I knew of Michael Innes (real name J. I. M. Stewart), one of the foremost classic English mystery novelists. I’ve probably read one or two of his stories before, though I don’t remember them. A deal on The Long Farewell persuaded me to buy it. It wasn’t bad, but it shows its age (the book was published in 1958. I suppose I have to agree that that’s a long time ago, though I remember the year well).
Our hero, Sir John Appleby, Commissioner of Scotland Yard, visits his friend Lewis Packford, an amateur scholar of Renaissance literature, while they are both on holiday in Italy. Lewis appears distracted, and makes several references to amazing possible discoveries of literary documents, and also to forgery.
On his return to England, Sir John is shocked to learn that his friend Lewis has shot himself to death at his family estate. He had recently made a sensational announcement about purchasing an old Italian book of stories – with notes in Shakespeare’s own hand in the margins of the Othello story. As if that wasn’t enough, Lewis has been discovered, posthumously, to be a bigamist.
Sir John is suspicious, and heads out to the Packford estate. He finds that Lewis’ brother has kept all the people who were present at the time of the death on site as guests, so Sir John is able to re-interview them all. Slowly he pieces the wicked plot together.
The mystery in The Long Farewell was all right. The characters were all right too. It was the presentation that slowed it down. Author Innes clung to Victorian – or at least Edwardian – literary conventions. The language is flowery, and the characters tend to express themselves in the style of literary essays. The book was a slow read.
There’s nothing really wrong with The Long Farewell, if you like this sort of thing. But if you’re looking for pulse-pounding entertainment, I’d advise you to go elsewhere.
I was familiar with Anthony Boucher (real name William Anthony Parker Wright), mainly because he wrote the scripts for the old Sherlock Holmes radio program. He was a prominent writer, editor, and critic in his heyday, working both in mystery and science fiction. Among his mystery heroes was a detective named Fergus O’Breen. But Fergus doesn’t appear in The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars; his sister does.
If you’re a fan (like me) of Sherlock Holmes, you’re probably familiar with two different groups known as the Baker Street Irregulars. The original group showed up occasionally in the Holmes stories, a ragtag gang of London street urchins who ran errands and served as informants for the Great Detective. The second group is an organization of Sherlock Holmes fans, originally organized in 1934 by Christopher Morley. It might be (I’m not sure) the first Fandom group. I’ve occasionally considered joining our local affiliate, which was called (last I heard ) The Norwegian Explorers.
Anthony Boucher was himself a member of the Irregulars, and paid his BSI friends the compliment of making them look like complete horses’ rear ends in his novel, The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars.
This is the scenario – the president of Metropolitan Studios in Hollywood is planning to make a movie based on the Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” But he made the mistake of hiring Stephen Worth, a drunken, opinionated hard-boiled mystery writer, to do the script. Worth, however, actually hates the Holmes stories, and has been very public about it. The members of the BSI, of course, are outraged – and some of them are quite prominent and influential (membership has included, over the years, Alexander Woollcott, Isaac Asimov, and Franklin Roosevelt). So the studio head invites a group of BSI members to come to Hollywood at his expense and serve as technical advisors. He puts them all up in a large Hollywood house, and the very first night Stephen Worth shows up drunk and unleashes a tirade on them all. Later that night, he is shot to death in his room. Then his body disappears.
What follows is a very strange sequence in which each BSI member has a bizarre, improbable adventure which oddly echoes various elements from Sherlock Holmes stories. They report on these adventures to a gathering of the whole group, in monologues modeled after the ones you find so often in the Doyle stories (and I’ve always found those monologues the most tedious parts. They are no more riveting here). In the end they all gather once more to try to determine the real murderer.
There’s a lot of clever plotting in The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars. But it’s too complicated, too implausible, and too clever by half. Toward the end I stopped caring, but I did finish the book. (I might mention that Boucher was a leftie, and his political sympathies come through here and there.)
The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars is worth reading for its historical significance, but it’s not a great mystery novel. I found myself sympathizing a little with the murdered, hard-boiled Stephen Worth.
The Senior Year Hiking Club of the exclusive Altdorf residential high school in Switzerland is on a mountain trek when a blizzard blows up. The teacher in charge makes the calculated decision –the right one, as it turns out – to return to the hotel at the cable car station rather than proceeding to their planned base camp. When they get back to the hotel, all the other tourists on the mountain have departed, and the weather makes it impossible to send another car down. But the night caretaker, a young American named Matty Burkhalter, opens the hotel for them so they can wait the storm out.
