Dorothy Sayers and Jill P. Walsh. Thrones, Dominions (1998)

     Dorothy Sayers and Jill P. Walsh. Thrones, Dominions (1998) Based on notes and drafts by Sayers of a novel she had planned and begun to write, this is a well done imitation of the Sayers style and form. Walsh has caught the Sayers adoration of Wimsey and her idealisation of his marriage with Harriet very well, perhaps to the point of gentle satire. The puzzle is satisfying, although the reader knows the perpetrator quite early on; but that’s common with Sayers, who was not much concerned with teasing the reader with red herrings until the denouement (except in Five Red Herrings, but even there, the murderer’s identity is fairly clear well before the end).
     The pleasure in this book comes from the characters, especially Wimsey and Harriet, and Walsh also shows a nice talent for social comedy. There are times when it seems she’s more interested in that than in the mystery, but Sayers’ notes justify her emphasis. Sayers planned the novel as having two main subjects, and Harriet and Peter’s adjustment to each other as husband and wife was to be one of them. Peter’s family should perhaps have been given more prominence; I think Sayers would have done that. But I suppose the publishers had some say I the length of the book. Considering the way Sayers expanded Gaudy Night and Nine Tailors into novels with a mystery element, Walsh would have been justified in insisting on a longer book.
     As it is, the marriage is charming. It clearly represents Sayers’ ideals, and certainly Walsh’s too, for she does these scenes so nicely. The Sayers reticence is there, but also the hint at passion unbounded and thoroughly enjoyed. Although the dialogue sometimes becomes a little precious, that’s Sayers' style, and Walsh is a sympathetic imitator of her prototype (whom, she says, she has admired since reading Gaudy Night in her early teens, a time when romantic novels and poetry can have a lasting effect). She must have read the couple of short stories of Wimsey as a married man and father very carefully.
     I found the puzzle well enough handled, though I would have liked to have seen the Wimsey-Parker relationship developed more; they are brothers-in-law, after all, not merely colleagues in detection. And Harriet and Mary will be excellent friends; I think more scenes between them would have added to the book, especially since Harriet isn’t sure she wants children at first. I guess I’m saying I could have read a book twice the length quite happily; I didn’t want it to end. Sayers usually wrote a lovely mix of social comedy, romantic love story, and adventure romance, and Walsh is an excellent pupil; I must look up her own published work.
     Sayers is very like Austen in her eye for the absurdities of social convention, but like Austen she also acknowledges the power of these conventions to cause real unhappiness. And like Austen, she believes that common sense, a disciplined heart, courtesy, kindness, and a strong moral sense will carry one through the worst of times. Also like Austen, Sayers rewards her heroes and heroines with great connubial happiness. It may be a fairy tale; but in real life, too, people can live happily ever after, or at least aspire to that state, and from time to time achieve it. **** (2003)

Charles Osborne. Agatha Christie: Her Life and Crimes (1999)

     Charles Osborne. Agatha Christie: Her Life and Crimes (1999) Cutesy title for a catalogue raisonnee of Christie's works with notes on her life. Osborne is probably most reliable on the bibliography, since he corrects some errors by other authors, and his notes on Christie’s life give one a painless overview. The glimpses of her relationship with Mallowan are worth having; they seem to have had an exceptionally happy life together. Osborne gives complete lists of the plays and movies based on Christie’s books, but although he mentions the TV adaptations regularly in the text, he supplies no list of those. He himself has “adapted” two of Christie’s plays into novels; I’ve read one, Black Coffee, and it’s rather badly done. Christie, with all her faults, was able to create a mood or atmosphere in addition to the dialogue, and that’s what Osborne can’t do. Worth a read to remind one of the books, and worth keeping as a reference.** (2003)

Improbable Research and the Ig Nobel Prizes

The Ig Nobel prizes are given yearly for oddball and strange research, the kind that answers questions that have caused brief puzzlement or annoyance. Such as Why is it so hard to walk with a full cup of coffee (or bowl of soup) without spilling it?

You will find the answers to these and other questions here, the website of Improbable Research. Not only fun, but Educational!

