The day-to-day activities of a funeral business in Auckland, specialising in Maori rites and rituals, might not be to everyone’s taste, but this is done very well, combining the human comedy of everyday life – will Francis ever find a way to sneak that fabulously expensive leaf blower past his accountant wife Kaiora? – with the solemn, sad, and serious business of death, loss, grieving, denial, injustice, and anger.
Francis is the micro-manager par excellence in his drive to offer clients a perfect service, right down to scrapping gum from the sidewalk in front of the business. He also likes boy-toys like that NZ $1,300 ultra, high-powered leaf blower, and then there was that white van. What was he thinking when he bought that bucket of bolts? Not even he knows. His conversation with the mechanic who tells him it is not worth repairing is classic when he says it is worth to him [to avoid hearing those four words he fears most from Mrs, viz. ‘I told you so’].
On the other hand Francis seldom asks for or gets the list price on the funerals he sells. More often than not at the sight of grieving relatives he offers discounts, adds extras at no cost, and volunteers more labour for nothing. The accountant grinds her teeth but draws the line at the leaf-blower.
It put me in mind of a marvellous Japanese film Departures (2008), discussed elsewhere on this blog. Click away.
By the way it offers a small window on Maori life and culture that is informative, compelling, and thoughtful. My faith in the enduring idiocracy was confirmed by reading the 1.0 ratings on the IMDb.
IMDb meta-data is 78 episodes of 55 minutes each, rated 7.2 by 2888 cinematizens.
Genre: PI
Verdict: Location, location, location!
It has all the clichés of the genre cosmetically refreshed by the location among the goofie Newfies in St John’s Newfoundland. Anne of Green Gables, Joey Smallwood, and Annie Proulx are nowhere to be seen.
A wannabe Jim Rockford approaching forty and living at home with father, much to the annoyance of stepmother, is PI together with Dad. It is all by the numbers thereafter without the laconic charm of Rocky, but at least there is no annoying Angel on the scene. Out hero is unkempt, unshaved, and childish, a clear case of arrested development that appeals to its like. His private life is a mess and dominates his professional life as a PI. He drives an old banger. All boxes checked. It is easy to imagine the checklist in the screenwriters manual consulted for this project.
Still the setting in and around St John’s Newfoundland is distinctive and the cinematography makes the place look attractive. It’s not, but it looks that way on film. The soundtrack, for once, also adds something to the ambience.
Despite my quibbles it is one thing many Canadian film productions are not. It is Canadian. It looks and sounds it. Many Canadian productions are so deracinated for the international market that they are anonymous, e.g. Street Legal, Da Vinci’s Inquest, Traders,…. [so anonymous that they are forgotten].
GoodReads meta-data is 561 pages rated 3.83 by 1163 litizens.
Genre: Biography
Verdict: Superb.
In this biography the reader can see the man in the boy and the boy in the man. As a boy Lenin was energetic, determined, self-righteous, a loner, and never wrong. Just ask him. Even as an adolescent, youth, and young man as he became a Marxist revolutionary he was cold, analytical, and bloodless. It should be noted that the heavy hand of Tsarism was personal. His elder brother was executed for plotting the murder of the Tsar and he was indeed guilty. His older sister was later imprisoned for sedition. As a consequence, his family was proscribed and ostracised. Tsarist repression was personal not theoretical, and soon its weight fell on him.
While he turned to revolution to right the manifold wrongs of Russian society he had no interest whatever in most members of that society. He never met a peasant and was revolted by those he saw. He supposed that all peasants who had bettered themselves, the so-called kulaks, were capitalists whose successes would impede the revolution, and so in that way, they were the worst enemies of the Forces of Right.
When other revolutionaries proposed immediate practical steps to relieve the suffering of the victims of the regime, Lenin ridiculed both the proposers and the sufferers as anti-revolutionary. His Marxism was born from the page, not the reality. There would be no sewer socialism for this man to ameliorate conditions in the now.
He differed from many other opponents of the ancient regime with his abiding interest in organisation, committee, dicta, regulations, definitions, words and more words which he then wielded to overcome objections, isolate opponents, and excise the weak from the paper revolution he created in his flow of words. Like Jim Kirk, he was willing and able to talk anyone to death. Lenin was never one given to self-doubts even as he chopped and changed.
