Imagine a Bird (poem)

I hope there's no paywall to prevent you reading this article in the New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/opinion/eliot-waste-land-poetry.html

My response to it is this poem, which I wrote in 2014. (Yes, the photo at the bottom is of a cardinal). 

 

Imagine a bird

The backyard, mud and snow, sad grey-green grass.
Imagine a bird impossibly red in this monochrome landscape.

I remember a woman in a red coat
surrounded by schoolboys in blue blazers.

Words spill from me,
cadence and echo carving time.

I want to paint an impossibly red robin
ablaze in the dimming light.

 (Copyright W Kirchmeir 2014) 

 

 

 

 

A misdirected letter, a valuable glove, and art forgery: Three more by Marsh

Ngaio Marsh. Hand in Glove (1962) Mr Period Pyke, careful with his money, can afford two servants. He spends his time keeping up with the social life of his upper middle class acquaintances, sending condolences and congratulations as appropriate. This time, the envelopes are mixed up, and the condolences arrive before the death, which turns out to be a murder discovered during a treasure hunt. Mix in an art forgery scam (of Troy’s paintings), assorted other malfeasance, stupidity, and secrets both guilty and not, and Alleyn’s work is cut out for him. The usual mix of social comedy, romance, and acute character observation make this a pleasure to read. The title refers to the glove tat is te killer's undoing.

     Marsh is underrated in my opinion. This book is episode six in the TV series. ***

 

Ngaio Marsh. Death at the Dolphin (1967) [Killer
Dolphin, 1966, in the USA] Peregrine Jay restores the decaying Dolphin Theatre with the patronage of the oil millionaire who owns the property. On the opening night of the first play there’s a murder very like the one that closed down the theatre many years before. Alleyn happens to attend, so of course has to take on the investigation.
     The cast and conflicts resemble the earlier one. Perhaps Marsh decided to rework the earlier tale, or perhaps she just wanted to indulge in writing about theatre, which she does very well. I read the theatre cases as much for insight into that wonderful business of make-believe as for the crime puzzle and the social comedy.
     As usual, there’s a romance, this time between the young playwright whose play about Shakespeare affords the opportunity to showcase a glove made by Shakespeare’s father. It’s the theft of this glove that leads to murder. Satisfying read. ***

Ngaio Marsh. Clutch of Constables (1968) On a whim. Troy decides to join a river cruise to fill in the time between a completed commission and  Alleyn’s return from Australia. Thus she becomes a witness to murder. There’s also art-forgery and drug running. The perp is the Jampot, man who manages to blend into whatever milieu affords opportunities for his crimes. All the bits and piece fit together into a satisfying picture of crime, there are nicely done satiric vignettes of American and other tourists, and an ambience of leisurely river cruising so well done that occasionally it verges on tedium.
     No one is who or what they seem (even Troy tries to hide her identity), so solving the puzzle becomes a problem in teasing out the incompatible falsehoods among the many (and mostly irrelevant) truths. Alleyn reappears just in time, and all ends well and poetically just. ***

Wierd News: Fortean Times

 

Fortean Times (1990s) Back in the days when drugstores still had magazine racks, the regional distributor placed Fortean Times on ours. I bought every copy I found, accumulating about two dozen issues. The magazine, published in England (where else?), printed a mix of strange news, commentary ranging from the simplistically credulous to the shrewdly analytical, and reviews of books and other media dealing with UFOs, lake monsters, ghosts, and other such phenomena that people wish were facts but almost never are. The editors took a determinedly anti-debunking stand, which led them to accept eyewitness reports as evidence. A more sceptical stance would have served them better, but  I suspect that then the circulation among the credulous would have suffered.
     We see what we expect to see, which includes not seeing what we don’t expect to see. We identify objects based on past experience and current expectations, which means that the unexpected and unfamiliar are usually misidentified. Even trained observers suffer from this failing, and perhaps more so, because they are, after all, trained to identify certain objects. The misidentification becomes seriously problematic when we mistake people’s intentions and attitudes because we are unfamiliar with their idiosyncrasies, or psychological differences, or culturally shaped behaviours.
     The attached cover image of issue 100 accurately represents the style, tone and stance of the magazine in its artwork, typefaces, and headlines. It tried to emulate Charles Fort’s attitude to science, which was generally dismissive, on the grounds that scientists too often refused to acknowledge the existence of phenomena they couldn’t classify, and that therefore their explanations were generally bunkum.
     Yet most of Fort’s objections were the result of his ignorance or misunderstanding of basic science. If he didn’t understand some scientific explanation, it must be nonsense. Unfortunately, this attitude is shared by too many of the contributors to this magazine. Their naive acceptance of eye-witness accounts and memory as reliable data is especially sad. A more accurate knowledge of how our perceptions and memories fail to report reality accurately would have made many of their articles better. They would also have lacked anything resembling solutions to the puzzles, and it was those solutions that the magazine often purported to offer. The fact is that most of the evidence that isn’t fraud is evidence only of someone’s experience of something they did not or could not understand. The proper response in most of these cases is, “There’s not enough factual detail, so we will never know.”
     Still, an entertaining read every time. It’s still available. I visited their website, and on the blog found the same mix of fascination with weirdness and credulous acceptance of the standard explanations. To subscribers it promises a menu of “the most fantastic phenomena on earth”. No hint that many of these phenomena exist only in the minds and imaginations of the witnesses who didn’t (and often couldn’t) know what they were looking at. But there is the occasional more common sense attitude to “reports” of what “seems to have happened”, which I guess is an improvement. **

Building an HO scale Locomotive from Wood

Building an HO scale Locomotive from Wood and Card

(Model Railroader, May 1972)

Back in the days before CAD/CAM and cheap injection molding, model locomotives of specific prototypes were rare. The makers in Japan and Korea supplied limited numbers made with brass. The first examples in the late 1940s and early 1950s were cheap, but by 1972 quality had improved and prices had risen to two to four weeks average pay. Most modellers made do with repainted cheaper mass-market models that were “close enough”. These cost a couple of days pay. Adding details representing a particular railway’s house style helped the illusion. But if you wanted something as close as possible to your favourite road’s engines, you had to scratchbuild.

