Shelby Spong. The Sins of Scripture (2005)

     Shelby Spong. The Sins of Scripture (2005) I’ve heard an interview with Spong (on CBC's Tapestry, with Mary Hines), and looked forward to reading this book. It says much that needs to be said, but I gave up on it about 1/4 of the way in. Spong’s writing is verbose and cliched; he’s much given to exclamation marks, too! * (2010)

Edith Pargeter. She Went to War (1942)

     Edith Pargeter. She Goes to War (1942) Republished in 1989, this book is interesting both as a record of the first couple of years of WW2, when Britain suffered a series of defeats and Hitler conquered most of Europe, and as a character-portrait. These were the years of the Blitz, of Dunkirk, the Peloponnesian defeat, and Britain’s slow fumbling towards military skill and efficiency. It’s quite likely that if the Japanese hadn’t provoked the US into war, Britain would have had to make terms with the Reich.
     Catherine Saxon decides to join up as a WREN because she realises she’s fed up with the complacency of her upper-middle class social group, who take it for granted that other people will fight their wars for them. Her assignment is teletype operator, and she’s soon promoted to command her watch. She writes letters to Nick, an old family friend, maybe her uncle, a paralysed WW1 vet. The letters trace her growing political awareness, which increases when she meets a private, Tom Lyddon, who has fought in the Spanish Civil War. He is killed, but he writes to her from Greece and Crete, and Cyprus. The letters deal more with Catherine’s thoughts and actions than with details of the war itself. She does give vivid descriptions of what it feels like to be in a bomb shelter during a raid, descriptions that gave me enough uncomfortable memories that I had to read them in small doses.
     Tom’s letters give enough details of the Greek campaign to show that in 1941 the generals and admirals were still unable to understand the importance of mobile armour and air cover, the lack of which led directly to the conquest of Greece. The fact that this conquest was welcomed by a large proportion of Greeks is not mentioned, possible because at the time it was not generally understood that Hitler’s racist doctrines were welcomed in many parts of Europe, and for that matter on the Allied side weren’t as vigorously opposed as they should have been. Both Canada and the US rejected many Jewish refugees, for example.
     Catherine slowly becomes aware of how the class system interferes with the war effort itself, as it did in WW1, when the largely aristocratic officer class found it difficult to adapt their strategic and tactical thinking to the new technologies of war. She’s determined to work for real change both during and after the war, a change that did in fact come when the British elected a Labour government instead of reinstalling Churchill and his Conservatives, and embraced the welfare state. It's significant that those who oppose the notion that the state has social responsibilities refer to the “nanny state”. This phrase resonates with undertones of petty tyranny for a certain class of people, but is nearly meaningless to most of the rest of us.
     Pargeter, who later made a name (Ellis Peters) and small fortune for herself as the creator of Cadfael, is good at giving us a portrait of Catherine. She’s a complex person, who at the age 26 has begun to think for herself, and redefine her relationship with the world around her. Her undying love for Syddon is perhaps too much a convention of love romance, but her strength of character makes it plausible if not exactly believable. The politics are a little less convincing, because we read them with hindsight, and so much of what seemed certain or reasonable at the time has turned out to be deceptive and illusory. You can’t go home again, said Tom Wolfe; you can never again be the innocent and naive person you were. Knowledge and experience impede the imagination even as they liberate it. Anyhow, Pargeter used her own experiences, but without research into her life I don’t know to what extent Catherine reflects her own attitudes. *** (2010)

Sue Grafton. L is for Lawless, M is for Malice, N is for Noose, O is for Outlaw

Sue Grafton.   L is for Lawless The title alludes to a psychopath who betrayed his fellow robbers many years ago, killed one of them, and has been waiting to get the loot ever since. There isn’t any loot worth mentioning, but by the time Kinsey has discovered this it’s too late. She also doesn’t get paid, as the family that wanted her to prove their father’s military service (so they would get death benefits) welshes when it turns out he was using stories of war service as a cover. One of the weaker tales in the series, with a surprisingly creaky plot. Even the psycho seems overdone. ** (2010)




    M is for Malice Kinsey finds a long lost black sheep, reformed of course, whose murder does little to help his dysfunctional family mend its rifts. The murderer is the last surviving relative of a girl betrayed by this family, but she has it all wrong: the lost sheep even then had a fine sense of honour. The story ends, uncharacteristically, with the perp suiciding by running into traffic. Grafton is back in top form in this novel, with Kinsey revealing a few more bits about her past, the social satire sharp as ever, and vexing questions of justice, loyalty, betrayal and love left unresolved, as they often are in real life. *** (2010)

     N is for Noose (1999) The noose figures in two murders that a dead small town cop was investigating. His widow wants Kinsey to find out why he was morose and tense in his final weeks, before a heart attack killed him. The perp attacks Kinsey, and nearly kills her in a final confrontation (a staple motif in Grafton’s books), she suffers the slings and arrows of small-town suspicion, and is glad to return to her medium-sized city. The mood and ambience of a late spring with gloomy weather and glooming mountains overlooking the town, the characters as narrow and closed in as the valley in which their town stands, the wary respect of the cops for Kinsey, are better done than usual. The plot is somewhat Patricia Cornwellish, which is not a compliment. **½ (2010)

