Michael W Jackson – Page 34 – Political theory and practice

Blood on the Snow: The Killing of Olof Palme (2005) by Jan Bondeson.

Blood on the Snow: The Killing of Olof Palme (2005) by Jan Bondeson.

GoodReads meta-data is 233 pages, rated 3.60 by 62 litizens.

Genre: Non-Fiction

Verdict: [Not what I was looking for and not much else.]

On 28 February 1986 Olof Palme (1927-1986), long-serving Prime Minister of Sweden was shot dead on the street in Stockholm at about 11:20 pm when he was walking home from a movie. Who dun it remains a mystery and with that why it was done. Into these voids much speculation has flowed.

Hedge: this is my only source though I did cast an eye over the entry for Palme on Wikipedia in the original search for a biography as explained below. Of course I remember him from the times as a lightening rod for many good causes and some not so good.

The author describes early police reaction as Keystone Kops: the panic line (+ 000, or 911) went unanswered, and the first person to call in the incident hung up before it was answered. When another caller got an answer, the officer taking call did not believe anyone would be shot on the street and regarded the call as a hoax. Only when two officers in a patrol car passing-by saw a small crowd gathering and stopped did police action, of a sort, start. Again their first reaction was that it was joke of some kind, nor did they recognise the fallen Prime Minister or his accompanying wife who, covered in his blood, stood stunned. These two hapless traffic cops seem to have had no training in management either crowds or crime scenes, and it got more chaotic as more officers and medics arrived.

The author describes all this in pitiless detail and more of the like was to follow, as no one seemed to have been in or taken charge of the investigation. Even when the realisation dawned that it was a shooting murder and then that the victim was the incumbent Prime Minister, the major crime or murder squads with their experienced detectives, forensic specialists, and equipment were not mobilised. Instead there was a stampede by senior police administrators for the glory of the case before world media, and the grandstanding started the very next day. Yes, there were press conferences, but no there was no management of the investigation. Indeed, in general one of the major faults the author finds is that the investigation was handled by administrators who themselves had no police experience.

The mass of witness statements collected, eventually, were contradictory and confused as any experienced officer (or reader of krimis) would expect, and the author narrates these on end, but never puts them in any discernible explanatory or analytical framework that I could fathom. The result is a confusing mass of detail with no contours which perhaps mimics the police approach.

The initial response of the grandstanders was to round up the usual suspects (druggies, pushers, violent criminals) and fit one of them to some of the eye witness descriptions (take your pick) of those around the time and place. When that failed the first grandstanders were pushed aside by the another lot who next went for foreigners (immigrants, refugees, or spies [Russian, American, South African, Iranian, Iraqi, Swedish, or in combination]). There followed a conspiracy theory focussed on a Bofors contract with India, implicating Indians, and a host of international arms traders. Then the police officers themselves became suspects as a way to explain the incompetence. There being no end to stupidity as we have seen in D.C., another school of thought was that his own immediate family murdered him, i.e., his wife and his son(s) either collectively or individually. Finally, well probably not ‘finally,’ there is also the belief that he arranged his own death as either suicide, or by cleverly swapping someone else so he could take off to a life of ease in one of the sunny but poor African countries he was always banging on about.

No doubt somewhere both Hillary Clinton and aliens have also been blamed. Check Pox News.

In each case vast time and money with attendant media irresponsibility went into the exercise to come up with nothing and the decades dragged by.

Because of the glory to be had in the case, the first officials to direct the investigation were managers who per the McKinsey testament had themselves no policing experience to influence, i.e., taint, their management activities. It is an article of faith in the Church of McKinsey, supported by faith alone and no evidence, that managers should not be contaminated with experience of what they manage. While that seems normal these days, and explains much incompetence, they must not have watched any krimis on TV either because they omitted the most basic procedures, like securing the crime scene, avoiding witness contamination, systematic finger printing, cross-referencing files, identikit pictures, and so on. (All these things were eventually done piecemeal after the fact.) These omissions were compounded by the desire to manage the investigation without assigning experienced homicide detectives in preference to officers personally dependent on and so loyal to the managers, including officers seconded from regional offices unfamiliar with Stockholm who were free of local prejudices, yes, but also unaware of the most basic geography of the city. The litany of blunders is Trump-like.

