Ban Dante!

A UN-affiliated group has recommended that Dante’s Divine Comedy be removed from schools around the world for being homophobic, islamophobic, and numerous other things they disapprove of.

The classic work should be removed from school curricula, according to Gherush 92, a human rights organisation which acts as a consultant to UN bodies on racism and discrimination. Dante’s epic is “offensive and discriminatory” and has no place in a modern classroom, said Valentina Sereni, the group’s president.
 

“We do not advocate censorship or the burning of books, but we would like it acknowledged, clearly and unambiguously, that in the Divine Comedy there is racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic content. Art cannot be above criticism,” Miss Sereni said.

There’s that classic formulation: “We do not advocate censorship or the burning of books, but …”

A happy note:

    Franco Grillini, the head of Gaynet, a gay rights’ organisation, said the suggestion that Dante’s writings should be prohibited marked “an excess of political correctness”.

Was Shakespeare Catholic?

This didn’t entirely convince me, but there’s some interesting information here. I ended up almost convinced that his family was mostly Catholic; as for Will himself -- maybe, maybe not.

Book Review: Angel Esquire by Edgar Wallace

As this BBC item posits, Edgar Wallace is not all that much  remembered today, though one of his creations, King Kong, certainly is. This is surprising, since it's estimated that one-quarter of all the books read in the UK in the 1920s were by Wallace. The link (I haven't listened to the audio, not being prepared to devote three hours) argues that perhaps Wallace simply produced too much material. I can't argue the point, having read only a handful of Wallace's output, but most of it I enjoyed. Wikipedia tells us:

...Wallace wrote screen plays, poetry, historical non-fiction, 18 stage plays, 957 short stories and over 170 novels, 12 in 1929 alone. More than 160 films have been made of Wallace's work. 

So there's no doubt that Wallace could grind 'em out. Nor that he had a knack for grinding out stuff people of his time really, really liked. People of today, not so much, other than a few weirdos like me.

But enough background and generalities. This is about one particular Wallace book – Angel Esquire. The book was published in 1908, one of Wallace's earlier novels.

I downloaded the book (here) after reading this review last year (but just got around to reading the book):

Christopher Angel, an eccentric Scotland Yard detective, will remind you of Albert Campion in his early, silly-ass days, but he is often genuinely amusing, as well as resourceful: “Great fellow for putting things right … if you’re in a mess of any kind, Angel’s the chap to pull you out.” 

When he’s not working on a case, he sits at his desk working on a racing form, and he is not perturbed at all when the police commissioner comes into his office and finds him so occupied. Angel is the perfect sleuth for a far-fetched mystery involving master criminals, English gangsters, and an intricate puzzle that must be solved before the rightful heirs can receive several million pounds.

As the reviewer says, the plot is 'far-fetched'; but I will attempt a summary: A crooked gambler

Gertrude McCoy, who played
Kathleen Kent in the 1919 movie,
Angel Esquire

(retired, but still crooked) leaves an estate of two million pounds; instead of designating a recipient, he names three people – two he had worked with and a young woman, Kathleen Kent, who is the daughter of a man who had been financially ruined at his casino. Considering that there were probably lots of people who had lost their fortunes in the same manner, why her? Presumably because we need a beautiful young woman in the story. In case you were wondering if she was beautiful, see at right Hollywood's conception of her in a 1919 film version of the story.

The fortune, though, is not to be divided among these three. The gambler loved puzzles of various types, and left behind a will that included a short rhyme/word puzzle. The first one to solve the puzzle, the solution being the combination to the gambler's elaborate safe, would get all the money.

One of the male legatees, Jimmy (just Jimmy), declines his rights in favor of the damsel. It turns out that he is not in fact a crook, but an aristocrat (a baronet – Sir James Something) who played at crime for the amusement it brought and never really stole anything, or always gave it back, or something (the 'gentleman crook' was a popular figure in thrillers of this time – Raffles being the best remembered today).

The other, Conners, is a genuine bad guy, who is part of a gang called the Borough Lot, who seem to spend most of their time hanging out in their clubhouse discussing what badasses they are and getting captured and let go for no good reason that I can discern.

Jimmy and Angel, meanwhile, team up on behalf of the damsel and take turns outdoing each other in displays of sang-froid , with many arch and wry comments as assorted bad guys are holding guns on them..

I described Conners as a bad guy, but he's not the main villain of the story. If you haven't picked out the really bad guy by roughly the mid-point of the story, though, you're not trying. It's not a spoiler, I trust, to let you know that the girl ends up with the money, Jimmy ends up with the girl, and Angel is being arch and wry right up to the final paragraph.

It's a very good book for the limited audience of folks like me who dig this stuff. It's not really a mystery story, which is my usual favorite genre, it's more of a romantic thriller with some improbable crime elements thrown in.

