GoodReads meta-data is 374 pages, rated 3.92 by 2710 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Whoosh!
It had to happen! McKinsey management has made it to the afterlife, and there, after a 360-degree review accompanied by all the mod clichés of corporate-speak, Satan’s performance has been found unsatisfactory. St Peter has mined the data on his computer tablet and there is no denying the optics of the spreadsheets: things in Hell are bad, but no thanks to Satan. Well, things are so bad many condemned souls cannot even get into Hell so long are the poorly managed entrance lines, but must abandon even that hope. Yet that is one of Satan’s core competencies.
His KPIs are no longer scalable, indeed, they are no longer visible. No amount of thinking outside the box, colouring outside the lines, corporate values, empowerment, leverage, over the wall(ness), bench-marking, peeling the onion, breaking down the silos, pushing the envelope, increasing the bandwidth, paradigm shifting, data-driving, closing the loop, low-hanging fruit, return on investment, SWOTing, or reaching out can take Hell down to the next level. When asked if his management of Hell represents best practice, well, what is Satan to say? Who’s is better?
After the usual collegial backbiting, some of it literal, Satan appeals this decision because St Peter is sending too many souls to Hell for parking in disabled zones, DVD copying, nose picking, unreturned library books, and the like. But the review committee to hear his appeal, packed with angels unlikely to be sympathetic with the Lord of Darkness, is implacable: Satan is being out-placed. G-o-n-e.
He is condemned to live on earth as an earthling! This is, indeed, for him a fate worse than death. Hell is certainly other people, vide Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos.
And where is he sent as an alternative to Hell? Birmingham England that is where. A place, it seems, where there is no respect for evil incarnate, and it is forever cold and wet.
There he adjusts slowly to the new circumstances, and seeks out Satanists to worship himself, but finds them useless poseurs who have never pitch-forked writhing souls into the Lake of Eternal Fire. He’s got nothing to learn from them. Then by chance he finds his métier in Heavy Metal music and for a time is a sin-sation. But even that grows boring: shouting damnation at dunderheads who pay for the privilege is fun and profitable but the amusement wanes. That low boredom threshold may have been his problem in managing Hell.
In an effort to fit in with his new neighbours Satan prepares a dinner party, like nothing anyone has ever had before. (Did I mention that he had a part-time job – more of a hobby to remind him of the old days – at a mortuary?) Then there was the flamethrower, he does like fire, for the crème brulée. It did not end well.
In time he discovers his dismissal was rigged in a management coup and finds unlikely allies (including Jeanne d’Arc) to put things back to rights, er, well, wrongs.
It is a cackle and since there is a murder (followed by a resurrection) it is classified as a krimi above. Well, two of each to be technical.
Heide Goody and Iain Grant.
When we were planning a trip to Birmingham I found a few novels set in Britain’s second largest city, this among them. Though that trip was cancelled, by then I had the book sample on the Kindle and when I started reading it, there was no stopping. It is the first title in a series and I have already finished the second which has more twists and turns than a dean at a budget meeting and started the third in which eternally young and bored Jeanne goes on an away mission. In the fourth, yes I have read that one, too, we learn where work-weary demons go for a quiet life. And I am now up to volume seven, ah hmm, eight.
GoodReads meta-data is 235 pages, rated 3.70 by 57 litizens.
Verdict: [Blank]
Charles XII in a Stockholm park
Charles XII of Sweden figured in the biography of Peter the Great I read before we travelled to Russia in 2016. That was the first time I had heard of him, but he seemed to be a snow and ice version of Alexander the Great. From that hostile, secondhand view, as Peter’s nemesis, aside from Charles’s warrior prowess, what was remarkable was that Sweden remained stable while Charles constantly campaigned. That stimulated me to find a biography. I tried samples of The History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1731) by Voltarie; Charles XII, King of Sweden (2012) by Carl G. Klingspor, and A Warrior Dynasty: The Rise and Decline of Sweden as a Military Superpower (2014) by Henrik Lunde. The scholarly one by Lunde has so much indigestible front matter about sources, acknowledgements, definitions, summaries that the sample ends just as the text begins. Voltaire’s pamphlet is a vehicle to excoriate the barbarian Peter the Great. Klingspor is hagiography. That left Bain.