Culling masses of obsolete paper recently, I came across an article by A. E. Sima Jr (aka Bud Sima). He described how his poor soldering skills prompted him to try his hand using wood and card for building a locomotive. He wanted a model of the Maryland & Pennsylvania’s heavy Consolidation (2-8-0) steam engine. He bought a Varney 2-8-0 to adapt, but when he took it apart in preparation for repainting, the boiler casting encountered the basement floor at a high speed and broke. Bud was left with a mechanism. He decided to make a locomotive body to fit.

The article describes how he did it. He drilled out a suitable piece of wood dowel (to make space for the weight), and cut out a space at one end so it would fit over the motor. He cut cab sides from sheetwood, but did use sheet brass for the cab roof. He made some details with wood, card, wire, and sheet brass, and bought others. In those days, several manufacturers offered dozens of details such as bells, smokestacks, feedwater heaters, steps, brake cylinders, and so on. The tender body was cut from a block of wood and wrapped in card. A dress snap made the electrical connection between tender and locomotive. So “for a surprisingly small outlay of cash”, Bud got what he wanted. I’m sure he inspired others to try their hand at scratchbuilding too. Model Railroader helpfully reprinted its plans and photos of the Ma & Pa locomotive.

Bud writes in a friendly conversational style. The photos and diagrams are adequate for the purpose. Nowadays, we would see a bulleted step by step description, with more photos. Anyone who’s put together a handful of kits would have little trouble emulating Bud’s project. The modern builder would use plastic tube and sheet material instead of wood. There are far fewer details parts available, so fabricating them might be a major challenge. Even so, Bud’s article could be just the inspiration needed. It’s available online for any subscriber to Model Railroader’s online services.

I enjoyed re-reading Bud’s story. ***

Murder at Winter Solstice, on the High Seas, and in the Theatre: Three by Marsh

 

Ngaio Marsh. Off With His Head (1958) A Mrs Bünz, fan of English folklore, arrives at Mardian village in order to observe the Seven Swords Dance, a mummery exhibited every Winter Solstice further back then human memory can reach. The granddaughter of William Andersen, ignorantly cruel patriarch of the family that performs the ritual, also arrives. Her goal is some kind of reconciliation on behalf of her mother, who ran off with a Catholic count, thus offending both William’s class-snobbery and Chapel religionism.
     The murder is apparently impossible, but Alleyn and his team winkle out the truth in this neatly plotted and sometimes insightful novel. There’s a good deal of by-the-way information about mummery, Morris dancing, the Green man, etc, and bucolic mores (some of it rather stereotypical). Marsh provides a nice mix of romance and psychology, but she doesn’t give herself room for the nuanced character building that makes most of her work such a pleasant read, so I give this merely a **½

Ngaio Marsh. Singing in the Shrouds (1958) A serial killer has murdered three times. He leaves flower petals and a broken string of pearls on the victims, and has been heard singing nearby. When his most recent victim is found clutching part of an embarkation notice for the Cape Farewell, Alleyn must join the cruise as a supposed VIP connection to the ship’s owners. A murder does ensue, but the killer’s vanity undoes him. Since he was an obnoxious ass, poetic justice feels right.
     The puzzle is, as usual, fairly presented and solved. Since Brer Fox is unavailable, Alleyn must rely on the mulish Captain and the ship’s doctor for help. He writes letters to Troy to give him space for rumination. The passengers are a nice collection of sly riffs on stereotypes. Romance blossoms (Marsh has a soft spot for young lovers). Freudian theories of childhood trauma’s effects on adult neuroses explain the murderer’s motives, but that doesn’t reduce the pleasure of re-reading this book. Marsh is a novelist who uses the crime genre to muse on the comedie humaine. Thus one’s average for her, which makes it a *** .

 

Ngaio Marsh. False Scent (1960) Another of Marsh’s theatrical excursions. Mary Bellamy, a narcissistic actress, who occupies the centre of her world and hence, she believes, of the Universe, is the victim. She’s of course made more than enough enemies, so Alleyn and Fox’s task is that of removing the innocents cluttering the path to the solution.
     A beautifully complex network of family, personal, business and professional relationships, and the usual withholding of essential information delay the investigation, and also mislead the reader (me). As so often in Marsh’s work, an obsession provides the motive. A satisfying read. ***

Leacock's Best (mostly)

J.B. Priestley, ed. The Best of Leacock (1958) Just what the title says. I would have included about 2/3rds if the pieces that Priestley chose. He kindly provides an Introduction explaining his choices, which shows that his taste does not include parody, his sense of the absurd is definitely English and not Canadian, and he doesn’t get the rage in Leacock’s satire of the Idle Rich. I think that may be because it’s the one book in which Leacock’s economic insights shape the satire. In some of his shorter pieces, Leacock hints that economics is a social science, and that human motives matter more than the numbers.
     Priestley wants to think of Leacock as the humourous uncle who tells his funny stories with a twinkle in his eye, and doesn’t really mean to be mean to the targets of his satire. This is, I think , a common misreading of Leacock. Under the veneer of absurdity, Acadian Adventures Among the Idle Rich is an angry and precise skewering of the selfishness and greed of what Veblen called the Leisure Class. Leacock goes a step further than Veblen’s careful dissection of the social meaning of conspicuous consumption: He demonstrates that too much money empties the brains of whatever sense and ethics their owners had, leaving behind a vapid desire for social status and the low cunning required to maintain the income-producing enterprises that pay for the pastimes of the idlers. The chapter on the merger of St Asaph and St Osoph is one of the most skillful illuminations of self-delusion and manipulation of ethics in the service of greed that I’ve read. The more serious and verbose attempts of, say, Sinclair Lewis don’t, I think, achieve the same suavely savage effect, certainly not as economically as in Leacock’s satire.
     I enjoyed rereading my favourites, but I skipped a few of the selections. This anthology serves well as an introduction to Leacock, whose work, sadly, has become an acquired taste. I suppose that’s the inevitable fate of humourous and satiric writing, which depends on allusions to a shared popular culture. But if you can find a copy in some second-hand bookshop, it’s worth buying. ***

