IMDB meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 16 minutes, rated 6.3 by 229 cinematizens.
Genre: Old Dark House wanna be.
Verdict: Femme très fatale.
Holding court in an Old Dark House, elderly Russian mother Putin confronts her two adult sons, both Republican Senators, one a retard and the other a spineless alcoholic. Decisively she decides then and there to leave her considerable fortune, acquired how is unknown, to the spineless alcoholic who has a very blonde wife in slinky silk and cosy furs. Elderly Mother is hale and hearty and it may be many years before she croaks. (Not now, sniggered the fraternity brothers.)
Fearing pre-mature internment in the gigantic family mausoleum across the street Elderly Mother has a baleful horn installed there for her to trigger if she wakes up dead. Well, anyway.
She signs the will in front of the assembled leeches and so signs her own death warrant. Blonde wife with the subtlety of a sledgehammer reminds sodden husband-son that Elderly Mother may live on for years before they see a thin dime so that she can buy new shoes and a sofa. The prospect of years and years and years of Blonde nagging is more than he can bear.
He comes home the next day to tell her that he has murdered his mother. Another day at the office. Blonde feigns shock and surprise but speeds to her paramour to encourage him, without quite saying it, that now is the time for him to murder the husband, which he does. Then she turns to the retard and encourages him to murder the paramour without quite saying it in express words. She will do anything to get those $5,000 Christian Louboutin stiletto shoes encrusted with blood diamonds! Move over Imelda! And that sofa of human skin.
Paramour is new to murder and does not quite finish the job on husband so Blonde takes over (and makes a rookie mistake herself).
Wiles at work.
While all these bodies are piling up Plod is nosing around, and Blonde tries her wiles on him, but he is a eunuch and his first friend does not respond. Her full frontal advances convince him she is up to no good, after all he has looked in the mirror and he knows that he is not in her looks league. Thereafter follows a cat-and-mouse game between Blonde and Plod. Bernie Olds figures as a beat cop before he got promoted to plain clothes in the Maltese Falcon (1941) and dropped the phoney Irish accent. Plod never does find the one secret passage in this wanna be Old Dark House, and has to be lead to it by someone or other.
The mausoleum horn figures in the denouement, after which Blonde goes off in cuffs to suborn the judge and jury into a not guilty finding, so she can find someone to murder Plod. Say what you like about her, she doesn’t quit.
Lilyan Tashman as Blonde is ruthless, unscrupulous, and selfish enough to be Republican Senate Leader. Plod is hopeless enough to be Barnie.
In 1931 talkies were still developing and it shows here. Each actor stands still and articulates the lines slowly and clearly. Movement and dialogue are kept separate.
The Award for Best Old Friends Return is a tie this year! [Gasp!]
The judge in his wisdom could not distinguish between two returns. And what a two they are!
They are the pseudonymous Emma Lathen and the singular Michael Dibdin. The works of both are discussed elsewhere on this blog.
Lathen was two businesswomen Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart who wrote thirty or more novels together while maintaining their incognito working at day jobs. Their krimis are delightful. The books they produce are set in the world of high finance. The touch is light. The narrative is informative. Check the Wikipedia entry for more information.
It is surprising to see how few awards their books won. Perhaps they preferred to conceal their identities and discouraged such recognition. I suppose there are ways and means to do that. Not only are their individual titles some of the most entertaining and informative I have read, but they sustained that impetus for thirty years.
None of their titles has ever been mangled into a film. Maybe that is just as well when I consider the film adaptations of other novels, where the screenwriter evidently did not read the book beyond the title.
Their privacy remains because I could not find any pictures of either on the web.
And now for someone completely different, Michael Dibdin who published eleven krimis set in Italy, following the career, and sometimes the life, of Inspector Aurelio Zen. Each title is set in a different part of the country as the square peg Zen is moved around as his superiors try to fit him into round holes here and there.
Their is a travelogue element to what are otherwise pretty grim studies of crime, corruption, venality, and resignation. Wherever Zen goes he eats and drinks the local menu and speaks the dialect and all of that adds detail. Often these apparent diversions are in fact integrated into the story with a deft hand.
Over the sequence Zen’s backstory comes out slowly. But at no time is it the centre of attention, nor does it detract from the front story. So many krimis I start to read spend many clumsy pages near the start establishing the character by an elaborate backstory, none of which is ever relevant again, often calculated to make the reader feel sorry for (not just identify with) the principal. (Then there are the LLBean and Ikea krimis in which every stick of furniture in every room and article of attire of every character is described though irrelevant to plot or character.)
