IMDb meta-data is 6 episodes of 45 minutes, rated 7.4 by 42 cinematizens
DNA: NZ
Verdict: Another droll delight from KiwiLand.
Tagline: Beware the garden shed!
The smaller the budget the bigger the imagination is corollary of the bigger the budget the less the imagination à la Luc Besson, Denis Villeneuve, Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, and there many imitators.
Assorted terrors strike via the vortex from smart refrigerators, reality game shows with a body count, robotic estate agents, Cluedo with casualties, and – worst for last – flair trousers redux.
The genre is SoCal Noir, a murder mystery in the sunshine of Los Angeles city and county. Before going further about the book, a preliminary remark is in order to quell the pedants. Kenneth Millar insisted that his pseudonym, Ross Macdonald be spelled as it is here, no interior capital on that letter ‘d.’ He did that to distinguish the name from another murder mystery genre writer, that is, the John D. MacDonald with a pair of extravagant capital ‘D’s.’ However, all too frequently the author’s name gets the unwanted interior capital ‘D’ on some of the books. Moreover, the auto-complete and spell-checker have to be tamed to respect his wishes. So be it. But then a writer as famed as George Orwell fought and lost a similar battle when he insisted in the publishing contract that the title Nineteen Eighty-Four be spelled out in letters and not put into the numbers 1984. You would never know that to see this book on shelves or web pages. After some comments on The Instant Enemy, there is a further discussion of the author and his alter ego.
Since at least 624 BC, according to one pundit, the older generation has complained about the declining standard of rising generation, but in the middle 1960s that plaint was reversed for it was the rising generation whose members criticised their elders about anything and everything. This reversal of fortune was dubbed The Generation Gap, which was much discussed by talking heads in the late 1960s to explain anything and everything from Vietnam War protests to hair styles, flared trousers, and the popularity of the Beatles. This gap spawned a song, a television show, a board game, and a lot more ephemera some of which has endured. The Instant Enemy offers Macdonald’s take on it. In that Archer’s age, over thirty, makes him an instant enemy to members of that rising generation.
In the novel the rising generation is embodied by Young Davy and even younger Sandy, his squeeze, who together seem bound for mutually assured destruction while taking a few others with them. Yet both come from comfortable homes in the green fields of the land of dreams that is Southern California. Keith Sebastian, Sandy’s father calls in Lew Archer to find them and return Sandy home. While Sebastian offers an impressive front, it does not take Archer long to realise there is no back to this Hollywood façade.
Sebastian has failed to make the transition from a promising young businessman to a successful one. Behind the trophy wife Bernice, the ranch-style model home, and the new luxury car Archer finds a loveless marriage, a cold house, and piles of unpaid and overdue bills on that car and all the other ever so tasteful chattels that adorn the wife, the house, and the car. Sebastian dances a desperate attendance on his wealthy boss, Stephen Hackett, in the hope of…something, anything to get through another week or month to keep up appearances. Then the bad gets worse when Hackett is kidnapped at gunpoint by none other than the two delinquents, Davy and Sandy. Unbelievable but true.
Why?
It is a tangled skein and by the end a Mormon genealogical tree combined with a Lombardi Chart is necessary because the kidnapping was brewed over three generations in Macdonald’s laboratory where the retorts bubble with the ingredients of tragedy, in this case an unloved child, illicit drugs, adultery, betrayal, a surly subordinate, a very nice woman who knows too much, a venal older woman with a toy-boy husband, and assorted police officers including one whom Uri Geller could not straighten. The body count reaches Midsomer Murders heights while Archer develops, applies, tests, and rejects alternative hypotheses until finding one that fits.
While the cast of characters seems to consist of people with no connection to one another and with nothing in common, in fact, on that dark family tree, they are entwined by marriage, adultery, illegitimacy, and murder, the latter being the strongest bond.
In addition to the two teenage rebels with a cause, Macdonald also adds some Cain and Abel. And as frequently the case in his novels, there is a black widow who has consumed two husbands. Without a doubt there be critics in the firmament who would label him a misogynist for this. Happy are the labellers. Happier still are the readers who suspend such swift and simple judgements.
Outside this terrarium of vipers and apart from the lost teenagers, Archer meets some very solid citizens: Alma in the nursing home who truly cares for her charges, a school guidance counsellor who goes beyond the call of duty, a security guard who keeps his word come what may, many others who lend a land, like the truck driver who finds a stunned Archer on the highway, Al at the sandwich bar, and a nameless gas pump jockey with a calliper on his leg, each of whom reminds both Archer and the reader of all the decent people out there. It is a distinguishing feature of Macdoanld’s fiction that these minor supporting characters, as many as twenty in each book, are endowed with personalities. None are plot cardboard. The contract could be the BBC’s Christopher Foyle (an avatar for this all-too-common stereotype) where virtually everyone but the sainted hero himself is a liar, cheat, murderer, traitor or all three in one. Archer is secure in his own identity and modest virtue, having no need to denigrate all others to be singular.
