Goodreads meta-data is 384 pages, rated 3.75 by 1569 raters.
Genre: Chick Lit.
Verdict: Gal pals unite!
Vivi(an) and Max(ine) are two damsels determined not to be distressed. They start three thousands miles apart and end up, unwillingly in each case, at the 1939 World’s Fair during a chilly May at Flushing in New York City. Vivi is a starlet on her way up in Hollywood’s food chain in sunny LA. Since moving there from Brooklyn Heights she has undergone voice training to lose the accent, wears lens for eye color, hair dyeing, posture correction, lost weight, layered with make-up, trained to walk, had cosmetic surgery, and been rugged out in new clothes. Later even her estranged sister barely recognises her. By contrast Max, who is a couple of years younger, say around twenty, was an NYU student in soggy Gotham vying for a scholarship in journalism. Her one aim in life is a job at the New York Times, in which ambition she is enthusiastically supported by her family for the Times is oracular. Then the World’s Fair beckoned, sort of.
Both are intelligent, independent-minded, and hard working. And everything is falling into place, until life throws each a curveball. The studio serves up a Steve Carlton slider to Vivi when the producer of her current film – her first leading role – decides to lend her to a friend and fellow producer who is masterminding an aquacade at the World’s Fair, despite her protests. Off she goes, resigned to making the best of it, after all her watery co-star is the biggest orb in the Hollywood firmament at the time, Johnny Weissmuller. Having her name coupled with his on a program has got to be good news. Hmm, was that a double entendre?
Max enters an internship program, aspiring for a placement with the aforementioned Times. Then a Bob Gibson sinker sees her instead relegated to duties with a daily newsletter published at the Fair. Worse, the duties are clerical, not journalistic. In each case the reader is left in no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that these curveballs came because of the stifling atmospheric sexism of the time and place. Women do the clerical work. Starlets are chattel property to be used.
When they both get to the Fair there is a lot about it that I found fascinating and it has whet my appetite for more on the Fair, and, gulp, less on the women. (Notice, I did not say ‘girls.’)
There are chaps circling around, including Tarzan.
As the story goes on we add three other women to the team who devise a way to outwit the men who manipulate them. Nicely done. The prevailing sexism and exploitation of the weaker sex is the underlying narrative, and the World’s Fair itself aspires to be a major character but comes over more as a painted backdrop. I was not sure about all the resolutions, particularly for the journalist-intern. She seems to have gotten the short end of the stick in her own plan. However, the chains of crippling sexism did fall away (at least for a time).
If the title ‘We Came Here to Shine’ is explained in the book, I blinked and missed it. The book has a very informative afterword about the history and the Fair that I particularly liked that and hope to follow up on a couple of the suggestions.
I had a soupçon of the 1939 New York City World’s Fair in the memorable Dark Palace (2000) when Edith worked at the League of Nations Pavilion as the lights went out in September. Occasionally I have wanted to find out more about this event, greatly overshadowed by start of World War II in Europe. Recently I went looking again for something; I had rather been hoping for a historical account but among the few titles I found most were concerned with style featuring colour plates and so on, not suitable for lazy reading on the sofa or at bedtime. Nor did any of these artistic, architectural, or fashion studies seem to have any sociological, political, or historical perspective as gleaned from the blurbs. The Mechanical Turk, however, consulted the algorithm and proffered this title which I resisted at first, but then asked for a Kindle sample in the absence of any more suitable alternative, and then read on to the end. Glad I did.
Susie Orman Schnall
Baseball fans will know both Carlton and Gibson, each of whom let his pitches do most of the talking, though Carlton on the few occasions when he spoke publicly was positively evangelical about the slider, while Gibson mostly grunted on and off the mound. Every batter knew Carlton would deliver a slider and no one could hit it. Every hitter knew Gibson’s out-pitch was the sinker and he liked to get batters out right now, but few batters ever saw it and not one ever hit it. Carlton once proclaimed he was put on earth to throw the slider, while Gibson’s mission was to get batters out, now! He did. They both did. There was a time when both were contracted to the same team, and that would have been a fearsome twosome to rival the tyranny of Koufax and Drysdale.
Goodreads meta-data 320 pages rated 4.04 by 23 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Agent 001 at work.
