GoodReads meta-data is 252 pages, rated 3.54 by 129 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: flying start, shuddering halt.
MetroPlex Studios begins pre-production work on a film version of Sherlock Holmes’s story The Speckled Band. So far so normal. What is less than normal is that for reasons unknown the studio has hired a screenwriter for the project who loathes the Sherlock Homes stories and is loathed by the Irregulars. He is one Stephen Worth, a vulgar representative of the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction of the gentlemanly Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler. As the fiction gods would have it Worth has an impregnable contract for the job and a clause that prevents the Studio from making the film without his script.
As the protests roll in from the keepers of the Holmes faith, the head of the Studio has a bright idea. He will employ a selection of these Irregulars as technical consultants. Their intrusion might cause Worth to quit, and if not, their intrusion might steer the project to a lee shore. It’s win either way. What can possibly go wrong?
We all know that answer to that closing rhetorical question, now don’t we. ‘Everything,’ in a word.
The five Irregulars whom he brings to California, houses, and hosts squabble among themselves over minutiae of the sacred canon in their competition for acclaim as the one true prophet of Holmes. Worth, the screenwriter nemesis, becomes even more obnoxious — some had thought that was not possible, but they were proven wrong — and determined to see the task through and tells everyone that, right to the moment he stops talking, because, Jim, he is d-e-a-d.
As the wind carries the news of the dissension and then the demise, Studio creditors begin to circle. All of this activity rouses journalists to smell the blood, and they splash headlines which prove that there is such a thing as bad publicity.
A roller coaster ride ensues, as the loyal Maureen tries to manage the situation while the police investigate, as the Irregulars pontificate.
Anthony Boucher
It starts fast and then bogs down into an all-talky drawing room investigation that takes most of the air our of the proceedings.
GoodReads metadata is 435 pages, rated 3.74 by 8858 litizens.
Genre: period krimi.
Verdict: Trying too hard.
Ex-communicate Giordano Bruno of Nola (1548 – 1600) became a peripatetic scholar, staying a few steps ahead of the Inquisition through Italy, Rhineland, Burgundy, Belgium, Nederlands, France, and then England. His travels took him to Oxford in 1583 where he found Lincoln College to be a mares nest of intrigue and backstabbing. So little has changed I shouldn’t wonder. As an enemy of the Pope, he was a welcome visitor to Anglican England, however as a born Catholic he was suspect at the same time.
In seeking refuge in England in these pages, Bruno accepts a commission to work for, that is, spy for Sir Francis Walsingham to ferret out enemies of the realm – Queen Elizabeth I. There are plenty of likely candidates in Oxford. If Bruno will merely keep his eyes open he may discern intelligence of value to Sir Francis. The arrangement suits Bruno for it secures his patronage in England and puts coins in his purse, and all he has to do is observe. Well, he is a scientist at heart, and observing is what he does. All the better to be paid to do so.
That commitment is the thin end of the wedge, and soon enough he is mired in detailed descriptions of gory murder(s) and bloody sacrilege. He is driven by his Holmesian curiosity and lust for the Lincoln dean’s daughter to dig ever deeper into comings and goings. He thwarted every step of the way by one-dimensional characters who are conjured on the page only to harass him and he stumbles under the weight of pages and pages of descriptions of woodwork, chandeliers, stone walls, floor boards, and guttering candles – all to evoke the time and place, and to bore this reader to mechanical pages thumbing on the Kindle.
B
Bruno did not want the life of a visiting professor, but his efforts to secure a tenured appointment failed each place he went. He was, perhaps, just too controversial to make a fixture. Allowing him to lecture for a few months, while he used the local library, could be branded as a sign of open-mindedness and even toleration, but to sign him up was going too far beyond the pale of conventionality. For he said in his tactless way what he believed: that the Earth orbited the Sun, that the universe was boundless, that Deism did not require an established Church, that…. Well, that is enough to kindle the fires.
A practical skill that made Bruno welcome in some princely courts was memory. He developed mnemonics to stimulate and structure memory, and devised a set of shorthand symbols to teach them. But to Republicans of the day these very symbols conjured the devil, like Arabic numbers today, and made him a devil. Idiocracy is nothing new.
Before MI5 and MI6 began their turf war, there was Walsingham (1532-1590). Wikipedia has a surprisingly informative and dispassionate entry on him right now. Read it before it gets edited again to satisfy a troll’s ego.
S J Parris
This is the first title in a series featuring Bruno. Having started it ages ago, this time I finished it but only thanks to perseverance not pleasure. After compiling a massive amount of research on the time and place, the author crams every last iota of it on the page at the expense of pace, momentum, interest, movement, character, balance, or plot. To liven the dead pages up that result, there are punctuations of fights and flights likewise described in numbing detail which I find even more boring. The result is indigestion as in a fifty-course degustation menu.