Zen is a certain age and accepts his lot in life. He is not a snappy dresser. He does not drive an Italian stallion. His few lady friends are just that, few. The one concession to the stereotype of Italians is the ever present offstage of his mother. Oh, and he also smokes too much and drinks so much coffee that he could blast off to the Moon if he tried.
Some of his stories were made into a lavishly produced short series of three feature length films for televisions in 2011. They were reasonable facsimiles of the novels but made Zen much younger and emphasised sex in a way not found in the books which were much more focussed on Italian culture and its corruptions in the period.
There is a profile of this fine writer on Wikipedia and a list of his titles.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 5.4 by 287 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery
Verdict: 5.4! Inflation!
Smooth PI takes an assignment. An avuncular defence attorney who is successful in getting guilty villains off hires him. Why? No sooner are his guilty felon clients found not guilty by a jury of evangelicals, then they are murdered by strangulation. Fearing that this mortality rate will harm his future business with villains he offers Smooth a wad to find the culprit.
Smooth has no hesitation in taking the lucre from this representative of murderous villains. However his new Wife objects, not on moral grounds, but because it will keep Smooth out at nights. This is national news in the rags. [Sure.] Indeed, Smooth’s every move is news and splashed over the Murdoch newspapers from the Props department. Is he Princess Di in disguise?
One of three.
Plod is not motivated to investigate these killings. But then one Plod is Shemp Howard busy looking for the other two stooges. (Interest waning…)
Wife interferes with Smooth’s investigation. Being independently wealthy Smooth lives in a palace with Mantan Moreland as a valet, whose acting talent exceeds that of Smooth, despite the despicable stereotype. Lionel Atwill is utterly wasted as a red herring. Wife shows some spark, dimmed by the tiresome constraints of the day that consign her fainting and screaming.
Smooth and Wife amuse themselves by phoning in false alarms to Plod. [Sure.]
Is this who I think it is under that hood?
Then a Republican in a wrap-around hoodie kidnaps Valet and Smooth and prepares to….[shudder] transfer Smooth’s brain — if it can be found — into Ray Corrigan wearing a gorilla suit. ‘Poor Ray,’ cried the fraternity brothers! Valet looks on, sweating, pale, and bug-eyed. Smooth seemed bored by the whole mad scientist shtick. What’s going on within the hoodie is unknown to the scriptwriter and stays that way. Then by the miracle of a screen dissolve, Smooth is lounging in a hospital. Valet has his eyes popped back in. Wife screams and faints on cue.
When asked how he got away from Dr GOP, Smooth says, with refreshing and irritating, honesty that he does not know (because it was not in the script). Later when asked how the poison simulated strangulation he gives the same answer. (Some coroner.)
According to Rule One of the B-picture Krimi Writer’s Manual, the least likely suspect did it. Yes, it was the avuncular lawyer and masked surgeon who got the villains off, then murdered them, and was preparing to swap Smooth for Ray, as above. No more ‘Mr Nice Guy’ for him!
Why Uncle did it is because…[gobbledygook]. Why he left a note initialed Rx with every corpse is never explained. Like much else: Like why I watched it to the end. Incredulity, perhaps, that it was so incomplete, haphazard, and uninteresting. Could that level of incompetence be sustained for the entire running time, I asked? Yes, I answered. Bear that in mind when considering the White House.
When Smooth is asked how he sussed it out, he says….. [see above].
It was released on 17 April 1942. The next day newsreels described Lt Colonel James Doolittle’s one-way mission to bomb Tokyo. Doolittle had an MIT PhD in engineering and applied that to avionics. By some miracle 71 of the 80 volunteer flight crewmen survived. The raid had no tactical effect on Japan doing little damage, but it did have a strategic effect that is sometimes neglected. A few bombs fell within a kilometre of the Emperor’s palace, causing the Imperial Navy to pull back more than a thousand nautical miles from the Eastern and Southern Pacific the more intensely to patrol nearer Japan to forestall another such attack. That retreat allowed the American build up of shipping in the mid-Pacific, e.g., Noumea, and eased shipping to and from Australia and supported ANZAC combat in the Solomons and New Guinea.