In 1947 Hero has returned from the war to a life of privilege at an Oxford college, where he mopes and feels sorry for himself. He is an archeologist who specialises in the Middle East of, well, not pre-history but 4000 years ago is getting close. A friend of a friend puts moper in contact with a Foreign Office (FO) toff who has a Sumerian doodad from those ancient days. ‘Meh’ is Hero’s reaction. But wait, there is more, this FO toff is also getting threatening messages in Sumerien cuneiform that seem to be relate to that doodad. Did it take the Royal Mail 4000 years to deliver them? This conundrum briefly arouses moper from his melancholy self-absorption at least to footnote the texts from which the threats emanate. Scholars must always footnote.
Then the FO toff gets crushed (yes, crushed) on top of a Sumerien statue (one of the colossi) at midnight in the British Museum (BM). This wakes up moper. (That reference to the BM is what got my click for Kindle. Be warned there is very little of it.)
At the same time the Irgun tries to assassinate the British Foreign Minister on the street, perhaps having mistaken him for the Archduke Ferdinand. The Foreign Minister wants Hero to protect him since he has mistaken the Scots accent of his security detail for Sumerien. Can the plot get any thicker?
Yes, it can because while escorting the FM moper meets the sister of his lost love. You see, Lost Love thought he was already dead and so jumped to her own death, aided by the S.O.E. Code names Romeo and Juliet. (If you don’t know what the S.O.E. was, keep it that way.) He wonders ever so politely what his chances now are with sister. We all know where that is going to lead, even if he doesn’t.
There are so many back and side stories and lengthy expositions on everything from the naming of ships to the location of hotels of the ‘Did you know?’ variety. Did you know that seven kinds of wood were used for the paneling on the luxury ocean liner? There follows a list of each, its qualities, and application on the ship. This is one of many such trivial pursuit sidebars that slow the pace, distract the attention, blur the focus, and weary the reader. Our author obviously did an enormous amount of research into the period and was determined to put it all on the page. Gracious, get on with it.
Hero is a man of endless talents. He leaps from tall buildings, outwits all manner of thugs, repairs ships at sea, and I am sure he can fly – with or without – a plane in the next chapter. All of these accomplishments he owes to his S.O.E. training. Sure. Truth is S.O.E.’s real expertise was in getting its agents killed and its managers knighthoods.
On the bright side, the ambience is brought to life, the characters are differentiated, the two story arcs (Sumerien and Irgun) are tantalising, Hero – on the rare occasions when he is not introspecting – is credible. There are some really arresting moments, say when a dead boring academic lecture, goes all spooky. (I wish I had been able to do that!) Too often there is the trivia quiz about extraneous and irrelevant details.
Loose ends there are a few. At the end I still did not know how or why the first victim got on top the colossus in the British Museum, i.e., mechanically how did he get put there. Where was gravity when all that happened? Did it take the night off? As to why, well it did not matter in the end. The dwarf loomed large and then vanished. Is that what dwarves do? The origins of Mr Smith are unknown. Was he victim of a gassing in the trenches of World War I? How did this freak hide on the Queen Mary? Buy clothes? Use face recognition on the smart phone? Although it is the centrepiece of the beginning of the book there is never an explanation of the artefact’s theft from the lecture hall.
Crutches there are a few. I lost track of the number of times when Hero is contemplating the woodwork for the next trivia round, when a voice at his side interrupts his reverie. Gosh, he seems to have no instinct to warn of these impending intrusions, and would hence never survive as a quarterback. Yet later we learn that he can sense the presence of invisible enemies, and he can see in the dark. It’s the daylight, then, that blinds him.
In an afterword the author links many of the events to historical reality, too many for this reader to digest. The author seems to have been born with a keyboard on each hand because he has hundreds of writing credits in all manner of genres. This one is part of series.
Goodreads meta-data is 447 (very long) pages, rated 4.47 by 136 litizens.
Genre: Thriller.
Verdict: Ugh.
There is a world of difference between a thriller and a krimi, and this is a thriller, well, a wannabe thriller. What it is largely is an exposition of the facts and figures about Switzerland in 1939. A crashing bore, you might think, and you’d be right. It is opened by a chapter about a German tank unit during the invasion of France in 1940, and I am now at 54% in Switzerland in early 1939 with no connection to that first chapter. No, I am not on the edge of my seat, rather slumped in the chair in frustration and boredom. (P.S. I flipped to the end and found a squib of an explanation of the tank unit opening. Too little, too later for this impatient reader.)
One major theme is the extensive arms production in Switzerland. They were busy selling to all sides. That is played up so much I began to think that the way to avoid war was to put the Swiss out of business as the merchants of death.