Black Adder: All the scripts

Richard Curtis, Rowan Atkinson, Ben Elton. Black Adder: The Whole Damn Dynasty (1998) We watched the series when it first aired. A wonderfully absurd and intelligent send-up of our notions of the past. History ain’t what we think it is, especially when the Adder clan is part of it.
     Here are all the scripts, with some added material that makes better sense on the page than on the screen. As with all scripts, it helps to have seen the performances. Atkinson, Fry, Robinson et al are superb comic actors with impeccable timing and a large range of tone and sneer. The four Black Adder series are worth watching again and again; many episodes are available on YouTube. The series became increasingly dark, and the last one ends in the fog of war. As with all good satire, the targets are the ones labelled the Seven Deadly Sins in another context. It’s really the weaknesses and flaws of human nature that exercise the spleen of the writers. But I suspect that the weaknesses and flaws are the price we pay for the glory.
     Recommended for addicts; I doubt that the casual reader will find much to amuse them, but I have a faint hope I’m mistaken. ****

Public performance and Murder (Marsh's Opening Night & Swing Brother Swing)

 

Ngaio Marsh. Opening Night (1951). Martyn Tarne has come to England to attempt a career in the theatre. She washes up at the Vulcan Theatre, as Dresser to leading lady Helen Hamilton, whose husband Clark Bennington is rapidly declining into a mean drunk. Tensions among the cast and with the author of the play, and Tarne’s uncanny resemblance to leading man and actor-manager Adam Poole stir up a witch’s broth of resentments and suspicions.
     The inevitable murder appears to repeat an earlier one the same premises. Alleyn solved that one and of course solves this one, too. But the investigation, though competently handled, isn’t the focus of the story. This is really a novel about the theatre, and actors, and the ambiance of rehearsal and performance. Worth reading for that alone. For me, it was a reread, and I enjoyed it more than the first read. Recommended. ***

 

Ngaio Marsh. Swing, Brother, Swing (1949) An eccentric and self-centred lord with an overweening notion of his musical talents, his almost equally eccentric family, a band-leader trying to preserve his status as first among equals, a vainglorious but talented accordionist, an unsuitable attachment, drugs, and the desire to maintain family status make for a well-stirred pot of resentments and anxieties. Murder is inevitable. Alleyn and Troy happen to be present when it happens, enjoying a night out. The puzzle is solved fairly, with plausibly distracting facts that have to be cleared away. Marsh has a lot of fun satirising human foibles and vanities. An enjoyable re-read for me. **½

The Empire Builders (Stead): data towards insight into ancestral foibles

R. J. C. Stead. The Empire Builders (1908) Stead’s verses remind me of Kipling in their jingoism and Service in their rhymes and rhythm. They range from sentimentally heroic tales of pioneering homesteaders to abstract paeans on Man, Mother, Empire etc. Stead liked adjectives and Latinate diction, which I suppose he believed made his commonplace prejudices sound not only poetic but thoughtful and weighty. They must have seemed so to his readers in 1908, when he published this book, and which reached its fourth edition (this copy) by 1910.
     An online search reveals many editions in many different formats and price levels. Stead’s verses appealed to a large audience. They don’t appeal to me, except as awful examples of empire-worship in the Edwardian era. And of the wrong-headed belief that anything that rhymes must be poetry.
     A curiosity, data towards a better insight into the foibles of our ancestors, and thereby also a warning that much of what we consider to be proper sentiments will certainly appear wrongheaded to our descendants. *

Footnote: Stead wrote jingoistic novels as well. He worked for the CPR's immigration department, producing "reams of rose-hued prose extolling the clean, healthy vigour of life in the open spaces—spaces opened courtesy of the CPR and available at good prices. On his own time, he writes in the same vein...". The posters were also "rose-hued".  

Grand Old Man of the Theatre painted and murdered (Final Curtain, 1947)

Ngaio Marsh. Final Curtain (1947) Waiting for Roderick to return, Troy is persuaded to paint the portrait of Sir Henry Ancred, Grand Old Man of the Theatre. He’s infatuated with a chorus girl, which the Family of course does not like at all. Troy enjoys painting the old man. But several practical jokes, ascribed to Panty, Sir Henry’s youngest grandchild and favourite person, roil the household, and eventually there’s murder.

    Alleyn has just returned from duty in New Zealand, but he must investigate the crime. Troy being one of his witnesses, complicates their reunion. Marsh plays fair enough with the clues and rosy piscids, but the main interest is the Family. They’re a wonderfully awful collection of eccentrics, all but one carrying the theatrical genes that made Sir Henry an expert ham who could carry any role at whatever pitch of realism or fantasy the director wanted. Or so I infer. The solution involves distorted affection and money, as it often does in Marsh’s tales. Merely average for her, which means it’s very good. ***

 

Addams Family and Others (Night Crawlers, 1975)

Charles Addams. Nightcrawlers (1957) A re-read. I enjoy Addams’s cartoons. They work so well because they show the logical consequences of whatever assumption has created the scene he depicts. Such as a pedestrian noticing a broom leaning against a parking meter. Or four oars protruding from four holes in the hull of a yacht. Or one witch to another, We’re out of dwarf’s hair, dearie. Can we substitute? Or the scenes on the book’s covers. ****

 

