Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis by Robert M. Edsel

This book was one of the selections I read for the Kimbell Museum’s book club. The group had a lively discussion; this is an important book and very dense. The discussion didn’t cover every issue I would have like it to do, but time is always a consideration.

I must confess that I was crying much of the time I was reading this book due to the intensity of the writing and the story Edsel was telling. I was fortunate enough to have been able to visit Florence and Siena a few years ago. If you have been to the Uffizzi Gallery, the Pitti Palace, the Santa Maria Novella Basilica, or any of the other notable sites in Florence or have been to Rome, Pisa, or Milan, you will appreciate the work the Monuments Men did during World War II to save the art and architecture so elemental to Western Civilization. If these men and women had not acted to save the paintings, sculptures, and buildings, the West – the world – would have been a very different, much culturally poorer place.

The “Monuments Men,” were a group of approximately 345 men and women from thirteen nations who comprised the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) section under the Civil Affairs and Military Government Sections of the Allied armies during World War II. Many were museum directors, curators, art historians, artists, architects, and educators. Together they worked to protect monuments and other cultural treasures from the destruction of World War II. In the last year of the war, they tracked, located, and in the years that followed returned more than five million artistic and cultural items stolen by Hitler and the Nazis. Their role in preserving cultural treasures was without precedent.

Saving Italy focuses on two Monuments Men, artist Deane Keller and scholar Fred Hartt, as they struggle to protect and save some of the world’s masterpieces, including Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper and Michelangelo’s David.

When Hitler’s armies occupied Italy in 1943, they also seized control of Western civilization’s greatest cultural treasures. As they had done throughout Europe, the Nazis plundered the masterpieces of the Renaissance, the treasures of the Vatican, and the antiquities of the Roman Empire.

On the eve of the Allied invasion, General Dwight Eisenhower created the Monuments Men to protect these historic riches. In May 1944, Keller and Hartt began the treasure hunt of a lifetime, tracking billions of dollars of missing art, including works by Michelangelo, Donatello, Titian, Caravaggio, and Botticelli.
Robert M. Edsel, who lives in Dallas and has praised the Kimbell Museum, has also written Rescuing Da Vinci and The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History. He is the co-producer of the documentary film, The Rape of Europa, and Founder and President of the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art. Academy Award winner George Clooney will direct and star in a film based on The Monuments Men, which is set for theatrical release in December 2013.

Eisenhower is to be credited with establishing the Monuments Men. Their efforts to save such important cultural icons bring to mind the lack of foresight and planning to protect the art and artifacts that were looted and destroyed when we invaded Iraq. In my opinion, there was little thought involved at all when we began that war. Also, the conflict in Syria is jeopardizing that country’s cultural treasures. Similar situations exist in other parts of the world. Our collective history should be protected for future generations.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in art preservation, World War II, and the lessons we need to take from history.

Note: As of 10/23/13 –
‘The Monuments Men’ Delayed to 2014
George Clooney won’t have a chance to charm Oscar voters this year after all. His World War II drama The Monuments Men has been pushed back to 2014, the actor said Tuesday. Originally slated to be released on December 18, the move makes it ineligible for the 2014 Academy Awards. Clooney said the film’s visual effects could not be completed in time for the December release date. “If any of the effects looked cheesy, the whole movie would be cheesy,” Clooney told the Los Angeles Times. Clooney directed and stars in the film, which tells the story of artists, museum curators, and academics attempting to rescue paintings from the Nazis.
From the Los Angeles Times

Hammett by Joe Gores

When I discovered this novel, I jumped on it. I don’t know how I missed it. I very much enjoy humorous mysteries; I have read 32 Cadillacs and a couple of Joe Gores’s other DKA novels. This book was no disappointment; Gores is a masterful novelist. If Hammett has any appeal to you, read this book.
Gores wrote that “I didn’t start out to be a mystery writer.” http://www.mysterynet.com/books/testimony/why-i-write-mysteries-joe-gores/

It is lucky for us that that is what he became.

Joe Gores was a three-time Edgar Award winner, and only one of three authors (the other two being Donald E. Westlake and William L. DeAndrea) to receive Edgars in three separate categories. He was recognized for his novels Hammett, Spade & Archer (the 2009 prequel to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon) and his Edgar Award-winning or -nominated works, such as A Time of Predators, 32 Cadillacs and Come Morning.

In his web posting, “Why I Write Mysteries,” he relates:
In 1955, Stanford University refused me a Master’s Degree in English Literature because my proposed Thesis was on the novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. “Since these novels are not literature,” they said, “obviously graduate theses cannot be written about them.” That is, if fiction is fun to read, it is mere escapist fare.

[I] discovered that the mystery is the only fiction genre that lets you write anything you want while demanding a form that makes you tell a story people want to read.

So I write my mysteries for pleasure, mine and I hope yours, and for money.

I think that this prejudice against mysteries has declined, although not completely. In a teaching job interview not too long ago, I was asked what novel had I read recently that I had enjoyed. The title that popped into my mind, out of all the books I had read in the past few weeks, was a mystery. Interestingly, the interviewer knew the book, and we talked about it. Later, I thought that maybe I should have mentioned another book because, well, is mystery literature? It is, as far as I am concerned!

Gores explains much better than I can the appeal of the type of mystery I prefer:
The opening line of “Gone Girl” [a short story Ross Macdonald wrote, featuring an early incarnation of private eye Lew Archer. The piece was written in the 1950s.] was ‘I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood,’” Gores recalls. “And I thought ‘My God, that is the way I want to write! . . . That kind of tightness, that kind of directness, no nonsense, no navelgazing. You are in there to create vivid characters who are doing extremely interesting things and that’s it.”
http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=30219

I have little patience for the type of mystery that involves the detective’s personal life. As I mentioned in another blog, this refers to such writers as Sarah Paretsky, Rita Mae Brown, and Sue Grafton. Unfortunately, this seems to be a fault of women mystery writers. But I generalize…

Hammett is excellent. I could have been reading Dashiell himself. The setting, the plot, the dialogue, the prose – all tone-perfect. Hammett, when published in 1975, was well-received as a fictionalized version of the adventures of Samuel Dashiell Hammett. Wim Wenders directed the movie version in 1982, which I’ll have to try to find. Decades later, Gores still felt he had “unfinished business” with the author, so in 1999, he asked Hammett’s daughter, Jo Marshall, if the family would consider a new book based on The Maltese Falcon.

Although Marshall first said no, she had a change of heart. As her daughter Julie Rivett puts it, the family felt that Gores was the right guy to take up her grandfather’s story. “He’s walked the walk as well as talked the talk. He knows as well as anyone where those characters came from,” she said.

Gores released Spade & Archer, a prequel novel that explains how Spade came to seek the falcon statue that is perhaps the greatest MacGuffin in detective fiction. It is both a love letter to the original work and a satisfying read for Falcon fans that circles back to where Gores’s own hard-boiled history—and the genre’s—began: with an appreciation for the finely written line, and a nose for trouble. I haven’t read this book; I intend to. The reviews I read were very positive.

Gores, who had been working on a new DKA novel, died 50 years after Hammett’s death, to the day. RIP, Joe Gores, and thanks for all the books.

Treasure Hunt by Andrea Camilleri

Treasure Hunt, Camilleri’s 16th mystery featuring Insp. Salvo Montalbano, begins at night, with the exploration of a nightmarish apartment, when two reclusive religious fanatics—brother and sister Gregorio and Caterina Palmisano—start firing guns at the “sinners” in the street below their apartment building in Vigàta, Sicily. Montalbano and his team lay siege to the Palmisanos’ house and eventually disarm the elderly couple without bloodshed. Among the unconventional and disconcerting items found in the apartment is a decaying life-size, inflatable doll. This doll will haunt Montalbano throughout the book, providing both comic relief and a symptom of a truly sick mind.
As a result of his feat at the snipers’ apartment, Montalbano is hailed as a hero after news cameras film his scaling the building–gun in hand–to capture the pair. Shortly after, the inspector begins to receive cryptic messages in verse from someone challenging him to go on a “treasure hunt.” Bored – not going on in his crime world – and intrigued, he accepts, treating the messages as amusing riddles, until they take a dangerous turn. His friend, Ingrid, suggests that Arturo Pennisi, a young man eager to witness the detective’s investigative skills first hand, assists him in tracking down clues in the treasure hunt. A number of bizarre incidents occur that puzzle Montalbano and eventually lead him, again at night, to another frightful interior, the lair of a maniac.

As in Seagull, Montalbano thinks of himself as old. Montalbano transforms his usual and often ironic disagreement with our times into the harsh underscoring of disorder and aberration (psychological, political, and social) that have become physiological and irreparable. At a certain point he finds himself walking down a country road, a road that he had walked down many years before as a boy: but instead of the ancient saracen olive grove that stood there in the past, there was only a mass of cement. This is not only an ecological comment, but a metaphorical observation of the passing of time and the decay of the body and the environment. I can sympathize with this. At my age, I am trying to understand the passing away of everyone and everything I knew growing up.

Montalbano continues to feel a deep loneliness. His usual secondary characters meaningfully remain in the background: Mimì, Fazio, Catarella, the Questore and Dr. Pasquano make their appearance without any substance, as if they were bit actors. Livia is only present in a few phone calls. Nicolò Zito, the Retelibera journalist who is a friend of Montalbano’s and an unrepentant Communist, is totally absent: the character who represented an attempt at bridging the gap between old politics and the new media.

Once again, Camilleri’s sardonic sense of humor distinguishes this crime novel and saves it from complete melancholy and despair. I know that there has been violence and blood and gore in the other Montalbano’s novels, but I was strongly reminded of Helene Tursten’s first few novels. Somehow I didn’t expect Camilleri to go this far. I look forward to see where the 17th novel takes us.

The Assassination of the Archduke by Greg King and Sue Woolmans

What do we know about World War I, much less about how it started? I remembered from some long ago history class that somebody got shot in Sarajevo, all the European countries were bound by alliances and had to fight each other, and the Tsar and his family were shot. Maybe I got some of that last from Dr. Zhivago (what a movie!).

However, like most of history, the situation was much more complicated than that and – surprise – people, real people, were involved. In this case, two people were assassinated by Serbian terrorists. Two people who loved each other deeply and had defied the very imposing, very petty, and very obsolete Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, King of Croatia, King of Galicia and Lodomeria and Grand Duke of Cracow, by marrying. It was a morganatic marriage, a marriage between people of unequal social rank, which prevents the passage of the husband’s titles and privileges to the wife and any children born of the marriage. Probably the most famous example in modern times, the marriage took place in 1900 marriage when the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, wed Bohemian aristocrat Countess Sophie Chotek von Chotkowa. The marriage was initially resisted by Emperor Franz Joseph I, but after pressure from family members and other European rulers, he relented in 1899 (but did not attend the wedding himself). The bride was made Princess (later Duchess) of Hohenberg, their children took their mother’s new name and rank, and were excluded from the imperial succession.

The Hapsburgs, once one of the most powerful families in Europe, were in decline by the end of the 19th century. Inbreeding, separation of branches of the family, and disunity among countries all contributed to the “Twilight of the Habsburgs” (title of a biograph of Franz Joseph by Alan Palmer). The last Habsburg, Otto von Habsburg, died in 2011. At age 98, von Habsburg brought to a close 640 years of European history.

Sophie was treated as though she was invisible by the Hapsburgs and was omitted from most royal events. Deeply religious (Catholic), she seems to have been able to forgive this and find comfort and love with her husband and three children. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie profoundly loved each other and their children.

Franz Ferdinand was the Emperor’s nephew and would not have been heir to the throne if it had not been for the scandalous murder/suicide of Franz Joseph’s son, Rudolf, at Mayerling in 1889. According to official reports their deaths were a result of Franz Joseph’s demand that the couple end the relationship: the Crown Prince, as part of a suicide pact, first shot his mistress in the head and then himself. Rudolf was officially declared to have been in a state of “mental unbalance” in order to enable Christian burial in the Imperial Crypt (Kapuzinergruft) of the Capuchin Church in Vienna. Mary’s body was smuggled out of Mayerling in the middle of the night and secretly buried in the village cemetery at Heiligenkreuz. Whether this is what actually happened is still unsettled 124 years after the event.

The continuing theme in this book is that Franz Ferdinand was misunderstood; the foreword was written by the Archduke’s great-granddaughter who quotes the Archduke’s daughter explaining why she answers questions posted by journalists: “But I must defend him,” “him” being her father. He was not a personable man and was reclusive to a great degree. Some of this can be explained by the treatment given his wife, Sophie. He preferred to be with her than attending official events to which she was barred. On the other hand Franz Ferdinand was a great friend of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and had an excellent relationship with King George V.

Why did the Archduke and his wife go to Sarajevo? Why was there so little military or police protection for them? Oskar Potiorek, an officer of the Austro-Hungarian Army, who served as Governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was responsible for Franz Ferdinand and Sophie’s stay in Sarajevo. He was clearly negligent in providing adequate protection for the royal visitors. He rejected numerous recommendations for providing safety for the two. Was this incompetence or part of the conspiracy to assassinate the couple? These are questions that perplex historians 100 years after the fact.

Franz Joseph was completely uninterested in the deaths. He gave every impression of pleasure at the death of his nephew and heir. However, as the Emperor of Austria-Hungary he had to do something. Austria-Hungary, like many in countries around the world, blamed the Serbian government for the attack and hoped to use the incident as justification for settling the question of Slav nationalism once and for all. As Russia supported Serbia, an Austro-Hungarian declaration of war was delayed until its leaders received assurances from German leader Kaiser Wilhelm that Germany would support their cause in the event of a Russian intervention–which would likely involve Russia’s ally, France, and possibly Britain as well. On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the tenuous peace between Europe’s great powers collapsed. Within a week, Russia, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Serbia had lined up against Austria-Hungary and Germany, and World War I had begun.

