Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon (2001) by Larry Millet
GoodReads meta-data is 404 pages rated 4.04 by 1552 litizens.
Genre: Sherlockiana
Verdict: Elemental.
In the dry summer pine forests of deepest Minnesota fire is an ever present danger compounded by the sparks flying from railroad trains owned by Robber Baron J. J. Hill. Meanwhile, Eugene Debs has been organising railway men into unions hostile to Hill. Trouble is brewing.
A new ingredient comes to this combustible mix when Hill begins to receive threatening letters signed by the Red Demon which promise ruin to the businessman. While having the character of blackmail threats, strangely the letters do not demand money. This is a new one for Hill.
When pursuing these letters his own trusted investigator disappears, Hill goes to the top of the tree by sending an agent to recruit Mr Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker Street, London SW. Hill offers a princely sum for Holmes’s services who he is more intrigued by the the situation than attracted by the dosh. He and Watson set sail for the new world and then take the train to the NorthWest frontier of St Paul.
There follows a lengthy game of cat-and-mouse in the later 19th Century woods of Minnesota with much detail about railroads, engines, tracks, switches, flying sparks and embers, trestles, telegraphs keys and posts, along with the axe men who live among the pines. Holmes and Watson pose as London Times journalists doing research for a feature piece on rough-hewn ways of life in the north woods. As if.
They discover a cast of characters among the rustics, which includes a retarded sheriff, a clever brothel madame, a prissy woodsman, a flannel-shirted thug, a skeptical newspaper editor, while Holmes and Watson consume vast American servings of food. It comes to a head when the summer drought makes a perfect fire storm.
Larry Millet
The text has footnotes relating to the Holmes cannon, and the historic events upon which the story is based. The telling is all rather theatrical as though the book aspired to being a screen play and much of Holmes’s work seemed pointless to this reader. Still it is diverting.
GoodReads meta-data is 327 pages rated 4.0 by 48 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: [Grrrr.]
A bus loaded with Israeli tourists in Bulgaria is bombed on the way to a Black Sea coastal resort. A joint Israeli-Bulgarian investigation follows. Sort of…
A Bulgarian detective who is a man’s man, constantly smoking, drinking, and cursing, and having a pissing contest with every other man he meets, is half of one team; the other is a Mossad data analyst who has never been in the field before, but her father came from Bulgaria and she has a smattering of the language. The set-up is promising, combining spreadsheets with head banging.
What follows is a disjointed series of backstories, punctuated by Man’s Man clumsy efforts to rape/seduce the Israeli who proves resistant to his crude efforts. None of it is played for laughs, and we all know that in time she will relent because he is, after all, a man’s man. The clichés abound without any substance. Blind Freddy spotted the mole about two hundred pages before Man’s-Man did.
Nor is the Israeli any better. After riding for several hours in a car just as bored as the reader is, she is asked to drive for a while, and after taking the driver’s seat goes ballistic to find the car has a stick shift and not an automatic transmission. Was she asleep for the preceding four hours when they drove down the road that she didn’t notice the gear changes up and down the hills of eastern Bulgaria with her single companion driving. And she is an intelligence analyst. Doh! (Don’t blame her, she is written that way.)
Much is made of identifying the bomber in the first half of the book and then this theme disappears. Evidently it did not really matter that much. It seems there was little reason to follow the trail.
There is some to’ing and fro’ing in Bulgaria and I preferred that travelogue to listening to that man’s man feel sorry for himself. What a snowflake! Nor is the Israeli any more interesting. A five-second scan of the reviews on GoodReads reminded me why I never bother to do that.
Ellis Shuman
The mechanical Turk alerted me to this title after I read a concise history of Bulgaria. I tried the sample and found it not to my taste but assuming there were not many Bulgarian krimis in English and this might be the only one to hand, even the best one, I persisted. Grrr, as above.
GoodReads meta-data is 352 pages, rated 4.78 by 27 litizens.
Genre: Autobiography.
Coach Thompson is a legend and it is easy to see why. This man is a straight-shooter with a fast draw. He transformed the Georgetown Hoyas from also rans to leaders with dozens of titles and trophies and what is more important, and singular, 97% of his players graduated. Coach was an educator on and off the court.