Nazi Misrule (Grunberger: The 12-Year Reich)

Richard Grunberger The 12-Year Reich (1971) A carefully assembled and somewhat selective description of daily life under Nazi rule. With every fact property documented, there’s not enough data about ordinary people’s actual feelings. Still, it’s a good overview of how ideological fantasies distort government and everything it touches. The overall impression is how the growth of totalitarian Gleichschaltung (alignment) suppressed common sense and humane values in small increments until the frog was boiled. And of how the near universal desire for a quiet and orderly life can lead people into a ceding control to the tyrants.
    About the only cavil I have is Grunberger’s obvious reluctance to admit the good things that sometimes resulted from bad motives. For example, the concerts arranged for factory workers were prompted by a belief in the superiority of Aryan art, and had the aim of lifting the lower classes to the Aryan heights. The audience comments quoted show that the listeners liked the music and ignored the motivation for presenting it. But Grunberger is I think clearly correct when he suggests that the Germans’ pride in their culture was intricately mixed with a sense of its superiority, which made it easy for the Nazis to spread their cult.
     Recommended. ***

Lynn Truss on courtesy in speech and writing.

 

Lynn Truss Talk to the Hand (2005) Truss is seriously annoyed by rudeness. Not the rudeness of ignoring merely fashionable etiquette, but the rudeness of ignoring other people’s rights, especially the right to be treated with respect. Her reaction is to stay inside and bolt the door. Maybe escaping rudeness can make for a more peaceful life, but it will be lonely one.
Truss’s six reasons for staying inside are:
* Was That So Hard To Say? (about Please and Thank you)
* Why Am I The One Doing This? (about downloading customer service onto the customer, etc)
* My Bubble, My Rules (about being a good guest, among other things)
* The Universal Eff-Off Reflex
* Booing The Judges (about fake egalitarianism)
* Someone Else Will Clean It Up
Of course her remarks go beyond my simplistic summary phrases. She’s well worth reading, more than once, which I intend to do. ****

Lynn Truss. Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2003) Truss’s first book. Her defence of good punctuation has, I hope, done some good. But she doesn’t go far enough: Punctuation is the (inevitably inadequate) method for signalling syntactic structure. The title demonstrates this admirably. But Truss doesn’t follow through. She discusses the conventions very well, and provides wonderful examples of what happens when writers ignore them. But her explanations of the rationales are too often misleading. For example, her differentiation between ; : . These marks correspond to the subtle signals in speech that there’s more to come, with some hint as to how it’s related to what’s just been said. The apostrophe is not a punctuation mark, but a spelling mark, as are the diacritic and the hyphen.

      I guess I want more conceptual rigour. But that’s nit-picking. Truss has done us all a service, and she’s done it with grace, humour, and nuanced awareness of how we differ in our pointing preferences. Buy this book, follow its advice, and read it at least once a year. ****

Sam Drake, early version of Lew Archer: Trouble Follows Me

 

  Ross Macdonald Trouble Follows Me (1946) Trouble doesn’t follow Sam Drake, the narrator, he looks for it. This early Ross MacDonald (first credited to Keith Millar) already has all the ingredients we associate with him: the sleazy underworld, corruptions in high places, police subservient to money and politics, losers chasing the American Dream, and repeated confusion about what is and what is not important in life. And of course attempts to preserve self-respect by concealing or lying about crucial facts.
     Drake is on leave, attends a very boozy party, and is on scene when a woman’s body is found swinging at the end of a rope. He’s dissatisfied with the inference of suicide, and after many and mostly plausible plot twists as well as several dollops of violence, he discovers the truth: An evil female has murdered her friend to conceal her own crimes.
     It’s war-time, and as far as I can tell, MacDonald gets the ambience right. I don’t know how many unpublished novels or stories MacDonald wrote before this one, but he’s mastered characterisation well enough that we care about the principals and ignore the cardboardiness of the secondary players. The tough-guy style wobbles a bit here and there, but it’s as least as good as Hammett and Chandler. A good enough entertainment for the pulp fiction audience it was written for. **½

Hillerman's Memoir Doesn't Disappoint

 

Tony Hillerman. Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir (2001) Hillerman is one of my favourite writers. His police procedurals set in Navajo country integrate plot, character and setting better than most fictions. Because of them, I want to visit that part of America, but I doubt I will make it there.
     This memoir begins with his childhood on a hardscrabble farm in Oklahoma, where his mother taught him to have low expectations, because then he would be seldom disappointed. But the dominant attitude here is gratitude for all the breaks that came his way: his luck in surviving the war, benefitting from the GI Bill, learning how to tell a story as reporter, and a happy marriage and family life. The war damaged him both physically and psychologically, damage that he plays down. But that damage also encouraged his gift of imaginative empathy. The narrator of the novels has the same voice as the narrator of this memoir. I like this man.
     Footnote: Hillerman’s memories of his war add to its history in the best way: the point of view of those that actually fought it.
     Recommended. ****

Fables of Brunswick Avenue (Govier)

 

Katherine Govier. Fables of Brunswick Avenue (1985) Sixteen stories, sixteen people who win some and lose some. Govier’s tales tend to gloom and faint despair. Most of her characters are or were young women hoping to make a career in some art or craft. Govier tells of how they came to settle for something less than they expected, of how love and marriage demand compromises and accommodations that are rarely apportioned equitably. But losing the game doesn’t equate to defeat, a paradox that elders like me have come to understand only too well. Something like self-respect can be reconstructed from the salvaged bits. And at the very least, there’s new insight, which sometimes is worth the cost.
     Govier writes well. Throughout, there’s the feeling that she writes from experience. Like Alice Munro, she shows us how people’s characters define or limit their choices. But her portraits are kinder, like photos taken with a soft-focus lens to hide the wrinkles.
     Recommended. ***

Three by Tey: Inspector Grant at Work

Josephine Tey: Four Five and Six by Tey (1959)

    The Singing Sands (1952, published posthumously). Inspector Alan Grant convalesces, at his cousin Laura’s home in Scotland, from a severe case of claustrophobia. As he detrains, he comes upon a dead man in an adjoining compartment, and subconsciously picks up his newspaper. The dead man has scribbled a verse about the Singing Sands which catches Grant’s attention; and that’s the beginning of a nicely convoluted investigation into an almost perfect murder.