W. R. Maples and M. Browning, M. Dead Men do Tell Tales (1994)

     W. R. Maples and M. Browning, M. Dead Men do Tell Tales (1994) A forensic anthropologist’s memoirs. Maples doesn’t acknowledge Browning’s role in the writing, so it’s not clear how they collaborated. Maples begins with a summary of his life, and ends with a plea for more resources for forensic anthropology. In between he tells tales of his more interesting or horrific cases in more or less chronological order. While I believe his claim that he finds it emotionally easy to look at remains, it’s clear from his editorial comments that he can well imagine the agony of the victims whose final moments he can read in their bones.
     He has no pity for murderers (at one point he calls reference to an abused childhood “the latest excuse”). He’s a “Christian”, and like most fundamentalists believes in capital punishment. He also as a justifiable pride in his professional skills, and admires the men who taught him his craft. He helped identify Pizarro’s remains, and the bones of the Tsar’s family excavated from a bog near Ekaterinburg. An ongoing project is the identification of American soldiers’ remains recovered from Vietnam and other places, a task that he says will come to an end as identification of the pitifully small collections of remains becomes impossible. An interesting read, and must reading for any current crime writer, I think. He mentions that licking a suspected bone fragment will differentiate it from rock, something that Peter has also told me. I will be sending this book to him. *** (2003)

Ellis Peters. A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs. (1965)

   Ellis Peters. A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs. (1965) Reprinted in 1988, this is clearly an early work by Peters, who is better known these days for her Brother Cadfael stories. This book is more of a romance with a mystery element than a true police procedural, which the superscription “Detective Inspector Felse investigates” leads one to expect. An eighteenth century tomb is opened, and two bodies are found in it, while the expected C18 corpse is missing. So there are three mysteries: who killed the newest body, who is the other dead man, and where is the missing squire? All three are satisfactorily resolved, and along the way Peters provides us with family secrets revealed, a couple of love stories, miscellaneous treasure, and so on. The whole thing is fun, Peters is a very inventive writer, and her characters are well drawn, while her love stories tend to towards the sentimental. In her Cadfael mysteries she also indulges her taste for sentimental romantic love, but her focus on the detection is better, and her incidental background and back stories are better controlled. She has the knack of creating a believable fictional world, in other words, which makes this book worth reading. **-½ (2003)

Bill Hayes. Steam Trains of the World (1981)

     Bill Hayes. Steam Trains of the World (1981) The title’s a misnomer, since most of the book deals with England. True, English engineers pioneered the railways, and railway practice around the world bears the signs of English dominance in the early development of rail. But a book with “world” in it title should have more than half of its pages devoted to railways outside of the British Isles. I read the captions, and the few paragraphs of text. The book has the usual selection of old pictures, and the captions display a reasonably thorough and accurate knowledge, especially of British railways. But a few silly mistakes about US railways cast doubt about the reliability of the information about other ones. Still, it’s a nice book, and some of the photographs are spectacular. A good basic resource for the middle grades, so long as the student doesn’t pay too much attention to the “interesting” trivia, where the mistakes show up. ** (2003)

Steven Pinker. Words and Rules (1999)

     Steven Pinker. Words and Rules (1999) Pinker explain and supports his thesis, which is that language is structured in two ways: it consists of words, and there are rules that govern their structure and combination. His evidence consists of experiments that show people perform differently in various language tasks depending on whether the words are regular or irregular in inflection. Work with people who speak uninflected languages show similar differences performance, but related to syntax (eg, the insertion of syntactic markers).
     He makes his case, but since he writes for the non-specialist, the book is very light on actual data. I would like to see more tables, even statistical graphs. Nevertheless, the book is important, since it provides hard data supporting the common and intuitive conviction that language does indeed consist of parts, and that grammar is the rules of how these parts are put together to make meaningful utterances. Along the way, it also provides data in support of the hypothesis that language is a separate system, and not merely a side effect of humans’ general learning ability (or “intelligence”). The Chomskyan Thesis gets more and more support as time goes on. The book also provides support for the conviction that behaviouristic explanations for language learning and behaviour are incomplete. If responses could in fact be shaped without pre-wired internal processing, then damage to the brain would not impair language skills as it in fact does, nor would we find that specific language deficits run in families (and if we construct a family tree, the distribution of afflicted family members would not be the kind we associate with dominant genes or gene-clusters). That is, language behaviours are shaped with insufficient stimuli. In other words, language behaviours pre-exist in generalised form, and the environment gives them their specific shape. **-½ (2003)