Michael W Jackson – Page 55 – Political theory and practice

The Line (2018) by Martin Limón

GoodReads meta-data is 385 pages, rated 3.84 by 83 litizens.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Too much shoot ‘em up, not enough think ‘em up.

Time: 1970s. Place: South Korea.

The US Eighth Army had about 60,000 personnel in South Korea at the time. So many people, so many of them bored, all of them with access to American goods at wholesale prices while across the street from each camp was a thriving blackmarket. Result, a lot of low level crime. Buy the whiskey, cigarettes, radios, washing machines cheap on the base; cross the street and sell them for a profit. Illegal but profitable.

Then again put 60,000 people together in small spaces leading regimented lives, and friction results. Crimes against persons follow. Then add the money in blackmarket transactions and the felony fires flicker.

By the terms of the alliance with South Korea, the Eighth Army polices itself with a Criminal Investigation Division, of which Sergeants George Sueño and Ernie Bascom are two investigators. They are both lifers and have been doing it a long time.* (This is the thirteen title in the series.) Their names and ways are known.

Both North Korea and South Korea are armed and dangerous. The piracy of the USS Pueblo in 1968 with the subsequent murder of one crewman in captivity, the crippling of two others, and the beating the rest into putty, is fresh in everyone’s mind. Ergo there are a lot of angry GIs who want revenge or at least who will make sure they are not next for the cement mixer.

The air along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) sizzles with tension. Talk about a misnomer, there was then no place on earth so militarised with a million armed men on each side of the line, many of them straining at the bit. It got worse when new North Korea artillery brought Seoul within range.

Bad as all that is, it is worse still in the Joint Security Area, that bubble inside the DMZ where those Blue Huts are with a Military Demarcation Line (MDL) dividing them in half.

JSA is an assignment no grunt wants because it is THE tripwire that (and all who dwell there) would be the first to go. Poof! In principle both sides have free movement within this small area, in practice everyone moves slowly and every move is watched with angry eyes.

Late one night Sueño and Bascom are roused from their cots in Seoul and ordered north to the JSA where they find the Lieutenant-Colonel in charge of the night shift standing guard over a dead body, that of a ROK soldier assigned to the JSA. Ten feet away stand a squad of NKs with AK-47s in ready. The corpse is sprawled over the MDL within the DMZ at JSA in the ROK. OK? The Chicken Colonel orders Sueño and Bascom to pull the body back to his side, while the NKs get twitchy. Sueño and Bascom do as ordered and begin their investigation into the murder of No-Go, as his friends called him, a ROK grunt who did warehouse duty in JSA.

What was No-Go doing in the middle of the night at the MDL? He should have been abed many yards away. Moreover, who split his skull with an entrenching tool?

The easy answer to the last question is the NKs. But why? They’ll do anything! Wait! If the NKs wanted him dead, they would have shot him. Period. No that answer is too pat, though some in the Eighth see it as another Pueblo incident. Meanwhile, life goes on, that is, crime goes on, and Sueñp and Bascom have other investigations to pursue.

They get mixed signals about continuing to investigate No-Go’s murder, but as always Sueño never knows when to quit, and Bascom goes along for the ride. Then the Eighth settles on No-Go’s buddy PFC Fusterman as the guilty party and begins to railroad him to clear the air. Convicting Fusterman will defuse tensions is the thinking of some. Others suppose the opposite, giving in the NKs a pass on this one will encourage other incidents. Back and forth goes the seesaw that Sueño and Bascom ride. It is pure McKinsey management pushing responsibility down to the lowest level, so when things go wrong the blame falls on those who have no choice in the matter.

It gets more complicated (too complicated for this reader) when a criminal gang horns into the plot. Sueño and Bascom drink a little less alcohol and bed fewer passers-by in this outing than in the earlier titles, but they still get beat up and shot at enough to get re-accredited as cartoon heroes. All that leaves this reader cold. As does Sueño’s repeated hormone attacks. Really Sueño zip it up for a while.