For those who demand what they think of as 'realism' in their reading – steer clear, this is most definitely not you cup of … er, rotgut whiskey. I much prefer, for the most part, escapism, and Angel Esquire is not a bad escape.

Putin and Russia

The disappearance of Vladimir Putin is fascinating, even if (as is most likely) it turns out to be a big nothing. The mystery around him points out again how very different Russia is from every other developed country (if indeed Russia is 'developed').

This is the point at which anyone writing about Rusiia must trot out Winston Churchill's remark from seventy-five years ago.

Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Of course, the reason the quote gets used over and over is that it remains true. The one immutable fact about Russia is that it is … well, weird.

The problem, of course, is that this weirdness makes it difficult (or impossible) to understand the country or to predict what it might do next. That is compounded by the inevitable corollary that they find us equally unfathomable and unpredictable.

Along these lines, I greatly enjoyed this review by P. J. O'Rourke (a favorite writer) of a new book about Russia, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, by Peter Pomerantsev.

O'Rourke opens with an intriguing lead sentence: “This is the strangest book of note I have ever read. And that’s as it should be, since the subject is Russia, the strangest country of note I have ever visited” and follows with several vignettes that illustrate how strange Russia is. Among my favorites:

Corrupt crony capitalism is familiar everywhere. But in Russia the corruption is so pervasive that even the cronies have to pay bribes, not just to the higher-ups but to the lower-downs. 

Pomerantsev visits a TV studio owned by Kremlin-connected moguls. It’s in a shabby warehouse on the wrong side of town. There’s no sign or address on the metal door. Inside is a dirty little room with a drunk guard. 

Pomerantsev goes down a dark corridor and up two flights of dingy stairs to another unmarked metal door. Behind that is a modern, well-lit, busy Western-style production facility. But there’s an inconspicuous door here as well, with a secret code pad. And behind that is a more modern, better-lit, even busier production facility with an even less conspicuous door with an even more secret code leading to the real offices of the moguls, where the real business accounts are kept. 

All this is to foil the tax police. Who come anyway. One of the moguls tells Pomerantsev that “the tax police were much happier taking bribes than going to the trouble of stealing money that had been paid in the orthodox fashion.”

Or there's this one, which calls to mind the classic movie Gigi:

It’s an interesting moral atmosphere in Russia. 

In Russia, small-town girls go to the big city and get ruined, but that’s what they’re trying to do. Really trying. They go to school for it. 

The students take notes in neat writing. They have paid a thousand dollars for each week of the course. There are dozens of such “academies” in Moscow and St. Petersburg, with names such as “Geisha School” or “How To Be a Real Woman.” 

If a girl with potential studies hard, “she earns the basic Moscow mistress rate: the apartment, $4,000 a month, a car, and a weeklong holiday in Turkey or Egypt twice a year.” 

In return, she’s available to her “sponsor,” as he’s called, any time, any day.

Of course, Gigi was made in 1958 and set at fifty or sixty years prior. The rest of the developed world has moved on, but not Russia.

Of course, in the long, long term, Russia may not matter. The country's demographics are outrageously horrible; Russians have an extraordinarily low birth rate and short life spans (life expectancy is on a fourth-world level) and are being replaced inside their own country by the nationalities they once held captive. Which might someday pose a whole new problem.

But that's far in the future. Back to Putin, one obvious question is, if he's alive and in even reasonably good health, why don't they just prop him up in front of a press conference under carefully-controlled conditions, have him answer a few softball questions and … problem solved.

That I am unable to answer that question is the only reason I continue to think that maybe there is something to all the rumors.

Addendum: Here are a few of the articles I've seen recently.

The Worst Book Ever Written about Jesus?

After the reviewer generously notes that The Lost Gospel is not overall the worst book ever (citing a ghastly encounter with dinosaur porn), he details why he thinks it's the worst in its category. Great review with a perverse effect -- it almost makes me want to read it, just for the laughs and to see if anything short of dinosaur porn can really be that bad.

Here are some of the claims that Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson make: (1) a 6th-century text that never once refers to Jesus or Mary Magdalene is secretly about Jesus, Mary, and their children; (2) the character “Joseph” named in this text represents Jesus, Apollo, Helios, Mithras, and a Roman emperor simultaneously; (3) Mary Magdalene was not Jewish and was, moreover, a priestess of Artemis; (4) when Jesus refers to the Queen of Sheba (Matt 12:42), he is speaking of Mary in code; (5) Jesus — not a peasant, but a powerful figure in the world of Roman politics — was the victim of not one but two assassination attempts, both of which he survived; (6) the Roman general Germanicus was the second threat to Jesus, but a Roman prefect named Sejanus saved him, Mary, and their children; and (7) the wine of the Last Supper symbolized Mary’s menstrual blood. As you will see below, this is only a small sampling of this book’s originality. 