His activities soon made him suspect, and he was exiled first internally and then abroad, and for seventeen years moved hither and yon, rootless and restless, but always pronouncing dicta, writing calls to arms, manoeuvring to dominate emigré publications, and vying for legitimacy among tiny leftist groups. Most of that time was spent in Switzerland.
At times he saw revolution an inevitable, like an earthquake, and when it happened the group that was organised, disciplined, ruthless, and prepared would prevail, no matter if the group was large or small, or played any role in precipitating the earthquake. But it had to be be ready, and he was the man to ready it.
During the disastrous Russo-Japanese War when thousands of hapless conscripts were dying in Manchuria, and the Russian fleet was sinking with all hands on board in the Pacific, while St Petersburg reeled after the massacre of the Father Gapon’s innocents before the Winter Palace, Lenin’s bottomless supply of invective, energy, abuse, derision, malice was aimed at half a dozen rivals on an obscure émigré publication in Geneva who threatened his status. Such were his priorities. As always he schemed, he plotted, he undermined his many rivals 24/7 like a relentless force of nature that never tired, never needed a rest, never took a break. (Yes, he did take vacations but rarely.) At times the Tsarist secret police monitoring émigré groups funded Lenin’s sect because he was so disruptive and destructive of the wider body of wanna be revolutionaries that it prevented any unified action. Lenin’s implacable self-righteousness would keep the opponents of the regime from coalescing, and it did.
Likewise, later Germany facilitated his return to Russia in 1917 in the hope that he would destabilise the Provisional Government after the abdication of the Tsar. There is considerable circumstantial evidence that even while he was in Petrograd, Germany was funding Lenin’s coterie. The German assumption was that Lenin’s agitation would be further pressure to get Russia to leave the Great War on terms dictated by Germany, and it was. Bolsheviks could hardly admit the German aid at the time and subsequently many records were destroyed, and with later purges reduced the number of eye witnesses.
In these pages the October coup d’état is anti-climatic and Lenin had no association with it on this telling though as soon as Leon Trotsky announced it, Lenin pounced on the opportunity, and the rest became history. While his years of exile had made him cautious, once in power the emotions he had long suppressed came to the fore, namely, his hatred for the imperial order and all who had served it.
His earlier theoretical studies had led him to the conclusion that a European wide social revolution would occur and events in Russia were just the beginning. He clung to that belief as an article of faith thereafter despite the contrary evidence. He always believed what he said, once he had said it, and could never admit error. Yet he did change his tune at times but never with a mea culpa.
After he had been shot in an assassination attempt, while a British Expeditionary Force had occupied Murmansk, as White Russian forces threatened to overwhelm the Red army, starvation was general, industrial production had fallen to zero, the Czech Legion turned on the Bolsheviks, an American Expeditionary Force landed in Vladivostok, Poland made war on Russia to secure borders, Ukraine agitated for independence, what then did Lenin do? He turned to writing a refutation of the detested Karl Kautsky’s The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx. Theory almost always came first for him. Millions might die of starvation, disease, and economic breakdown, while thousands of others might die defending the Revolution from the British or the Whites, but exposing Kautksy’s intellectual errors took priority over such matters. The few dozen readers of Kautsky’s turgid and vague book had to be set straight with Lenin’s turgid and vague prose.
While Comrade Number One was civil to rivals, opponents, and allies in the Party he casually consigned thousands of others to state terrorism, arbitrary arrest, torture, imprisonment, murder, exile, forced labour without even the pretence of a fair process. All this and more was justified in his mind by the need to embed the Revolution and the Regime. This was a judgement only he could make, according to him. He turned loose a generation of thugs and they reproduced themselves in the coming generations.
He was a valetudinarian for decades, and perhaps there was something to it, though the many doctors, physicians, and specialists consulted, including some imports from Germany and England, could make no diagnosis. His workload was punishing because he was a micro-manager who found it difficult to delegate, because he did not trust any of his comrades to be as perfect as he thought he himself was. Age wearied him and as he strength failed he tried to cement his regime. Comrade Jospeh Stalin was there and Lenin saw him as a rival to Leon Trotsky for succession. Few others, including Trotsky, realised that Stalin had the ambition and ability to push himself forward. Ah huh.