Macdonald’s imagery at times transcends the story. Savour these opening lines from The Galton Case(1959): The law offices were above a savings bank on the main street of Santa Teresa. A private elevator lifted you from a mean lobby into an atmosphere of elegant simplicity, creating the impression that you were rising effortlessly to the level you deserved, one of the chosen. Or the time when Archer admits to himself that he likes the work, late at night, driving from one place to another like an antigen connecting cells in the great body of Southern California. He is a healer; we may hope, one of many, assuaging some of the injuries we do to ourselves.
Trolls should be warned that these pages reflect the manners and mores of the time and place. These are guaranteed to offend some sensitive souls. These trumpeter swans can be found venting on Good Reads.
* * *
The Midsomer Murders mayhem occurs off the page and Archer himself seldom carries a gun. Indeed, having read all eighteen titles, several more than once, I am not sure he ever fired a bullet, though his own licensed gun is stolen and used in a murder in The Way Some People Die (1951). Still less does he come up smiling after beatings, druggings, pistol-whippings, or woundings as does Philip Marlowe in the novels of Raymond Chandler. On the rare occasions when he is assaulted, as occurs in these pages, it takes him some time to recover, because he is not the man of steel that Marlowe was.
If Raymond Chandler had a screenwriter’s ear for dialogue, Ross Macdonald had a jeweller’s eye for imagery. There is seldom a wasted word on his pages. If he pauses to describe the fittings and furnishings of the Sebastians’ home or the make and model of their car in The Instant Enemy, a reader can be sure those facts will be rebound in the pages that follow, so pay attention.
Sometimes Macdonald’s metaphors and images come so thick and fast that they create a traffic jam in the reader. Sometimes the psychologising slows the momentum of the story. And sometimes there are missteps. Fortunately, Macdonald follows the old coach’s wisdom: ‘Forget the mistakes and keep trying.’
The species into which cataloguers slot Macdonald’s novels is styled ‘Hard Boiled,’ but he offers neither the snappy dialogue of Chandler nor the bone-deep cynicism of Dassiell Hammet, the double litmus tests for Hard Boiled. Though it is true that Lew Archer is named for Sam Spade’s deceased partner, Miles Archer, who only believed in fifty-dollar bills, and was sired on Hammet’s typewriter.
While Macdonald’s The Underground Man (1971) earned a rave review on the front page of the New York Times Book Review section by that distinguished southern American novelist Eudora Welty (though I confess that I could not finish the only book of hers I tried). Yet none of his novels was ever awarded the paramount prize of the Edgar. To be sure he garnered many other awards, but not that crown of crowns. Such is the way of the world.
In his books, unlike life, the world bends towards justice of a kind, but there are seldom happy endings. Perhaps Macdonald wrote one book eighteen times, as has been said, the same story of twisted love, divided loyalties, the effects of the sins of the past, wayward offspring, fractured families, irresponsible parents, each magnified by the glare of money in the prism of California sunshine that blinded the individuals to their own motives and deeds. It was all one case.
By number eighteen in the sequence the biggest mystery is Lewis Archer himself about whom the reader learns almost nothing, being a man without a past. There are only a few shards with information scratched on them scattered through the books. In The Goodbye Look (1969) we learn he had been a soldier who has seen that last look on faces of men who died. In The Drowning Pool (1950) there is mention of a wife named Sue who left him because of his irregular life. In The Doomsters (1958) he refers to his police work in Long Beach. In another he has a sexual dalliance with a witness that goes nowhere. In Black Money (1966) the names of the philosophers Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Henri Bergson pass his lips. These gleanings are few and far between.
The reader is not manipulated into feeling sorry for him with a back sob story that reveals his feet of clay. Why should we? Archer does not feel sorry for himself! He is no Heathcliff forever lamenting his fate. Archer’s emphasis is on the other people in the story, not on himself. He remains in the shadows to observe and report not to take the limelight.
He has neither the finicky mien of Colin Dexter’s Endeavour Morse, nor the quirky car of Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone. Here, then, is a challenge for a Post Modernist to dissolve the twinned author Macdonald-Millar and write a biography of Lew Archer himself. The Wikipedia entry, and yes there is one, marks the starting line, not the finishing line in his life story.
This title was number fourteen of the eighteen, with a nineteenth incomplete at his death. Each stands alone but bound together they are Lew Archer’s life. Oh, and there are collections of short stores (some of which germinated into the novels) called The Name is Archer (1955) joined by Lew Archer Private Investigator (1977). When an apprentice Macdonald published stories featuring other characters, some of which have been reissued as though they were Archer stories, again despite his objections. Macdonald wrote at least two crime novels without Archer.