Unknown Writer Shouts, "Look at Me! Look at Me!"

Somebody named Will Self thinks he's a better writer than George Orwell.

He probably also thinks he's a better writer than Bob Houk. He may well be right on the latter point, but on the George Owell/Bob Houk spectrum, he's probably well over on the Bob Houk side.

Self objects to Orwell's passion for simplicity and clarity. Given that the the starting point of writing is (or should be) to communicate, one suspects that Self has yet to master an understanding of his trade. This lack of understanding, unfortunately, seems to be widespread among current writers. He summarizes his own limitations in what appears to be an attempt to mock Orwell.

I like Orwell's writing as much as the next talented mediocrity.

A bit of attention to clarity might have saved Self from calling himself a mediocrity.

To be fair, this is probably just an attempt to get people to pay him some attention, and it seems to have succeeded.

Worst Book Cover of the Year?

It's still early, but this one is definitely in the running.

What I especially like about it is that the opening words of Amazon's product description are: ""This carefully crafted ebook ..."

Not exactly the words I'd choose to describe a book that not only has a superfluous apostrophe in the title, but also has the apostrophe turned backwards.

Nominee for Worst Book Title

I have commented on several occasions on this blog and elsewhere that I am not deeply offended or upset by the somewhat racist language and attitudes sometimes found in the books of earlier times.

I simply accept that any book is going to include evidences of the prevailing attitudes of the times in which it was published. The author, as a product of his/her culture, would have been likely to share at least many of those attitudes, and would be likely to impute them to his/her characters. Therefore, casual conversation among the characters in a book published in the 1920s or 1930s might well include negative comments about Jews, or there might be black servants speaking in dialect. Such things can be mildly annoying in some cases, mildly amusing in others, but I don't too worked up over them.

And I'm not getting worked up over this book, either, but I've got to say it this is possibly the worst book title I have ever seen (or at least it's in the running with Agatha Christie's Ten Little Niggers -- later retitled Ten Little Indians, now known as And Then There Were None).

In checking on Amazon, I note that this was re-issued later as 12 Chinamen and a Woman, which is an improvement.

I'm going to guess, based on the title and the cover blurb, that this is about 'white slavery', which was a popular delusion of the first half of the twentieth century.

Book Review: The Girl at Central (1914) by Geraldine Bonner

Short version: Good story, well-written, laughable solution to the mystery.

Wikipedia’s entry for Geraldine Bonner doesn’t tell us much about her, so little in fact that I will quote the whole thing (other than a listing of her books):

Geraldine Bonner (1870–1930) was an American author, born on Staten Island, New York. As a child, she moved to Colorado where she lived in mining camps. After moving to San Francisco, California, she worked at a newspaper, the Argonaut, in 1887, and subsequently. She wrote the novel Hard Pan (1900) and used the term "Hard Pan" as a pseudonym. 

Bonner wrote short stories which were published in Collier's Weekly, Harper's Weekly, Harper's Monthly, and Lippincott's.

The highly-admirable Golden Age of Detection Wiki has no entry for her, though in fairness she is only very marginally a writer of that era, her last book being published in 1919.

She wrote several mysteries, of which The Girl at Central is the only one I have read thus far (although I’ve downloaded a couple others at Gutenberg).

The title character and narrator is Molly Morgenthau, a telephone operator of Jewish-Irish ancestry (thus the name) in Longwood, New Jersey, a small town on the rail line between New York City and Philadelphia. Because of her job, she overhears a good deal of information about the locals, which she shares with the reader. She is a likable character and her narrative style is interesting and fun. The author gives her a voice that seems quite authentic for her time and socio-economic background.

The mystery involves the murder of Sylvia Hesketh, the wealthy belle of Longwood, who is murdered on a deserted road, apparently by a blow from a blunt instrument. The mystery is not only who killed her, but what the heck was she doing at that location.

We know already that Sylvia’s money was supporting her household (her mother and stepfather) and that she was on bad terms with the stepfather, who disapproved of her flirtatious behavior. Evidence is found of her plans to elope on the evening of her death with one of her several suitors, giving the stepfather (who would be financially ruined if she left) with a powerful motive. But it appears she stood up the suitor, which would certainly give him a motive as well. And she also (via a phone call Molly had conveniently listened in on) had made plans to see another, disfavored, suitor before the elopement, to give him the bad news. Thus another person had a motive.

Like the last mystery of that timeframe that I reviewed, an airplane (or rather, aeroplane) figures in this story, and the way it is used in this story is every bit as improbable as in the previous one. I think maybe some writers of the time felt like they had to put a plane in the story because it was the Big New Thing, but they didn’t know enough about flying (how could they?) to get the details right.