But that night, one of the students, a young woman, is stabbed to death. It’s The First Death of Winter. Matty Burkhalter finds himself responsible for preserving the evidence and (on the telephoned instructions of the police) interviewing the surviving students, now all suspects. Everybody has secrets, but Matty has a secret of his own – he’s wanted for murder in the US, and the less attention he gets from the police, the happier he’ll be.
Kevin Wignall is a reliable writer. Thrillers are his usual genre, but this one is more of a mystery, with echoes of Agatha Christie. He’s not the fanciest prose stylist out there, but his work is professional. The First Death of Winter was a low-key, satisfying mystery story. There’s a Christian character featured, who’s a little weird but sympathetic overall.
The other day I reviewed a book by William MacIlvanney, considered a founder of the Scottish “Tartan Noir” school of detective fiction. I disagreed with some of the attitudes he expressed, but was highly impressed with his writing. Now I’ve read a book by one of MacIlvanney’s successors, J. M. Dalgliesh – A Long Time Dead. The writing was good in general (though a misplaced modifier sneaked past the editors), but the world view here was even less to my taste.
Duncan McAdam grew up on the Isle of Skye, but fled family tensions as soon as he could. Now he’s a police detective in Glasgow, but he’s unpopular both with his colleagues and his bosses. When they get a call that a young woman’s body has been found on Skye, buried and preserved in peat, they send Duncan off to investigate. He has no wish to go – his mother has dementia and is confined to a home there, and he doesn’t get along well with his sister. But go he must.
The dead girl has been easily identified – she is Isla Matheson, who vanished about twenty years ago and was assumed to have been a runaway. Her body shows no sign of violence. And she seems to have been a popular girl – no motive for her murder is apparent. Duncan’s investigation will delve deeply into the dark side of island life, uncovering secrets that, like the body, have been long concealed.
J. M. Dalgliesh is a good writer. He paints his characters well and crafts effective dialogue. I quite enjoyed reading A Long Time Dead – right up until the solution appeared.
Discussing that solution involves dropping a spoiler into this review – I’ll try to conceal it, but it won’t be hard to guess. The murderer’s identity and the motive hinge, as in so many modern stories, on the guilt of the one subculture in our society that it’s still OK to stigmatize. Crazy nonconformists who haven’t evolved with the times, who don’t even merit sympathy. Know what I mean?
Anyway, A Long Time Dead was a pretty good mystery, but I’m done with J. M. Dalgliesh.
Last week, I told I was almost done with Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and couldn’t talk about it in full yet. Now that I’ve finished it, I can say I appreciate it overall and it won’t make any list of recommended reading from me. It was a little long-winded, unevenly humorous, and the point driven home at the end is an ugly one.
Twain’s Yankee engineer is an ideal man, in a sense, and very lucky. He applies knowledge to a variety of fortunate occurrences and builds a brilliant reputation for himself. He quickly earns the loyalty of people who pull him through other scrapes, even to when he takes full credit for all actions afterward. He can practically create the entire nineteenth century in Medieval England on his own. And at the height of it, when Camelot falls apart as it does in the historic legend, he says, now we must push to destroy the Catholic Church and the order of chivalry. The final chapters depict this push with horrific bloodshed that could be taken as comic if there weren’t so many bodies on the ground.
Aside: I was offended by Merlin’s stunt at the very end, because when has he demonstrated any skill of this kind before? Is or is he not a charlatan?
What should readers take away from this application of Progressive ideals on the medieval world? Does the Yankee triumph? Does he accomplish his goals?
A Connecticut Yankee was published in 1889, the end of a pretty good decade in the United States. That was before the Spanish-American War for Cuban independence, the Philippine-American War against Filippino independence, the Russo-Japanese War in which the US worked for a balance of powers, and conflicts over the building of the Panama Canal. Theodore Roosevelt was a player in all of these. After these came World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, so one would understand if viewers came away with the impression that the great Progressive Era ushered mankind into the position he’s always wanted–to play God. If the Yankee’s ideas would not be accepted by rubes too thick to see the wisdom of them, then the rubes could die, and should die to out of the way of progress, and would die in front of the Yankee’s superior technology.