Charles XII (1682-1718) was king of Sweden from age fifteen and made endless war with Danes, Germans (the Hanseatic League, Saxony, Prussia, Hannover), Poles, Danes, and Russians singly or in alliances. For the Hansa Stockholm was a backwater that had no business in Baltic commerce (timber, amber, felts and furs). For the Poles, and Poland was a power in this day, Sweden was the protector of hated Protestants and it was, accordingly, god’s work to destroy Swedes. For the Danes, Sweden had once been a colony in all but name and should stay that. For Russia Sweden blocked access to the Baltic.
Then there were the outsiders, Catholic France wanted to undermine Protestant Netherlands by weakening its Swedish protector, and Protestant England that wanted to undermine Catholic France by encouraging continental Protestants.
Got it so far?
Two generations earlier Sweden had intervened in continental religious wars and earned the title of Protector of Protestants. Sweden then was little more than a geographic expression, however, Swedes, though few in number, proved to be organised, thorough, and committed and so had military success. The artillery helped. Swedish armies were among the first and most proficient at combined arms operations where cavalry, artillery, and infantry co-operated and co-ordinated in attack or defence. By the time Charles took the field this was old news.
Once enmeshed in the geo-politics of the region, Sweden could not extricate itself and instead waded in deeper and deeper. By age fifteen Charles conceived of a Swedish Empire that enveloped the Baltic and drove the hated Danes onto the peninsula shorn of a navy. Sword in hand he set out to make it so – this became the Great Northern War (1700-1721) that in time drew in the Ukraine, Ottomans, Bulgars, Tatars, Hannover, Prussia, Danes, Saxony, Poland, Cossacks, Tatars, and more.
When Charles took the throne the Swedish Empire was at its peak, encompassing all modern Sweden, a good chunk of the middle of Norway, all of Finland, the Karelia peninsula some of which is now in Russia, the Baltic islands, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and some of the Polish Baltic coast. There were also two overseas colonies in Delaware in America and in Benin in Africa. It was a power of its day to rival the Netherlands and England, though not golden Spain nor vast France. That is, it was a middle power.
What followed in the reign of Charles XII was continuous war that led to defeat and by 1721 Sweden had shrunk to the borders it now has. He left Sweden spent, depleted, exhausted, and impoverished by his appetite for war with the hordes of Russia, the masses of Poland, the might of the Germans and Prussians, and he never seemed to know when to quit. When adversaries offered favourable peace terms, he spurned them. The comparison to Alexander the Great makes itself.
Greater Sweden
One historian estimates that one fourth of all men between 20 and 40 years old during his tenure died in war. Nearly every man served in the army at one time, stripping the land of labor in the fields, orchards, ports, markets, tanneries, smiths, and so on. By his death vast stretches of contemporary Sweden were ghost towns. If young(er) men are away at war for twenty years there are fewer young children.
King Charles departed Stockholm in 1700 and never returned to that capital. He spent the remaining twenty-one years of his life mainly with the army on campaign. Yet with his absence for more than two decades back home Sweden remained stable and willing, if not always able, to supply his financial and human requirements for the army. Despite his long, and costly absence from Stockholm, there was no usurper, no rebellion by the nobles at the war taxes, no deterioration in the civil administration for lack of funds, no palace coup, no secret deals with the Russians, Poles, or Germans to end the war. Or so it seems. That is what I found fascinating when I read about Charles in the biography of Peter the Great. Regrettably Bain offers no explanation for this remarkable stability in the permanent crisis.
If Peter the Great had spent twenty-one years away from Moscow there would have been a palace coup and/or an uprising by the nobles in the first six months. French kings seldom travelled further than Versailles, fearing that when absent the nobility would plot even more than it did when the king was present. Elizabeth in England had a secret service actively blocking internal threats to her seat. Alexander had secured his home base with a trusted emeritus general and a small but dedicated palace guard in Macedonia, but nothing like any of that seems to have been the case, or to have been necessary, in Stockholm.