Franz Ferdinand and Sophie’s children suffered greatly after their parents’ death. Unrecognized by the Hapsburgs, they were shuffled among Sophie’s family, never knowing stability. When Hitler came to power, the sons were sent to Dachau where they almost died. Their lives after World War II saw more loss.

The causes and consequences of World War I remain with us today. For example, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and its divisions by the European nations are with us even now in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the other countries of the Middle East. This is history that we need to know. I recommend this book as one element of the history of the 20th and 21st centuries.

A Bookman’s Tale: A Novel of Obsession by Charlie Lovett

I have been remiss in not writing about this book. I thoroughly enjoyed it and intended to share my pleasure in this book. Unfortunately, things happen.

This book has been compared to Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind, Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book, and A.S. Byatt’s Possession (one of the most haunting books I’ve ever read). I might also mention Chemistry of Tears, discussed elsewhere in this blog.

A book about antique books and the stories behind them is a natural for comparison. The subtitle is A Novel of Obsession, a descriptive that could be applied to the protagonists of all these stories.

In this book, a mysterious portrait ignites an antiquarian bookseller’s search—through time and the works of Shakespeare—for his lost love. The Bookman’s Tale tells a terrific story — there’s mystery and suspense, murder and seduction — but more importantly, Lovett shows us how it’s all connected, all of this: the reading and the keeping and the sharing of books. It forms a chain long and strange enough to tie a heartbroken young scholar from North Carolina back to the Bard himself, who might or might not have been William Shakespeare.

Bibliophile and antique book restoration expert Peter Byerly is directionless following the unexpected death of his young wife, Amanda. In hopes of getting his life on track, he’s moved from North Carolina to England and is trying to face bookshops again, which he and his wife, once loved haunting.

In a small bookshop, a painting of Amanda falls out of an early Shakespeare folio he is perusing. This inexplicable event starts him along a trail of detection as he tries to establish provenance of the art piece along a twisting path that might just prove for once and for all that Shakespeare was the actual author of all of his plays.

If you are a bibliophile and love old books, this is your book. Lovett describes books passionately and lovingly throughout his novel, as they are throughout the comparative novels. These are all meticulously researched and span generations. All novels jump from the past to the present and everywhere between.

However, this is not to imply that this book is a pale imitator of those popular books. Mr. Lovett might address a similar subject matter, but he chooses to tell his tale in a far different manner from his predecessors.

The Bookman’s Tale is told in a straightforward manner, quite unlike the fanciful prose of Spaniard Ruiz Zafon or the clinical narrative of Brooks. Though his narrative travels through time, the words Mr. Lovett chooses are rather plainspoken, though not without their own melody. He projects heartfelt warmth that is lacking in both Ruiz Zafon’s or Brooks’ novels.

There is a paranormal aspect of The Bookman’s Tale. Specters and more are both described and hinted at throughout Mr. Lovett’s book, creating a sense of expectation that is quite lovely.
The author’s scholarship is impeccable—let there be no doubt of that—but he uses the facts to support the more metaphysical aspects of his story rather than for strict authenticity, and that definitely sets The Bookman’s Tale apart from People of the Book.

This book has it all: antiquarian books, deceit, love, murder, passion, Shakespeare, death…and (spoiler alert) a secret passage. What more could you ask for?

361 by Donald Westlake

I was familiar with the humorous Donald Westlake, the creator of John Dortmunder, who is the most clever and least lucky thief in crime fiction. You want a good laugh and a terrific mystery, look for John Dortmunder. Or Joe Gores’s DKA series. Good giggles there, too.

However, 361 is not that Donald Westlake. No grins or tickles in this book. 361 is a searing, raw, emotional novel, not for a reader looking for happy endings.

Published in the UK in 1962, 361 was Westlake’s third novel under his own name, following The Mercenaries (1960) and Killing Time (1961). It is among the best of Westlake’s early works, some believe it is one of his finest novels.

Westlake would, of course, strike literary gold later in 1962 with the first Richard Stark/Parker book, The Hunter, but in many ways the groundwork for the Parker novels was laid here: stripped-back prose, short, clipped sentences, and a blunt, realistic depiction of violence and its consequences. 361, like The Mercenaries and Killing Time before it, is written in the first person, narrated by a protagonist whose peculiar oddities and eccentricities give the novel its distinctive character and flavor.

Ray Kelly is newly discharged from the Air Force as the story opens, going to New York to meet his father. Ray’s dad is inexplicably nervous when the two meet up, but Ray doesn’t dwell on his anxiety—until the next day, when, as they’re driving out of New York heading for their home town, a tan-and-cream Chrysler pulls alongside their Oldsmobile and a guy in the Chrysler sticks his hand out the window and starts shooting at them. A month later Ray wakes up in hospital having lost an eye and, his brother Bill informs him, his father. Shortly after that, Bill stops visiting Ray, and Ray is told by a nurse that Bill’s wife has been killed in a hit-and-run.

Thereafter, Ray enlists Bill’s aid in trying to find out why their dad—and seemingly Bill’s wife—was murdered, in the process uncovering their old man’s murky past as a mob lawyer. But it’s Ray’s reaction to the news of the death of Bill’s missus that gives the earliest indication of what an oddball character he is: “‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I never met her.’” He’s a peculiar, intriguing character, perhaps even more twisted in his own way than the shifty types and gangsters he encounters in his quest for justice and the truth. At one point, whilst attempting extract
information from a frail pensioner, he bows his head, removes his glass eye, and looks up again, uttering the words, “I can see your soul this way. It’s black.” Following this gruesome piece of theater, the old man becomes the first of the bodies on Ray’s hands.

But Ray’s also surprisingly funny at times—he gets irritated by people who take their time getting to the point, and some of his his sarcastic put-downs are priceless—not to mention strangely philosophical; attending a funeral, he narrates:

So Saturday six hired pallbearers carried the coffin from the funeral home. There was no stop at a church for the suicide; he went straight out of town to a clipped green hill with a view of Lake Champlain, and into a hole which no priest had blessed with holy water. He would have to make do with God’s rain.

This taken care of, Ray runs around New York and surrounding areas leaving a bloodbath behind him. We learn the reason for his mean streak, and then an additional trauma that he accepts with his by-now expected emotionlessness, after which he does his best to embrace the badness within him. That he can’t quite—not all the way, anyway, but it doesn’t stop him delivering a fitting vengeance on the man who brought so much destruction on his life.

Incidentally, look up “361” in any Thesaurus and you’ll find this: destruction of life; violent death; killing. Pretty descriptive.

Westlake’s characters have feelings but that are never celebrated at the expense of the plot. This clear-eyed attitude is refreshing and addictive, but it’s also probably why Westlake never had a breakthrough bestseller: the average reader needs more obvious sentimental emotional engagement than Westlake was willing to provide. 361 is the most extreme example of this emotional distance. Westlake himself said that it was almost a technical exercise in creating emotion without speaking of it. This is the kind of mystery I prefer. The books in which we learn what the character is wearing, who his/her friends are, or have long philosophical talks with him/herself are not my favorite. (I’m thinking of Sara Paretsky or Sue Grafton – I gave up on them long ago).

Westlake had over a hundred novels and non-fiction books to his credit. He was a three-time Edgar Award winner, one of only three writers (the others are Joe Gores and William L. DeAndrea) to win Edgars in three different categories (1968, Best Novel, God Save the Mark; 1990, Best Short Story, “Too Many Crooks”; 1991, Best Motion Picture Screenplay, The Grifters). In 1993, the Mystery Writers of America named Westlake a Grand Master, the highest honor bestowed by the society.

By the way, The Grifters, with John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, and Annette Bening, is one of my all-time favorite movies. It is based on a novel by Jim Thompson, which I have read, and it is one of the few movies that didn’t disappoint me in its film adaptation. Read the book, read the movie, or else.

Bellman and Black by Diane Setterfield

In Norse mythology, Huginn (from Old Norse “thought”) and Muninn (Old Norse “memory” or “mind”) are a pair of ravens which fly all over the world to bring information to the god Odin. Odin is referred to as “raven-god”. In the Prose Edda and the Third Grammatical Treatise, the two ravens are described as perching on Odin’s shoulders. Heimskringla details that Odin gave Huginn and Muninn the ability to speak.

Huginn and Muninn’s role as Odin’s messengers has been linked to shamanic practices and general raven symbolism among the Germanic peoples, and the Norse concepts of supernatural creatures.
In the Third Grammatical Treatise, an anonymous verse is recorded that mentions the ravens flying from Odin’s shoulders – Huginn seeking hanged men, and Muninn slain bodies. The verse reads:
Two ravens flew from Óðinn’s shoulders;
Huginn to the hanged and Muninn to the slain [lit. corpses].

Setterfield references these birds in her closing: the descendants of Thought and Memory will gather at the end of your story, just as they do at the end of William Bellman’s story.

This is a thought-provoking, challenging, and provocative book, not for readers who do not want to think about what they are reading or remember events in their lives. Those of us who have experienced deaths of family and friends will understand some of it. I think the book requires a second reading to understand all and, even then, much will be left to the reader’s interpretation.
It was a difficult book to read, in that it is difficult to see a man’s life collapse so totally.

Setterfield’s first book, The Thirteenth Tale, was published in 2007, and has been sitting on my bookshelf ever since. It has moved up to the top of my very tall stack of books to read.

As a ten-year-old boy, William, out playing with his friends, idly kills a rook. A rook is in the crow family, with black feathers often showing a blue or bluish-purple sheen in bright sunlight. The feathers on the head, neck and shoulders are particularly dense and silky.

Collective nouns for rooks include building, parliament, clamor and storytelling. Their communal nesting behavior gave rise to the term rookery.

William is the grandson of a wealthy woolen mill owner. However, his father married beneath him, was cut off from the family, and eventually deserted his wife and son. Consequently, William is beneath his grandfather’s derision. He will not inherit the mill from his grandfather. His uncle, though, hires him as at the mill, and he takes to it like the proverbial duck. He learns everything there is to know and suggests improvements which his uncle puts into place, with some manipulating of the grandfather.

William is an outgoing, pleasant, sociable young man with a charming way with the ladies. He wins over all the workers at the mill, even the ones who initially mistrust him because of his family ties.

Eventually, grandfather dies. His uncle takes him on as an assistant. The mill flourishes. Then his uncle dies. Because his cousin, Charles, has no interest in the mill, William takes over. William meets and marries and has four children. Life is good.
Then his mother dies and his life falls apart. His friends die. His wife and three children die; the fourth remains in a coma for months. He finds solace only in work.

The odd thing is that at every funeral, over many years, there is a man in black, unknown to William. Finally, at his children’s graves, he talks to this man, Mr. Black, and they make a deal.

William turns over management of the mill, moves, with his daughter, to London and spends a year building a department store for death, Bellman and Black. As you undoubtedly are aware, death was to the Victorians what sex is to us. The business booms, and William is at the store all day and all night. Yes, he has a bed built into his office. He has no friends, hardly sees his daughter, is rarely away from the store. Death is his business.

Profits, though, begin to decline. Why? No explanation, other than cremations seem to be the fashion now.

Then William is visited by Mr. Black who appears only as a darkly shrouded form. He has come to say good-bye. William offers him money, but he learns that he misunderstood the deal. What Mr. Black is offering is “Thought” and “Memory,” the thought and memory of death. He remembers all the people he has known who have died, and then he remembers the rook he killed.

After William is buried, his daughter and the son of a friend who was there at the beginning go back to the mill to see the flocks of rooks that fly over the mill each day. It is a startling sight.

Is the rook death? It is Thought and Memory. As mentioned above, a collective noun for rooks is storytelling. The rook will be there at the end of your story and tell it to other rooks. Setterfield closes by telling us that rooks have a collective noun for us: an entertainment of humans.

The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse

After reading a string of depressing, although well-written books, I decided that I needed a definite change of pace. P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie and Jeeves seemed just the ticket, old thing.

If you have any sense of humor, then you will appreciate Wodehouse’s creations of Bertram Wooster and his man Jeeves. Bertie is a complete twit, constantly getting himself into awkward, potentially embarrassing predicaments, while Jeeves is the calm, perceptive, and always sensible gentleman’s man who somehow solves Bertie’s dilemmas. This is a plot device that goes back to the stock characters of Roman comedy, servants are frequently far cleverer than their masters. This is quintessentially true with Jeeves, who always pulls Bertie Wooster out of the direst scrapes by means of cunning and resource, often by deceptively manipulating him or by convincing him to sacrifice himself.

During the middle 60 years of the 20th century, P.G. Wodehouse (1881- 1975)—familiarly known as Plum—was the finest writer of comic fiction in the English language. His novels and stories, especially those about sun-dappled Blandings Castle or the immortal duo of dimwitted but lovable Bertie Wooster and his formidable valet Jeeves, are nearly all masterpieces of intricate plotting and clockwork timing, packed with Keystone Kop action, outmoded slang, literary and scriptural quotation, and, not least, smile-inducing similes on every page.

“My motto is ‘Love and let love’ – with the one stipulation that people who love in glass-houses should breathe on the windows.” From Come On, Jeeves

Just reading sentences like that makes life worthwhile. Here, in capsule form, are the Master’s mature virtues: the curiously arch tone, the beautifully balanced syntax and elegantly contrived diction, the learned allusion, some re-purposed stock phrases, and a simile that slowly unfolds to a zinger.