When the investigation proved intractable and the quotient of glory available evaporated these managers abandoned the project leaving no one in charge. Anyone who has worked in a large organisation has seen some or all of these behaviours by the McKinsey bots in our midst: The rush for CV glory; when things go wrong the flashing blame bat that strikes subordinates, the hasty departure before the trumpeted change fails, and so on. ‘Fail and Move up’ is surely a chapter title in the McKinsey manual.

If all one knows of Sweden is what we read in these pages, the real question is how such an unpopular, reviled, and despised man ever got to be PM. There are long roll calls of vitriol about Palme. It remains that the party he led won election after election, and when it lost it was by a hair. That electoral popularity might explain why he was feared by some, but this angle is not explored in these pages.

In these pages following the great tradition of blaming the victim much responsibility for everything is implicitly applied to Lisbet Palme, his wife, who was walking with him at the time of the murder. She went into hysteria and shock – who would not – but this obvious fact seemed to have escaped the notice of the on-site police officers (when they arrived) who said she was inconsistent and uncooperative. And in this case and all others that followed, cheque-book journalism ensured everything said under the veil of secrecy was broadcast within twenty-four hours.

After getting off on that note, she thereafter was reticent with the police – again who would not. Because the investigation was disorganised with even junior officers competing for glory, she was questioned repeatedly by different officers. In one notable instance four different sets of officers tried to interview her on the same day. And no they did not share their findings with each other, and in some cases no notes were taken in the name of secrecy, opening the door to wild speculation. It might be that she soon concluded the police were using her as a dupe – who would not – and she became ever less cooperative.

It is also pretty clear that some members of the Pox media did not want a resolution, but a continued melodrama with which to castigate authority. This is another angle omitted in this text. Rather like the 1970s murder of Australian journalists in East Timor which is periodically revived to boast circulation and hits, not to resolve the incident.

I wonder if any police investigation subjected to the same intense and enduring examination would prove to be similar? Mistakes are made, and concealed. Short cuts are taken and hidden. Officers are unfamiliar with or contemptuous of protocols. Equipment does not work. Analyst cannot use the expensive systems they have. And so on. I wondered that at the time of Chamberlain Trial(s). I did ask a judge of my acquaintance about this but he fobbed me off.

I also wondered what all those Swedes were doing on the sidewalks at near midnight in Stockholm on a cold winter night. There seemed to be many people dawdling about. Is that typical in sub-zero weather? Are those Nordics that tough?

For film buffs try Death of Pilgrim (2013), a four-part series, for a gripping account of one of the (many) subsequent investigations into the original investigations.

While mentally in the Nordic world I went looking for a biography of Palme but after reading the Kindle sample of the only one on that source I decided against it – breathless, sensation-seeking, and superficial journalism it seemed to me – and opted for the above title, though I did not like its sample any better – it read like a failed thriller script – but it came from Cornell University Press and that bespoke quality, a rigorous editorial process that would prize order, facts, dispassion, and analysis. And the blurb on the Amazon Kindle entry said this book would lay to rest the innumerable conspiracy theories. That seemed promising. So I had hoped when I pressed on. As if!

Sweden, the Swastika and Stalin: The Swedish Experience in the Second World War (2011) by John Gilmour.

Sweden, the Swastika and Stalin: The Swedish Experience in the Second World War (2011) by John Gilmour.

GoodReads meta-data is 336 pages rated 3.67 by six litizens.

Genre: History.

Verdict: A good book about a grim subject.

Sweden spent the years 1939 – 1945 between a rock (Nazi Germany) and hard place (Soviet Russia). By dint of careful diplomacy, a determination to temporise, and a good dose of secrecy it managed to stay out of the war, despite threats, pressures, sanctions, and counter pressures from Great Britain which made difficult things worse. The incumbent Social Democratic (SD) government won a wartime election in 1942 and continued to do nothing and that was indeed hard going. The election produced a SD majority but the incumbent PM chose to retain a coalition to express national unity (and share the responsibility).

