Good Reads meta-data is 371 pages, rated 4.40 by 1282 Litatizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: First Contact.
DNA:Strine.
Verdicts Excellent.
Tagline: The proof is not in the picture.
Grad student Dawn’s summer job as RA to Professor is to catalogue the archive of old astronomical photographs, scan them into digital form and enter them into the new whiz bang data base. The resident A.I. Called Casandra (you’ll see why) assists her in the data entry and cataloguing.
While Dawn brushing dust off her hands down deep among the file boxes in analog archive in the second basement, her brother is a high flying astronaut about to launch into space.
While scanning the pictures is mechanical and AI does the menial work of indexing, Dawn’s job is to place them on the scanner in the sequence of the time stamps on the back and tell AI that meta-data to enter into the catalogue. However later in reviewing the work she notices discrepancies between the print pictures she remembers putting on the scanner and the resultant scans in the electronic database for one quadrant which happens to be the object of her own research when she prepares a progress report for professor. Huh? How could that happen.
Meanwhile flyboy brother is bound for that very same quadrant where things do not go according to the NASA plan.
As the prospect of alien contact, mediated by AI, arises the Russians act in the best interest of humanity, while the Americans scramble for immediate commercial exploitation yet deny it is real. Seems all too realistic these days.
It is one of Peter Cawdron’s most well developed First Contact books. I liked in particular Maria the Red and The Silent One.
Why did AI Cassandra let Dawn send the birthday greeting to her brother? Because Cassie was already on the spacecraft, but couldn’t she be in two places at once as she was on earth? Very unlike Cassandra who had tried to kill Dawn earlier at least to block receipt on the spacecraft. In that attempt Cassandra had killed a lot of others; nothing subtle about crashing a passenger jet into a building to hit one lowly grad student in the basement.
The prospect of technology transfer that motivates the American greed is put paid in these pages. Could we really reverse engineer alien technology? Could ants reverse engineer an iPhone?
I did find the lengthy and sanctimonious speech at the United Nations at the end to be tedious, and pointless. But then I find most sermons pointless. Even my own!
Good Reads meta-data is 584 pages 4.13 rated by 1,202 litizens.
Verdict: Grim, doesn’t begin to describe describe it.
Tagline: ‘I told you so!’
Poet Conquest turned his hand to compiling and writing history and the reviewers at the time of the first edition did not let him forget it. I have a foggy memory of some the reaction to the first edition because I had just finished an undergraduate course on Soviet history. What was this storm in a tea cup about?
Conquest conceived of Stalin’s reign as one of terror, and compiled evidence of the depth, depravity, scope, and scale of this murderous policy. The likes of the egregious Noam Chomsky dismissed his argument and evidence and took the position that there was no difference between Western nations like the UK and the Soviet Union, embracing the so-called Convergence doctrine.
Others assaulted Conquest for relying on hearsay, secondhand reports, and personal (ergo biased) testimony. If all such sources were excluded, all that remained were the official Soviet accounts which in the 1960s had little to say about that period, even after Chairman Nikita Khrushchev’s famous 1956 secret speech denouncing Stalin whom he had loyally served.
That Conquest had written poetry was cited as evidence for his incompetence as a historian, as evidence of his penchant for fiction, his soft-headedness: Ad hominem one and all. Shoot the messenger and the message dies with him.
In the introduction of the 50th anniversary edition, Conquest wrote that the first edition was well received. What is that? Selective memory, or, as I suspect, irony.
Conquest’s sin according to the 1968 critics was to argue that terror was the foundation policy of the Soviet Union. According to Conquest it had been incipient in Lenin’s time, and became fully developed with Stalin. The first line of defence proffered by these apologists was to quibble over the definition ‘terror.’ The next was to cite the many confessions of the well-known victims. There followed an appeal to the sheer incredulity of the alleged scale of scope of the terror attributed to Stalin.