While he was away, he was, in fact, not always with the army. Here is a quirk of history. After defeat at what proved to be the last major battle of the Northern War in central Russia, Charles found it impossible geographically to return to Sweden and so he went south on the reasoning that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. He found his way to the Ottoman Empire which sheltered him from the Russians for many years, while he always plotted a return to the battlefield and always urged the Ottomans to strike at Russia. He was there for years, and wore out his welcome.
When he finally returned north he continued to make war on all comers, and whenever the Senate or Chancellor in Stockholm cried for peace, he sent a stern letter reminding them who was king, and they then dutifully complied to his latest demand for yet more money and yet more men.
While he was polite in person he had a stubborn streak that had no bounds. With no political sense he went at everything straight ahead. Likewise his military tactics consisted of frontal assaults. There was no Napoleonic manoeuvring or artillery preparation. He usually plunged ahead so rapidly that artillery could not keep pace and in some campaigns he dispensed with it altogether. His wars were as destructive as Napoleon’s it is true but there is nothing constructive in his reign as there was in Napoleon’s: schools, laws, reforms, science, bridges, roads, weights and measures, tolerance….
Charles was nearly as ascetic as any stylite, wearing one uniform until it was bloody rag and then changing to a new one, eating the soldier’s gruel, sleeping on the ground in a Russian winter, and so on. He was usually at the front in combat and that is where he was killed in a meaningless skirmish with Danes. In these ways he led by example. But he had none of Napoleon’s charm in dealing with the rank and file. He remembered no names, handed out no medals, did not promote individuals for special contributions, offered no pensions, seldom even acknowledged the men as more than tin soldiers.
In sum, it remains a mystery to me why Swedes put up with this self-destructive man who was willing to take the whole Swedish people with him to the grave.
GoodReads meta-data is 110 pages, rated 3.96 by 324 litizens.
Genre: Biography (sort of).
Verdict: Wash your hands and fasten your seatbelts.
Ignaz Semmelweis
Hands up if you know Semmelweis (1818–1865)! He is the man who explained why we should wash our hands. His assiduous research into morbidly rates in maternity hospitals in Vienna led him to the conclusion that infections were transmitted by the hands of the doctors from one patient to another. From that finding he advocated hand washing and more hand washing. On that subject more in a minute, but first a few words about the book.
The Life and Works of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was an eighty-page thesis submitted to meet the requirements of the medical degree Céline earned. But there is nothing thesis-like about it. An indication of its tone and style hits the reader in the first lines: ‘Mirabeau howled so loudly that Versailles was frightened. Not since the Fall of the Roman Empire had such a tempest come crashing down upon men…. ‘ This opening passage goes on the characterise the French Revolution as a carnival of blood. Only three chapters later does Semmelweis appear, well, first his mother appears.
To return to the story, for that hand-washing advocacy Semmelweis was shunned, ridiculed, demoted, demonised, exiled, and finally driven mad; in the latter state he took his own life by the very infection he had identified.
Members of the obstetrics profession had long been resigned to high mortality in pregnant women, and accepted it. According to this upstart Semmelweis, doctors themselves caused these deaths! Ridiculous! Moreover, hand washing was undignified! Hmmph!
The fact that women who gave birth at home, or even on the street, had lower death rates than those who gave birth in all modern-conveniences maternity hospitals was written off as false news.
John Stuart Mill once opined that if the laws of geometry annoyed Republicans they would immediately declare them false. (He may not have mentioned Republicans but I got the hint.) Semmelweis’s intrusion upset a very elaborate and complacent medical establishment and the reaction was to shoot, stab, garrotte, strangle, quarter, and bludgeon the messenger.
In Paris, Prague, Berlin, and London as well as Vienna the medical profession united against this tiresome interloper and his pages and pages of data. In truth he was an easy man to reject, being rude and crude; he was quite unwilling to proceed by half-measures. It was all or nothing for him with the result that it was nothing. On more that one occasion he barged in the office of a hospital director and berated him about hand washing. Likewise he burst into wards when doctors were doing the rounds and berated them in front of patients and students. The Austrian emperor at one point exiled him because of these disruptive antics.