August 1939: Was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact a harbinger of the unity of totalitarians to make war on western democracies? This possibility threw Swedish thinking into a spin that only got worse when the war started in September 1939 with Poland followed by the Finnish Winter War in November 1939. It seemed both totalitarians were concentrating on the Baltic, a conclusion confirmed when the Soviet Union occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in short order.

Finland had been part of Sweden until the Congress of Vienna in 1815 when after the defeat of Napoleon it became a spoil of war for Russia. Because of its long integration into Sweden there were many ethnic Swedes in Finland caught up in the Winter War, and popular pressure was great in Sweden to do something to help them. There was also a strategic elements, too, because Finland’s Åland Islands had an almost exclusively Swedish population of 10,000. These islands block entry into the Gulf of Bothnia from the Baltic Sea and were bound to be a Soviet target to deny sea access to Finnish ports on the the west coast. That would also strangle eastern Swedish ports on the Gulf.

During the Russian Civil War the Bolsheviks had lost Finland; did the Red Tsar want to reclaim Finland as a Soviet Socialist Republic? That would put the Red Bear on Sweden’s doorstep. There was no good news in any of this. It got worse.

Then came the German invasion of Norway in April 1940, which had also been part of Sweden until 1905 in the living memory of a good part of both populations. These next door neighbours spoke a similar language, followed the same habits, had similar democratic governments, and worshipped the same gods. Ditto Denmark with an even smaller population and with even less of an industrial base and a smaller army. After being offered the chance to join the Aryan side, the Norwegians chose to fight and fight they did. The Swedish government stood back as its neighbour and blood relative went down. That passivity convinced democratic Finland it could not count on anything from democratic Sweden and it began to ally itself more closely with Germany against the next Soviet attack which was only a matter of time.

The Swedish government quickly realised it could not withstand a German attack, and tried very hard to negotiate a modus vivendi with Germany, Soviet Union, and Great Britain. The diplomatic activity was Herculean.

The result was a negotiated neutrality that yielded to the inevitable and remained flexible rather than an absolute neutrality that brooked no exceptions and broke when tested. Some may see hypocrisy in this approach but its purpose was to spare Sweden those privations inflicted upon warring and occupied nations, and was that not the main responsibility of the government, to shield its people as best it could? There can be little doubt that before say February 1941 any resistance to German demands would have led to an invasion and occupation. It would have been a form of national suicide to defy the Germans before the tide turned at Stalingrad in 1943. Had Sweden done so there would have been a brief battle with many encouraging words from Great Britain, followed by defeat, and occupation. The privations inflicted by such an occupation would have been far greater than those suffered in its neutral isolation.

One product of the negotiations was a triangular trade whereby the Germans allowed four merchant ships to enter Göteborg Harbour each month with food and fuel from England. The merchant ships were British or Swedish. In return the British accepted Swedish exports of iron ore to Germany. Great Britain also imported Swedish ball bearings by air freight. Yes, these flights were sometimes attacked by the Luftwaffe.

It is also true that Swedish commercial interests prospered during the war supplying Germany with iron ore and ball bearings in return for food stolen from Poland and Ukraine and paid for by gold stolen from Jews and others, e.g., melted down teeth extracted from murdered corpses.

Had Germany not become completely fixed on preparing for war with the Soviet Union an invasion and occupation of Sweden might well have happened no matter how craven the Swedish government became. But the demands of the Russian invasion absorbed all the mental and material resources of Germany and made dickering with Sweden a minor nuisance.

Thereafter, as the balance of the war turned against Germany, Sweden dared to act more independently in a series of small tests concerning interned Norwegians ships, military training, use of railroads, and the like. Likewise after the United States entered the war, the Allied diplomacy became much more aggressive in its demands on Sweden, technicalities and legal fictions the British had (pretended) to take seriously were brushed aside by American representatives. Our author regards this as bad manners.

Perhaps it should be noted that Germany wanted to use Swedish railways extensively to supply its occupation of Norway to avoid coastal shipping in North Sea exposed to British air and sea attacks. Goods and men could go by ship from Germany through the Gulf of Bothnia to Sweden and then by train through Sweden to Norway or Finland putting them, all pretty much beyond British reach at the time. One element which the author omits is that shipping men and goods by train through Sweden would have used Swedish neutrality to discourage aerial attacks on the trains by either the British or the Soviets, surely that was part of German thinking that the author passes in silence.

