malicious pleasure kind of way. Me, I'm a tedious high-minded kind of guy, easily brought down by stories of researchers way more intelligent than me who still bellyache and squabble like brats over credit, travel, awards, reputation, prestige, lab space, start-up funds, and needing people to be always telling them how wonderful they are. Ugh, human interest, gimme a break. 

Readers with an interest in infectious diseases will learn much about the various methods of research and prophylaxis to identify and deal with the various pandemics that have threatened us in the last century. She also goes over the history of the creation of various vaccines.

I recommend this book not only for the sake of historical memory, well researched and told, but also to better understand and appreciate current scientific efforts that have been made in our ongoing pandemic. Recall in less than a month we had the genomic sequence of the virus and two vaccines in under a year.

The Ides of Perry Mason 47

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

Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason - Dorothy B. Hughes

The 1978 biography, written eight years after the subject’s death, paints a convincing portrait of Gardner as fighter and competitor.  Such was his compulsion to succeed, early on he doubted his ability as a writer. So he listened carefully to the advice of editors and other writers. He worked for 10 years – the Twenties basically – writing as many as 650 stories for pulp magazines. This book has a shockingly lengthy bibliography of westerns featuring heroes like the Patent Leather Kid and mystery stories starring private detectives the alluring-alliteration-loving Gardner[1] named Lester Leith and Paul Pry.

In his long years of toiling on his craft, he came to accept as axiomatic that in the crime tale characterization and description got in the way of what readers wanted: action. Gardner thought there were two kind of readers so in his fiction he wanted to give the lowbrows the action they craved and to appeal to the highbrows with short informative digressions, brisk pacing, plot twists and courtroom fireworks.

Gardner’s publisher Morrow commissioned Hughes, a mystery writer in her own right, to write this biography. She was also a mystery critic for the Albuquerque Tribune so her journalistic style is very readable and easy to follow as she covers Gardner’s youth, lawyering, and career in writing, publishing and broadcasting. She had access to his correspondence so this book verges on the autobiographical, so extensive are the quotations from his letters.

Sometimes the letters are tantalizing but we are left unsatisfied. For example: “…the last Donald Lam that I did, I put away the feeling that it was too lousy to revise and sent it to my publisher.” Nowhere does Hughes include a gloss as which specific Cool & Lam novel Gardner so disliked. Thus, the difference between journalists and scholars. Like I always say when I watch the TV news, “It never occurs to reporters to tell you what you really want to know.”

Unfortunately, Hughes does not often put on her critic’s hat. She was a fine writer of mysteries, with The Expendable Man and the tour de force In a Lonely Place reprinted by New York Review of Books. I was looking forward to her examination of aspects of Gardner’s writing that wove his magic, that ineffable magnetism that makes it impossible to bail out of a Mason mystery once past the half-way point. And what critical stances are expressed – e.g., that the last seasons of Mason the TV series avoided getting stale – are open to vociferous debate.

The older I get, the more I’m convinced the Seventies were a stranger time than we can really come to grips now, especially those of us who were young adults at the time. Perhaps because 1978 was too much in the midst of change, Hughes is unable to take stock of the place of the Gardner Fiction Factory (his words) in the history of the whodunit. Though in the late 1960s Gardner did indeed stay current – he was crazy about technology like computers and CB radio and scientific advances in forensics - Hughes gives little sense of how whodunnits were changing in the 1960s and 1970s to become longer, darker, more regional, and more ripped from the headlines.

Time passes. Though the TV series is easy to find nowadays, Gardner’s novels have been infrequently reprinted in the last 20 years because the books have become quaint.  Readers in 2023 don’t grok cuspidors, carbon paper, hat closets, folding boats, jump seats in taxi cabs, and poor access to telephones, much less CRestline-6-9342. Old-fashioned jobs like elevator operator or car hop provoke uneasy smiles and incomprehension. Ditto for outdated expressions: hang crepe, taxi dancer, to be in a brown study.