Luckily, the improbable aviating doesn’t have much to do with the solution, other than clearing up side issues. That’s the good news; the bad news is that the actual solution to whodunnit is even more unlikely.

Oh, of course Molly meets a nice young man and ends up married to him. I knew that would happen on page one.

Despite the very disappointing solution, I thought the overall story, especially the lively narration, made this a worthwhile reading experience. I would not recommend it to most modern readers, but those who enjoy books of the era, and are willing to overlook a few plot holes (and the word ‘dago’) will like this one.

Book Review: 32 Caliber

This is a short book (a novelette or novella or whatever the preferred term is) of about 120 or so pages (I read it in ebook format, so I'm not sure about pages). It was copyrighted in 1920, and it definitely shows its age – not always charmingly so.

I am a fan of books of this era and am used to racial, class, and gender attitudes that are not in line with current thinking. I generally just shrug it off as an artifact of the times. I did the same with this book, but let me warn you that it took a hell of a lot of shrugging.

Given that the story is rather short, an added problem is that the author seems uncertain whether he is writing a mystery or a romance. I enjoy a mystery that includes some sort of love interest for the protagonist, but in this case, of the 120 pages, the author has split them about sixty pages each between mystery and romance. The result, as you might expect, is that neither element is developed very satisfactorily.

The basic story here is that of the eternal triangle. A young lawyer is having domestic problems and the story begins with his wife telling him she wants a divorce. A nasty scene (overheard by the servants) follows, in which the husband, wife, and boyfriend threaten each other, joined in by the husband’s law partner, who is also the wife’s brother (though he seems to like his partner much better than his sister).

The husband digs up some dirt on the boyfriend’s business dealings and lets him know about it, also telling his wife, who is temporarily still with him. The boyfriend calls and asks for a meeting with the husband, telling him to come – alone – to the country club they all belong to at a specific time. The husband comes, but brings his wife and the car goes off the road on the way, killing him and badly injuring her.

You’ll not be surprised to learn that it was not an accident. He had been shot in the head. Suspicion falls, naturally enough, on the wife, who had a gun of the correct caliber (.32, of course). The law partner investigates, quite ineptly, in order to clear his sister.

The other principal suspect, the boyfriend, has a strong alibi, having been seen at the country club eating his dinner at about the time of the shooting.

There were also a bunch of Bolsheviks thrown in as suspects, one of whom had been convicted of sedition during the war, largely through the victim’s efforts, and had upon his recent release threatened those who had put him away. They just happened to be driving on that road at precisely the time of the killing.

A major no-no for reviews of mysteries is spoilers. So I will give you adequate warning that I am about to tell you how this crime was committed. I am doing so in full confidence that you won’t believe me anyway. What I’ll do, though, is put the spoiler in reverse type – if you want to see the solution, highlight the text that follows:

The villain (the boyfriend, of course) flew a plane, taking off and landing from the fairway of the country club, and machine-gunned the victim from the air. He was not gone long from the dining room because it was near the fairway.

See, I told you you wouldn’t believe it.

Oh, and the reader is also supposed to believe that the police were so slipshod that they never noticed that the car in which the victim was driving had bullet holes in it. A bunch of them. I know cops were supposed to be dumb in a lot of the books of that era, but this seems to be rather stretching things.

To end on a positive note, I enjoyed the book despite the many, many flaws, primarily because it was such an interesting picture of upper-class attitudes of the time (the protagonist is very concerned with maintaining his family’s image), and especially because of the insight into political thinking. Bolsheviks, though they actually played little role in the story (it felt like they were thrown in just to provide another suspect(s), but even the author never seemed to really believe that they could have done it) were very much on people’s minds at the time – the Palmer Red Raids took place in late 1919 and early 1920, while the Sacco-Vanzetti trial was in 1921.

Cool & Lam

In the past month or so I’ve read three books from Erle Stanley Gardner’s second-string mystery series, Cool & Lam.

The books feature a detective agency consisting of a founder, Bertha Cool, and her junior partner, Donald Lam. In literary terms, it’s a very unequal partnership – the stories are at least 90% Lam.

Based on the three I’ve read, the formula is that a beautiful woman hires the agency, she and Lam engage in a lot of semi-sexy banter (though nothing more – these books were written more than a half-century ago), a murder takes place, Lam plays fast and loose with the evidence, he gets arrested for the murder by a hard-ass cop, he talks his way out of the arrest, solves the murder as well as whatever ancillary crime initially got them involved, and collects a large fee, making Bertha happy.