There is a splendid closing chapter about Lenin’s afterlife as a symbol that is worth reading on its own. In short, much of the promotion of Lenin as the Saint of Communism served as a smokescreen for Stalin to out manoeuvre and oust rivals for supreme leadership. By reprinting all of Lenin’s innumerable publications, carefully edited with hindsight, by naming Petrograd after Lenin, by naming streets for him here, there, and everywhere, by putting Lenin’s name on the masthead of Party publications, preserving the body, building a temple for the cadaver, storing the deceased’s brain that science might one day understand his genius, putting Lenin’s profile on stamps, rubles, and bus tickets, Stalin was acting as the conservator, curator, and heir to Lenin’s legacy. That includes the display of the embalmed body, which we trooped by in the Kremlin as 2016 after a forty-five minute shuffle in the line.
But that was about the only thing left. Leningrad is now St Petersburg again. Nowhere did I see any sign of the First Comrade. There were plenty of fellows dressed and made up as Stalin selling photo ops to tourists but not one Lenin. Still less were there any of his likenesses anywhere. I saw only one Hammer and Sickle symbol on the flag at a tennis club. On many buildings I could see the shadow of that symbol which had been removed or sandblasted off. Instead the national iconography was Romanov and Imperial — the last Tsar and the double-headed eagle — whom and which Lenin hated beyond reason.
An astounding irony of history emerges in these pages. When Lenin was a high school student preparing for University entry examinations in 1886, the headmaster of his school in Simbirsk in the sticks on the south western Volga about 900 kilometres from Moscow and twice that far from St Petersburg, wrote a testimonial. This writer was Fyodor Mikhailovich Kerensky whose own son Alexander was five years old at the time. The cognoscenti will know these rest.
Alexander Kerensky
Thirty-one years later in October of 1917 the names of Kerensky and Lenin came together again. In the long fallout of the February 1917 upheavals Alexander became the Prime Minister of the Provisional Government of Russia and Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov whose code name was…Lenin became his successor.
*L During the summer hiatus of In Our Time (BBC 4 podcast) I came across an old episode on Vladdy and became interested in this title. After all I had seen Vladdy in Red Square a couple of years ago, looking as bad as the fraternity brothers on Sunday morning, or much like Jeremy Bentham these days.
IMDb meta-data is 19 episodes of 25 minutes to date, rated 7.5 by 101,362 Kiwis.
Genre: Horror
Verdict: 3D (Dry, Droll, and Deadpan)
Tip One: Watch in sequences. You’ll see why. Tip Two: The delivery is often fast, there are asides, and sotto voce comments that are best appreciated by turning on subtitles. We have seen all the episodes and we are watching them again but to be specific these comments concern Season 2, Episode 6 Mobots.
Sergeant Ruawai Maaka briefs the duty watch at Wellington Central Police for the morning. Once again he urges officers not to use of pepper spray on lunch! Too late for those who tried it for breakfast but had the nozzle turned the wrong way around. Captain Frank Furillo never had this problem.
After the others have their assignments, e.g., assisting the spray victims to the medic, changing the channel on the television, making tea, Sarge turns to the crack Hardly Normal Squad of Officers Karen O’Leary and Mike Minogue. These secret squirrels retire to the concealed room behind the bookcase in the back hall. What’s going down? All over the Mt Victoria area old mobile phones and other discarded electronics have disappeared from kitchen drawers, sheds, garages, under stairs, attics, coat pockets, and closets. First these items disappeared into these recesses and then they disappeared from them. Wow!
Thereafter Sarge Maaka offers the running commentary of a police reality television show as O’Leary and Minogue scope the doings, starting with O’Leary’s mum who lives in the area. Yes, this is Mrs O’Leary without a cow. The cow turns up in another episode.
There is a delightful scene with a snake, sort of, and a taser that makes Davis Quinton of Dog River look responsible.
To assist the field officers Sarge has called in a tech head, who begins by undoing everything his predecessors did, reinstalling all the software, and then rebooting in the middle of the operation for beta testing. Doing all this gives Tech time to pick his nose.
Loved the interrogation with the transformer. Updates are indeed dangerous. Try this IOS, Punk! After seeing this object lesson, for the moment I am holding off Catalina.
So far we have had no references to the Bee Hive in Wellington, though surely that is a tempting target.
GoodReads meta-data is 208 pages, rated 3.95 by 150 citizens.
Genre: Chick Lit
Verdict: Ditto
The Set-up: Post war life in a picturesque small village in Little England is the locale. There is much description of the settlement, the weather, the railway embankment, the culverts, along with the habits and peculiarities of the residents. Two long established families have been forced in the last generation to sell their properties. One house was bought by a wealthy titled lady, while the other by a parvenu businessman.
