Good Reads meta-data is 242 pages, rated 5.0 by two litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: Bristol, UK
Verdict: Uphill.
Tagline: Deviants all.
Delightful chapter headings accompanied by epigrams from poetry, song, training manuals and other sources of high and low literature. These are worth the effort to read the book.
Yes, I did find it an effort. Much of it is presented in police interview transcripts – boring. The same person may be interviewed four or five times, and each time states her legal name and address, place of employment….
One of the police officers has hormonal surges that seem, well, adolescent in a trained-up cop.
It has an excellent plot all the same, and I enjoyed the descriptions of the academics, though I did not notice a seminar. The pompous, opinionated, solipsistic, alcoholic, and lecherous are all on parade. I certainly recognised some of them.
I did get muddled up about the presence of high school students. No doubt I blinked when that was explained. But there were a lot of explanations and I skipped many on the assumption they were padding and not blocks in the plot wall.
I hope the author has more to offer.
Read while disporting at the Retreat in Taronga Park Zoo.
Good Reads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 3.74 by 943 citizens
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Japan.
Verdict: Unusual.
Tagline: Tell me a story.
Dutiful granddaughter visits her aging grandfather regularly. He has an unusual form of dementia (which is described in some detail for clinicians) and to hedge against that she plays a game with him that he used to play with her when she was a child. The poser provides two or three details, and the respondent has to make up a story based on that. I might say there is a blue house with a red bicycle parked in front of it on a rainy day. Now weave a short story based on that information.
One day on her way to visit her grandfather, she sees an assault and an innocent bystander who went to the aid of the victim is arrested by the police who mistakenly suppose he is the perpetrator. This all happens far across a river and before she can get to the other side everyone is gone. Later the police show no interest in her claims because they have the culprit and she was so far away, but she is sure.
She puts this information to her grandfather and asked him to weave it into a story. He does. She checks it out…. Hmm. She finds further clues and asks him to elaborate the story with them. He does. She checks and adds more. He elaborates further. Voilà! She does the legwork to feed him intel and he moves the pieces of information around until everything clicks into. Think of Archie and Nero and there it is. She does Archie’s legwork and he does Nero’s cogitation.
There are four more such crime problems, the last being close to home.
Masateru Konishi
It is a charming set up and a delightful premise. That the old man has visions at times when he telling the stories adds to the fun as she has to sort those out to follow the thread.
While we had a long birthday weekend at the Retreat in the Taronga Park Zoo with a harbour view room, we took the 100 bus down Military Road to Mosman and had coffee and a stroll. We went to Hartog’s Books where I acquired this title. (Some historians think Dutchman Derk Hartog was the first European to see Australia, the northwest coast, or even Rottnest Island off Perth.)
GoodReads meta-data is 270 pages, rated 4.0 by 2,330 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: SoCal.
Verdict: Chapeaux!
Tagline: Families divided!
Archer is hired to recover a stolen painting but that quickly develops into something far more deadly. Thirty years ago in an Arizona desert the painter’s illegitimate half brother was beaten to death, nearly beyond identification. Ten years ago, at the height of his creativity and sales, the painter himself disappeared. Presumed now to be dead. There will be more deaths to follow in the here and now, unless Archer can put the jigsaw puzzle together working from the edges inward.
When reading an Archer novel, if a drunken blowhard boasts of his long ago high school football triumphs, pay attention because somewhere later that fact will fit into the plot. When a clerk at a liquor store hesitates in replying to a question about the shop next door, the silence says it all. When comments about how aging changes a person are made that is thread to follow.
There are some of the signature features of Ross Macdonald’s Archer stories. An archeological murder in the dim past. A few mixed up youngsters in their twenties. Half-truths, lies, and secrets. But a new twist is that Archer is falling in love with a newspaper woman, and that makes him vulnerable, and confused.
The title comes late in the piece and is worth waiting for because it heralded the end for Archer himself in the 18th and last of the Archers.
I read it first in the year of publication and it stayed with me.