It is a long gruelling story of racism as Coach learned the games behind the game, and he learned them well. Among his teachers were Red Auerbach who saw this gangly youth in a pick-up game on a playground one summer and encouraged him to stay in the game. Coach later played two season with the Celts as back-up to Bill Russell, giving Coach plenty of time to study the game, front and back. (Bill never sat down.)
But most of all there were his parents whom he wanted to make proud of himself, and so he worked at it. Did he ever! The towel on his shoulder became a signature. It reminded him that his parents spent their lives working 60 or more hours a week cleaning up behind white people so he could better himself, and when he said that in an interview a storm of angry protest broke with the Pox News haters who regarded it as a provocative remark. In another of his trademarks, he shrugged and repeated it, because after all it was true. But as we know truth has no value to Pox News.
In one telling passage he takes a list of examples of things coaches do, like arguing with officials, defending players before the media vultures, benching players, and shows how such actions are reported when a white coach does them, and when a black coach does them. When he argues a ref’s call a white coach is feisty, when a black coach argues he is intimidating; when a white coach defends a player he is fair and a black coach who does that is stubborn; in benching a player a white coach is disciplined and a black coach is angry; and so on. Some of the examples can be found in 2020, by the way.
When he started recruiting for the Hoyas at Georgetown he often went after unschooled athletes that were regarded as high risk by other colleges, including at least two with prison records to whom he gave a second chance. As long as they kept their grades up to graduate, he guaranteed their scholarships even if they did not make the team. This arrangement so impressed parents that they drove their boys to take it and to make the team to pay off the implicit debt. Rival coaches were not sure if this was madness or underhanded, and made a fuss about it both ways. One of those second-chances was AI. The cognoscenti will get The Answer. The fine upstanding white young men who played against AI taunted him as a jailbird. Yep. [Swish.] AI always had the last laugh.
Hard though it is for this cynic to believe, the University administration stood behind Coach even when his teams lost, and he was burned in effigy, labeled ‘nigger,’ on campus. On other occasions his university office was ransacked with a message for this African boy to go home! Need I say it, Georgetown University is Catholic school and a bastion of the liberal elite, and yet scratch the surface and there it is.
He himself had been cut from the Olympic team because of the unspoken quota on black players, and he knew it. This is one of the reasons why he was never grateful for his accomplishments. He had earned them, and he knew others had also done so but were denied them by unseen, unspoken, unbreakable racial quotas.
One observer (Michael Jordan) called him the Aristotle of basketball for his training of kings of the court. Coach thought of himself as a teacher who used a basketball to instruct in the use of one’s talents, in teamwork, in courtesy, in civility, in responsibility, in the value of education…..in the Georgetown way, never back down and always applaud an opponent’s well-earned victory.
I have always liked Patrick Ewing, and now I know why. Surely the best NBA center never to make it to a final. This is the coach that channeled the Van Gogh of basketball, Allen Iverson, into a productive career without parallel.
The Answer.
Coach has some choice words for that old chestnut that blacks have biological superiority as athletes, too, seeing in it yet another way to belittle the accomplishments of blacks. He attributes the success of black athletes to intelligence and a drive to succeed, and the ability to succeed where there are fewer racial barriers, sports being one of the domains where the barriers are lowest these days.
The janitors, laundrymen, ballboys, porters, ushers, maids, attendants, security officers, and doormen at hotels and arenas all welcomed his teams because the players said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and never left a mess for someone else’s mom and dad to clean up. A player who violated such norms of courtesy and civility would find himself with his 21-point scoring average on the bench until he learned that 70% of Hoya basketball was off the court.
John Thompson was the first Division I coach to hire an academic advisor for the team, a woman. He then hired a trainer, a woman, whom he promoted to assistant coach so that she could sit on the bench in games (and also get on a higher pay grade), readily available for injuries. Both appointments threw the NCAA into a frenzy trying to find rules to block such changes since both were white women it also set off a media feeding frenzy. Use your imaginations just a like a Pox journalist. Both these women worked for Coach for many years.
