“It is possible, my lord, if your lordship will excuse my saying so, that the liveliness of your lordship’s manner may be misleading to persons of limited—”
“Be careful, Bunter!”
“Limited imagination, my lord.”
“Well-bred English people never have imagination, Bunter.”
“Certainly not, my lord. I meant nothing disparaging.”
I was first introduced to Lord Peter Wimsey through the BBC production of Clouds of Witness (the subject, in its book form, of this review) broadcast on Masterpiece Theatre back in 1973, with the irresistible Ian Carmichael starring. (He didn’t actually resemble the character described in the books, but once seen, he’s impossible to get rid of.)
Clouds of Witness is one of those stories where coincidence and withheld information combine to confuse a fairly simple problem. Lord Peter Wimsey is in Paris, on his way home from a holiday in Corsica, when he learns that his brother Gerald, Duke of Denver, has been arrested for murder.
The fatal events occurred at a hunting lodge in Yorkshire, where the duke and his family and friends were staying. Denis Cathcart, a slightly-too-smooth young gentleman to whom Peter’s sister Mary is engaged, is discovered in the early hours of the morning, shot to death outside the conservatory. Sir Gerald is standing over him.
Mary claims she was awakened by a gunshot, which is a lie, since the shot had been fired more than an hour earlier. Gerald refuses to explain what he was doing outside at that hour.
Sir Gerald’s lawyer, at his client’s wishes, plans to base his defense on reasonable doubt; the gunshot wound could reasonably have been self-inflicted. But Lord Peter, when he shows up, is determined to get past the intersecting lies and discover what really happened. The true murderer must not be allowed to escape. The investigation will lead him to be shot at, to nearly drown in a Yorkshire bog, and to risk his life on a trans-Atlantic airplane flight in a storm (this story is set in 1920, you must remember).
Clouds of Witness is not Dorothy Sayers at the height of her powers, but it’s a fascinating and original detective problem, enjoyable and well worth reading. I particularly enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek descriptions of the English nobility and their quaint customs.
“…You want to look dignified and consistent—what’s that got to do with it? You want to hunt down a murderer for the sport of the thing and then shake hands with him and say, ‘Well played—hard luck—you shall have your revenge tomorrow!’ Well, you can’t do it like that. Life’s not a football match. You want to be a sportsman. You can’t be a sportsman. You’re a responsible person.”
“I don’t think you ought to read so much theology,” said Lord Peter. “It has a brutalizing influence.”
It had been a while since I’d read any of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey books. Two collections showed up at bargain prices on Amazon recently, so I snapped them up. Then I settled down with the first novel, Whose Body?The author was still finding her voice as a mystery writer here, but it’s a very enjoyable read.
Lord Peter Wimsey, if you’re not familiar with him, is an English nobleman, the younger brother of a duke. He suffered “combat fatigue” in World War I, and immediately after was jilted by his fiancée. He took up detecting crime as a sort of therapy hobby, and is good at it. His success is aided by the fact that he looks and acts very much like Bertie Wooster (Ian Carmichael played both roles creditably), so people underestimate him. (His valet Bunter, by the way, is hard to distinguish from Jeeves.)
When the man who is repairing the church roof at the Wimsey ducal estate is detained by the police, the dowager duchess turns to her son Peter to figure out what’s really going on. The poor workman walked into his bathroom one morning and found a dead man in his tub, naked except for a pair of pince nez glasses. Inspector Sugg of Scotland Yard (a stereotypical character whom the author wisely faded out of succeeding books) loses no time arresting the poor man and his housemaid.
Meanwhile, a well-known Jewish financier, Sir Reuben Levy, seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. He bore a superficial resemblance to the mysterious body in the bath, but is not the same man.
Lord Peter, assisted by his good friend Inspector Parker, takes advantage of the considerable license the police authorities allow the nobility, and starts his own investigation. It will lead to a horrible discovery and a terrible revelation.
