All posts by Lars Walker

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Headless Billionaire,’ by Michael Leese

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Roper’s memory had cinematic qualities. He could call up the past and watch it like a TV show. If that wasn’t astonishing enough, he had also revealed another factor. His recall mirrored the technology of the moment. This meant his early memories appeared as if on a VHS tape, while the more recent ones were in digital format. Hooley had once speculated that had Roper been born a hundred years earlier his memories would have been on a flickering black-and-white film reel.

A standard scene in a detective mystery – if it’s not a plain police procedural (a very good thing of another kind) – calls for the master sleuth to stand in a room surrounded by lesser men, as he sees things they don’t see and makes mental connections they can’t make. They often think he’s crazy, until he explains his deductions. From Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot to Monk, this has been a set piece.

So it wasn’t much of a jump, once we became aware of the existence of autistic savants, to come up with an autistic detective. I’ve encountered several examples. Jonathan Roper, hero of Michael Leese’s The Case of the Headless Billionaire, is one of them, and it’s not a bad effort.

When a billionaire philanthropist disappears, Chief Inspector Brian Hooley is assigned to the case. The man vanished into a London crowd in broad daylight, and the police are baffled. Considering the difficulty of the case, Insp. Hooley asks to get Jonathan Roper assigned to assist. Roper is on suspension, having nearly ruined an earlier investigation through his artless honesty. Roper is on the autistic spectrum, and other detectives find him hard to work with. But Hooley has always gotten along with him, managing to adjust to his eccentricities. He treats him as a sort of substitute son.

Roper is the right man for the job. In his time off, he’s been working on his social skills, and he’s learning to ask for explanations of “normal” behavior. He’s also constructing a new way of organizing his own memories, making his deductions more efficient.

Their investigations will lead to corruption in the medical research field, and to human smugglers (human smugglers sure show up in a lot of stories these days. I wish the authorities paid as much attention to them as authors do). The detectives’ lives, as well as those of many innocents, will hang on the efficiency of Jonathan Roper’s remarkable brain.

I liked The Case of the Headless Billionaire. The writing wasn’t bad, and the characters were okay. I won’t say this was a masterful book, but it did the job it set out to do, and I was interested in Hooley and Roper. The issue of fetal stem cell research played a part in the story, but it was framed in a way that sidestepped the controversial issue of whether it’s morally acceptable in the first place.

Worth reading.

[Note: I discover, on searching our files, that I reviewed this book once before under its previous title, Going Underground. I’m surprised I didn’t recognize it, and can only attribute this to old age. But I liked it better this time around.]

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Musing on film: ‘Svengali’

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Trilby (Marian Marsh), Billee (Bramwell Fletcher), and Svengali (John Barrymore) in “Svengali” (1931).

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been watching old mystery movies, of which a surprising number can be found posted on YouTube. This is, I freely admit, an exercise in pure escapism. I can’t watch new movies these days; they’re more moralistic than Victorian stage plays – and the morality is wrong. Old movies remind me of the world we threw away in the 1960s. I’m more at home there.

Last night I caught the movie Svengali (1931), which I remember used to show up on TV a lot when I was a kid. That film is only the most famous of a number of dramatic adaptations of the novel Trilby, by the English/French artist and author George du Maurier (grandfather of Daphne du Maurier, who wrote The Birds). I haven’t read the book (I’m thinking about it; I can probably find a free digital version), but according to Wikipedia, the Trilby/Svengali narrative forms only a small part of the novel. The novel is largely an evocation of du Maurier’s own youth as a struggling artist in Paris in the 1850s. The book was very influential – many of our conceptions of “bohemian” life in Paris, even today, are based on it.

Trilby O’Farrell is a half-Irish artist’s model in Paris, a free spirit. The young artist “little Billee” (inseparable from his friends Taffy and Laird, whose gorgeous whiskers provide much of the movie’s visual charm) falls in love with her. But she also comes to the attention of Svengali, the Jewish mesmerist who recognizes that she has a beautiful – though untrained – voice. He hypnotizes her, making her into a stellar concert artist. (The Victorians had excessive ideas about the power of hypnosis.) When she and Billee fall out, Svengali takes the opportunity to put her under a permanent spell. He fakes her suicide, spirits her out of Paris, and embarks on a concert career. Before long, “Mdme. Svengali” is the toast of Europe. By the time Billee finds her again, she’s lost beyond recall.