Connoisseurs may note that the doyens of detective fiction, Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor in their massive reference work describe this novel as ‘good,’ but offer greater praise for Macdonald’s The Ivory Grin (1952), The Galton Case (1959), and The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962). The one that resonated the most on first reading and which has stayed with me is the last one, The Blue Hammer (1976).
Equally, Barzun and Taylor also reprove other Macdonald’s titles for overcooked plots and broken metaphors. Indeed, some of the plots, like that of The Goodbye Look require a GPS, that is a Genre Plotting System, to follow through a forest of grafted family trees and generations of undergrowth.
There is a great deal of literature on Macdonald and Archer’s world. Impressive as it is, to read it is to lose sight of the novels themselves. Too often the dissection of scholars leaves behind only the odour of formaldehyde. But perhaps it is justice since Macdonald as Millar earned a PhD in English at the University of Michigan.
Only a few films have been made, despite the obvious appeal of the material and the setting. Some say Macdonald was reluctant to surrender control of the stories but, just maybe, it was a spectral Archer himself who objected, despite the money on offer, to preserve his own identity and integrity. He was right to do so because one film version changed Archer’s name to facilitate marketing, and another moved the locale from SoCal to NOLA, that is New Orleans. Both decomposed the interwoven psychological themes to mere dollars and cents and so reduce the characters’ motivations to the supermarket mundane. These movies are Harper(1966), based on The Moving Target (1949) and The Drowning Pool (1975), based on the 1950 novel of that name. Both were vehicles for Paul Newman’s blinding star power.
Seek and ye shall also find a made-for-television movie called The Underground Man (1974) mutated from that novel, but it is larded with the tropes of television cop shows at the expense of the psychological depth or the intensity of the original. It starred a miscast Peter Graves as Archer. Even more woefully miscast was Brian Keith as Archer in the eponymous short-lived six-episode television series of 1975. Neither actor had the anonymous, everyman quality of Archer nor the compensating gravitas of Paul Newman. In addition, Macdonald’s storylines, perhaps without royalties, have also found their way in Russian and French films according to the IMDb.
If it has not been clear in the foregoing verbiage, the purpose of these musings has been to alert readers to the corpus of Archer stories in the hope that some might a sample and find it to their liking. His novels are readily available in whatever form a reader might like from bytes to MP3 to hard and soft covers, new and used.
Sources:
Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor, A Catalogue of Crime: Being a Guide to the Literature of Mystery, Detection, and Related Genres, Rev. ed, (1989).
Mathew Bruccoli, Ross Macdonald (1984).
Michael Kreyling, The Novels of Ross Macdonald (2005).
Ross Macdonald’s Archer novels in publication order:
Paul Nelson and Kevin Averey, It’s All One Case: The Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives (2016).
Tom Nolan, Ross Macdonald: A Biography (1999).
Bernard Schopen, Ross Macdonald (1990).
Eudora Welty, ‘The Stuff that Nightmares are Made of,’ New York Times, Book Review (14 February 1971), page 1.
Michael Jackson has no memory of why, where, when, and which Archer novel he read first, but it must have been sometime in the mid-1970s, and one was not enough! Since then, he has read all of them, and the short stories, and Kenneth Millar’s other books, and some of the twenty-seven by his wife Margaret Millar. Imagine the clickety-clack of typewriters in that Santa Barbara household.
The Black Eyed Blonde (London: Mantle, 2014) by Benjamin Black
Chandler Redux
Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot have transcended their originators, Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Other writers have, within the limits of copyright laws, revived these two fictional detectives and put them back to work. And they are not alone; the one-named Spenser of Robert Parker, Jim Chee of Tony Hillerman, and Evariste Pel of Mark Hebden, all have had second and third reincarnations. Philip Marlowe, sprung from the brow of Raymond Chandler, joined these ranks in 2014 when The Black Eyed Blonde appeared from the keyboard of Benjamin Black. This is a Marlowe who is older but no wiser than he should be.
His rebirth begins with these lines:
‘It was one of those summer Tuesday afternoons when you start to wonder if the earth has stopped spinning. The telephone on my desk looks like it knows it’s being watched. Traffic trickles by below, and a few men in hats are going nowhere.’
So observes Philip Marlowe from the window of office 615 in the Cuenga Building.
Thus begins another day without another dollar for him. It is some months after the events described in The Long Goodbye of 1953.