I read the One (1) star reviews to remind myself why the aliens will never make contact with humanity.
I re-read while we spend a long weekend at the Taronga Park Zoo retreat with a harbour view room.
Heavily armed and armoured police assault children and murder mothers for the crime of reading! Is it Florida or Texas? Can’t decide which. It depicts bleak future dominated by illiterate bullies. Or maybe that is today. You be the judge.
Good Reads meta-data is 187 pages, rated by 2.67 by a measly 3 litizens.
Genre: krimi; Species: Academic.
DNA: Oxbridge.
Verdict: Dry.
Tagline: Pass the port to the left and the sherry to the right.
It opens with a discussion of Thomas Hobbes! Regrettably Hobbes makes only one more appearance near the end. Still that opening soupçon was bait enough to hook me.
But wait! There’s more. No sooner is Brother Hobbes consulted than the foregathered Dons unite in rejecting Sociology and all sociologists! I began to wonder if the author had the University of Sydney in mind.
In 1974 when my shadow darkened the door of the University of Sydney the Vice Chancellor of the day repeatedly declared his determination to keep out the barbarian sociologists clamouring at the sandstone gates of the quadrangle. It was also a time when we endured weekly faculty meetings wherein colleagues lectured we of the hapless hosts on the errors, mortal and venal of those who did not drink but the waters of neo-classical economics. These sinners all were ‘sociologists’ by many other names! This subtext was loud, clear, and repeated weekly.
Max Weber, Emil Durkheim, Harriet Martineau, Mary Douglas, and company be damned! Derive those demand curves!
(Aside, an acolyte of that faith said to me once that original research in economics was impossible because all was known. No, I am afraid he wasn’t kidding. So pure are they of the faith that when we had a Nobel Prize winner in Economics visit, few of the local economists bothered to attend his lecture or seminar, because he was not one of them. He was…shudder…a psychologist who studied the economic behaviour of people! People! Such was completely irrelevant to those who preferred faith to facts.)
Now back to the action: The foibles, ego centrisms, obsessions of the denizens of a fictitious but very realistic Oxford college are paraded and parodied. Well, most scholars are self-parodying in their own microcosms. This college is old fashioned even by Oxford standards. In my aforementioned days colleagues assured me Sydney was second only to Oxford, and now I begin to see why. We operated according to two rules. Rule One – everyone/thing here is excellent. Rule Two – don’t question the first rule.
Leachers, idlers, incompetents, narcissists, blackmailers, egotists, drones, preachers, and deluded wielded their vices. Pareto’s keep the boat afloat, barely.
In addition to its protected species of academics with arcane ranks and specialities there are students, who typically do not figure in the story, porters, administrators, and the visitors. Some of that later cross the stage.
This well-ordered world is jarred by the need to raise money for its long-neglected physical plant, starting with the roof of the chapel no one attends in this secular age. A professional fund raiser arrives to take stock of the needs and prospects. He expects members of the college to assist in this project in their own common interest and is puzzled by their unwillingness to lift a finger for the greater good. Clearly he has not spent much time among this congregation or he would not have been surprised by this solipsism.
Then comes a second and greater shock when one of the oldest and most senile Fellows of the college is murdered in the library where he goes to sleep away the day between meals.
Enter plod who ever so deftly and politely asks questions. Being questioned, [shudder…] by an outsider is not something these cosseted men can abide, but needs must. Yes, they are all men.
Among their number is one person whom they all despise – the only thing they agree on – and soon every finger of blame is pointed at him. The plot thickens when it becomes apparent that he could not possibly have done it.
Yikes.
Plod plods on.
By the way, Plod is Inspector Barnaby. Yep. Same as…. (If you don’t know, then you don’t know. Got it?)
It was highly recommended in Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime (1989), so I went looking for it. Glad I did.
IMDb meta-data 1h and 43m, rated 6.0 by 566 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy Comedy.
DNA: France.
Verdict: Diverting.
Tagline: ‘It was better tomorrow!’