Wodehouse was a prolific author, writing 96 books in his remarkable seventy-three-year long career (1902 to 1975). His works include novels, collections of short stories, and musical comedies. Many characters and locations appear repeatedly throughout his short stories and novels, leading readers to classify his work by “series”. I know this is lengthy, but here it goes:
• The Blandings Castle stories (later dubbed “the Blandings Castle Saga” by Wodehouse, about the upper class inhabitants of the fictional rural Blandings Castle.
• The Drones Club stories, about the mishaps of certain members of a raucous social club for London’s idle rich.
• The Golf and Oldest Member stories.
• The Jeeves and Wooster stories, narrated by the wealthy, scatterbrained Bertie Wooster. A number of stories and novels that recount the improbable and unfortunate situations in which he and his friends find themselves and the manner in which his ingenious valet Jeeves is always able to extricate them. Collectively called “the Jeeves stories”, or “Jeeves and Wooster”, they are Wodehouse’s most famous. The Jeeves stories are a valuable compendium of pre–World War II English slang in use.
• The Mr. Mulliner stories, narrated by a genial pub raconteur who can take any topic of conversation and turn it into an involved, implausible story about a member of his family.
• The School stories, which launched Wodehouse’s career with their comparative realism.
• The Psmith stories, about an ingenious jack-of-all-trades with a charming, exaggeratedly refined manner..
• The Ukridge stories, about the charming but unprincipled Stanley Featherstonehaugh
• The Uncle Fred stories, about the eccentric Earl of Ickenham..
• The stand-alone stories. Stories which are not part of a series (although they may contain overlapping minor characters), such as Piccadilly Jim, Quick Service, Summer Moonshine, Sam the Sudden, and Laughing Gas.

Almost all of these series overlap: Psmith appears in a “School” story and a Blandings novel; Bertie Wooster is a member of the Drones Club; Uncle Fred and Pongo Twistleton appear in both the Blandings Saga and the Drones club stories; Sir Roderick Glossop, one of Bertie’s nemeses, visits Blandings in one story; Bingo Little is a regular character in the Jeeves stories and the Drones Club stories, etc.

Where do you start? According to Michael Dirda in the Wall Street Journal (August 30, 2013), among the novels, the top tours de force were Right Ho, Jeeves (1934), The Code of the Woosters (1938) and Joy in the Morning (also published as Jeeves in the Morning) (1947). Among the short stories the winners were “Uncle Fred Flits By”—in which Frederick, Lord Ickenham and his nephew Pongo impersonate increasingly improbable characters—and the touching “Lord Emsworth and the Girlfriend,” followed by only marginally lesser classics such as “Sonny Boy,” “Tried in the Furnace” and “From a Detective’s Notebook.” These masterworks are, of course, only the tip of the oeuvre.

Along with E. Nesbit’s (an author with whom I am very familiar – see PhD dissertation subject) contemporaneous books about the Bastables, the Railway Children, and the children in her fantasies, Wodehouse’s children’s stories helped liberate children’s literature from goody-goody Victorian moralism. And even when Wodehouse stopped writing them, many of his adult characters—notably Bertie Wooster and the various members of the Drones Club—continued to behave like carefree schoolboys, living for practical jokes, rags and silly competitions; afraid of fearsome aunts and authority figures; prey to puppy love rather than sexual passion.

Also, you may have seen House with Hugh Laurie. About 20 years ago, he and his best friend Stephen Fry (a fantastic actor, e.g. Wilde with, incidentally, a very young Jude Law as Bosie) starred in the Bertie and Jeeves series on the BBC. (Why do they get some of the best TV?) You can watch some episodes on YouTube. They were born to play those roles. The series is also available on DVD. They also had a series; they are marvelous comedians. You don’t see that so much on House, but it is there.

Some of Wodehouse’s quotable quotes:
“Misery loves company, and seldom gets it.”

“She looked like a martyr at the stake, who deprecatingly lodges a timid complaint, fearful the while lest she may be hurting the feelings of her persecutors by appearing even for a moment out of sympathy with their activities.”

“I remained motionless, like a ventriloquist’s dummy whose ventriloquist has gone off to the local and left it sitting.”

If you go to the P. G. Wodehouse website, you can find a quotation generator plus lots of other things Wodehouse http://www.wodehouse.co.uk/ .

The work of P.G. Wodehouse possesses many virtues, and one of them is inexhaustibility. I suggest you begin with Bertie and Jeeves. From now, when I am down I will reach for Bertie and Jeeves.

A Novelist Who Made Crime an Art, and His Bad Guys ‘Fun’

In honor of Elmore Leonard. I haven’t really gotten into Leonard; my loss. I intend to make up for that now. Please click this link to a great profile of this master writer.

100 Novels Everyone Should Read

From a British newspaper. I’m going to have to live to be 150 and be sure my library card is up to date. I doubt seriously, though, that I even undertake Proust. How many of these have you read? A number I read in college, but that’s been so long ago. And many of the books are better read when you are older and have more experience of life and the world.

100 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
WH Auden thought this tale of fantastic creatures looking for lost jewellery was a “masterpiece”.
99 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
A child’s-eye view of racial prejudice and freaky neighbours in Thirties Alabama.
98 The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
A rich Bengali noble lives happily until a radical revolutionary appears.
97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Earth is demolished to make way for a Hyperspatial Express Route. Don’t panic.
96 One Thousand and One Nights Anon
A Persian king’s new bride tells tales to stall post-coital execution.
95 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Werther loves Charlotte, but she’s already engaged. Woe is he!
94 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
The children of poor Hindus and wealthy Muslims are switched at birth.
93 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
Nursery rhyme provides the code names for British spies suspected of treason.
92 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Hilarious satire on doom-laden rural romances. “Something nasty” has been observed in the woodshed.
91 The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
The life and loves of an emperor’s son. And the world’s first novel?
90 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
A feckless writer has dealings with a canine movie star. Comedy and philosophy combined.
89 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Lessing considers communism and women’s liberation in what Margaret Drabble calls “inner space fiction”.
88 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
Passion, poetry and pistols in this verse novel of thwarted love.
87 On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Beat generation boys aim to “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles”.
86 Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
A disillusioning dose of Bourbon Restoration realism. The anti-hero “Rastingnac” became a byword for ruthless social climbing.
85 The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Plebian hero struggles against the materialism and hypocrisy of French society with his “force d’ame”.
84 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
“One for all and all for one”: the eponymous swashbucklers battle the mysterious Milady.
83 Germinal by Emile Zola
Written to “germinate” social change, Germinal unflinchingly documents the starvation of French miners.
82 The Stranger by Albert Camus
Frenchman kills an Arab friend in Algiers and accepts “the gentle indifference of the world”.
81The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Illuminating historical whodunnit set in a 14th-century Italian monastry.
80 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
An Australian heiress bets an Anglican priest he can’t move a glass church 400km.
79 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Prequel to Jane Eyre giving moving, human voice to the mad woman in the attic.
78 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Carroll’s ludic logic makes it possible to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
77 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Yossarian feels a homicidal impulse to machine gun total strangers. Isn’t that crazy?
76 The Trial by Franz Kafka
K proclaims he’s innocent when unexpectedly arrested. But “innocent of what”?
75 Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
Protagonist’s “first long secret drink of golden fire” is under a hay wagon.
74 Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
Gentle comedy in which a Gandhi-inspired Indian youth becomes an anti-British extremist.
73 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
The horror of the Great War as seen by a teenage soldier.
72 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
Three siblings are differently affected by their parents’ unexplained separation.
71 The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
Profound and panoramic insight into 18th-century Chinese society.
70 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Garibaldi’s Redshirts sweep through Sicily, the “jackals” ousting the nobility, or “leopards”.
69 If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
International book fraud is exposed in this playful postmodernist puzzle.
68 Crash by JG Ballard
Former TV scientist preaches “a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology”.
67 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
East African Indian Salim travels to the heart of Africa and finds “The world is what it is.”
66 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Boy meets pawnbroker. Boy kills pawnbroker with an axe. Guilt, breakdown, Siberia, redemption.
65 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Romantic young doctor’s idealism is trampled by the atrocities of the Russian Revolution.
64 The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
Follows three generations of Cairenes from the First World War to the coup of 1952.
63 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson’s “bogey tale” came to him in a dream.
62 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Swift’s scribulous satire on travellers’ tall tales (the Lilliputian Court is really George I’s).
61 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
A painter is murdered in Istanbul in 1591. Unusually, we hear from the corpse.
60 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Myth and reality melt magically together in this Colombian family saga.
59 London Fields by Martin Amis
A failed novelist steals a woman’s trashed diaries which reveal she’s plotting her own murder.
58 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Gang of South American poets travel the world, sleep around, challenge critics to duels.
57 The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
Intellectuals withdraw from life to play a game of musical and mathematical rules.
56 The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
Madhouse memories of the Second World War. Key text of European magic realism.
55 Austerlitz by WG Sebald
Paragraph-less novel in which a Czech-born historian traces his own history back to the Holocaust.
54 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Scholar’s sexual obsession with a prepubescent “nymphet” is complicated by her mother’s passion for him.
53 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
After nuclear war has rendered most sterile, fertile women are enslaved for breeding.
52 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Expelled from a “phony” prep school, adolescent anti-hero goes through a difficult phase.
51 Underworld by Don DeLillo
From baseball to nuclear waste, all late-20th-century American life is here.
50 Beloved by Toni Morrison
Brutal, haunting, jazz-inflected journey down the darkest narrative rivers of American slavery.
49 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
“Okies” set out from the Depression dustbowl seeking decent wages and dignity.
48 Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
Explores the role of the Christian Church in Harlem’s African-American community.
47The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
A doctor’s infidelities distress his wife. But if life means nothing, it can’t matter.
46 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
A meddling teacher is betrayed by a favourite pupil who becomes a nun.
45 The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Did the watch salesman kill the girl on the beach. If so, who heard?
44 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
A historian becomes increasingly sickened by his existence, but decides to muddle on.
43 The Rabbit books by John Updike
A former high school basketball star is unsatisfied by marriage, fatherhood and sales jobs.
42 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
A boy and a runaway slave set sail on the Mississippi, away from Antebellum “sivilisation”.
41 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
A drug addict chases a ghostly dog across the midnight moors.
40 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart craves luxury too much to marry for love. Scandal and sleeping pills ensue.
39 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
A Nigerian yam farmer’s local leadership is shaken by accidental death and a missionary’s arrival.
38The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
A mysterious millionaire’s love for a woman with “a voice full of money” gets him in trouble.
37 The Warden by Anthony Trollope
“Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money,” said W?H Auden.
36 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
An ex-convict struggles to become a force for good, but it ends badly.
35 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
An uncommitted history lecturer clashes with his pompous boss, gets drunk and gets the girl.
34 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts” in this hardboiled crime noir.
33 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
Epistolary adventure whose heroine’s bodice is savagely unlaced by the brothel-keeping Robert Lovelace.
32 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
Twelve-book saga whose most celebrated character wears “the wrong kind of overcoat”.
31 Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
Published 60 years after their author was gassed, these two novellas portray city and village life in Nazi-occupied France.
30 Atonement by Ian McEwan
Puts the “c” word in the classic English country house novel.
29 Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec
The jigsaw puzzle of lives in a Parisian apartment block. Plus empty rooms.
28 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Thigh-thwacking yarn of a foundling boy sewing his wild oats before marrying the girl next door.
27 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Human endeavours “to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world” have tragic consequences.
26 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
Northern villagers turn their bonnets against the social changes accompanying the industrial revolution.
25 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Hailed by T?S Eliot as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels”.
24 Ulysses by James Joyce
Modernist masterpiece reworking of Homer with humour. Contains one of the longest “sentences” in English literature: 4,391 words.
23 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Buying the lies of romance novels leads a provincial doctor’s wife to an agonising end.
22 A Passage to India by EM Forster
A false accusation exposes the racist oppression of British rule in India.
21 1984 by George Orwell
In which Big Brother is even more sinister than the TV series it inspired.
20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Samuel Johnson thought Sterne’s bawdy, experimental novel was too odd to last. Pah!
19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
Bloodsucking Martian invaders are wiped out by a dose of the sniffles.
18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh based the hapless junior reporter in this journalistic farce on former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes.
17 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Sexual double standards are held up to the cold, Wessex light in this rural tragedy.
16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
A seaside sociopath mucks up murder and marriage in Greene’s literary Punch and Judy show.
15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
A scrape-prone toff and pals are suavely manipulated by his gentleman’s personal gentleman.
14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Out on the winding, windy moors Cathy and Heathcliff become each other’s “souls”. Then he storms off.
13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Debt and deception in Dickens’s semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman crammed with cads, creeps and capital fellows.
12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
A slave trader is shipwrecked but finds God, and a native to convert, on a desert island.
11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Every proud posh boy deserves a prejudiced girl. And a stately pile.
10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Picaresque tale about quinquagenarian gent on a skinny horse tilting at windmills.
9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Septimus’s suicide doesn’t spoil our heroine’s stream-of-consciousness party.
8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee
An English professor in post-apartheid South Africa loses everything after seducing a student.
7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Poor and obscure and plain as she is, Mr Rochester wants to marry her. Illegally.
6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Seven-volume meditation on memory, featuring literature’s most celebrated lemony cake.
5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
“The conquest of the earth,” said Conrad, “is not a pretty thing.”
4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
An American heiress in Europe “affronts her destiny” by marrying an adulterous egoist.
3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy’s doomed adulteress grew from a daydream of “a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow”.
2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Monomaniacal Captain Ahab seeks vengeance on the white whale which ate his leg.
1 Middlemarch by George Eliot
“One of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” said Virginia Woolf
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/4248401/100-novels-everyone-should-read.html

The Bat by Mary Roberts Rinehart

After the last book, I did promise that I would cleanse my palate with something truly classic and well-written. Well, one out of two isn’t bad. When I saw a Mary Roberts Rinehart’s novel on Net Galley, I couldn’t believe my luck. My mother introduced me to her books back in my pre-teen days – that is what passed as YA literature back then. I read a couple of her books in the past few years and enjoyed them for what they are – old-fashioned, demure, cozy mysteries with a likeable heroine narrating the story. This book, however, was just a little too too, if you know what I mean.

In case you aren’t familiar with Rinehart, she was born in 1876, in Pittsburgh and died in 1958. Her family experienced financial difficulties, which surprised me, as I’ll explain a little later.