Bertha Cool is fat and greedy – beyond these characteristics, she barely exists in the stories I’ve read. Donald Lam is a disbarred attorney. Although the books have some noirish qualities in the style of the story-telling, Lam is the antithesis of the bare-knuckles noir hero -- he seldom fights, and when he does, he loses. When he's in a tight corner, he believes in trying to talk his way out.

The three books I’ve read are:

Bedrooms Have Windows (1948) – Lam is shadowing a conman in a hotel lobby when he meets up with a beautiful woman with whom he is soon, for reasons too complicated to explain, in a motel (actually an ‘auto court’) registered as husband and wife. Soon she disappears, just as a man and his mistress die in an apparent murder suicide in an adjoining unit of the auto court.

Lam tracks down the woman, walking into her bedroom as she is dressing. She begins to tell him the truth of her story then he goes to another room so she can finish dressing. When he returns, she has been murdered. Lam of course is arrested for the various murders.

Top of the Heap (1952) – The agency is hired to track down a couple women with whom the client spent a recent evening (in another auto court). Lam suspects that the whole thing is an effort to create a phony alibi for the client. Soon there is a murder in the mix (the reason for the phony alibi), and Lam is again arrested.

The most interesting aspect of this book is a really clever (I thought) money-laundering scam engineered by the murder victim.

Bertha is almost totally absent from this story, with the exception of a cringe-worthy appearance at the end in which her greed is caricatured in a heavy-handed manner.

Kept Women Can’t Quit (1960) – An armored car robbery turns into a murder case when one of the participants is murdered. Except he wasn’t a participant. Lam, who is working for the victim’s gorgeous girlfriend (the ‘kept woman’ of the title) is arrested for the murder, of course.

Very clunky solution, in which a character who only briefly appeared in a supporting role very early in the story suddenly reappears and turns out to be the killer (even though there has been nary a clue pointing to him anywhere in the book).

All of these books have huge flaws, but they are still fun stories to read.

The Patron Saint of GAD?

There is a movement afoot to seek canonization for G. K. Chesterton, a popular writer of (among many other things) mystery stories. His most famous stories featured a modest and seemingly insignificant Catholic priest named Father Brown.

A note about the title of this entry: Those of us who are fans of mystery stories of the twenties and thirties refer to that era as the Golden Age of Detection, or GAD. As is usual with such designations, there are disputes about the exact time limits of GAD – the strict definition is expressed as ‘the interwar years’. I often think of books in the forties, fifties, and even later as GAD, but I am viewed as a liberal on this point.

In any case, Chesterton is an imperfect fit, since many of his stories were written before World War One; the first Father Brown collection, The Innocence of Father Brown, was published in 1911.

Nonetheless, he is generally thought of as being a GAD writer and was a major influence on others. My favorite mystery writer, John Dickson Carr, who began writing late in Chesterton's career, was such a big fan that he modeled his best-known detective, Gideon Fell, on Chesterton.

The Father Brown stories have been frequently adapted, most recently into a series that recently ran (and may still be running) on British television. I haven’t seen these, but I have been reliably informed that I should not consider this a deprivation – they are described by those who enjoy the original stories as (to use a phrase that seems apposite) god-awful. If you wish to explore Chesterton, I recommend instead that you read the books.

However good a writer he was, though, there appears to be a fair amount of controversy over the proposal, since Chesterton has sometimes been accused of anti-Semitism. Certainly some of his writings sound bad to modern ears.

If you wish to give some thought to the issue, here is a statement in support of Chesterton by the Chesterton Institute at Seton Hall University; here is an opinion article, strongly opposed, from a British Jewish publication, and here are two pieces that look at both sides from the BBC and Religion News Service.

I will not pretend to be an expert on Chesterton. I’ve read little beyond the Father Brown stories, I am not a Catholic (though I was raised in that church and maintain a cultural affinity and fondness for it), and thus I’m in no position to take a stand on whether he should or should not be considered for sainthood.

If his anti-Semitism was of a nature that it could be characterized as merely an acceptance and reflection of attitudes that prevailed in middle- and upper-class English society at the time (see Agatha Christie’s early books, written during Chesterton’s lifetime, for some nasty examples), then it would be deplorable, but not necessarily a stopper, in my opinion. No rule says that saints must have achieve perfection on earth, it being Catholic doctrine, shared by other Christian faiths, that perfection is an impossibility in an imperfect world. If he wrote, said, or did things that went much further, that could well be another matter.

Resurrecting Jeeves and Wooster

I posted a few weeks ago about a ‘new’ Agatha Christie novel, featuring Hercule Poirot, which is to be written by somebody else. I was not enthusiastic about the idea, to put it mildly.