As I was skimming through the pages of stilted, meandering prose I wondered why I had elected to read it. What prompted me to take up this stew. I flicked the pages on the Kindle faster and faster and then…
Our hero secret agent Müller is impressed by the banker he meets, the more so since she is a woman, because she knows a lot about Switzerland that he, native though he is, does not know. One of the unknowns for him is where Basel is. Yep. It seems to be news to him that it is on the German border with that most peculiar train station. (Psst. There must have been a reference to this station in the blurb and that is why I selected it.)
One of the three Basel train stations is very peculiar. The Basel Badischer Bahnhof was known from 1933 to 1945 as the Basel Deutsche Reichsbahn. See the difference? No, well, check those dates and think again. Historically a rail company from Baden built the track and the station in the 19th Century and arranged by treaty – when Baden was an independent duchy before German unification – with Switzerland (in effect with canton of Basel) to operate the station which is on Swiss territory. This arrangement rolled over when Germany absorbed Baden. The track and the platform are by treaty German, but the station building is Swiss. De facto the border runs through the station between the platforms and the station hall. This was a legal fiction until 1933 with advent of Nazism made it a grim reality.
1938
Think of a train station as three components to get the picture: the tracks, the platforms, and the hall. In this station the tracks and trains on them along with the platforms to enter and leave the trains were in Germany, while the hall that travellers passed through was in Switzerland. That division, by the way, is easily to visualise in Sydney Central Station for intercity travel with the ticket barrier and its scanners as the border.
On the other side of the hall there are platforms and rails serving Switzerland (like the suburban platforms at Sydney Central). I know that I saw this station when in Switzerland (1983) because I remember asking someone about the Badischer in the name and getting fobbed by an interlocutor who either didn’t know or didn’t care or both.
Today this kind of arrangement can be found elsewhere. In both Vancouver and Toronto airports (and perhaps elsewhere, too) USA customs and immigration is accommodated in the Canadian airports on Canadian territory. To leave Toronto one passes through Canadian officials and then US ones to get to an aircraft going to the USA. In that zone the US authorities are sovereign by treaty like an embassy.
Back to Basel, from 1933 this division of the station made it a tempting conduit for some fleeing Nazi Germany, and knowing that fact, Nazi agents manned the checkpoint from the platform to the station with vigilance and plainclothes Gestapo agents roamed the hall in Swiss territory intimidating and on occasion kidnapping travellers. That latter was illegal but the neutral Swiss seldom complained, preferring to go along to get along with the bigger and meaner neighbour as long as the victims were not Swiss.
I can find almost nothing about this anomalous station. I went looking for history on the Swiss Federal Railways web site to no avail. That is, Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, Chemins de der fédéraux suisses, Ferrovie federali svizzere, and Viafiers federalas svizras, whew! No wonder it has more than 30,000 employees! Visiting archives, I once travelled on SFR from Zurich to Geneva to Neuchâtel, and back.
Is this station another missed opportunity for Hollywood to muddle history ‘based on a true story?’ Dibs! I can imagine the clichés punctuated with childish CGI for by the prepubescent boy directors and audience.
All of this is more interesting than the tome at hand. Read it and decide for yourself.
IMDb meta-data is 11 episodes of 48 minutes each. Ratings are below.
Genre: Hard Boiled.
Verdict: An intoxicating cocktail of cynicism and optimism.
These titles from the second season came my way:
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot rated 7.4 by 53 cinematizens,
Spanish Blood rated 7.2 by 32 cinematizens,
Pick-up on Noon Street rated 7.4 by 34 cinematizens,
Guns at Cyrano’s rated 7.2 by 30 cinematizens,
Trouble is My Business rated 7.5 by 35 cinematizens, and
The Red Wind rated 7.5 by 30 cinematizens.
From the typewriter of Raymond Chandler this series adapts some of his early short stories for the screen. A few of these early stories featured Mallory before the gestation of Philip Marlowe in print, but Marlowe has been retrofitted into these scripts. (Word to the wise: the entry on Wikipedia is not useful for the early days of Marlowe.) These are episodes from the second season. My efforts to locate the first series have not (yet) been successful.
In these outings Marlowe is (retrospectively) the Marlowe of The Big Sleep, tough and cynical, incarnated by Powers Booth (1948-2017), the only Marlowe I have seen who has the bulk, with added jowls and a vocal rasp from all those cigarettes and scotch. Some cluey aficionados rank him as the #2 Marlowe after Bogart. Could be. That’s one toss I won’t argue.