Despite the overheated tripe on the Amazon web page I downloaded and read this title out of morbid interest in the setting at Oxford University during the religious war(s) in 1585. Because Bruno was such a fascinating character I might try the second volume in the hope that the writer has gained confidence and no longer needs to force-feed the reader pointless descriptions. But not just yet.
I have been reading my way through a krimi series by Michael Pearce. The touch is light, the locale exotic, and the treatment respectful and affectionate, as the Head of the Khedive’s Secret Police strives to keep order in an essentially disordered Cairo (and beyond) in the 1900s. This fearsome Head is the Mamur Zapt to give the job its Arabic name. He is one Gareth Owen, a Welsh captain in the British Army that occupied Egypt to secure repayment of loans, as the French once tried to do in Mexico and the Germans in Venezuela.
The legal fiction at the time was that Egypt was a semi-autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire at the indulgence of the Sultan in distant Constantinople who appointed the local governor, the Khedive. This arrangement came about in the aftermath of the construction of the Suez Canal which had led to vast investments and speculation in Egypt with attendant boom, corruption, and bust, occasioning ever greater tax increases to repay loans. The Khedive liked the high life and had soon sold all the Suez Canal shares assigned to Egypt to pay for his pleasure. French and British financial interests in Egypt reduced the Ottoman Empire’s sway over the region and that suited the Khedive to get away from the Sultan’s taxing reach.
The high life was very expensive because it included hundreds of pashas and their extended families who also got on the gravy train; in 1882 the party ended. A British Army intervened and the Khedive agreed to an arrangement that made Egypt a protectorate of Great Britain but still nominally associated with the Ottoman Empire so it was not coloured British pink on maps. None of this was easy. There was at least one pitched battle in 1882 before the Khedive went to the table, where he and the pashas were guaranteed British support in return for inviting the British to stay and stay and stay over the protests from the Sultan. That the Ottoman Empire could not resist this arrangement was one sign of its own decline.
Pearce was born in Sudan, educated in Cairo, and obviously knows the lands and peoples well, and holds them in high esteem. Most of the violence occurs off stage and in some titles there is no violence at all, but a mystery of a theft or — in one — a strange reappearance. Some of the events occur in what was then called Egyptian Sudan, a vast area, larger than India and nearly as diverse though not densely populated.
In these pages Cairo is a living museum of humanity with its myriad of races, ethnicities, nationalities, hundreds of religions, thousands of sects, alongside remnants of ancient histories (Pharaonic, Greek, Roman), and the endless variety among the Arabs themselves. All are dominated and much is determined by the relentless Sun and the life-giving Nile. Then there are the interlopers — Russian, Italian, Armenian, Syrian, Mingrelian, French, American, English, Montenegrin — who come to steal ancient artefacts or to build casinos or railroads for maximum profit and generally exploit the region.
The author is in no hurry to crowd in his encyclopaedic knowledge of Egypt but includes some title by title. Nor he is in any rush to give Owen a long and tiresome back story. We learn more about Owen as each title unfolds as the sequence continues.
Michael Pearce. Chapeaux!
One of the nationalities that is growing in awareness among Cairenes is Egyptian Nationalism: Egypt for Egyptians, and all that, but as many characters note, it is no easy matter to say who is and who is not an Egyptian. The Greek Christian Copts entered Egypt long before the Muslim Arabs and have a claim to historical priority. The Sudanese in the south were native to the region since before time. Religious conflicts among Jews, Copts, and Muslims are common as are conflicts among sects within each of these religions. Ottoman intrigues to undermine the Brits are daily. And in some of the later titles, the women of the burka become restive. Tourists are also a factor for good when the spend money, and bad when they overstep the mark or are victims of crimes.
In this swirl Owen goes about his business, censoring the local press every night and frequenting coffee houses to keep in touch with the vast network of informants he inherited when appointed. The Khedive liked a Brit in the job so that he could distance himself from any acts of the Secret Police, while being sure the acts occurred to keep his regime stable. In same spirit of McKinsey management, the Brits can also disown the Mamur Zapt, if need be, as an agent of Khedive. Thus Owen could be stabbed in the back twice. However, sometimes two masters can be played off against each other.
Owen takes a softly, softly approach that at times irritates the offstage Khedive, but he is usually more interested in the harem than anything else. Most of the Brits accept softly softy but there is an Army in occupation and sometimes it takes all of Owen’s growing skill to keep the soldiers in the barracks and out of trouble. His job is to prevent problems more than solve them and once the soldiers appear to keep order, inevitably disorder follows. There is an iron law in that.