Mary Roberts Rinehart was a well-known mystery and romance writer. Her stories combine adventure, love, ingenuity, and humor in a style that is distinctly her own. Most of her fiction included startling plot twists. Rinehart generally added realism in her depiction of contemporary life, with many different classes, corruption high and low, and a great diversity of characters. Her leading lady was inevitably a woman of a certain age with a comfortable income, with the notable exception of her Miss Pinkerton series. Rinehart’s stories appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, and she was also a published playwright.
Mary Roberts graduated from the Pittsburgh Training School for Nurses in 1896. That same year she married physician Stanley M. Rinehart. She and her husband started a family, and she took up writing in 1903 as a result of difficulties created by monetary losses. Her first story appeared in Munsey’s Magazine in 1903. The Circular Staircase (1908), her first book and first mystery, was an immediate success, and the following year The Man in Lower Ten, which had been serialized earlier, strengthened her popular success. Thereafter she wrote steadily, averaging about a book a year. A long series of comic tales about the redoubtable “Tish” (Letitia Carberry) appeared as serials in the Saturday Evening Post over a number of years and as a series of novels beginning with The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry (1911).

Rinehart served as a war correspondent during World War I and later described her experiences in several books, particularly Kings, Queens and Pawns (1915). She wrote a number of romances and nine plays. Most of the plays were written in collaboration with Avery Hopwood; her greatest successes were Seven Days, produced in New York in 1909, and The Bat, derived from The Circular Staircase and produced in 1920. She followed this in 1926 in novel form.

In 1914, Rinehart’s writing and career drastically changed. Rinehart gave up mystery and humorous fiction, and turned to straight novels for most of the next 15 years. Her novels were commercially hugely successful, but critically slammed. While inoffensive morally, critics felt they represented lowbrow popular fiction. According to her biographer Jan Cohn, Rinehart often suffered horribly from depression during these years. Her husband Dr. Stanley Rinehart bitterly resented his wife’s commercial success. He seems to have used his medical degree and general intellectual skills as a weapon to demonstrate his mental superiority to his wife, the trashy author of popular fiction, and pushed her to write “serious literary works”. By contrast, Rinehart had a happy relationship with her three sons. Motherhood is always depicted in glowing terms in Rinehart’s fiction, although often shown to be very hard work, while marriage is an unmitigated horror story. Husbands are commonly depicted as misogynists who are cold hearted, philanderers, men intolerant of their wife’s career, who have to have their own ways in the smallest details. The best of these mainstream tales are from the 1930’s and in the collection Married People. Rinehart also wrote a number of powerful tales about wife beating long before it became a feminist issue in the 1980’s.

Rinehart did write some mystery and humorous fiction during these years. The crime story “The Confession” (1917) is a grim but powerful portrait of a woman’s guilt, depression and mental breakdown.

She also wrote two fusions of supernatural-psychical research fiction and mystery fiction, “Sight Unseen” (1916) and The Red Lamp (1925), which are among the author’s lesser works. As early as “The Amazing Adventure of Letitia Carberry” (1911), Rinehart was talking about spiritualism in her mysteries, but in that story it is just a red herring – no actual supernatural events occur.

Spiritualism is not found just in Rinehart, but in many other American authors of mystery fiction of the period, such as S.S. Van Dine, Ellery Queen, and John Dickson Carr. It makes their storytelling so interesting. The Bat uses spiritualism, but as mentioned above, it serves as a red herring.

In the early 1920s, the family moved to Washington, DC when Dr. Rinehart was appointed to a post in the Veterans Administration. He died in 1932, but she continued to live there until 1935, when she moved to New York City. There she helped her sons found the publishing house Farrar & Rinehart, serving as its director.
She remained best known as a writer of mysteries, and the growing popularity of mysteries after World War II led to frequent republication of her works. Her autobiography, My Story, appeared in 1931 and was revised in 1948. At Rinehart’s death her books had sold more than 10 million copies.

Sometimes real life can be stranger than fiction. Rinehart also maintained a vacation home in Bar Harbor, Maine, where, in 1947, her Filipino chef, who had worked for her for 25 years, fired a gun at her and then attempted to slash her with knives, until other servants rescued her. The chef committed suicide in his cell the next day.

Rinehart suffered from breast cancer, which led to a radical mastectomy. She eventually went public with her story, at a time when such matters were not openly discussed. The interview “I Had Cancer” was published in a 1947 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Rinehart encouraged women to have breast examinations.

The Bat
I had the feeling as I read this book that it would be easily adapted to the stage. Ninety plus of the story takes place in the living room, with characters coming in and out of various doors. Turned out I just really have a second sense (you think). As this story was originally a play, Rinehart might have used a little more creativity in rewriting it as a novel. It was also adapted for the movies in 1926, along with The Bat Whispers (1930), and a remake of The Bat in 1959. In 1933 RCA Victor released The Bat as one of the earliest talking book recordings. I would love to hear that. I wonder how many records it took to record and whether it was on 16 rpm or another speed.

Some believe that The Bat shows Rinehart at the height of her powers and is her greatest work. I can’t agree. There were too many characters, the butler was referred to as “the Jap” (although that might have as politically correct as you could get at the time), and Rinehart operates as uber-omniscient author. She is constantly telling us that a character is doing something that no one else notices. Subtlety is nowhere to be found. I don’t remember that style from her other books; perhaps it is because of its stage heredity that it is present here. Also, I was about 75% through the book when I realized who done it – I don’t appreciate that in a mystery.

Off, off topic:
When reading books from another era, you can pick up the most interesting pieces of trivia. At one point, Miss Van Gorder refers “Gillette as Holmes.” I wondered who Gillette was. I Widipediaed him. The following is from that source:

William Hooker Gillette (July 24, 1853 – April 29, 1937) was an American actor, playwright and stage-manager in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best remembered today for portraying Sherlock Holmes on stage and in a now lost 1916 silent film. His portrayal of Holmes helped create the modern image of the detective. His use of the deerstalker cap (which first appeared in some Strand Magazine illustrations by Sidney Paget) and the curved pipe became synonymous with the character. And it was in his play, not in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, that Holmes first said “This is elementary, my dear fellow,” which subsequently became “Elementary, my dear Watson”. Gillette assumed the role onstage more than 1,300 times over thirty years, starred in a silent motion picture based on his Holmes play, and voiced the character twice on radio.

So, really, Gillette is responsible for the image we have today of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle created him, but Gillette gave him form.

The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction by James M. Cain

I am in awe of James M. Cain. I have read Mildred Pierce, but I don’t think I have read his other very famous novels. Seen the movies, yes, but as those of you have read and seen Mildred Pierce (the original with Joan Crawford) the two have very little to do with the other. Both terrific, but quite different.

What has happened to short stories? I am old enough to remember when magazines (wait – you mean I’m old enough to remember magazines!) printed short stories in each issue. By the time I came along they were romance stories in the women’s magazines my mother subscribed to; in the 1920’s through the 1940’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, The American Mercury, The Bookman, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and dozens of pulp magazines published short stories by the very best of contemporary authors. (This is being written on the day we learned that the Washington Post has been sold to Amazon – what’s next? The New York Times??)

Maybe we associate short stories with those anthologies we had in school; maybe we just don’t think short stories are cool. They should be popular now. They are perfectly suited for mobile consumption. The iPhone and iPad and other tablets are with their owners all the time, and a story on these devices can be read on a treadmill, in a bank line, on an airplane, wherever the user has a few minutes and wants to be transported to the magical place stories can create. Poe’s definition of the short story remains as true today as when he wrote it: “a story is a thing that can be read in one sitting.” If he were writing today he might rephrase it: “…in one hour on the tread mill.”

Roy Hoopes, the writer of the introduction to this collection of short stories and one novella states that Cain was essentially a writer of short fiction. The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity are really novellas, according to Hoopes. Cain himself wrote, “In one respect … it [the short story] is greatly superior to the novel, or at any rate, the American novel.”

Cain was from Maryland and most of his early work was placed in the East. He wasn’t successful in selling this fiction and, as a result, taught school, worked as a newspaper reporter, and served in France during WWI. The characters in these stories were “homely characters” who spoke in “ain’ts, brungs, and fittens.”
He was good friends with H. L. Mencken, who is regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the first half of the twentieth century.

A very controversial figure, Mencken commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, pseudo-experts, and the temperance movement. He was skeptical of economic theories and particularly critical of anti-intellectualism, bigotry, populism, fundamentalist Christianity, creationism, organized religion, and the existence of God.

An outspoken admirer of German philosopher Nietzsche, he was not a proponent of representative democracy, which he believed was a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors. During and after World War I, he was sympathetic to the Germans, and was distrustful of British propaganda. However, he also referred to Adolf Hitler and his followers as “ignorant thugs.” Mencken, through his wide criticism of actions taken by government, has had a strong impact on the libertarian movement.

Cain followed Mencken’s lead in the essays he wrote for Mencken’s publications. He also started writing successful short fiction. He decided to go to Hollywood where he got a job writing screenplays. He gradually found the West, especially California, appealing. One of the principal forms of recreation in the 1930’s was taking car drives. He and his family took hundreds of trips to the canyons, valleys, beaches, and all the other California attractions. He decided that California was the natural background for his writings.

His two greatest influences on his literary style were Ike Newton and Ring Lardner. Ike Newton was a bricklayer who had laid a walk on the campus of Washington College while he talked to twelve-year-old James Cain for hours. Cain later used Ike’s speech to create the dialogue in his stories. One of the most recognizable traits of much of Ring Lardner’s writing, both in his columns and in his fiction, is the use of the American slang vernacular.

Several of the short stories were truly haunting, making a remarkable impression on me. Many of the stories followed Cain’s basic theme – two people who conspire in committing a crime, but mistrust lead to betrayal. “The Baby in the Icebox” was reminiscent of The Postman Always Rings Twice in that the setting is a gas station, one of the characters is a drifter, and the husband is a jerk. “The Girl in the Storm” is melancholy and ironic. “The Birthday Party” was a poignant coming-of-age tale. Not all the stories have unhappy endings; in fact, the novella Money and the Woman (The Embezzler) went about 180◦ away from the way I thought it was going.

This was an excellent collection of first-rate short stories. Please bring back the short story; after reading this book, I am very nostalgic for the genre.

Conjure House by Gary Fry

I got this from Amazon for my Kindle because there must have been some kind of special deal. (I checked – it was free). At least, I hope that is what it is because I can’t imagine buying it otherwise.

It has a 4.5 rating on Amazon; I can’t imagine how it managed that.

If you hadn’t figured it out by now (and I know you have because you are a very smart person or you wouldn’t be reading my blog), I didn’t care for this book. This is the first book I’ve read in a long time that I feel owes me for the hours of my life I spent reading it.

It is a mishmash of horror tropes – a little H. P. Lovecraft, a little Stephen King, a little who knows. The writing isn’t even good – it is too repetitive and pointless. He mentions three different characters’ excellent vocabulary four times.

The story doesn’t make any sense. SPOILER ALERT: Why would the children without thumbs kill Anthony’s parents fifteen years after their younger son, Simon, disappeared? Why did the children assume Victorian dress once the big bad guy disintegrate? Did their thumbs grow back? Was Simon the only child he had taken in over a hundred years? What made the big bad disintegrate? Was it Anthony’s pseudo-psychobabble? According to Anthony, a psychology PhD candidate, the big bad is bad because his father was mean to him. What??? The author is credited with a PhD in Psychology. Let’s hope he sticks with his day job (unless it is writing books), except I think he recently published another book.

So, in conclusion, resist the this book. Don’t be fooled by the Amazon ratings. Avoid this book at all costs. I need to go read one of the Brontés, Wilkie Collins, Jane Austen – anybody – to wash my mind out. The sooner I forget this experience the better.

The Bat by Jo Nesbø

This book is the first in the Harry Hole series. It was published in Norway in 1997, but only now has been translated into English. There are ten books in the series; I make it a rule to begin with the first book in a series.

So, I haven’t read the other books; I don’t know that I will. I read some reviews on Goodreads and Amazon that conceded that this was not that good a book, but that the later ones were much better. That may be, but I’m going to have to wait to find out – too many other books to read right now.

I can compare this book to the first book in the Kurt Wallander series or the Amos Walker series or another half dozen series, mystery and not, that I have read. In those cases, I couldn’t wait to get hold of the next book, and the next one, etc. That’s not my experience here. I just couldn’t “bond” with Harry. I just didn’t see where Nesbø was going with the character. As to the plot, I kept thinking the book was over and couldn’t understand what could be in the pages left.

I will give this series the benefit of the doubt, though, and read one or two more. If other reviewers can assure me that the books get better, then I’ll give Harry Hole a chance. However, I can’t recommend this specific book.

Of course, I did finish the book. Is this like the diner telling the waitperson the meal wasn’t any good after he has eaten it all? Hope not.

The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl

In a way, every piece of fiction is a mystery – How is it going to turn out? What will happen to the characters? If the reader doesn’t care, then the author hasn’t succeeded in writing a good book. The author must create a degree of eagerness and anxiety in the reader to keep him (or her) turning the pages. The anxiety in The Last Dickens is ideal for the bibliophile: what happens when we lose the voices that tell us what happens next? It’s June 1870, and Charles Dickens suffers a stroke midway through his serial The Mystery of Edwin Drood, leaving the story a genuine whodunit that will never and hasn’t ever been solved. How will readers cope without knowing how the book ends? And how will Dickens’s American publisher, the financially struggling firm of Fields, Osgood & Company, survive without the profits from his book?

I like to think of this as the third entry in a trilogy. Matthew Pearl’s first novel, The Dante Club blended history and mystery in a story featuring Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and post-Civil War Boston. In his second novel, The Poe Shadow, Pearl re-created Edgar Allan Poe and life in mid-nineteenth-century Baltimore. In this novel, he presents a neatly written, meticulously detailed, and meticulously researched tale.

