L. Gough. Accidental Deaths (1991) & Anon. The Yellow Book of Locker-Room Humour (1980)

     L. Gough. Accidental Deaths (1991) I read this on the way to England, and have forgotten almost all of it. It’s a hard-boiled ‘tec story, in which a number of deaths appear accidental, but aren’t. The style was overwrought, and the characters and plot obviously forgettable. Still, in my notebook I rated it ** (2006)

     Anon. The Yellow Book of Locker-Room Humour (1980) A collection of mildly risque stories, the kind that rely on innuendo and puns, etc, for their effect. This makes some of the stories quite witty. **  (2006)

Henry Sampson, ed. The Dumpy Book of Veterans of Road, Rail, Sea and Air (1960)

     Henry Sampson, ed. The Dumpy Book of Veterans of Road, Rail, Sea and Air (1960) Sampson may be a partner in the publishers of this little book, which represents state of the art printing for 1960. It looks like offset printing was used; there is almost no visible screen on the pictures, and the blacks tend block out detail. Anyhow, the content is exactly what the title says, except of course that the sample is heavily weighted towards English subjects. Road and rail are done in many small pictures, with short captions. The ships and planes are given extended captions with more or less complete histories. Still of interest today. But I have no way of gauging the accuracy of the information. **½ (2006)

Hilda Lawrence. Death of a Doll (1947)

     Hilda Lawrence. Death of a Doll (1947) A reprint from 1982, and you may wonder why. It’s a book that draws you in if you give it time; it took me a while to get through the first third of the tale, but then I wanted to read on. The plot circles around the suspicious death of a shopgirl, who has just moved into Hope House, a kind of YWCA. But one of her regular customers does not believe it was suicide. She engages a family friend who happens to be a ‘tec, and he, along with two elderly ladies, gather enough facts to first show that it was murder, and then unmask the culprit. That person is a classic psychopath. The atmosphere, the descriptions of New York in wintertime, the characterisation are all first rate. Only the pacing of the story falters, especially in the beginning. But a satisfying read all the same. *** (2006)

Amanda Cross. Death in a Tenured Position (1981)

     Amanda Cross Death in a Tenured Position (1981) The victim, Janet Mandelbaum, called to a newly endowed chair in Harvard’s English Department, dies because of her opposition to feminism. This should make her the darling of the Eng. Dept. Professors, who are almost all opposed to the monstrous regiment of women, but bend, reluctantly, to the demands of the times. For this is a novel about the lethal effects of the feminist wars. Kate Fansler, professor English at a New York University (carefully disguised, but modelled on Columbia), is asked to help Janet acclimatise, and fails. This failure is one of the causes of Janet’s death. Kate realises this too late, just as she unravels the knotty mystery.
     Along the way, Cross provides her usual mix of fond and satirical takes on academia. That’s one of her book’s chief delights, at least for anyone with a nostalgia for that supremely irresponsible and therefore supremely useful life. For if humans did not value learning and art, they would have no reason to moil for pelf. I enjoyed the book, but it’s not a top-notch mystery, just a very good one. ***

Spiderman 2 (2004)

     Spiderman 2 (2004) [D: Sam Raimi. Toby McGuire, Kirsten Dunst] Peter Parker disappoints his boss (pizza baker), his friend (Mary Jane), his other boss (editor), his aunt, and his prof. Why? Because his deadlines and appointments are messed up when he answers a call for Spiderman. So he decides to give up being Spiderman, which seems to work out OK, except that his conscience, in the form of his dead uncle’s ghost, urges him to do what he has to do. Oh, yeah, Dr Octopus, a physicist who’s invented controlled fusion, has been hi-jacked by his A.I. harness, which proceeds to feed off his darker impulses and wreaks major havoc. Of course it all works out just fine in the end, after a few major CGI effects, including one in which he stops a speeding elevated train using only his spidey webs and his muscles. Cool!
     Maltin rates this as “the best comic book movie ever made”, which is hyping it a tad too much. For one thing, Dick Tracy (1990) I think is better, and for another, the attempt to make Parker into a more or less normal nerd doesn’t quite succeed. The reason is Toby McGuire, who either can’t act or is poorly directed. I can’t decide, but I suspect it’s the director’s limited vision of nerdiness. Apart from that, it’s a pretty good movie, and would probably be even more effective on a theatre screen. Spidey’s travels along the deep canyons of the City need a really, really big screen for maximum effect. ***