Here’s another writer, at The Telegraph in the UK, who shares my view. The article mentions the new Christie, but is primarily focused on similar desecrations new books carrying on the characters created by Ian Fleming and P. G. Wodehouse. I’m not a James Bond fan anyway, but I can assure you that I will not read the upcoming Jeeves and Wooster crapfest, to be written by some guy named Sebastian Faulks. The closing paragraphs express my feelings well:

Faulks admits that Wodehouse is inimitable, which rather leaves one to wonder what the point of his exercise is. I suppose it seemed like a piece of fun when first suggested, but as the grim day of reckoning – that is, publication – looms, it seems akin to an act of vanity and, indeed, hubris. 

No one, surely, will purchase Faulks’s vanity project because they expect to be entertained by it. On the contrary, many readers will want to be annoyed by it. I am confident Faulks’s novel is knowing and loving, but it’s unlikely to be anything more than that. Perhaps his next project will be to write a tragedy in blank verse. It could even be set in Denmark. 

These resurrections provide a passable entertainment for a rainy winter’s afternoon. But why settle for the imitation when the pleasures of the real thing are so much more nourishing? The test of any of these impertinences is whether they bear re-reading. Almost none do so. They are matters of commerce, not literature. 

Perhaps it is appropriate that Bond is considered as a brand to be exploited for maximum commercial gain. Fleming’s own obsession with brands and status was suitably vulgar itself. Treating Wodehouse in a comparable fashion, however, seems rather different. Even vaguely sacrilegious. Wodehouse exists in an Elysian genre of his own. He is, more than almost any other author, incomparable. 

Stepping into the ring with Wodehouse (or Tolstoy) can only end one way, and the comparison cannot possibly be to Faulks’s advantage. His new book is brave. That is to say: it is an act of lunatic folly.

Serial Stupidity

As mentioned a few days ago, I am reading (and enjoying) In the Garden of Beasts, about FDR’s first ambassador to Germany, William Dodd. Much of the story is about his daughter, Martha, an attractive woman in her early twenties, who had many affairs before, during, and after the period of the story (including Carl Sandburg while still in Chicago, and Thomas Wolfe when he visited Berlin).

She was initially enamored of fascism and among her lovers were high-ranking Nazis, including Rudolph Diels, the first chief of the Gestapo.

It was through Diels that she began for the first time to temper her idealistic view of the Nazi revolution. “There began to appear before my romantic eyes … a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.”

Good for her. Her initial failure to see Nazism as it was can be forgiven, both because many others (including many high State Department officials) did not recognize its full horror and because she was young.

But what became of her political views after having her eyes opened to the “espionage, terror, sadism and hate” of Hitler? She turned to Stalin, and began a lifelong devotion to communism, including betraying her own country (and her father’s trust).

A New Hercule Poirot Novel Is on Its Way

It will not be a newly-discovered manuscript written by Dame Agatha, alas; her grandson, who has charge of the estate, has chosen to try to ‘update’ things.

Literary agent Jonny Geller, joint chief executive of Curtis Brown, said estates were keen to produce new work from their authors “to drive readers to the original work. One way of doing that is reinventing it”.

In case you might wonder what ‘re-inventing’ means:

Mr Geller, who has worked with the Fleming estate on new James Bond books, said: “There is real potential that hasn’t been exploited. You can have young Poirot or modern Poirot.”

Hmmm … are we going to have a hip young Poirot? That would seem difficult to do in the late 1920s, which is the timeframe in which they are planning to place the stories, according to the article. Poirot's first appearance in The Mysterious Affair at Styles makes plain that he was a refugee from Belgium who had already been retired from the police there at the time of WW1.

I fear though that we might have a ‘modern’ Poirot, concerned about the environment and expressing sympathy for gay rights, or taking on similar views inconsistent with a middle-class, rather traditionalist, person of the interwar era.

However worthy one might consider such ideals, they would be wildly out of place in a Poirot story. And yet such anachronistic sentiments are commonly ascribed by modern writers (of novels, movies, and TV shows) to characters of other eras, in an apparent effort to attract modern readers.

I guess it works, since they keep doing it. But I would find it rather annoying to read a book set in 1928 and find that it is populated by people from 2013 dressed up in period costume.

Time Travel

I have a weakness for time-travel stories. I have been assured by those who know more about science than I (which means damn near everybody) that the idea is ludicrous, especially travel into the past, where the potential contradictions and impossibilities become a real problem.

Thus, I loved this item. Take that, all you ultra-practical naysayers. Here’s a real honest-to-goodness scientist explaining exactly how it can be done.

A wormhole would allow a ship, for instance, to travel from one point to another faster than the speed of light -- sort of. That's because the ship would arrive at its destination sooner than a beam of light would, by taking a shortcut through space-time via the wormhole. That way, the vehicle doesn't actually break the rule of the so-called universal speed limit -- the speed of light -- because the ship never actually travels at a speed faster than light. 