What is fascinating is the ways and means of investigating within the interstices of the Eighth Army. There is always a paper trail if one knows where to look and whom to ask, even when the perpetrator has tried to erase it, there are all those copies in triplicate times triplicate, and these two lifers can follow these snail trails. They know a lot of other lifer sergeants with whom to trade information. The sergeants’ network holds many an army together.

Further, Sueño has learned to speak Korean and his interactions with the locals are very well realised. He may be a ‘big nose’ but he knows and respects the ways of Koreans. No-Go had a family and Bascom and Sueño find out a lot through them. Fusterman had a family, too, and its members send a lawyer to defend him in the Court Martial. While feisty, she is an underdeveloped character in this telling, too easily misled while loudly proclaiming her savvy and contributing nothing to the story. Don’t blame her, she is written that way.

Inspector Kill and Officer Oh from the Korean National Police put in a welcome appearance. Kill is a dedicated man but he takes orders, and Oh remains enigmatic but a good friend to have in a tight corner. These two like nothing better than slamming up villains of any kind and sometimes it suits them to work through Sueño and Bascom.

Then there is the climatic firefight in the JSA which seemed gratuitous in the context of softly-softly, though it was noteworthy that one of the weapon wielders on the Sergeants’ side was a woman MP whose quick wit prevented a further disaster. The madness of Colonel Peel, another officer in the mix, is, well, madness. Though there is an implied complexity in the NK officer Kwon that might have been better brought to the surface when to save his family he refused to defect.

By the way, the fiction then as now is that the JSA is administered by the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission, consisting of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland. Neutral? As if. These representatives are seldom seen and never heard.

Grant Limón license, because many strange things have happened in the unique place that is the JSA.

There is a superb Korean film, much more low key than this book, called ‘Joint Security Area’ (2000).

We saw it after we visited the JSA in 2004, and even in 2004 when things were not as tense as in the 1970s, the JSA crackled. At the time I was visiting professor at Korea University.

*Lifer means someone in for the maximum enlistment of twenty years. Not quite literally life but it most feel like is sometime.

I’m Sorry I am Late (I Didn’t Want to Come (2019) by Jessica Pan

GoodReads meta-data is 383 pages and it is rated 4.06 by 1246 litizens.

Genre: Chick Non-fic

Verdict: A cackle! Then a bore.

Executive Summary: Dedicated introvert bites the bagel and tries to live as an extrovert for one year. Disasters follow.

Long Summary: Self-diagnosed Shintrovert* (shy + introvert) goes all out to be a self-confident extrovert and talk to anyone and everyone on the street, on the bus, in the supermarket, in London. London! That was bound to fail. Luckily she was not charged with numerous violations of civil code of mutual indifference that rules Britannia.

The phrase in the title ‘Sorry I’m late, I didn’t want to come’ is her main social gambit. Maybe that explains a few things right there. She seeks professional help from a variety of consultants, while using friend apps. Do such things exist? Yes, they do. Both the consultants and the apps are real.

The social media apps match isolated loners with other isolated loners, although neither of them admits to it, with a view to a meeting. Some of these meetings consist of awkward silences, others are trips to a film where nothing can be said. Progress on extroversion scale: 0.

The consultants are varied, one teaches her to be charismatic by smiling, nodding, and offering a firm handshake. Was that Hitler’s method? Gandhi’s? Now we know. Others heckle her to thicken the social skin. Both get paid. Another listens to her talk and then gets paid. [No comment.]

She also reads the abstracts of social psychology journals to lard footnotes through the pages. Cargo cult: If is is in print, then it must be true, right? Check out Pox News for the latest on that.

I did keep flicking the pages but it got so-o-o-o repetitive. It is like far too many clever pieces published in the New Yorker magazine that are then puffed up into a book. Emphasis on puff. At sixty pages it was an amusing ride, at 383 (!) it was as tedious as a continuous family get together for Thanksgiving that lasted a year (with no survivors.) It went on and on for no other reason than to go on and on than to tear pages off the calendar.