The movie is really a vehicle for its star John Barrymore, whose intense gaze (emphasized by makeup) and theatrical acting style suit the character perfectly. (The costumers also do a good job of making him look much taller than he really was.) The acting in general is the sort you see in early sound films – the actors are still moving slow and holding their expressions for the camera, waiting for a cue card. The potential of snappy dialogue and throw-away lines hasn’t been discovered yet. Some of the cinematography is very effective, though. There’s a wonderful scene where Svengali takes control of Trilby from a distance. An intense shot of Barrymore’s burning eyes cuts to a moving shot that travels over the roofs of Paris, into Trilby’s chamber window. The age of the technology shows, but it was impressive special effects for the time.

You may be aware, even in these debased times, that there’s a kind of hat called a “trilby.” It was named after the character in the book; illustrations and stage costumes put her in this hat – basically a fedora with a stingy brim. It became very fashionable for both men and women, and had a long run. Frank Sinatra was rarely without his trilby.

Oddly, Marian Marsh, who plays Trilby in the movie, never seems to wear a trilby (or else I glanced away and missed it). Seems like a lost opportunity, like doing Sherlock Holmes without the deerstalker cap. One of my main memories of Miss Marsh, from the many times I saw the film when I was a kid (it always seemed to show up on some local station two or three times a year), was her hair. Not as she originally appears, in a sort of Dutch Boy wig that hasn’t aged well, but as it looks during her first big concert scene. It’s curly, and it hangs to her shoulders. I remember saying to my brothers, way back then, that she “looked like a cocker spaniel.” (At the time, girls wore their hair straight, sometimes ironing it for effect.)

I remember this keenly because – in a small irony only important to me – just a few years later, in college, I fell in love with a girl whose hair looked exactly like Trilby’s concert hair (styles had changed), and it didn’t seem funny to me at all anymore. Makes watching it bittersweet, even now.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Impression,’ by Ray Clark

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Sometimes I hate a book enough to read it all through just so I can tell you in detail how bad it was. That was the case with Impression, by Ray Clark. I’ve read worse novels, but few combined inept writing with such personal offense to myself.

Detective Inspector Stewart Gardener and his partner Sean Riley are the heroes of this police procedural, part of a series set in Leeds in North Yorkshire. When a local prostitute is found dead in her kitchen, stabbed to death with a bayonet, and then a local businessman is found choked to death with sealing wax (!) in a butcher shop doorway, their investigation begins. That investigation, to this reader, seemed a remarkably ham-handed one. A local online journalist comes to them with a theory that these murders are recreations of historical murders in the area. They laugh him off, with tragic results. Also, when a couple whose daughter was recently kidnapped show up on their radar, they treat the two with surprising insensitivity – largely because the husband is a born-again Christian, and so (in their eyes) contemptible.

This hatred for born-again Christians comes up again and again in the book. Author Clark wants to make sure we’re in no doubt how he feels on the subject. “Real practicing Christians,” DI Gardener states authoritatively, “see the born-again converts as part-timers—people who are not really taking the Lord and the good book seriously.” Further on, Riley says that the fact that a man is a born-again Christian “tells me that he is hiding from something in his past.” That’s an odd way, in an English book, of dismissing John Wesley, John Newton, and William Booth, among so many others.

But my complaints aren’t only theological. The author is lazy. His characters never come to life, and most of them are hard to keep straight. He misuses the term “begging the question,” and is prone to misplacing modifiers and misusing words, as in the line, “Despite being still in the throes of summer, [a character] was dressed in a camel hair coat and trilby….”

One major plot point involves a child, decades ago, playing constantly with a Polaroid instant camera. However, we’re also told that the child’s family was very poor. Apparently the author has no idea what Polaroid film used to cost.

Finally, the climax was melodramatic and implausible.

The book made a poor Impression on this reviewer.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Blood Line,’ by Solomon Carter

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Another free book by an author I’m not familiar with. I think this is the fourth in the string. I’ve disliked each book less than the last, and The Blood Line by Solomon Carter was the best so far. Not stellar, but not bad.

