December 2020 – Political theory and practice

The Shakespeare Requirement (2018) by Julie Schumacher.

GoodReads meta-data is 309 pages, rated 3.66 by 2195 litizens.

Genre: Novel.

Verdict: Amen, Sister! Tell it!

In which are chronicled the further adventures of Professor Jason Fitger who has become chair of the fractious Department of English at Payne State University after the longterm incumbent decamped over the summer. Fitger is immediately deluged with a backlog of administrative paperwork, including a Vision Statement. To be budgeted each department must submit such a statement that meets the approval of the Provost.

The University President’s main task is constantly lobbying the state legislature to slow the continued, inexorable erosion of Payne’s appropriation. In her absence the University is run by the above mentioned Provost who is seldom seen, and any effort to secure an appointment fails. Indeed some long-serving deans have never seen this shadowy provost.

In the age of McKinsey management, Payne University is dedicated to cutting deadwood, increasing quality, and turning anything and everything to a profit. The Business School has become a Forbidden City unto itself selling degrees. The sciences have been tailored into applied research and development laboratories for the industries owned by Payne donors. Drug and medical insurance companies fund and own the life sciences. Those sciences that could not secure private funding have disappeared, e.g., astronomy, with the planetarium now used for storage. The University president dreams of a future where there will be a Division of Numbers and a Division of Words, and she will then have only two direct reports to delegate to the Provost.

All the while, the administration has grown from one building to three while the student population has increased and the faculty members decreased. (Once remodelled the planetarium will be the fourth admin building.) Faculty members are constantly summoned to training sessions to keep abreast of Payne’s many, conflicting priorities. Indeed, one member of the English department has been dispatched to sensitivity training for twelve consecutive weeks. There are rumours that the consultant who runs the sensitive training is from North Korea.

A nefarious plan is afoot to eradicate all humanities departments at Payne State University. How could that be done? Not so hard when one thinks about it. Get this! That Vision Statement must be endorsed unanimously by all members of the Department with signatures! That is the killer. There was, there is, there never will be anything that all members of the English Department will agree on! Nothing.

The first line of defence is to dispute the composition of the Department. Do all the adjuncts, associates, emerita, or honoraries count? Do the drudges who do all the work count? The part-timers, the temporaries, the underpaid grad students, and the unpaid interns: Do these transitory peons four-to-a-room in the dank and dark basement count? Does anyone even know their names? Fitger’s forays into the cellar do not go well.

When the academic year begins the English Department has no Vision Statement and hence no budget, but it has more students than any other department on campus, students whose expectations have been inflated by the endless trumpeting of all those administrators recruiting students (= cash flow). It falls to Fitger to cajole, coax, bribe, coerce, or blackmail members of the English Department one-by-one to endorse a statement while dealing with the flood of students. Oh, if it were only that easy. Then there is a really big Kapow!

The catalyst for the explosion is the Shakespeare requirement. All majors in English have had to do a one semester course on the Bard since time out of mind, taught by the most senior member of the Department who is long past retirement age but whose pension was looted by corporate shenanigans facilitated by McKinsey management. His whole being is embodied in this course. He is also the only member of the faculty with a record of publications making him untouchable. But the Vision Statement has opened the whole question of the curriculum, and from the can wriggle the worms of post-modernism in its many forms. The Bard may only survive because the Po-Moeans cannot agree what should replace him.

Then comes the Mission Statement followed by ……

Ah, life without a budget means, among other things, that meetings cannot be held because meeting rooms are rented to departments. In the same McKinsey spirit only the student toilets and hallways are cleaned. To have offices and faculty toilets cleaned, Departments have to pay for it from the budget. No budget, no meetings and no cleaning. Still less can Fitger’s desk-top computer be repaired, nor the broken window replaced in the Department secretary’s office. Though as long as the window is in disrepair the contents of the office are not insured, as he is repeatedly reminded by the Safety Officer whose job is to harass him, not to repair the window.

Lest a reader think this rent-seeking is fantasy, when a director of a unit I was enjoined to prepare a budget that included renting the teaching rooms we used. Nothing came of it at the time but it was a trial run.