Theoretically, a wormhole could be used to cut not just through space, but through time as well. 

"Time machines are unavoidable in our physical dimensional space-time," Davis wrote in his paper. "Traversable wormholes imply time machines, and (the prediction of wormholes) spawned a number of follow-on research efforts on time machines.

Not that I understand any of that. But I take it to mean that I am perfectly justified in continuing my dreams.

Book Review: The Chief Witness (1940) by Herbert Adams

This is the first book I have read by Adams, a somewhat popular British writer of Golden Age mystery novels.

At the start of this story, featuring Adams's series detective Roger Bennion, Bennion is hosting a dinner for his father, Sir Christoper; his Scotland Yard friend, Inspector Goff; and a newspaper reporter. Crime is the principal topic, of course, with much discussion of the role of coincidence.

One assumes that we are about to be treated to a coincidence, and one is not disappointed. The next day, Bennion drops by Goff's office to return the latter's forgotten pipe, and is invited to accompany the detective as he looks into a strange case: two men, brothers (attorney Alexander Curtis and accountant Frederick Curtis), both committed suicide by shooting themselves, at precisely the same moment – 10:58pm – the time being established in both cases by that tired device, broken timepieces.

Though the possibility of a suicide pact is floated, no experienced reader is fooled by a clock that fell off a desk, and such a reader would be disappointed by a detective who was so easily misled. The suicide idea is quickly discarded, and a few days later the accountant's feckless nephew-by-marriage, Wilfrid, is arrested for his murder – with inheritance as the presumed motive.

Wilfrid is a good name for a feckless nephew, isn't it?

Bennion, who had left town and done nothing in the first week after accompanying Goff on the first day's inquiries (and pointing out the clock) is drawn deeper into the case upon his return by the nephew's attractive fiancé, the niece/ward of Alexander's partner, Morant. She is pregnant (the word is not used – she says that she "must" marry Wilfrid, and that it must be soon. Bennion, being a detective, gets the hint).

Bennion is not satisfied about Wilfrid's guilt, though there is a fair amount of evidence against him, because he had no motive whatsoever to kill Alexander, to whom he was not related and with whom he had only a slight acquaintance. We're back to coincidence – were two brothers killed on the same night in unrelated acts? If so, who killed Alexander? The police aren't satisfied either, but go ahead, based on the evidence, with the prosecution of Wilfrid.

On the Alexander front, the first suspect is of course his wife. This gets muddled considerably when it turns out that she and Alexander were not in fact married (!) and that Alexander wanted out of their irregular relationship in order to marry (properly, this time) another woman. The 'wife' threatens to expose him to scandal unless she is properly rewarded for their years together, and there has been disagreement about the monetary definition of 'properly'. There is, however, no evidence against her.

But if we are not willing to accept the coincidence of two brothers being killed on the same night, we have the difficulty that nobody seems to be sufficiently connected to both brothers to have reason to kill them – other than the thoroughly unlikeable third brother Marmaduke ('Smarmy Marmy' as one character calls him). But though he seems to have owed Alexander some money, nothing can be found to indicate he killed either, much less both.

Another character who behaves somewhat suspiciously has an airtight alibi, which is checked thoroughly and attested to by the police.

Though all the on-stage detecting is done by amateurs, this still has some elements of a police procedural, I think, because much of the work is doggedly tracking down clues, following blind alleys, and questioning witnesses. A good deal of time is spent on a box of chocolates left in a cab that really don't mean much (I think this might just have been filler, because the novel is relatively short).

Readers who prefer strong characterization will be disappointed with this book; pretty much everyone is two-dimensional. The only character with any depth at all is a rather secondary one – Alexander's 'other woman'). All the rest are totally forgettable, including Bennion (though he has some amusing lines).

The solution is (mostly) fairly-clued, although final proof relies on the villain 'confessing' when he (to choose a pronoun at random) thinks he has the hero cornered.

As the foregoing may indicate, I have mixed feelings about the book, but overall I liked it sufficiently that I will give Adams another try. I have another book (Death of a Viewer) downloaded, and there are a few more here.

A side note: The book was published in 1940, but I have to assume it was finished sometime before September 1939, and published early the next year, since there is no mention of the war, but several mentions of concern about it.

The Ereader, 1935 Version

It’s not surprising this didn’t catch on. I doubt many 1935 housewives would have allowed such a monstrosity in their living rooms (or was ‘parlor’ still the correct term in 1935?)

Anyway, it is basically just a microfilm reader (such as we used to find in libraries) mounted on a pole.

The text carries the information that microfilm was patented in 1859, which is much earlier than I would have guessed and that

… New York banker George Lewis McCarthy … developed the first practical use for microfilm in 1925, allowing him to make miniaturized copies of bank documents.