N.B. Semmelweis worked from aggregate data and there is nary a mention of a microscope observing little critters. That came later. What he had was a mass of data that showed a correlation between no hand washing and death. Reason and evidence are feeble assailants of the fortress of conventional wisdom and it took forty years for Semmelweis to be vindicated, and countless thousands of maternal deaths that soap and water would have prevented.
All of the above can be gleaned from the Wikipedia entry. And it bears little resemblance to the book at hand by one of the most remarkable figures in French literature: Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (1894-1961) who used the nom de plume Céline. He was invalided out of the Army in 1915 with a wound at Ypres. Later he took a job with the League of Nations in Francophone Africa where he travelled extensively. Upon returning to France he trained as medical doctor and laboured in the working class districts of Paris where he was seldom paid. At the time he was a rabid communist only later to because an equally rabid fascist (and energetic anti-Semite) during the war years. He could be as rude and crude as Semmelweis.
Dr Destouches
His most famous novel was Journey to the End of Night (1932) about his observations in Africa, followed by Death on Credit (1936) about working class life and death in the slums of Paris. He wrote in the argot of the people he chronicled and not the stylised prose of the Academy and was thus reviled by the literary establishment for generations. These establishment gatekeepers are now gone and forgotten, while Céline is still in print.
Declaration of interest: One of the first reading assignments I had in graduate school concerned Semmelweis and his empirical data. That is all I can remember but the name stuck because of the association with hand washing.
GoodReads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 2.73 by 11 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
Verdict: Not found.
Declaration: I read only the Kindle sample.
We have been to Doris Duke’s (1912–1993) home — Shangri-la — three times, and found it interesting, impressive, intriguing, innovative, and more. The accounts of the guides and the handouts tell visitors a little about the reclusive DD, but not very much.
When I went looking for more information after our last visit I came across a reference to this forthcoming title, so I signed on for the Kindle sample when it was published. In due course it popped up on the screen.
Well, the sample includes the first two chapters which I read to the end. I am none the wiser about DD. The chapters I read have neither rhyme nor reason but dart back and forth with the breathlessness of a confused thriller writer. There is no orderly or organised examination of her origins, nature, nurture, growth, and….
Even that soft touch, GoodReads, has some stingers about the ‘shambles’ the book is and the endless ‘fluff’ and ‘distractions’ that pad it out. Two chapters was more than enough for me to press Delete.
This title was published by a very major New York City publisher from which fact draw your own conclusions, Reader. Bingham has published many short stories and other fiction.
Here’s what I already knew: Mr Duke make money from cigarettes, so much that he founded the eponymous university, Doris was the only child and a fabulously rich heiress who built on Oahu a spectacular all-modern-conveniences house, which has an Arabic water garden and pavilion. She filled the house with with Islamic decorative art. During its construction in the 1930s the film Lost Horizons (based on James Hilton’s novel) was current and the builders nicknamed the building Shangri-la; she liked that. Tall, elegant, and rich, this is one of the places where she went for solitude, hiding from the predators.
In addition to the buildings and the art work, there are also videos of its construction and some of her activities there. She was a very serious collector and the property also houses an archive documenting and authenticating the collection. She willed it all to the state of Hawaii to preserve and make public with an endowment of one billion dollars.
There are entries on Wikipedia that offer a more general account of the Dukes.
GoodReads meta-data is 180 pages, rated 3.71 by 1376 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Midsomeresque.
Contemporary outsized, lumpy vicar Annabel Dixon cannot resist a mystery in picturesque England today. When Sir John Many Pounds buys a mansion in the woods she sets off to snoop, and welcome him to Upton Saint Mary in Cornwall. No sooner does she arrive at the mansion than Sir is shot dead with a crossbow arrow. (Turns out everyone in rural England is a dab hand at a crossbow.)
When not salivating over men in uniform, Vicar finds clues and then Plod arrests the most likely suspect and repeatedly ask him to confess which he does. End.