Venality, back stabbing, undermining, intransigence, solipsism, this book has it all. Innocent readers might think it is exaggerated.

Rather than agree and survive, members of the English department would rather disagree and perish. This revealed preference partly arises from a failure of imagination. Tenured members of the Department cannot imagine their own demise. Never fear, that unseen Provost can imagine it. In short, tenure means that a professor is entitled to a specific job, but if that job itself is eliminated, there is nothing to which that professor is tenured. If I am a tenured professor of Albanian political theory, when the position of professor of Albanian political theory is eliminated then so am I.

In the end Fitger proves what everyone thought. He is much too inept (nice) to be a head of department, and that is what saves him, and the Department. The last service done by the Shakespeare teacher is something to ponder.

I waited for more than year for this title to become available on Kindle but it didn’t so I got it in hardback, because I could wait no longer to read of Fitger’s latest escapades.

With the great personal restraint I have long cultivated, I have not told a story about the conversation I once had when acting dean with the head of a department about accommodating curriculum changes in which he happily agreed that (1) he and his department would not cooperate and (2) as an inevitable result there would be fewer of them. So be it! Compromise was not an option. Sssh. The cognoscenti will know which department that was.

The Divine Miss Marble: A Life of Tennis, Fame, and Mystery (2020) by Robert Weintraub.

Good Read meta-data is 520 pages, rated 3.77 by twenty-six litizens.

Genre: Biography.

Verdict: Indomitable!

“Cinema lies, sport does not,” Jean-Luc Godard, an avid sports fan.

Alice who? Among Alice Marble’s (1913-1990) lesser claims to fame is that she was the inspiration for the DC Comics character Wonder Woman!* That accolade arose from her athletic career. (See title above.)

Born to a working class family in San Francisco, Marble’s father was a mechanic on the street cars, and her mother managed the brood of children. In time Alice would give tennis lessons to King Edward VIII of England, and play private exhibition matches at San Simeon with the Hollywood A-List. Get it!

But it all started with a Louisville Slugger. (The cognoscenti will get it.) As a tweenager she idolised her older brother and followed him in playing baseball, where it quickly became apparent that she could run faster, throw harder, field better, and out hit him. It was embarrassing for him in sandlot games to be chosen after his kid sister, and it was worse when she won a ballboy tryout for the San Francisco Seals. (Again with the cognoscenti.) So this brother bought her a second-hand tennis racket from a pawn shop and more or less locked her into the fenced public concrete tennis courts in the neighbourhood while he went off to play baseball.

On these courts she took on all comers, boys, girls, Jews, Chinese, blacks, and anyone else who showed up with a racket, and she won in a serve and volley game. Pow! Going out to play like this, she wore shorts and t-shirt. In this girl one sees the woman to come and not just in the attire but also in the can-do attitude.

One observer of her powers on these courts staked her entry into local competitions (and bet on her to win). She did and he did. This led to other sponsors and other wins. Her game was completely untutored but it was dynamic and powerful enough to get local press mentions, and that led to more sponsors.

At one point, her penurious family bought her a membership in an elite tennis club, thinking she would learn things there about both tennis and life and attract more and better (i.e., not gamblers) sponsors. At this country club, she was a fish out of water the only time she went for a competition. Her clothes were not suitable; she didn’t know what to say or how to say it. The only people she knew there were the bus boys who also played tennis on the public courts. Then in the club competition draw her snobbish opponent protested at playing this pathetic nobody in shorts and a t-shirt! Rattled and embarrassed, after a re-draw Marble lost in a double humiliation.

Enter Eleanor Tennant, whose fame as a tennis coach was national, likewise of working class origins, but now tennis teacher to Carol Lombard, Marion Davies, Errol Flynn, and others. She saw in the teenage Marble the stone from which to carve a champion, and she set to work with the wit, insight, tenacity, patience, and loyalty that marked her coaching career. She passed many of these qualities onto to her protégée.