Twain was a member of the Anti-Imperialist League that opposed the U.S. war effort against the Philippines and various conflicts that gave a sense of an expanding American empire. Twain may have asked, if we were a free nation, why would we fight to subjugate other nations? Which is the very thing the Connecticut Yankee attempts in the end. He presses his ideals into tryanny and in a manner of speaking murders everyone. Maybe that was Twain’s point.
Anyway, let me share a few links before I let you go for the day.
More on Connecticut Yankee: James Turner has a long piece on Medievelists.net. “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court found some of its greatest and most engaged champions with Soviet artists, perhaps unsurprisingly when you consider the novel two-pronged critique of both the inherent corruption and excesses of aristocratic society and its cautious approach to the cold heart and supposedly self-defeating exploitation of workers under the capitalist system.”
Recommended changes: Agrarian author Wendell Berry offers revisions to the Marvel cinematic universe in this piece by Jeff King. “The villains have just not been believable. Why a squinting, purple monster looking to eliminate half of life in the universe when the strip mining industry is right there?”
Role Models: With Purim starting, Mijal Bitton suggests American Jews look to Esther as a role model. “Esther symbolizes the way too many Jews feel today — confronted by rising hatred against their Judaism.”
Good Fun: A little love for Don Quixote. “Cervantes is ingenious.”
While we waited for Jan, Brian asked me about Ena and the children. I had seen them the day before; Sunday: the day of the child, the new agnostic sabbath when all over the western world diffident fathers turned up to catch a glimpse of the only things they still believed in from their marriage. They brought gifts of ill-fitting clothes and books that would never be read and membership-cards for leisure centres.
Usually, when a writer is expressly liberal in his opinions, I’ll drop him quietly, because we’re just not compatible. But I enjoyed William McIlvanney’s Strange Loyalties too much to do that. I may even spring for the previous two books in this series. This novel was written back in the 1970s, and the liberalism expressed is similar to the naïve kind I myself espoused back in those days. McIlvanney is remembered as a founding father of the “Tartan Noir” school of detective writing, but I doubt very much that any of his successors ever surpassed him. This is a bona fide work of literature, genre or not.
Jack Laidlaw is a Glasgow detective. In the honorable tradition of hard-boiled policemen’s lives, his is going to pieces. He’s divorced, and his relationship with his new girlfriend is on the rocks. When his brother Scott is hit by a car and killed in their home town, Jack is gripped by an existential compulsion – he needs to know why. The death isn’t legally suspicious – the driver was with his family, and Scott was unquestionably drunk. But why had Scott’s life gone awry in the first place? Once he was a talented artist with a bright future, but somehow he’d lost his reason for living.
The investigation will lead to Scott’s ex-wife and her social circle, and to his old friends. Jack will uncover corruption, which will tie in with a case his partners are working on back in Glasgow. And he will learn, in the end, his brother’s dark secret.
First of all, I have to say that the prose in Strange Loyalties was as good as I’ve ever read. Anywhere. McIlvanney was a brilliant stylist. Great lines abound: “A kitchen in the morning: it can be a garden of the senses. The sunlight is shafting in through the window, as if William Blake had been given the commission today and is announcing the sacredness of everyday.” “There are few sounds more forlorn than the phone of someone you love ringing out with no one to answer.”
Also (and maybe this is a function of the cultural period), even though there’s plenty of darkness and cynicism in this book, it wasn’t nihilistic. There were hopeful moments. There was even an obscure biblical reference, a mention of the “Rechabites.” (But that was also the name of a temperance society, so maybe it was they the author had in mind.)
I relished Strange Loyalties. It was as smooth as top-shelf, single malt whisky (not that I’ve ever tasted that). Highly recommended.
“Trust a guy like you to drive this far. What’s wrong with Minnesota?”
“Too many Scandinavians.”
Craig Terlson’s entertaining Luke Fischer mysteries began with Surf City Acid Drop, which I’ve finally gotten around to. I had assumed, on the basis of the title, that we’d find about our hero’s background as a surfer, but in fact it’s just a metaphor. The “acid drop” is a phenomenon where a wave drops out from under a surfer; Luke (who has never surfed) gets the water pulled out from under his feet, so to speak, more than once in this story.
Luke Fischer is a Canadian expatriate slacker living near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. He insists (often) that he’s not a private detective, but occasionally people ask him to look for things. His new client is a slightly shady woman who tells him she wants him to find her brother, who has disappeared and gone on the road.