But of course the scale and scope of the terror were exactly the point. It surpassed belief, and yet it happened. As to the confessions by a few score of the known victims, Arthur Koestler had already demolished them in his Darkness at Noon (1940), though it, too, had been dismissed by many Western apologists because it was a novel.
The quantitative scale of the terror is indeed astounding. It wasn’t until Saddam Hussein that a murderer killed as many of his own population in proportion as did Stalin. The death toll of Stalin’s tenure ranges up to 20 million. In individual cases in the Purges an innocent would be convicted and murdered, his wife would be arrested and sentenced to years in Siberia and then five or six years later executed. Oh, and a son or daughter would be arrested eight year later and executed. All were guilty only by name.
Conquest adds depth to Koestler’s explanation by painting the party as a metaphysical, spiritual being of veneration, a Red Christ on Earth. Self-sacrifice to protect and further this entity even when it seemed to be in error was the duty of a true believer. ‘For after all it could not be in error, so the fault must be within me.’
The Terror operated at several levels. At the top it eliminated anyone who had opposed a single word Stalin had ever said (personal animus figured in much of it), who might be a rival (personal insecurity was another factor), or had an independent power base (insecurity again). Conquest’s Stalin is thin skinned and insecure. A typical manoeuvre was to arrange for the murder of one those rivals, then blame the murder of this comrade on a conspirator among the other rivals and eliminate him, and everyone he talked to …and so on in a conga line of murder. It seemed that anti-Sovietism was a contagion transmitted by proximity.
Once these people were eliminated, they were replaced by Stalin’s sock puppets (like those we see strutting around Washington DC these days who will disappear soon enough, well not soon enough, but disappear they will). A similar tide was unleashed by the regional levels of the Party where anyone who did a job competently was eliminated in favour of a zealous Stalinite. No light was permitted to outshine Comrade Number One, who aspired to being Comrade Number One and Comrade Only. Experts were replaced by zealots. Knowledge or being factually right, these were irrelevant or worse, signs of disloyalty. Of course since the zealots brought nothing to the jobs their tenure depended on their zeal for anyone could and did replace them.
Since the peasantry, the overwhelming majority of the population, had never embraced Communism with enthusiasm, it had to be beaten into submission with contrived famines, massive relocations (like the movement of American Indians to the Badlands), and simple, random murders by ICErs. At the bottom it became the rule of thugs.
The Wall of Grief in Moscow. The Wall of Gift with cut outs for thee and me, comrade.
Having just read a biography of Henry VIII which touched on his own reign of terror with its enormous death toll, similarities are many, including the willing executioners. Who — Surprise! — were the next to go to the block.
The Soviet army presented a special case since it had been created and inspired originally by that great Satan named Leon Trotsky, and so was cursed by original sin. Once Stalin had surrounded himself with puppets in the Party, he began on the army. Since all potential critics had now been eliminated and replaced by insecure sycophants, the charade of legality was no longer played. In one case five generals were murdered before their arrest papers had been signed. There were cases of mistaken identity that came to light and … they were murdered all the same.
Trotsky was a zircon mirror of Stalin and that made him a threat if only imaginary. This is an example of the shafts larded in the text.
Of all the ironies in the story the one I will leave readers with, be there any, is this. The willing executioners were themselves the next victims, and the next.
Robert Conquest
There is a superb concluding chapter that pulls together much of the descriptive material into conclusions about the nature and effect of the Great Terror, and an epilogue about its continuing influence. All grim. Very. It beggars belief that one man could ruin a country and that disbelief was crucial in making it possible for him to do so. In that is a warning for today. One that will almost certainly not be heeded.
Georges Clemenceau once said it takes lot to ruin a country, but it can be done, has been, is, and will be.
Good Reads meta-data is 715 pages rated 3.85 by 218 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
DNA: English, very.
Verdict: Miles from the cartoon stereotype.
Tagline: ‘I am; I am.’ (For those with a long memory.)