Both of Marble’s parents died young while she was still in her teens, leaving the elder brother as head of the family. All the children left school and worked. From fourteen Alice worked in a Wilson Sporting Goods store in the back, shelving and stacking. The manager later gave her a brand new racket, and she hence remained brand loyal. (The purchaser of this racket left it for pick-up and never returned.)

It is a story of ups and downs, triumphs and failures. Because of her social background Marble was often denigrated by tennis officials and her naiveté meant she was sometimes manipulated, too, because Eleanor could not be there every minute. Marble’s wins on the court were spectacular and so were her losses. With Marble there was fireworks. It was all so different from the demure and muted world of ladies’ tennis at the time.

When she was ranked in the top ten in the USA she contracted tuberculous and collapsed on the centre court of the French Open. That seemed to end her career, if not her life. But two long years later she was back, hitting the ball harder than ever. Eleanor paid all the medical bills with the money she earned from her precarious existence as coach to the fickle glitterati. Who knew when the novelty of tennis would give way to another Hollywood whim and leave her high and dry.

By the way, the US Tennis Association that sponsored her trip to the French Open, spent years trying to sue her for failing to complete her contract to the point sending a bill collector from New York to California to extract the money while she was hospitalised in a sanitarium. Eleanor as always settled that. But it is pretty clear that had Marble been one of the tennis club snobs this treatment would not have occurred.

Part of Marble’s recovery was to take operatic singing lessons for breadth control and she discovered that she could sing and that she liked to sing. Another part was a contrived competition for Eleanor’s favour with her other protégé Bob Riggs. Yes, him.

Marble was prone to dehydration in the long matches played in the sun, and a response to that, again from Eleanor, was to put soaked cabbage leaves under her visor. These fell out at one particularly embarrassing moment. Read the book to see when.

Remember that snob who called her a nobody. A year or two later by chance they were again paired in a local competition, and Marble literally drove this snob off the court with a record number of aces and a smash that broke her nose.

With Eleanor’s instruction Marble broadened her repertoire with top spin, slices, undercuts, lobs, drop shots, back spin, cross-cuts, and tactical court management, i.e., using all the court for her shots. She also slowly adjusted to the surfaces of clay and grass which had none of the bounce of playground concrete. She also learned, as was much remarked in her mature years, to play with an effortless economy of motion while still hitting blazing shots.

She played an aggressive, masculine style and wore shorts as she had as a girl. This at a time when women wore lady-like long skirts and patrolled baselines. Not Marble who went to the net for the kill time and again. These attributes made her news copy and she quickly became famous beyond her accomplishments. She seems to have very little ego in it all, though, and soldiered on.

She made the cover of Life but not Time, as far as I can tell. This celebrity led to a line of leisure and sportswear. There was the singing, clothing, Wilson endorsements, prize money, DC Comics, and personal appearances but there was so little money in the game she was never well off and lived at home with her brothers well into maturity, when not at Eleanor’s tennis camp in the sticks, practicing all the daylight hours and retiring at 10 pm.

She grew tired of answering questions about her personal life and made up a husband on a secret military mission, and who then died. This is the mystery of the title. The author does an excellent job in unravelling this long-running deception. By the way, for those who must know Marble had lesbian relationships, though she was at times squired around by Will du Pont as a cover. Yes, that du Pont who is described as wooden, pinched, and gloomy. It is no wonder she did not accept his many offers of a marriage of convenience. There is a charming account of her first encounter with the word ‘lesbian.’

After Pearl Harbor, she tried to join up in something, anything, but was refused because of the scars on her lungs. At the personal invitation of President Roosevelt she headed a physical fitness campaign on a speaking tour, and then took to selling war bonds in another campaign of personal appearances. In one sixty-day trip she sold a million dollars of bonds, gave the same speech a hundred times, and autographed everything handed to her all day long and some of the night.

Throughout her career she played doubles, including mixed doubles. In this case the word ‘mixed’ refers to gender. Marble, however, once played double mixed doubles, which her enemies never let her forget. Huh? She and another woman played in a mixed doubles match with two black men in Harlem for a Red Cross fund raiser. In short order that more or less ended her access to courts in the South.