In addition, and in the main the raid raised US morale in the steady diet of bad news for months – Pearl, Manila, Bataan, Corregidor, Guam, Attu, Wake… Morale and the demonstration the Japan could be hit, these were the two purposes of the raid and it succeeded on those scores. Taking off in an armed B-25 from the deck of the USS Hornet has to be seen (on You Tube) to be believed. The deck was less than half the prescribed length of the runway for these aircraft when loaded with bombs. They certainly could not land on the flight deck and so had to fly over Tokyo for a few minutes and ditch at map co-ordinates in China.
Japanese reprisals against Chinese civilians as they searched for the down pilots led to tens of thousands of rapes and murders. While such a search had been anticipated, the scale and savagery of it surpassed any expectation. Japanese history, I am told, is silent on such reprisals but long on the damage done by Doolittle’s Raid.
Another America: The Story of Libera and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It (2013) by James Climent
Genre: History
GoodReads meta-data is pages 336, rated 3.60 by 163 litizens.
Verdict: Quite a story well told.
Settling freed slaves in Africa started when the British Royal Navy began breaking up human trafficking. When the RN found a contraband cargo of slaves — termed recaptives — they were put ashore; the easiest place to land them was in what became Freetown of Sierra Leone. It was near the sea lanes the RN patrolled to interdict the traffic, it had a natural harbour with plenty of fresh water nearby, and the prevailing winds made it was easy to navigate there. It was easy for the Brits, but of course the enslaved individuals might be from anywhere. Certainly few originated from that area.
When the American Colonial Society (ACS) hatched the idea of exporting blacks to Africa, this British example offered a model of sorts, well the only available example. The ACS was a committee which included some heavy hitters like Henry Clay and James Monroe though they gave it only a little of their time. Its purpose was mixed. Some like Clay wanted to rid the South of free blacks, whose presence might inspire black slaves to seek freedom themselves. There were a surprising number of such freedmen for a time as the generation inspired by the rhetoric of the American Revolution, among them Monroe himself, manumitted slaves in their wills. As members of that generation died, black southern freedman (and women) increased.
Thus one area of Liberia is called Ashlands after Clay’s Kentucky estate, while the capital is called Monrovia after the President Monroe.
Yet Southerners did not want a mass exodus of slaves for two reasons, one political and one economic. The latter is the cotton business which rested to a lot of cheap labour. The political reason was the Three-Fifths clause of the U.S. Constitution. That is 3/5s to the illiterate. (Look it up and be informed.) Every few years some semi-literate journalist stumbles over the Three-fifths Clause and it appears in the media as a by-lined discovery of investigative journalism. I do not kid for I have seen same. Me, I learned about it in Civics in High School.
Likewise there were northerners who wanted to sweep freedman away from the streets of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York to protect their wives, daughters, and maiden aunts.
Then there were the abolitionists who supposed a black would never have a good life in the United States because of white animosity, regrettably concluding that they would be better off in their own society. There were other abolitionists who thought that was an immoral cop-out and opposed transportation.
Then there were evangelicals, then as now, never constrained by fact, logic, or sense, who urged transporting savage American blacks who can never be civilised to Africa where they will take Christianity to civilise the heathens. Tune in to so-called Christian TV for more the same twisted reasoning everyday.
In short, there were many interests who saw in the prospect what they wanted to see, including shipping companies in Boston who saw lucrative contracts for transportation.
The response of blacks was also varied. Their only social organisations were churches, and in the north church leaders liked the idea and set about cooperating with the nascent schema. When, however, their congregations learned of the prospect, they were far less enthusiastic about leaving behind the advances and achievements they had made in their own lives for an unknown new world.
In the south freed blacks were more enthusiastic than their ilk in the north for the scheme, perhaps because their lives were more precarious.
While the ACS initially relied on Federal fundings secured in a slow process by President Monroe, at least three states started their own schemes, Maryland, Mississippi, and Virginia. Each recruited by means fair or foul a shipload of blacks and sent them to Africa, accompanied by white overseers. Often a number of slaves would be freed on the docks so as to transport them.
No effort was made to recruit blacks with the experience or skills needed to start from scratch in the new environment. Nor was there any assessment of the likely new environment. Instead the ships began to sail toward Freetown and then tack south a bit to an area not claimed by any European power, because there was no harbour, and nothing to motivate a claim. This is the coast of what became Liberia.