Alright already, I know that many readers take it seriously as a psychological self-help guide, but you don’t have to be sick to laugh out loud, and I did. As usual the legion of GoodReads reviews are therapy for the writers and uninformative for the reader. Par for that course.

*Shouldn’t that then be ‘shy-introvert?’Autocorrect objects to both versions so nothing to choose there.

Fear in the Night (1947)

IMDb meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 12 minutes, rated 6.4 by 1192 cinematizens. (I do worry about some cinematizens when I see ratings like this.)

Genre: noir

Verdict: Oh hum.

In his first feature film a rake-thin Dr Leonard McCoy has a bad dream and tells the world about it, repeatedly. His Georgia origins are pronounced. (Get it?) He was born Jackson DeForest Kelley. Can you believe any parents would do that?

The dream opens proceedings and it is very well done, with spinning and shadows. In it there is a femme fatale, to be sure, and man bent over a safe in conservatory with four mirrored doors.

A robotic, and so perfectly cast, McCoy emerges from behind one door while the couple are intent on the safe behind another door, and he stabs the man to death while the femme scoots.

He then wakes upon a sweat, and begins to blab, while striving not to blab, he blabs to his brother-in-law of the chiselled chin (Paul Kelly) who laughs it off, slaps him around to straighten him out, and finally begins to think something might have happened. Chin is a copper and he has his ways of finding out things, namely, a slap on the chops. After the pair of them with their wife and girlfriend, respectively, just happen to go on a picnic on the grounds the very mansion possessed of a conservatory with four mirrored doors. Small world.

Sidebar: By now the fraternity brothers had passed out from boredom and beer in equal measure.

Thereafter Kelley and Kelly are on the case. McCoy cries, faints, trembles, and is useless, while Chisel-chin does all the running, thumping, and shooting. As we Noiristas realised from the second act, the harmless little man next door was an evil genius who had hypnotised weak-minded McCoy into hiding in the conservatory closet to surprise the safe cracker and moll.

The moll was Harmless’s wife who was going to run off with the cracksman after he cleaned out Harmless’s safe. Not nice to be sure.

Turns out robot McCoy had no responsibility because the yegg attacked him when he appeared out of nowhere ergo he acted in self defence. Sure, tell that to the judge, which he did. The end.

The dream sequence at the beginning derives from ‘Spellbound’ (1945) and anticipated later imitations. In this outing it lacks the gravitas imparted by Alfred Hitchcock who added doses of Salvador Dali hyper-reality to it in ‘Vertigo’ (1958). Strangely ‘Fear in the Dark’ is not included on the IMDb list of more than a thousand films with a dream sequence, but it does index many Donald Duck cartoons. Did A.I. compile that list?

One of the reviews attached to the IMDb entry – Film Noir of the Week – goes on and on for about 3000 words interpreting the film as a homosexual love story between Chisel-chin and trembling McCoy. Believe it, Ripley! I watched a different movie.

McCoy had just come out of the army and was branching out from his pre-war career as a radio singer. (!) His acting peaked in this outing, though he had a career as a villain in westerns on television before The United Federation of Planets was desperate enough to draft him. He remained robotic.

Jan Morris, Trieste (and the Meaning of Nowhere) (2002).

GoodReads meta-data is 208 pages, rated 3.98 by 116 litizens.

Genre: Travel

Verdict: languid and insightful.

Morris first set eyes on Trieste in 1946 as a soldier in the British Army, then near to fifty years later Morris returned.

When Trieste had been in the Austro-Hungarian Empire for nearly a century it was the port of Venice at a time when the Hapsburgs, at the height of their powers, developed maritime ambitions in the Adriatic. To link it to the capital, all-weather roads and railways were built over the mountains while the harbour was dredged, and made modern. Vienna was the seat of a vast empire and home of a royal house that had once extended from the Carpathian mountains to the Pacific Coast of Mexico. It was rivalled only to London and Paris as a world capital at its peak, and Trieste was its nautical doorway for those years.