Taken together in these episodes what I noticed is the racial themes in Spanish Blood and Pick-up on Noon Street, and I wondered how closely that aligned with Chandler’s original stories, or was it the production company, HBO, beating the virtue drum? I don’t recall anything about either Latinos or Blacks from Chandler’s stories, except in the background as gardeners or drivers, maids and servants. Make of that what one will. I may have to re-read these stories myself for a refresher.
There is also a recurrent motif in that the victims of a crime had contrived the crime to gain publicity in the dream factory town, where publicity is oxygen, where if you are not going up then you are going down on the popularity gauge, because someone else is going up on it. That seemed surprisingly current given the great desire of so many people to be victims.
My personal favourite from this half-dozen is The Red Wind. Its evocation of the Santa Ana wind is a malevolent character in the wings, just off camera, in this drama. It precipitates actions, explains method, and drives the momentum. If anything this is even more effective on film than on the page. Maury Chaykin, before he went straight and became Nero Wolfe, is as repellant as a Republican Senator, lazy, stupid, corrupt, and greedy. He positively drips malice off the screen onto the carpet in front of the television. Yuk! (Note he is not in the story but an addition for the screen play and wonderful.) While the screenplay retains all the convolutions, for unknown reasons it changed the context to a political campaign, as was the case also in Spanish Blood. It also changed the colour of the bolero jacket that is crucial to the plot. Change for the sake of change is not limited to management.
The staging is for television, slow and methodical and that allows for Marlowe’s worldweary voiceovers. I went shopping for Season One but cannot find it in any of the usual locations. Odd that.
It is also striking that a man-eating femme fatale is the pivot in all of these stories. Did Chandler fear women that much. It sure seems it watching these in a row. Moreover, the women, though played by different actors, bear a resemblance to each other, but I put that down to the preferences of the casting director for the willowy athlete. The only one miscast is the lead in Red Wind: The camera looks right through her. (Every time I encounter this story I react to Marlowe’s closing speech on the pier. It seems ill judged to me. Maybe the flyer could only afford the pearls he bought and dreamed of replacing them sometime with the real thing. But Marlowe has no truck with dreamers.)
It offers plenty of eye candy with period dress, automobiles, and much location shooting of the vanishing 1930s Hollywood and, more generally, Los Angeles. Love those California Spanish mansions, and the tropical foliage (in which lurk deranged rapists, murderers, black-widow spider women, and drug-addled teenagers). The cigarette smoking is constant by one and all, as it was then. Most of all there is the light, the sun, the blue sky above all the depravity. Sunshine Noir as this style came to be called is aborning in these stories, and some of the quips are gold, if ephemeral, perhaps that is fool’s gold that flashes in the sunlight.
The user reviews on IMDb are replete with pedants picking errors in the models of cars, street addresses, and other, like essentials. Keeps the trolls busy, anyway.
Goodreads meta-data is 329 pages rated 3.7 by 323 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Many trees, little forest.
Welcome to the back office of a very large and expensive hotel far away from the glitz and glamour of the lobby and the guest rooms. In back the floors are concrete, the paint is peeling, and the staff are treated like slaves. No it is not quite that bad, but the contrast between the front of the house and back is nonetheless stark. The laundry, the stains, the effort to please those paying a thousand dollars a night, the demands of the head of an association who brings its annual conference with hundreds of expense-account guests each year, the thefts, the health inspections, the demarcation disputes among the staff, the ego war in the kitchens, the indifference of the McKinsey-schooled managers to anything that does ring the cash register, they are all in a day and night at the Hotel California, which I identified with that rambling structure the Hotel del Coronado with its paper thin walls in San Diego where I once had a conference.
Our hapless protagonist has been passed over for promotion to manager more than once. Is that the cause or the effect of his increasingly cynicism? The incumbent manager, ever faithful to the book of McKinsey of delegating responsibility downward to maintain deniability, seems to take delight in heaping ever more duties on him, perhaps to drive him out. Well our hero is made of stronger stuff and will not buckle…yet.
With housing for nearly a thousand guests across several buildings and an endless stream of comings and goings it is a small town, and lots of shenanigans from mischief to murder, with a suicide in-between not to mention the nocturnal tepee creeping. (The description reminded me of the Hilton Village in Waikiki.) The police have learned to use the deliveries entrance. None of these events are good for business and the sooner swept under the carpet the better. Woe betide the housekeeping staff who lift that carpet.
There is slow build after an initial explosion of violence in a guest room, and much exposition of hotel mechanics along with a survey of the staff. That may sound laboured, however, it is well integrated into the unfolding of the narrative. Note, it is merciful shorn of IKEA descriptions of furnishings or Elle clothing fashions. Indeed I have no idea what the protagonist looks like.