Owen has a shambling multi-lingual Greek as his number one legman, who has the uncanny ability to get people talking to him from market porters, to hotel maids, to slumming tourists. The office is run with Prussian efficiency by Nikos, a Copt, who worships the files and who is always there with the files. Owen has speculated that he sleeps in an empty drawer with the name Nikos on it, but since Nikos keeps everything, including his door, locked Owen has never been able to confirm this suspicion. Selim provides the muscle when that is needed.
Then there is Paul, the aide-de-camp of the Consul-General, who is in fact the military governor of the protectorate. Paul is a master of never saying ‘no’ when insuring that things do not happen and likewise of never saying ‘yes’ but insuring the right things do happen. He is the consummate master of committee meetings who agrees with everyone, never commits himself, and yet the outcome is always what he wants.
Owen also has a good friend in the Egyptian judiciary with whom he works ever more closely on cases. Mahmoud el Zaki, an Egyptian nationalist, who aspires to see a modern Egypt make its own way in the world free of British suzerainty, but who himself remains wedded to many of the old ways where women are concerned.
Owen has a mistress, an Egyptian named Zeinab, who is a force of nature in her own right. No burka and veil for her. She can be counted on the stimulate Owen in many ways. She has even bamboozled that master of spin Paul more than once.
Other characters include the operational commander of the uniformed police, a tall, pudgy, pink Scots named McPhee who was a school headmaster back in the Highlands, but who wanted a job in Egypt because he loves the cultural mélange in Cairo. If ever Owen needs to trace a fragment of a tile, McPhee may be able to tell him where it was made. Though to tell him, McPhee may first try to explain the place of tiles in Egyptian culture at great length. And don’t get him started on mosques about which he knows everything and more: Sheiks have been known to consult McPhee on such matters. Windbag though he is, McPhee is an excellent organiser, having learned from unruly Scots schoolboys, and he can be relied upon in the crunch to turn out the uniforms when necessary.
No one is a cartoon in these stories. Even some pretty unlikely and unlikeable characters finish as rounded individuals like the dissolute riding’, huntin’, and shootin’ Egyptian prince who at the eleventh hour saves Owen’s life. In an earlier title Owen was rescued from an assassination attempt by some smugglers thanks to a village watchman, who was in fact a twelve-year old girl.
A word of warning for those who start at the beginning. Each of the novels, no doubt at the insistence of the publisher, is stand-alone. The result is that basic information about the Egyptian legal system, Owen’s place in Egypt and his personal life, and the basics of the context are repeated in each novel. It is like those cooking shows where in each episode the chef says heat the wok first or boil the water first. Got it. By volume fifteen below readers are jaded by this repetition and I expect it dissuades some from continuing.
1.The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet. Collins Crime. 1988.
2.The Mamur Zapt and the Night of the Dog. Collins Crime. 1989.
3.The Mamur Zapt and the Donkey-Vous. Collins. 1990.
4.The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind. Harper Fontana. 1991.
5.The Mamur Zapt and the Girl in the Nile. Collins. 1992.
6.The Mamur Zapt and the Spoils of Egypt. Collins Crime. 1992.
7.The Mamur Zapt and the Camel of Destruction. Collins Crime. 1993.
GoodReads meta-data is 244 pages, rated 3.58 by 108
Genre: krimi
Verdict: verbose
When the eternal Berlin Wall crumbled in November 1989, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) underwent a transformation for a few short months that are now largely forgotten. From 1989 to October 1990 it remained an independent polity, and this period is stretched for this story. In this book there is sentiment for the DDR to remain independent and go from red to pink, that is to retain many of the benefits of the communist regime without the oppression, while avoiding the myriad evils of capitalism. The benefits include health care, childcare, pensions at fifty-five, convenient public transport, and so on, but not forced labor camps, re-education, endless surveillance, disappearance, murders at the Wall. Of industrial pollution and environmental degradation and the economic distortion nothing is said. Against this opinion is the desire for Unification which is made to seem in these pages a capitalist plot.
In this context Plod is roused from his crappy east Berlin office to go to West Silesia on the eastern border of the DDR with Poland way off his patch to look at a homicide. The order came straight from the Minister’s office, so off he goes. He finds there not only the local cops but others from neighbouring Saxony. Why all the interest he wonders, but not enough to ask anyone. He contributes nothing to the investigation. When he tries to report to the Minister, he is greeted with indifference. Investigation of the homicide was urgent and then unimportant in the space of a few hours. Plod finds that both irritating and suspicious, but his lassitude prevents him from making any backchannel inquiries, yet surely a veteran officer has backchannels.