I found nothing about the many American bomber pilots who flew to Sweden and were interned. There were a lot, I believe, and many did it to avoid Catch-22. SEE https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Sweden_during_World_War_II

Life was hard in wartime Sweden without a doubt, yet nothing like that endured in Norway during the occupation or in England during the Blitz nights or V-rocket days. The Swedish government managed to protect its population from forced labour in Germany, genocide, Allied bombing, starvation, and the like as inflicted on Norway where the the cold shoulder of Sweden is still well remembered.

When in Stockholm years ago a Swede proudly told me that a princess of the Swedish royal family, living in an apartment that looked onto the German embassy, had drawn a curtain in 1940 so as not to look at the Germans. Take that you Nasties!

I wondered about Waffen SS recruitment from Sweden when other sources say there were 15,000 from Norway, and 5,000 from Denmark, who went to the Russian front. The author is largely silent on popular support for Germany though surely there was some, especially once it went to war with the Bolsheviks.

An excellent last chapter sums up and concludes the foregoing discussion. I wish more books had that and did it as well. Throughout the book there are a lot of typos which may have come from the OCR conversion to a digital copy.

The Rock (2016) by Robert Daws

The Rock (2016) by Robert Daws

GoodReads meta-data is 196 pages, rated 3.82 by 1,670 litizens.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Rhyme and reason take a holiday in the sun.

When errant police officers from the London Metropolitan Force are sent to Siberia to avoid smelling the place up it usually means an indefinite secondment to the Orkney or Shetland Islands, but when those billets are already filled with losers by other krimi writers, the alternative is Gibraltar. Hence our heroine finds herself on the Rock.

It is by the numbers, an odd couple of police officers, he older and grumpier, she the youthful secondee who remains ambitious despite the blotted copybook, cross-cut with contemporary and historical events in such a profusion this reader got lost in the first twenty pages. There is a chase at the outset, an accidental death, another accidental death, an ostensible suicide (but we know better), a murder forty years ago, ….. [stay tuned because there is more crammed into fewer than 200 pages.] No wonder travel insurance for Gibraltar is so expensive.

The saving grace is the locale, and for that I persisted. They say see Gibraltar … before lunch and leave; it doesn’t take long.

What with all the cross-cuts, there is no narrative, but lots of whoosh of speeding motor bikes, running feet, hurtling cars which betrays the aspiration to a screenplay. Good luck on that.

Credit where it is due: the supervisor is not a cardboard character for once.

First of the series and the last for me.

The Red Telephone Box (2015) by P F. Ford

The Red Telephone Box (2015) by P F. Ford

GoodReads meta-data is 258 pages, rated by 4.26 by 480 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: STFU, Dave!

It seems someone has set fire to Dave’s partner’s digs while said partner has disappeared into the night. What follows is a police procedural, an approach I usually like.

In this instance the police procedure is overshadowed by Slater’s constant, petulant sulking about everything from a lumpy mattress to a parking place. His knickers are constantly knotted and he lets everyone know it far and wide. Within the first five pages he has antagonised everyone he encounters (including this reader), and it gets worse after that. He is such a spoiled brat it is hard to take him seriously as a mid-thirties career copper in his fifth outing on the page. What a piece of work is this man!

How could any responsible manager (let alone author) turn this immature self-indulgent paranoid loose on the public became my question. He is credited with a good clear-up rate but I suspected the missing partner might have fiddled the books and then done a bunk with he caught wind of an audit. Think about it and it adds up.

On the other hand Dave’s constant whining allows his supervisor to tear strips off him and that is fun. When Slater is not breaking the china and blaming everyone else for his clumsy ineptitude there is some nice police procedure using CCTV technology and shoe leather to find eye witnesses to fill in the blanks and blurs of the film. But in the end all of this is undermined, and proven irrelevant. What a let down that is. The interest readers invested in the procedure was wasted and with it vanishes trust in the author. Surprise, Reader, there was no point to it. And here I thought contempt for readers was the preserve of Post Modernism.