Hoya scheduling had been historic. Every year was the same as last year. No more when Coach came on the scene. He wanted to play arch rivals at home, or not at all. (And if these rivals refused to schedule at Georgetown, he leaked it to the press to embarrass the rivals.) He wanted to play and beat teams that dominated post season tournaments in early season games. He also wanted a better gymnasium for his team(s) and fill it with shouting fans. To further these ends he engaged in an infinity of negotiations in the games behind the game. He seldom compromised, and that got him the reputation as a trouble-maker, but he noticed white coaches were seldom asked to compromise and he stuck to his guns.
Then there is the deflated basketball he kept on his desk about the other 70%, but, well, read the book. The title is explained on the last page, but I didn’t get it.
Coach admits his many mistakes, civil, social, and tactical, and hands out praise to many who worked with the Hoya teams. The telling is episodic marked by basketball seasons. In that respect it is not easy to read though the ghostwriter’s prose is smooth.
Coach with Patrick Ewing, lately his successor at Georgetown.
Recent news from GT suggests things have gotten worse in subsequent days. Autobiography is never a completely reliable source, to be sure.
IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 45 minutes, rated 8.0 by 4727 cinematizens.
Genre: Sherlockiana.
Verdict: Inert.
Hound of the Baskervilles (1983)
IMDb mea-data is runtime 1 hour and 40 minutes, rated 6.6 by 1129 cinematizens.
Genre: Sherlockiana.
Verdict: Foggy.
The Hound gets another workout in this misty production with little to remember from it.
Ian Richardson as Holmes is condescending and superior. Donald Churchill plays Watson as Nigel Bruce without the avuncular charm. Brian Blessed injects some energy into a still life of a movie.
The major characters of The Moor and The Hound are obscured by the fog machine run amok.
But notice this, in Holmes’ study at Baker Street 221B there hangs on the wall near the door a picture that seems to be of a Turk in uniform. A very similar picture is to be seen in many episodes of the Jeremy Brett productions, including that of the Hound of 1988. I found myself more interested in this coincidence than in the narrative.
GoodReads meta-data is 236 pages rated 3.83 by 220 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: ingenious but talky.
Setup: two mismatched women from San Francisco, one reticent and hesitant, the other assertive and aggressive, take a holiday together in Mexico City where one of them dies. Well, yes, dies, but was it an accident, a suicide, or a murder. If the latter, who dun it? If suicide, why dun it? If accident, how come? These are the questions around which the plot unwinds.
The plot thickens when after this ordeal, the survivor returns home to San Francisco only to disappear almost immediately. Her husband says she has gone east to recover from the trauma while he has to stay in Bay City to work.
Hmmm. The missing woman’s brother never liked the husband and finds gaps in this story, hiring a gumshoe to investigate, who also finds gaps but is less inclined to leap to conclusions than the brother who by now has bought a gun.
It all started in the Mexico City hotel room and the action returns there in the end to a rather convoluted conclusion that is typical of the psychological interiors Millar so expertly explored. I did not find the villain entirely credible or even worth the bother, but it ties up the title nicely.
Millar’s books won many awards, and it is easy to see why. The prose is effortless (and I can only guess how hard it is to achieve that) and the insights into the minds of the characters are surgically judicious. Even though I did not invest in any of the characters, they offer an array of different people and the motivations of each are, well, distinctive and credible. Millar also has an eye for the telling detail to make Sherlock Holmes take note. Not a cardboard plot device among them. Except possibly the villain, though much space is expended trying to round out the villain’s character without success for this reader.
Margaret Millar
In 1965 Millar received the ‘Woman of the Year Silver Cup’ of the Los Angeles Times. During its existence between 1950 and until the endowment ran out in 1977 the award was presented to almost 300 women to honour achievements in science, religion, the arts, education and government, community service, entertainment, sports, business, and industry. Other recipients include Lily Tomlin, Irene Dunn, and Anäis Nin.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 9 minutes, rated 5.6 by 126 cinematizens.