“There is no test of literary merit except survival, said George Orwell, “which is itself an index to majority opinion.” Is it possible that a writer who sold 300,000,000 copies of his books in his day would just gradually fade away? Could it be Gardner is on his way to Wilkie Collins status: only read by the most hardcore, readers like us?

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* There must be something about an alliterative name that they are so popular and memorable enough to spring to mind without much coaxing: Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mantle, Fred Flintstone, Charlie Chan, Bruce Banner, Betty Boop, Peter Pan. Try it yourself: you’ll come up with a half-dozen in less than minute.  . . .  Did you date yourself like I just did?

Reading Those Classics #7

Classic Set in the Big Apple. It’s about New York City, though that’s like saying Anna Karenina is about Russia.

Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos

When I was a kid I went through a jigsaw puzzle phase. I found that the way to start is with the four borders and then work in. But struggling to decide where to begin reviewing Dos Passos’ masterpiece reminded me that I stopped wasting time with puzzles when I broke down badly on a 1000-piece puzzle of Convergence by Jackson Pollock. That is, in the novel with so many characters, so many situations, so many scenes, so many set pieces where do you start telling somebody what this is about, why it is worth reading?

Because we get to watch as Dos Passos reaches his goal of composing his picture puzzle about the stuff that happens to a variety of New Yorkers in the Roaring Twenties. Now that ought to be sufficient to draw any Flapper and Sheik Fan like me who already knows Dashiell Hammett, early Aldous Huxley, that pop history reporter Frederick Lewis Allen, Bernarr Macfadden, Edmund Wilson, and of course that poster child of  the Jazz Age F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The stories New Yorkers of all kinds are all broken up and time stretches out to cover about 30 years leading up to the middle Twenties. We meet characters, some alone, some in tandem; we lose characters for a time and find them later. Dos Passos weaves so many stories, sets such a fast pace, and many characters have such dull names - Stan Emery, Ed Thatcher, George Baldwin, Joe Harland, etc. etc. – that following all these alienated people through their journeys on the City’s mazy noisy streets becomes desperately difficult sometimes. Granted, some have names that are memorable, such as Phineas P. Blackhead, a putrid inflamed plutocrat who gets exactly what he deserves when he mocks his servant Ahmed for servility.

I mean, between the descriptions of the city noises and smells and the dramatic cinematic scenes - it’s so intense that it’s tiring after about 45 or 50 minutes’ reading. But Dos Passos’ voice is always clear and engaging, so powerful and imaginative that it never puts the reader off.

He pushed up the window and leaned out. An L train was rumbling past the end of the street. A whiff of coal smoke stung his nostrils. He hung out of the window a long while looking up and down the street. The world’s second metropolis. In the brick houses and the dingy lamplight and the voices of a group of boys kidding and quarreling on the steps of a house opposite, in the regular firm tread of a policeman, he felt a marching like soldiers, like a sidewheeler going up the Hudson under the Palisades, like an election parade, through long streets towards something tall white full of colonnades and stately. Metropolis.

Sure, though Dos Passos is like any other modernist in that he has discarded Victorian certainties, he is still a moralist. But I never have a problem with an author pointing out being bored, alienated, cynical, and passive are not useful responses to capitalism during any of its stages. And living a personal life full of foolishness, cowardice, willful unfairness, and determined ignorance doesn’t do self or others or the world any good either.

But to my mind the draw of this kaleidoscopic, noisy novel is the astonishing ability of Dos Passos to make us see by lightning flashes.

Click on the title to go to the review.

Prize Winning Classic: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

Classic Novella: Old Man – William Faulkner

Classic Epistolary Novel: Augustus – John Williams

Classic Comic Novel: Thank you, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

Classic Short Stories: New York Stories – John O’Hara

Classic Air Pilot Memoir: Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

John Putnam Thatcher #14

Murder without Icing - Emma Lathen

Given the reputation Wall Street bankers have in our money-ridden world, it’s hard to sell a mystery series starring a vice-president of the Sloan Guaranty Trust. But having read more than half of the 24 books starring John Putnam Thatcher, I like them because they are set in various industries: car-making, grain importing, mail order nurseries, garment making, and fast food franchising, to name just a couple, so there’s a nostalgic feeling ‘this is the way the world used to work,’ at least, for the haves.