Trieste only became Italian by dint of others, and like its neighbour, Venice, it has never felt itself to be Italian, but rather a world of its own with its own language, mōres, and manners. And that is what it was in 1946 when a callow Morris arrived with the 2nd New Zealand Division, to a Free City under the aegis of the United Nations, while national borders were resolved in the jig-saw puzzle of the post-war Balkans. Both Italy and Yugoslavia advanced claims for it, both for the same reason: as a buffer against the other, i.e., neither wanted it for itself. While those tensions played out the city was divided and occupied as Vienna was for a time. In Trieste it was Kiwis on one side and Jugs on the other for a time in an uneasy fait accompli.

Berlin was divided and occupied and so important no one would yield a centimetre thereby spawning a vast culture of art and literature about that long-divided city. Vienna was divided and occupied for a time and Graham Greene immortalised it in ‘The Third Man.’ Trieste was divided and occupied and no one noticed, not even many Triestinos.

Today Trieste is in if not of Italy, but the city lies within a few kilometres from the successors of Yugoslavia, Slovenia and Croatia, once the hinterlands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As the guns of August unlimbered in 1914, it was through the port of Trieste that the remains of the slain Archduke passed on the way to Vienna.

But to revert, at the end of World War I Italy got title to Trieste as a spoil of war for being on the winning side after the blood bath at nearby Caporetto with the result that the city lost its raison d’état for it was then shorn of its hinterland and the capital it had been developed to serve, namely Vienna. No longer glowing in the reflected glory of Viennese art, culture, literature, music, power, or commerce, Trieste fell into the torpor of a melancholy lassitude where it was content to remain far from any beaten path.

Proof of its irrelevance is that it was all but untouched in World War II, not being important enough for anyone to bomb it to smithereens, and when Italy changed sides in August 1943 neither partisans nor fascists bothered much with Trieste, since it had offered no material, strategic, or symbolic advantage. Ergo there was no rush to get there and fight over it. However it bears scars of that war in another way, as the locale of a Nazi charnel house at San Sabba.

In the parade of names of Triestinos only Italo Svevo meant anything to me and that was very little, as the author of ‘The Conscience of Zeno.’ By the way ‘Italo Svevo’ is a pseudonym for Aron Schmitz.

Marie-Henri Beyle (Stendhal) served as French Consul there. While his most famous novel is Le Rouge and le Noir, for my money far more interesting is the one set in Italy, namely La Chartreuse de Parme. Though he preferred cosmopolitan Milano to the backwater of Trieste.

James Joyce spent much time there pencilling his incomprehensible Ulysses, which Morris by-passes ever so delicately.

Illy coffee stems from here where the family remains. We have been loyal imbibers of Illy for many a year in its red, blue, and pink banners.

Much of the book is Morris musing on life, and it is so well done that I, curmudgeon first class that I am, have no complaints. Indeed I hope to read more of Morris’s books in due course for sheer pleasure of the effortless prose.

Effortless to read, but no doubt it takes quite an effort to achieve that.

There is a story of an aspiring young writer visiting Anatole France, famed for his elegant yet simple prose in many novels. The ingenue was shown into the master’s study where France was at work surrounded by a mass of pages, doodles, crumpled-up balls of paper, pages of cross-out done with such vigour as to tear the paper, and more discarded pages overflowing the bin. Seeing the eyes of the would-be acolyte noting the mess, France said, ‘this writing, it is not so easy as it looks when it is done.’

We spent four nights in Trieste in 2019 and enjoyed it. I noticed several posters called for a Free State of Trieste.

Ruth Downie, Prima Facie (2019)

Goodreads meta-data is 119 pages, rated 4.51 by 101 litizens

Genre: krimi, period piece

Verdict: Ruso and Tilla are at it again.