Teenage Henry came to the throne unbidden, as it were, when his older brother died. The spare took command from the heir like George VI when bro Eddie stood down. High policy of a Spanish entente led to matrimonial politics as it often did in this period, and at 19 he married his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon who was 24. They set about their first duty to the realm to produce an heir and a spare themselves. Many were sired but unborn. Stillbirths, miscarriages, and death I lost count 6 in all. Worse! A girl named Mary.
Through all of this and that which followed as she was displaced, Catherine was pious, resolute, dignified, perspicacious, and stable unlike her mercurial husband and then ex-husband. Hank could have done well to learn from her but he was too immature to do so, and it seems from this telling, because he was the spare, little of his upbringing prepared him for the crown.
The popular stereotype of a bloated degenerate chasing women is far from the mark, though toward the end of his life he did begin to live down to it. The quest for a wife was not just libido, after all kings have had mistresses since, well, since there were kings, but had much more to do with the succession. He needed his own heir and spare, first to secure his own tenure, and, secondly, to keep the realm stable. If foreign rivals, if domestic aspirants thought there might be an interregnum, they would act accordingly. Plague, fever, accidents had killed many a king at an early age, and might do so again. Wait and see, temporise is often the best policy.
Without an heir, many a magnate might aspire to the throne and manoeuvre, rebel, or resist to get it when Henry died, and might even be tempted not to wait for his natural death. Equally, without an heir, and with domestic instability, foreign potentates might prefer to wait him out.
Matrimonial politics was a linchpin of the age, and it is complicated. If he took an English wife from a noble family, that family would be positioned near the throne and might use that leverage to plot against him. Moreover, that favouritism showered on one noble family would alienate every other great family and set them to plotting. To prefer one is to alienate all others. Making one friend makes many enemies.
Ergo, there is something to be said for a foreign wife. Ah, but that too had perils. To take a German wife related to the Holy Roman Emperor might please that vacillating incumbent in his long-running contest with the Pope, but… there is France to consider, and Spain, and the Pope himself. And so on and so on and so on. To make a matrimonial alliance with one power was to alienate the others.
Foreign war he found much harder than jousting and soon gave it up, turning to conniving where – after the passing of Wolsey – he was regularly out connived by one pope after another, one French king after another, one Spanish king after another, and one Holy Roman Emperor after another. Wolsey in foreign policy and Cromwell on domestic matters, if left alone, were successful but their successes bred Henry’s suspicion and distrust for he seems to have been a deeply insecure man – if we venture onto psycho-biography – beneath the bluff mask.
[ See on You Tube ‘Re-creating KING HENRY VIII with the help of AI.’ ]
This biography ends with a summation chapter that weighs Henry’s credit and debits. However, this spreadsheet does not include the death toll of his regime, so I have added a comment on that below.
Credit – He laid foundation of England, Great Britain, and eventually the United Kingdom to become a nation(s)-state following the example of Spain and France; established a professional bureaucracy; began building a navy with warships and not just transports; removed the foreign influence of Rome, established the national church and all that went with it; did much to codify the laws of the lands…and more.
Debit – He inherited a prosperous and stable realm which he drove into and out of debt with his reckless gambits, and adolescent indulgences that lasted his entire life. He destroyed his two most able and loyal ministers in Wolsey and Cromwell, and paid the price thereafter, or his realm paid for him. The foreign policy achievements of his tenure were largely of Wolsey’s making, while the domestic achievements came from Thomas Cromwell’s hand.
No sooner had he become king than he embarked on the first of three unsuccessful foreign wars to reclaim the French lands that by convoluted logic were English (thanks to William the Conqueror). He squandered a great deal of dosh and good will — both domestic and foreign — in these adventures. The tales of negotiations with Spain, France, Pope, and Holy Roman Emperor put Machiavelli to shame with the duplicity, connivance, deceit, and downright lies. In most of these negotiations Henry paid, and paid, and paid to subsidise his temporary allies, especially when Wolsey was not there to restrain the royal cheque-writing hand.