However, yes there is a ‘but’ coming. The exposition does become forced when every room, every employee, every incident has a nickname or code name in hotelese which is explained. The tide of information is relentless. Time after time, page after page. It gets to be mechanical, Robbie. It became like following a jaded tour guide reciting facts and figures to no end. None of that exposition fed into the plot.
There are clever set-ups like the Bob Johnsons Convention which was a completely new idea to me, and it made a screwball comedy sort of Kurt Vonnegut sense. The solution wrapped-up just about everything, but not everything. Bob ‘Bull’ Johnson must still be roaming the hallways.
Alan Russell
Oversold re laugh out loud but dryly amusing page-by-page. But perfect for bedside table reading matter.
Goodreads meta-data is 208 pages, rated 3.56 by 258 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Meh.
I have read at least a dozen of these Charles Paris krimis and enjoyed the plotting and the theatrical ambience which is so lovingly detailed. This book is the sixteenth in the sequence. Surprising then, I could not finish this one but stopped at 48% on the Kindle meter. It seemed to be going nowhere. Instead there were endless discussions about the nature and meaning of the play to be performed – Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night – that went on and on in every chapter.
The only crimes were artistic, punctuated with Charles’s usual alcoholism and colossal blunders in relating to his Penelope, who has wisely divorced him but still – for reasons of the plot – puts up with him, and diamond hard cynicism. Not a stiff in sight.
I signed out in favour of another title by another author. Have I become an impatient reader? Guess so. Because of my affection for the other titles by this writer and appreciating how hard it must be to sustain such a series, I hesitated for some time about posting this remark, but well, the truth will out. I don’t suppose my comments will damage the sales of this title or any other.
GoodReads meta-data is 161 pages, rated 3.59 by 593 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Offbeat, very.
No, not this one.
Morbidly obese, incompetent accountant Eugene daydreams about escaping the rut of an hour-long commute on the crowded, dirty, smelly, and unreliable Tube where people sneeze on him to work, a cold sandwich downed at his hot desk in an open-plan zoo between associates struggling not to bump into his ungainly bulk. That bulk may well be the only reason he hasn’t been fired, the firm fearing some kind of law suit for discrimination against the fat.
Eugene lives with his grandmother to save money, so poorly paid is he. His co-workers shun him, and it is easy to see why. He is painfully inept, tongue-tied, sloppy, and, well, not very bright. The tomato sauce stains on his shirt are ever present. ‘I’m a Loser’ is his theme song.
Into this downward spiralling life comes a wind, well, a breeze, of change. After work one day, during a cloud burst he ducks into a bookstore where he comes across a krimi he read years ago when he was a student, and thumbs through it, recalling something of the story and savouring the recollection of his youth when he read it. The rain stops, and as he heads toward the dreaded Tube, and because he went into the bookstore he walks along a street he usually does not, passing an Op Shop which has a men’s trench coat in a window display. More rain is in the offing and he is surprised to find that the coat encompasses his XXXXL+ girth. ‘Sold!’ and as he walks along he feels a surge of energy – a new experience for him.
Strange. Remember Jackie Chan’s The Tuxedo [2002]? Not quite as powerful as all that but a surge nonetheless.
Moping in his room, as he does every night, stuffing his face with greasy food and slurping gigantic sugar-laced sodas, trawling the web, when nearly unconsciously he types an advert onto an internet market place as a PI.
Imagine his surprise when a few nights later, surrounded by pizza boxes and double whopper colas, he gets an imperious response to this notice, instructing him to arrive at an address at 11 a.m. tomorrow morning…alone. Taking time off work, sure that no one will miss him, he meets Melissa who sets him to find her missing husband, a highly paid and successful surgeon, who has been gone for weeks. Did I mention that Eugene is also a virgin and naive to boot. He will do anything she says if he can fathom it.
Trouble is that Eugene has no idea what to do, desperately trying to remember the detective books and films he has read and seen for inspiration. He is not very good at that either: Mumbling, stumbling, scratching. It does eventually occur to him to ask around among husband’s colleagues. However, his near total lack of personality means most ignore him even though with his size he is hard to miss.
He is altogether a loser, but somehow…. Yes, he has the luck of the stupid, and by chaotic shambling he uncovers the plot, and it is resolved with very little help from him. There is an adage in sports that a better opponent brings out one’s own best game. One plays up, or tries to do so, to the competition. Eugene does something like that.