By some mischance Ruso and Tilla have taken up residence in Gaul on his brother’s farm, while the latter is away. What Ruso knows about farming is zero. So he tries to look thoughtful when the foreman seeks his decisions. Meanwhile, he tries to make peace among his many quarrelling siblings, in-laws, relatives, and visitors. He means well but seldom succeeds. Tilla tries to be a good Roman wife and shut up, but she is not good at that either.

Then Ruso’s younger sister has an illicit boyfriend who seems to have murdered his employer. After much avuncular tsk, tsk, tsking, he hopes to let the law take its course. Not so his sister who throws herself into the defence of her beau and Ruso must extricate her, and the best way to do that is to find the real killer. He means well but seldom succeeds at this either.

Enter Tilla who is much better at getting people to talk to her, partly because she is such a foreign specimen no one takes her seriously – big mistake.

This title is an entry in Downie’s Medicus series. Much I sympathise with Ruso and love Tilla, I fear that the author is running out of steam.

The War of the Worlds Murder (2005) by Max Allan Collins.

Goodreads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.71 by 276 litizens.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Fun but flabby

When CBS executives pressured Orson Welles to reduce the verisimilitude of the script for the Halloween broadcast in 1938, his standard defence was that no one would be stupid enough to think it real. Ah, he should have paid more attention to P. T. Barnum. There is always someone that stupid with many friends, just look at the White House today.

In 1938 Welles was an infant terrible of twenty-three years already with a string of theatrical triumphs behind him. While he was a creative genius, as well he knew, he needed help and founded the Mercury Theatre with John Houseman to produce his genius. Yes, that John Houseman.

Welles never did one thing at a time; while he continued to stage dramas for the Mercury Theatre on Broadway, he also branched out with the Mercury Theatre of the Air, while simultaneously writing scripts for movies. If he had fewer than three separate and independent projects to work on in a day, he became bored.

Welles own career in radio started with that voice as the caped avenger in ‘The Shadow,’ who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men, rivalling Santa Claus in contravening of the NSW Privacy Laws. To return to this yarn Welles is hatching a new project and he brings into the tent the writer of ‘The Shadow’ stories from earlier years, Walter Gibson, who is the narrator thereafter.

Gibson is no ingénue but even he is swept up in the profligate and prodigious energy that Welles exudes, and — since all expenses are paid — he goes along for the ride. He enters just as the Mercury Theatre of the Air is rehearsing for The War of the Worlds. It is fascinating to read of the organised chaos that produced live-to-air radio in 1938. While on air and in role before the microphone Welles scribbles new lines for the other players to whom he hands them.

Genius he may be, but that most levelheaded of men, Houseman, knows Welles is riding for fall, and he tries to reign Welles in, again and again. Ditto the CBS executive who delivers the budget, but who also wants to curb the enthusiasms of the Wunderkind least the corporate goodwill evaporate taking the money with it. Gibson observes all of this with wry detachment.

The Welles that emerges in these pages conforms to the general impression. Genius, yes, without a doubt, charming and charismatic to get his way. But also he can be crude, rude, and arrogant by turns. And ever theatrical in appearance, tone, and movement. He could turn the taps on for love or hate with equal ease and switch between them in a breath, because he did not mean any of it. Not so much that he was insincere, as like an Olympian god, he was indifferent to the matters of mere mortals. (What a comeuppance then to spend all those later years pitching for Findus frozen peas and Paul Masson wine in television advertisements. These make painful viewing on You Tube. How low the Olympian fell before the long arc of justice.)

Every time Houseman forced a compromise on him after much resistance and rancour, Welles would give in with lavish good grace, and promptly undermine the agreement. To give an example, if CBS insisted that no real names be used. He made up names that in the script did not look like real names but when said with certain inflections — which he coached the actors to do — sounded like real names of people or places. When CBS said the script cannot have a simulated President Roosevelt speaking, after hours of angry resistance, Welles conceded by substituting a Secretary of the Interior. He then cast as the Secretary an actor famous for his perfect impersonation of FDR. And so on.