In retirement she struggled to make a living and her health deteriorated quickly. But with each set-back she rebounded. ‘Indomitable’ is the word that best describes her personality. She was knocked down plenty of times but always got up swinging. We won’t see her like again in today’s world of cosseted millionaire mediocrities in sports.

I had never heard of her until I came across her name in one of ‘What Happened on this Day in History’ entries I did for 2018-2019.

By the way, the public courts she started on were refurbished and named after her at the Golden Gate Park in the sky.

She published two memoirs, the second posthumously, but both, alleges this author, are very unreliable. He convinced me with his own assiduous research into dates and times. She made up more than that husband.

This is an impressive biographer who has checked every fact more than once and has a deft way of putting aside Marble’s unreliable assertions for proven fact. In the fact-checking he reminds me of Robert Caro. There is no higher praise. But the air goes out of that comparison because Weintraub also sprinkles the pages with annoying slang like ‘the writing chops,’ ‘wiped the floor with Collins,’ ‘dough,’ ‘in the joint,’ and many more that will date the book, confuse some readers who are not native speakers of English, and leave translators at a loss.

*’Wonder Woman’ was conceived … to set a standard among children and young people of strong, free, courageous womanhood; to combat the idea that women are inferior to men, and to inspire girls to self-confidence and achievement in athletics, occupations and professions monopolized by men” because “the only hope for civilization is the greater freedom, development and equality of women in all fields of human activity.” So said her creator.

The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle (2020) by David Edmonds.

GoodReads meta-data is 336 pages rated 4.60 by measly 5 litizens.

Genre: History.

Verdict: More Circle than Schlick.

The book is a history of the Vienna Circle from its inception in 1907 to its development, evolution, and activities to its end in 1936. It began with Philip Frank, Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, Kurt Reidemeister, and Moritz Schlick with others attending ad hoc skull sessions. Their discussions at first were in Viennese coffee houses, but as the agenda got more systematic and others joined, they began to use a classroom after hours. Their discussions concerned the relationship of science to philosophy and vice verse. How does science know the world as distinct from philosophy? These philosophers set out to answer that question.

In time they found a prophet in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s gnomic jottings. The more unintelligible Wittgenstein’s aphorisms, the more they were dissected in the search for meaning. One acolyte made pilgrimages to Wittgenstein’s mountain retreat and recorded the master’s oracular remarks. When Wittgenstein did a volte-face, the Circle members did likewise.

Schlick became the de facto manager of the Circle as others participated, like Rudolph Carnap, Herbert Feigl, and Kurt Gödel with visitors like Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper. Rose Rand and Olga Hahn both attended its meetings and published. Neurath was the public face of the Circle and published a manifesto in 1929 announcing the birth of logical-empiricism. (By the way the picture language that guides travellers to rest rooms in train stations originated with Neurath, see his International Picture Language [1936].) Only statements that can be verified by observation (it is raining) or are logically coherent (a bachelor is an unmarried man) are permitted. For all else: silence. This was a conclusion they just could not stop talking about.

The Circle seeded analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world which started with a clean slate, ignoring with contempt the two thousand years of thinking that went before it. Plato, Kant, Hegel, and others were all thrown into the dustbin of history. A. J. Ayer was the English apostle who carried the reliquary to Great Britain for veneration.

These thinkers pondered:

What sentences can be deduced from S?
Under what conditions is S supposed to be true, and under what conditions false?
How is S verified?
What is the meaning of S?

While they were preoccupied with such matters, Nazism arose in Germania and Vienna became a battleground. In 1936 Schlick was shot dead on the steps going to a morning class in the mistaken belief he was Jewish by an aggrieved student who was then exonerated by the judicial system. Needless to say, the McKinsey managers at the University of Vienna welcomed the student back and expunged Schlick’s name from its records. Since the court had found Schlick somehow responsible for his own murder, his widow was denied his pension. And some might have thought the reference to McKinsey management was gratuitous.

He was murdered on these steps going to class.

It gets worse.

In the 1970s an Austrian newspaper published an historical account of this murder, and the perpetrator who had survived sued the newspaper for libel, and …. won. The Brown Years have been buried deep. Only in Austria! See my review of a history of Austria elsewhere on this blog.