Christian Hayes
It is unusual and unexpected and diverting. It includes a novel within the novel, namely that 1940’s noir he found in the bookstore in a tour de force. I did read it all and that in itself is a recommendation from this impatient reader. There is a sequel but I have not bit yet. Perhaps I will.
[A week later.] I did, very similar to the above but with unexpected touches like the cab stand at Russell Square, at which I remember once waiting far too long before dawn on a wet day for a ride to Heathrow.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 17 minutes, rated 8.2 by 6 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Charming.
Somewhere in a Latvian potato field Aldis talks to the plants, commending them on their endurance, praising their versatility, luxuriating in their foliage, and cheering them on. This potato field is his canvas, his work, his mission, his wife, his dog, his life. Then one night he sleeps through the crash of an alien spaceship into his field of dreams! Well, farm work is tiring, making him a heavy sleeper and he missed the impact only to awaken to a loud knock at the door.
Next thing he knows the long arm of Riga has reached out and evacuated him from his property while the downed spacecraft, which he is told is a weather satellite, is secured. The government offical who moves him is Arn from Prince Valiant working a second job. Aldis plots with two friends, a married couple, that he stays with while his farm is fenced off for study, to get back among those tubers, because they cannot do without him, nor he without them. The trio try several ruses in good fun to get in, from movie making to a tourist walk through the potato field but the guards will not open the gate to either the costumed film crew or the ersatz tourist.
Desperate, Aldis goes in via a wormhole burrowing under the fence, and finds a great silver potato (looked like that bean in Chicago to me, but not that big, things in Chicago have to be too big). He politely knocks on the door and it opens wherein he finds an injured alien from Area 51. They communicate, sort of, a mutual goodwill. All Aldis has is a bag potatoes he just picked and he offers one to the alien. Offer accepted, and the alien bites in, and starts to feel better immediately. Aldis is surprised but he know his potatoes are good.
Aldis goes back to his potatoes and the alien takes off, disappointing Official Arn before he can use the alien technology to make Latvia great (again). After haranguing Aldis and his two co-conspirators…he asks for some potatoes to take home!
The slow smile from Aldis is charming, as is the whole deal.
P.S. We are left to infer that none of the officials bothered to knock.
GoodReads meta-data is 201 pages, rated 3.75 by 16 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: By the numbers.
It is 1990 in the People’s Republic of China following the Tiananmen Square massacre. Inspector Bao goes to see an opera. On his police officer’s salary his ticket puts him in the cheapest of cheap seats. As the luck of crime writing would have it, another patron nearby is murdered in his seat, and, well, a fictional dick has got to do what a fictional dick has got to do and he investigates.
Of course, he is warned off by overlings and that threat causes him to redouble his efforts, and so on. It is an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion and that is among the coppers.
There is much locale and atmosphere of contemporary China and that kept me flipping Kindle pages as the genre clichés piled up.
Two straw horses dominate Bao’s tedious efforts at social criticism: first, is the corruption of the Communist Party which has become even more strident and hypocritical post-Tiananmen and, second, evil capitalism (which is simply equated to money) corrupting the comrades. It is a world of blacks and whites. Reminded me of that Danish kiminiologist who equates anyone with a few Euros to Hitler – Jussi Adler-Olsen.
Mostly Bao, like so many other fictional detectives, is more interested in his own introspection and self-absorption than anything else. ‘I am so fascinating’ would a truthful subtitle for many krimi heroes.
Chris West
There is much of China, as indicated above, the division between city slickers who breathe smog and country bumpkins who breathe methane, dutiful northerners and slack southerners, real Chinese versus Hong Kongers, and the spectral shadow of Mao and the Cultural Revolution hang over all like a miasma. (Aside, it seemed to this cynical observer that the Trump era bore many similarities to the Cultural Revolution with its celebration of ignorance.)
Some time ago I came across an explanation for the two names Beijing used to bear when transliterated to English: Peping and Peking. One means northern city and other northern capital but I forgot which way around they go.
Goodreads metadata is 172 pages, rated 4.27 by 227 litizens.
Verdict: What a trip!
An incredible story that has not (yet) been bastardised and exploited by Hollywood. (I searched IMDb.) Dibs on that.
On 4 December 1941 Pan American flight 606 took off from Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay for Auckland in far New Zealand (and return therefrom) with stops along the way, starting with Honolulu. It had a crew of ten men and fifty passengers. All the members of the crew were experienced long-haul flyers, well versed in Pan Am’s exacting safety protocols.