There are interesting asides about some of the Eastern landen (provinces), like Western Silesia, in the DDR seeking their own separate deals with West Germany. There is also a reference to a referendum in the DDR to unification being defeated but I could find nothing about that. I guess that is part of the fiction. In the Wikipedia account, the only impediment to Unification was the reluctance of the Western Allies, mainly in the person of Margaret Thatcher, to a resurgent Germany.
Instead of investigating anything, Plod spends far too much time arguing with everyone he meets about the virtues of the DDR. His daughter, a British Army officer, a neighbour, they all get the benefit of his explanation of the good points of the corrupt and oppressive regime he served while grizzling about it. Plod seems to be the only one who does not realise the Unification is happening, and its completion is inevitable.
To be sure even now the DDR has its defenders who battle it out in the Wikipedia editing wars everyday. Look at the editing history at the bottom of each page. Oh hum. And that is in the English language version of Wikipedia. The German language version is even more hotly contested from my brief glance with edits coming one after another. There are plenty of films about life in the DDR, but for me the best is the muted, Barbara (2012) discussed elsewhere on this blog. Timothy Garton Ash’s book The File (1997) says it all.
First in a series. I chose it since we are ticketed to go to Berlin 2020. I could not find a photograph of the author but on Twitter he describes himself as the author of crime and hope punk, mostly tales of East Germany. ‘Hope punk?’ Don’t know.
A Murder of No Consequence (1999) by James Garcia Woods
GoodReads meta-data is 278 pages rated 4.03 by 91 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: D&D (Deep and Dark)
It is early July 1936 in Madrid and the stifling summer suffocates everything in Madrid. Early one morning Inspector Ruiz and Sergeant Felipé are called to investigate the corpse of a young woman found in a vast Retiro public park. These are homicide dicks and this is a homicide. The questions start here. Who was she? There is a purse with money in it, lacking the all important identify card. She is dressed in a fine silk gown, and there is no sign of sexual assault. So it is neither robbery nor rape gone wrong. Her calloused hands do not fit with the dress. There is no disturbance of the ground from which absence they conclude the murder — strangulation — occurred elsewhere.
It became a police procedural in the atmosphere of the fatal storm clouds gathering in Spain at the time. Even as Ruiz and Felipé go through their routine procedures carloads of armed hoons peel around threatening each other. Shootings and murders at political rallies occur nearly everyday. It is an NRA paradise. Everyone has guns and everyone uses them.
Ruiz follows three good rules: Start where you are. Use what you’ve got. Do what you can. These two have a photograph of the girl and they have the expensive dress with a maker’s tag in it. Off they go. Their inquiries are baulked at every turn because this is a society in which the wealthy are above the law. Anyone who sits on a gold-plated toilet answers to no one. Think of the Thief in Chief’s ideal world. This is it. The girl was a maid in the household of a very wealthy and politically connected man. No one in this household is much bothered by her murder, and certainly cannot spare even a few minutes to talk to the investigating officers about it. It fits the time and place.
As they try to find people who knew the girl, they question milkmen, greengrocers, doormen, and the like, and are warned off in no uncertain terms by Falange Blue Shirts. In keeping with the Krimi Writer’s Manual, being warned off spurs their desire to persist. Another warning is delivered by the Guardia Civil. Shutter!
Regrettably, Ruiz (but fortunately not Felipé) has a life outside policing, and we get (far too much of) his backstory, and his side story punctuated by an American exchange student who throws herself at him within five minutes of nodding on the stairway. What dean would let a student go on exchange to Aleppo today, because that was what Madrid was like in the summer of 1936? He also moons about his youth in the Army of Africa, and pals around with his now middle-aged school mates, who have to be one Socialist and one Royalist. so we can see the country dividing. It’s all contrived, but the pace, writing, and dialogue are pretty well judged so that it moves.
It ends at the Montaña Barracks on 20 July 1936 when the shooting became general.
Spoiler here. That this naive village girl could be used as a courier travelling by train hither and yon over a roiling Spain to deliver letters is a stretch. How would she manage the logistics? Sure Don Carlos can buy the railroad tickets, but how would she find an address in Seville? Take a taxi, she who has never seen one, and would know how to hail one or pay the driver. And if she travelled to distant Badajoz would she stay overnight in a hotel until the trains resumed. She whose bed was straw on a packed earthen floor until a few weeks before the story starts?
To think about these practical details of travelling is to see how unlikely it is. If Don Carlos was buying all those train tickets someone would have noticed, or if not, why all the indirection. Then there are all the disruptions to railroads at the time by striking workers and union busters that would have frightened her to death. It seems to me just as likely that she would take a little money and run. It seems to me also that she would have been even less likely to realise what she had mistakenly been allowed to see.