The firm’s junior partner, James Osgood (an historical figure), attempts to solve the real-life mystery that is proving fatal for several characters. The amiable, ordinary Osgood makes a believable man of letters. As a man of action he is an adorable fantasy, given to pedantic lecturing. In his efforts to find Dickens’s document, Osgood places his trust in a shady character to track dangerous clues through the city’s opium dens, he confides to his bookkeeper and sidekick, Rebecca Sand, this explanation: “I thought of consulting with Scotland Yard to secure a police escort, yet it would likely drive away the very man who can guide me. I am a publisher, Miss Sand. I know what it means. It means I must find a way, very often, to believe in people who believe in something else — something I often may not be inclined toward in the least.” He’s more stuffy than swashbuckling, but is able to hold his own with the bad guys.

Unfortunately, Pearl juggles too many narrative threads for a novel this length. He is forced to resort to exposition at inopportune moments, throwing off the pace. The subplot set in India and centered on Dickens’s son Frank, a supervisor in the Bengal Mounted Police with his own interest in the opium trade, is a promising gesture but never pays off. Pearl knows his Dickens, undoubtedly better than many of his readers do, and his focus on the author’s dark late period is valuable to those who would like to know about Dickens, the man. The problem is that by putting “the Chief” in his book (which he does through a series of flashbacks to the author’s final, backbreaking American tour), Pearl introduces a writer he can’t match, on any level. Of course, few writers could.

An intriguing element of the book is the historical struggle among publishers extant at the time; some of which still exist intact, some of which have been altered, and some of which are extinct. Fields, Osgood & Co. know that if they retain exclusive rights to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, it could mean the difference between a successful publishing company and capitulating to their chief New York rival, Harper & Brothers. There is also a role for the trade circular that would come to be known as Publishers Weekly.

One of the pleasures of reading Pearl comes from enjoying the skillfully detailed 19th-century settings he constructs. In The Last Dickens, he recreates a world in which there were no international copyright laws, Andrew Johnson’s impeachment loomed, and steam elevators improved travel in office buildings. He also gives a contemporary feel to his works by reminding us that the 19th century in which the drug trade, organized crime, and urban blight loomed large and were less genteel than we tend to imagine.

It’s enticing to think that somewhere in some old, unexamined library or bookstore out there is a pile of missing manuscript pages in Dickens’s hand that would unravel the mystery of Edwin Drood. There have been several attempts by miscellaneous authors over the many years since Dickens’s death to complete the book – in the theater, film, radio, and novel. But none of them have the voice of Dickens himself.

Historical Epilogue for The Last Dickens:
Some facts behind characters and elements of The Last Dickens:
• After Fields’s retirement, James Ripley Osgood thrived for several years. The terrible Boston fire of 1872 destroyed some of the steel plates owned by the publishing firm. The following year, Osgood was forced to sell all three of his magazines. Facing steep financial problems, Osgood agreed to a merger with Houghton & Hurd. Later in life, Osgood moved to England to work for Harper & Bros. as their London agent. He died in 1892 in London, where he is buried.

• After Fields retired, he used his various experiences to write his memoirs of literary figures. He also spoke on the lecture circuit. He died in Boston in 1881 and is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

• Fletcher “Major” Harper retired in 1875. He died in 1877 at his home in New York and is buried at Greenwood cemetery. He was the last survivor of the original Harper brothers.

• Following seven years of service in the Bengal police, Francis Dickens continued his chosen profession in North America, receiving an appointment to the North-West Mounted Police in Canada beginning in 1874. Francis participated in several important battles and was promoted to Inspector in 1880. He died in 1886 while traveling in Moline, Illinois, where he is buried.

• Approximately ten years after Dickens’s death, one of Dickens’s sons, Charley, co-wrote a theatrical production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood with a new ending, which he claimed was in part based on the authority of the information his father had shared with him. The play has to this day never been produced. The manuscript is at the Charles Dickens Museum in London. (Charley was originally depicted as a character in The Last Dickens, but eliminated in a later draft)

• Years after Dickens’s death, a collector discovered a sheaf of his papers in Dickens’s unique shorthand. It was believed the bundle of papers could be the ending of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Turning to Henry Dickens, one of Dickens’s sons, to help decipher, the papers were decoded—but apparently had nothing to do with Drood.

• According to a literary historian in the early twentieth century, James Osgood wrote a manuscript detailing his experiences as a publisher, including extensively about his time with Charles Dickens during the American tour. This manuscript has never been located. Osgood had left it in the possession of A. V. S. Anthony, an engraver, at whose death passed it on to his widow. Tracking their descendants leads to actor Anthony Perkins, whose father was named James Ripley Osgood Perkins after the publisher and who also had a son named Osgood Perkins. If the manuscript still exists, it does not appear to be registered to a library or archive and may still be held somewhere as a private possession (http://www.matthewpearl.com/dickens/epilogue.html).

The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey

This is another book I read for the Kimball Museum’s book club. I found it off-beat, enigmatic, and worthwhile reading, although not really a page-turner. Maybe it’s I who is off-beat because it seemed that no one in the group liked it, at least the outspoken members. I really don’t know how I feel about the book; put me down as neutral.

Peter Carey has won the Booker Prize twice, for the novels Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang. This is the first book by Carey that I have read so I have no basis for comparison. However, two reviews stated that:

Peter Carey’s dazzling new novel, The Chemistry of Tears, encompasses heartbreak, the comfort of absorbing work, the transformative power of beauty and the soul of an old machine. If you’ve never read the Australian-born, two-time Booker Prize–winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang — or, most recently, Parrot and Olivier in America — his 12th novel is a terrific introduction to his work. Once again, Carey demonstrates an artful ability to capture a two-way interplay between past and present that is part historical, part fanciful and completely wonderful (McAlpin, Heller, NPR.org).

This novel lacks the wicked energy of Parrot and Olivier or Theft: A Love Story. But if Carey’s best books are superlative, the next tier down is still better – meatier, more imaginative – than many writers ever manage (Caplan, Nina, http://www.independent.co.uk)

So, I have more books to put on my to-read list. As they say, so many books, so little time.

Maybe what the book club readers were reacting to is that The Chemistry of Tears is a novel that speaks to the intellect rather than the heart. While it is tightly engineered, The Chemistry of Tears also contains vagueness and ambiguity, mystery and wonder. This novel reaches a bit too far for ambiguity to make the book really accessible. Carey’s goal in the book is setting up the illusory versus the actual, the mechanical versus the organic; it just takes great deal of work on the reader’s part to get it.

Peter Carey moves between two time periods, two countries, and two main characters. Catherine Gehrig is an horologist working at the (fictional) Swinburne Museum in London. The book begins when she learns of the sudden death of a heart attack of her lover, Matthew Tindall, Head Curator of Metals at the same institution. Catherine has been Tindall’s mistress for 13 years. He was older, married, and a father, but the pair of them lived an idyllic, secret life together. Now, Catherine believes that all possibility of happiness in life is gone.

Despite her grief, which we hear a lot about and which should make her a sympathetic character, Catherine isn’t easy to like. Her voice is brittle and snooty. It isn’t a voice that seduces. Quite soon, it’s possible to wish she would keep quiet about her “secret darling.”

It is in his depiction of Catherine as a technician that Carey presents her most effectively. He has clearly done a massive amount of research into what conservators and curators do in modern museums. The Swinburne and Catherine’s workroom are always entirely convincing places, and there is much incidental pleasure in learning about the place, the tools, the dust coats, the fume cupboard, the elaborate hierarchies.

Eric Croft, her boss, is one of the few at the museum aware of her affair with Tindall. He hopes that a new project, the complex reassembly of a magnificent, mid-19th century automaton of a silver swan, will distract her. He also provides an exceptionally able young assistant, Amanda, along with boxes packed with the swan’s hundreds of screws, rods and rings and eleven densely filled notebooks.

These are the journals of the second character, Henry Brandling, a British railroad heir who, desperate for entertainment for his sickly young son, travels deep into the land of expert clock makers in the German Schwarzwald in 1854 to commission a mechanical toy duck that will eat grain, apparently digest it and then, with a whirring of springs, defecate. Catherine becomes obsessed with Henry’s fantastical tale about his dealings with Herr Sumper, a mechanical genius and probable con man, and his strange household, a story that alternates and ultimately intertwines with her own.

There are many strings left hanging at the end. Ambiguity, remember? However, in the end, details (and logic) don’t really matter. The closing scenes, in which Catherine and Amanda finally recreate what Henry Brandling brought back from the forest, are among the best in the book, and the moment when the swan is set in motion is delightful.

Watch a video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4YggCiDRI0) of the mechanical Silver Swan housed in the Bowes Museum in Northern England, which inspired Peter Carey.

Master of Shadows The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens by Mark Lamster

I read this for the Fort Worth Kimball Museum’s book club. I knew next to nothing about 17th century history – just a little about the Stuarts, Cromwell, and the Great Fire – but not European doings. Now I know way more than I ever wanted. Some of it little came in handy when I was teaching early American literature this summer. One never knows what random information one may pick up that might come in handy at the most unexpected times.

The audience for this book would, I think, be readers who want to know more about political history and art history. It is not for the casual reader; it is not light reading. Also, I have the paperback edition with few illustrations – all in black and white. I don’t know whether the hardback would have more painting, and in color. I was lucky enough to have Rembrandt’s Eyes by Simon Schama, which is chock full of Ruben’s paintings mentioned in Master of Shadows.

I was also relatively unfamiliar with Rubens. I knew the name, of course, but his paintings are not as ubiquitous as are those of Monet, Rembrandt, Botticelli, or Munch. Chances are, you, like myself, are much better acquainted with the adjective than the work of the painter. Few people can cite a Rubens painting by name, but “Rubenesque” has become a synonym for any amply proportioned female. Rubens has fallen out of style and is now thought of as an Old World master of a painting style—symbolic representation, heavy on Greek and biblical references—that we now think of as musty and antiquated. High Baroque, the style in which he painted, is nowadays synonymous with pointless complexity. After all, how many modern museum-strollers have the time to invest in all of the reference books needed to make sense of his allegories? But despite the one-dimensionality associated with the painter’s name, here’s a book that puts Rubens in a whole other frame.

Peter Paul Rubens got more done in one day than most of us get done in a lifetime. Rubens wasn’t content with merely being, conceivably, the world’s greatest painter during his lifetime. Instead, he filled his resume with an impressive array of occupations. Like superspy, for one—in addition to treaty negotiator, statesman, wealthy landowner, antiquities dealer, and factory head.

Rubens the politico-spy is just one of his many pursuits that surface in Master of Shadows, but it’s perhaps the least likely, given what was regarded as an artist’s lack of prospects when it came to upward mobility in the 16th and 17th centuries. Painters had a relative low status in society and were viewed as manual laborers because they worked with their hands. They could, possibly, earn a fortune. Rubens certainly did, with many royal and ecclesiastical commissions, which he met, with the assistance of helpers and students executing large portions of the paintings that bore his name. Painters were rarely drafted into diplomatic service, despite what Mark Lamster cites as the most natural cover: they had the ear of kings, queens, dukes, and assorted courtiers.

Rubens was eventually put on military salary by the Spanish crown (which had dominion over his native Antwerp). He was handsome, affable, quick-witted, and a natural salesman and he knew when to keep his mouth shut. Lamster calls him “the perfect spy.” There’s no doubt that Rubens’s undertakings were useful to Europe’s volatile politics. Intrigue was everywhere, with one clandestine deal being canceled out by another, and a third in place as a fall-back.

Rubens worked primarily as an operative for the Spanish crown, which was engaged in a prolonged war with the emerging Dutch republic, a conflict that engulfed all of Europe’s powers and involved the countries’ colonies. Rubens believed he could resolve this perpetual war, and he devoted several years of his life to this effort, risking all that he had achieved. He would arrange for a peace between Spain and England, with the expectation that England would then force its Dutch ally to compromise with Spain. It was a shrewd bit of strategic thinking, but it would not work unless Rubens could convince England and Spain, traditional enemies, to come to terms. Ultimately, Rubens did not succeed, although he was knighted by both Philip IV, King of Spain, and Charles I, King of England. One can see the sources of conflict in Europe that extend even to the 21st century. Lamster does a valuable job of sorting out the tangled politics of the Low Countries during what was a violent, complex, and energetic era. I was never entirely clear exactly what was going on, but I suspect the participants weren’t either.

Rubens was able to balance affairs of state with his personal business interests. He was not an agitator, at least externally; repeatedly browbeaten by various members of the nobility, the painter/spy worked ceaselessly to please, winning the favor of kings (such as Spain’s Philip IV) who had previously held his lack of a birthright against him.

Rubens approached negotiations as he might have approached a painting. That is, as a problem to be solved, requiring just the right balance of materials and techniques—shadow, color, and symbolism on the painting side of the equation; pointed reasons, financial assurances, and talk of shared interests at court.

We see Rubens’s political concerns feeding into his art, yielding it greater narrative scope. His early work evolved into a style where the relationship between metaphor and meaning became more direct. He had to make sure that his patrons understood precisely what his art was conveying. Satisfying human vanity went a long way in Rubens’s political career, and visualizing a king as a metaphorical god of justice and happiness, beloved of his flock, made for a favorable frame of mind when a favor was needed.

Mark Lamster’s affection for his subject is so complete and his research is so thorough that “Master of Shadows: The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens” manages to be generally engaging, instructive and thought-provoking. My occasional impatience arose, undoubtedly, from my overall lack of interest and experience with 17th century European history.

Lamster demonstrates the relationship between Rubens’ diplomatic assignments and his important artistic commissions. The author also reveals Rubens to be an attractive and likable man who clearly interested and charmed those around him.

Lamster provides a portrait of a major painter at a time when artists were still fully integrated into the intellectual, social and political affairs of their time. For Ruben, the artist was very much a man of affairs — well-educated, -traveled and -schooled in the social graces. Flemish painters, like their Italian counterparts, were members of respectable, even prestigious guilds. It’s not hard to see how a man as self-possessed and as socially gifted as Rubens could find a role in high-level diplomacy.