Aging Detective Inspector Joe Hogarth of Southend in Essex, England, is summoned to a very nasty crime scene with his two female colleagues. The deceased has been dead several days, and decomposition is well under way. The dead man was known as a forger, specializing in false passports and other IDs. The method of the murder is interesting – first the man was given a powerful “speedball” injection of cocaine and heroin, and then he was stabbed to death before the drugs could kill him. Why would anyone take the trouble to do all that?

Before long another local criminal, a human trafficker, is found murdered exactly the same way. This is obviously personal for the killer, but who could that person be? The field of possible suspects is wide; the problem is finding the person with the right kind of hate.

Joe Hogarth is a sort of a sad sack – middle-aged, never married, lonely but scared of commitment. Instead of taking risks in dating, he medicates himself with alcohol. Meanwhile, an old enemy of his has been released from prison. All unknown to Hogarth, this psychopath has come to town and is laying plans to repay him for all the time he spent behind bars.

I thought The Blood Line was well-written. Joe Hogarth is a good character, and not politically correct; I was interested in him. My only real objection, though, is a big one – the story is kind of dreary. Hogarth has a dreary life, and little hope is in view. Maybe things will get better in the next books in the series.

Otherwise, pretty good. Cautions for the usual.

Authors, Non-fiction, Reading

R.I.P., Paul Johnson

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Sad, sad news. The historian Paul Johnson died today. He was born in 1928, and was a practicing Roman Catholic. He wrote more than 40 books, as well as innumerable articles. Originally a leftist, Johnson grew disenchanted with the Left, objecting especially to its blinkered moral relativism, a theme that runs through all his works. His books Modern Times and Intellectuals were formative for me (I delighted in his takedown of Ibsen in Intellectuals), and I also appreciated The Birth of the Modern.

The English Spectator has a memorial post today here. It includes a quote from an article he wrote for them on moral relativism:

As I see it, the Satan who confronted Jesus during this encounter is the personification of moral relativism, and the materialism which creates it. What we are shown is not merely ‘all the kingdoms of the world’ but the entire universe, in all its colossal extent, reaching backwards and forwards into infinity and beyond the powers of the human mind to grasp except in mathematical equations. We are told: this came into existence, not by an act of creation, but as a result of the laws of physics, which have no moral purpose whatever — or indeed any purpose. There is no conceivable room for God in this process, and mankind is an infinitely minute spectator of this futile process about which he can do nothing, being of no more significance than a speck of dust or a fragment of rock. If you will accept this view of our fate, then there is just a chance that by applying the laws of science to the exclusion of any other considerations, and by dismissing the notion of God, or the spirit, or goodness, or any other absolute notion of truth and right and wrong, we shall be able marginally to improve the human condition during the minute portion of time our race occupies our doomed planet.’

Rest in peace, Mr. Johnson. You’ll be much missed.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Cold Trail,’ by J. C. Fields

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I’ve been reading a lot of free books made available through various Kindle promotions lately. As you may have noticed, I wasn’t entirely happy with the last couple I reviewed. Was J. C. Fields’ The Cold Trail more satisfying?

Well, yes. But not entirely.

This book is part of a series, and there were the usual problems with character relationships that had to be explained, but that wasn’t handled too badly. The story begins with the disappearance, a few years back, of three female volleyball players from a college in Missouri. A few years later, our hero, Sean Kruger, a professor at another Missouri college, is able to rescue a different volleyball player. Kruger is a former FBI agent, and he worked on the earlier abductions. The similarities prompt him to get his hacker friend to do some checking in the records, and he believes he can discern the work of a serial killer. Because of this he makes up his mind to go back to his old job at the FBI, which assigns him to the case.

Eventually he and his team are able learn that one thing connects a number of disappearances of female athletes over recent years. In each case, a particular software company was installing a system in the college at the time. And the man overseeing the installation was the son of the company’s owner, computer mogul Robert Burns, who recently retired as a senator. The son in question was Robert Jr., “Bobby,” and he has just been elected to his father’s old seat. Is it possible a US senator is a serial killer?

Of course it’s possible, and much money has been spent on covering up Bobby’s “indiscretions.” But it goes far deeper than that. We’re talking about the Russian mafia and international human trafficking.

The story worked pretty well. The characters were interesting, and they interacted well. The dialogue was good. The book could have used a proofreader – I found misplaced modifiers and word confusion (like “vanilla folder”). But as a narrative, it wasn’t bad. I caught what looked to me like one plot weakness, but that happens.