A ship might have between fifty and eighty blacks, men, women, and children, and two or three white overseers who would land. Initial efforts to colonise islands rather than risk the rocks, sandbars, or shoals off the beaches were disastrous. There were few natives on the islands because there was little water, game, or land for agriculture and the islands were lashed by wind and rain.
Equally, the overseers were unprepared for what lay ahead.
When shore landings were made, the natives were not friendly. European traders had long been welcome for a week at a time, but not colonists who came to stay and who would compete with the natives for game, land, water, and trade with visiting Europeans. The natives referred to the incomers as ‘black white men’ because though their skin was dark, their ways — clothing, manners, attitudes, weapons, food — were white.
Even worse was the insects and the disease they bore: malaria. Between a third and half of all transported blacks died within twelve months, mainly due to this malady.
The differences among the transported: north and south, free and slave would be cemented into the gestating social structure. Equally the hostility between the natives and transported would also endure and be solidified over the years in the population. Of course there were divisions among the natives in the area but these recede in importance against the black white men. In short, the black white men reproduced the very society they had left. Skin colour was of paramount importance. The light-skinned dominated the dark settlers, and both enslaved the natives. Yes, in the 1920s there was slave labour in Liberia to make rubber for Firestone Tires.
A ruling caste and class emerged which carefully guarded its dominance in much the same way as occurred in the ante-bellum South. At the top were the descendants of the First Fleet, free emigrants (rather than an emancipated slaves), mulattos (only part Negro and part white), light-skinned, these people put the wagons in a circle that lasted well into the 1960s. Oh yes, elections occurred. In one instance an electorate of 5,000 cast 25,000 votes for the incumbent! Get the idea? Sounds like Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago, where miracles of miracles, the dead voted for years.
Ellen Sirleaf Johnson whose election turned a corner, it is to be hope.
The ruling caste was finally deposed in the latter Twentieth Century in a series of bloody civil and tribal wars. It makes gruelling reading. More than ten percent of the population died. A sitting head of state was found guilty of crimes against humanity during the course of these events, as one crazed tyrant replaced another. Exhaustion set in, leaving the country a wreck which has struggled to recover since then, and has had free elections and at least one peaceful transfer of power. These are hopeful signs, but the background of deep animosity among Liberians remains, I suppose, rather as it did in Tito’s Yugoslavia for forty years only to re-emerge whole when the amber melted.
GoodReads meta-data is 244 pages, rated 3.58 by 108
Genre: krimi
Verdict: verbose
When the eternal Berlin Wall crumbled in November 1989, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) underwent a transformation for a few short months that are now largely forgotten. From 1989 to October 1990 it remained an independent polity, and this period is stretched for this story. In this book there is sentiment for the DDR to remain independent and go from red to pink, that is to retain many of the benefits of the communist regime without the oppression, while avoiding the myriad evils of capitalism. The benefits include health care, childcare, pensions at fifty-five, convenient public transport, and so on, but not forced labor camps, re-education, endless surveillance, disappearance, murders at the Wall. Of industrial pollution and environmental degradation and the economic distortion nothing is said. Against this opinion is the desire for Unification which is made to seem in these pages a capitalist plot.
In this context Plod is roused from his crappy east Berlin office to go to West Silesia on the eastern border of the DDR with Poland way off his patch to look at a homicide. The order came straight from the Minister’s office, so off he goes. He finds there not only the local cops but others from neighbouring Saxony. Why all the interest he wonders, but not enough to ask anyone. He contributes nothing to the investigation. When he tries to report to the Minister, he is greeted with indifference. Investigation of the homicide was urgent and then unimportant in the space of a few hours. Plod finds that both irritating and suspicious, but his lassitude prevents him from making any backchannel inquiries, yet surely a veteran officer has backchannels.
There are interesting asides about some of the Eastern landen (provinces), like Western Silesia, in the DDR seeking their own separate deals with West Germany. There is also a reference to a referendum in the DDR to unification being defeated but I could find nothing about that. I guess that is part of the fiction. In the Wikipedia account, the only impediment to Unification was the reluctance of the Western Allies, mainly in the person of Margaret Thatcher, to a resurgent Germany.
Instead of investigating anything, Plod spends far too much time arguing with everyone he meets about the virtues of the DDR. His daughter, a British Army officer, a neighbour, they all get the benefit of his explanation of the good points of the corrupt and oppressive regime he served while grizzling about it. Plod seems to be the only one who does not realise the Unification is happening, and its completion is inevitable.