This was an enormous flying boat – a Boeing 314 – equipped with all the latest mod cons and hi tech of the day. The hull was marked with company logos and a US flag on roof and both side of the nose cone, as well as the civilian registration number NC-18609.
By this time it was Standard Operating Procedure for the pilot commanding to be handed an envelope as he entered the aircraft to prepare for takeoff with the forbidding label: To Be Opened Only in an Emergency. Captain’s eyes only. Captain Robert Ford was required to carry it in the internal right hand breast pocket of his uniform coat at all times per company rules. He had carried such an unopened envelope on many previous flights: Situation normal.
The flight duly arrived in Honolulu and laid over for fuelling, passenger changes, and some relaxation for the crew, staying at the Moana Hotel where we had a reception once. It took off the next day, 6 December and wound its way southwest making stops for fuel, food, relaxation, and water at Canton Island, Suva, and Noumea. So far so normal.
Everyone was aware of the tensions in the Pacific and at each stop there is talk about it in the abstract. Then…. about an hour from Auckland the onboard radio operator began trying to establish radio contact with Auckland and came across a Kiwi radio news bulletin that proclaimed unconfirmed reports of an attack at Pearl Harbor …. Oops! Consternation prevailed as the crew members recalled the Pearl Harbor they had left less than a day ago. They continued in silence for a few minutes while the radio operator sought confirmation, then they received a message from the Pan Am ground station in Noumea: Pearl Harbor Attacked. Implement Plan A. Good luck.
The Captain opened the envelope to read PLAN A (PLAN B was for Pan Am flights in the Atlantic Ocean, mostly to South America, but also one to Africa). Plan A was very detailed. It started with a decision tree. That is, it was divided into parts based on where the aircraft was when the envelope was opened. This close to Auckland and with no apparent trouble there, the obvious thing to do was to get to Auckland by taking anticipatory evasive action and changing their flight path and going to radio silence (both sending and receiving can be traced).
Leaving aside the details, Plan A said to continue West to New York City, like Magellan or Columbus, not to return over the Pacific. How to do this was left to the discretion of the captain. This was an enormous challenge to both man and machine. They had no maps, charts, weather reports or history, radio locator guides, tidal records, descriptions of anchorages for such an aircraft, spare parts, and they would need fuel, food, and mechanical supplies along the way. Nor had any of them ever before been in those parts of the world. West from Auckland the nearest Pan Am base was…[wait for it] at Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo. (Why Pan Am established a base station there remains a mystery.)
Dinner time.
During a week in New Zealand the crewmen laid in supplies from the Pan Am base in Auckland, all the few remaining passengers having disembarked there, using the cash on hand in the local office and pocketing the rest for later. An array of spare parts and two whole engine assemblies were packed into the passenger accommodation. Meanwhile, the navigators went to the public library to look at geography textbooks, maps, and atlases with tracing paper to make copies and the radio operators went to radio stations to seek out information about which radio bands were used in those parts of the world. The library mission was fruitful, the radio investigation was not. From Auckland to New York City on the western route was 20,869 miles at least.
The areas to traverse were vast and may be war zones by then. One possibility was to overfly Australia to Perth and from there to South Africa, however, flying over the Australian continent with no landing gear was daunting. In any case, that last leg from Perth over the southern India Ocean to Durban was beyond the range of the aircraft. Instead they decided to go to Darwin and from there to Ceylon via the Dutch East Indies…. To infer from these pages, most of the decisions were collective after discussion, which was after research.
What’s so hard about this anyway? Just draw a straight one place to another and fly that. Simple. Hmm. How does one allow for the drift of crosswinds, the false readings of the magnetic North Pole, the inconvenient location of mountain peaks, the long stretches where there will be neither fuel nor food nor any place to land the beast. How do you know you are flying a straight line? Indeed.
The subsequent adventures were many. The Boeing was buzzed by fighter aircraft, just missed Japanese bombing in Darwin, shot at by a Japanese warship, had to repair the engines several times (once in flight), borrow money from strangers, fly by dead reckoning, guess at the location of mountain ranges, hit unexpected storm fronts, land in unfamiliar waters (including some that were mined) risking accidents, guesstimate the wind drift, allow for the magnetic North Pole, stay aloft when one engine, pushed beyond the redline – exploded while in mid-air, all the while looking out for Zeroes. In some takeoffs the plane was more than a ton over the prescribed weight, because they stocked up on avgas whenever they could get it. One engine blew doing that.