P. D. James. Talking About Detective Fiction (2009)

     P. D. James. Talking About Detective Fiction (2009) The blurb refers to a :perfect marriage of author and subject”, which is hyping this nicely produced book a bit too much. But it was a pleasant read nevertheless. P. D. James breaks no new ground, I’d be surprised if she did. She clearly loves detective fiction more than other crime fiction, and she drops a few useful hints about how she does her own work. It begins with a setting, progresses to the characters, and (we infer) only then do the victim, the perpetrator, and the method emerge from her imaginings.
    James writes a clear and elegant style. What we may have suspected from her fiction, that she’s a cool and sometimes ruthless observer human evil, is here confirmed. Like Poirot, she has a bourgeois attitude to murder: she disapproves of it. She admires Christie’s puzzle-setting plots, but like most readers notes that Christie is weak on psychology and character. I first realised this when I noticed that Christie’s  characters all talk the same bland upper middle class English. James prefers Sayers, Allingham, and Marsh, in that order. I’d put Allingham last, but James’s comments have persuaded me to read more of her work.
All in all, a very pleasant read. ***

Love Finds A Home (2009)

     Love Finds A Home (2009) (D: Dane Peterson. Sarah Jones, Haylie Duff, Jordan Bridges, Patty Duke] This movie is irritating, and that’s an understatement. The story is quite good, involving family conflict, generational conflict, medical emergency, personal griefs, etc. The setting is a Missouri town sometime in the late 19th century. The main characters are a Belinda, a doctor and Lee her blacksmith husband, plus Lillian their adopted daughter; the doctor’s pregnant friend Annie (also a doctor), the latter’s mother-in-law Mary, an opinionated mid-wife; Josh, the new apprentice to the blacksmith; and assorted secondary characters. So what’s wrong with this movie?
     Plenty. For one thing, the appalling anachronisms, starting with the two women doctors. Women doctors were extremely rare in the late 1800s. The characters generally are imaginary 20th century Americans of a certain type dressed up in 19th century costumes. There’s a scene where the pregnant friend sits in the living room in deshabille while men are present, which violates so many social norms of the time that it’s ludicrous.
     The sets are off kilter in so many ways it’s painful. The doctor’s house is a nice 20th century two-story with a porch and hanging baskets, painted white, in a yard with no visible outbuildings for the horses, or even a chicken coop to house the birds whose clucking signals morning, every morning. The kitchen is, well it ain’t a late 19th century kitchen. The blacksmith and his apprentice are shown “working”, banging on unidentifiable objects made of some metal or other. The town lacks paint, and its dusty ambience indicates the Southwest, not Missouri. Merchants around 1890 would have made a point of painting their false fronted stores in order to impress the customers.
     Then there’s the acting, which is at best intermittently competent. Not that the writing gives the actors much to work with. How many times can a doctor say “I’m a doctor, I know...”? The only one who actually understands her stereotype of a character, and plays it well, is Patty Duke.
     And the music. Intrusive is an understatement. Maybe the producers realised how awful the script was and thought that folksy sentimental tunes would carry the movie where the writing failed.
     The underlying problem is that the producers wanted to make a wholesome “family movie”. They seem to understand that as a movie that leaves out all the bad stuff that mainstream movies include. They don’t include what would have made this an interesting movie, and possibly a good one: the doubts that believers face when they don’t get what they want, when faith seems at best a mild anodyne. There’s a very brief reference to the pains of childbirth as the punishment for Eve’s role in the Fall, with a hint of disagreement with that reading of Genesis. It’s not followed up. The blurb says “...Belinda [the doctor] looks to a higher power...”, which indicates the producers’ aims. That higher power shows up in a pastor who appears at odd intervals to dispense bromides, three prayers, and four or five references to God. Religion and faith, and the doubts and conflicts that mark a life of faith, are simply not present in the story, let alone integrated into it. Yet the few hints show that faith is supposed to be essential to the characters. Why the almost total absence of a defining trait of the characters, of the essence of the story? Was it because a “family movie” mustn’t trigger questions of the kind that adults don’t want their children to ask? That’s my suspicion.
     You can’t make even mediocre art if your focus is on “values” rather than story and character. ½