In a stolid petit bourgeois neighbourhood time travel occurs, by accident. A couple from 1958 are inexplicably hurled forward in time to 2025 where they are fish out of water socially and technically. While the emphasis is on all the tech toys there is an undertone that the future is not all golden. There are homeless people on the streets and women are still victimised.
There are plenty of laughs as the couple comes to terms with the brave new world of cell phones, Siri, self-driving cars, streaming media, tell-all television, an untamed Roomba, and more, and socially with racial integration, social media, sexual liberation, and the price of cigarettes!
He is so firmly set in his 1958 ways that adjustment is nearly impossible, but she, long used to going along to get along, adapts better than he does to contemporary expectations, wardrobe, norms, and so on. Her talents for organisation, solicitude, and encouragement pay off at work. She is willing to try. And she succeeds little by little. Her maternal care at the office, so unusual in contemporary business, leads to commercial success, an inexplicable result to her manager who manages by McKinsey’s veiled management threats: ‘We have a KPI for you!’
While his skill to say ‘No’ leads to nothing, per Lear. So he stays at home. Role reversal follows. He has one shock after another, and becomes a changed man, though we wonder how long that will last once he is back in 1958.
We saw it on Wednesday at the Palace in Leichhardt as part of the Alliance Française film festival; one of the three we chose to see. I didn’t know what to make of the third with its immaculate conception, Nun in the City (2025) Doux Jésus and haven’t written it up. It is another fish out of water tale with some high points but, well….
Johannes Simmel, It Can’t Aways be Caviar (1960) (The Monte Cristo Cover-up)
Good Reads meta-data is 558 pages rated 4.26 by 1,299 litizens.
DNA: Austria.
Genre: SpyFi.
Verdict: Amusingly sophomoric.
Tagline: Stir slowly.
Banker Lieven, thanks to the misdeeds of his business partner, gets pressed into espionage service…. by the French, then the Germans, then the English…in this travelogue 1939-1941 – London, Brussels, Zurich, Berlin, Paris, Toulouse, Lisbon, and more.
On each occasion he finds it best to go along to get along. Unlike James Bond of the same era and ilk, Lieven is a pacifist.
He is also a gourmet and wherever he goes he cooks, even in a war ravaged countryside. His recipes dot the book. Wherever he goes, like Bond, the women surround him, and he does his duty by them. He takes license to thrill but not to kill.
It was highly recommended in Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime (1989), so I went looking for it. Not readily available to this reader but I came across it in the Internet Archive, and read it on the iPad screen from that source. I didn’t finish it, partly because the antics became repetitive and partly because of the awkwardness in screen reading on the iPad. I made it page 100 and noticing that many more awaited I withdrew. It is in print for German readers.
Maigret et le mort amoureux (2026) Maigret et les vieillards (Maigret in Society)
IMDb runtime is 1h and 20m, rated 6.0 by 97 cinematizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: France.
Verdict: Diverting.
Tagline: Living in past is passé.
Eternal Maigret plods on. This incarnation has neither the bulk nor the patience of the original, but he is persistent and competent. His team, though often pictured, does little, and, well, Lucas is a schoolboy! Lucas!
The maid stole the show in a tour de force performance of inner pain. All that was undermined by the gratuitous twist at the end, which is not in the book. Once again it seemed to me that the writer and director did not understand their own work and undercut it.
Spoiler.
I found the plot resolution inadequate in the book, and it is faithfully reproduced in the film, though other liberties were taken as in the coda. The maid I can understand. But the count, no? Hypochondria is mentioned but not developed. Nor does the hearsay remark, ‘They won’t let me!’ have any explanation at all. None.
I couldn’t find any opinionators on Good Reads to set me straight.
As to the maid’s piety, I thought the point was that a secular man like Maigret would miss the signs of that, or seeing them, would not fully grasp their significance as a motivation. I liked that. Simenon sometimes did have Maigret err.
But would monsieur le count have committed suicide while sitting at his desk editing his memoirs, having given no earlier indication of his emotions?