In this 1972 mystery, the bank has changed its usual sponsorship from a symphony to a hockey team. When a potential partner of the team is killed at the airport after the team deplanes, the police get involved and Thatcher has to identify the perp.

This was written just a bit before the sports industry became the cultural and economic behemoth that it is today. So it is just as interesting to read as a cultural artifact – a shard of pottery, as it were – besides a mystery. Recommended to born-in-the-Fifties fans of boxing on ice too, especially ones who know who Rocket and Pocket Rocket were.

Click on the title to see the review.

·         Banking on Death (1961)

·         A Place for Murder (1963)

·         Accounting for Murder (1964); Silver Dagger Award

·         Murder Makes the Wheels Go Round (1966)

·         Death Shall Overcome (1966)

·         Murder Against the Grain (1967); Gold Dagger Award

·         A Stitch in Time (1968)

·         Come to Dust (1968)

·         When in Greece (1969); shortlisted for Edgar Award

·         Murder to Go (1969)

·         Pick Up Sticks (1970)

·         Ashes to Ashes (1971)

·         The Longer the Thread (1971)

·         Murder Without Icing (1972)

·         Sweet and Low (1974)

·         By Hook or by Crook (1975)

·         Double, Double, Oil and Trouble (1978)

·         Going for Gold (1981)

·         Green Grow the Dollars (1982)

·         Something in the Air (1988)

·         East is East (1991)

·         Right on the Money (1993)

·         Brewing Up a Storm (1996)

·         A Shark Out of Water (1997)

 

Khazars as Chimera

Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words - Milorad Pavic (Christina Pribicevic-Zoric, tr.)

This novel disguised as a reference work has encyclopedia-like entries would be enjoyable for dipping into between other books, in waiting rooms, on busses or planes, before bed, etc. Taking it to a desert island would work too. As one can imagine, when reading an almanac or massive biographical resource like "20th Century Crime and Mystery Writers," the reader will negotiate both stimulating sections and dreary sections.

I read it through, in what readers into post-modernism may call a “linear fashion,” though I’m not sure that’s the best way to read it but that’s how we reading gluttons roll.

The first lasting impression is that its where and when are intrinsically cool. This fictionalized reference dictionary is about the lost trading empire of the Khazars, which spanned what’s now the Ukrainian steppes to lands approaching the Ural River and from the Middle Volga region to the North Caucasus and Crimea. So the place is a region that rivals southeast Asia for diversity. And the time period has such range that we don’t whether to name it late antiquity, or the early Christian era, or the dawn of the medieval age.

Another theme is the ‘Khazar polemic’ when a Khazar kaghan invited representatives of the three major faiths to explain to him why the Khazars should adopt their particular confession. In fact, the novel is about knowledge and truth, about their ephemerality. It is also about belief in the sense that people will draw useful life lessons from the wackiest content in legends and fables but, more concerning, be quite willing to believe any junky claim relative to history and society if it fits their prejudices neatly enough. A bit of fiction brings us closer to the reality in which we find ourselves, but too much fantasy that panders to our biases will screw us up.

Most entries are beautifully written, the writing and repetition creates a rhythm. Pavic constructs reality so that it has variability and draws our attention. However, this is post-modernist fiction so the difficult writing style, the metaphors especially, sometimes seems not only strange, sometimes gross, but also needlessly complicated to get a point across. I know, obscurity and tedium come with the po-mo territory, but at times it is like coming up with a metaphor for the sake of inserting a metaphor. Like looking at a psychedelic poster, this sometimes creates a feeling of oversaturation, but with words words words.

And so the reader will just sigh and go with the flow, like reading Faulkner and assuming you will get it the next time you read it.