The House at the End of Hope Street by Menna Van Praag

There have been so many times in my life that I needed this house. Undoubtedly, everyone has needed this house at least once in her life.This is such a wonderful, soothing, cheerful, up-lifting book I would recommend it to anyone who is generally as negative about life as I am. It really isn’t my usual kind of book; maybe I need to change my usual kind of book. One review I read said that it felt like “a big hug.”

I was feeling that I had been overdoing it on the mysteries and needed a change of pace. (This blog is, after all, All Books Considered.) I had read about this book somewhere and had ordered it sometime ago. I wish I had read it sooner.

Part modern romantic fiction, part fantasy (low), part feminist history, the eponymous house exists for women who have lost all hope. Only those women can see the house; it is invisible to anyone who doesn’t need it (and men). A woman can only stay ninety-nine days; usually, that is sufficient time for the house to give the woman hope and show her the way to her new life.

The house has been in Peggy’s family for centuries, and some of its guests have been Daphne du Maurier, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Emmeline Pankhurst, Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, and Mary Somerville. There are also some ghosts who returned or, in the case of the cat, never left. The guests in this book are Alba, Carmen, and Greer, who are all at the end of their endurance, without anywhere to go, without friends, without hope.

The house sends the three messages when they need them, objects that they need to find their bearings, and advice from the previous residents. Imagine getting writing advice from Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker! The house doesn’t tell the women what to do; it just makes suggestions. And everything that happens to the women while they are in the house isn’t happy; however, things seem to work out for the best and the women learn from their experiences.

This book has inspired me to go back and read the Victorians – one of my eternal resolutions, I just keep getting distracted. Sarah Addison Allen is compared to this author in several reviews. I’m not familiar with her because I am not, as I said, attracted to contemporary fiction, certainly not the “big hug” kind, but I will keep my mind open and investigate her books.

At any rate, I highly recommend this book. Maybe, like the house, I saw it just when I needed to.

Joyland by Stephen King

It’s been years, no, decades, since I read Stephen King. But there was something about the cover (which as you can tell from its retro art is King’s ode to pulp crime novels) or the write-ups that made me read this book. And I am so glad I did. It’s perfect summer reading, even if you don’t have a beach within hundreds of miles (which I don’t).

Joyland is King’s story about the adventures of a 21-year-old college boy in a haunted Southern amusement park as he attempts to overcome the crushing blow of his first experience with heartbreak. The book delivers chills, not horror, and could be a ghost story told while toasting marshmallows around a fire. It’s mock-Gothic Americana whose tone is more important than its plot, mostly because it barely has a plot, and only a soupçon of insubstantial menace. For most of the book, there’s not even a villain, just a sense of carnival sideshow creepiness that takes the place of a specific evil.

Devin narrates the story, reflecting on the summer of 1973, an immemorial year for him, as Poe might put it, which infuses the story with thoughtful moments of old-age wisdom. I could so relate to all the cultural references – I was 21 in 1971, my own most immemorial year. And, while I didn’t work at an amusement park (Six Flags over Texas is a stone’s throw from me), I was a tour guide at our state capital in Austin. We didn’t exactly sell fun like Joyland does, but we tried, and we were a tight group that explored what 1970 and 1971 had to offer. I listened to the Doors like Devin – even saw them in 1968 – but I never got into Pink Floyd. Maybe this is one reason King is so popular. He is able to tap into certain aspects of life that apply to almost everyone. King’s unique brand of horror has always been so potent because it has an underlying sense of humanity.

This is a coming-of-age novel, bittersweet as they all are, mixed in with a crime novel and a horror story – and it undeniably works. King was born in 1947, so the ages don’t match, but numbers don’t matter. You can tell from the get-go that Devin is Stephen King. It is a personal tale that explores the importance of love, loss, and death. One line leapt out at me: “When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.” I have been in contact with my 1971 summer love, and we have similar, but not identical memories. We all have our own perspective of any event; which is true and which is illusion?

At Joyland, Devin makes friends with Tom Kennedy and Erin Cook, also summer hires at Joyland, which years before had been the scene of the murder of a young woman named Linda Gray whose ghost is said to be seen at the Horror House. He also befriends a young boy, named Mike Ross and his mother, Annie. Their lives all become interwoven when Devin and Erin decide to investigate the mystery of Linda Gray’s unsolved murder by the “Carny Killer” after Tom has a vision in the Horror House he won’t discuss.

Joyland is a quaint, old-fashioned establishment that offers rickety rides, rigged games of skill, and other lurid but finally tame diversions. Between the lines is an implied critique of the sanitized, corporate, Disney-style amusements that have supplanted the grass-roots titillations of an earlier, cruder era. Through Devin, who senses that Joyland’s days are numbered, King is lamenting the disappearance of a certain type of forthright hucksterism not all that different in spirit from pulp fiction.

As Devin learns from the masters of the trade, the carny-from-carny folk, the naive seductions of the carnival take advantage of the human desire to be honestly manipulated and charmingly ripped off. Devin discovers that his special talent is cheering up the kiddies, especially while costumed as a huge dog, which, in the Joyland parlance, is known as “wearing the fur.” It’s a noble calling, as Devin’s boss explains to him in a rather wooden speech that might be King’s own manifesto as writer: “This is a badly broken world, full of wars and cruelty and senseless tragedy. Every human being who inhabits it is served his or her portion of unhappiness and wakeful nights. . . . Given such sad but undeniable facts of the human condition, you have been given a priceless gift this summer: you are here to sell fun.”

Joyland is a far gentler, deeper, more thoughtful book than the one it masquerades as. Joyland is a coming of age story that teaches us to appreciate those special moments in our lives because “some days are treasure. Not many, but I think in almost every life there are a few”. King leaves you with the powerful idea that even though the day will come that we are all forced to meet our maker, there’s something undeniably beautiful about that.

For all that, it is good fun. The novel is like a plump wad of cotton candy; it fills the mouth with fluffy sweetness that quickly dissolves when the reader starts to chew. That’s by design. King’s ambition this time around isn’t to snatch us and hold us in his grasp but to loft us up high, then briskly set us down the way a Ferris wheel does. Or a first love. Joyland comes with all the horror trappings for which Stephen King is known: a sinister carnival, a grisly unsolved murder, a haunted ride, but much, much more.

The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing

“The big clock ran everywhere, overlooked no one, omitted no one, forgot nothing, remembered nothing, knew nothing. Was nothing.” – George Stroud

How does a man escape from himself? No book has ever dramatized that question more perfectly effect than The Big Clock, a masterpiece of American noir.

Fearing based the novel on the October 1943 murder of New York brewery heiress Patricia Burton Bernheimer Lonergan and Sam Fuller’s 1944 thriller The Dark Page. A combination of these two suggested a plot thread to Fearing, and he began writing The Big Clock during August 1944, continuing to work on the manuscript for over a year. He married artist Nan Lurie in 1945, and much of the novel was written in her loft on East 10th Street in New York City. The manuscript was completed by October 1945, and it was published by Harcourt Brace in 1946.

The Big Clock is the story of George Stroud, editor of Crimeways’ magazine, one of several publications in the Janoth Enterprises publishing empire. Stroud is dissatisfied with his job and his marriage.

One day, before heading home to his wife Georgia, Stroud has a drink with Pauline Delos, the beautiful girlfriend of his boss, Earl Janoth. Things happen. The two have a few dates, including a night away in Albany and a gay old time in Manhattan the next day. In the morning, Stroud escorts Pauline home, leaving her at the corner just as Janoth returns from a trip.

Janoth and Pauline have a spat over the shadowy man Janoth spotted walking from Pauline’s. “At least this time it’s a man,” Janoth quips. Yes, it seems that Pauline swings both ways. She in turn counters by questioning Janoth’s sexual proclivities, especially in regard to his relationship with his right-hand man, Steve Hagen. Enraged, Janoth bludgeons her to death with a brandy decanter. These homosexual references are pretty risqué for 1946.

Janoth knows there was one witness to his entry into Pauline’s apartment on the night of the murder; he knows that man must have been the man Pauline was with before he got back; but he doesn’t know who he was. He badly wants to get his hands on that man.

Janoth turns to the only man he can trust, Steve Hagen. The cool, calculating Hagen concocts a scheme to provide Janoth with an alibi and discover the elusive figure who could connect Janoth to the crime. In order to do this, Hagen calls on one of his most trusted employees to track him down: George Stroud, who else?
All signs point to the man seen with Pauline. However, Stroud can’t reveal his identity or deny his guilt, both due to the damning circumstantial evidence and because telling his side of the story would ruin his marriage and his career. Who would believe his innocence? Stroud also can’t stall the search or else draw suspicion to himself. He has to give the appearance of doing his typical persistent job of investigation, hoping to escape detection while uncovering enough evidence to place guilt on Janoth.

Stroud has been playing both ends against the middle and it’s all about to fall down around his ears.

Stroud’s cover story is that he is looking for a missing link in a high-powered political-industrial deal. Meanwhile, it appears that there are some dubious dealings going on behind the scenes at Janoth Enterprises that have nothing to do with Pauline Delos. During his investigation, Stroud learns that there is a leak within the organization that is strengthening a rival company, Jennett-Donohue, for a takeover of Janoth’s empire. Fearing ingeniously refers to this treachery with the title for a painting Stroud purchased on his last night out with Pauline – The Temptation of St. Judas. However, the identity of the traitor is never properly revealed.

The Big Clock ends abruptly and ironically illogical in its chronological structure. From approximately 8:30 pm to “the rest of the day”, Stroud speaks of making dinner dates and buying tickets for a show that night. Then a page later he’s talking about that afternoon. Perhaps Fearing is making an overly conscious effort to subvert “the big clock” by this shift in hour. He may be suggesting that there are no nicely-wrapped conclusions in life by never explaining the circumstances behind the novel’s business intrigue. He does this by using a story that Stroud tells his daughter with a moral of not pulling at any “loose threads.”

In The Big Clock, Fearing employs no less than seven narrators to tell his tale including Stroud, Janoth, Hagen, Stroud’s wife, two Crimeways reporters and unconventional artist Louise Patterson. Fearing captures each of the narrators’ voice, from the philosophical musings of Stroud, to the coldblooded assessments of Hagen, to the uncontrolled tittering of Patterson.

The Big Clock is Fearing’s most successful novel, commercially and aesthetically. It’s a crime story, but more surreal than hard-boiled. The two key figures in it are the Big Clock, of the title, and Gil’s Bar, which is its antithesis. The spaces and characters all array themselves in actual and spiritual proximity to one pole or the other.

Gil’s Bar is everything the Big Clock is not. It is an ill-lit, not to mention illicit, dive. Behind the bar Gil keeps a grand array of junk. Patrons challenge Gil to produce an item that they imagine he could not possibly have. Gil invariably produces it, and the patron stands Gil a drink while he tells the story of how he came to possess it. Whereas the Big Clock values everything every instant and discards everything every instant for something new, Gil’s junk heap operates on a different principle. Everything remains in the junk heap to be valued again and again, in yet one more of Gil’s anecdotes without end.

In The Big Clock, characters who are close to the orbit of Gil’s Bar are marked by their openness to art, alcohol and sexual variety. Characters close to the Big Clock instinctively close themselves off (although, this being America in the 40s, everybody drinks). The central character is the one most evenly divided between the two.

The Clock at Janoth Enterprises controls all of the timepieces in the building, as omnipresent and omnipotent as Janoth would like to think he is. Fearing’s “big clock” is metaphor for the invisible framework that seems to control the fate of man; the tedious beat to which most men march and a rhythm that Stroud believes himself above. Stroud fancies himself a free thinker, only seeming to escape from the “pincher claws” and “grinding gears” of “the big clock” when he surrenders himself to its mechanisms.

John Farrow’s 1948 The Big Clock starring Ray Milland is available on DVD. The book was also adapted for Roger Donaldson’s 1987 spy-thriller No Way Out with Kevin Costner.

In his introduction to Kenneth Fearing: Complete Poems (1994), Robert M. Ryley described the events of publication and the aftermath:
Published in the fall of 1946, The Big Clock made Fearing temporarily rich. Altogether he took in about $60,000 (roughly $360,000 in 1992 dollars): about $10,000 in royalties and from the sale of republication rights (including a condensation in The American Magazine), and $50,000 from the sale of film rights to Paramount. Overestimating his business acumen, he had negotiated his own contract with Paramount, permanently and irrevocably signing away his film rights, and relinquishing his television rights till 1952, by which time, he discovered to his rage and frustration, Paramount was showing late-night reruns and had thus cornered the market. A more immediate problem was alcohol. He told his friend Alice Neel (the model for Louise Patterson, the eccentric painter in The Big Clock) that since he could now afford to start drinking in the morning, he was having trouble getting any work done. On one occasion he almost died from a combination of scotch and phenobarbital, and in 1952 he was so shaken by his doctor’s warnings about the condition of his liver that he went on the wagon.

Fearing died in 1961, of malignant melanoma in Manhattan.

There is a famous anecdote about Fearing. During the Red-baiting years of the 50s, the FBI rounded up Fearing and asked him the inevitable question: “Are you a member of the Communist Party?” His answer: “Not yet.”

What makes it a story is the enigma of this answer. Is he saying that the FBI’s harassment is, ironically enough, the very thing that will drive him into the arms of the Party? Or is he saying that he is not worthy of the Party? Not ready? Or, more interestingly, that the Party itself is not ready for him?

Fearing’s writing style maintains a taut, yet relaxed feeling that works so well in classic noir. This book belongs on the shelf next to the works of Hammett, Chandler, Cain and Woolrich of every reader of the genre.