Thus Luke sets out on a road trip that will take him through the American West and Midwest. Along the way he’ll encounter an eccentric hit man he calls Mostly Harold, who will become his problematic ally – if Harold doesn’t decide to kill him instead. All in a quest for a much-coveted bag full of rocks (not diamonds).
As always, Craig Terlson’s quirky characters and socko prose are what made the book. I found this one a little more cohesive than the one I read previously, but still I think Luke’s great weakness as a main character is his lack of fire in the belly. He doesn’t seem to care much about anything, and even his fear of death seems muted. Which doesn’t mean he isn’t still fun to spend time with. But it did make some stretches of the book a little slow. The humor, though often dark, helps pass the time.
All in all, I quite enjoyed Surf City Acid Drop, and recommend it. Cautions for language and violence.
I’ve been reading Mark Twain’s 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and have not finished it, but I wanted to share some thoughts today. Blogging is designed for that, updates along the way.
The point almost from the beginning is that this engineer from 19th century America is an intellectual paragon among sixth century rubes. Their superstition and gullibility make them victims of every charlatan (usually of a religious or magical flavor) who comes into town. Hank the Yankee sees through all of them and will deliver them from all bondage, if he can devise a way to do it. I’m near the end of the book, and though luck has saved his neck many times, his progressive prowess has prepared him for that salvation just as often.
His progressive acumen is as good as magic, because Hank’s been able to create a telephone and telegraph network, school system, railroads, various consumer goods, and many kinds of explosives. He intends to create a thriving democracy in Camelot, if not all of England, and I’m wondering if that’s where Twain will leave it–19th century America triumphing overall. We see a little tension in the story here and there, because Hank is not brilliant and has been successful largely by force of plot and luck. So, I’ve wondered if the satire will turn back on him, and the story will end with everything crashing around him. Will the 19th century man be shown to be the greatest product of society, the pinnacle of the evolutionary process, the smartest and the best of all, or will his Social Darwinian hubris trip him up? I may find out later today.
What can I share with you today?
First, let me apologize for missing the Sunday Singing post last week. Circumstances disrupted by routine and by Sunday afternoon, I decided not to post it. I’ll get one up tomorrow, if I don’t fall a roof in the morning.
Boycotts: The SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, has the U.S. Army and defense contractors as sponsors and participants for years, but this year, helping Israel defend itself against the neighboring monsters is too much for some.
Publishing: A new publishing house formed by three experienced executives intends to forego advances and offer “authors a high percentage of a book’s profits—a model used by some other types of hybrid publishers.”
Food: What is corned beef? It’s an innovation of Irish-Americans who lived near Jewish Americans and took a shine to this kind of meat in Jewish delis.
Photo: Bomber gas station, Milwaukie, Oregon. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
“It seems to me that the dragon is awfully small,” said Kristin, looking at the image of the saint who was her namesake. “It doesn’t look as if it could swallow up the maiden.”
“And it couldn’t, either,” said Brother Edvin. “It was no bigger than that. Dragons and all other creatures that serve the Devil only seem big as long as we harbor fear within ourselves. But if a person seeks God with such earnestness and desire that he enters into His power, then the power of the Devil at once suffers such a great defeat that his instruments become small and unimportant. Dragons and evil spirits shrink until they are no bigger than goblins and cats and crows. As you can see, the whole mountain that Saint Sunniva was trapped inside is so small that it will fit on the skirt of her cloak.”
Saint Sunniva won’t be familiar to non-Norwegian readers, and not even to most Norwegians if they’re the American kind. She is a legendary saint supposed to have been martyred by Jarl Haakon (whom you’ll remember from The Year of the Warrior and Death’s Doors). She fled into a cave with her companions to avoid falling into Haakon’s hands, and they all died there. Later King Olaf Trygvesson found their uncorrupted bodies and declared their sainthood. I never used the legend in my own books.
I shared with you a special deal on Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy in the Tina Nunnally translation last month, and now I’ve taken up (re-)reading it myself. I’ve read the trilogy before – twice in the previous English translation and once in the original Norwegian. I should probably read that again, but my second-hand copy’s in very poor condition. And I wanted to try Nunnally – I’ve heard good things about her work.