There is a neat but totally irrelevant interlude with a Serbian arsonist that occupies the foreground for a quarter of the book and then — poof! — is gone. Not what one might call an integrated plot.

Slater is as annoying as the Bulgarian discussed an earlier post, do pay attention: inept, self-indulgent, slow witted, and clumsy.

This is the fifth instalment of Detective Sergeant Dave Slater series, but the first and last for this reader.

Checkmate to Murder (1948) by Edith Lorac

Checkmate to Murder (1948) by Edith Lorac

GoodReads meta-data is 224 pages rated 4.09 by 152 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: mannered.

On a dismal foggy night five artistic types gather in an open-plan artist’s studio, while two play a serious game of chess at one end and two others are painter and subject at work on a portrait at the other end with the fifth – a woman – who prepares a meagre dinner for them in a blackout during the Blitz in 1940. The painter is temperamental but his sister – the cook – abides him, while the portrait subject is supercilious, and the two chess players are upright civil servants. Quite how these five came together is one mystery that goes unsolved. Yes, I know an explanation of sorts is offered but did it compute, I ask?

While the five are at it in the ramshackle studio cum residence for the siblings, in the landlord’s hovel next door the old miser is shot dead!

A bumptious Special happens on the scene (or does he) and lands on the first person he sees, Miser’s nephew, as the guilty party, and makes a ruckus with the Studio Five, though suspicion will fall on this special, readers know he is too stupid to have done anything that required forethought. The nephew is young, clean-cut, and in uniform so he is innocent in this cosmos.

A literal-minded Scot from Scotland Yard begins inquiries and a nice police procedural follows as witnesses can be found even in a blackout. Former tenants of the studio prove a rum lot. The special may be dumb but…., as above. Round and round we go.

Until deux ex machina arrives and a simple but unbelievable solution is proffered. SPOILER. The subject and painter conspired on the assumption that the chess players in full view would be so engrossed in the game that they would not notice if Subject left the room and went next door to do the deed, while squirrelling the loot away in a chimney (if I have understood the painfully detailed and nearly incomprehensible details), meanwhile the painter would continue to daub paint. I never did fathom the so-called ‘lay figure’ that was crucial to the plot: I’m like that sometimes.

The characterisations are distinct and credible while plod puzzles it all together. The pace is glacial. The author had dozens of these krimis and more besides. Her characters are certainly of greater interest than some I have encountered lately, naming no names, but they know who they are those thin (wo)men.

Double Star (1956) by Robert Heinlein

Double Star (1956) by Robert Heinlein

GoodReads meta-data is 243 pages, rated 3.90 by 20,380 litizens.

Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Zippy.

An actor is hired as a stand-in for an incapacitated politician who just has to make a public appearance. Actor is reluctant to get tangled up with this exercise but the money is good and the thespian challenge is irresistible, and then there is the woman. These are the typical ingredients for a Heinlein novel with some Sy Fy window dressing which is seldom integral to either plot or character. Nonetheless it is a diverting ride to be sure.

Once in-role our hero finds he cannot leave it. The principal he is doubling combines being hors de combat with so many admirable qualities that Actor stays in part. The end.

While Martians figure in the early going, they more or less disappear and with them much of the Sy Fy element about other lifeforms. Though there are some good scenes, as when Actor discovers that not everyone is fooled by his flawless impersonation. That was nicely judged.

There are also some fumbles. Much is made of dropping a candidate from a cabinet nomination and then that line disappears. Surely such a victim of trade-offs would have had to be compensated. There are a few other glitches like this, but overall I was pleasantly surprised at the presentation of the political process. Subtlety is not something I associated with Heinlein’s fiction, but it is manifest here, especially in the realisation that a political campaign can do some good and for it to do that a team effort is best.

Dotted throughout are alternative history tidbits that add spice to the narrative.

In my prejudice these day I usually associated Heinlein with Ayn Rand bellowing about rugged individualism while enjoying the benefits of a well-ordered community made possible by everyone else. What I expected to find was there, albeit in a minor register: namely, many blokes furiously engaged in displays of manhood, aka, pissing contests that fascinate so many chaps. However they neither dominated proceedings nor put me off the story line this time.