Whose Body? is an enjoyable introduction to a stellar (and groundbreaking) detective series. I was particularly intrigued, on this reading, by certain instances of what today we’d call “cultural stereotypes.” Sir Reuben Levy’s description sounds like a standard, slightly antisemitic trope. But the author is delving deeper. We learn from those who knew him that the man was in fact a capital fellow, and much loved. The same goes for an American character who talks in the kind of broad American accent one sees so often (painfully) in old English books. But again, on getting to know him, we learn he’s an admirable guy. I’ve heard Sayers criticized for “snobbery,” but I think it’s deeper than that. She uses the stereotypes in order to transcend them, and makes a subtextual statement in doing so (Hey! I used subtextual in a sentence!)
I highly recommend Whose Body? Not only is it an intriguing, well-plotted mystery, but there are few literary pleasures that compare with listening to Lord Peter talk piffle.
Jamie: [in English] It’s my favorite time of day, driving you. Aurelia: [in Portuguese] It’s the saddest part of my day, leaving you.
Jared C. Wilson has a new book out called, Love Me Anyway: How God’s Perfect Love Fills Our Deepest Longing. The quote above from the movie Love, Actually doesn’t make it into the book, but many song lyrics do as Jared plays with popular sentiments on his way to expounding God’s marvelous love.
“Think of what love might result if we all put each other’s interests ahead of our own. We’d find ourselves in a beautiful stalemate.”
“Most of us are prepared to love others only up to the point where it begins to actually cost us.”
Actively suppressing our self-interest out of concern for God and each other would certainly rework how we live in society. And they thought Christians were weird before.
Long ago, when his career was young, Bernard Cornwell used to write mysteries set in the yachting world. I found some of them in a public library (in Florida, as I recall), and enjoyed them very much. Cornwell stopped writing them because they weren’t selling, and went on to write historical epics, winning fame and fortune. But I’ve often mourned those sailing stories.
So when I saw a bargain on Killer Aboard, by Sean Blaise, about murder on a trans-Atlantic sailing voyage, I grabbed it up, hoping for the same kind of magic.
I was disappointed.
The hero of Killer Aboard is John Otter, who usually works as a skipper of yachts for the wealthy. But he’s bored with that, looking for something more elemental. When he hears of an English university program that would have him captaining a crew including several students who’ll be learning as they go, it seems like just the challenge he’s been looking for, and he signs up. The voyage begins in South Africa.
Among the sailors are the university instructor, who thinks she ought to command the ship, a South African on the run from loan sharks, and several university students whose true motivation is not educational, but a treasure hunt involving Napoleon’s (empty) tomb when they stop over on the island of St. Helena. By the time they leave St. Helena, a local will have been murdered (unknown to Capt. Otter), and the students will be bound in a deadly pact of silence. Then there’s a murder. Then the great storm hits and all the communications equipment is fried.
I had two problems with Killer Aboard. One was the weak writing. Author Blaise’s diction is often awkward, and he never knows where to place his commas. My second problem was the hero. John Otter is not, it seems to me, a very good commander. He commands as I would in his place (I’d be a bad commander too), letting discipline slide until it’s too late. He knows and cites the proper principles – start out like a dictator so there’ll be no question when things get rough – but he doesn’t follow them.
Once the storm comes up and things get hairy, the book does its job as a thriller. But I wasn’t happy about it all, and don’t recommend it.
Captain McGee. Private cruises. Personalized therapy. And a little twinge of pain when the plane took off, pain for McGee, because she was too close to what-might-have-been. If there’s no pain and no loss, it’s only recreational and we can leave it to the minks. People have to be valued.
In 1963, Fawcett Publications (which began, as I’ve told you before, in Robbinsdale, Minn., the town where I live, but had by this time been in New York state for decades) faced a business crisis. Fawcett was one of the pioneers in the field of “paperback originals” – novels published specifically for the paperback market, generally sensational and lowbrow in character. Their most popular writer was Richard S. Prather, author of a series of racy hard-boileds starring a randy private eye named Shell Scott. Prather had received an irresistible offer from Pocket Books, and was jumping over to their house. Fawcett desperately needed a new series detective.
In a moment of sanity (fairly rare in publishers) they turned to one of their most dependable and talented writers, John D. MacDonald. “Give us a series hero,” they said.
MacDonald’s response was a character he planned to call Dallas McGee. Dallas would be a lanky beach bum, living on a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Instead of a private eye, he would call himself a “salvage specialist.” When people were robbed or cheated out of valuable possessions or large sums of money, they could go to McGee. He would try to retrieve them, and if he succeeded he got to keep half.