Among the cast are two spinsters who keep, breed, and sell dogs in a disheveled house that belongs to the landlord farmer, whose own finances are precarious. He is also the landlord for some others.
There is a young war-bride widow who never thinks of the past, along with her younger sister and the two of them live with their mother in another property rented from the farmer now that they have had to give up their erstwhile manor to the titled lady buyer.
Nearby is an irascible major who treats his wife like a slow-witted subaltern, and she loves it, with a nephew in residence who mopes around like an impoverished member of the Lost Generation of 1919.
Her ladyship of the newly-bought manner has a ne’er-do-well son in tow. He had been in the army but that is barely mentioned. [Whatever you do, don’t mention the war.]
These characters amble about, occasionally ricochet off each other and carom here and there for two hundred pages before the two sisters get paired off with the parvenu and the farmer, while the nephew and moper continue to ne’er-do-well and to mope.
Elizabeth Fair
This is the first of half a dozen novels set in Bramton Wick, and I suppose the characters continue, but I will probably not find out for myself. While the book is very well written and the dissection of the various characters is gentle and insightful, there is no momentum in it.
None of them has any ambition, any desires, any blood, any purpose, any mission, any thing to motivate them for the day ahead, or the reader for the pages ahead. It is as though each waits off page to come on and act out the prescribed role and then retire to the wings. That social type has been exemplified for the time being now on to the next.
It is, however, a study in the managing social relationships and that gives it the title Chick Lit. Most of the management is done by the sisters and it is through manipulation, not communication, but it is amusing, mild, diverting, and well intentioned, if utterly pointless. I hasten to add that Chick Lit does not have to be pointless, Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend and the Overdue Life of Amy Byler, both discussed elsewhere on this blog, are certainly Chick Lit and they have momentum. Barbara Pym’s comedies of manners, several of which are discussed on this blog, also have a claim to the genre Chick Lit avant le mot, and her characters have vitality and meaning that seems to lack in the book under review. Likewise, the Jon Hassler novels that feature Miss Agatha take the label Chick Lit proudly and let me tell you Miss Agatha has purpose.
IMDb meta is 1 hour and 17 minutes, rated 5.1 by 332 cinematizens
Genre: SyFy
Verdict: Incomprehensible
‘The virgin sacrifices to the gods of a ghastly galaxy!’ The marketing tag line.
Somewhere in middle England Dr Joe uses a radio telescope half an hour a week. This access infuriates the Director who tries to KPI Joe off the ear piece. There is much gobbledegook about the radio telescope for connoisseurs. It seems a storm in a screenwriter’s teacup.
Doc has a loyal secretary who is sometimes Sandy and at other times Zena. Continuity editor please note. He also has an underling to order around.
But (what a surprise) a few hours before the plug is pulled Dr Joe gets a call: from outer space! He answers the call. Big mistake. He was warned not to do so by the Carry On accountant who just happens to be there for annoyance.
Next thing you know a Dalek on an asteroid sends a robo-ship to Earth to space-nap the lot and plonk them down in a one room set and they end up donning shower caps with USB cables on them. No Hollywood ego would have put those on, although it was amusing to imagine it.
This is the A-Team. The first and last line of Solar defence!
Once they plug in they become Eggheads! No, they become the Solar System’s first and only line of defence. Oh? Let’s review this A-Team: Doc who cannot get a research grant, underling who waits for loser Doc to tell him what to do, a secretary who doesn’t know her own name, a Carry On accountant, and the cleaning lady (who sensibly refuses to wear a shower cap). This is it. This is the best we’ve got. Only they can save us from a Republican apocalypse. We’re doomed! Doomed!
There is an unrelated aside with human sacrifice, as per the marketing tg line cited above. Ho hum. The knife man moves so slowly the fraternity brothers fell asleep during this episode. Really he will never fulfil his Killing Performance Indicators at that speed and doesn’t.
They play a PAC Man arcade game with the unnamed, unidentified, and unknown invaders — probably Europeans looking for terra nullius — and win! ‘Fire!’ is repeated eight times in this segment to give the illusion of action. [No sale!]
Journeyman Sy Fy author Murray Leinster wrote the story which was adapted into a screenplay by John Brunner. That is a good pedigree but it hardly shows in the finished product. Admittedly there is some awareness of the laws of physics in contrast to so much Sy Fy: There is a lag in signals. The angle of declination is determinate. Yet we have flames in space.