I was reminded of this title (which I had read when a high school boy) after I posted a review of Il general della Rovere, a film with Vittorio de Sica, where a lowlife impersonates a hero and comes to live up to that heroic standard. There are parallels in that summary but the telling by de Sica is compelling and I cannot say the same about Heinlein, but I did read it to the end, and that is not something I do not automatically any more.

Harbour Master (2016) by Daniel Pembrey

Harbour Master (2016) by Daniel Pembrey

GoodReads meta-data is 386 pages rated 3.48 by 1084 litizens.

Genre: ~~krimi~~, thriller

Verdict: by the numbers.

A floater in Amsterdam harbour kicks off the book and there is much about the harbour which adds local colour, residential houseboats on canals, Eurocrats, and the Red Light District are all present and ticked off the list. About halfway through the book this victim is all but forgotten and I never did figure out what she had to do with the plot. But then neither did our hero.

Yes, I am afraid I found it all pretty mechanical from the Handbook of How to Write an International Thriller. The publisher strives so hard for this market that the promotional material refers to Scandinavia fiction. Get a map, Dude! The Netherlands is not now nor has it ever been in Scandinavia. While astride the high horse of pedantry, I also wondered about the protagonist’s penchant for referring to the country as Holland. Would a Dutch public servant do that?

Nearing retirement inspector Henk van der Pol cannot resist a little payback for some officers who have made his life a misery of late. Well that seems to this reader a better summary than the official one which sees Henk as a paladin, the one just man, among all the corruption. His Christ complex put me in mind of the last episodes of Foyle’s War when the protagonist carried the cross ever so manfully. Henricus combines self-righteousness with a victim complex.

The plot, as thriller plots evidently must be, is far-fetched and global from Ghana and back.

There are some very nice parts but they are buried in the breathless complexity of implicating everyone else in evil. Here’s an instance: When van der Pol realises one of the alleged victims simply could not have been assaulted in the locale reported, and that particular alleged victim’s plan to pay himself was ingenious to say the least, but all that seems attenuated and anti-climatic by the time we wade through Ukrainian gun slingers, Secret Service thugs, Belgium swat teams, and …. Oh, I almost forgot to mention the vigilante murder of one villain. Well, you get the picture.

It is volume one is a series. All yours!

The Library at Night (2006) by Alberto Mangual

The Library at Night (2006) by Alberto Mangual

GoodReads meta-data is 373 pages rated 3.99 by 3,333 litizens.

Genre: Bibliomania.

Verdict: Ruminative.

While converting a French barn into his private library Mangual thinks about libraries, books, and readers. Alberto Mangual, Argentine born, is a cosmopolitan writer, editor, translator, and — most of all — reader. How will he house his 35,000 books? What kind of shelving is best? Should the shelves be enclosed against dust and light? If so, can he afford that? Where will the readers go for e-books? How will the books be arrayed on the shelf? Each of these and many other practical questions sent him to the books for answers reaching back beyond the fabled library at Alexandria and forward past the internet.

By the way, Alberto, I recommend Henry Petroski, The Book on the Bookshelf (2010), mainly about bookshelves and shelving.

The chapter titles all have the same stem: The Library as ….

Myth
Order
Space
Power
Shadow
Chance
Workshop
Mind
Island
Survival, and finally
Home

The insights are many and the prose is textured but supple. Savour a few passages with me.

‘The Alexandria Library that wanted to be the storehouse for the memory of the world was not able to secure the memory of itself.’ Now we know very little about it.
A satire from the third century BC refers to the in habitants of that library at Alexandria in this way: ‘A horde of well-fed scribblers constantly squabbling among themselves in the cage.’ Universities it seems have a long history.
‘The ancient dead who rise from books to speak to us.’
A book on papyrus has lasted longer than any book on a digital media. Indeed CDs decay after little more than a decade, despite the claims of manufacturers, even if one still has the device to play them.
The universal library is the world itself.
In the Koran we read that ‘one scholar is more powerful against the Devil than a thousand worshippers.’
Every person’s library is autobiographical.
In my mental library many books are reduced to a few remembered lines. By the way, his mental library also includes all the library books he has borrowed to read.
We can imagine the books we’d like to read though they have not (yet) been written.
Reading was once considered useful and important, then become at times dangerous and subversive, and now is condescendingly accepted as a pastime for others [by those who do not have time to read]. (Corollary: No one has the time to do something they regard as unimportant, and everyone has the time to do the things they think are important.)
He might have added this thought from me: there is no book so dreadful that some idiot on GoodReads scores it a 4+ and praises it.