Welcome to the mean streets of a sweltering Bay City (aka Santa Monica), a crime noir in the sunshine state of California, a few miles south are the mystic lands of Mexico. Marlowe wallows in an enervated ennui when the bell above the outer office door tinkles, announcing the femme fatale’s entrance. With the relaxed casualness of the entitled, Mrs. Clare Cavendish hires Marlowe to find a missing lover, one Mr. Nico Peterson. Asked about him, she seems to know little, as if to say, ‘So hard to keep track of them, my harem.’
Her insouciance about a lover is both deflating and alluring to Marlowe. This sublime siren, exuding a heady elixir of pheromones, needs no song to attract this man. The spy-beautiful Clare is never far from his thoughts (and dreams) hereafter while he tracks the elusive Mr. Peterson through beatings, pistol whippings, sappings, police interrogations, torture, gun shots, and Mickey Finns — the usual noir menu of mayhem and murder. This detective has the constitution of fiction. The body count reaches six or was it seven? So hard to keep track of them.
This Marlowe smokes and drinks a little less than Chandler’s and is less inclined to mouth the sexist, ageist, racist, homophobic, and other prejudices of the 1950s though some of the other characters do that. Even if Marlowe has been laundered, there is still plenty to offend those eager for offence. Mexicans are Wetbacks. Homosexual muscle men are weak at the core. The essence of a woman is sex. Laundered Marlowe is, but dry cleaned no. Set-in stains remain.
Plot, situation, characters have echoes in Chandler’s backlist. There is a stifling conservatory, a histrionic sibling, assorted alcoholics, an overbearing parent, and bushels of money which has not bought or brought happiness. His case files include a missing sister and a rare coin. As he mopes about this damsel sans distress, this Mrs Cavendish, when he gets to the bottom of a gimlet, his thoughts turn to the recently departed Terry Lennox. (Marlowe’s thoughts also turn to that absent woman in his life who is not named until late in the piece but we all know it is Linda Loring who has found him so irresistible that she had to fled to Paris.)
Bay City remains the sunny sin city of Chandler’s creation, where everything has a price and nothing has a value. Beneath the blinding sunlight of day bubbles a sewer.
The plot is a Möbius strip. As with Chandler, the savour lies in the journey, not the arrival: the snappy dialogue and evocative descriptions. Above all, the picture of Marlowe, in the words of the 1940 song, ‘bewitched, bothered, and bewildered’ by that Cavendish woman is worth the cover price. Moreover, the ending is a corker when the sixth and last dead man exits. With O’Henry irony, the one person who survives, scared but unscathed, is Mr Nico Peterson, a premature report of whose death had stymied Marlowe’s initial efforts.
The descriptions, the dialogue, the musings on the trek are savoury. Here are a few of lesbons motsto whet the appetite for the whole repast:
– ‘Using my special deep-toned, you-can-trust-me-I’m-a-detective voice.’
– ‘Treading gracefully on her own shadow.’
– ‘Belief is not part of my program.’
– ‘The world is porous; things trickle through all by themselves, or so it always seems.’
–‘I would have gone to her if she’d been calling from the dark side of the moon.’
– ‘Once you think a thing, it stays thought.’
There are plenty more of such strokes to reward a reader.
Had I to make a criticism, it would be that the relentless over-description of the clothes everyone wears, including Marlowe himself; it is done so repeatedly and so mechanically — upwards to twenty times on my count — that it blunts any impact. Done a few times when the clothes tell the reader something of the person or situation, and it scores points. When it is done again and again, well, the edge dulls. The same can be said of the descriptions of fittings and furnishing of rooms. These, too, are piled high. Once or twice these descriptions add perspective but after that they become padding. Black must have done a lot of research in back issues of Vogue, Esquire, McCalls, and Interiors, magazines. TMI!
While in the pedant’s corner, note that Trans-Canada Air Lines did not brand itself Air Canada until 1965, and it did not fly non-stop from Los Angeles to Toronto in the middle 1950s, contrary to these pages. Moreover, all beaches in California are public up to the mean tide line. Ergo the Cavendishes did not have private sand. There is another false note that involves the plot, and it is best to say only that it involves Mrs. Cavendish and her younger brother in the finalé.
Benjamin Black is a pseudonym for the Irish novelist John Banville, who is the master of several genres, including this one with his own crime series featuring Dr. Quirke (who like Spenser is a man with only one name) of 1950s Dublin. When The Black Eyed Blonde appeared, it was heralded as Book One of Marlowe Lazarus, implying that there would be a Book Two. It is disappointing to say now, ten years later, though it was widely and warmly reviewed and went through many editions, printings, media, and translations, that the implicit promise has not been fulfilled. Alas! One can dream of what Banville might have done in a pastiche of Chandler’s short story ‘The Red Wind,’ a personal favourite.