So Houseman decided to teach Welles a lesson he would not forget – SPOILER ALERT — by framing him for murder! As an accomplished producer Houseman knows everything about staging and with the help of a woman scorned he fakes a murder scene with Welles’s name written all over it – literally, for Welles to find a few hours before the ‘The War of the Worlds Broadcast.’ That’ll tame him was Houseman’s hope. A subdued Welles could then be guided to moderate the realism of the upcoming broadcast, thought Houseman.

Yes the frame-up did stun Welles, but the show must go on and, if anything, the spectre of the murder fired him to make even greater effort in the broadcast. Houseman had underestimated his man.

I said ‘flabby’ above because I found the pages padded with endless and pointless descriptions of clothes, decor, food, and the appearance of players who walk across the page. Buried in this verbiage is short story that is a corker, notwithstanding the fact there is almost no investigation, no psychological depth, just an elaborate prank within an even more elaborate prank. But the evocation of radio drama was fascinating and I intend to listen to a few from Audible, starting with ‘The Shadow!’ On a similar note I read years ago, and have dredged up the reference thanks to the app Book Collector, John Dunning, Two O’Clock Eastern Wartime (2001). It too evokes the magic of radio in 1942.

A number of other items related to Welles’s ‘The War of the Worlds’ broadcast have been discussed on the blog, including Ed Murrow’s documentary on it and Hadley Cantril’s study The Invasion from Mars (1940). Seek and ye may find.

It turns out there were plenty of people dumb enough to believe that invasion story, despite the station breaks, the newspaper advertisements, the fabricated place names, the incorrect terminology, the elapsed time, and any number of radio-addicted children who recognised the voices of the actors. These people vote, drive cars, and have opinions. Think of that. Look around, they are your neighbours today.

Collins is a writing industry from his Iowa home with a number of series. This one is in a set of so-called Disaster novels, that centre on a real, or in this case imagined, disaster, e.g., the Hindenburg crash, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the London Blitz, or the assassination of Huey Long. In them he mixes real people of the time and place with some fictional ones to stir the pot. He does a great deal of research for the context, but anachronisms still appear, as he admitted in the afterword to this novel. These always jar.

Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman.

Good Reads meta-data is 624 pages, rated 4.1 by 81,342 litizens.

Genre: Poetry

Verdict: Exhilarating!

To say that Whitman’s poetry is exhilarating is just a start. It zips, it dips, it soars, it flies, it ponders, it races in a cascade of verse. About 400 poems are combined in this book, which began as a collection of twelve, and became his life’s work as he revised, edited, amended, and augmented it.

It also departed from the conventions of poetry in its celebration of the immediate, material world and the human body in contrast to the mannered abstraction that prevailed at the time. The verse is blank, by the way, and rhymes are few and far between, and that also made it odd. For its time it was also explicit about sex, and implicit about homosexuality.

No one in the literary establishment would touch it in 1855, as a consequence he printed it himself in the 95-page first edition. (One sold in 2014 for $US 305,000.)

The narrative voice is without a doubt Whitman himself (and sometimes that is explicit in the verse) as he surveys man, woman, child, beast, and nature. He sees himself in all the others and they in himself. When he sings of himself he includes one and all, slave and free, male and female, living and dead, victorious and vanquished, owner and drudge, lilac and rose, dog and cat, vegetable and mineral, high and low, black, white and red, yellow and black, urban and rural, owner and labourer, prostitute and lady, believer and atheist. The tone is ever affirmative, though the later entries, forty years after the first edition, and after his years as an ambulance driver in the Civil War, and after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, shade into melancholia. One of his duties as a driver was carting and burying amputated limbs.

It was denounced from the pulpit, banned in Boston, and burned as obscene. That free publicity increased sales. When reviewers tore into his work, he published these reviews in the following editions of ‘Leaves of Grass.‘ At one point a thousand copies were sold a week for months on end. New printings were invariably new editions as he included more poems and more hostile reviews, and they sold out in a day.