It is all trip and no arrival, though there is a subsequent, similar book by Mangual called Packing My Library (2018) when it came time to move that carefully wrought Barn Library. It is much shorter and perhaps I will continue with it.

He does say something about organising the books by language which is overridden by content in some cases, e.g., all the krimis are together. But he does not discuss the systems libraries use from Dewey on, nor does he mention the software now available for private libraries such as I use – Book Collector. Zip on cataloguing or shelving, yet these are the gears of most libraries.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1988)

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1988)

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 45 minutes, rated 8.0 by 4727 cinematizens.

Genre: Sherlockiana.

Verdict: Inert.

The Granada Television production of the Holmes Cannon from 1984 to 1996 was heralded as complete and faithful to the originals in forty-one instalments. (It was thus not complete with seventeen remaining.) It is certainly true in this case that the screenplay seems to follow the text with few cinematographic additions. Conan Doyle may have been honoured by such fidelity, but as a viewer he would have noticed how mechanical is the result. While on paper the reader suspends disbelief and there is movement in the narrative, on the screen it seems episodic, or worse, a sequence of still-lifes to display the period furnishing and costumes and not much else. N.B. that the story was written in episodes as a serial and it shows in this production.

None of the supporting characters are developed though the ingenue performance of Dr Mortimer with his dog is good it seems out of place. How could that young man had not have noticed Miss Stapleton until the heir came on the scene. Moreover, he does not capitalise on the great line about the footprint for the Sherlockians. It comes out nearly as an afterthought. I blame the director for that, not the actor. And how is it that this pet dog offers no clue to the hound?

Neither Miss Stapleton nor her sinister brother/husband gets much chance to perform. She looks confused most of the time and I guess that is in character but it got to be monotonous and he looks perplexed, not the mercurial charmer he can be made.

Likewise, the blustering litigator is a cipher despite the actor’s bellowing, though the role of his daughter is restored to its rightful place in the story. (She is usually omitted.)

But most of all, THE MOOR is rendered null and void. What the camera could do with it is left out in favour of the text, and that is a great shame. The 2002 version with Richard Roxborough in the lead does a superb job of making THE MOOR the dominant character in events, even more than the Hound.

Edward Hardwicke offers Dr John Watson as a mature, capable albeit literal-minded man who warms himself in the reflected glory of Holmes. While Jeremy Brett as Holmes was wonderful in the first episodes in this series. British born and bred, yet he was a new face to Brit telly, having lived and worked in Canada and the USA, and he obviously relished playing one of the most enduring British icons, but here he seems off-colour, though perhaps I am biased by knowing the hell he went through in his private life about this time. Ghouls may read about that trial on their own time. His career (and his life) drew to a close shortly after this interrupted and incomplete series ended.

Viewers at the time might have just seen a version of The Hound from 1983 with Ian Richardson in the lead. Stay tuned for my trenchant comments on that in due course.

The Cat of Baskervilles (2018) by Vicki Delany

The Cat of Baskervilles (2018) by Vicki Delany

GoodReads meta-data is 309 pages, rated 3.96 by 1395 litizens.

Genre: VIG (Vogue + IKEAA + Gourmet) does not a krimi make.

Verdict: Zzzzzzz

I took the plunge and persisted because of the cute title but found page after page of description of clothes, furniture, and food, giving up at 25% of the catalogue per the Kindle because little of interest had happened among all that padding. There was no development in the characters or the plot but the surface of Vogue + IKEAA + Gourmet. Marching through an IKEA maze would be more challenging and interesting than reading on, so I quit. Be warned.

For some time I did not bother to write notes about books I put aside, but then found I returned to them by mistake. I might be tempted again by this cute title unless I remembered it (or had notes on it in the Book Collector app) so I started to write notes, and once written to post them.