There are some entertaining descriptions of Karl Popper’s thuggish behaviour that fits his texts.

I was motivated for graduate school by the taste of Plato in my undergraduate thesis. Yet when I arrived at grad school there was nothing but acidic analytic philosophy which ingested political theory and dissolved most of it. The readings were often derived from the Vienna Circle or its acolytes like Ayer, or the egregious Popper. Analytic philosophy is rigorous and that is good training, and it was the fashion of time, but it is also empty and sterile. Not something to say in a seminar paper. Salvation came in the form of teaching the history of political theory to undergraduates, noting the irony that these texts were not included in graduate program.

I commented on Exact Thinking in Demented Times (2017) a time ago.

‘Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science’ (2017) by Karl Sigmund.

Dissolution (2004) by C. J. Sansom

GoodReads meta-data is 456 pages rated 4.08 by 40870!

Genre: period Krimi.

Verdict: Grim.

In 1535 King Henry VIII’s war with the Pope is in full swing. Roman religious institutions are being investigated to ensure that they have converted to the New Way(s), their treasures registered, taxed, confiscated, and carted off. While a few monasteries were licensed to continue, most are being closed, putting monks, abbots, brothers into the cold of an English winter. Ditto for nuns.

It is a world of informers where a loose word would reveal a residual Catholicism and be met with the axe. Priest holes are becoming a real estate feature. Priest hunters are getting advanced degrees. It is all brutal, violent, and merciless in the name of the Lord. Some things never change.

Among the monasteries on the list is Scarnsea on the south coast. First minister Thomas Cromwell sent a commissioner to close it, and – gulp! – he is murdered. In the dark of night. Murdered, yes, but worse. Decapitated! The punishment for treason! There is much discussion of this procedure which in the end — Spoiler — is undermined by the plot denouncement.

In response Cromwell sends his number one trouble shooter, Matthew Shardlake to (1) to bring justice to the murderer and (2) to speed the dissolution of the monastery. Shardlake may be the number one confidant, but even so Cromwell puts marbles under his feet to keep him uncertain.

Added to that brew, Shardlake is a hunchback, an affliction many see as a sign of the Beast. His career as a lawyer is owed entirely to Cromwell and he cannot risk failure in this assignment. He takes along an acolyte to do the stepping and fetching. Shardlake spends far too much time feeling sorry for himself in his back (!) story.

The result is the monastery of Otranto with the residual population of monks, about thirty where once there were two hundred, and many servants who are ciphers, and unwanted guests who have taken shelter there. It is all gloomy, claustrophobic, clinging, freezing, and stifling. And that is reiterated on nearly every page in case it was missed the first hundred times it was said. (Aside: people who live in cold climates do not spend so much time talking about it, but rather just get on with it.)

The heavy hand of religious oppression hangs over everything. Big Brother’s many little brothers are, indeed, watching everything, everywhere. It is all rather depressing to read. While prepubescent film-makers over the years have been transfixed by Henry’s wives, most have overlooked the fact that his oppression of Catholics led to at least 50,000 executions and judicial murders, while encouraging vigilantes to do others: Thomas More was not alone. Yet Henry’s name has never become an adjective for violence and murder thanks to the marital distractions.

There is far more description of rooms, clothing, odours, and weather than adds to either plot or character and must be called padding to get to the length for airport bookshelves for long haul flights.

What I can say is that it reads easier, makes more sense, and more effectively conveys the time and place than the coterminous and vastly overrated Hilary Mantel novels.

A Concise History of the Netherlands (2017) by James C. Kennedy.

GoodReads meta-data is 502 pages, rated 3.70 by 140 litizens.

Genre: history.

Verdict: Alstublieft!

‘God made the world; we made the Netherlands,’ say the Dutch, referring to the 60% of the Netherlands’ current landmass which has been reclaimed from the North Sea via land fill, drainage, polders, dikes, levees, canals, sluices, weirs, damns, culverts, and windmills. All the mud, water, mire, swamp, morass, bog, and more, combined with the lack natural resources, meant that the Netherlands was largely left alone by the larger nation states surrounding it (France, Germany, and England), though it offered a soggy passage among them.