More importantly, we have a title that makes no connection to the story and some very poor acting.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 44 minutes, rated 6.5 by 3213 cinematizens.
Genre: War, Fantasy.
Verdict: Ahab, tank whisperer.
Context. In the July and August of 1943, near Kursk in South West Russia, an enormous tank battle occurred as the Nazis launched their last major Eastern offensive, putting into the maw a million men (Germans, Austrians, Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Slovenians, Croatian, and more) with 3000+ tanks. Big, huh? But the Soviets saw that bid and raised it, offering to Ares more than two and half million men with 7000 tanks. The air fleets were likewise enormous. Events far away determined the eventual outcome when the Western Allies invaded Sicily leading the Nazis in Russia to fall back because reserves of men and material intended to sustain a counter-attack in Russia were diverted to Italy.
Set-up. After one tank engagement in the weeks this battle dragged on, a badly burned Ahab is pulled from a T-34 and miraculously recovers from his near fatal wounds in ten minutes. This is Comrade Found who becomes the tank whisperer. He communes with the steel hulls of burned-out hulks and confirms that his tank was destroyed by the titular White Tiger tank.
This is a long way from the Soviet propaganda films about the Great Patriotic War like Two Soldiers (1943), It Happened at the Donbass (1945), The Star (1953), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), ….. where bare and barrel-chested hero workers rip German tanks apart with one hand while hold Lenin’s testament aloft in the other. In this film there is blood and grit, and no one turns to Lenin for solace. Moreover, the tank whisperer is a non-entity, pigeon chested, cross-eyed, monosyllabic, and stooped. This is no Hollywood hunk taking time off from the steroids and the gym.
But once Found recovers in record time from burns — he is reborn, he is back in a tank seeking out the White Whale of a Tiger in some mixed up zoology. White proves so destructive and elusive that the Soviet Army dedicates a small unit led by the Tank Whisper to seek and destroy it. Shoot ‘em ups occur. Tank whisperings save Ahab but the great White gets away again and again. There is talk that it has a ghost crew as well as magical powers to cloud men’s mind. It is the S-H-A-D-O-W tank! Talkative German prisoners tell everything they know which is not much without even getting a cigarette in return.
One of dozens of books on the battle.
That occupied the first hour plus, then — inexplicably — we cut away to a ceremony led by Russians with a German Field Marshall surrendering in the presence of American and British flags and at least one American general officer uniform. The Nazi delegation includes all arms: Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, and Luftwaffe. Huh? From 1943 to 1945 in a flash. The White Tiger made no further appearance in the last two years of the war.
There follows another half hour with several pointless scenes in a ruined city, perhaps Berlin, which I watched with one eye. It ends with an incomprehensible monologue from guess who? Only one ear was required for that: Found says the White is still out there waiting. Ah huh…, and…. Nothing.
By the way, there are no women in the film after Tank Whisperer leaves the hospital, apart from a few passing in street scenes at a distance.
Leaving aside the last half hour it had some mystery, which was never resolved, and so just became an excuse for blown ‘em up and shoot ‘em up. Tant pis. The early musings of a couple of the characters were a good start but they became repetitive rather than informative, not a patch on similar musings in The Thin Red Line (1998) or Castle Keep (1969). Still when I compare it to the trailers I have seen of recent Anglo-American war films White Tiger has a verisimilitude completely lacking in them. There is not a bareheaded, bare chested Brad Pitt in sight reminding us his food-fad diet, the hours a day he spends in the gym and at the make-up chair.
I cannot forbear, and why should I, from mentioning that one reviewer on the IMDb refers to the setting as the winter. Winter in July, well maybe, in Boston but not in west central Russia.
Not my usual far but I found some references to it that made it sound more thoughtful than the usual shoot ’em up. Not so, I found.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 1 minute run time, rated 5.7 by 128 cinematizens
Genre: Howdunnit (not Whodunnit).
Verdict: All hat, no oil.
‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!’
Unlike The Whistler, The Shadow did not need to spy on people to find out their secrets: he got up in the morning knowing them. Moreover, The Shadow had ‘the power to cloud men’s minds so that they cannot see him,’ completely unnecessary where the fraternity brothers are concerned, but handy nonetheless. Still it left the brothers wondering about women’s minds. Nor did The Shadow need a gimmicky off-key whistle like you-know-whom. Finally, he was voiced once by Orson “I am a Genius” Welles. It ran to 677 episodes from 1937 to 1954. Most of which have been lost to ravages of indifference. But some can be had from Audible.
