Fiction, Reviews

‘Very Old Money,’ by Stanley Ellin

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So, thought Mike, if a tree crashes down in Durie Forest with only servants in earshot, does it make any sound? No, it does not.

Working my way through the works of Stanley Ellin, my new enthusiasm, I come to Very Old Money, a rather odd book that’s kind of an Upstairs, Downstairs comedy (or tragedy) of manners, though a murder is involved.

Mike and Amy Lloyd are our main characters; Amy is actually the center of the story. When they lose their jobs teaching at a posh private school, a friend refers them to a placement service that recruits servants for the very rich. The job Mike and Amy get is a strange and challenging one – they are to work for the Durie family, who are “very old money.” The Duries’ wealth goes back to colonial times. To the Duries, the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers are nouveau riche. The Duries do nothing ostentatious. They live in a vast mansion off Fifth Avenue, but they keep out of sight and out of the newspapers.

Mike is to be their chauffeur. Amy is to serve as assistant to the chief housekeeper, and also as a companion to Miss Margaret, the family’s honorary matriarch, who went blind during her youth, when she was a famous beauty and an aspiring painter. Miss Margaret lived in bitter retirement until just recently, when she suddenly took new interest in life. She asked that a companion be hired for her, specifying that the woman must be very tall – which Amy, conveniently, is.

They soon find themselves embroiled in intramural intrigue. The housekeeper instructs Amy to report to her everything Miss Margaret does, while Miss Margaret insists that she tell no one about her secret visits to a hotel, and the cash she regularly withdraws from her bank account. This places Mike and Amy in an increasingly untenable position, but that’s nothing to what’s going to happen when Miss Margaret brings her plans to a conclusion.

Very Old Money is an unusual crime novel, but I enjoyed it quite a lot. Ellin’s writing and characters are consistently superior. I was particularly impressed by the fact that I was sure I knew where the plot was headed, and was completely wrong (as well as somewhat shocked).

Not a book you’re likely to fall in love with, but well worth reading.

Authors, Goofing

‘Wodehouse Playhouse’

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I did a search on YouTube for a BBC comedy program I remember from the 1970s, “Wodehouse Playhouse.” I caught a couple episodes back in the day, on PBS, and I remembered it as somewhat low-budget, but energetic and fun.

I tried this once a couple years ago and only found one episode, which I duly posted on this blog. But now I find that the whole thing is available. The first episode is above.

(There’s another version on YouTube, and it may be better, as it won’t let me post it here. If the quality of this one disappoints, you might search for that other.)

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Eighth Circle,’ by Stanley Ellin

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“Perish the thought,” Ruth said. The tapping of her high heels made a quick obligato to his footsteps as they moved off down the street, and he observed, she walked careful inches apart from him. “Perish radar. Perish everything that does away with witches and warlocks and wonders. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” she singsonged cheerfully, picking her way across a stretch of broken pavement, and then let out a small yelp. “Oh, poor mother! But that wasn’t my fault, was it? There are more cracks than pavement here.”

I have an idea I may have read this book already, many years ago, because one scene in it had stuck in my mind over time – though it’s possible someone else could have written a similar scene in another book. But the name of the author, Stanley Ellin, seemed familiar to me. So I bought The Eighth Circle. And I’m very glad I did. I have a new author for my short shelf of favorites.

The hero of The Eighth Circle (published 1958) is Murray Kirk, proprietor of a high-end New York detective agency. Their approach is pure business – no toughs, no guns, no rough stuff. Just the discreet gathering of sordid information. Murray is a cynic; he’s seen enough private dirt to be convinced that everybody’s corrupt. There is no idealism left in Murray Kirk.

So when a lawyer friend approaches him with a case involving a policeman accused of corruption, Murray isn’t interested at first. Until he catches sight of the lawyer’s beautiful sister, who’s engaged to the accused cop. Murray is suddenly head over heels in love, and he has a plan – take the job, but undercut the case. Prove the cop’s guilt. Then the girl will throw him over, and Murray will be there to comfort her.

But in the event, worldly, disillusioned Murray Kirk has a few things to learn about life and the human heart after all.