Then there is in his policy the rule of the axe in the domestic realm which slayed many. Estimates of the death toll exacted in his regime very greatly from 72,000 to 20,000. Wikipedia has a spreadsheet. Take a look. The wholesale destruction of people to make a new regime, reminded this reader of Stalin making the new Soviet Man by eliminating those who did not fit in. Like Henry, Stalin fought off foreign enemies, disciplined a state bureaucracy, mobilised industry and recruited a huge army, built roads…often over the bodies of loyal subjects.
John Scarisbrick
This book is closely argued and clearly written, larded with insights, and a boon in untangling reality for the reader. It does not rely on cardboard stereotypes so beloved in the popular culture’s renditions of Henry, who, it has to be said, invited these depredations.
The used volume I acquired is errant in that page 528 is succeeded by…page 625. For second I thought I had read a lot more than I had in that afternoon, but then later page 672 is followed by page 577. Whew! That means about 50 pages are missing between 528-577. I have accepted that gap as Seshat’s will and leave it at that. Amen. (If you don’t know, look her up, yes Seshat is female. She is more reliable that the flighty Hermes who is created with creating the alphabet.) My interest in the intricacies of Tudor theology and politics was sated and I chose not to pursue the missing fifty pages.
The only other time I came across such a gap in a book was another Penguin edition, which this one is too, of the Forsyte Saga that I bought in Amsterdam. When I discovered the gap I took it back to the bookstore and swapped it for another with a clerk who was very responsive. In this case, I did want to know what was in the missing pages. N.B. If the missing pages had been the last chapter, well, I would have wanted to fill that gap. It is more likely a narrative of theological hairsplitting.
Good Reads meta-data is 231 pages rated 3.94 by 167,404 litizens.
Genre: Noir. Species: Sunshine.
DNA: SoCal.
Verdict: Who dun it?
Tagline: Where in the world is Sean Regan?
The immortal Philip Marlowe’s first big case, and today he is still on the job somewhere, in some media (paper book, film, play, poem, radio, audio book, ebook, and more) or another, doing something. Ergo, this is vintage Chandler, a man of his time and place and an ear for dialogue.
That 1930s context means he lacks contemporary sensitivities. Fortunately for us there are many Good Readers on the job to tell us that in the 1-Star reviews where they parade their virtues – many. Here is a sampling of their insights in bold with my reactions.
misogynist – It is true, and an apt reminder of those bad old days that so many people are trying to turn the clock back to now. It is a big word that is often misspelled in the tirades.
too many detailed descriptions – Yes, true and I also find it tedious, though sometimes it does deepen either plot or character. Editors get paid to convince writers to cut such verbiage. Too bad it wasn’t done for this one to make it even leaner and meaner. Try Honoré Balzac, Charles Dickens, or Herman Melville sometime. These writers were paid by the word.
actually 0-stars – ‘actually?’ The superfluous ‘actually’ is ‘actually’ unnecessary. Emphatically unnecessary!
convoluted – Yes, indeed there are twists and turns and I got lost a few times with all those comings and goings. That however intrigued me rather than defeated me. If you don’t like a mystery don’t read a mystery.
I don’t like this author – A valuable insight for others.
homophobic – indeed, true and grating, and another salutary reminder of the bad old days that we are now reinventing.
slightly sexist – Slightly! Hardly. Wake up! Far more than slightly.
racism – Huh? I must have missed this one, but no doubt true.
A lot of these comments sound like idiot’s revenge for having to read something assigned by others for classes, clubs, or sadism.
It is also true that it is replete with brittle dialogue, memorable characters like District Attorney Wilde, General Sherwood, Eddie Mars, Butler Norris, Bernie Ohls, Harry Jones, and Agnes Lozelle, Canino; some very well judged negotiating with Cronjager, Brody, and Mars. Then there is the ghostly presence of the Irishman. Vivian herself has no trouble holding her own despite the prevailing attitudes that outrage some readers. Carmen is addled, like it or not, such individuals exist. Finally, it did much to cement the krimi noir into the popular mind.