What a pedigree to take to the movies! What a flop the movies were and are!
In the movies he knows from nothing and back again. His mind is the only thing clouded. His gimmick is a black cat suit for a costume party. He is surrounded by people who know his secret.
Lamont Cranston interferes in police investigations to the amusement of his uncle, the Police Commissioner. His faithful driver is an oaf. He ridicules his girlfriend, Margo Lane whose single contribution to proceedings is to wear silly hats. Yet this is the Shadow. Hardly! A mere silhouette of his radio self.
This Shadow is so pathetic he has to hold a gat on the cops while he explains things to them. Not a cloud in sight. However in this outing the police do figure it out and there is a nice scene toward the end when the Irish Inspector No-First-Name Cardona and Lamont piece it together based on nothing but the clock and the script.
But to back up: Four sneaky types fall off balconies to break their necks and die, apparent suicides. Each was alone when taking the concrete dive. No one pushed them. Were they drunk or drugged? No. Were they following a Des Moines Sky Mall map? No. Were they by some scriptwriting coincidence suicides? No. Were they raptured by the Kool Aid? No. What then?
That is intriguing but the weary and dreary direction undercuts the suspense. Later the explanation involves either Indiana (Jones) or Australia, sort of.
There is also a neat idea about a secret lab in a warehouse that is not integrated. The only critic linked to the IMDb entry who bothered to comment on it said the plot was ‘not wholly coherent,’ exemplifying understatement.
Kane Richmond as Lamont Shadow has the profile of a superman double, chiseled features, powerful jaw, a brow untroubled by thought, a masterful baritone voice, broad shoulders, an effortless glide of step, a toothy grin, and the confidence of a schoolyard bully. Yet, strangely, he has no presence on the screen.
Margo gets some compensation for the twenty-four carat sexism throughout. Her best line is a reply to Lamont is: ‘Don’t yell at me until after we’re married and then don’t you dare!’ Even better when Lamont is trying to open a safe with much manly posturing as he prepares to pick the lock, she reaches past him and opens the door which she had noticed was not closed but which Lamont had not, so busy was he preparing for his display of masculine genius. Hssss [sound of ego deflating].
On the radio The Shadow and The Margo were a team and all business but on film they seem to be auditioning for a comedy show on the way to a masked ball, and failing. There is much, too much, slapstick with the black costume that he always has handy. The comic relief is annoying as usual.
It is little wonder that translating this successful radio serial to film failed. The radio audience would have found it to be a failure as above. The scriptwriter used bait and switch, and the audience switched back to radio.
GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages rated 3.4/5.0 by 351 by litizens.
Genre: krimi, period.
Verdict: serious and intense.
Vienna: In 1888 Gustav Klimt is arrested on suspicion of murder when one of his models is found dead! Klimt is an uncouth giant from whose hand comes those ethereal paintings. That was a striking contrast.
His friend and commercial lawyer Karl Werthen promises to help him. To Klimt it is all some kind of joke and he treats his incarceration as a research trip. But the murder was the fourth in a series and the Pox News clamour to scapegoat Hillary is loud, though an advisor to the police minister tells Werthen that Klimt is not the guilty one but public opinion demands a scapegoat, and well…..Hillary is not available so it might just have to be the big guy.
Gustav Klimt
Werthen is ill equipped to investigate a murder but his old friend from Graz (been there) Dr. Hans Gross is an accomplished criminologist, as he says repeatedly. Gross is passing through the capital of the Empire en route to the University in Bukovina to take up the Chair of Pompous Pontificating in that remote corner of the Austrian Empire. To extend his stay in Vienna Gross is ready to lend a hand.
While Werthen is strait-laced, upright, and uptight, Gross is ready to get down and dirty, crawling around the crime scene with a magnifying glass or probing a corpse in the mortuary. Werthen finds all that distressing, disturbing, and distasteful, but Gross’s effort does turn up clues missed by the plodders.
Gross concludes that the murders have been calculated to implicate Jews. About halfway through (per the Kindle measure) someone observes Gross and Werthen. Ominous. Is this the perpetrator watching those who seek him. His perspective recurs now and again thereafter.