On the marketplace of ideas of Good Reads the book at hand scores 3.5 / 5.0 from 4,515 scorers. There is the usual range, which I sampled by reviewing those who scored it ‘1.’ A few of these latter scorers offered explanatory comments: the major theme is the desecration of an icon. ‘How dare Banville offer a Marlowe who differs slightly from my image of him!’ Well, he dared. His Marlowe has grown, and with growth he has changed a little. Black’s Marlowe is more introspective and more vulnerable than he was decades earlier. Aren’t we all?
Other Good Readers’ pearls included the remark, surely something we all wanted to know, ‘I hate noir’ followed by ‘I hate the fifties.’ Then there were sensitive souls whose overflowing virtue required them to sniff at the residual sexism, racism, and smoking in the story. These ‘ism’s,’ evidently it needs to be said, were of the time and are to be found aplenty in the Chandler oeuvre. Be warned trolls of delicate virtue.
There are two cautionary notes. (1) In reviews, advertising, and catalogue listings, sometimes ‘Black-eyed’ is hyphenated and sometimes not. It is the same book with or without the hyphen. (2) However, this book is not to be confused with Erle Stanley Garner’s Perry Mason vehicle The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde(1944) in which the compound adjective is definitely hyphenated, as it should be. By the way, Garner’s connect-the-dots story scores higher, albeit with fewer raters, on Good Reads than Black’s. Chandlerholics will also note that Black’s title had an incarnation in Benjamin Schutz’s short story ‘The Black Eyed Blonde’ in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (1988) which has a different plot, and no hyphen.
Vigilant readers will know that Black’s Black Eyed Blonde is credited as the alleged origin of the screenplay for a feature-length film called ‘Marlowe’ in 2022, starring Liam Neeson as the titular Marlowe. He is the latest in a long line of Marlowe impersonators, per the table below. Marlowe has also been animated on radio, podcasts, CDs, and audiobooks galore by Ed Bishop, Van Heflin, Gerald Mohr, and others. Then there are the innumerable translations.
Note: in some renderings Phillip has a double ‘l’ which it did not have in Chandler’s spelling.
Year
Actor
Age
Title
IMDb
Rating
1944
Dick Powell
40
Murder, My Sweet
7.5
1946
Humphrey Bogart
47
The Big Sleep
7.9
1946
Robert Montgomery
43
The Lady in the Lake
6.5
1947
George Montgomery
31
The Brasher Doubloon
6.5
1959-1960
Phillip Carey
35
Philip Marlowe (TV series)
7.1
1969
James Garner
35
Marlowe
6.4
1973
Elliot Gould
35
The Long Goodbye
7.5
1978
Robert Mitchum
61
The Big Sleep
5.8
1975
Robert Mitchum
58
Farewell, My Lovely
7.0
1983-1986
Powers Boothe
38
Philip Marlowe: Private Eye (TV series)
7.7
1998
James Caan
58
Poodle Springs
6.0
2022
Liam Neeson
70
Marlow
5.4
Note: In 1942 both Lloyd Nolan at 40 and George Sanders at 36 used the plot of, respectively, The High Window and Farewell My Lovely, but not the Marlowe name for Time to Kill and The Falcon Takes Over.
To say the obvious, Robert Mitchum alone has impersonated Marlowe twice. The actors who have donned his persona have ranged from a boyish 31 to a decrepit 70. Marlowe has also been black, played by Danny Glover (1995) in The Red Wind an episode on the television anthology Fallen Angels, and – wait for it – he has travelled to the mean streets of Prague in Smart Philip (2005) and Tokyo in The Long Goodbye (2014) and a cameo in an episode of Bitter Blood (2014) as Tokyo Marlowe. Surely in an age when identity is subjective, it is time for a queer and female Marlowe or both in one.
Bibliography
Byron Preiss, ed., Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration (1988).
Benjamin Black, Christine Falls (2006). The first novel featuring Dr Quirke.
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953) and ‘The Red Wind’ (1938), a short story.
Erle Stanley Garner, The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde (1944).
Frank McShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (1976).
Richard Rodgers, Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered, a song from from Pal Joey (1940).
———
Michael Jackson read The Long Goodbye while a penurious grad student pecking out a dissertation on Aristotle and overnight became a Chandler addict. He bought a copy of the book at hand on Grafton Street in Dublin in 2014.
Good Reads meta-data is 292 pages, rated 4.29 by 24 litizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: AI
Verdict: It’s all in the title.
Tagline: She did it!
A parable about identity.
In a university library a man gropes a … robot, and it whacks him. This robot is the titular Emily. Oops! All of this is apparent from the security video of the incident. ‘Robot strikes man!’ screamed the ABC News bulletin, and not ‘Man molests robot.’