The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes

I am writing this review/essay the week the Trayvon Martin verdict was handed down and President Obama observed that 35 years ago, he could have been Trayvon. This book was written in 1963, but it could have been written today. People are still wary of young black men, whether they are in black hoodies or, as Hugh Denismore is, a respectable young doctor from a wealthy and well-educated family, finishing a medical internship at a university hospital in Los Angeles.

This novel also addresses the issue of abortion. Written ten years before Roe v. Wade, Hughes does not oppose, at least directly, abortion; the characters all consider the operation immoral, appalling, and sordid. The marshal who observes, as Doc Jopher is arrested: “… there’ll be another Jopher. And another telephone number. And another old woman. Another and another and another. There’ll always be abortionists just as there’ll always be prostitutes and pimps and pushers. When man wants an evil, he’ll always find someone evil to supply him. (243)”

The fact that to get an abortion Iris had to go to an alcoholic, unlicensed doctor and have the procedure on the floor with unsterilized instruments doesn’t seem to strike anyone as wrong – that Iris should be able to go to a clean hospital for an illegal abortion, not risking her life or reputation just isn’t an option. I hope that those living in states restricting woman’s access to a legal abortion, such as I here in Texas, realize that we may end on up those days again. With one or two clinics open in a state and all the other limitations in place, women will have to return to those bad old days.

So much for my editorializing.  I won’t apologize or ask you to ignore it if it offends you. If it offends you, you should read it and think about the point I am trying to make.

You may have heard of Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, and Jim Thompson if you are at all familiar with mid-century noir. Dorothy B. Hughes ranks with these writers as a master of this genre. With its reissue of The Expendable Man, New York Review Books has given readers the opportunity to rediscover the extraordinary Dorothy B. Hughes. In books like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With The Expendable Man, her last work of fiction, Hughes reverses the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes.

Dorothy Hughes’s writing, like the best noir writing, is simultaneously rich and spare, with sumptuous descriptions summoned by irregular sentences and familiar language. “Across the tracks there was a different world,” begins the novel:

The long and lonely country was the color of sand. The horizon hills were haze-black; the clumps of mesquite stood in dark pools of their own shadowing. But the pools and the rim of dark horizon were discerned only by conscious seeing, else the world was all sand, brown and tan and copper and pale beige. Even the sky at this moment was sand, reflection of the fading bronze of the sun.

Raymond Chandler famously wrote that hardboiled fiction must be written in the “speech of common men,” yet also wrote astoundingly poetic descriptions of Los Angeles. Hughes, like Chandler, began her literary career as a poet, and this tendency is apparent in her writing.

Ms. Hughes wrote 14 mystery novels, most of them set in the Southwest and involving an upper-class hero caught up in evil intrigue. Her best-known works include The Cross-Eyed Bear (1940), Ride the Pink Horse (1946), The Expendable Man (1964) and In a Lonely Place (1947), which was made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart.

After working as a reporter and women’s editor in the 1920’s, she began reviewing crime fiction for The Albuquerque Tribune, The Los Angeles News, The Los Angeles Mirror and The New York Herald Tribune

In 1931, she published an award-winning book of poetry, Dark Certainty. She wrote a history of the University of New Mexico in the late ’30s, and then turned to writing fiction. In 1940, her first two novels, The Cross-Eyed Bear and The So Blue Marble, were published. Her 1942 novel The Fallen Sparrow was Hughes’s breakthrough and her introduction to Hollywood. The story rights were bought by RKO which released a movie based on the novel in 1943, starring John Garfield as the survivor of a Spanish prisoner-of-war camp, faced with new Nazi enemies in the United States. This movie was a box-office success and one of the more serious topical thrillers about World War II, and it helped transform the book into Hughes’s best-known work. Her 1946 novel, Ride the Pink Horse was turned into a brilliant film by director and star Robert Montgomery the following year. The film version of her 1947 novel In a Lonely Place starred Humphrey Bogart and was released in 1950.

Hughes’s work decreased as she started a family and found motherhood encroaching on her time and ability to write, but she always wrote literary criticism — for 39 years she was a literary critic specializing in mysteries for the Albuquerque Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Herald Tribune. In 1950, she received her first Edgar Allen Poe Award for her work as a critic. Hughes’s fiction became well-respected among readers for its vivid language, linked to a tough yet powerful style of writing. Her books usually featured lone upper-class heroes operating on their own, independent of the powers that be and in quest for justice. Hughes was writing far ahead of what Hollywood was prepared to deal with even in the ’60s.

In 1964, Ride the Pink Horse was adapted into a new movie, The Hanged Man. This marked the end of her direct influence on Hollywood. Her work, however, was a major influence on other mystery writers of the postwar era, and the movies they inspired remain among the most respected of their particular libraries. She was especially influential on the next two generations of female mystery writers. In 1978, Hughes was dubbed a “grand master” by the Mystery Writers of America. She returned to non-fiction writing late in life and received her second Edgar Award for her book Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason. Hughes died in 1993 at the age of 88. Her most popular books regularly went into reprint throughout the later decades of her life.

In his Afterword to this new edition, Walter Mosley asks, but does not answer, why Hughes has not been as celebrated as her peers, like Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy. “Bringing her back is no act of nostalgia,” he writes. “It is a gateway through which we might access her particular view of that road between our glittering versions of American life and the darker reality that waits at the end of the ride.”

In The Expendable Man, Hugh Denismore is driving his mother’s Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix to attend a family wedding. His life is going great; he would seem to have the world at his feet. Then why does the sight of a few redneck teenagers disconcert him? Why is he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the desert highway? And why is he the first person the police suspect when she is found dead in Arizona a few days later?

Hughes holds back a few facts for several chapters. She provides hints but doesn’t directly state the primary reason for Hugh’s distress and anxiety until his first interview with the police – Hugh is black, not white, unlike many noir heroes. It becomes clear that Hugh’s discomfort with the noisy teenagers is due to the racist epithets they yell at him as their car drives by, and that his tense interactions with various service personnel during his trip have a very simple explanation. Hugh’s overwhelming terror at hearing of Iris Croom’s death is entirely rational. The local detectives’ overt racism only heightens his fear.

Hugh feels he cannot tell his family about his distress for fear of ruining the wedding festivities, but he luckily finds his allies in Ellen Hamilton, his niece’s roommate and the daughter of a D.C. judge; Skye Houston, a white lawyer preparing to run for city office; and Hugh’s brother-in-law Edward, a successful and well-respected doctor in Phoenix. Against them are the detectives Ringle and Venner, whose determination to prove Hugh’s guilt overrides any opposing evidence; an anonymous caller intent on viciously harassing Hugh; and Iris Croom’s mysterious Phoenix boyfriend, who may or may not be married but who certainly arranged for her abortion.

In Walter Mosley’s Afterword, he discusses the role race plays in this novel. To fail to inject politics into any discussion of noir is both a dishonest proposition and a losing one. The Expendable Man, which makes use of noir’s generic conventions of corruption, resonates only too well today. With the election of President Obama, we were supposed to be in a “post-racial era.” This week’s events have shown that we are far from being there.

Hugh Denismore experiences a combination of confusion and resignation when confronted with overt racism – confusion because he is used to a near-“invisible” blackness in L.A., resignation because he remembers encountering the same hatred in his childhood.  Hughes, however, neatly upends her own inversion of the classic noir trope of good and evil drawn along racial lines: race, in The Expendable Man, is not an indicator of good or evil. In fact, neither is racism, oddly enough, although the “bad” characters are easily identifiable by their overt and ugly bigotry. Hughes has managed a precise illustration of racism as a system and the ways that people can work to undermine the system even as they are implicated in it. When Ellen Hamilton checks into the motel, the desk clerk states in a transparent lie that the only room available is the one Hugh has just vacated. Yet Hugh’s belief in this moment is not that the clerk is participating in racism, but that her friendliness and willingness to help Hugh and Ellen mean she is working with them to undermine the system that prevents her from giving them another room.

Like many crime writers, Hughes is interested in appearances: the look of guilt and innocence. His adversaries, based on circumstantial evidence and their suspicions of Denismore’s race, don’t believe in Denismore’s innocence, and on its own, Denismore’s innocence isn’t all that interesting, anyway. It has no shape or size. In this novel, any one character’s psychological depth is arid compared to the interactions between them, how they test and threaten each other.

Difference is defined by oppositions of power, after all – black, white; accuser, accused. Noir provides a language and a rhythm for such differences. The contrasts of heat and coolness, light and shadow, create the setting for stagey confrontations – accusations, interrogations, discoveries, confessions – that move the plot forward.

Morality, too, is a matter of contrasts. Blackness in “The Expendable Man” occupies a position of ethical superiority. Denismore is so peaceable, or passive, that he isn’t even threatened by the appearance of Bonnie Lee’s father, who rages against him. It’s not only white racism that Denismore is against; insistently, it’s white abortion. The classic American fear that a black man would sleep with a white woman is here transformed into the fear that a black man would “kill” a white woman’s baby. Abortion functions as a sex crime without the sex. Denismore’s doctor brother-in-law, Edward, explains that all medical men are approached, from time to time, by someone wanting the service. “One thing I’ll say, Hugh, and it’s God’s truth. I’ve never been approached by any of our people. Only the ofays… Somehow they seem to think that a Negro doctor lacks morality.”

Denismore’s search for the abortionist—a fallen doctor for a fallen woman – shapes much of the plot and ratchets up the danger and risk he faces. He finally finds Doc Jopher, a white boozehound who lost his medical license for operating while under the influence, and who lives in a shack with his booze and his hound, Duke.

The real villain in this novel – the absolute limit of horror that blacks and whites together must combat, though the battle will never end – is the death of the unborn. In the tightly calibrated world Hughes has created, black morality can only appear in contrast to something that readers, and the author, could paint as unquestionably immoral. That is, Hughes was able to explore race and difference because she put “evil” somewhere else. For noir, everything in the world is in some way tainted. Only the unborn can be blameless and incorruptible. It’s the perfect symbol for her moral economy.

It bears noting that illegal abortion, of course, was evil, if not on the terms The Expendable Man understands it. It killed thousands of women. It was expensive and humiliating. There was no anesthetic. And terminating an unwanted pregnancy was much more dangerous for poor women and women of color, who lacked access to providers. According to one report from the Guttmacher Institute, in New York City in the early sixties, abortion was responsible for twenty-five per cent of childbirth-related deaths for white women; for non-white and Puerto Rican women, it was fifty per cent.

The Expendable Man does not suggest that racism can be combatted by action or waited out in time; it is a disease, and it must be quarantined, the scene fled. The last lines find Denismore back in the car with a woman, the right woman this time. He and Ellen, backs to the desert, are driving towards their future. It awaits them in Los Angeles, away from Phoenix.

The beauty of the Southwestern American desert is a deceptive cover for the violence — born of fear and hatred — that lies beneath it in a tawdry, seedy underbelly familiar to noir. There are no satisfying solutions in The Expendable Man, and the solutions that do come seem almost pat and almost saccharine; however, though the solution may not be satisfying, the novel as a whole certainly is. Noir does not present a puzzle to be solved. We can expect no easy answers, because the answer is not the point. Hugh Denismore’s search for Iris Croom’s true killer is not prompted by a desire to apprehend the villain, or even to find the truth. His search is prompted by the apparently selfish desire to save his reputation. Yet Hugh Denismore is not a selfish man; he is, by any reckoning, a good man, who loves his family and wishes to save them from the grief of hearing him branded an abortionist and murderer. His is not the superhuman intellect of Holmes or Poirot; Hugh Denismore is only human. That, in fact, is the truth that hides within noir: it is the stories of the only human, tawdry and stained and yet somehow golden for all of that.

As Hugh and Ellen set out to find Iris’s killer, the threat of disappearance stalks Hugh. He could end up in jail or murdered, the fact of his race denying him any margin of protection. Lest the novel’s allusive title be lost on anyone, Ellen spells it out: “In our country, more often than not, we are what Ellison so well describes as invisible.” The Expendable Man dramatizes the relation between existential invisibility and actual expendability. It was Hughes’s virtue to discern, far more clearly than Harper Lee (that other white woman with a ’60s novel about a black man’s innocence and an unjust society’s guilt), the systemic quality of American racism. Hughes’s virtue is also a virtue of her genre. In the noir novel, after all, corruption and abuse are not individual moral failings. They are etched in society’s bones.

 

 

Mrs. Poe by Lynn Cullen

I must be honest. I have fallen behind on my writing due to my responsibilities to my students. Consequently, I haven’t been posting my reviews for Net Galley; as a result, it seems that I’m not being allowed access to books that I would be interested in reading. So, I’m trying to catch up and prove myself to be worthy of inclusion.

I chose and was granted permission to read it. I was interested in it because of its title. I am and always have been a major Poe fan (I memorized Annabel Lee for my 9^th grade English class – this was back when students had to memorize poetry – a practice that should be reinstated but won’t be since it’s not a skill on The Test).

What a mishmash of fact and fiction! Coincidentally, I just taught a class on American Lit from the Beginning until 1865, so these names were fresh in mind. And names there were in this book. It is the paradigm of “name-dropping.”  Anyone who was anyone in the first half of the 19^th century has his or her name mentioned, in passing or as a major character. Historical context is one thing, but this goes over that “red line.”

The whole premise of the novel – that Poe and Frances Sargent Locke Osgood had a physical love affair and that she bore him a child while both were married to other people – is difficult to credit. It is true that some writers have speculated that during this period Osgood had a love affair with Poe, but reliable evidence does not, at this time, exist to prove such a claim. Osgood met Poe in 1845, and they quickly became friends. She socialized with Poe at literary salons, visited him and his wife, Virginia, at their home, and published a number of poems in the Broadway Journal, of which he was editor. In the pages of the Journal they conducted an open literary flirtation, but, as critic Mary DeJong has said, “For Osgood, writing itself was a kind of performance, and she reveled in drama as much as Poe did.” Their flirtatious poems, DeJong speculates, “define their roles as patron and protégé, artist and admirer—not the quality or depth of their emotions” (The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 5^th Ed., Paul Lauter, General Editor). Creativity and imagination are to be admired, but there has to be some historical basis for it in an historical fiction novel. The majority of this book is “will they or won’t they?” I won’t spoil the book for anyone who actually reads it, but the answer is right out of a Harlequin romance (or so I suppose, being too snobbish to ever have read one).