After finishing The Long Goodbye the algorithm suggested this well-worn title and with little better to read at the time I started…. Yes, I have read it before, yes I have seen the totemic representation on celluloid, and yet it seemed fresh and new on the Kindle pixels. So I went on, and on.
Some hack is missing a chance to bring the late Sean Regan to life.
Good Reads meta-data is 189 pages, rated rated 4.0 by 367 litizens
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Strine.
Verdict: One of his best!
Tagline: A lighthouse, a coffin, a naked man, and one new shoe. Oh, and a dog.
Once again Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte of the Queensland CID has been summoned from afar to investigate a difficult case, this time in Victoria at the fictional Split Point near Geelong. In a concealed cranny in the local automated lighthouse a maintenance worker accidentally found a naked dead man who had been shot dead. The first question is who is he? The second is why was he there? And third, and foremost, Who dun it? (And why?)
To find out, Bony, as he prefers to be called, takes up residence in Split Point rather as Jules Maigret would have done. He befriends locals, starting with Stug, the aging cattle dog, and a carpenter who can talk to and about wood all the day long. The dog finds the shoe where no shoe should be and Bony is on the job!
It is a superb rendering of place, and a meticulous police procedural as Bony connects the dots of both things done and said, and things not done and not said that seem odd omissions. He makes a mistake, and has to admit it, only to find it wasn’t the mistake he first thought it was.
Upfield was self-taught and a fast learner who pounded a manual typewriter in the back of a caravan that he customised himself, as he travelled around Australia, mostly in the hinterlands often in the remote outback to devise his stories.
This was number 15 in the 29 Bony mysteries that Upfield published from 1929 to 1966. He himself would have made a good character in one of his books. Inevitably, his oeuvre has been mangled — ‘theorised,’ as they say (and I cringe) — by PhDs looking for fodder. The result is unintelligible. Abandon reason all ye who enter groves academic. Oh, and he wrote another dozen books on a variety of subjects.
Good Reads meta-data is 379 pages, rated 4.19 by 46,317 litizens.
Genre: Noir; Species: Sunshine.
DNA: SoCal.
Verdict: And it’s goodbye from him.
Tagline: Portrait of Madison.
This is the last complete outing for Phillip Marlowe. It has many good moments which are outnumbered by bad ones. I found it hard to sympathises or relate to either Terry Lennox or Roger Wade, and the women in their lives seem to be clothes horses and little else.
All in all, I found Lennox and Wade, and Marlowe himself for that matter, poor little rich boys decrying how tough life was on them. Yet they all live comfortably just as they want in what seems to be an undemanding environment without health or wealth worries. Yet each rails against his lot in life. Much of it seemed like an old man grumbling about contemporary society which has had the audacity to pass him by.
Whoops! This just in! Boy, was I wrong…again! The dénouement at the end is superb and it makes use of most of what went before, some of which I had thought was useless padding. Though I have read it two or three times before I was still taken aback by the wrap. It explains a great deal about the broken characters of Terry Lennox, Eileen Wade, and Roger Wade (a stand-in for Chandler himself) that had irked me. It also gave the much put-upon Bernie Olhs a chance to shine. Chapeaux! Chandler’s master’s touch was, well, masterful.
Having vented that and eaten my order of crow, I enjoyed much of it. Though the policing early on was over-egged I did like the distinctions drawn among the police officers. I rather liked the effort Lennox always made to be polite and not to slur. I liked Dr Verringer’s affronted dignity. (On the other hand, Dr Loring seemed to be a cardboard popinjay.) I liked Earl’s showmanship and wished he had an act two. Today one might say Earl was neurodivergent. That is, nuts! Randy Starr’s aloof chill was perfect.
Most of all I like the importance of things not did and not said. Like the spaces between the stars in aboriginal astronomy, they are more important than the shiny distractions.
