IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 4 minutes, rated 4.3/10.0 by 907 cinematizens
Genre: Confusion.
Verdict: Monogram quality. (Say no more.)
The set-up: a room full of portly American men with svelte molls congratulate themselves as the war rages. Strangely they are celebrating, strikes, slowdowns, sabotage, arson, and destruction of their factories, rolling stock, warehouses, and ships. Though they look like the usual cast of B-movie extras they are no patriots! Are they Republicans? They are traitors!
Into their midst intrudes Bela Lugosi to whom no one ever says no. With the help of an ever handy hypodermic, he manipulates the host. Thereafter the industrialists play ten little Indians as one after another is found dead on the doorstep of the Japanese embassy in Washington DC. How they died and got delivered C.O.D. is left off stage. Perhaps Lugosi has a bulk contract with USPS for corpse deliveries. After the second or third, foul play is suspected.
You are in my needle’s power!
As always Lugosi appears and disappears by script magic. He sneaks up behind each victim and….
As the pile of corpses on the Japanese embassy doormat mounts the Lone Ranger, constantly flipping open his wallet looking for his mask, appears to investigate – the host’s niece. Nice.
SPOILER. In the last few minutes we discover that the industrialists had all been replaced by doppelgängers made to order by plastic surgery, the miserable scriptwriters crutch. The substitutes are nefarious Japanese who talk just like Ohio but are members of the dreaded Black Dragon Society. Where all those molls who were likewise celebrating American setbacks came from is left to the viewer’s imagination.
The surgeon who altered the men was …. [Go on, guess] the dedicated Nazi doctor Lugosi. Ah ha. To show their gratitude the Black Dragons threw Lugosi into a prison cell, so that he would not blow the cover of the agents he had created. Sounds like McKinsey management at its best: Save on the surgeon’s fees.
Black Dragons may be mean but smart they are not. Of all the prison cells in all the worlds, they put him in one with an exact look-alike due to be released. With a flick of his cape, Lugosi swaps with the look-alike and goes free to seek his revenge by travelling as a Nazi from Japan to the USA during the war. Sure. Why not. Book that berth and sail away across the Pacific, Manila, Guam, Wake, Honolulu all the way.
Moreover, this dedicated Nazi’s revenge helps the American war effort. Sure that adds up.
The substitution explains why a saboteur can have a nice niece. It does not explain why she does not notice any difference in her favourite uncle. (The script gives her some outs but they are lame, to say the least.) Still less does it explain why anyone would care.
It was released on 6 March 1942. The opening credits feature a rising sun flag in the frame.
Notice the Rising Sun flag at the top left.
The film would have been made in a fortnight in early February just after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, when the threat of other attacks or even an invasion was in the air.
Insightful observations follow. Buckle up. Everyone smokes. Everyone. That surprised me because I thought smoking became general after World War II, because the mass production of cigarettes for the Army spread the habit and made it cheap. But in the opening scene at the dinner party the air is thick with smoke and every actor has a cigarette, pipe, or cigar. Now, perhaps in that scene the smokes are being used to indicate how rich and decadent they are, but that seems far too subtle for anything from a Monogram production, though the smoking is less distracting thereafter.
GoodReads meta-data is pages, rated 4.04 by 2028 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Slow and sure.
It is October 1939 and the war is on. Handsome young London doctor Ben Bones has been assigned to Midsomer in anticipation of casualties from bombing nearby Plymouth. Off he goes with his gorgeous wife Penny who is angry about this move, and blames him for it. It seems she grew up in these environs and has no wish to return. Having escaped Midsomer alive, who would want to return? No one. Indeed she blames him for almost everything including the war and they are talking about separation and divorce through gritted teeth, when they speak, which is seldom.
As these Bickersons arrive at the village of Midsomer Birdswing darkness has fallen and the blackout combine to make it inky. Mindful, too, of petrol rationing they park the car and walk to find their accommodation.
Wham!
