Michael W Jackson – Page 40 – Political theory and practice

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.

Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon (2001) by Larry Millet

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.

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.

This is the first of a series.

The Burgas Affair (2017) by Ellis Shuman

The Burgas Affair (2017) by Ellis Shuman

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.

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.