Contemporary accounts relate the devotion Poe and Virginia had to each other, although it has been suggested that Virginia and Poe had a relationship more like that between brother and sister than between husband and wife. Poe biographer Joseph Wood Krutch has suggested that Poe did not need women “in the way that normal men need them”, but only as a source of inspiration and care, and that Poe was never interested in women sexually.

Poe had several relationships with women; they were an important part of his life and his writing. The first woman, his mother, set a pattern for the other relationships – abandoned by her husband, she died at the age of 24 of tuberculosis, when Poe was two years old. Poe wrote, Poe replied, “In speaking of my mother you have touched a string to which my heart fully responds. To have known her is to be the object of great interest in my eyes. I myself never knew her — and never knew the affection of a father. Both died . . . within a few weeks of each other. I have many occasional dealings with adversity — but the want of parental affection has been the heaviest of my trials”. (Ostrom, John Ward. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols, New York: Gordian Press Inc., 1966, pages 78-79). Poe clearly expresses his need of female attention and love. It is a theme we see recurring not only in his life but also in many of his literary works. His many poems and short stories were a direct response to, and result of, the many women, and their complementary sorrows, that dominated his life.

It this picture and the impression I have from his writings that makes it difficult for me to see Poe as the sex magnet Cullen portrays him in this book.

As to Frances Osgood – during most of the book she is crushing on Eddie, fretting about what other people think of her, and dashing off the occasional sentimental verse that Poe publishes in his journal. In fact, Osgood was a much-admired popular poet. She thought of herself as a professional writer rather than as a literary artist and took full advantage of the many opportunities presented by a flourishing print culture. Her work and circumstances embody both the opportunities and the constraints of the contemporary literary marketplace. Osgood published in every venue available to her—books, magazines, pamphlets, anthologies, newspapers. Her poems, including beautiful and poignant expressions of maternal love and impassioned articulations of heterosexual love and enthrallment, were widely sought after by magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book and Sartain’s Union Magazine. A contemporary reviewer claimed Osgood was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s equal as a poet but far superior in “grace and tenderness.” This is not the character depicted in this book.

I have other nits to pick with this book. Several of the persons – who actually lived and had a part in Edgar Allan Poe’s life – have their personalities and actions distorted. Others are represented fairly closely to what we know from history.

For example, Margaret Fuller plays a major role in the plot. She is shown to be a petty, scandal-mongering gossip who affects Native American jewelry. She is more interested in other people’s personal lives than social works or the arts. This is the Margaret Fuller who was an American journalist, critic, and women’s rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was the first full-time American female book reviewer in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States. Somehow, there is, as they say, a disconnect.

One character Cullen does get right is Rufus Griswold. His contemporaries considered him to be erratic, dogmatic, pretentious, and vindictive. He and Poe competed for the attention of poet Frances Sargent Osgood. They never reconciled their differences and, after Poe’s death, Griswold wrote an unsympathetic obituary. Claiming to be Poe’s chosen literary executor, he began a campaign to harm Poe’s reputation that lasted until his own death eight years later.

These were complex, creative people. You wouldn’t know it from this book. If you are interested in this period, historically and literarily, read biographies, literary criticism or, even better, their actual works. Just don’t waste your time on this book.

The Return of the Dancing Master by Henning Mankell

The Return of the Dancing Master features a new Henning Mankell detective named Stefan Lindman. Coincidentally, perhaps, a character named Stefan Lindman is Linda Wallander’s odd, unconventional boyfriend in the first BBC4 TV series. He was killed off at the end of the first series. This series stars Krister Henriksson, rather than the Swedish Wallander starring Rolf Larsgaard or the British version starring Kenneth Brannagh .

Published in 2000, it was translated into English in 2003 by Laurie Thompson, and won the 2005 Gumshoe Award for Best European Crime Novel.

While Stefan Lindman, a young, 37-year-old policeman, is on extended sick leave due to cancer of the tongue, he hears about the murder of Herbert Molin, his former colleague, and decides to investigate it himself. Lindman’s inquiry becomes increasingly complex and dangerous as he uncovers the links between Herbert Molin’s death and a global web of neo-Nazi activities.

Herbert Molin, a retired police officer, known to be a recluse, lives alone in a remote cottage. Two things have come to occupy his attention: his enthusiasm for the tango and an mania about “demons” he believes are pursuing him. Early one morning shots shatter Molin’s window- by the time his body is found it is almost unrecognizable. He has been dumped near his house. He’s been tortured; his back has been whipped, his feet flayed. The wounds are full of grit and dirt. There is only one clue – bloody footprints in the pattern of the tango on the living-room floor.

Like all Mankell’s thrillers, the northern European landscape and climate are characters in the novel. Most days, it drizzles, and when it’s not drizzling, it’s lightly snowing. When it’s not lightly snowing, it’s snowing for Sweden.

The central policeman, this time, Lindman, is the focus for Mankell as much as the crime itself. Struggling to face up to his own mortality following his cancer diagnosis, he is curiously freed up to investigate another person’s death. While being driven to solve a murder, he often reflects that it may be his last. The crime forces him to think about his own beliefs and values.

Giuseppe Larson joins Lindman in the investigation by a man, a infrequency character in Mankell novels, a laughing policeman. Larson is a relaxed, happily married local policeman who is more than willing to admit: “I have absolutely no idea what is going on.”

It indeed is a puzzling, intricate case with no witnesses and no obvious motives. Lindman becomes more and more impulsive as he uncovers the links between Molin’s death, World War II, and an underground neo-Nazi network that runs much further and deeper than he had ever imagined. I was unaware of Sweden’s role in World War II; officially, the country was neutral, but it gained monetarily from both sides and Swedes were split in their sentiments toward the Allies and the Axis countries.

Sweden’s part in WWII was very complex and byzantine. During the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Sweden allowed the Wehrmacht to use Swedish railways to transport a German infantry divisions along with their armaments from Norway to Finland. German soldiers traveling on leave between Norway and Germany were allowed passage through Sweden. Sweden sold iron ore to Germany throughout the war. At the same time, Sweden shared military intelligence with the Allies and helped to train soldiers made up of refugees from Denmark and Norway, to be used in the liberation of their home countries. It also allowed the Allies to use Swedish airbases between 1944 and 1945.

In addition, Sweden became a refuge for anti-fascist and Jewish refugees from all over the Scandinavian countries. In 1943, following an order to deport all of Denmark’s Jewish population to concentration camps, nearly all of Denmark’s 8,000 Jews were brought to safety in Sweden. Sweden also became a refuge for Norwegian Jews.

Molin’s murder proves to be as tangled and intricate. As Lindman’s investigation progresses, he realizes he never knew the real Molin. He learns that Molin was a lifelong Nazi sympathizer. The plot involves the secret world of Nazis, both past and present. The unrelenting Lindman turns out to be an clever and resourceful investigator, though those seeking action rather than ratiocination and psychological introspection will be disappointed. Hard-boiled detection is not Mankell’s style. Secrets are slowly and logically unraveled, and thoughtful readers with a taste for the unusual will find Lindman, and the mystery he solves, provocative.

I wish that I could read Swedish. I would like to know what Mankell’s prose technique is actually. In English, the prose can be cold and spare. On my “bucket” list, I will have to include research of the different translators of all the Mankell books I have read to compare their approaches.

Hammett Unwritten by Owen Fitzstephen

In the book and the John Huston’s movie version (there were two others made earlier) of The Maltese Falcon, nothing who is he says he is and nothing is what it appears. In Hammett Unwritten, what is true and what is imagined? This book continues that style.

A note: Owen Fitzstephan is the name of a character in Hammett’s The Dain Curse. McAlpine sensed that this character was autobiographical, that this character was Hammett himself.

McAlpine reports that he discovered the text, Hammett Unwritten by Owen Fitzstephen, at the bottom of a cardboard box of the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin (my alma mater). Thus McAlpine suggests that Hammett wrote this book, using a pseudonym from another novel, slightly altering the spelling.

Of course, McAlpine claims that this is not his real name, either, although it is.

Hammett Unwritten’s intent is to unmask the reasons of the 30-year block suffered by Dashiell Hammett. As far as we know, his last publication was The Thin Man in 1934; he died in 1961. It is generally acknowledged that Poe invented the detective story; it evolved with Doyle. Christie, Sayers, Marsh, Chesterton, Carr, and other British authors who wrote during the Golden Age of detective stories gave us outstanding mysteries and characters. But these were British detectives with sophistication and sleuthing acumen. Hammett was an American and had been a Pinkerton man.

Hammett brought his experience and background to the genre. He created a new kind of pulp fiction detective who knew how to take a punch and when and how to throw one. He worked for money; he was no amateur, no dilettante .

Sam Spade (BTW, Hammett’s first name was Samuel), Nick Charles, and the Continental Op had the intense integrity to put his own obstinate moral code and sense of justice before self-preservation or even the law. We don’t read Hammett’s stories to be dazzled by feats of deduction. We keep reading Hammett because his works because his detectives accept the violence of the world and are than more willing to get their hands dirty as they oppose it.
Raymond Chandler (I personally prefer him to Hammett) reflected on the genre Hammett invented in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder.” According to Chandler, Hammett “… took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”

In Hammett Unwritten, a worthless bird statuette –the focus of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon sits on Hammett’s desk. As Dashiell Hammett closes his final case as a private eye, had acquired the black bird at a police auction. For a decade it bears witness to his literary rise. When the novel opens on New Year’s Eve 1959, an aging Hammett is studying his own obituary, taken from a journalist who wrote it up when Hammett had a heart attack, but recovered unexpectedly. Then a flashback takes us back to 1933, when Moira O’Shea, aka Brigid O’Shaughnessy, appears at his door to collect the Maltese Falcon.

Now, in 1959, suffering from writer’s block, the famous author begins to wonder about rumors of the falcon’s “metaphysical qualities,” hinted at by Moira, which link it to a powerful, wish-fulfilling black stone cited in legends from around the world. He recognizes that when he possessed the statuette he wrote one acclaimed book after another, and that without it his fortunes have changed. As his block stretches from months to years, he becomes entangled again with the scam artists from the old case, each still fascinated by the “real” black bird and its alleged magical powers. A maze of events takes Hammett from 1930s San Francisco to the glamorous Hollywood of the 1940s, a federal penitentiary at the time of the McCarthy hearings, and finally to a fateful meeting on New Year’s Eve, 1959, at a Long Island estate. There the dying Hammett confronts a woman from his past who proves to be his most formidable rival. And his last hope.

This book asks a simple question: why did Dashiell Hammett stop writing? After a brilliant 12-year run that included The Maltese Falcon and ended with The Thin Man, the master of hard-boiled detection turned from the typewriter. Did he do so because he lost the falcon statue he picked up in a 1922 caper? Cutting back and forth through Hammett’s life, McAlpine may get some details wrong, but the overall portrait feels accurate. The story shines in scenes with real people such as Lillian Hellman, though encounters with people who supposedly inspired characters in The Maltese Falcon are less successful. Fans of Hammett and noir ought to enjoy requisite shocks of recognition.

In Hammett Unwritten, Hammett is drawn into a mystery far stranger than he ever could have imagined, and the ending had me engrossed. It could have been the Maltese Falcon that signaled the onset of Hammett’s writer’s block; after all, it is the belief in an object, rather than the actual object that can create fear and loathing. I was ready to believe the author’s theory.  What Hammett fans still wonder, though, is what made Hammett so willing to let go of Sam Spade, the Continental Op, Nick and Nora Charles and his other evocative characters? In the end, many issues explain Hammett’s blocked last decades, and they all probably tell part of the story. We really can only guess what laid waste to Hammett’s genius.

In the late 1930s he began to turn his attention to politics—civil rights and workers’ rights, in particular—often using his celebrity as leverage, and that his commitment to the causes he embraced proved absolute and unwavering.

Hammett Unwritten achievement is that it accomplishes the next-best thing to writing the unwritten—it satisfies the unappeasable longing for another Dashiell Hammett novel. It picks up precisely where Hammett left off. What’s notable about Hammett Unwritten is McAlpine’s intuitive knowledge of what fans of Hammett most want. Hammett Unwritten gives his life the hard-boiled second act it most certainly deserved.

Break My Heart 1,000 Times by Daniel Waters

I love ghost stories; this one did not impress me.

I confess that I was not familiar with the author, but, apparently, Daniel Waters is critically acclaimed for Generation Dead which has two sequels. I have not read those books. I’m not tempted.

I was intrigued by the concept, but it was never explained. There was a great deal that was left unexplained.

Since the “Event,” ghosts are a normal part of life now. Veronica’s house has two ghosts: her father’s ghost appears at the breakfast table each morning. A boy haunts her bathroom. But what was the “Event”? Was it a virus, a holocaust, a bomb, what? Calling it the Event implies that it was a single instance, but other allusions suggest that it continued over a period of time.

Some people who died have not reappeared as ghosts. Some ghosts can’t leave a specific space; others seem to be able to move about at will. Other ghosts have certain schedules when they appear; others pop up when least expected.

Veronica and Kirk take it upon themselves to investigate Mr. Bittner, one of their teachers who seems to have an intense interest in Veronica. What they uncover they never suspected.

The shift from one character to character is confusing and often distracting. Honestly, for me, the plot was predictable, the characters stereotypical. There was much more telling than showing. For example, we are told that Veronica is a flirt and has dated dozens of guys; however, there is only one other boy, besides Kirk, who figures in the story.

Apparently, Break My Heart 1,000 Times will be a movie. I think I would rather be reading another book.