To be sure even now the DDR has its defenders who battle it out in the Wikipedia editing wars everyday. Look at the editing history at the bottom of each page. Oh hum. And that is in the English language version of Wikipedia. The German language version is even more hotly contested from my brief glance with edits coming one after another. There are plenty of films about life in the DDR, but for me the best is the muted, Barbara (2012) discussed elsewhere on this blog. Timothy Garton Ash’s book The File (1997) says it all.
First in a series. I chose it since we are ticketed to go to Berlin 2020. I could not find a photograph of the author but on Twitter he describes himself as the author of crime and hope punk, mostly tales of East Germany. ‘Hope punk?’ Don’t know.
The next category to be revealed …. [drum roll].. is the book Closest to the Bone. The winner in this category is Straight Man (1997) by Richard Russo. It chronicles the lows and lows of the life of a head of a department at a university. Fractious colleagues, deceitful deans, whining students, shrinking budgets, and geese. It has everything.
It is discussed elsewhere on this blog. Get clicking’.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 2 minutes of runtime, rated 6.2 by 449 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery
Verdict: Odd Coupling
At Southern University up north learned professor John or Cyrus Benton (the props department could not make up its mind about his first name) back from a harrowing expedition to the Gobi Desert in the interior of Mongolia gives a lecture — the fraternity bothers fell asleep instantly at this point — on his discoveries, which include…[gasp] a map to the Ming emperor’s legendary temple of Eternal Shopping Mall. With the lights dimmed for PowerPoint he talks while the film of the expedition runs behind him.
Dimmed lights, steady drone, cool night air, no wonder the fraternity boys dropped off.
As Prof’s lugubrious presentation nears the punch line…he keels over and a mêlée ensues as everyone tries to take a selfie with the corpse, because corpse he is. Plod arrives and declares it a natural death due to PowerPoint overexposure, but Mr James Lee Wong soon undermines that conclusion.
Grant Withers
Casting notes: Grant Withers plays Plod as only he can: a perfect fit. This Plod is loud, impatient, stupid, patronising, inept, ranting, incoherent, slow-witted, pompous, inconsistent. and a fool. In short, he is presidential material. Withers played this stereotype repeatedly, and he must have brought his own felt hat because he always has it on.
Boris Karloff played Mr James Lee Wong in five previous film with quiet dignity, a respectful authority, and a certain dry wit. Karloff’s contract ended and with a contempt for the viewing public now equaled everyday by the News Corporation, the studio cast the diminutive Keye Luke as Wong. Not even as the nephew of Wong but Wong himself. Still it is the first, and for years the last time, a Chinese actor was cast to play a Chinese lead. Progress of a sort. But in this rendition Number One Son does not have the gravity or grace of Karloff. He does, nonetheless, hold his own against the village idiot Plod, but that is not a high bar.
Lotus Long
The ethereal Lotus Long is cast as Benton’s loyal assistant Win Len, and endures some of Plod’s groping efforts at humour. For that alone she deserves a round of applause. He is clumsy, vulgar, and oafish as he dismisses Chinese as savages, and she is glacial and reserved as he tweets out garbled non-sequiturs. Now who does he remind me of….
There is another point when Plod is yucking it up about taking anything Chinese seriously apart from Chop Suey when one of the villains no less points out to him that Genghis Khan ruled the world long before Europeans were using soap. [Was this a personal hygiene hint?] It is all way beyond the fourth grade level Plod attained by cheating. Presidential indeed.
Going for gold, Plod makes a meal of the absurdity of burying any Chink in a tomb and then digging it up. Mr Wong replies that a Chinese expedition is scheduled to dig up George Washington soon. That comparison passes way over Plod’s head.
These are pretty pointed remarks though they are passed off as throw-away lines. Let’s credit George Waggner who wrote the screenplay and director Phil Rosen for retaining and staging these lines.
As between Plod and Wong, the race goes to Wong, but he lets Plod think he figured it out. It may have been a step forward to cast a Chinese to play a Chinese lead, but Luke is not convincing, scowl though he might.