From Ceylon to Karachi, Bahrain, Khartoum (landing on the Nile River), Léopoldville (on the Congo River), and Natal in Brazil. The distance from Léopoldville to Natal was 3480 miles. The maximum range of the Boeing was 3600 miles. Not much leeway if a storm threw the ship off course, if headwinds slowed the plane, if they mistook landmarks, if the next waterway was clogged, if the navigators miscalculate, if the effect of magnetic North Pole confuses things…. They had by now violated all manner of safety rules to adapt the aircraft to the circumstances, changing the fuel mix, rerouting hydraulic lines to reuse oil, and punching holes here and there so that they could pour fuel into the tanks in flight from jerry cans in the cabin. Needless to say, no one smoked.
Captain Robert Ford
That flight from Léopoldville to Natal took 23 hours and 35 minutes. Due to the recurrent overheating of engines because of substandard fuel, the cowlings on two of them had blown off, increasing the risk of fire. The plane trailed smoke for most of this leg of the journey. The plane was fully serviced and repaired at Natal before takeoff. (In a sad and annoying coda, while in Natal thieves got on board and stole the crew members’ personal affects [watches, rings, extra shoes] and much else from the plane, like a gyroscope.)
The long way.
Early in the morning of 6 January 1942 Pan Am flight 602 radioed La Guardia Tower for permission to land. The call was acknowledged and a stunned silence followed. After that it is anti-climatic.
Over five weeks the total flight time was 209 hours in the air, covering 50,694 kilometres or 31,500 miles. Most of the flight was incognito because the aircraft was regarded as technological prize of value to an enemy, i.e., it had advanced navigation and communication systems which were only being used for the first time on this flight. Those assets together with the engines made it a valuable commodity. Moreover, the ground stations they visited did not report the passage for the same reason, and in any event such civilian news would not have had priority for wartime communication. Ergo the families and friends of the crew had not word of them since leaving Noumea five weeks before.
The Wikipedia entry is slim pickings. It does not even include the flight number or offer a map of the route. This anodyne account is the only book I could find. Yet the documentary material seems plentiful, as all the crewmen kept logs, and Pan Am had plenty of photographs.
‘Anodyne’ I said above. Never once does a member of the crew lose his temper, despair, grow despondent, blame another, slack off, be late for departure, go into hysterics, become so hungover as to be unfit for duty, but each and every one is the very model of modern Pan Am employee stepping out of the advertising poster. What a cheerful, polite bunch – insufferable. Disney’s seven dwarfs were more creditable than these (paper) thin men.
The fifty passengers are invisible in these pages. Only one has a name, a Fiji resident who asked to visit the cockpit when approaching Fiji so that he might see his home from the air. Even later when the plane was detained in Bahrain to take on a passenger for Léopoldville, she is never identified or mentioned thereafter, though there was much grousing about being delayed for her convenience. The implication is that being a woman, she cannot have been worth the bother to these men. For all we know, she might have been carrying an enigma machine or Tojo’s P.I.N. to the Allies.
Despite the enveloping context of the war, the book is also silent on the politics of some of the locales where the plane stopped. New Caledonia (Noumea) was a French colony. Was the colonial government Vichy or Free French in late 1941? Did that distinction effect the reception of the plane on either of its two landings? Unknown. Likewise at Léopoldville, at the time the Congo was a Belgian colony, and Belgium had been occupied by the Germans since in 1940 and by the time the Pan Am plane got there Germany had declared war on the USA. What was the nature and attitude of the Belgian colonial authorities to this aircraft and crew? We’ll never know from these pages.
New Zealand was an ally of Great Britain in the European war, but when the Japanese attacked Malaya that bought the war closer. Did that happen while the Pan Am crew was in Auckland? Did it make things easier or harder for them? This context is absent.
All of which is to say there is a lot more to the story for someone else to dig up and put into words.
Amuse yourself by imagining how Hollywood would mangle this ‘based on a true story.’ Captain Ford would be played by that midget, whatshisname, and he would flap his arms to power the aircraft, which would be attacked by giant condors. There would be much yelling and histrionics and CGI galore of irrelevant crocodiles and such. A Nazty femme fatale would figure in the plot. The passengers would include the director’s current squeeze. Christopher Nolan would add his own touches with a gratuitous big-named star taking his hat off and putting it back on repeatedly. (An old theatrical trick to upstage the action.)
Pan Am seems to have been a world of its own, and I am wondering about reading a history of the company to find out more. Recommendations are welcome.
![The Long Way Home (2d ed) (2010 [1998]) by Ed Dover](https://theory-practice.sydney.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/9780615214726.jpg)