     Along the way we learn a good deal about fishing, Scottish legends, explorers, Grant’s childhood, megalomania, and assorted other bits and pieces. Tey allows herself room for digressions that add to character and ambience, and refer the reader to what were then current events, and current notions of British nationhood. She also delivers herself of definite opinions on the current state of civilisation, usually inserted into the remarkably civilised conversations between her characters. The result is a novel threaded onto a crime investigation, and a very satisfying one. ***

 

Young and Innocent is based on A Shilling for Candles. Available on YouTube.

     A Shilling fo Candles (1936) Christine Clay, a famous film star who has worked her way up from a factory girl,  turns up drowned on a beach in Kent. Grant is called in because a couple of small details and an implausible alibi flummox the local police, and Grant and Williams, too, when they take over. A couple of well-done plot twists extend the tale to novel length. This is Tey’s second Grant and fourth novel: she manages to insert the digressive illuminations of character and ambience that make her books such a pleasure to read. The title refers to a phrase in Clay’s will (which also drags a monstrous red herring across the trail). Well done. ***

     The Daughter of Time (1951) Grant lies in hospital waiting for his broken leg to heal. He’s bored. Very bored. His friend Marta Hallard suggests that he work on an unsolved mystery. A few chance remarks about Richard III and the two princes in the Tower stir his interest in a portrait of the king. The face does not, in Grant (and Williams’s) estimation belong to the kind of man who would murder two nephews. With the help of Brent Carradine, a nice young American that Hallard sends to help out (he’s besotted with one of the actresses in her current play), Grant resolves the puzzle to his satisfaction: Richard III did not arrange for the murder of the two princes; Henry VII did. How he arrives at this conclusion is beautifully told. That it’s found to be a widely held opinion doesn’t detract from Grant’s success.

     The opening scenes allow Tey to give a few neat observations on hospital care, fashionable novels, the problems of boredom, the “tandypandy” of popular notions of history, etc. Tandypandy refers to an historical legend that completely contradicts the known facts. The Canadian “freedom convoy”, trumpism in the USA (and elsewhere), and the rise of ultra-nationalist far-right groups everywhere, show that tandypandy can have very nasty consequences.

     A beautifully written novel. ****

 

Footnote: Many of the radio and TV dramas and audiobooks of Tey's novels are available on YouTube.

Simplicissimus: German Satire from the 1920s and 30s

 

Stanley Appelbaum. Simplicissimus. 180 Satirical Drawings... (1975). The satirical weekly Simplicissimus was published from 1896 to 1944, but its years as Nazi propaganda rag were a sad comedown from its heyday as one of the most thoroughly moral weeklies. It attacked everything and anything that its editors found objectionable. The hypocrite, the poseur, the indifferent capitalist, the militarist, the fashionable people and ideas of the day, all these and more were mocked in it pages. Some drawings were gentle joke, other savage attacks. The quality of the art ranges from pretty good illustration to astonishingly evocative art. Some, like those by Käthe Kollwitz, merely represent reality. Others use conventional imagery to signal the social types and classes on display. Most artists have mastered the expressive line that shows us anything from rage to languor.
     Dover Publications commissioned this selection of drawings. Appelbaum wrote a potted history of the magazine for it, as well as brief bios of the artists. The cover illustration’s caption reads, “Why do we [men] need suits when the women wear almost nothing?” Out of print, but worth a search. ****

Bridge Lore for Model Railroaders (no, not the card game).

 

Bob Hayden, ed. Model Railroad Bridges and Trestles. (1992) Out of print. A compilation of articles published in Model Railroader magazine from 1962 to 1991. We get everything from general information about types of bridges and their uses, to detailed descriptions of how to build model bridges from scratch.
     Model railroaders love bridges, they make a wonderful setting for any train in any scale. I’ve seen many, many photos of model railroads, and too many of the bridges concocted by their builders are impossible. This book, if you can find it, will help you build a plausible bridge. Or else, get the Model Railroader’s Guide to Bridges and Trestles  

     Recommended  ****

Thee More by Lapham: Migration, Home, and Discovery

  Lapham’s Quarterly 14-3: Migration (April-May 2022). A very timely collection, now that migrations will become the new normal. Not that they’re really new: One could label our species homo peregrinus, since wandering has been hominid behaviour as far back as archeology and paleontology can tell. For us modern hominids it’s species-specific behaviour. But so is territoriality, hence the conflicts caused when we wander into land already claimed by other humans. That’s why writing about it is very ancient.
     Migration may be freely chosen or forced. Either way, it causes home-sickness. We mourn the place we came from. But we can’t go home again, because the time we’ve spent elsewhere ensures that we and home have changed. Return is usually impossible for the exile. The excerpts from migrants’ and exiles’ writings range from melancholic nostalgia to optimistic hope for a better or at least tolerable future. The urge to explore prompts much individual and some group migration. People who do this write high-spirited and often self-aggrandising accounts.
     The accounts of flight from war, natural disaster, and political oppression are harrowing. The German word for those who flee their homelands is Flüchtling, “flightling”, which could be a good Anglo-Saxon word. Instead we use the French “refugee”. So German speakers are reminded that such migrants flee from peril, while English speakers think of them as seeking safety. Language has subtle effects.
     Recommended. Subscriptions to Lapham’s Quarterly are available on their website. ****