I admit I approached the book with some degree of reluctance. It’s a fine example of the great Scandinavian tradition of depressing literature (though with the ameliorating influence of Christian faith, which most of the other modern stuff lacks). Kristin is a vivid and fascinating character, mostly respectable by most people’s standards, and always honorable in her own eyes. Yet Undset’s penetrating artistic eye looks deeply into her essential selfishness, which is gradually revealed to Kristin herself through a lifetime of living with consequences.
I’ve often said that Kristin Lavransdatter is an inverted romance novel. The beautiful, willful young girl defies her parents to run off with the dashing knight. But where the romance heroine lives happily ever after, Kristin has to live with her choices. All her chickens come home to roost, one after the other. And yet, the promise of God’s grace never leaves her.
What do I think of Tina Nunnally’s translation? It’s good. I can never read a Norwegian translation (my own included) anymore without quibbling, of course. I sometimes think this one a little too literal, just a little clunky. But I probably need to remove the beam from my own eye before I say that.
The first English translation, done in the 1920s by Charles Archer and J. S. Scott, has been criticized as artificially mannered, featuring deliberate English archaisms that don’t correspond to Undset’s idiomatic Norwegian. I understand the concern, though I can’t help sympathizing a little with Archer and Scott. One of the pleasures, for me, of working with Norwegian is the fact that its diction does have a kind of medieval quality from an English-speaker’s point of view. If I ask, “What means this word?” in English, that’s Renaissance Faire talk, but it’s perfectly grammatical in Norwegian. Getting used to such sentence construction has heavily influenced the way I write my Viking novels. When I think out a sentence in Norwegian, I sound medieval.
But the old translation had other sins, too, I am informed. Certain passages were bowdlerized, and are now restored in this version. (No doubt another, politically correct, bowdlerization is on its way soon, courtesy of Our Betters. So read this one while we enjoy a season of free speech.)
It’s pointless to criticize Kristin Lavransdatter as a work of art. It’s above my pay grade, and I’ve written much about it before. But I recommend it without reservation.
I shook my head. Lydia studied my face, looking for the lie.
“We’re just looking for answers,” I said.
That part was true—otherwise, I would’ve left this soggy grayscape days ago. Even now, the sun pulled a Houdini and went back to its usual place, shining somewhere over a cornfield in Kansas.
Luke Fischer, hero of Manistique, a Canadian transplant in Mexico, is emphatically not a private eye. But he ends up looking for people anyway. When his friend Franco, who is a private eye, asks him to sit in on a private poker game, he ends up witnessing a shooting. A young woman dies, and there’s talk of missing money. Soon Luke is headed to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (of all places) trying to find the young woman’s father, who is rumored to have stolen a lot of money from some dangerous people.
In Michigan, Luke finds himself teaming up with “Sam,” an attractive female county sheriff. The body count rises steadily as they pursue Luke’s quarry, and when that man is killed, they pursue the killers. The trail will finally lead them all the way to New Mexico.
I very much enjoyed, and positively reviewed, Three-Minute Hero, the book that follows Manistique in the Luke Fischer series (I seem to be reading them in the wrong order). And the virtues of that book were displayed here – colorful hard-boiled prose and strong dialogue.
But the weaknesses were here too – a little more apparently. Chief of these is a certain aimlessness in the plotting. Although there’s plenty of violence in this story – and it’s pretty explosive – one can’t help wondering in the intervals what these people are here for. Luke’s mission is somewhat vague from the start, and even when he’s finished the job he was paid to do, he feels obligated to keep following the money – though he doesn’t seem interested in it for its own sake. It’s something about justice, for people he barely knows. One senses an echo of Carlos Castaneda, too, as he has a mystical conversation on a motel porch with an old man who may or may not exist. Perhaps this is all an existentialist exercise.
I must also confess my slight annoyance at a surrender to current intellectual fashion, evidenced by the inclusion of not one, but two Girl Boss characters – women indistinguishable from men except in their physical appearance, one of whom easily tosses much larger men around a room.
And I have a couple Gun Culture quibbles – a .40 caliber pistol is described as remarkably powerful, and a “silencer” reduces pistol shots to a near-whisper (that’s technology firearms companies would pay good money for, because it doesn’t exist yet).
Author Craig Terlson is now a friend of mine on X, and an entertaining one. I like his writing very much, and all in all I enjoyed Manistique – especially as the story approached its big, climactic showdown. The next book in the series will show considerable improvement, so he’s learning the craft. I recommend this book, in spite of some weaknesses.
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