Genre: Spy
Verdict: energetic
Post war a woman sees a man she encountered during the war and knows to be a spy. Impetuously she sets out to tackle him with the subtlety of sledgehammer. She is aided by a hotel house detective who is comic relief, well, comic anyway, and also a former boyfriend counter spy. The boyfriend is too good to be true, but is.
Cuthebertson
The spy is after the plans — is it always plans? — of an atomic-powered tank, which mercifully we never see. Ever reliable West Australian Allan Cuthbertson plays a by-the-book soldier toward the end. Cuthbertson had served the RAAF during the war in Air Sea Rescue in the Solomon Islands and New Guinea campaigns. After that playing solider must have been a lark.
I rather hoped the title indicated a bit more wit than slapstick, but not to be.
IMDb meta-data is runtime the longest 49 minutes ever recorded, rated an astounding 3.6 by 137 monkeys at keyboards.
Genre: Old Dark House.
Verdict: Fail.
In a remote, suitably gloomy Scots castle our cast gathers to read the script with growing disbelief. Because most of the chaps are in uniform it must be wartime, but you’d hardly know from the dialogue.
Soon enough the number of guests at Castle Gloom decreases and the simple working class retainers blame the Phantom, which is never explained, but we do see someone lurking about in a robe and cowl with a skeleton mask waiting for Halloween.
Danger Man is unavailable so this is a case for oxymoronic Army Intelligence. There is a confused and confusing love interest, an immature boy-soldier, a dour laird, an aloof and icy ladyship, and all those uniforms. With a touch of realism the AI investigator spends all his time in the local pub.
Phantom lurks.
Turns out one of the uniforms is a Nasty Spy who is – sit down and take a deep breath – the father of the youngest son. Wait, father! How did that happen? [In the usual way.] And the son has in his possession secret plans for deep-fried Mars bars! The Scots’ secret weapon!
It gets worse. Much of the dialogue is spoken by the actors with their backs to the camera. This is a technique that makes expensive synchronisation between audio and video unnecessary. When it is not used, it is apparent that the dialogue is indeed out of synchronisation.
Released on 19 February 1948 with a thud, even as a quota quickie this must have been shelved. None of the players is noted for anything else on the IMDb. Most of them have but a few credits and for several this is the only one. Good career move. Quit.
About half the run time is distance shots of the exterior of the heap and some murky interiors. Dashed were my hopes for an Old Dark House with secret passages, cobwebs, sliding panels, spring loaded walls, and spy holes.
Not to be mistaken for the lost 1932 film of the same title, though losing this one would be a service.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 11 minutes, rated 5.6 by 446 cinematizens
Genre; Sy Fy
Verdict: Zzzzzzzzz
The cast assembles on a wide-bodied trans-continental jet passenger plane, as per the movie poster, only to discover it has propeller-driven engines! Gadzooks!
The identity problem of the airplane is only the first of their problems.
This is the Otranto Airlines Flight 000 from LA to DC with no stops at SL on the way. Remember overhead bins without doors? Well, I do and it was nostalgic seeing them again, waiting for the rain of hats and coats which never came. This film is too high concept for that old chestnut.
The passengers board; everyone smokes. Beau sits next to Belle and he is astounded to discover she can add 2 + 2. That mathematicians for you. He on the other hand is an engineer, motors and such, but the only oil is in his manner not in his pores and he does not have the one long finger nail mechanics need to get at screw heads, or so I have been told. His engineering is done on the drawing board: ‘That should work!’
Silently enduring an attack of the piles with many a grimace is a bearded man with a deep voice. He has to be a professor what with the way he cannot find his ticket.
Then there is the salesman stereotype played by the ever reliably irritating Roy Engel (aka as Engle) and a middle-aged blind woman with her attentive but not very bright husband. Yes he is a proto-GOP specimen off the petri dish who raves about Reds among the dust bunnies under his seat.
Nailed it, this is a Cold War …, well, ‘drama’ seems too strong a word, let’s just say, piece, and leave the ‘of what’ to the imagination. The intentions are the only thing good about it.