   O is for Outlaw (1999) The outlaw is Kinsey’s ex-husband Mickey McGruder, whom she hasn’t seen for fourteen years. She walked when he asked her to provide an alibi for the death of Benny Quintero. Now he’s been shot, and two detectives from L.A. visit her because Mickey apparently made a 30-minute phone call to her a few days earlier. A storage-scavenger offers her a box of stuff he found in McGruder’s storage locker, whose contents were auctioned because he hadn’t paid the rent. In the box Kinsey finds a letter that arrived the day after she walked, which exculpates Mickey. So naturally Kinsey has to discover what really happened, who tried to kill her ex, and who killed Benny. She’s of course nearly killed herself before she unmasks the killer, but this time the plot is less important than the characters. Well done, as usual. **½ (2010)
 

Peter Lovesey. Swing, Swing Together (1976), Mad Hatter’s Holiday

     Peter Lovesey. Swing, Swing Together (1976) Harriet Shaw, skinny dipping with two of her classmates, witnesses suspects in a murder case. This is enough for Det. Sgt Cribb to take her along with him while he chases the suspects down the Thames. The story alludes to and loosely follows Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome, 1889). It turns out that Harriet has in fact witnessed a murder in progress, done as a test of the method to be used on the intended victim. The chase ends in Oxford; the murderers did the job at the behest of a prison warden who was obsessed with his reputation for respectability. In the finale, Harriet is “rescued” from the advances of a lecherous don (whom she suspected of the crime) by the nice young constable who gallantly lent her his cape when she emerged from the Thames like Venus on the half shell, so that she could return to where she had left her clothes. So that’s all right. A nicely done entertainment; we saw it on TV some years ago, too. Lovesey does good mild social comedy and satire. **½ (2010)

     Mad Hatter’s Holiday Set in Brighton after the mass-holiday season, with an intricate plot,

both as a murder mystery and as a family drama. We see most of it from the point of view of an almost pathetic little man, a dealer in optical instruments, who spends his holidays admiring women through his binoculars. But this time he falls hard for his fantasy mistress, strikes up an acquaintance with her and her family, and assists Det. Sgt. Cribb and Thackeray with his naive and painfully respectable evidence. The murderer, a nasty adolescent sociopath, is murdered, but Cribb doesn’t pursue the matter. He’s satisfied to know the truth, while the coroner’s inquest returns a verdict of murder by person(s) unknown. Well done. **½ (2010) 

Update 2023-07-30: The TV series is available on YouTube.

Linda Shapiro. Yesterday’s Toronto 1870-1910 (1978)

     Linda Shapiro. Yesterday’s Toronto 1870-1910 (1978) A collection of photos with reasonably well-researched captions. Nostalgia trip, really, with selections intended to bring back warm feelings about the Good Old Days, which of course weren’t. But the pictures are useful, and the information for the most part is too. Here and there a few reminders of reality help us understand what rare treats the times at the beach or at the Ex really were: wages were low, cost of living was high. We are much better off now, in all respects. One of my continual annoyances are references to long ago prices without reminders of wages. When a dollar a day was a decent wage for a shop girl, a nickel for tram fare was a lot of money. ** (2010)

Elizabeth D’Oyley. English Diaries (1930)

     Elizabeth D’Oyley. English Diaries (1930) A school book, apparently aimed at senior high school. The flyleaf is inscribed “J A Bennett VB”, which I think would be grade 11 here. The selection starts with Charles Wriothesley (pron. rizely or rizzly) through Pepys, Boswell, Sir Walter Scott, etc. Most of the diarists are remarkably circumspect about their own reactions to the events they describe, the main exception being Pepys and Fanny Burney. In part this is no doubt the effect of  D’Oyley’s care in selecting suitable passages. An interesting read, since it provides eye-witness accounts of historical events, and implies differences in the goals of education between the 1930s and now. **½ (2010)

Ed Gorman & Martin Greenberg. Solved (1991)

     Ed Gorman & Martin Greenberg. Solved (1991) What do you get when you ask crime fiction writers to  write stories that “solve” unsolved crimes of the past? You get a pile of pulp fiction. The stories here offer all the familiar formulas: conspiracies, mob-corrupted politicians, psycho-pathologies, megalomaniacs, and so on. Plus more or less vivid gore. Entertaining reads, but not especially memorable, in fact, I’m having a hard time recalling the stories.
The Jack the Ripper tale works best, I think: a vicar’s wife tells how she comes to suspect her pompously pious and uncharitable husband is the Ripper, and how she expects to burn in Hell for having poisoned him with arsenic. Told obliquely in the first person, it works because the character is plausibly devout. **