Fawcett green-lighted the project, and McDonald quickly churned out several short novels starring Dallas McGee to launch the series rapidly. They were nearly ready to release the first one when disaster struck – inconvenience for Fawcett, but tragedy for the nation. Pres. John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22. Everyone understood that it would be very poor taste to offer a series hero named Dallas in the present atmosphere. They consulted with the author and settled on a new name – Travis McGee. The pages were all re-set, and the first book, The Deep Blue Goodbye, appeared in early 1964.
Not long ago, a sale price showed up for the e-book version of Nightmare in Pink, the second offering in the series. I figured, “Why not? Let’s see how it holds up.”
I was amazed how much I enjoyed it.
Travis McGee, it is explained, is a veteran of the Korean War. One day during the war, his buddy Mike Gibson was substituting for McGee while he was on leave. Mike came under attack, and ended up crippled and blinded. Today he lives in a VA hospital. McGee visits him from time to time. Now he’s facing life-threatening surgery. He has a favor to ask.
His sister Nina, he says, is a commercial artist in Manhattan. She’s gotten engaged to a businessman, an investment broker. Would McGee check the guy out, see if he’s kosher?
McGee can’t say no. But by the time he’s arrived, the issue seems moot. Nina’s fiancé is dead, victim of an apparent mugging. Only the evidence doesn’t add up. When McGee starts poking around his life and his associations, it looks as if he suspected some crooked goings-on. Could he have been murdered to keep him quiet?
As McGee slips into a relationship with Nina (no surprise there), he also steps on some trip wires, alerting people who are very powerful and very ruthless, who will not hesitate to destroy both him and his new girl.
I had a strange sensation as I read Nightmare in Pink. A clarity, a cleanness I don’t experience with most contemporary novels, even ones with better sexual morals. It was a feeling something like stepping out of a smoke-filled room into the fresh outdoor air.
What Nightmare in Pink was not polluted with was Wokeness. Travis McGee came before men felt obligated to be apologetic about being men. He’s proud to be a man, comfortable in his masculinity. He likes women and they like him. I read books like these to live vicariously, and Travis McGee offers a mainline shot of pure, vicarious testosterone.
I’ve often written about my pleasure in hard-boiled narration. McGee does hard-boiled narration, but in his own way. Instead of the jewel-like aphorisms you find in Raymond Chandler, MacDonald’s McGee offers thoughtful meditations. He makes observations of the world, of humanity, and right and wrong. I don’t always agree with him, but there’s more genuine thought going on here than you’d expect in a straight-to-paperback potboiler from Fawcett.
In short, I had a blast with Nightmare in Pink, and recommend the whole series (though I consider the e-books a little overpriced).
[The book has a new introduction by Lee Child which does little to advance MacDonald criticism, in my opinion. His best argument to persuade modern people to read the books seems to be that MacDonald was ecologically aware. That’s true, but misleading. Current environmentalism tends to the Luddite side, and MacDonald was no Luddite. He had a business degree, and sympathetic businessmen are not rare in his books.]
However, the current president of South Korea Moon Jae-in works against that hope. From the transcript:
Gordon G. Chang is a China analyst and author of The Coming Collapse of China. He thinks that Moon’s hard-left economic policies and his history suggest that he really wants to establish socialism in a unified Korea. He’s limited because South Korea has a democratic government.
CHANG: But if he could do what he wants to do he would formally merge South Korea and North Korea and I think he would impose a strict socialism in the South so it would be a very different South Korea. It wouldn’t be a democracy, it wouldn’t be a free market society, it would resemble in many respects what we see today in North Korea.
What’s more, Chang says, Moon hopes to align this unified Korea with China.
CHANG: Moon Jae-in, if it were up to him, he would end the alliance with United States, throw out American troops, and essentially become a satellite of China.
My long automotive nightmare is over. I find it almost impossible to believe. I’d grown accustomed over the last 3 ½ months to thinking of my old PT Cruiser as a long-ago dream, like lost love or a chance to play Hamlet. But it happened at last, though not without drama. (I was sure I had a picture of my car I could post here, but it appears I don’t. Don’t want to take one now, because it’s been sitting in a lot all summer and looks kind of grungy. Imagine, if you will, a white PT Cruiser with woody panels.)