Which reminded me that when I was in college in the late sixties, I worked nights at Valley National Bank (at the time the largest bank in Arizona), and a big part of my job was feeding checks into a microfilm machine. Not very exciting work, and the pay sucked too.

Apple Found Guilty of Price-Fixing

Given that the prosecution had the words of the defendant’s guru, in which he pretty much said, “Hey, let’s do some price-fixing today!” this case clearly fits in the open-and-shut category. As far as I can see, nobody who doesn’t work in Cupertino even bothered to pretend to be surprised.

Apple Inc. broke antitrust laws and conspired with publishers to raise electronic book prices, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, citing “compelling evidence” from the words of the late Steve Jobs. [ … ] 

In her ruling, Cote said “compelling evidence of Apple’s participation in the conspiracy came from the words uttered by Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder, CEO and visionary." 

She quoted Jobs, who died in 2011, as saying he understood publishers’ concerns that Amazon’s $9.99 price for new releases was eroding the perceived value of their products and that Apple was willing to try pricing e-books at $12.99 and $14.99. She noted that Jobs bought an e-book for $14.99 at the launch of Apple’s e-book store and told a reporter that day that Amazon’s $9.99 price for the same book would be irrelevant because soon all prices will “be the same.” 

“Apple has struggled mightily to reinterpret Jobs’ statements in a way that will eliminate their bite,” Cote wrote in the 160-page opinion. “Its efforts have proven fruitless.” [ … ] 

“Through their conspiracy they forced Amazon (and other resellers) to relinquish retail pricing authority and then they raised retail e-book prices,” Cote wrote. “Those higher prices were not the result of regular market forces but of a scheme in which Apple was a full participant.”

I notice that in the penalty phase, the government may ask that the court require education on antitrust for Apple execs. Sounds like a good idea.

Several weeks ago, at the start of the trial, I offered some thoughts on the possible effects of the case (anticipating Apple’s defeat) here.

Race in Period Literature

I was reading a favorite blog about mystery books (The Passing Tramp) the other day, when an author I’ve read a few times came up in regard to a delicate subject. The author is Leslie Ford (real name: Zenith Brown), and the subject is race – specifically, negative depictions of racial minorities (blacks, in this case) in books from another era.

The Tramp points out that at least one publishing firm specializing in reprints of Golden Age mysteries refuses to touch Ford’s books:

There are those like Leslie Ford, whose ubiquitous and unconscious racism automatically eliminates her from our consideration [for republishing], customer requests notwithstanding.-- Tom Schantz and the late Enid Schantz of Rue Morgue Press

I’ve only read two books by Ford, All for the Love of a Lady and The Bahamas Murder Case. We will eliminate Bahamas quickly because I don’t recall that there were any black characters in the book. All for the Love of a Lady I read a couple years ago, so forgive me if my memories are hazy.

It was set in Washington (as were many Ford books, apparently) during World War Two. I remember enjoying immensely the insights into the thought processes and practices of the era – victory gardens, trading ration stamps, upper-class people discussing the adventure of riding buses, etc. As a mystery, I recall it as mediocre. As the title might indicate, it was almost as much a romance novel as a mystery, with much of the attention focused on saving the marriage of the couple at the center of the mystery.

But we are here today to discuss race. Ford’s characters are upper-class Washingtonians – all have servants, the servants are black, and the depictions of them, while not nasty or excessively negative, are very patronizing and condescending. Reading the passages of conversations between the central characters and their cooks and maids had me shaking my head in dismay on a number of occasions.

And yet – the book is a product of its time. As nearly as I can determine, using other books and movies as my guide, as well as memories of my own childhood ten or fifteen years later, the depictions by Ford of white attitudes are accurate. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

And if the author shared the attitudes of her characters (as it seems likely she did)? Then shame on her. She was hardly alone, but as the Tramp points out, some people were already beginning to call for change.

Look at the uproar in 1939 over the refusal by the Daughters of the American Revolution to allow Marian Anderson to sing at Constitution Hall.  First Lady Elanor Roosevelt resigned her D. A. R. membership over this shameful exclusion.

But I don’t see why that means her books should not be reprinted, read, or enjoyed. There are a great many authors and artists whose private lives or political/social views one might find offensive. Ezra Pound was a fascist, and a damned fine poet. I don’t let Wagner’s anti-Semitism get in the way of my enjoyment of his music.

But, as an artist, Leslie Ford is not in the same category as Pound and Wagner. Her books are, the little I have read, enjoyable, but nothing great. If she ends up forgotten, it will be unfair, but there are so many other good mystery writers of that era that the loss will not cause me any sleepless nights.

Still, if I come across any of her books in used book stores, I will snap them up, and will read and enjoy them without an ounce of guilt.