A Kimt painting of flowers
The conceit is that Gross has written several textbooks on criminal investigation which have been read by Arthur Conan Doyle who then used the techniques therein revealed to create Sherlock Holmes. Gross assumes everything stems from sex and cites Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing to that effect. To avoid censure Krafft-Ebing wrote his book in Latin – Psychopathia Sexualis. (We passed Krafft-Ebing’s mansion a few week ago when traversing Vienna.) They seek out a young Sigmund Freud for advice but he is out of town for the moment.
The malevolent observer arranges for a red herring, and muses on his duties. Gulp!
Then the story seems to end half way through and there is a romantic interlude in which Werthen gets married to live happily ever after. As if!
Then the krimi resumes. Odd construction. What would Aristotle make of this disunity? Same as me. Annoying is what I made of it. One character mentioned the sewers (shades of The Third Man) in passing and leaves it at that. The mention alerted this reader but nothing came of it. False alarm.
Vienna in 1888
The story starts again, and includes a stay to the Lower Belvedere which we visited in September 2019. The plot goes around and around and includes the much exploited events at Mayerling and even Sissi with a head of hair to make Farrah Fawcett cringe. In the end our heroes prevail, but only just.
There are many nice touches. Foremost is the study in corruption of the prince who masterminded the whole thing in the name of saving the Austrian Empire, chiefly from those Magyars. Franz Ferdinand is also a nice portrait of nobody’s fool. Then there is the Emperor whose sole concession to modernity is to make himself available to receive petitions from citizens twice a week for an hour. Otherwise, Austria in 1898-1899 as portrayed in this novel clings to the past. Motor cars are discouraged. Electricity, despite the role of one of its citizens — Nicoli Tesla — in it development, is not used by the government for illumination. All the sixty Austrian generals based in Vienna are seventy or more years old. The body politic was a gerontocracy with sclerosis, lacking a mirror of self-knowledge.
J. Sydney Jones
Jones has a compère in fin de siecle Wien and that is Frank Tallis whose books include Vienna Blood, Death in Vienna, Vienna Woods, and Fatal Lies discussed elsewhere on this blog.
Having just spent a week in Vienna I recalled many of the streets and byways that figure in this book.
GoodReads meta-data is 224 pages, rated 3.93/5.00 by 228 litizens.
Verdict: Parody plus
In the Yarra River valley the self-appointed, self-satisfied gatekeepers of Australian literature gather at the home of Mervyn and Janet Blake, having removed themselves from Melbourne to concentrate on their labours refined and many. He has published several novels but recently has concentrated on devastating critiques of the works of others, while she publishes short stories. They are much celebrated in the tiny world of the antipodean literati, almost as much as they celebrate themselves – legends in their own minds.
There are frequent gatherings of their acolytes at this quaint country retreat. Among the number are Martinus Lubers, Arvin Wilcannia-Smythe, Twyford Arundal, and others. As fine a pencil-necked crew of four-eyed paper-shufflers as Upfield could imagine. Of course these aristos do not mix with local hoi polli, but are much observed by the locals, including Mr Pickwick, a neighbouring cat.
This smug world shatters when Mervyn is found dead one morning in his study. There is no discernible cause of death. Inspector Cardboard from Melbourne Criminal Investigation Bureau arrives to muddy the waters and does so energetically, concluding there is no crime to investigate. He congratulates himself on his perspicacity and returns to Melbourne.
Still suspicions remain because there is no discernible cause of death and Bony is summoned from far Queensland, being the only sensible detective in the wide brown land, and he is seconded to the case. He sets about learning the ways and wherefores of the village and its villagers.
It has all the Upfield features:
A careful and respectful description of the locale and locals.
A stalwart local plod stymied by the aforementioned Inspector Cardboard.
Grizzling about government while relying on it.
Bony reading footprints on cement sidewalks, well, almost.
His many annoying habits, rolling his own cigarettes and drinking many cups of tea with exaggerated courtesy.
A school of red herrings among the cast.
A crime within a crime to roil the depths.
An off-stage persona who was there all the time.
A beautiful woman to admire Bony.
Published in 1948 and set immediately after World War II there are may references to shortages of goods except for tea, which occasions the ritualistic grizzles about the GOVERNMENT, but nary a mention of the war itself, still less of its toll on the village – yet local men must have been in the army in Singapore, New Guinea, or Egypt.
