Sometimes I read a book and I think, “This writer is following a formula.” Following a formula can even work, depending on how the writer fills in the blanks.
One Wilde Night by Patrick Logan works, but only on a technical level.
Tommy Wilde, our hero, has a PhD in biochemistry, but ended up running a crime scene clean-up business. He works mostly at night. He’s training a new employee one night when he gets a call for help from his loser brother Brian, a drug addict. Tommy runs to meet him – at their church – where Brian is panicking over the body of a drug dealer. The dealer – Brian says – just dropped dead. Not his fault.
Due to an overwhelming sense of obligation, Tommy helps Brian dispose of the body, while eluding the drug dealer’s associates. Or so he thinks. In fact, this is just the beginning of a long, long night in which Tommy will be beaten up, kidnapped, threatened and physically mutilated.
There’s a template for writing a thriller. Start by putting your character in a bad situation, then make it steadily worse. Turn every step forward into two steps back.
Author Logan dutifully follows this template. The problem is that at some point, if you raise the stakes enough, you start losing credibility. Everybody has bad nights, but nobody’s nights go that bad in this many ways. This is the sort of story logic you find in a thriller movie, but in a book the audience has more time to reflect and ask themselves, “Do I believe this?”
Even worse, One Wilde Night never really resolves any of Tommy’s problems. It ends in a cliff-hanger. In other words, what we have here isn’t even a whole story. It’s just the first chapter of a story.
And sure enough, there’s a whole series of Tommy Wilde stories to follow.
But I ain’t reading them.
I should note that the church and their priest come out looking good here, so the author at least seems friendly to Christianity. However, he also drops a whole lot of f-bombs.
Well, that was an experience. I went ahead and followed my instinct to download George du Maurier’s novel Trilby, based on my weird fascination with the old John Barrymore movie, “Svengali.” I wasn’t prepared for the degree to which the book would grab me. It was one of those “hard to put it down” reading experiences.
My shame is great at being taken in like this by a Victorian bestseller, and not even a mystery or an adventure tale! A love melodrama, of all things.
Most oddly of all, though Trilby fascinated me, I can’t really recommend it to our readers. I have several objections to the thing.
As you may (or may not) be aware, Trilby is a story mostly about the lives of artists in Paris’ Latin Quarter in the 1850s. This novel’s extreme popularity established that time and place forever in the public mind as a colorful, freethinking milieu. Three British painters – the big war veteran Taffy, the jolly Laird, and the young, innocent Little Billee, share an atelier. There they meet a charming young woman, Trilby O’Ferrall, who is of Irish/Scottish parentage but has spent all her life in Paris. She works as an artist’s model and a washer woman. She’s beautiful, unaffected, uninhibited, and charming. They all fall in love with her to some extent, but Little Billee does most of all. However, he can’t handle the fact that she does nude modeling (“for the altogether,” as she puts it. This is where our phrase “in the altogether” originates), and is not chaste. In spite of his religious freethinking (much is made of that), he’s basically an upper middle-class boy.
Another member of their circle, though generally unwelcome, is Svengali, a Polish Jew and a brilliant musician. Svengali can play any instrument beautifully, except for his own voice. When he hears Trilby’s voice, he’s intrigued, but he soon learns that, though the sound itself is magnificent, she is utterly tone-deaf.
Eventually Billee overcomes his scruples and proposes marriage to Trilby. She agrees reluctantly. Although she reciprocates his love, she understands their social differences would doom their marriage. Soon after, Billee’s mother and sister come to visit, and his mother has a talk with Trilby, who agrees to break the engagement and disappears. Billee then suffers a breakdown which marks the end of his time in Paris. But his talent has now been recognized, and when he recovers, back in England, he is a famous and sought-after man.
Five years later, he, Taffy, and the Laird have a reunion in Paris. They’re surprised to learn that their old acquaintance Svengali is now the talk of Europe. He is famous as the manager of his beautiful wife, “la Svengali,” said to have the most ravishing voice in the world. The trio get tickets to her concert, and are almost – not quite – certain that la Svengali is in fact their old friend Trilby, whom they’d thought dead. When by chance they encounter the Svengali carriage on the street, both their old acquaintances pretend not to know them.
From there it all rolls on to a tragic conclusion, more drawn-out than in the film.
I said, in discussing the movie, that the cinematic Trilby reminds me of a girl I once cared about. It disturbed me, as I read, that Trilby in the book was even more like the girl I knew than the actress (though my girl did not share Trilby’s sexual mores). On top of that, elements in the story took me back to my college days. I think it was a feeling that, in some ways, I was reading about my own life that gripped me as I read Trilby.
But you, Kind Reader, never knew that girl. And you (probably) weren’t there when I was in college. So I have no reason to think you’d react to this book as I did.