Lapham’s Quarterly 10-1: Home (2017) The human homing instinct is as strong as the urge to wander. In the end, we wander until we come home. Home may be what we left or what we find. It signifies safety and comfort. “Home is where they have to take you in,” Robert Frost wrote. Home is where we have family and the extended family we call our tribe. “A house is not a home,” says anonymous, that composer of random wisdom.  “Home is where the heart is,” anonymous says again.
     Yes, home is defined by our feelings. It’s not a place, but a deep attachment to a place. Happy are they who can carry their homes with them, for they will never be strangers in a strange land. But most of us leave home one way or another, and thus home is inextricably tied to wandering. Life is a journey, we say. Away from home and back again.
     Another fine anthology. ****

 Lapham’s Quarterly 10-2: Discovery (2017) Not as focussed as the other collections, because “discovery” is a rather nebulous concept. Or rather, a very wide-ranging one. It covers everything from what explorers discover to what each of us finds out about oneself. Besides, what’s a discovery for some is ancient knowledge for others. For the child, every day brings new discoveries. For the elder, every day confirms what’s been discovered long ago.
     Nevertheless, some interesting bits about what drives the search, and of the difficulties and delights of finding things out, especially the unexpected. I think that as long as we can experience the curiosity of the child, life will be a pleasure, despite the annoying pains and creaky joints of old age. ****

Munro: The Moons of Jupiter (1982)

 

Alice Munro. The Moons of Jupiter (1982) Munro’s short stories could be called micro-novels. She gives us not only a whole character but a whole life. How does she do it? It looks like magic. It is magic, if by “magic” we mean the control of our attention so that we see what the magician wants us to see. The magician (to paraphrase Teller) takes advantage of our ability to process data swiftly and efficiently by leaving out unnecessary details or small changes in stimuli. We see what we expect to see. We see what the brain insists must be there, even when we know it’s not. Hence the illusion, and the pleasurable surprise at our inability to see it any other way. Fiction uses the same technique, whatever the medium. We know only what the author decides we should know.
    Munro does this very well. She drops a detail here and an aside there, and we pick up on these cues to fill in the gaps that the short-story form inevitably leaves. The result is that we see the story exactly as Munro wants us to see it. And what does she want us to see? That people are damaged by others and by themselves, but somehow manage to survive, and sometimes to thrive. She’s ruthless in showing us how stupid, thoughtless, and malevolent decisions prevent the happiness that we seek, and how some unexpected felicity creates those moments of joy that keep us hoping for the best. She presents people as they are, and as they see themselves, and how the tension between those realities bends their paths in unexpected but inevitable directions.
    I always enjoy reading one of her collections, but on some level they leave me exhausted. Recommended. ****

The End of the Reich: Two accounts of the Götterdämmerung

 Anton Joachimsthaler. The Last Days of Hitler (1995, translated 1996). James Lucas. Last Days of the Reich (1986) Bound together in one volume, these are written by amateur historians.
     Joachimsthaler is bent on disproving the apparently wide-spread notion that Hitler didn’t die in the bunker on 30 April 1945, but escaped to South America, and that the corpse burnt in the Reichstag garden was that of a double. He has taken the trouble of chasing down all available documentation, which is more than enough to show that Hitler did in fact shoot himself. He also shows that Stalin, for reasons only partly explained by his desire for favourable propaganda, ordered the record to be obfuscated. It may be Stalin really believed that Hitler escaped. Besides, he had already made plans to annex East Germany and other nations as a buffer between Soviet Russia and Western Europe.
     Lucas, disturbed by what he saw when in action in Carinthia (Austria) in April and May 1945, assembled an account of the military (and some political) events of April and May 1945. He apparently wanted to publicise the fact that in the days leading up to the final capitulations a good deal of very bad stuff happened, including the repatriation of partisans to Yugoslavia, where they were murdered; the desperate last stands of SS units with civilians caught in the cross fire; and the flight of Volksdeutsche from Silesia and elsewhere, many of whom died or were murdered along the way.
     About the only take away for me was confirmation that the western Allies’ willingness to let Stalin take Berlin was a mistake that caused a great deal of misery. Interesting for anyone obsessed with World War 2, and nice examples of the difference between amateur and professional history. Worth reading if you find it. **½

Mortimer and Friends (Murderers and Other Friends, 1994)

 

John Mortimer. Murderers and Other Friends (1994) Part two of Mortimer’s intermittent autobiography. Charming, humane, with occasional flashes of rage at injustice and stupidity. I enjoyed this re-read. Mother gave me the book for a birthday; she enjoyed Mortimer and Rumpole as much as I did. (So did all the family).
     Highly recommended, partly because it also portrays a time and Zeitgeist that’s now long past, partly because Mortimer understands the difference between law and justice very well, and partly because he’s just very good company. He’s a raconteur, he can make any event interesting and often a reason to reflect about what makes life worth living. If you could push Mortimer to pontificate, he might say something about good company, a loving family, satisfying work, and perhaps jousting at windmills in the sure and certain hope that some of them would prove to be giants worth slaying. Recommended. ****

Dogs aren't quite human: Fifteen Dogs (Alexis 2015)

 

Andre Alexis. Fifteen Dogs. (2015) Apollo and Hermes idly discuss a puzzle: If dogs could be self-aware like humans, would they be just as miserable as humans? Apollo thinks they’ll be even more unhappy, Hermes disagrees, so of course they have to conduct an experiment. They give fifteen dogs in a veterinary clinic the gift of self-awareness (mislabelled “human intelligence” by Alexis, who commits the common error of assuming that intelligence requires some kind of sentience). The gods also grant language, which enables the dogs to disagree about the value and purpose of their new abilities. That leads to conflict, murder, banishments and self-exile, politics, and poetry, among other things.
     This story proceeds in a ruthlessly matter-of-fact way. Alexis uses his knowledge of canine psychology to extrapolate plausible behaviours, and adds a few bits of anthropomorphic personality to create something of a plot. The result is a book that I read at almost one sitting. There’s a map of Toronto to help the reader to follow the dogs’ the travels and travails. Highly recommended. ****