I liked the rural setting, the jolly Vicar (though not her constant swooning over men in blue), the village gossips, the cup cakes, and the cat, aptly named Biscuit, but not the plot. Do English courts really send blonde, blue-eyed, attractive, youthful men and women to prison for pilfering, when there are so many immigrants to slam-up. Do not the fairest of them all get off with words of warning, while the immigrants do porridge?
Alison Golden
Do suspects confess when asked nicely to do so? Are there no lawyers in rustic England? This is the first of series.
IMDb meta-data is: broadcast on 19 September 1964 for 52 minutes, rated 7.9 by 426 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: Meow!
This IMDb summary leaves out the best part: A soldier from the far future is accidentally teleported through time back to 1964. The psychiatrist assigned to examine the soldier realizes that he has been bred purely as a killing machine, but tries to reawaken the warrior’s humanity. Meanwhile, a second soldier arrives, dedicated to hunting and killing his enemy. Yada, yada…
There is an opening scene on a vast no man’s land, potted with shell holes, mangled trees, laser blasted rocks, and a miasma hangs over it all as Cochise in body armour with a visored helmet creeps from shelter to cover.
Just as Cochise closes in to kill Enemy in single combat, the two of them trip over a script and are hurled back in time 1800 years to era of the Yankee Dynasty in MLB. Poor saps. Once there an emeritus Mike Shayne sets about boring Cochise back to his lost humanity. There is marvellous scene when the suspicious Cochise, who thinks he has been taken prisoner by a clever and deceitful enemy disguised as an inept pensioner, sees a house cat and tries to communicate with it to escape these fiendish do-gooders. This, however, is not a battle cat and scoots to the bowl.
Mike Shayne feels very smug in rekindling Cochise’s suppressed humanity with psycho-babble, right up until Enemy from that no man’s land arrives in his living room! Human or automaton, a stereotype has got to do what a stereotype has got to do.
After seeing this episode, no cat will ever look the same. I watched it again recently when I found it, after some searching, on Daily Motion, where finding anything happens by chance.
GoodReads meta-data is 292 pages, rated 3.71 by 1399 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Elik (Elle + IKEA).
The setting is grand but underdeveloped in preference to descriptions of the clothes worn by everyone who passes over the page and even more detailed descriptions of furnishings and fittings of homes, offices, and elevators, but strangely — mercifully — not cars. All of that pointless detail puffs up the book far beyond plot or character.
The plot is good, too: all those items in storage a museum never has occasion to display are tempting for a thief with inside assistance who plays a long game.
But do people repeatedly tell others they have something of the utmost importance to tell them…next Friday at 3 pm. Or do they just blurt it out; do they just tell them right now! That starts it off on the wrong credibility foot and it stays that way.
An enormous red herring is so conspicuous that he could not possibly be guilty. Near the beginning there is a nice but underdeveloped incident in the First Ladies exhibit. I like some of the coming and going in DC but there is little of it. There is a distracting sidebar about a nutter claiming to be James Smithson’s heir. It adds nothing to the plot, ambience, or character. Though it does remind us that not all the idiots are in the White House.
This title is one of a series by Truman, daughter of Harry, set in D.C. For example, Murder at ….the Library of Congress, National Gallery, National Cathedral, Pentagon, Kennedy Center, Washington Tribune, and Ford’s Theatre.
GoodReads meta-data is 364 pages, rated 4.19 by 17465 litizens.
Genre: Chick Lit.
Verdict: Flip, flip go the pages.
The narrative arch is a mystery that keeps interest for a while, but the litany of drunks, hangovers, casual sex, and more of the aforementioned soon wore thin. Knit one, purl one, repeat. Fascinating. Not.
The locale offered some interest but on the page it always took second place to the drink and sex.
Our heroine is given a shop in picturesque Cockleberry by an anonymous benefactor. That is the overarching mystery. Who is the giver and why? The shop has been derelict five years (and that gap is never explained within my attention span). What will our hapless heroine make of it? (Since we know it is the first of a series, success of some kind is guaranteed.)
Without a shred of self-discipline, numeracy, or much else Heroine makes the shop a success and discovers some true(r) love. She also discovers who her benefactor is. My discovery was why some chick lit is not for me.