The variations the title noted above indicate something. The French is explicit: Maigret and the Old Ones and indicates the theme that these persons who live in the past of an ever decreasing circle. Neither the lovers nor society hits that nail on the head. But Penguin has always been free with translations, despite its pious claims to the contrary.
I was pleased with myself for recognising Olivier Rabourdin as the prosecutor. Although this character has no place in the book. He has been added to give Maigret a sounding board. for his internal musings. Also missing from the film is the opening paean to Paris in the springtime when Maigret goes to work riding on an open-air bus platform. That would have made a nice travelogue.
***
We saw it at the Palace in Leichhardt on a Wednesday late morning as part of the Alliance Française film festival. We selected three items from the many on offer and this was one of them. Of late I have been watching other French films on TV5Monde+ from New Brunswick, Quebec, Belgium, Switzerland, and Senegal as well as France.
Georges Simenon wrote 75 novels featuring Jules Maigret along with 28 short stories between 1931 and 1972. That means he completed 2 or more titles each year. (In addition, Simenon was also publishing other novels at about the same clip!) Maigret has worked on the radio, podcasts, audiobooks, paperback, hardcovers, and celluloid.
Georges Simenon
One internet pundit declares that 34 actors have embodied Maigret. He has been German, Dutch, English, Russian, Czech, Mexican, Japanese, as well as Italian in the actors who have played him: Harry Baur, Boris Tenin, Richard Harris, Rupert Davies, Charles Laughton, Michael Gambon, Gino Cervi, Benjamin Wainwright, Rowan Atkinson, Jean Gabin, Jean Richard, Gerar Depardieu, Denis Podalydès, and — best for last — Bruno Cremer. M 2
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2hr and 2m, rated 6.4 by 2,400 cinematizens.
DNA: China, PR.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: More fun than Solaris. (But then so is root canal.)
Tagline: The world ends in 2033. Let’s dance!
A romantic comedy about the end of the world. That about sums it up.
To save the world, a lunar outpost is hard at work, but things move too fast and the 300 soldiers, engineers, and scientists have to evacuate, toute suite. Off 299 of them go, leaving behind one inept nerd who missed the memo, the alarms, the door knocks, the PA announcements, the sirens, the flashing red lights, and more.
He is now alone in the vast moon base with a year of supplies for 300 personnel. From this redoubt he watches a large asteroid strike the Earth.
Wallop! Darkness fell!
Curtain.
Two things follow. Turns out he is not quite alone, and the world has not quite ended.
There is plenty of slapstick as nerd reacts to his abandonment and solitude. And even more when he has company. (Too much of the latter.)
Mission Control on earth re-established a feed from the Moon base but cannot communicate but only watch nerd and his antics along with us in the audience.
Many of the gags are repetitive and it could be cut by 30m without loss. The vainglorious ending was inconsistent but it gave the nerd redemption. It sledgehammers home the communist message of the prophet Jeremiah that the individual must find his good in the good of the whole. If only the Bible basher read the book.
It is virtually a one-man show and the lead undergoes many change from a gormless nerd to a determined achiever wth several intervening steps.
The quality of the effects is superb, if at times, repetitive and boring.
IMDb metadata is a runtime of 1h and 10m, but no raters or ratings.
Genre: SyFy.
DNA: Uganda.
Verdict: Now I can say I saw it.
Tagline: Exotic.
IMDb summary: In the year 2056, a young Ugandan astronaut is diverted on return from her deep space mission to investigate a mysterious communication breakdown on the distant planet Xylara, only to discover a deadly alien threat.
After the set-up it descends into a CGIs shoot ‘em up. It is essentially a one woman with one expression show. The aliens’ plan is to bore us to death with their slow incompetence.
When CGIs expose their…guns I usually surf on, but I stuck this out for the bragging rights of seeing a Ugandan movie.
After the set-up it descends into a CGIs shoot ‘em up. It is essentially a one woman with one expression show. The aliens’ plan is to bore us to death with their slow incompetence.
When CGIs expose their…guns I usually surf on, but I stuck this out for the bragging rights of seeing a Ugandan movie.