Wexford and the secretive corpse: A Sleeping Life (1978)

 

Ruth Rendell. A Sleeping Life. (1978) A woman’s body found on a path isn’t much of a surprise, but one without any identification is an annoyance. Her handbag contains only keys and some cash. However, Wexford discovers her identity fairly quickly. What takes time is filling in the details of her life. Frustrating gaps and inconsistencies prevent a clear idea of who murdered her and why. Wexford stumbles on the solution when he hears a chance remark about eonism (that’s a spoiler). An alert reader will likely not need that clue, however.
     A satisfying Wexford. ***

Ursula Bloom on Stratford (re-read)

 

Ursula Bloom. A Rosemary for Stratford-on-Avon (1966) My copy was given to me by my mother, who received it from my uncle Paul Morgan. They grew up in Stratford–on-Avon, which enabled them both to add marginal notes.
     Ursula Bloom lived near Stratford as a child, and takes a proprietary interest. Much of her book is about Marie Corelli, who moved to Stratford towards the end of her career, apparently believing that she would be welcomed, respected, and lionised in such a literary shrine. She was, at first, but her quarrelsome nature soon antagonised the town.
     Bloom, who had a fair success as a novelist, writes her remembrance like a novel, with much invented dialogue between the worthies of the Town. That makes for amusing reading, but tends to create a rather confusing mix of attitudes and emphases. Bloom also romanticises the country town; this is nothing like the Stratford I remember, which was a determined market town with a hard-nosed attitude towards the tourism business that Shakespeare's Birthplace attracted. (Its other major industry was Flowers Brewery, which made real ale until it was acquired by one of the multi-nationals that now dominate that craft.) There’s no question that Corelli was a difficult person who overestimated both her talent and her eminence. But Bloom’s manner and tone, and the almost complete absence of quotations from contemporary sources, make me suspicious. A note by U.P. states that the book infuriated Uncle Peter (my great-uncle), and I’m not surprised. (Uncle Peter was a for a while assistant librarian at the Memorial Theatre.)
     An oddity, but a keeper because of the family connections. **

People worth knowing: Eleanor Wachtel's Original Minds

Eleanor Wachtel. Original Minds (2003) Sixteen edited interviews originally broadcast on CBC’s Writers and Company. I’ve read writings by most of them, and met Desmond Tutu when he visited the Anglican Diocese of Algoma during his tour of Canada. He was, despite the horrors of apartheid, a cheerful and happy man. All are worth listening to, but I especially enjoyed the interviews with George Steiner, Jonathan Miller, and Oliver Sacks, perhaps because they are among my favourite people.

     Wachtel is a wonderful interviewer. She may begin with a set of questions, and clearly shifts to some questions she wants answers to, but her interviews sound and read like conversations. She prompts her guests with comments and questions directly related to what they’ve just said. She’s also done her homework: one always gets the impression that she’s read at least the two or three most important works by her guests.

     A book worth re-reading. Find the program here: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany. ****

Waugh on God, and Kershaw on Hitler.

 

 Alexander Waugh. God (2002) Waugh has assembled all the passages from the Talmud, the Bible, and the Qu’ran in which God speaks for himself, plus a wide range of scriptural and other comments about God. This amounts to a portrait, both incomplete and inconsistent, which is no surprise. By definition, God is beyond human understanding, so any attempt to assemble a coherent description of the Deity is bound to fail.
    Nevertheless, worth reading, if only for the salutary reminder that what one may think the sacred texts and religious authorities said about God isn’t like that at all. ****

  Ian Kershaw. The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany 1944-1945 (2011). A thorough and thoroughly depressing account of the end of the 3rd Reich. Once again, I’m astonished at the denial of reality by men (and some women) who could or would not understand that their fantasies of Aryan glory were at best mere superstition. There were of course many people who disobeyed Hitler’s order to fight to the death and capitulated rather than suffer the destruction of their towns and villages. But as the Reich went under, many Nazis went on a last murderous and nihilistic spree of revenge and annihilation. On the Eastern Front, much of the fighting continued in a desperate attempt to stave of the vengeance of Russian troops and gain time for evacuation of troops and civilians. Many SS units fought rather than accept what they expected to be a harsh and unforgiving imprisonment.
     Apart from the unnecessary suffering inflicted on soldiers and civilians by Hitler’s refusal to capitulate, three other themes impressed me. First, the fantasy that Nazi heroic resistance to Bolshevism would be recognised and celebrated by future generations. Second, the Reich leadership’s stubborn belief that resistance would buy time during which the Alliance would disintegrate as the Western powers realised that they had a common enemy in Stalin’s Russia. The Alliance did disintegrate, but not until Stalin imposed his rule on Eastern Europe some months after the end of the war. Third, the belief by Doenitz and his rump government that they had some leverage for negotiating peace terms. Overarching the whole is the thesis that Hitler’s intransigence caused the self-destruction of the Reich.
     Kershaw’s account of the end of Hitler’s Reich seems much shorter than its 400 pages (plus 164 pages of notes, bibliography, and index). He manages to present this complex multi-stranded story clearly. For me, it was a page-turner. ****

Lord Peter Wimsey, married and a Visitor to Oxford

 

Jill Paton Walsh. The Late Scholar (2013) This is Walsh’s fourth excursion into emulating Dorothy Sayers. The first was a completion of Sayers’s last novel from her notes. This is a new and pretty good fabrication.
     Lord Peter Wimsey is now the Duke of Denver (not having read #2 and #3, I missed that translation). He is called on to settle a dispute at St Severin’s College, Oxford, in accordance with an ancient rule that the Duke of Denver must be the Visitor that resolves a stalemated dispute among the Fellows. There follows a nicely done pastiche of Sayers’s style and substance. Walsh, herself a Cambridge scholar, knows how universities function, and how disputes among Fellows can lead to murderous hatred, although not nearly as often to murderous action in real life as in fiction.
     I enjoyed Walsh’s version of Wimsey. The plot is fair, the characters are believable, the ambience is Oxford, and Peter and Harriet are comfortably married and parents as we perhaps have come to expect them to be. Recommended. ***