Half the run time is assembling the cast. The only drama is handled by the supporting actors in the cockpit and they do it well, when those prop wannabe jet engines take on a life of their own. The pilot, co-pilot, navigator, and cabin staff up front play out a drama within the play in the few minutes they have the camera.
Turns out Prof, Belle, and Beau are the brains of a new super-duper weapon that will vaporise THEM and they are travelling to DC to sign the death warrant for civilisation.
After Husband jumps out of the back door, they realise that a higher force has rid them of that nuisance so that it can judge them for their about to be sins. Remember, it made sense to the screenplay writer.
The plane is suspended at an impossible height and they exit through the same door — very gingerly — to meet a silent, youthful jury and a judge who lectures them on their destructive weapon while in the mist the jurors mutter. It is all allegorical or metaphysical or hermeneutical or something. Scientists are held responsible, not the politicians and soldiers who might use such a weapon. Does that compute?
STOP!
It has the seriousness, the sincerity, the drivel of a play written by a high school student. If we changed the weapon to pollution and the scientists to moguls I might suspect an acned Al Gore! It is that wooden, pompous, and vacuous.
The dialogue is lifeless and there is no action. Most of the players are more intent on finding their floor marks than projecting. Odd that since most are sitting down. Though there is a corker of a review on IMDb written by a full bo[o]r(e) GOPer. Check it out. It is easy to spot with its 10-point rating and incoherent spouting. At least Husband had the grace to exit. He must have known what was coming.
Once Sunday School is out, the three scientists get a reprieve to eat their notes instead of the airline food, which at the time was probably a better culinary choice. There will be no Yankee super weapon. Kind of makes you wonder what THEM will do though. (Guilty, I had the volume so low it is possible that the lecturer covered that and I missed it. Maybe he has a sibling lecturing away in Russian.)
The clue that it was a fantasy was that the airplane is so wide-bodied that three people could walk past each other in the aisle!
Not even Aristotle could figure out why the jumping husband was there in the first place and why the wife had to be blind. After he jumped she was written out.
The IMDb entry gives a release data of September 1961, but no further details. A cynic might suspect it was released into the wild and no one took it. No premiere location is given contrary to the general practice.
Secrets of the Seven Smallest States of Europe (2004) by Thomas Eccardt
GoodReads meta-data is 348 pages rated 3.78 by 65 litizens.
Genre: History
Verdict: The Micro Seven!
Go ahead list them!
Ordered by population.
Population
Area in km2
Per capita GDP US$
Vatican City
825
0.49
–
San Marino
34,232
61.2
60,551
Monaco
38,300
2.1
115,700
Liechtenstein
38,784
160
98,432
Andorra
77,543
467
42,035
Malta
514,564
316
48,246
Luxembourg
626,108
2,586
112,045
Source: Wikipedia
These entities have most of the features of a state, though the most dubious inclusion is Vatican City. While each is unique, in general they have survived largely as a convenience to their larger neighbours, usually because they had nothing those neighbours wanted. Their existence was written into treaties at one time or another. Luxembourg was a buffer between France and Germany. Monaco made many compromises with France to retain such sovereignty as it has. Only Malta and founding member Luxembourg are in the EU, but most accept the Euro.
The only one with significant natural resources is Luxembourg which has long produced high quality steel. None is self-sufficient in food. They have all issued post stamps for revenue. Andorra made itself into tax-free shopping mall. Monaco has that casino. Liechtenstein has Swiss banking secrecy even if the Swiss no longer do. San Marino has a nonpareil stone cutting and stone working craft. Malta has Maltesers. The other major asset Malta has, along some of the other micros, is an expatriate community that supports it.
The micros represent collectively and individually a residue of European history. The Knights of Hospitaller played a major role in making Malta European when Charles V of Spain gave the island to the Knights (in return for a first round draft pick [checking to see who is paying attention]). Then there are the 13th Century Grimaldis in Monaco who passed from pirates to princes, the come-lately Grand Duke of Luxembourg, and the co-princes of Andorra, and the fiefdom that is/was Liechtenstein, a country named after a family. Only San Marino stands apart with its 13th Century origins as a republic (and by the way being a republic does not make it democratic, see a political science 101 textbook for the distinction). Of the Vatican, well it is a medieval monastery writ global.