My reservations were mostly political and paranoid.

The evil senator is, of course, a conservative Republican. And he is owned, part and parcel, by Vladimir Putin and the Russians, who are using him to destabilize the US economy.

It occurred to me that Robert Burns might be a stand-in for Donald Trump in a left-wing fantasy.

Also, we got to watch the FBI at work investigating a senator, and they cut legal corners from time to time. Nothing sinister about the squeaky-clean FBI illegally surveilling a Republican, right?

Also, the bureaucrats in this book never worry about wokeness. There’s no concern over microaggressions, and nobody talks about their preferred pronouns. I did not believe this was true to contemporary life in the federal government.

All in all, The Cold Trail left me with chilly feet.

But the writing wasn’t bad.

Fiction, Reviews

‘One Other,’ by Lewis M. Penry

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Writing a story (of any length, but novels are hardest in this respect) presents many challenges, and it’s a surprise any of us ever gets it tolerably right (I’m not saying I get it right myself; that’s for others to determine). You’ve got to cobble together an interesting plot, and then you’ve got to cat-herd your characters into doing the (sometimes outrageous) stuff they need to do in order to keep common sense from breaking out. A story implies unusual activity, and unusual activity usually means forcing characters to do extreme stuff. This can be done well or badly. I felt it was done rather badly in Lewis M. Penry’s One Other, second in his DS Jerome Roberts police procedural series.

Dr. Ben Carr is one-half of a medical practice in the London suburb of Shefford. He’s a family man and football (soccer) coach. Apparently popular with his neighbors – so why did someone stab him to death in his home?

Detective Sergeant Jerome Roberts, along with his superior DI Richard Martin, starts questioning neighbors and friends, and a darker picture of him emerges. Dr. Carr seems to have had his share of enemies – there’s his business partner (whom he’s been blackmailing), and the families of female students he’s been sleeping with. There’s the football mom who threatened him publicly for not putting her son into a game. There’s his own brother, too.

As police pressure increases, the suspects respond violently, turning on one another, and even on themselves. The whole thing erupts in a series of homicides.

And that’s my problem with this book. This isn’t supposed to be grand opera or Shakespearean tragedy. It’s a story about ordinary middle class citizens in a suburb. No doubt they’re all sinners like the rest of us, but (it seems to me) the author overestimates the capacity of the average person for deadly force. Killing another human is the first and most stubborn taboo. It takes serious fear, trauma, or specialized training to get past that taboo. Communities don’t just break out in murder like an epidemic of chickenpox.

One Other fell down, for this reader, in the psychology department. I simply didn’t believe the story.

You may feel differently.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Defendant,’ by G. K. Chesterton

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The poor—the slaves who really stoop under the burden of life—have often been mad, scatter-brained and cruel, but never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling literature will always be a ‘blood and thunder’ literature, as simple as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.

On a friend’s recommendation, I picked up the Project Gutenberg version of G. K. Chesterton’s The Defendant. (My link, of course, is to a version you’ll have to pay for. You think we’re running a charity here?) It’s pretty standard Chesterton, which is to say, eccentrically stimulating.

The book’s title, as the author himself admits in the Foreword, is awkwardly put. Chesterton does not stand in his own defense here, but in defense of various topics he has chosen for no other reason than that they’re out of fashion (or were at the time). Subjects include: “Penny Dreadful” novels, skeletons, publicity, nonsense, “ugly things,” slang, detective stories, and patriotism. It helps, in reading, to have some general idea of intellectual fashions around the turn of the 20th Century. Although Christianity is mentioned, this is not one of Chesterton’s most Christian (or Catholic) works.

The Defendant isn’t one of the most memorable books in G. K.’s ouvre, but it’s definitely worth reading. There are excellent moments:

“There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorne says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.”

“Scripture says that one star differeth from another in glory, and the same conception applies to noses.”

Fiction, Goofing, Reviews

‘Quick Service,’ by P. G. Wodehouse

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The inner office was, however, empty when Joss entered. It was only after he had banged cheerfully on the desk with a paperweight, at the same time shouting a jovial “Bring out your dead,” that Mr. Duff came in from the little balcony outside the window, where he had been attempting to alleviate his dyspepsia by deep breathing.