By 1919 it had become a part of the American literary canon though quite how that came about it is a mystery in the vigorously contested Wikipedia entry. Who championed it passes in silence in this wordy but vague entry. But more than one reader puts Whitman in the pantheon with Shakespeare and Dante. Well, this reader does.

These days PhDs earn tenure by finding fault with the poems, with Whitman, with the air he breathed. There are a few sips of this bile in the Wikipedia entry. Confident this reader is that Whitman’s verse will outlive all the spite and spittle of these pygmies.

Quoting lines and passages do not do it justice. It was meant to heard and I listened to it in Audible edition that is superb. Robin Field’s voice is not distracting, the diction follows the cadence of the prose, and brims with energy, as it should.

Below is a list of some of the individual poems:

By Blue Ontario’s Shore,

O Captain! My Captain!

Dalliance with Eagles,

Faces,

From Pent-Up Aching Rivers,

I Sing the Body Electric,

Native Moments,

The Open Road,

The Sleepers,

Song got Myself,

Spontaneous Me,

Song of the Open Road,

To a Common Prostitute,

The Untold Want, and

A Woman Waits for Me.

During World War II it was one of fifty books distributed freely to members of the US Armed Forces and auxiliaries as exemplars of Americana. What would be distributed today? Surely not books, but videos to reflect one hundred and fifty years of free public education in which literacy has declined. Perhaps it would be episodes of ‘Say Yes to the Dress?’ Or a collection of garbled tweets from a twit.

Whitman was fired from his day job by his boss who read a few pages and found it filthy. The grass of the title by the way is in the hand of a child which the narrator says is the handkerchief of the Lord.

Some of the entries on Good Reads reach a new low of self-indulgence, even for that forum, when a one-star rater admits to not reading such filth. Others offer anagrams of the title that reflect their scatological personality. Fatuous as these entries are the authors took the time and trouble to post them. As usual most of the comments are about the commenter and not the alleged subject.

Letter to a Hostage (1944) by Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Goodreads meta-data is 39 pages, rated 3.93 by 594 litizens.

Genre: Musing.

Verdict: A period piece.

Though it celebrates the grit of his comrades in facing the Nazi juggernaut of 1940, the pamphlet was banned in Vichy France because it was dedicated to St Ex’s very good friend and the captain whom he admired, Léon Werth, a Jew. St Ex got out but Werth did not. It takes the form of an extended letter, musing on life that does go on. Ironically St Ex did not survive the war but Werth did. Slight though it may be, St Ex has as always an uncanny knack for finding the le mot just each and every time, some lyrical, and some mournful.

The first draft was to be the preface to Werth’s novel, Trente-trois Jours, about the Defeat and the flight of refugees. But when Werth went into hiding in the Jura, and St Ex escaped to Lisbon where he revised it into a more general reflection on time and place and recast Werth a symbol of all of France.

That is why the Vichy authorities banned it. Treating a Jew as French was bad. Explicitly admiring this Jew for his patriotism was worse. But making him a symbol of FRANCE was intolerable.

As always with St Ex the sky is there, and so is the sand of the Sahara.

Yet even here idiocy is to be found. One reviewer on Amazon says that St Ex ‘fought valiantly to keep France from becoming Socialist at the hands of Charles De Gaulle, and it probably cost him his life.’ Yep. Was that a Tweet from the Twit in Chief? There is no point in trying correct this nonsense, best just to savour it.

Mick Herron, Joe Country (2019)

The meta-data is 352 pages from Amazon, rated 4.5 by five litizens. It is not on GoodReads yet.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Whoosh!

The denizen of Slough House are joined by a new Regent Park cast-off named Lech Wicinski, who had child pornography on his MI5 laptop. How dumb was that! So dumb that only a robot would suppose it true, and once supposed off Lech goes to the endless exile of Slough House, while his girlfriend (tipped off by an anonymous caller) goes ballistic and walks out. Just when it seems things cannot get worse he meets Jackson Lamb. Worse now has a name.