‘Wham’ is all Dr BB remembers when he regains consciousness again. A truck ran them down and disappeared into the gloaming. Exeunt stage right feet first bad Penny very dead. BB has two broken legs and assorted bruises. One break is compound and he is at a low ebb, bunking upstairs at a pub. There were no witnesses and his memory is little.
Penny, so conspicuous at the start, disappears. How and where she is buried passes in silence. If she had surviving family, this reader missed it. Yet her history at Birdswing influences much of what follows.
The more so when BB begins to suspect (thanks to anonymous note – where would writers be without anonymous notes?) the rundown was murder, not accident. This suspicion is far beyond the imagination of the local part-time plod who is officious, pompous, and incompetent. (Definitely professorial material.)
As BB slowly recovers he is integrated into the village, its ways, its gossip, its history, its hostility to Penny, its local gentry, and its characters. He is swept up by the uncompromising amazon Lady Juliet who brooks no excuses and drives him to doctoring, first in a wheel chair, and then on crutches. His London training and quick thinking saves a school girl from a deadly spider bite and puts him in good with the locals.
The horsey Lady Juliet and the crippled Doctor Bones begin to investigate the death of Bad Penny, though with no great vigour. Bones is distracted by the wiles of the school teacher who flatters no end. However his attention is brought back to the death … by an apparition.
Emma Jameson
This title is the first in a series and I will certainly read more. Lady Juliet’s inner doubts combined with her bold as brass exterior is most engaging, while Dr Bones grits his teeth exercising his mending bones.
There are some nits that need picking. Did a 1939 English village (Pop. 200) have a traffic light? This one does. For details about village life I thought of Margery Allingham’s Oaken Heart (1941), discussed elsewhere on this blog. Get clicking.
Was John Wayne a cultural token in rural England by October 1939, considering that his first major role in Stagecoach premiered in Los Angeles in March of that year, and screened in a few theatre in London in June 1939? He is cited as such in these pages, but it strikes a dissonant cord with this reader.
GoodReads meta-data is 416 pages, rated 4.04 by 2318 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: [Sigh]
The fog that is Chief Inspector Jean-Basptiste Adamsberg returns. This time in pursuit of shy spiders. José Garcia brought Adamsberg to life in a film years ago, and I still picture Garcia when I read these titles.
A number of elderly men die from the bite of the so-called reclusive spider. Oh hum. Yet Adamsberg cannot stop thinking about it. An arachnidologist he consults assures him the bite of this spider is not fatal, yet there are the three deaths associated with bites from just such spiders. Others are content to conclude that their age led to death triggered by the spider bite. Now if Adamsberg had reacted against this ageism we might have had an interesting story, because throughout the ages of the victims is used to dampen, dismiss, or deter interest in the case(s), but no Adamsberg just has one of his ineffable hunches. Tant pis.
Of course, if his boss had been versed in McKinsey management KPIs Adamsberg would never have been permitted to pursue this obvious dead-end. ‘Stick to the cases that can be cleared to make us look good,’ that would have been the direction.
There is much to’ing and fro’ing here and there, and — as usual —there are ructions in the squad. Situation normal. There are the Cartesian positivists who follow Adrien Danglard, the nominal number two in the unit versus the metaphysicians who follow Adamsberg. The computer nerd Froissy is there, along with the Amazon Violette Retancourt, sleepy Mordent, Mercadet, Voisenet, Noël with the short fuse, and Veyrenc with the strange head of hair, Estalère who worships Adamsberg, Justin who does not, Kernorkian, and Lamarre. Let’s not forget Snowball on top of the photocopier.
Fred Vargas
While I have enjoyed previous titles in this series I cannot be enthusiastic about this entry, which seems padded with pointless and repetitive dialogue and more repetitive and pointless dialogue while very little happens. The evocation of place which was a highlight in earlier entries is absent here. Nîmes is just a five-letter word here, not a place. Nor are there any surprising characters like the stableman or the sailor who figured in earlier novels. Still less do the victims have any character. Again unlike some earlier entries when the character of the victim was crucial.
That the villain could fire that weapon with such deadly accuracy in all the circumstances is an assumption too far for even this indulgent reader.
GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages, rated 3.90 by 1801 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: superb (again).
Aurelio Zen is on the job again, returning to his home town, Venice, to do a lucrative favour for an old friend. He conceals his true purpose in a several tissues of lies.
The favour is to investigate the disappearance of a wealthy American several months earlier. Zen’s cover is that he has been sent from distant Rome to investigate the Contessa’s complaints about intruders in her decaying mansion. He calls in some favours to assure himself that there is nothing to find about the American. He simply left. Now all he has to do is go through some motions and then collect his fee. Contessa is an honourary title for an elderly widow who complains of nocturnal visitations, which the local police put down to her dementia.
Knowing well the slipshod ways of the Questura, Zen has no trouble with his masquerade. His task is made easier by a national political crisis upsetting the usual ways of (not) doing things. In this context, other officers mind their own business, and leave him alone with the orders he forged for himself. As usual he trusts no one and uses the fax machine of a family friend rather the one at the Questura.
The atmosphere of Venice in February is cold and wet. The fog obscures reality while it penetrates stone and flesh. In this world, nothing is as it seems. And even when Zen peels aways the last layer the mystery remains. Nothing ever changes.
This title is fourth in the series and it is compelling. The more so since I read it while in Venice, though the weather was much better at the time. I recognised many of the streetscapes through which Zen walked, many of floating vaporetto stages (San Marco) on which he waited, some of the Venetian cuisine (nero pasta) he ate, and some of the museums (Accadamia) he passed. I first read this title and all the others in the series many years ago, after returning from a semester in Firenze.
Michael Dibdin
Each title in the series is set in a different region of Italy, and each offers something of a travelogue in the rich details of the setting which combine to explain some of what happens. However, the picture it presents of Italy is tainted to say the least. Incompetence, corruption, and indifference are the hallmarks. Senior police officers are mainly interested in tailoring. Politicians are uniformly corrupt. Citizens learned long ago to use the blind eye. The cynicism is pervasive. Yet Zen is a Sisyphus who does the best he can in this distorted world.
Although we liked the 2011 three-part television series, it makes Zen a much younger man, than he is on the page. Zen does not contact Inspector Brunetti when in Venice. Too bad.
GoodReads meta-data is 330 pages, rated 3.72 by 486 litizens.
Genre: Mystery.
Verdict: All trip and no arrival.
The opening invokes Chaucer’s Fourteenth Century world of the Canterbury Tales with the young prelate, Fairfax, riding through rain to a distant valley where the local priest has died. The job is to bury the priest in a Christian fashion, reassure the locales, and return within two days. Ah huh. The weather is miserable and gets worse. The rain leads to landslides and he has difficulty in finding the valley and getting into it. I felt wet just reading it.
The language and mōres are archaic. The Christian Church is almighty and Fairfax is one of its lowliest servants. But even so he is set apart from the primitive villagers, none of whom can read or write, and if cleanliness is next to godliness, they are a long way off. Work and prayer are their only pass times. A wheeled wagon is the most advanced technology they have and there are few of those.
In order to deliver a eulogy for the dead parson, Fairfax tries to learn about him by inquiring of the locals, and examining his belongings. It is in the latter that the plot thickened for he finds strange objects, and many forbidden books on the ancients. Among these relics are plastic items and a small sheet of metal with that most dreaded of symbols on it, an apple with a bit taken out of it! [Gasp!]
In further investigation Fairfax learns that the parson made no secret of his fascination with The Time Before and collected relics while rambling through the valley. Yet the mere possession of a plastic straw would lead to his excommunication or worse – he could be made to watch Pox News. Did he rely on the isolation of the valley to shield him from the long arm of the Church in ferreting out heretics.
Yes, an apple minus a bite. Get it yet? Ask Bill Gates. I had to read the first reference to plastic twice for the light to go on.
From this point on the text becomes more explicit about the cataclysm God visited on humanity because of too much or too little science centuries ago. The Church rejects all science and technology, teaching, nay, enforcing quietism and acquiescence in God’s mysterious ways – infant mortality, women dying in child birth, cuts leading the fatal infections, and the like. All very Fifteenth Century, post apocalypse.