The Eighth Circle (the reference is to the eighth circle of Hell, where liars, flatterers, and grifters find their doom) is not only an interesting mystery story, but a very fine novel in its own right. The prose resonates, the characters are complex, and the dialogue sparkles. The ending even surprised me. Reading this book was an unalloyed pleasure, and I recommend it to one and all.

I’m embarrassed I wasn’t better aware of Stanley Ellin – particularly if (as is likely) I’d read this book before. He’s highly regarded by critics, and I’ll be reading more of him.

Music

Friday music: ‘Aura Lea’

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If it’s Friday and I don’t have a completed book to review, I turn to music. I’ve done a lot of Norwegian songs, but I’m running out of ones that are familiar to me (and I have surprisingly little to say about the ones that aren’t familiar to me). So I’m edging into traditional American songs. I don’t think the kids learn them anymore. Stephen Foster’s too racist, and anything written before the 1960s is pretty much assumed to be the same sort of thing.

I don’t think you can really find much fault with Aura Lea, though. A lovely, sentimental song full of longing and nostalgia, and the name “Aura Lea” sings particularly well. It offers a great opportunity for a singer to really open his throat on the long vowel and let go from the diaphragm. Elvis Presley sang the melody, with different lyrics, as “Love Me Tender” in 1956 (I’m old enough to remember when that one was new). “LMT” sings all right too, but I prefer the original.

The lyrics were written by W. W. Fosdick (1825-1862), an American lawyer who had some success as a poet in his day. The melody came from George Rodway Poulton (1828-1867), an English-born American. Neither of the two is remembered today for anything else, except that Poulton was tarred and feathered in 1864 for having an affair with a young student. Wikipedia, my source, does not say whether this trauma contributed to his early death three years later. Fosdick, you’ll note, was already dead by then, without assistance as far as I know.

But the song had, as they say in show business, “legs.” It was published in 1861, right about when the Civil War began. Soldiers on both sides took comfort from its unabashed sentiment, and sang it around their campfires. Minstrel shows featured it. The U.S. Military Academy came up with a song called “Army Blue” to the same tune, and made it a graduating class song.

Aura Lea is lyrical and sentimental and idealized. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong with those things, as well as they’re done well.

(I see that I’ve posted about this song before. Ah well. Have a good weekend.)

Fiction, Reviews

‘Gangster,’ by Dan Willis

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I saw a new book in Dan Willis’s Arcane Casebook series, and recalled that I hadn’t read one in a while. So I bought Gangster. I enjoyed it, until I was reminded why I’d stopped reading the books.

Alex Lockerby, hero of 11 previous novels, is a “runemaster” working in an alternate universe version of New York City, where magic works. Alex designs elaborate runic patterns that do various kinds of magical jobs for people. He’s so successful that some of the most powerful people in the city are his clients, and he’s dating the most feared sorceress in the world.

At the start of Gangster, Dan is framed for the murder of a friend who is a reformed gangster. His influential associates get him released on bail, but he has to figure out who has laid such an elaborate plan to frame him, and why.

Also, somebody is doing duplication magic, turning small bills of currency into large ones. Alex is baffled, because this is a trick he didn’t think was possible, and anybody with such potent magic shouldn’t need to be counterfeiting money. Occasional character Bill Donovan, soon to create the OSS for the government, is hanging around the edges of that mystery.

I’ve tried to figure out why I enjoy Dan Willis’s magical mysteries more than Jim Butcher’s, and I really can’t explain it. I just do.

But – and I’d forgotten this – author Willis has adopted the literary stratagem of ending each book with a cliffhanger. As I’ve frequently told you, I hate cliffhangers. I consider them a breach of the author-reader contract. I’ll admit the major mysteries in this book were explained, but the cases weren’t properly closed. And a new mystery was introduced on the last page, to lure us on to the next book.

Well, I’m not biting. I’m onto you, Dan Willis. If I follow this new thread, it will just lead to another cliffhanger. No sale.

Otherwise, the book was pretty good.

Religion

Very like a straight line

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Photo credit: Wolfgang Hasselmann wolfgang_hasselmann. Unsplash license.

Had a nice day today, but it stretched long, which is why I’m posting late. The board of the Georg Sverdrup Society, whose journal I edit, met in Mankato, Minnesota. And then we were treated to a tour of the archives and museum of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod, on the campus of Bethany Lutheran College in that same town.