This title is the first in a series. I could not find a picture of the author. It put me in mind of a far more subtle series set in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War: Rebecca Pawel’s study of Guardia Civil Carlos Tejada, starting with The Law of the Return (2005).
GoodReads meta-data is 348 pages, rated 4.2 by 2881 citizens
Gerne: krimi
Verdict: Procedural
A journalist is found dead in his Spartan home in Birmingham, the second largest city in England these days. Local plod writes it down as suicide and prepares to leave, but by chance DI Mariner is nearby, attracted by the flashing lights of the panda car; he takes a closer look. It is enough to make a citizen lose faith in Plods. He finds obvious signs it is a murder and also a witness hiding under the stairs which the local plod had missed.
The witness is of little use for though he is twenty-nine years old he is on the far end of the autism spectrum. That malady, its effects on families, its care and treatment, the cocktail of guilt and wishful thinking it triggers, the charlatans that comes out to feed on it, these are all central to the plot. I found out more about autism than I liked, truth to tell, but it did develop the plot, including the description of the home as spare, sparse, and Spartan.
The deceased was the sole-carer of this autistic man, his brother, and had devoted most of life in recent years to that. Now that he is dead, their reluctant sister has to prise herself away from her high-powered job to take over. One day she is soaring with corporate eagles, and next day cleaning up the living room after this unhouse trained man-child brother has…. While she has been well paid, and her brother left a sizeable estate, the cost of residential professional care for the autistic brother is cosmic, far beyond ‘well paid’ and ‘sizeable,’ more in the income range of an Oil Sheik, a Latin American dictator, or the President in Thief. In any event the deceased estate will be tied up for at least a year, and she will not be well paid if she has to care for the brother full-time. The problem for her is N-O-W. One place she turns for help is the kindly old family doctor.
Meanwhile, Mariner noses around. He is especially motivated to stick his oar in the water because by sheerest chance (maybe a little bit too sheer for some readers, like this one) he realised he had seen the deceased outside a pub earlier that very evening as the victim was getting into a distinctive, if old, Stuttgartmobile.
Thereafter the herrings are diverse and red. Mariner’s fallibility is nicely handled as he goes from dead ends to false trails and back. The moral growth of the sister as she copes with her unwanted brother, and in so doing begins to see the world in a different light is credible.
According to the formula the least likely person is the villain and that applies here with a deus ex machina revelation, although it leaves many, many loose ends. We may infer that low bid contractors for the Bleachers did it and they remain untouched, yet they killed four people on someone’s orders. What were those symbols that were mentioned several times early and then dropped? Did I flick a page too fast and miss the point? Perhaps later titles in the series dot a few of these i’s, and I might find out.
Chris Collett
There is much to’ing and fro’ing in Birmingham, including Bournville which we visited on the utopia trail in 2004, and many of the city’s canals. When planning a trip occasionally I consult Trip Fiction for novels set in the destination, click on https://www.tripfiction.com. Anticipating a trip to Birmingham late in 2020 I went looking and found this title.
GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages rated 3.4/5.0 by 351 by litizens.
Genre: krimi, period.
Verdict: serious and intense.
Vienna: In 1888 Gustav Klimt is arrested on suspicion of murder when one of his models is found dead! Klimt is an uncouth giant from whose hand comes those ethereal paintings. That was a striking contrast.
His friend and commercial lawyer Karl Werthen promises to help him. To Klimt it is all some kind of joke and he treats his incarceration as a research trip. But the murder was the fourth in a series and the Pox News clamour to scapegoat Hillary is loud, though an advisor to the police minister tells Werthen that Klimt is not the guilty one but public opinion demands a scapegoat, and well…..Hillary is not available so it might just have to be the big guy.
Gustav Klimt
Werthen is ill equipped to investigate a murder but his old friend from Graz (been there) Dr. Hans Gross is an accomplished criminologist, as he says repeatedly. Gross is passing through the capital of the Empire en route to the University in Bukovina to take up the Chair of Pompous Pontificating in that remote corner of the Austrian Empire. To extend his stay in Vienna Gross is ready to lend a hand.
While Werthen is strait-laced, upright, and uptight, Gross is ready to get down and dirty, crawling around the crime scene with a magnifying glass or probing a corpse in the mortuary. Werthen finds all that distressing, disturbing, and distasteful, but Gross’s effort does turn up clues missed by the plodders.