While Fairfax recoils from the parson’s heretical pursuits, the suspicion grows that the parson was murdered. That seems farfetched until Fairfax finds the local Church registers have disappeared, four massive volumes recording the births, marriages, and deaths in the valley for a millennium. This mystery and the consequences of the weather lead him to stay in the valley longer than planned.
While some of the locals try to urge him on his way, none too subtlety, others seem to want him to stay. For the latter is it because they want a priest, or is it because they want something from him. He cannot tell.
Thereafter it is all trip and no arrival. There is much rain and mud as Fairfax and company try to dig up the past, though quite why is lost on this reader. It is Ypres without the context.
E. M. Forester used this premise in a short story, ‘The Machine Stops’ as did Isaac Asimov in Foundation and Empire without the mud. In this case The Cloud failed and everything was lost. There is no substitute for saving to the local drive, and backing up on hard disks galore! Though that is easier said than done.
How often has the office of Vice President been vacant? Or in other words, how many US presidents have served part or all of a term in office without a vice-president? More than one might think. Read on for the answer and the explanation.
Eighteen presidential terms were served in whole or in part without a VP. One president who served two terms had no VP for part of each term. A blank space in the VP column means that the VP became President.
The situation can arise in one of two ways. The incumbent president may leave office by death or resignation, yielding to the VP leaving no VP. Or the opposite may occur. The VP may leave office through resignation or death. In either case once the office of VP is vacant and there was until the 25th Amendment in 1967 no constitutional means to fill the office. Two VPs and one President have resigned.
That is about 40 years without a VP between 1812 and 1974. That is about a quarter of the total years.
The most curious example would be Andrew Johnson, the Vice-President who succeeded Abraham Lincoln. If he had been impeached there was no Vice President to succeed him. According to the constitution at the time the office would have gone to the President of Senate, Benjamin Wade of Ohio (who was an advocate of female suffrage), and that made him unacceptable to many Senators. To further complicate the picture, Wade had not been re-elected and, as a lame duck, his term would expire before the remainder of Johnson’s term, and that would mean… [Trouble].
Three incumbent presidents were not re-nominated by their party: Tyler, Fillmore, and Pierce. In the cases of Tyler and Fillmore that was due to internal ruptures of the Whig Party. The Democrats declined to re-nominate Pierce.
GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages, rated 3.17 from 190 litizens.
Genre: policier.
Verdict: It grew on me.
The first entry is the series Seymour of Special Branch set in 1906. Young Seymour has been recruited to Special Branch due to his several languages, because his anglicised name hides Italian and Russian ancestors, and his ambition. His remit is the docklands of London’s East End — long before it became the upmarket enclave it is today — where migrants speak those languages and more.
Then one fine day he is called to the FO (Foreign Office) from whence he travels to Trieste to find out what has become of the British consul, one Lomax by name, who has gone missing. Because Seymour is not a gentleman by birth some in the FO do not want to send him, but others suggest that his background and work with foreigners equip him for the job. Off he goes.
Ah, Trieste. He finds a different world there which he slowly absorbs and the absent Lomax dominates the story. Seymour poses as a low-level FO messenger charged with reporting on Lomax’s disappearance. He questions the office staff in the consulate, Lomax’s friends, and the police. In doing so he learns about the tensions in Trieste between the Austrian masters and the Italian population leavened with Serbs and Croats, along with the Big Enders and Little Enders. That a Great War might be sparked by a small event is presaged with a heavy hand.
Even better is the slow development of a picture of Lomax, who at first blush seemed to be an alcoholic idler, but as Seymour peels away the surface he finds depths in Lomax: ethical, technical, artistic, and political, belied by his al fresco life at a café.
In a minor register the tug of war between the city police, who are Italian, and the Austrian secret police is well handled. They cooperate reluctantly but are bitter rivals for status and budget. Linguistic nationalism is one of the master narratives.