At one time the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium, Brabant, Dunkirk, Flanders, the Netherlands, Limburg, and Luxembourg) loomed large, but the Hapsburgs had other more pressing problems, as their gene pool swung from Austria to Spain. When they withdrew the Low Lands were left to their own devices as a buffer between the greater powers. It is a complicated story. For a time the Netherlands included Belgium, but the latter broke away in an argument about taxation between Antwerp and Amsterdam. The provinces of the Netherlands squabbled among themselves about taxation, even when William III of Orange was King of England. He gets short shrift in these pages.

By the way, Holland is one of the nine provinces, and to refer to the whole country as Holland is like calling Australia by the name of one of the states, e.g., Victoria.

Rotterdam and Amsterdam used the experience of the Hanseatic League to go into global trade, and the Dutch Golden Age was born. Literally golden because of the lucrative profits made shipping goods for others far and wide. As commercial ventures this trade was unarmed, and the Dutch specialised in building ships with vast storage and no room for weapons, unlike the East Indiamen ships used by the British East India Company (BEIC). To convert the Dutch trading ships to warships, they had to be rebuilt and no one would pay for that. Ergo once the BEIC challenged by gun Dutch traders, they lost. But for a while the Netherlands had a global reach from Taiwan, to Korea, to Macau, Ceylon, Indonesia, South Africa, Suriname, Brazil, Aruba, St Maartens, and more.

When the Golden Age flourished so did Dutch art and that became an established part of the culture that remains today in all those galleries and art students.

When Arthur Wellesley (Wellington) broke the French attacks at Waterloo a quarter of the troops in the thin red line were Netherlanders in orange who are largely omitted by English history.

At the Congress of Vienna ending the Napoleonic Wars a republican, greater Netherlands was regarded as too unstable and too unwieldy to survive. Instead it was divided into two, creating the Kingdom of Belgium and the Kingdom of Netherlands. The House of Orange had dominated several of the nine Dutch provinces, after generations of asserting its primacy more generally, and it became the royal choice. The House of Orange was resisted by the burgers of Amsterdam because of its engrained animosity to Catholics and propensity to tax, both being bad for business. But their attitude was not decisive.

Is this orange a connection to Northern Ireland protestants? Yes, it traces back to the William of William and Mary.

That town hall in Amsterdam on the Dam had been built as a republican town hall, but during the Napoleonic ascendancy it was converted to a royal palace for Napoleon’s brother, Louis, who became King of the Netherlands. By the way, Napoleon installed him to extract taxes, but once in place, this brother sided with the Dutch, and Napoleon then removed him after but four years. This was the first instance of a Dutch king. Après la guerre the town hall became the royal palace of the House of Orange, but because of the long hostility of Amsterdammers to the House of Orange, the monarch took up residence in Den Haag as neutral ground, making it the seat of government, though Amsterdam is still referred to as the capital. Confusing, no? Confusing, yes!

Declaration of interest. I spent a semester at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies years ago, and have returned to the country many times since.

This book does not even mention, still less resolve, one of the mysteries of the Netherlands I encountered. Walking from the Institute to my apartment in the evening, I went along quiet, darkened residential streets, where, invariably, in each house I passed the front curtains were open at all hours of the day and night. Indeed it seemed the curtains were never drawn, and I saw many a Dutch family in the front room watching television or eating dinner as I went by. Whence came this practice of public display of private life?

Another enduring memory of the Netherlands came from the lunches in the common room, where the Dutch invariably ate sandwiches with a knife-and-fork. Yep. Even a ham and cheese was cut and sliced.

Sleeping Dog: A Leo and Serendipity Mystery (1985) by Dick Lochte.

GoodReads meta-data is 287 pages rated by 3.81 by 332 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Vroom!

Serendipity Dahlquist, aged almost thirteen, uses her roller blades to good effect, to rescue ageing PI Leo from an unhappy client. Precocious does not begin to describe Serendipity. She reads a lot, and thinks more, and as curious, fearless, and street smart as only a tweenager can be.