For one thing, it’s Victorian literature – that is to say, overwritten. Du Maurier isn’t a horrible over-writer like so many Victorians; often he can be amusing in his frequent digressions. (By the way, there’s a lot of French dialogue in this book, so it helps if you have decent French. Which I don’t). But he does take his time telling the story. This isn’t just a narrative; it’s sort of a leisurely travelogue.
But my main objections are moral and theological. This was a somewhat scandalous book in its time – “Read about all the naughty things they get up to in Paris!” Trilby isn’t a virgin for much the same reason that a girl in the South Sea islands wouldn’t be a virgin. It’s alien to her culture. Du Maurier may have been challenging Victorian sexual mores here, but he keeps it oblique.
Much worse is the antisemitism. A lot has been written over the years about Svengali as a Jewish stereotype. Which he certainly is. He’s arrogant, selfish, grasping, and filthy (an odd accusation to make against any Jew, when you think about it). The passages concerning Svengali are frankly horrifying. However, fortunately, Svengali isn’t in the book as much as in the movie.
It should also be noted that there are several Jewish characters in Trilby, and the others are rather nice.
Even worse, from my perspective, are the theological digressions. The author takes several opportunities to have his characters contemplate – or discover – the complete absurdity of Christian doctrine. Everyone who thinks about it (in this book) soon agrees that the Judeo-Christian God is ridiculous and there is no Hell to fear. Either everyone is saved or everyone just goes to sleep. Nothing to worry about, as long as you do good.
So I don’t really know what to tell you about Trilby. It might fascinate you as it fascinated me. Very likely it won’t. If you do read it, you’ll have to wade through some nasty spots, but there are also many rewards.
The city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, settled by Britons in 1749, has always held an important role in maritime trade. The video above describes the remarkable story of the horrific disaster that destroyed one square mile of the port city and damaged other communities miles away. Thousands were killed and injured by the results of the largest man-made explosion prior to December 6, 1917, when the Mont-Blanc destroyed Halifax.
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.]
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.
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.
“O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus” sung by the congregation of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California
This moving hymn feels like watching an ocean roll, as the metaphor goes. Its slow statement Christ’s profound love can be happy and ecstatic, but it’s in daily living, in common struggle, and in grief that we can feel the soul-stirring depth of his unchanging love for us.
Samuel Trevor Francis (1834-1925), a London businessman, wrote the words. Welshman Thomas John Williams (1869-1944) wrote the melody. Williams was an insurance salesman, so this popular hymn comes to us from the business sect of Christendom.
1 O the deep, deep love of Jesus! Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free, rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me. Underneath me, all around me, is the current of thy love; leading onward, leading homeward, to thy glorious rest above.
2 O the deep, deep love of Jesus! Spread his praise from shore to shore; how he loveth, ever loveth, changeth never, nevermore; how he watches o’er his loved ones, died to call them all his own; how for them he intercedeth, watcheth o’er them from the throne.
3 O the deep, deep love of Jesus! Love of ev’ry love the best: ’tis an ocean vast of blessing, ’tis a haven sweet of rest. O the deep, deep love of Jesus! ‘Tis a heav’n of heav’ns to me; and it lifts me up to glory, for it lifts me up to thee.
Last week, an independent bookstore in Chicago splashed up attention for many Twitter users with a tweet complaining about a customer who wanted to rent rather than buy some expensive books. Rebecca George, a co-owner of Volumes Bookcafe in Chicago’s Wicker Park, wrote in Jan 9 tweet: “Turns out one of our biggest sales last month was for the person to stage their home for the holidays and now they want to return them all. Please don’t do this to a small business, people. That one sale was a third of our rent.”
The books were eye-catching art and cook book, no doubt published to show off the reader’s good taste. The most modest book in the set was entitled Authenticity: The Vain Attempt at Finding the Real You. (I’m sorry. I made that up.)
The tweet has been seen almost seven million times and picked up by news outlets, making January a very good month for sales by good-hearted book-buyers showing their sympathy.
What else is online?
Reading Good Books: An essential freedom that builds character more than we know. “American kids, more than ever, are stratified into those who read—those who have regular access to books—and those who don’t. I’m not talking here about basic literacy, but being open to the human good that is the enjoyment of literature.”
Kristin Lavransdatter at 100.Sigrid Undset wrote a “medieval romance in the twentieth century (published between 1920 and 1922), [and] she somehow reverses a thousand years of morbidity, bringing a long dead genre back to life. . . . Kristin Lavransdatter is really just a love story—but one of the most savagely honest love stories ever written.”
Mystery: All About Agatha is a podcast that has read all of Agatha Christie’s novels, discussed them, and ranked them against each other. I look forward to looking up All Hallow’s Eve to see if they place it within the worst five.
Writing: Backstory brings characters to life, making them appear as real people, except when it floods the reader with irrelevant details. So it’s a very good, except when it isn’t.
Terry Teachout: The New York art critic died last year on Jan. 13. Patrick Kurp calls that fact “comparably difficult to believe. It’s like saying France no longer exists. Seldom in my experience was so prominent and successful a writer so generous with his success.”
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.
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.