Nicola May
It is the first (and for me last) in a series set in picturesque Devon. The author published this first volume herself and has since made quite a success of the series. So be it.
I seem to recall I went down that way once by train to a PSA conference in Exeter in 1980. The Veil of Ignorance is drawn over any details.
GoodReads meta-data is 208 pages (it seemed like a lot more), rated 3.96 by 120 relatives of the publisher.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: slow and steady and slow.
Romanian public intellectual journalist muses on life, and death when late one afternoon with a colossal hangover he finds a dead body has disordered the books in his study – the library of the title. He vaguely recognised the victim as a passing acquaintance. What to do?
In his befuddled state he concludes that hiding the body in the cellar of the apartment building makes more sense than calling the militia (police). Sure he is a 98-pound weakling intellectual, lugging around a deadman in the dark of night is the safer option in a ruthless totalitarian state governed by a demon in a necktie.
Does it have to be said? None of that goes well.
He sets out then to resolve the mystery to make sure he is innocent, because all that pálinka the night before has undermined his confidence. The fraternity brothers have ordered a case of the stuff to see if it beats Romulean blue ale.
He romances a duchess who lives in a deuce palace with her father who disapproves of this slovenly journalist. She and he have enough misunderstandings to quality the title as Chick Lit.
After a while this hack realises someone is systematically plotting to bring him to ruin. He consults the list of people who hate him compiled in the telephone book, and settles on a likely prospect, a chicken farmer whom the journalist tried in the court of pubic opinion some years ago.
He gathers the principals in a room, and…..
Nit picking note: the dead man was not killed in the library, ergo there was no attack in the library. And as noted above a study with bookshelves does not a library make. A library has to have librarians, as well as books.
While it is set in Red Bucharest it is largely bleached of references either to communism or the regime. How such an all enveloping miasma can be filtered out is itself a wonder. After all, it was published in Romania by a regime that left nothing to chance. By the way, the femme fatale is not in fact a duchess but she lives like one and that is why he calls her that. Indeed how did anyone live like that in Romania in 1983?
George Arion with pipe.
This is the first in a series involving our hero, one Mladin, Andrei. In 2018 Arion was still publishing a book a year. Strength to his arm, but no more for me.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 2 minutes, rated 5.9 by 290 cinematizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Woof!
The dogs have been replaced by the design of a warplane, but much else is word-for-word of The Kennel Murder Case (1933). In recognition of its original two dogs feature in this version.
After twice-over befuddling the inept secret police of an unnamed foreign power Philo (autocorrect insists that he is ‘Photo,’ regrettably we know better), Philo returns to the Big Apple to thwart the nation’s Republican enemies on home soil.
While in the European power’s inner sanctum he had learned that the plans of a top hush Yankee warplane were already on file there. How did they get there? Can we close the barn door now that Pegasus has bolted? ‘Do we care,’ chorussed the fraternity brothers on the way to the beer refrigerator in a well-worn path?
This rather brash and energetic incarnation of Philo inserts himself into the household of the aircraft owner and designer only to find him dead – three times over. He was clubbed, stabbed, and shot. This is a man with enemies. Was he a dean?
Suspicion falls with a thud on the victim’s errant brother who is nowhere to be found until, thanks to one of the dogs, someone opens the hall closet. Thump. Body number two.
Not to worry, Philo sorts through it all. The jilted girlfriend, the grasping sister, the fiancée, the ever-present butler, the next door neighbour and her dog, his own dog, his buffoon sidekick who is stuck with some terrible lines but mans-up for them, and others now forgotten.
In the great tradition, the least likely suspect did it as revealed in a final punch-up.
Among the cognoscenti there are those that claim to prefer the 1933 original in which Philo was played by William Powell, who finally learned his lesson and never did that again. Me, I am agnostic on this important question, at least until I can watch The Kennel Murder Case (1933) again. N.B. I tried reading it and found it so mannered, laboured, forced, and fey that I stopped when the Kindle sample ended, leaving me a wiser and happier man.
