Lord Peter Wimsey, married and a Visitor to Oxford

 

Jill Paton Walsh. The Late Scholar (2013) This is Walsh’s fourth excursion into emulating Dorothy Sayers. The first was a completion of Sayers’s last novel from her notes. This is a new and pretty good fabrication.
     Lord Peter Wimsey is now the Duke of Denver (not having read #2 and #3, I missed that translation). He is called on to settle a dispute at St Severin’s College, Oxford, in accordance with an ancient rule that the Duke of Denver must be the Visitor that resolves a stalemated dispute among the Fellows. There follows a nicely done pastiche of Sayers’s style and substance. Walsh, herself a Cambridge scholar, knows how universities function, and how disputes among Fellows can lead to murderous hatred, although not nearly as often to murderous action in real life as in fiction.
     I enjoyed Walsh’s version of Wimsey. The plot is fair, the characters are believable, the ambience is Oxford, and Peter and Harriet are comfortably married and parents as we perhaps have come to expect them to be. Recommended. ***

Dalglesh and a Lighthouse

 

P. D James. The Lighthouse. (2005) The victim hangs by the neck from the railing guarding the walk around the lantern of a lighthouse. None of the visitors to the island on which it stands, nor the staff tending to their needs, could have done it. Dalgleish of course shows not only that someone did do it but also who it was. Money, vanity, ancient secrets and grudges, wartime hurts and hatreds, and social class all figure in the tangle of motives that must be unravelled in order to expose the murderer.
     Another well done Dalgleish mystery. James knows how to create believable characters, so that even the most outlandish and puzzling murders make psychological sense. It’s Dalgleish’s understanding of psychology that leads him to the murderer, and the technical problem of how it was done seems almost an afterthought. Another good read. ***½

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.