The futurist artists with whom Lomax mixed are also brought to life that made me appreciate Italian Futurism’s effort to break with the past through art.
The parallel to the murder the Archduke at Sarajevo is evoked quite explicitly with unerring hindsight. Likewise Seymour’s dalliance with the only young woman in the novel is strictly routine. On the plus side, Seymour does grow up a little in the story, and thinks twice about some premature conclusions, particularly about Lomax.
Michael Pearce. He has at least two other series of krimis which I will sample and report.
I read it while we were in (the once Free Territory of) Trieste: having seen Miramar, Casa Revoltella, the grand canal, piazza central, and so on.
This sign was still there when we here in Trieste in September 2019.
Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom (2005) by Roger Pearson.
GoodReads meta-data is 384 pages, rated 3.86 by 140 litizens.
Genre: Biography
Verdict: As irreverent as the man himself.
No one can say nothing about Voltaire (1694-1778), good or bad, that he did not say himself. Everything about the man was fiction, starting with his name, and that is a fact. Born François-Marie Arouet he later took the name we know him by, and PhDs since have tried to figure out why he needed a nom de plume since he bragged no end about what he wrote, and why that name and not something grander, say, like Almighty.
The obvious answers do not lead to tenure: He wanted to be different so he made up his own name. And why that one? He was a wilful brat, the youngest and last child, much indulged, and called, as a result, le petit volontaire. Translate it this way: petit means small, of course, and volontaire means will, so the little wilful one, i.e., brat. See: volontaire becomes Voltaire by striking out the middle letters ‘on.’ Instead the PhDs have become anagramalogists and offer a host of convoluted reasoning to arrive at tenure via the obscure. Occasionally he ennobled himself with a ‘de’ in front of Voltaire. This jeu has likewise kindled a blaze of academic gibberish.
From this start he became, like an air-headed celebrity today on morning television, famous for being fatuous. Many people today will recognise the name but be unable — I have asked a few on trains bound for Wynyard — to name any of his accomplishments. Start here: he published about ten million words in every literary form, plays, poems, odes, essays, novels, history, and science in two thousand pamphlets, plays, histories, novels, essays, and books. In addition he conducted empirical scientific research into optics, chemistry, and more. Put that in the Research Quality Framework! Then there are the letters, thousands of them, most composed to last.
All of this in an age of control through censorship that a modern McKinsey manager can only dream of. He was twice convicted of naughtiness and did porridge for eleven months the first time. That lesson was learned. The second time he arranged for a bribe, er, a Florida campaign donation to the jailer. On other occasions when the McKinsey managers of the day were intent on KPI-ing him he found it best to absent himself to the countryside where few Parisians ventured, and then to England and Switzerland. Then there were at least two beatings he suffered, arranged by people who felt offended by his words. It is all theatrical enough to make Orson Welles jealous.
How’s this for a story. When he needed money, on the advice of a mathematician, he borrowed money to buy enough tickets in a state lottery to win a packet while paying back the loan and to be rich thereafter. He used this wealth to claim his father’s inheritance which had been tied up in Jarndyce vs Jarndyce. Again a well-placed campaign contribution to the Florida attorney-general freed up his inheritance and he was set for life. Others might then have retired to the bottom of a bottle, or to an estate to kill defenceless creatures. Not so for Voltaire who went for bigger game that could fight back and did – mainly the corrupt Church. He also thereafter remained a lifelong investor and an avid follower of financial news.
He liked to claim at dinner parties, offering many details, that he had been sexually abused as an altar boy. (Is such a thing possible in the age of Enlightenment, one asks, putting down the newspaper.) This experience, he went on to say, explained all of his failings, and none of his successes. Noel Coward was a bore in comparison.
He admired the intellectual freedom and social atmosphere in the Netherlands and later in England, but hated the weather and the food in those northern reaches. Chief of his inspirations were William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton. Some say that the story of the apple falling on Newtown started with Voltaire’s quill.
He often published books anonymously or with pseudonyms to escape the wraith of royal and ecclesiastical censors. Let’s remember how serious that is: The royal censor had an axe and the ecclesiastical censor had a bonfire.