I know Frat boys are hard on and up most of the time but groping a metallic androgynous robot seems desperate even for one of them. How did he even know in the silence of the reading room it was a she, Emily? So what’s with groper? Near sighted as well as desperate? Does this make sense? Read on.
In this fictional world there are tens of millions of 1.0 robots that look and act like robots. Think Robbie’s descendants and you’ve got them. Now Apple has introduced 2.0 robots that still look like robots, but with integrated A.I. that allows for these model 2.0s to learn and develop. These 2.0 Robbie’s have been to school! One of those, as it turns out, is the aforementioned Emily.
Whatever!
It is a violation for a robot, however provoked, and what is so provocative about steel being touched anyway, to harm a human. Lawgiver Asimov made that the first precept. The penalty is to erase the robot’s memory, the personality, and reprogram the shell. Goodbye, Emily. To avoid this fate perpetrator Emily goes on the run. It seems AI has a selfish gene that wants to survive. (This app insisted on a capital after the period I put after the I in AI. The only way to get into lower case was to omit the period. Is this another example of the rule of A.I.)
Meanwhile, the McKinsey management of Apple is frantic to shift the blame for this malfunction on to… anyone else. Blame-shifting is a required minor in all accredited business degrees. But first the fugitive bot must be found. Both missions – shifting the blame and finding the runaway ‘bot — are landed on the design engineer of model 2.0. Though his expertise plays no role in what follows.
Engineer’s head is spinning with the unexpected, unwelcome, and upsetting news that a 2.0 has harmed a human being; he is nonplussed. Moreover, it is abundantly clear that if he cannot find the missing ‘bot, whom we know as Emily, and find out what permitted the Em to strike the man, Engineer will (1) be fired, (2) become a pariah, (3) and be arrested as complicit in the offence. And (4) he will be required to watch endless speeches from that idiot whose name shall never cross my keyboard.
Meanwhile, the free press beats the story to death with the sense of proportion and social responsibility we now expect: none. Pitchforks in hand, brandishing torches vigilantes turn on robots. Just for fun Pox News stokes the fire by calling them socialist robots! (Makes as much sense as anything else on Pox News.
If you were a runaway robot, where would you hide? Yep. Right. Where there a lot of other robots, because, well, they all look alike.
Now we take a sharp turn away from the mystery of finding the rogue to discover that all of this is only preliminary.
What follows is a court case to decide what a person is, and whether Emily has the rights of a person. Is she the Rosa Parks of metallic A.I.? A non-person who might be gavelled into being one by a judicial ruling? Discussing these points occupies more than half the book.
But wait!
Enter Perry Mason!
If Em goes to trial it would have to be a jury of peers. Yes? But she has no peers. She is no Shylock – neither tickled nor bled. There is nothing about this obvious point in the book but it came to my mind. Why isn’t the jury made up of robots? Good question, Mortimer. Collect the law degree on the way out.
Nor did I fathom why Engineer showed zero interest in Emily’s library assault. Indeed why was Em sitting in the library? One of the best ways to find out something is to ask. Why didn’t he? The voltes faces of first the lawyer and then the judge were too easy. However I did like the shelter for unwanted bots.
Here’s a new twist for me. I finished the book, and when I did a message arrived on the Kindle screen telling me there was an additional chapter if I wanted to read it. Big decision, right. I read it. How does that work in the printed book?
It resolves into a take on the Isaac Asimov story ‘Evidence’ (1954) for the cognoscenti that is a spoiler. In this context it undermines just about the whole book.
Francis Malka
Not sure what to make of the idea of two endings. Seems the author should decide on one, not me.
Quibbling aside, it is an inventive book that kept me reading.
IMDb meta data is a runtime of 1h and 42m, rated 8.1 by 48,344 cinematizens.
Genre: Dramedy or Comdram.
DNA: Poland via Hollywood.
Verdict: Satire stings.
Tagline: A sea of troubles!
A Warsaw acting company gets caught up in the German invasion of Poland, and the more its members try to wriggle out of the net, the more deeply enmeshed in it they become.
Betrayal, espionage, treachery, mayhem, torture, suicide, murder, all have a lighter side in this offering. The Nazi’s are so preoccupied with being Nazis they fail to notice details.
Whatever is made of that, as theatre it is pitch perfect. When Jack Benny (yes, you read that right) has to imitate a dedicated Nazi he reiterates the nonsense he has heard another Nazi say, and is relieved, though surprised, to find that it works.
Released in January 1942 the makers saw it as a contribution to war effort to mock and belittle the enemy as Charlie Chaplin had in The Great Dictator (1940). Yes Mel Brooks reprised it.
We went to see it on the wide screen at the Ritz in Randwick. What a treat.
Good Reads meta-data is a listening time of 17h and 3m, rated 4.4 out of 5 by 18 audiblistas.