There’s probably a lesson in the fact that our different church bodies are the offspring of two opposing sides in 19th Century controversies among Norwegian Lutherans in the U.S., and yet we find ourselves today, if not allies, at least amiable rivals. The ELS is a legacy group out of the old Norwegian Synod, the most conservative and rigidly orthodox of the Norwegian immigrant church bodies. My group, the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations, comes from what was then the liberal, free-wheeling, revivalist Lutheran Free Church. Our spiritual forefathers were bitter enemies who anathematized one another in fiery sermons and editorials. Now we find much to unite us.

That observation is, I suppose, the wrong way to introduce my topic tonight. Because I want to talk about objective truth. Eternal verities that must not be compromised.

Yesterday I described my delight at the new, sharp sight I’m enjoying in my left eye since my cataract surgery, less than a week ago as I write. My drive to Mankato today was along one of my favorite scenic routes in my state, Highway 169 along the Minnesota River valley, through Le Sueur, St. Peter, and Mankato. The skies were clear and colors were bright, and I felt ten years younger than I had a week ago.

But, as I mentioned, I do now have minor retina damage that slightly warps everything I see through that eye. Straight lines no longer look straight to me.

The lesson modern thought would have me learn from this experience is that I should abandon the whole idea of straight lines. Since I can’t see them anymore, obviously they don’t exist for me. We all live in our own reality, and my reality no longer includes straight lines.

I say phooey. I can remember straight lines. I can listen to the testimony of reliable people who talk to me about them. I can study geometry if I care to, and learn all about parallels and right angles and so on.

It’s like that bloody elephant in the famous secular parable. One blind man touches its flank and thinks an elephant is very like a wall. Another touches the trunk, and decides an elephant is very like a snake. And so on. Moderns take all this to mean that elephants don’t exist as such, but are something different for each person.

But the actual point of the parable is that they’re all wrong. What those blind men need to do is to get together and pool their information. After some frank consultation, they’ll probably be able to construct a pretty reasonable description of a whole elephant. If not, they can ask somebody who can see.

Uncategorized

I was (semi) blind, but now I see

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I think I’m in a position to close the book on my cataract ordeal now. For this particular eye, at least. The other will be clouding up in its own time, they assure me.

But I woke this morning to the stunning realization that the vision in that much-abused left eye is crystal clear now. Good as it was even before I tore my retina, back before the cataract grew. Possibly better. Which is delightful.

Except for one small detail, a rather bizarre one.

My vision is warped.

The guy who operated on my retina told me I’d probably never get perfectly clear vision again. The retina, after all, is kind of like a mirror. Break a mirror and glue it back together, and it’ll never quite be the same.

So I was expecting my sight on that side to be a little fuzzy. But it’s not. It’s just warped.

If I look at a straight line, even the line of words in this sentence on the screen, it’s a little… wavy. Just a little.

It doesn’t really interfere with anything. In fact, it’s kind of amusing, like having my own personal funhouse wherever I go.

If I were a sniper, I suppose, it might interfere with my daily life. But I can get by just fine with a little bend in my perception. There are many people around who can testify that my view of the world has always been a little skewed.

Bottom line (it’s a crooked line, but on the bottom): my vision is clear and bright, and I’m extremely grateful to God and modern ophthalmological science. My grandmother had cataract surgery back in the 1960s, and she had to spend weeks in a bed, with sandbags holding her head immobile. Then she had to wear coke-bottle glasses the rest of her life.

Fiction, Reviews

‘How It Happened,’ by Michael Koryta

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As Barrett cast off from the dock and motored away from Port Hope, farther out into the bay, toward the open sea, the morning sun was winning the fight with the fog and the breeze had come to its aid, pushing back the fog in long gusts like strokes of a whisk broom.

This Michael Koryta guy is some kind of writer. I haven’t found a dud from his hand yet. How It Happened is a splendid narrative about an imperfect man struggling to find the truth.

Rob Barrett is an FBI agent. He’s young in terms of experience, but has a reputation as an expert on interrogations. He’s sent to the town of Port Hope, Maine, to try to break a missing persons case, because he spent some time there during his troubled youth.