“Aha, J. B.,” said Joss sunnily. “Good morrow.”

“Oh, you’re there are you?” said Mr. Duff, making no attempt to emulate his junior’s effervescence.

The managing director of Duff and Trotter was a large man who, after an athletic youth, had allowed himself to put on weight. In his college days he had been a hammer thrower of some repute, and he was looking as if he wished he had a hammer now and could throw it at Joss….

“You’re late!” he boomed.

“Not really,” said Joss.

“What the devil do you mean, not really?”

“A man like me always seems to be later than he is. That is because people sit yearning for him….”

The first book of P. G. Wodehouse I ever bought was the collection The Most of P. G. Wodehouse, published by Simon & Schuster back in the ‘70s, which included the novel Quick Service as a sort of extra (it remains the most reasonably priced way to get this book, so that’s the link I’m using). Thus, Quick Service was the first Wodehouse novel I ever read. I enjoyed it immensely then, and did again on re-reading. Especially because its main character is surprisingly different from most of your Wodehouse heroes.

The plot of the story is extremely tight and complex, but cutting back to the essentials, we start at Claines Hall in Sussex, which now belongs to Mrs. Howard Steptoe, an American millionairess, and her husband. Also in residence is her poor relation, Sally Fairmile, who serves as a sort of secretary. Sally has just gotten engaged to young Lord Holbeton, another guest at the manor. The problem is that under the terms of his father’s will, Lord Holbeton can’t touch his inheritance yet without the approval of his trustee, Mr. J. B. Duff of Duff and Trotter’s exclusive grocery store in London. Sally suggests that she go talk to Mr. Duff, and see if she can’t charm him.

But when she arrives at Duff’s office, she finds not him but our hero, Joss Weatherby, an artist who works in the advertising department. Joss immediately falls in love with her. When she’s gone, Duff reappears, having learned, through eavesdropping, that Joss painted a portrait of a Mrs. Chavender, which now hangs at Claines Hall (where Mrs. Chavender just happens to be a current guest). Duff was once engaged to Mrs. Chavender, he says, and it occurs to him that her face, with its haughty sneer, would make a wonderful poster for the store. He then fires Joss, but Joss heads off to Claines Hall, to take a job as Mr. Steptoe’s valet (a job that Sally mentioned is open). His plan is to steal the portrait, get his job back, and marry Sally.

There may be other heroes like Joss Weatherby in other Wodehouse stories (my memory sometimes fails, and there are a lot of stories), but such an energetic, bright, confident type isn’t the Master’s usual fare. Uncle Fred and Uncle Galahad were probably something like this in their youths. “Aplomb” is the word that best suits Joss. It makes no difference whether he’s discovered swilling his boss’s sherry, breaking into a French window, or perched on a chair, cutting a painting from its frame, he is never dismayed. His self-confidence only ebbs in those moments when he contemplates his unworthiness of the woman he loves. And then only briefly. Joss Weatherby is a great tonic for the depressive reader.

Quick Service is a tremendous story, and everyone should read it.

Authors, Reading, Uncategorized

That hideous winter of our discontent

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Your correspondent is a tad down today. Translation work has been slow (read nonexistent), and it snowed and snowed for days and days. Stopped today, and we should be safe for a while according to the forecasts. But it’s… full out there. Chock full. This is one of those years when we don’t know what to do with all the accumulation. The piles along the driveway are nearly as tall as we are.

Of course my neighbor clears the snow for me with a machine, but it’s guilt-inducing to watch him at it.

The news is depressing too. I think I’m going to turn off talk radio again for a while (except for some hours of Prager). Listen to Pandora instead. Confession: I’d like to see my party, you know, pulling together. But I’m afraid that if I say that I’ll be accused of being a RINO. The arguments in favor of the Twenty make some sense to me, but I don’t like watching friends turn into enemies. Simple soul that I am, I don’t think that really helps in the long run.

Above, maintaining the theme of love for That Hideous Strength I’ve been proclaiming all week, here’s Andrew Klavan talking about it. Some of this is a little hard to understand (how can anybody not love Narnia? How can anybody read THS with ease the first time through?), but his opinions on the meaning of the book are spot on. They get him the all-important Walker endorsement, which is nice.