I read the Inferno, Part I of the Commedia, as an undergraduate and it made an impression on me. One for Dr Sarah Gardner. But I aways wondered about the remaining two parts. I finally scratched that itch by listening to an Audible version of the whole over the last few weeks on daily patrols of Newtown.
Hmmm…. I found Purgatory boring, all too much like listening to conference presentations: one after another, each successive one less interesting than the one before.
However, it proved more bearable than Paradise which was so saccharine that I gave up on it with more than two hours of empty rhetorical calories to follow.
Conclusion? Machiavelli was right, the people in Hell are more interesting than those in Heaven. He wrote something like this: In hell I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings and princes, while in heaven are only beggars, monks and apostles. Certainly Dante’s Hell is far more entertaining than his Purgatory or Paradise.
Further reading: Maurice Joly, The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864) adds to the fun. See also Sebastien de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (1989), sanctimonious though it is. But first try Machiavelli’s own short story, Belfagor.
Good Reads meta-data is 25 pages rated 3.95 by 213 litizens.
Genre: SciFi; Species: First Contact.
DNA: USA
Verdict: A landmark.
Tagline: Mirror, mirror.
Interstellar space flight is routine, and Earth ship Llanvabon is on a research mission to study a double star in the Crab Nebula. This is such an unusual astronomical opportunity that, whoa, it has attracted another, alien ship.
First problem is to identify it. Definitely not from Earth. Yikes! Aliens. This is the first contact of any kind with an alien species after decades of interstellar flight.
Second problem how to establish peaceful contact. Many tentative steps are taken by each side.
Third, now that rapprochement seems to have been established the next problem to solve is how to communicate. Fortunately, Ensign Apple whipped up a translator app on his iPhone. [Sure he did.]
Fourth, the aliens are humanoid in the same way MAGAs are. They do not talk but use a radio wave telepathy.
Fifth, the ships swap two crew members to get acquainted. Still things are volatile. Why? Each ship has armaments intended to blast meteors that they are could use on each other and back track to the home world for invasion!
Six, it is a stalemate. Neither captain wants to attack if this is a good opportunity for cooperation, but neither wants to reveal their origin in case the other has hostile intentions. Indeed, they – both captains and both crews – begin to realise they are thinking nearly exactly alike.
Murray Leinster
Spoiler ahead!
The resolution is to swap ships, each denuded of any revealing information about origins as a kind of technology transfer of good will. Each leaves for its homeward with alien ship.
Murray Constantine (Katharine Burdekin) Swastika Night (1937).
Good Reads meta-data is 208 pages rated 3.62 by 2909 litizens.
Genre: Dystopia.
DNA: Brit.
Verdict: Prescient and timely.
Tagline: ‘I told you so.’
Anno Domini 2444, five hundred years after Germany won World War II (yes the author saw that coming when even Charles Lindberg didn’t) together with the Japanese. Hitler has now been deified in gold. Women are herded like cattle and used only for selective breeding. Jews, homosexuals, the Bosox nation, Slavs, Romani, game shows hosts, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Quakers, and other subhumans have been exterminated. On the other side of the world the Empire of Japan luxuriates in its triumph by pillaging far and wide.
The demigod Hitler is portrayed as 7’ (2.1m) tall with a strong chin, blond hair, cobalt blue eyes, and dimples. Even better looking than Elvis.
No books are left to burn, but the thought police remain ever vigilant. If this is starting to sound like….
In the novel Hero begins to find out the truth about the war and Hitler and is hunted down by the aforementioned ICE agents and murdered. End of story. Downbeat indeed.
Katharine Burdekin
Irony is that in the free Britain of 1937 the author had to pose as a man to get her book published.
Further Reading: The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick with its novel within a novel, which seems mild in comparison. Likewise, Swastika Night makes Handmaiden’s Tale seem like a fairy story.
Good Reads meta-data is 321 pages, rated 2.82 by 800 litizens.
Genre: Krimi; Species: Historical period.
DNA: Italian; Florentine.
Verdict: Nicely done.
Tagline: Hell is right here, right now.
June in the year of 1300, Durante Alighieri, who prefers to be known as Dante, is one of the six Priors who serve a two-month term of office, rather like a city council with executive powers. He is pleased with this preferment until the chief of the guard, whom he regards as a dolt (and who regards him as a puffed up popinjay) asks him to attend a crime scene in a long-abandoned church. As he picks his way through the rubble in the city streets left by the latest battle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, Dante ponders on the cesspool that Florence is sliding into.
At the church he finds a talented mosaic artist who has been murdered and mutilated. He is tempted to let the Guard deal with the crime the way he usually does: arrest the nearest beggar and torture him into confessing: Case closed. Policing has never changed it seems. But there are intellectual puzzles in this case and Dante pursues them.