The client was not even Leo’s but his office mate’s. The two are not partners but split the rent on the office, as Leo tries to explain to everyone but no one cares about this fine point. Their names are on the door of the Bradley Building office and that makes them partners. Period! Then Leo’s oily office mate/partner is murdered, and, well, a PI has to do what a PI has to do in the screenplay.

What follows is a pastiche of The Maltese Falcon (1940) as this odd couple — the precocious Serendipity with the battered Leo — look for a lost dog while by-passing Serendipity’s long errant mother. Her grandmother is in loco parentis but largely preoccupied with her career as a regular in a daytime television soap opera until a wall falls on her. How could that happen? Good question.

The plot concerns, ahem, illegal dog fighting and is just as unpleasant as it sounds. Leo and Serendipity meet a lot of deplorable enthusiasts for this bloodsport, and one sheriff who has made his mission in office to eradicate this disgusting exhibition on his turf. There are some vivid characterisations, like the hapless Botolo brothers, though their sister seems to have interchangeable names, Constanzia and Consuela. The body count is high, and not just dogs.

The plot is perfectly tied up in the best Ross Macdonald fashion, and the text even includes a nod to one of his titles for the cognoscenti. But what the plot does not reconcile is Groucho the dog, why he was taken in the first place with that reference to money.

First in an all too short series. Arf!

Kinvig (1981)

IMDb meta-data is seven episodes of 30 minutes each, rated 6.7 by fifty-two cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: [Zzzzzzz]

Des Kinvig is the work-shy proprietor of a 1970s electrical repair shop on the high street in a working class town of the English midlands. Together with his layabout pal, he dreams of ETs, UFOs, and BEMs. Then one day the Queen of Mercury appears (or does she?).

Sounds better than it is. Nigel Kneale is credited as the writer of all seven episodes, and he is in the first rank of screenwriters for sure, but here he tried his hand at comedy, trusted to arthritic directors, with low-rent players, and canned laughter. Not all seven episodes were aired; such was the audience reaction. The rating above is nostalgia inflated by about a factor of ten.

It must be one of the most difficult to watch Sy Fy series ever (partly) aired. It makes Star Maidens look good, difficult though that is to believe.

Sherlock Holmes and the Masks of Death (1984)

IMDb 1 hour and 12 minutes (it seemed longer), rated 6.3 by 390 cinematizens.

That Hammer master of horror, Peter Cushing returns to Holmes twenty-seven years after he last donned the deerstalker in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) with John Mills (between the forest sideburns), the eternal Scotsman Gordon Jackson, a miscast Ann Baxter, a catatonic Ray Milland straight from Madame Tussaud’s, and Anton Diffring, as always the villain, in a 1913 London when war clouds gather.

Dead men without a mark start popping out the sewers. Taking Scotland Yard literally, Scotsman Gordo drags the scent across Holmes’s nose and stands back. The action is, well, by the numbers with a red whale, rather than a red herring, a gratuitous appearance of The Woman played by the dowager Baxter. There is some verbal sparing with The Woman, and one nice action scene when Watson dispatches a hooligan very economically on a moving train. Holmes’s major insight is that someone is lying.

Spoiler. The Aryan Anton, despite innocent appearances, has secretly been making poison gas down below so that when the war begins he can release it into the town gas that illuminated London. The dead men were production accidents.

The print I found on You Tube was terrible and that may partly explain why I found it boring.

Midnight at Malabar House (2020) by Vaseem Khan.

GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages rated 4.28 by 125 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: A good start.

On New Year’s Eve 1949 at a midnight party in the palatial home of a British ex-patriate the host himself is murdered, though no one seemed to notice at the time. By some chance the investigating officer was the first and only woman in Indian policing. Sure. Everywhere she goes no one takes her seriously. No doubt this is true but to read it is repetitive and boring.

On top of that we get an endless mish-mash of backstories at the expense of any momentum in the front story. I did persevere, but only just.

There is plenty of India but diluted by the didacticism. If Khan continues the series I hope he brings more focus to the front stories.