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 ****

Advertising and Identity Politics

Is there a link between advertising and identity politics? This ad for a 1958 Edsel was posted on a Usenet newsgroup recently. I read it several times, and that question and some tangential thoughts developed.

The text is fascinating. The italicised arrived tell the reader that it’s not just about pulling up in front of the house. The car is a “status symbol”, a phrase much used in the 1950s to deprecate advertising. But some 60 years on, the text looks like it’s about more than mere status. It’s about achieving an identity, that of a successful businessman. It’s about being recognised as a person of importance. It’s about getting the respect the Edsel owner clearly deserves.

It begins by touting the car as a signal of status and identity: Other drivers spot that classic vertical grill a block away. Whomever the Edsel owner encounters will treat him as he deserves.

The neighbours will admit you deserve respect, too. And parked in front of your home, your Edsel always gets even more attention. It says you chose elegant styling....  And it all comes at the lowest cost of the medium-priced cars. Status at a bargain, which stamps the buyer as a canny money manager besides all his other virtues.

Advertising always tells a story. This ad tells the story of a successful white middle-class man, someone who has transformed himself from whatever he was before he started working towards this day. The day he drives up in a brand new red two-door hard-top Edsel in front of his a ranch style home, his good-looking (slim) wife, his two charming children. He’s wearing a suit, white shirt and tie, and a hat. He has arrived, he’s achieved the American Dream.

That dream doesn’t consist of house, car, clothes, or other goods. Those are mere signs and symbols of what actually matter: status, identity, privilege. By linking the Edsel to success, the ad assumes the values that prompt the striving for success. By taking those values for granted, the ad creates an assumption of shared values. That in turn reinforces those values. The central value is being somebody.

I think the link to identity politics is obvious. Identity politics is about being respected. More, it’s about being accepted as worthy of respect, as deserving acknowledgment, as having one’s proper place in society. It’s about having the same status as everyone else. It’s about being somebody instead of being ignored, deprecated, disrespected. It’s about deserving to achieve the American Dream.

How to spell ʃ (and brief a note on English spelling)

     

     English spelling is notoriously problematic. It's a mashup of several different spelling conventions, made worse by a number of inconsistencies. Teaching spelling is also problematic. English-speaking countries focus on letters instead of sounds, so much so, that some English speakers refer to "alphabetic languages". Another result of this focus is the insistence on correct spelling for words that are never confused when speaking. That's just two (too, to) effects of confusing letters and sounds.

     Every language uses a specific set of sounds, called phonemes. Most languages use around three dozen phonemes. An "accent" consists of variations of the phonemes, and may have more or fewer phonemes than the standard version. The English alphabet is borrowed from the ancient Romans, with a few additions. We have 26 letters for about 40 sounds. Q and X each spell two sounds, which could be spelled KW and KS. C duplicates the sounds of S and K. In effect we have only 23 letters. So we use letter combinations (which include  "silent letters"), and spelling conventions that signal different sound values. But for many common words, one must memorise the spelling.

     And there's a twist: English speakers are more willing to adopt foreign words than just about anybody else. Along with the words we usually adopt the foreign spellings. So we end up with multiple spellings for the same sound.

     One of these sounds is the one that begins "she". It has more spellings than any other sound. Here are the most familiar ones:

How to spell ʃ

Common words:
oCEan
groCery *
CHef
caCHE
suspiCIon
Sugar
nauSEous
faSCist
conSCIence
SHine
aSSure
seSSIon
naTIon

From other languages:
FuCHSia
GauTHier **
SCHnapps

* Regional dialect
** Pronunciation varies

Footnote 1: Linguists have identified about 400 distinct sounds used by the known languages. Another linguistics concept is the "morpheme": think of it as a unit of meaning. For example combine the base "dog" (which refers to an animal) with "s" (which means "more than one), and you get "dogs".  Some linguists refer to the spelling unit as a "grapheme": a letter or combination of letters that spells a single phoneme, or some conventional combination of phonemes.

Footnote 2: Phonemes and sounds are not the same. The essence of a phoneme is that it signals a difference in meaning. Thus in "sing" and "sang", the sounds spelled by "a" and "i"  are phonemes  because  the two words have different meanings. On the other hand, the  sounds spelled by "ng" in "singer" and "finger" are different in most English dialects, but the difference is ignored. If they were phonemes, then "singer" rhymed with "finger" would be a different word than its usual pronunciation. (And in "ginger", "ng" spells a combination of three phonemes.)

Footnote 3: Homonyms come in two varieties: two words with the same spelling but different sounds (and meanings), called homographs. And two (or more) words with the same sound but different spellings (and meanings), called homophones. The study of homonyms helps one to understand the difference between a sound and a phoneme.

Footnote 4: Almost every phoneme in English is spelled two or more ways. Every letter and most letter combinations stand for two or more phonemes.
 

Class war? Yes, always.

NYT comment 2020-01-17 on “The Bernie Sanders Fallacy”, by David Brooks, in which he argued that there is no class war.

There has always been a class war. Rulers and ruled do have common interests, nicely summarised in the Canadian triplet of "peace, order, and good government." But they also have different interests, and these sooner or later lead to more or less open conflict.

Nevertheless, I think Brooks is correct: Values matter more than economics. Economics is a means, not and end. We want a strong economy not because a strong economy is good in itself but because it enables us to achieve our non-economic goals.

It seems to me that two of the central values of all human societies  are fairness and justice. Capitalism as it is practiced these days is unfair and unjust. The irony is that Trump's promise to "drain the swamp", to  punish China for stealing jobs, to restore good old American manufacturing and mining jobs etc, all these promises appealed to these values. That's why so many centrists and independents voted for him. That's why the Democratic hopefuls have to emphasise fairness and justice. E.g., the present tax system is unfair to the 99%. Dumping pollutants into the air, earth, and water is a form of freeloading, which is unjust. And so on.

The Dems' campaign is at bottom about fairness and justice. The leftist term "class war" is a distraction, especially so in a country where a sizeable minority freaks out at any hint of "socialism."