Then there is a strange conclave in a sleazy tavern of men who claim to be founding a studium in Florence, that is, a university. Dante seeks their company and this accomplished poet is most welcome, but…. Is all as it seems? Or is it not. Place your bets!
It is a time when failed crusades to the holy land have undermined many verities. Moreover, anyone who has been to the East is tainted. There is a prologue that provides that orientation.
Then there are rumours that an heir to the Holy Roman emperor yet lives and that makes the ever so corrupt Pope worry. Such an heir might threaten the Pope’s hold on the throne. His reputation for incompetence was only bested by his reputation for greed, gluttony, and rapine. Now who does that remind me of?
Having only recently listened to Dante’s Inferno on my foot patrols I noticed many incidents in this novel that recall passages in it. According to our author then, Dante found much of Hell on the streets and byways of Florence. Nicely done that. These references are codified in an afterword I discovered when I got there.
I also savoured the portrayal of the other priors, who like the prestige of the assignment, but are loath to do any of the work that is supposed to go with it. I could not help but recall all those university colleagues who festooned their CVs with every committee assignment they ever had, and laboured to avoid doing any of the committee’s work, mainly by never attending meetings.
Good Reads meta-data is 188 pages rated 3.49 by 9040 litizens.
Genre: Fiction.
DNA: Mexico.
Verdict: Humorous, creative, then tedious, and finally tiresome.
Tagline: A dental autobiography.
A discontinuous and disjoined narrative of Hero who was born with extra teeth and then by a convoluted story becomes fascinated by teeth, and not just his own. He becomes an auctioneer and that brings him into contact with teeth; teeth put up for auction. A tooth from Plato or Virginia Wolfe. And so on. Disbelief is suspended at the factory door.
Author was commissioned to write the text for corporate murals in a juice factory and in so doing, she asked workers about themselves, their work, and so on, and incorporated a lot of that in the pieces that constitute this book. (Or is that ‘comprise’? I have forgotten the rule that distinguishes them. Pedants, please enlighten me.)
The result is a series of short pieces threaded around Hero, barely. Each is well written but there is no momentum and I wasn’t sure why I should keep reading it. So I didn’t. Maturity, that is.
Well, I liked the reference to the horse’s teeth. You know the one. Yes, you do. In debating an obscure theological point of dogma, savants become vexed about the number of teeth a horse has. They argue from first principles, though of course, different first principles, on and on. Pages are filled with decretal (look it up) references, Biblical verses, Ex cathedra assumptions, and scholasticism logicism. Careers were made and broken on the wheel of peer review in this debate. At no time, do these magi consider examining a horse.
The story is often attributed to Francis Bacon, as it is in these pages, but a brief investigation of the internet suggests that there is no text to support that paternity claim. The most likely conclusion I found in the five-minutes of my own research is that it was concocted (by a journalist) in the early Twentieth Century who gave it authenticity with a fabricated pedigree by referring to an exact date, 1432, and the lustre of Sir Francis Bacon’s name. Accordingly, file it under the heading of ‘He never said it,’ along with many other commonly cited remarks.
Aristotle often gets indicted for a similar dental lapse but of course…. It is more complicated when one bothers to consult his text of De Anima where he wrote ‘males have more teeth than females in the cases of men, sheep, goats, and swine….’ ‘Ah huh!’ I hear.
This observation is taken by some to denigrate women, though quite how is lost of me. Do women want to be in the company of sheep and swine along with men as a kind of identity? It is also cited as evidence that Aristotle was a fool for not counting teeth. He, the first and probably the greatest empiricist, did not count THE teeth! Indeed I have heard this trumpet sounded in more than one conference presentation on the circle of purgatory I occupied during my career. Well, let’s turn the pages of De Anima and we find there further comments that suggest he did count teeth, including women’s, in a story of a woman of eighty spawning wisdom teeth at that advanced age. What we might conclude from all this is that the woman or women he examined did have fewer teeth than the man or men he examined, and it being of incidental interest he left it at that. But of course, among you readers are various numbers of teeth due to congenital deformations, accidents, decay, violence, surgery, and age. Moreover, at different times of life we each have a different number of teeth. See complicated. Need it be said, yes of course, nothing is obvious to the purblind: the text of De Anima does not assert, state, imply or support the inference of masculine superiority because of dentures.
Moreover, none who mount the soapbox on this point themselves ever do any dental counting in sheep, swine, or women nor cite anyone else who has. That is a thesis topic in search of an author.
By the way, Bertrand Russell played a role in spreading and legitimating this furphy as he did others. Bertie was never one to check the original text when the muse inspired him, and he has become a secular saint whose word is law to be repeated but to be tested.