Thereafter some printers would blackmail him with threats of exposure unless he paid up! That was bad. What was stupid was that he could not help but brag about these anonymous publications in letters which blew his cover. What a windbag he was. Though there seems to be no evidence that he reviewed his own pseudonymous works as Anthony Burgess did. That is a trick he missed, one of few.
Polymath he was and spent weeks and many francs doing experiments in physics the better to understand Newtown so as to explain him to Francophones in the baleful grip of René Descartes’s metaphysics.
This frail and anaemic looking man never lacked for energy or wit. While often ill and always complaining of bad health he could never sit still, not even for painting and sculpture to immortalise him. He grew wealthy with his endless negotiations and investments, and at about sixty, persona non grata from France, Prussia, Saxony, Austria, and elsewhere he took up residence in the semi-autonomous canton of Gex across the lake from Geneva to continue his war on ignorance and corruption central, namely the Church.
He was free; he was rich; he was old; he could say what he wanted without trying duck and cover. He let loose with a barrage of invective, took up lost causes of individual victims of the Church, besieged officialdom in five countries with petitions and letters. An avalanche of pamphlets, plays, essays ridiculing, admonishing, mocking the high and mighty came forth. More than once he double-tracked: dictating one essay to a secretary, while with quill in hand he was writing another.
He was a Euro celebrity and the world came to him. He held court with hundreds come to catch a glimpse of him. To handle the crowd and to give the locals a show, he hired a dozen retired dragoons as an honour guard and decked them out in silk and ermine. He invested heavily in watchmaking and gave clocks to anyone and everyone to develop a market. He even gave one to the Pope, which was accepted, much to his delight, since it was made by a Huguenot protestant. That somewhere in the interstices of the Vatican time was regulated by a protestant technology amused him no end, and of course he could not keep this to himself so he spread the word, which eventually got to Rome and the clock came back. That amused him even more. The Church giving back loot rather than taking it, as it usually did.
As an aged, valetudinarian, ectomorph, celebrity he bought property and was a fearsome negotiator. Vendors liked the idea of selling to this celebrity, so he first beat the best price down, then quibbled about the timing and currency of payments, then wanted complicated buyback provisions, and more. At first he did this to ensure that his de facto wife would have a cash settlement if and when he died before the descent of distant relatives, blackmailing printers, tax famers, Church vultures, and other shysters. But then she died, and he kept doing it as sport. He outlived most of the people who agreed to his terms and got richer and richer. Yet he argued the margin with publishers, pursued plagiarised editions with vigour, and pinched every sou, while spending freely.
He likewise negotiated with the local priest, bishop, and archbishop the terms under which Easter would be celebrated in Gex, and he was so persistent, dogged, and slick that he always got his way though in one instance Easter was delayed while he pressed his case. God had to wait for Voltaire! He loved that.
Like Thomas Jefferson he was a deist, that is, one who believed god, an intelligent being, made the world. It was then up to us to make the most of it. This deity did not expect to be worshipped and did not intervene in the world. The Church that promoted those beliefs was an elaborate hoax to control the unwary to the benefit of the Pat Robertson wannabes. Jefferson’s deism is ignored by all those small government types who quote him, yet it is there on the walls of the memorial in DC for those that have eyes to read.
While he combatted the Inquisition at every turn, seeing it to be the logical conclusion of The Roman Catholic Church, he was an incorrigible and unpleasant anti-semite.
While he and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were contemporaries with Volatire the senior who encouraged the young Rousseau, but…. There are several ‘buts.’ Though they cohabited in Paris and later in Geneva, but never met face-to-face. Voltaire criticised some of Rousseau’s essays and the thin-skinned Rousseau bristled and never forgave or forgot. (Check out Jacq’s autobiographical Confessions, which surely take a prize for pettiness.)
In heady early days of the French Revolution its leaders legitimated themselves by gathering to Paris its intellectual precedents. Huh? Yes, well, they dug up Rousseau and Voltaire and installed them in the Panthéon. They have since been across the aisle from each other. I rather think whoever did that got the joke. The Panthéon was one the first places I went to on my first visit to Paris, and there they were, and still are.