Gross concludes that the murders have been calculated to implicate Jews. About halfway through (per the Kindle measure) someone observes Gross and Werthen. Ominous. Is this the perpetrator watching those who seek him. His perspective recurs now and again thereafter.
A Kimt painting of flowers
The conceit is that Gross has written several textbooks on criminal investigation which have been read by Arthur Conan Doyle who then used the techniques therein revealed to create Sherlock Holmes. Gross assumes everything stems from sex and cites Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing to that effect. To avoid censure Krafft-Ebing wrote his book in Latin – Psychopathia Sexualis. (We passed Krafft-Ebing’s mansion a few week ago when traversing Vienna.) They seek out a young Sigmund Freud for advice but he is out of town for the moment.
The malevolent observer arranges for a red herring, and muses on his duties. Gulp!
Then the story seems to end half way through and there is a romantic interlude in which Werthen gets married to live happily ever after. As if!
Then the krimi resumes. Odd construction. What would Aristotle make of this disunity? Same as me. Annoying is what I made of it. One character mentioned the sewers (shades of The Third Man) in passing and leaves it at that. The mention alerted this reader but nothing came of it. False alarm.
Vienna in 1888
The story starts again, and includes a stay to the Lower Belvedere which we visited in September 2019. The plot goes around and around and includes the much exploited events at Mayerling and even Sissi with a head of hair to make Farrah Fawcett cringe. In the end our heroes prevail, but only just.
There are many nice touches. Foremost is the study in corruption of the prince who masterminded the whole thing in the name of saving the Austrian Empire, chiefly from those Magyars. Franz Ferdinand is also a nice portrait of nobody’s fool. Then there is the Emperor whose sole concession to modernity is to make himself available to receive petitions from citizens twice a week for an hour. Otherwise, Austria in 1898-1899 as portrayed in this novel clings to the past. Motor cars are discouraged. Electricity, despite the role of one of its citizens — Nicoli Tesla — in it development, is not used by the government for illumination. All the sixty Austrian generals based in Vienna are seventy or more years old. The body politic was a gerontocracy with sclerosis, lacking a mirror of self-knowledge.
J. Sydney Jones
Jones has a compère in fin de siecle Wien and that is Frank Tallis whose books include Vienna Blood, Death in Vienna, Vienna Woods, and Fatal Lies discussed elsewhere on this blog.
Having just spent a week in Vienna I recalled many of the streets and byways that figure in this book.
GoodReads meta-data is 224 pages, rated 3.93/5.00 by 228 litizens.
Verdict: Parody plus
In the Yarra River valley the self-appointed, self-satisfied gatekeepers of Australian literature gather at the home of Mervyn and Janet Blake, having removed themselves from Melbourne to concentrate on their labours refined and many. He has published several novels but recently has concentrated on devastating critiques of the works of others, while she publishes short stories. They are much celebrated in the tiny world of the antipodean literati, almost as much as they celebrate themselves – legends in their own minds.
There are frequent gatherings of their acolytes at this quaint country retreat. Among the number are Martinus Lubers, Arvin Wilcannia-Smythe, Twyford Arundal, and others. As fine a pencil-necked crew of four-eyed paper-shufflers as Upfield could imagine. Of course these aristos do not mix with local hoi polli, but are much observed by the locals, including Mr Pickwick, a neighbouring cat.
This smug world shatters when Mervyn is found dead one morning in his study. There is no discernible cause of death. Inspector Cardboard from Melbourne Criminal Investigation Bureau arrives to muddy the waters and does so energetically, concluding there is no crime to investigate. He congratulates himself on his perspicacity and returns to Melbourne.
Still suspicions remain because there is no discernible cause of death and Bony is summoned from far Queensland, being the only sensible detective in the wide brown land, and he is seconded to the case. He sets about learning the ways and wherefores of the village and its villagers.
It has all the Upfield features:
A careful and respectful description of the locale and locals.
A stalwart local plod stymied by the aforementioned Inspector Cardboard.
Grizzling about government while relying on it.
Bony reading footprints on cement sidewalks, well, almost.
His many annoying habits, rolling his own cigarettes and drinking many cups of tea with exaggerated courtesy.
A school of red herrings among the cast.
A crime within a crime to roil the depths.
An off-stage persona who was there all the time.
A beautiful woman to admire Bony.
Published in 1948 and set immediately after World War II there are may references to shortages of goods except for tea, which occasions the ritualistic grizzles about the GOVERNMENT, but nary a mention of the war itself, still less of its toll on the village – yet local men must have been in the army in Singapore, New Guinea, or Egypt.