Of course Lamb does not believe anyone is that dumb but he does not care about injustice, as long as it leaves him alone. In another dumb move this injustice bumps into Lamb and he goes to work, as only he can. Though the beautiful Emma Flyte, briefly head dog at the Park, refuses reassignment to Slough House after falling afoul of the very malevolent Diana Taverner on the First Desk, she pitches in when Slough House denizen Louisa Guy (even more unstable than usual) sets off for Wales in deep winter, while Catherine Standish, sober for now, tries to corral Jackson Lamb with no success. Situation normal.

The meta-data does not lie. There are 352 pages but they flew by.

The office politics that Lady Di gets up to are straight out of McKinsey, and the absolute depravity of her political masters would make Pox News executives envious, the contract thugs loose in Wales are there to murder a child who saw something (though I was never quite sure what) and it is all in a day’s work for them. Bien sûr, Taverner was not so stupid as to believe Lech had pornography on his lap top but she exiled him faire encourager les autres. While whoever planted the material on his laptop may be a security threat, she is more interested in using the incident to terrorise subordinates into even more slavish obedience than fixing the leak. To fix it would mean revealing that the leak occurred on her watch. Lady Di does not admit to errors! With priorities like that is it any wonder she has risen to the top in the world where managers manage per McKinsey?

As usual there are thrills and spills with the Slow Horses from Slough House. Emma gets her pretty face shot off, Lech was not cut out to be a field agent and gets cut to pieces, Cartwright survives to keep feeling sorry for himself, Louisa likewise is surprised to be alive along with the intended victim, Catherine is even more tedious sober than when drunk, and Jackson Lamb could not care less as long as the world leaves him alone.

Meanwhile, back at Regent’s Park, Lady Di plans her next move up the greasy pole, enumerating the heads she will step on to get there. She is always sure the enemies are inside the tent, not outside. Meanwhile, the German plant in the Park who engineered the distracting pornography remains in place undetected. That plant may be a threat to national security but it is no threat to Lady Di – so all is good at the First Desk.

Helen Tursten, Night Rounds (2012)

Goodreads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 3.78 by 2817 litizens.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: meticiulous

Inspector Irene Huss is on the job after a nurse is murdered in a private hospital. This is the second instalment in the series following ‘Detective Inspector’ Huss (2004). As the police go to work the staff of the hospital, its owners, the medical consultants, patients and their visitors are questioned, and the interstices of the nineteenth century building are examined. Tursten knows this world well from her earlier career as a nurse.

What follow is a police procedural rich in the locale both the city of Göteborg and of the hospital. Its principal owner is the surgeon in chief, who has a trophy wife and the debts to prove it. It is February and the freezing rain becomes a pivotal character in the plot. When the temperature rises to freezing, it is cause for smiles, but when it rains and then freezes again, there are no more smiles but plenty of black ice.

There is a split among the nurses, some have been working at this hospital since it was owned by the surgeon’s father, and others are twenty year old contractors who come and go. The old guard nurses are loyal to the past, including its ghost, and the contractors just want to get paid. Ghosts or not, there are some haunted characters in this hospital of Otranto.

Even as Huss and the team investigate more murderers occur that may be related or may not. Along the way we see street people who have long since become non-persons to the social services, some faked qualifications that no one has the time or interest to check, and Huss herself is so preoccupied with things at home (two teenage children, a dog, and a husband in that order of priority) that she makes mistakes.

While her immediate superior tries hard, his roots are in the old school when women made the coffee and they show through, but Huss grits her teeth and bears it. Both that such sexism is present and that Huss ignores it, riles some GoodReads reviewers who qualify for the Snow Flake Award. Curiously one such writer condemns the books as easily forgotten and then dwells on this sexism in detail. It seems the writer both forgot the book and remembered it. Take that Aristotle, a thing can be itself and not at the same time. So much for the law of the excluded middle.

I have also read ‘Fire Dance’ (2014) and liked it.