The call came just after 7:00 this morning. The lady at the auto shop said my car was done and ready to pick up. She said they’d actually gotten a call the other day from the supplier, saying we’d have to wait another two weeks, but (as usual) they didn’t know what they were talking about. The part (a shifter cable) showed up yesterday, and they’d installed it and it was working.
I drove over, submitted my credit card, and got my keys back. The bill was steep – north of $1200. I have the money, thanks to the Lord’s provision, but it would put a big dent in my bank account.
The next step was to install new license plates. They’d actually expired back in July – not merely the tabs, but the metal plates themselves. I’d brought a screwdriver, but I found the screws were corroded, and some of them wouldn’t move at all. Finally got a mechanic (a young woman, just to make it humiliating) to do the job for me.
Then I discovered that the radio didn’t work anymore. I don’t know what it is about this garage and car radios – the one in the loaner I’d been driving didn’t work either. A guy checked the fuses, said they seemed all right. He’d have to take the dashboard off and check the ground wire. Couldn’t do it right away, could I bring it back at 1:00 this afternoon?
I took the car home, then drove it back at the time appointed. This time, thankfully, it didn’t take too long. He said it was a fuse after all. The diagram in the car, he said, was wrong. I said I wasn’t in the least surprised.
I was glad to have my wheels back, but sad about the cost. And what do you know? I opened my mail today, and there was a property tax refund from the state, covering the bulk of the bill.
Proof that God lets His rain fall upon the unjust.
It is a childish game I have always played and have never been able to resist—a game of arranging life, whenever possible, in a series of scenes that make perfect first-act or third-act curtains.
Wikipedia’s biographical article on Moss Hart, author of the autobiography, Act One, includes what seems to me a very telling detail. In the book, Hart describes his relationship with his aunt Kate, an eccentric semi-delusional who fancied herself a grand dame. She shamelessly sponged off her family, dressed in an affected “fashionable” style assembled from other people’s cast-offs, and was devoted to her nephew Moss. It was she who introduced him to the theater (cheap seats, of course), and who nurtured his fascination with that world. In the book, Hart tells how Aunt Kate died, tragically, while his first produced play was in rehearsals. She never knew of it, because he’d saved it as a surprise.
In actual fact, according to Wikipedia, Aunt Kate lived on for some time, becoming increasingly eccentric. Finally she turned on her nephew, breaking in on his play rehearsals and wrecking scenery. Once she set a fire backstage.
Now that I’ve finished Act One, it seems clear why Hart “edited” this scene of his life. The whole book is a lesson in storytelling. The truth spoiled the mood of the act, so he fixed it, as a good playwright does.
Moss Hart was born into an impoverished Jewish family in New York City (not apparently a religious family – they celebrate Christmas and he speaks occasionally of his love for lobster). His immigrant grandfather had come from a prosperous English family, but broke with them and emigrated. When his profession (cigar making) fell to automation, he was left without a living, a severe humiliation. Young Moss was the child on whom he lavished his attention. After his death, Aunt Kate took his place.
Thanks to Aunt Kate, Moss knew he wanted to be part of the theater, a ticket out of the poverty he hated, though he wasn’t sure what he’d do in the business. He tried, and abandoned, acting. Eventually he and a friend took jobs as social directors at a Jewish “summer camp,” an established cultural tradition in those days. These jobs were mostly about arranging entertainment, and Moss learned a lot, eventually becoming the best paid social director in the old “Borscht Belt.” But then he came up with an idea for his first comedy. Without his knowledge, a friend sent the play to the Broadway producer Sam Harris, who amazed him by calling him to ask if he’d mind collaborating with George S. Kaufman to bring the play up to professional standards.
George S. Kaufman was like a god to Hart. The rest of the book is a journey through the writing and production process for that single play. They “fixed it,” and tried it out in Atlantic City. The audience liked the first act, but it went downhill from there. Convinced they still have a salvageable show, the pair plunge into re-write after re-write, as out-of-town audiences continue to fail to find it funny. Then Kaufman gives up. Hart despairs. And then he has an inspiration and persuades Kaufman to give it one last re-write before the New York opening in four days. Then the big payoff.