Most of all it offers a window on haute literature versus commercial fiction as the acolytes circle each other. Bony finds a cicerone to this new world in a commercial author, one Clarence Bagshott (aka Arthur Upfield) who explains to him that writers may be either storytellers or wordsmiths or both. (It takes pages and pages to make this simple point, I am afraid.) The best writers are both. A story teller may be a good writer but not always, though a wordsmith with nothing to say does not make the cut.
Commercial fiction places a premium on storytelling because that is what buyers want to read.* (Amen, to that Brother Arthur!) Litterateurs write only words. [Snort!] They turn inward and haughtily disdain commercial fiction as beneath their rarefied vocabulary. Does this explain Dan Brown’s success?
Upfield must have had a lot of fun characterising these wordsmiths from their frilly clothes, poncy hairstyles, sneering lips, pinched features, skimpy moustaches, watery eyes, reedy voices, skinny arms, and ridiculous names. There is not a manly man among them, to be sure, and the ladies fair little better but he spends fewer words deprecating them.
By convulsions many, the plot involves a commercial writer, I. R. Watts, whom Bony tracks down. Watts is pseudonym and neither the publisher nor Australia Post is very cooperative in penetrating the disguise. However, Bony has his ways, he asked the Tax Office which happily reveals all. Yep. Damn GOVERNMENT!
Spoiler ahead.
Here is where it gets complicated and interesting. Yes, of course, this storyteller of commercial fiction is the pseudonym of one of the very same literary snobs, but which one and why?
Turns out Janet Blake is I. R. Watts, whose commercial success might rival that of Upfield himself. She is a story teller par excellence. Having read one of the Watts books while on the trail, Bony attests to that with the assurance and confidence of a man who has read little. Here is where the flour is stirred in to thicken the plot, for she has long kept this secret pseudonym from her husband Mervyn Blake who is so self-centred he did not notice either her industry nor the income that resulted from it. I can believe that when I reflect on some of the cases of Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) with whom I have worked. This disorder is a pattern of self-centred, arrogant behaviour, a lack of empathy and consideration for other people, and an excessive need for admiration. [Fill in the blank for the names of those near by. Continue on a separate page.]
Her earnings as I. R. Watts maintained their lives while he scorned all others in his literary criticism. The commercially successful novels of Watts would have been beneath his contempt. His own career as a novelist has ended and in truth it never quite started it seems, since his early novels were rejected by British and even, shock, Australian publishers until Janet Blake made suggestions, changes, and so on, and when they were then emended and published she allowed him full credit. Rather than embracing that productive partnership, Mervyn (because of his narcissism) rejected her further contributions, and though he wrote many other novels, none were published. Into that lacunae grew his bile and his criticism of others. Sounds like a good case for tenure.
In short, she did him in, though quite why I never did get, apart from the fact that he was an insufferable dolt, but then look around, no shortage of those, and few of them are murdered. The how is made of hardened air inside pingpong balls.
Thanks to the scavenging of Mr Pickwick, Bony works it all out and arrives at the herring de jour.
You say ‘Boney’ and I say ‘Bony,’ because Upfield wrote it as ‘Bony.’ When some of the stories were filmed for television it the 1970s the name was changed to ‘Boney’ for reasons only known to those who made the change. That in turn has influenced some of the re-issues of the books. The stupid lead the blind as usual. That television series is discussed in connection with comments on another Upfield title to be found elsewhere on this blog.
Upfield published at least thirty-seven Bony titles; he addition he published two dozen short stories, and a great deal of non-fiction in newspaper articles about the outback, aboriginals, and life in the scrub. He served in the Australian Army in World War I and upon return to Australia lived as a jackaroo for years. He was an active member of the Australian Geographical Society and participated in many of its expeditions.
* To Bagshott’s literary dichotomy I would add a third category today: Prize fiction. The books that are entered for literary prizes today are not written for readers of either stories or words. They are written to arrest the attention of the overwhelmed and jaded hacks who serve as jurors on selection panels for literary prizes who must pick winners out of the hundreds of titles submitted. The weird, the strange, the incomprehensible, the attenuated, the dead boring, the unreliable narrators, the omission of punctuation, these are all devices to make a book standout of a pile of ninety volumes on the desk. I have spoken! Did I say ninety, one such hack has since told me that he had one hundred-and-fifty the last time he did one of these duties.