Most of all it offers a window on haute literature versus commercial fiction as the acolytes circle each other. Bony finds a cicerone to this new world in a commercial author, one Clarence Bagshott (aka Arthur Upfield) who explains to him that writers may be either storytellers or wordsmiths or both. (It takes pages and pages to make this simple point, I am afraid.) The best writers are both. A story teller may be a good writer but not always, though a wordsmith with nothing to say does not make the cut.
Commercial fiction places a premium on storytelling because that is what buyers want to read.* (Amen, to that Brother Arthur!) Litterateurs write only words. [Snort!] They turn inward and haughtily disdain commercial fiction as beneath their rarefied vocabulary. Does this explain Dan Brown’s success?
Upfield must have had a lot of fun characterising these wordsmiths from their frilly clothes, poncy hairstyles, sneering lips, pinched features, skimpy moustaches, watery eyes, reedy voices, skinny arms, and ridiculous names. There is not a manly man among them, to be sure, and the ladies fair little better but he spends fewer words deprecating them.
By convulsions many, the plot involves a commercial writer, I. R. Watts, whom Bony tracks down. Watts is pseudonym and neither the publisher nor Australia Post is very cooperative in penetrating the disguise. However, Bony has his ways, he asked the Tax Office which happily reveals all. Yep. Damn GOVERNMENT!
Spoiler ahead.
Here is where it gets complicated and interesting. Yes, of course, this storyteller of commercial fiction is the pseudonym of one of the very same literary snobs, but which one and why?
Turns out Janet Blake is I. R. Watts, whose commercial success might rival that of Upfield himself. She is a story teller par excellence. Having read one of the Watts books while on the trail, Bony attests to that with the assurance and confidence of a man who has read little. Here is where the flour is stirred in to thicken the plot, for she has long kept this secret pseudonym from her husband Mervyn Blake who is so self-centred he did not notice either her industry nor the income that resulted from it. I can believe that when I reflect on some of the cases of Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) with whom I have worked. This disorder is a pattern of self-centred, arrogant behaviour, a lack of empathy and consideration for other people, and an excessive need for admiration. [Fill in the blank for the names of those near by. Continue on a separate page.]
Her earnings as I. R. Watts maintained their lives while he scorned all others in his literary criticism. The commercially successful novels of Watts would have been beneath his contempt. His own career as a novelist has ended and in truth it never quite started it seems, since his early novels were rejected by British and even, shock, Australian publishers until Janet Blake made suggestions, changes, and so on, and when they were then emended and published she allowed him full credit. Rather than embracing that productive partnership, Mervyn (because of his narcissism) rejected her further contributions, and though he wrote many other novels, none were published. Into that lacunae grew his bile and his criticism of others. Sounds like a good case for tenure.
In short, she did him in, though quite why I never did get, apart from the fact that he was an insufferable dolt, but then look around, no shortage of those, and few of them are murdered. The how is made of hardened air inside pingpong balls.
Thanks to the scavenging of Mr Pickwick, Bony works it all out and arrives at the herring de jour.
You say ‘Boney’ and I say ‘Bony,’ because Upfield wrote it as ‘Bony.’ When some of the stories were filmed for television it the 1970s the name was changed to ‘Boney’ for reasons only known to those who made the change. That in turn has influenced some of the re-issues of the books. The stupid lead the blind as usual. That television series is discussed in connection with comments on another Upfield title to be found elsewhere on this blog.
Upfield published at least thirty-seven Bony titles; he addition he published two dozen short stories, and a great deal of non-fiction in newspaper articles about the outback, aboriginals, and life in the scrub. He served in the Australian Army in World War I and upon return to Australia lived as a jackaroo for years. He was an active member of the Australian Geographical Society and participated in many of its expeditions.
* To Bagshott’s literary dichotomy I would add a third category today: Prize fiction. The books that are entered for literary prizes today are not written for readers of either stories or words. They are written to arrest the attention of the overwhelmed and jaded hacks who serve as jurors on selection panels for literary prizes who must pick winners out of the hundreds of titles submitted. The weird, the strange, the incomprehensible, the attenuated, the dead boring, the unreliable narrators, the omission of punctuation, these are all devices to make a book standout of a pile of ninety volumes on the desk. I have spoken! Did I say ninety, one such hack has since told me that he had one hundred-and-fifty the last time he did one of these duties.
GoodReads meta-data is 278 pages, rated 3.68/5.00 by 28 litizens.
Genre: period krimi
Verdict: Nifty.
Edna Ferber (1885-1958) and firebrand, fictional suffragette Winifred Moss are travelling in Budapest in 1914. The trip is R and R for Suffragette after a gruelling period of arrest and torture in London, while Edna is escaping her cloying mother, ensconced in Berlin. From Kalamazoo, Ferber’s parents were Jewish, one Hungarian and one German, thus she travels with the languages for Mitteleuropa.