However, I did find the cynicism piled high for no reason other than to explain why Marlowe was such a jerk and who seemed hate everyone else who had the misfortune not to be the all-wise (to other people’s faults) Marlowe. Castigating everyone else is not social criticism; it is just ranting. I supposed some of Marlowe’s posturing was Chandler’s effort at a Code Hero, but it was inconsistent, as Marlowe himself says.
Notwithstanding all of that and more, I have a soft spot for this book because it was the first Chandler title I ever read; that was in 1973. He had been recommended to me by Don Andrews, and one wintry night on a break from typing a draft chapter of the PhD dissertation in the unheated basement of the rented Edmonton house, I took a break and went out to the neighbourhood convenience store on 82nd Avenue for a snack to keep me going: deadlines to meet. It was near to the 10 pm closing time for the store. Consequently I was not alone, there was a line of a few other last minute pallid nocturnals at the cashier which meant I stood for a few moments next to a wire spinner rack of paperback books, and the one directly in my eye-line was The Long Good-bye by Raymond Chandler. It seemed a message so, after checking my scant money, I added it to my boodle ( a packet of shelled and salted sunflower seeds and a bottle of coke, I suppose) and paid up.
Raymond Chandler
I returned to the cellar and revivified with the walk and the fuel I did complete the chapter and pushing aside the manual typewriter I took up the book, entering Chandler’s imagination. I kept reading until Earl came on the scene in Chapter 16, that means to page 129 well after the midnight hour. I was gripped; I was hooked. There was no turning back. It was my doorway to krimi noir where I have since spent many happy hours.
My soft spot does not extend to the egregious 1973 movie that mangled the story to fit the director’s avowed agenda, and had an atrociously miscast Marlowe, who has since monopolised the Audible recordings of Chandler stories. Aaargh!
For entertainment I read some of the one-star reviews on Good Reads. The prize one declared the book to be irrelevant to India. If that is the criterion let’s put it to the test. That means no comfortable well-off person in India is gnawed by self-doubts. Nor that any drunk is unsure about what he did when tanked. That no wife grew quietly to despise her husband. There is no Indian doctor was so full of self-importance that the rules did not apply to him. That no All India police officer manipulates suspects to get the result he wants. That no elected officials is too busy courting votes to do the job he was elected to do. That no soldier returns home broken in spirit by the experience of combat, capture, and torture. India must be quite a place if none of its billion people are like these.
IMDb meta-data is 1h and 15, rated 5.8 by 435 cinematizens.
Genre: SY Fy.
DNA: Faux.
Verdict: enjoyed it
Tagline: Formica. Formica? Formica!
A tribute to 1930s screwball comedies blended with a 1950s SciFi B-picture, it is presented as a rediscovered 1938 film that involves time travel to 2018. What we get is 2018 as it might have been imagined in 1938 (by writers in 2017).
This imaginary 2018 is a world of bright primary colours, instant messengers, television phones literally, battery-powered slide rules, self-sharpening pencils, the electro mesh that answers all questions, victual reality at restaurants, 24-hour news (bi)cycle, and so on. It is sophomoric fun though it wears thin.
In 2018 the 1938 man is a fish out of water who cannot open a car door, wants to smoke tobacco cigarettes, and doesn’t have a personal television phone! The plot, such as it is, shows his discovery of this new world, including its slang. (Confession today I have been mystified by design-for-the-sake-of-design car doors that I cannot fathom. Am I a man of 1938? [That’s a rhetorical question: Don’t answer it!]. But in an emergency how does one open the door, one might ask.)
It does try too hard and the result is overkill but the leads are winsome and can act better than the material with a poignant finale that was signalled for those with sharp hearing.
Good Reads meta-data is 189 pages, rated 3.73 by 33 litizensGenre: krimi.DNA: Brit.
Verdict: By the numbers.
Tagline: True crime made unreal.