Roger Pearson
I had no ambition to read a biography of Voltaire but the stars aligned to direct me to it, and I — weak reed that I am — bent. When harvesting titles from tripfiction.com for our 2019 sojourn in Mitteleuropa links led me from Austria to Switzerland (because I have found virtually no interesting krimis set in the land of cuckoo clock I looked*). One of the titles listed there was ‘A Visit from Voltaire’ by Dinah Lee Küng (2004). I asked for a sample (and will get to it). And once I did that the Amazon mechanical Turk spat out other suggestions, including this title.
Earlier in the week when dog walking we encountered Rousseau the poodle whose predecessor, we recalled, was Voltaire. See the alignment of the stars is apparent in retrospect. It’s that kind of neighbourhood.
All of this was confirmed on our travels when I noticed a picture of Voltaire in the reception lobby of the hotel in Venice, though I forgot to ask why it was there. Still it meant Voltaire expected me to do the homework.
*Before the pedants strike, let me add I have read Friedrich Dürrenmatt, but his stories are generic, not rooted in Switzerland, and Friedrich Glauser of whom the less said, the better. I started Tracee de Hahn’s ‘Swiss Vendetta’ but how can I read anything written by a Tracee? ‘Night Train to Lisbon’ starts in Zurich but, well, the train left. Maybe it was Geneva, and that is the point. The origin was just a rainy day anywhere.
IMDb meta-data is twenty-seven hour-long episodes rated 8.0 by 51,306 idiots.
Genre: Derivative
Verdict: The Bickersons in space. (Well, not that good, but like that.)
A group of Star Trek wannabes mix with CGIs while imitating a Seinfeld episode. Oh hum.
No characters, no character development, no narrative, no mystery, no awe, no story, just a few ever more lame gags that could have been situated anywhere, decorated with a lot of rubber face masks. The mental level was frat boy with keg.
I did like Arbor Day and the best use of the Kardasians, but not enough to persevere after episode three. It was mercifully free of the repetitive high volume shoot ‘em ups that now comprise Star Trek movies.
Though in one shoot-out the determined efforts of one alleged character to present right profile regardless of the circumstances was apparent. So was the absence of officers from the bridge on several occasions. Is that anyway to run a starship?
The name Orville I suppose is a tribute but nothing is made of it. Apollo 11 carried a splinter of a strut from Kitty Hawk lend by the Smithsonian Museum. (Figure it out, Bro.) Now that was a tribute.
GoodReads meta-data is 254 pages, rated 3.69 by 397 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: I wanted to like it but didn’t.
Setup: In November 1941 Edgar Rice Burroughs, yep père Tarzan himself, has taken a vacation in Waikiki to finish a book free from distractions of home and hearth. One of his sons has tagged along to carry the luggage. Burroughs is a man’s man and mixes with the uniforms that populate Hawaii, and distrusts 40% of the local population who are Japanese. In addition there is German in the next door cottage, who can only be up to no good.
A ’man’s man’ to be sure but at this time in his life Ed B was a teetotaller who did not smoke. Real men did both to prove their manhood. However Ed paid his manly dues by killing defenceless creatures for sport, and making sexist and racist remarks.
ERB was prone to bad dreams (caused by indigestion) and these he dutifully recorded in his adventure stories. Hmmm. We can be glad he did not have diarrhoea.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
There is nice hook at the start that describes the 3000 deaths in the attack on 7 December as murders, and then adds to that total the murder at the start of this story. Clever, but insubstantial. Too much hindsight after that as everyone assumes a war with Japan is coming. More likely many thought that little yellow Nips would not dare take on those manly men.
Enjoyed the description of our home-away-from-home Waikiki as it was in late 1941. While much has since changed some things have not, like Fort DeRussy.
Read it before but doing so again on the Kindle.
Does it really matter what colour trousers each character wears, tan or white, linen or cotton? Max seems to think so, padding out every scene with such useless detail.