Dalglesh and a Lighthouse

 

P. D James. The Lighthouse. (2005) The victim hangs by the neck from the railing guarding the walk around the lantern of a lighthouse. None of the visitors to the island on which it stands, nor the staff tending to their needs, could have done it. Dalgleish of course shows not only that someone did do it but also who it was. Money, vanity, ancient secrets and grudges, wartime hurts and hatreds, and social class all figure in the tangle of motives that must be unravelled in order to expose the murderer.
     Another well done Dalgleish mystery. James knows how to create believable characters, so that even the most outlandish and puzzling murders make psychological sense. It’s Dalgleish’s understanding of psychology that leads him to the murderer, and the technical problem of how it was done seems almost an afterthought. Another good read. ***½

Winter murder (Innes: There Came Both Mist and Snow)

Michael Innes. There Came Both Mist and Snow (1940) Well-done closed-cast mystery. It’s Christmas, and Appleby is among the guests snowed in at a country house. The murder is done for money, but the method and the misdirections make for a pretty puzzle, neatly solved by means of literary allusions. There’s enough social comedy and melodrama to distract from the fantastic plot. The narrator is Arthur Ferryman, a waspish writer who never misses an opportunity to make a snide remark about social pretensions, moral failures or personal weaknesses. Nevertheless, a pleasant entertainment, better than average for the genre. **½

Suicide or murder? (Engel: The Suicide Murders, 1980)

 

Howard Engel. The Suicide Murders (1980) Engel’s Benny Cooperman series is a pleasure and a treasure. Cooperman is a private investigator working in a time when a PI’s work is less and less valuable. The police do a better job of finding missing persons or fingering violent perps. No-fault divorce has made the PI’s prime source of income practically pointless. But Cooperman still has a few clients, and for reasons of literary necessity, they are mixed up with murders. Engel needed to make some money, and lucky for aficionados of crime fiction, he discovered a talent for laid-back low-key PI stories. This novel was the first in a series of ten.
     This one’s a re-read for me. It begins with a woman wanting to discover her husband’s supposed mistress. But he commits suicide that very afternoon. Or so it seems. As the title hints, the suicide is a screen for murder.
     Cooperman’s inconvenient questions lead him deep into the city’s corrupt links between politicians and various rich men with at best semi-legal projects for making money. There are additional deaths, an uneasy relationship with the cops, an attempt on Benny’s life, and a hint of romance. Engel also builds a nicely done, not-quite-cliche back-story for Cooperman, which adds to the charm of the book. It got me hooked, and I read as many Coopermans as I could find. A couple of them were made into movies, look for them on YouTube.. Recommended. ***½

Murder at Christmas: Wycliffe and the Quiet Virgin

 

 

W. J. Burley. Wycliffe and the Quiet Virgin (1986) A re-read. A noir plot about family secrets, sexual and other rivalries, obscure and obscured relationships, and determined attempts to bury the truth and the bodies of the people who know it.
     Wycliffe’s Christmas holiday hosts are deeply implicated, which complicates his work. The virgin of the title is a girl who plays the Virgin in the Christmas pageant, and then disappears. That sets the plot in motion. Her discoveries about herself form the core of the puzzle and the motives for the murders.
     I like this series, the writing is competent, and Burley plays fair, with characters are real enough that we care about their fates. The TV series was pretty good, too; many episodes are available on YouTube. Recommended. ***

Lew Archer, ex-cop searching for truth.

      Ross MacDonald Black Money (1965) A missing-person case turns into a complex tangle of love triangles, murder, and money laundering. Archer plods along, is pistol whipped, falls for the wrong woman (again), and untangles the mess. But that’s not the same as cleaning it up. MacDonald is one of the crime writers who understands how evil spreads like a stain that permanently darkens the lives of everyone it touches. He also knows that crime springs from delusions driven by misplaced passion and an inability to accept that life has no fairy-tale happy endings. He knows the American Dream pursued becomes a nightmare reality. ***

     Ross Macdonald. The Name is Archer (1983) The short stories featuring Lew Archer. More tightly plotted than the novels, but with the same cast of dream-chasers whose naive belief in a happy ending triggers the evil that engulfs them and the bystanders caught up in the backwash. ***

     Lew Archer, ex-cop, ex-soldier, ex-husband. A loner who connects with the drifters and grifters that his cases wash up. He has a powerful sense of justice, and a stubborn focus on finding the truth. 

   The truth reveals dysfunctional families, domestic abuse, fraud, impersonations, long-buried secrets and corpses, corruption in high places, and men and women who confuse respect with love, and money with happiness. There are good cops, power-mad cops, cops bought by some rich sponsor, cops defeated by the evils they can’t prevent. Fathers who abandon their sons and daughters or overwhelm them with their own unfulfilled dreams. Mothers who spoil their children or demand a perfection they can’t achieve. Social strivers who will do anything to preserve their reputations, or to protect the family from scandal. Fantasists who believe that one final job will propel them into a life of ease and status. Losers who will never win because they can’t recognise that what they already have is better than anything they yearn for.

     MacDonald’s style derives from Hammett, but improves on it. I read my collection of Archer novels one after the other, which showed that MacDonald rearranges the same cast of characters and suite of events into new designs which nevertheless demonstrate the same bleak vision of the American Dream become the American Nightmare. No matter how people try to achieve some resolution of all their problems, the best they can hope for is a life without serious troubles. Recommended. *** to ****