Ingredients: wealthy Murray family with many sibs clashing over the dosh, live-in beautiful house-keeper, widowed scion, various grandchildren impatient for an inheritance, and others in the menagerie. Then House-Keepeer is found murdered in a locked room and the mystery begins. The frame seems to fit one of the other servants or a wanna be relative, but does it…. I cannot say because I didn’t finish it.
Slow, wordy, with remote characters.
I went looking for it because I read this author’s historical biography called Machiavelli and His Times (1936), which is more restrained than many other accounts of Machia. The author published many others of this ilk on Florence Nightingale, Oliver Cromwell, and the like. But she also tried her hand at this krimi.
Muir was Dorothy Muir (1889-1977) who used the initial ‘D’ to get through the sexist ceiling at publishers. She took up writing when her husband died young and she needed an income in Edwardian England. Writing was one of the few careers open to a woman and it allowed working at home with her children.
This is one of three krimis in which Muir used a true-crime as the starting point for her story. They might appeal to other readers.
Good Reads meta-data is 160 pages, pages rated 3.97 by 730 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: Brazil.
Verdict: What a setting.
Tagline: Man overboard! And good riddance.
It is 1933 and the prototype of that idiot has just become German Chancellor. The Graf Zeppelin is winding its way from Wilhemshaven to Rio de Janiero with its wealthy passengers. There is some intriguing description of such journeys and how Zeppelin’s navigated. The first airship had been patented in 1894. Commercial flights began in 1910 with what was the first private airline. Before the start of the Great War (1914-1918) more than 10,000 passengers had travelled on 1,500 flights. In that war they had been used to bomb England. Only in 1926 when the post-war restrictions relaxed were new German zeppelins built. These were bigger and better than their predecessors and plied the Atlantic route in competition with steamships. A ship voyage of weeks was reduced to days on a zeppelin. By 1937 they were well known enough to figure in Charlie Chan at the Olympics (of 1936).
Sidebar: in 1975 ground transportation magnet Peter Abeles predicted the return of the airship as a conveyance in Australia 2025 (in a library near you). Well, we do see blimps these days hanging over football stadia for meaningless aerial views to advertise sponsors. Maybe that is what Abeles had in mind….
In this story a passenger is found dead in the men’s WC much to the inconvenience of the other passengers. On board by some manner of means (how could he afford it?) is a Berlin police detective who takes over the investigation to determine if it was suicide, accident, or murder. Since the deceased joined the fight in northern Brazil, he was only briefly on board, but he did dine at a table with five others, so they become the focus of the interrogations. Among them is a Prussia aristocrat in love with the sound of her own voice and gin, a eugenist come to Brazil to advance the cause of racial genocide, an English scion of wealth and privilege, and some other stereotypes.
A trans-Atlantic zeppelin being readied for takeoff
The copper decides discretion is best – see cover art and remember Phil Sheridan on the good. Then there is a denouement in a Rio hotel room that caught me by surprise, and like a lot of these climaxes completely undermines all that went before it. Not very satisfying.
Moreover, it leaves many a loose end flapping in this reader’s mind: the coincidence of the deceased passenger even being there, the unspoken complicity between the ‘detective’ and the lord, why was the ‘detective’ playing detective from the start if the arrival of the soon to be deceased passenger was coincidental, why was the deceased so damn nervous (had he read the next chapter? And most of all, how was the deed done?
Whether there are any good Nazis, there are number of books with that title.
IMDb meta-data is 6 episodes of 45 minutes, rated 7.4 by 42 cinematizens
DNA: NZ
Verdict: Another droll delight from KiwiLand.
Tagline: Beware the garden shed!
The smaller the budget the bigger the imagination is corollary of the bigger the budget the less the imagination à la Luc Besson, Denis Villeneuve, Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, and there many imitators.
Assorted terrors strike via the vortex from smart refrigerators, reality game shows with a body count, robotic estate agents, Cluedo with casualties, and – worst for last – flair trousers redux.