During the Spanish Civil War, to avoid that conflict Andorra pretended to be French, and then to avoid World War II to avoid that conflict it switched to pretend to be neutral Spain. Dual nationality can be handy. San Marino supported fascist Italy but did not declare war on anyone while the Italians lost their black shirts at the casino in Monaco. During the war many (of the few) Liechtensteineans (take that spell checker!) embraced Austrian Nazism, but after the war they dusted off neutral Swiss cow bells. During World War II the German dismembered Luxembourg and its steel went into tanks, while Malta was bombed to ruination.
Luxembourg has laboured to integrate itself into Europe and the UN, and Malta has trod the path of de-colonisation along with many other African and Asian states though it seldom associated itself with them.
I am ready for Eggheads! I can distinguish Monaco from Monte Carlo, and I know how the Grimaldis got the title prince, and I am telling all! First, Mount Charles in Italian is Monte Carlo, and it is a rocky rise named for an earlier Grimaldi, and the area now is where the Croesus clan lives, as in ‘as rich as Croesus.’ Monaco City is where the casino and historic belle époque buildings are to be found.
The first Grimaldis who seized the area and ruled by the sword were nautical pirates who tired of salt water. One of them, trying to establish the legitimacy of his rule, wrote letters sent by couriers to all manner of dukes, kings, princes, popes, and signed himself as Prince of Monaco. After doing this for years and getting little response, because it was convenient in a geopolitical struggle a king of Spain wrote back and addressed him as prince to secure access for shipping to and from Naples.
Well, thereafter this Grimaldi make sure anyone and everyone knew that the King of Spain said he was a prince, and that made it so! Does that still work?
Liechtenstein is the only country in the world named after a family. Roy Licthenstein is no relation. or maybe he is and just cannot spell.
It is alleged that San Marino hosted about 100,000 refugees from World War II, about ten times the resident population. Many were Jews escaping from the German killing machine in 1943. I did find that number hard to credit.
The mechanical Turk consulted the algorithms and the stars and recommended this title after I had read concise histories of several European countries. I bit out of (idle) curiosity.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 19 minutes, rated 7.8 by 868 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy fy
Verdict: Corker.
The greasy pole of sales representatives in the corporate world looks just that: greasy. Protagonist is slick, sleek, smug, and sure, but he is saddled with a bumbling, inept, ill-kempt Partner who holds him back. Partner is always late, cannot find the right room, PowerPoint remains a mystery to him, slovenly, confused, and a dead weight.
But the greater mystery which silently infuriates Protagonist is that Partner is well thought of in the firm despite his obvious ineptitude. There is no justice in this world! (Hands up everyone who has thought that sometime!)
All the while, Protagonist gets a string of texts, emails, letters, calls from Nobody who wants an appointment. Protagonist has no time for appointments with nobodies and rejects these requests, until one day Nobody walks into his office and makes his pitch. As a salesman himself, Protagonist is amused by this persistent, if diffident, approach of Nobody and condescends to spare him five-minutes.
Nobody then explains the procedure by which a person can be willed to death! He has answers for all of Protagonist’s objections, what-ifs, and questions. All that is required a one-time fee of $50.
SPOILER coming.
Thinking of bumbling Partner, Protagonist has nothing to lose but a measly $50 and says he will join up. After all $50 is small change for him.
But no, he has misunderstood the pitch…., Nobody explains.
Protagonist is the intended victim whose death is now willed and will occur. This was but a courtesy call so that he can get his affairs in order. ‘Good afternoon,’ Nobody says, as he takes his leave.
In the last minutes Protagonist sees his world in a new light, and the sight transformations of the loyal receptionist, Partner, and others is sharp but subtle. Deft film-making indeed.
It is a gem with plenty of the commotion of a big firm in the background, and Robert Picardo (aka Dr Hologram) as Nobody is perfect. While in the cast there is also a princess royal answering the telephone in the outer office. (Figure it out.) Protagonist is reptilian and memorable for it.
I came across it on DUST and I wanted to write it up so as to remember it. Move over O’Henry.