The two missing are a young couple, Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly. Jackie is the only daughter of a widowed fisherman, and the light of his life. Ian is the son of a prominent local citizen with political pull – which is why the FBI has been called in.

Rob does what he does, and finds a young woman, Kimmy Crepeaux, who admits to participating in the killing of the two young people, and is eaten up with guilt. She names the murderer as a local handyman with an immaculate reputation – though Rob knows him better than most people and considers him a plausible suspect. But Kimmy is a junky and a loser, a person with no credibility. Nevertheless, Rob gets the police busy searching for the bodies where Kimmy said they’d be – and they are not there. Instead, they show up at last 200 miles away. Rob is disgraced, and exiled to “FBI Siberia” in Montana.

But he can’t give it up. There’s more to the case, he’s certain, and he goes back to Port Hope on his own time, determined to discover what really happened. His informants tell him he’s thinking too small, that the case is way bigger than he suspects. Will he be able to handle the truth once he finds it?

I was impressed with the writing in How It Happened. I was impressed with the characters, the dialogue, and the plot. I was impressed by the depth of the author’s compassion. I enjoyed the book more than I can say.

Highly recommended. Cautions for the usual.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lost On a Page,’ by David E. Sharp

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[In case you’ve been wondering how my left eye is doing, post-surgery (cataract), I woke up this morning with clearer vision that I’d had when I went to bed. I believe it’s now better than it was then – but such things are hard to judge when the progress is slow. My retina surgeon led me to believe I’ll have permanent diminished sight, but the cataract guy thought he could restore it substantially. I await the final resolution of this contest of expertise.]

I knew this one was going to be strange, but it looked like it could be fun. And I guess it was, more or less. David E. Sharp’s Lost on a Page is a literary fantasy, in which characters from different genres interact, fighting and making alliances in a struggle against their own authors.

We meet Joe Slade as a hardboiled private eye in a typical urban nighttime setting, when he gets lured into chasing a strange group of people. They lead him into a library (or bookstore, I forget which), and somewhere in a maze of shelves they pass through a portal into a library in another world. There his new acquaintances reveal themselves to be an elf, a dwarf, and a wizardess. They reveal their discovery that they are characters in fictional fantasy stories, and they have decided to invade the World Where Books Are Made, to get revenge on their author for all the awful things he’s put them through. They’ve read Joe’s stories, and consider him just the ally they need for this violent job.

As they jump from fictional universe to fictional universe, they’ll find themselves in a Regency romance, a space travel story, and a zombie apocalypse novel. They’ll learn that there are things that the rules of fiction won’t permit them to do, and that different powers work differently in different worlds. And, of course, love with blossom.

Lost On a Page was a creative and original book, and amusing in places. I enjoyed the author’s self-mockery as the characters complained about their working conditions. However, I think the author also bit off more than he could chew. The book was awfully complicated, with settings and rules changing from scenario to scenario. And the author’s vocabulary wasn’t up to his challenges. For instance, when they jumped into the Regency romance, he tried to adopt the literary style of such books, with unhappy results: “Any afficionado would lecture this was a wine to be savored slowly and to which one should pay great homage.”

I finished the book, but it annoyed me. You might like it, though, especially if you’re a Jasper Fforde fan.

Music, Uncategorized

Post-cataract patriotic stuff

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Here I am, in spite of my augurings yesterday, having risen from a bed of pain just to craft a blog post for you. And you alone. (I think that’s about the total size of our readership.)

I’m happy to report that, in spite of my warnings, I do have the ability to read a computer screen, and am capable of posting in a languid, invalid fashion. (I heard that! Somebody said, “How will that be any different?”)

I can report, since I know you’ve been holding your breath about it, that my cataract surgery went just fine. Everything looks good. I did not acquire immediate clear vision in my affected eye; they tell me that’ll probably take two or three days in my case. But everything seems to be squared away, ship shape and Bristol fashion. Thank you for your prayers.

Tomorrow is Independence Day. Hence, I post above the classic movie performance of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” by that noted Norwegian-American actor, James Cagney. (Seriously. His mother’s father was a Norwegian sea captain.)

Have a free and brave Fourth!

Book Reviews, Creative Culture