Act One is a brilliant drama, disguised as an autobiography. I’m not sure how much to trust it in terms of facts, in light of the Aunt Kate episode, but the mechanics of storytelling are exemplified beat for beat, and they work wonderfully. Act One is a fascinating, amusing, bittersweet and ultimately triumphant personal story. It’s a masterful short course in plotting for a writer in any discipline.
It’ll be a day or two until my next book review. I’m reading Act One, the autobiography of Moss Hart, the renowned Broadway playwright and director. It came up as a bargain e-book on Amazon, and it’s about two things I like – writing and the theater. It is an interesting book, and I’ll have much to say about it when I’ve finished reading.
The book was made into a biographical movie in 1963. I didn’t see it, of course (we rarely saw movies in our family), but I caught part of it on TV at some point over the years. My perception of the film (which got mediocre reviews) is marked by an article I saw in Parade Magazine at the time of the release. At least I’m pretty sure the article was about this movie. There’s a scene that exactly corresponds to what it described.
According to the article, when they were casting the parts of famous people who only appear briefly, they hired some of those people’s actual children to play them. I’m pretty sure a son of Robert Benchley played him in the scene where there’s a gathering in George S. Kaufman’s apartment. (Might have been Nathaniel, but I can find no mention of it online). There were others as well — I forget who. IMDb says nothing about this casting gimmick, but I like to believe I remember correctly.
There’s a formula in the movie business, I read somewhere: “When you’re casting famous real-life characters, the smaller the part, the more they must resemble the person they’re playing.”
That sounds paradoxical, but it makes sense in practice. When you’re dealing with a lead, you’ve got the whole length of the production to convince the audience that (taking an example purely at random) Kyle MacLachlan is Franklin Roosevelt. But when you bring somebody on for a minute as, oh, Humphrey Bogart, you don’t want the viewer to be diverted from following the story to ask, “Is that supposed to be Bogey?”
The movie that jumps to my mind when I consider this rule is “The Plainsman,” a 1936 film by Cecil B. DeMille, which stars Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok. Except in height, Coop bears no resemblance whatever to Hickok. His nose is the wrong shape, his hair is way too short, and there’s no mustache at all (Hollywood, after World War I, adopted a long-standing tradition of erasing almost all mustaches from historical characters. Only the Hippie Era shook them off it). But Buffalo Bill Cody wears the proper long hair and imperial goatee. As does General Custer.
I’m not sure how they managed to preserve Buffalo Bill’s beard and hair style in 1944’s movie, “Buffalo Bill,” starring Joel McCrae. But they got away with it. I suppose Buffalo Bill’s appearance was so iconic they couldn’t escape it.
Note to future producers: If a movie is ever made of my life, you have my permission to cast somebody thinner and taller to play me. But you need to keep the pigtail in the older scenes.
I didn’t grow up here, but when you come to stay in L.A. it adopts you. It’s a wild crazy aunt of a town, dressed up in boas and bangles and laughing too loud, sometimes getting angry for no apparent reason and throwing a screaming fit, only to calm down and pull you in for a forgiving embrace even though you haven’t done anything to be forgiven for.
I genuinely love James Scott Bell’s Mike Romeo novels. As I’ve said too many times already, there aren’t a lot of Christian writers today who can write a story worthy to play with the big kids in the industry. Bell’s books are that good, and they manage to keep the language mostly PG. Mike Romeo is a particularly interesting hero, a genius, a Harvard drop-out, a martial arts expert and former cage fighter. He’s on a spiritual journey, facilitated now by his new employer, a disabled Jewish lawyer named Ira for whom he serves as investigator.
As Romeo’s Town opens, Mike rescues a clerk in a bookstore from a knife-wielding attacker, braining him with a large volume on Shakespeare by Harold Bloom. Almost predictably, it’s Mike who ends up in trouble with the law. Then he and Ira go to see a new client, a teenaged boy attending an elite private school, who has confessed to dealing drugs. His mother, who hired them, thinks the boy is covering for another student. Mike’s investigation (punctuated by frequent fights, sometimes to the death) leads him into the intersection between the social elite and the narcotics rackets. With some nasty surprises for him personally. Plus a reunion with the love of his life.
Mike Romeo is a fascinating character, and (in my opinion) author Bell does hard-boiled narration better than anybody writing today, but with a sly personal slant. Highly recommended.