Lotus Long was half-Japanese but from the latter 1930s she pretended to be Chinese to avoid the opprobrium increasingly directed at Japan. Thus, when most Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were interned, she was not. Though in 1946 she played Tokyo Rose in a film of that name. She married a cameraman because he made her look so good, she said, and they stayed married for fifty-six years until his death. She played Eskimos, red Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiians, and other stereotypes in a mere twenty credits. She quit the business in the 1940s and devoted herself to philanthropy. Cinematizens loss.
Grant Withers played this painful fool so routinely the fraternity brothers have come to think that it is the real man. Maybe he watched too many of his own 202 films. They certainly sap my will to watch.
A Murder of No Consequence (1999) by James Garcia Woods
GoodReads meta-data is 278 pages rated 4.03 by 91 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: D&D (Deep and Dark)
It is early July 1936 in Madrid and the stifling summer suffocates everything in Madrid. Early one morning Inspector Ruiz and Sergeant Felipé are called to investigate the corpse of a young woman found in a vast Retiro public park. These are homicide dicks and this is a homicide. The questions start here. Who was she? There is a purse with money in it, lacking the all important identify card. She is dressed in a fine silk gown, and there is no sign of sexual assault. So it is neither robbery nor rape gone wrong. Her calloused hands do not fit with the dress. There is no disturbance of the ground from which absence they conclude the murder — strangulation — occurred elsewhere.
It became a police procedural in the atmosphere of the fatal storm clouds gathering in Spain at the time. Even as Ruiz and Felipé go through their routine procedures carloads of armed hoons peel around threatening each other. Shootings and murders at political rallies occur nearly everyday. It is an NRA paradise. Everyone has guns and everyone uses them.
Ruiz follows three good rules: Start where you are. Use what you’ve got. Do what you can. These two have a photograph of the girl and they have the expensive dress with a maker’s tag in it. Off they go. Their inquiries are baulked at every turn because this is a society in which the wealthy are above the law. Anyone who sits on a gold-plated toilet answers to no one. Think of the Thief in Chief’s ideal world. This is it. The girl was a maid in the household of a very wealthy and politically connected man. No one in this household is much bothered by her murder, and certainly cannot spare even a few minutes to talk to the investigating officers about it. It fits the time and place.
As they try to find people who knew the girl, they question milkmen, greengrocers, doormen, and the like, and are warned off in no uncertain terms by Falange Blue Shirts. In keeping with the Krimi Writer’s Manual, being warned off spurs their desire to persist. Another warning is delivered by the Guardia Civil. Shutter!
Regrettably, Ruiz (but fortunately not Felipé) has a life outside policing, and we get (far too much of) his backstory, and his side story punctuated by an American exchange student who throws herself at him within five minutes of nodding on the stairway. What dean would let a student go on exchange to Aleppo today, because that was what Madrid was like in the summer of 1936? He also moons about his youth in the Army of Africa, and pals around with his now middle-aged school mates, who have to be one Socialist and one Royalist. so we can see the country dividing. It’s all contrived, but the pace, writing, and dialogue are pretty well judged so that it moves.
It ends at the Montaña Barracks on 20 July 1936 when the shooting became general.
Spoiler here. That this naive village girl could be used as a courier travelling by train hither and yon over a roiling Spain to deliver letters is a stretch. How would she manage the logistics? Sure Don Carlos can buy the railroad tickets, but how would she find an address in Seville? Take a taxi, she who has never seen one, and would know how to hail one or pay the driver. And if she travelled to distant Badajoz would she stay overnight in a hotel until the trains resumed. She whose bed was straw on a packed earthen floor until a few weeks before the story starts?
To think about these practical details of travelling is to see how unlikely it is. If Don Carlos was buying all those train tickets someone would have noticed, or if not, why all the indirection. Then there are all the disruptions to railroads at the time by striking workers and union busters that would have frightened her to death. It seems to me just as likely that she would take a little money and run. It seems to me also that she would have been even less likely to realise what she had mistakenly been allowed to see.
This title is the first in a series. I could not find a picture of the author. It put me in mind of a far more subtle series set in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War: Rebecca Pawel’s study of Guardia Civil Carlos Tejada, starting with The Law of the Return (2005).
for the best Best Chick Lit read in 2019 is The Overdue Life of Amy Blyer (2019) by Kelly Harms. Among its many lessons is that there is hope as long as your hair is not on fire.
The award for the Best History read in 2019 goes to The Oaken Heart (1942) by Margery Allingham. It is an understated account of quiet endurance in very dark times. It is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
