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 I don’t know how many unpublished novels or stories MacDonald wrote before this one, but he’s mastered characterisation well enough that we care about the principals and ignore the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. ****