With its hotel upstairs featuring English plumbing the threadbare but comfortable Café Europa is favoured by English-speaking travellers. It is likewise convenient to the sights and sites of Buda (though few figure in this story apart from the Chain Bridge and the Castle).
In act one The Travellers observe the betrothal of a young American heiress to a sclerotic Austrian count. She previously had been courted by a dashing Hungarian, a scion of a porcelain fortune, but her parents arranged a marriage to the count, who is supremely indifferent to the whole matter, but his mother is the match-maker on that side. The American parents want the marriage to get the lustre of aristocracy, while the mother wants the gelt. The girl does not seem to mind but acts like the spoiled child she is. It is all very Edith Wharton [without her subtlety], until…..
The bratty heiress is murdered in the garden at midnight! Who dun it?
Act two opens with the local plod Hovarth investigating only to be pushed aside by a bumptious, idiot from Vienna who must arrest someone to satisfy aristocratic pressure. Neither the parents nor the match-making mother seem to care about the dead girl, but both parties are embarrassed by her murder. Talk about blame the victim.
Act three sees the murder of another American tourist: Buzzing around from the beginning is an annoying Hearst journalist named Harold. He goes here and there stirring and sewing sensationalism, malice, and half-truths. Think Pox News with energy and there it is. Harold differs from Pox journalism in having a certain puppy charm. Then Harold is shot dead in the street.
Act four: Meanwhile, Edna and Suffragette fall in with some local artists, reluctantly.
After much to’ing and fro’ing the cast gathers, ostensibly, in a wake, but we know the denouement is coming at 90% on the Kindle. We know this because, deus ex machina, while falling sleep the night before Edna and says to herself and the inevitable portrait of Emperor Franz Jozef on the wall in her hotel room: ‘That’s it!’
Act five offers an explanation of sorts: It turns out the murder….. Whoops, Spoiler ahead, take warning! Everything is political. Brat’s father is not only rich, stupid, and vain, he is also the owner of Colt Firearms and a matrimonial union with the Austrian Empire would feed the weapons to its army. Yes, it is a long bow, but there you have it. The best way to scuttle the union is to murder her. Sure makes sense. But then, maybe that sort of thing does to some tiny minds.
Harold of Hearst had begun to figure it out, and so he also had to go. Bang!
Spoiler. In keeping with the great tradition of krimis the murderer is the least likely, the seemingly gawky busboy, who is in fact a thespian terrorist. Another long bow.
The hindsight is thick throughout, everyone knows war is coming, quite how they could be so sure is left to one’s imagination when so many others, including many of the decision-makers, were taken by surprise. It was made fact by repetition. There had many conflicts in the Balkans already and another was perhaps inevitable, but the prescience in these pages anticipates the Great War not another armed border dispute.
The multiple-sclerosis of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is well done. Everywhere is the picture of Franz Jozef, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, and monarch of many other constituent polities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and once President of the German Confederation, yet the regime is comatose. He leads his peoples in clinging to the past. He will not promote to general a soldier less than seventy years old, only if all eight grandparents were themselves nobility may one enter the court circle at the Hofburg, telephones are forbidden in imperial buildings, he has never ridden in an automobile, though aged he ascends six flights of stairs each night to his army cot rather than have a new-fangled elevator installed. Electricity is banned from official buildings. He favours only those who do the same.
Yet in Paris, in London, in Berlin modernity is bursting out in all forms, electricity, automobiles, telephones, jazz, dance, short skirts, women smoking – none of these practices are permitted in the K and K (for King and Emperor) lands. French, English, and German armies are promoting young officers with technical educations and embracing new weapons and tactics, while in K and K the cavalry sabre remains the ultimate weapon.
The descriptions of the modern art as a revolution itself, destroying the old order, are very well done and quite arresting. Even the Hearst hack is conscious of something in the art he sees, though he cannot articulate it and it does not delay him long from the spoor of cheap sensationalism.
While thinking Edna and Suffragette drink Bulls Blood wine. During our recent visit to Budapest, I asked about this very wine, recalling its role in completing the PhD dissertation long ago. The vintner said it was an export label first applied to vast quantities of red wine Hungary traded to the Soviet Union in return for oil in the 1960s. It would seem that the Soviets then bottled it and traded it to Canada for wheat. In turn I traded it for words at the typewriter. Yes, I know, there are extensive entries for it on the web but if read closely, they do not contradict the essence of the intel above.
Ed Ifkovic
Edna Ferber had a long and distinguished career as a writer, novelist, playwright, and essayist. This is the sixth in a series featuring her.
