GoodReads meta-data is 287 pages rated by 3.81 by 332 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Vroom!
Serendipity Dahlquist, aged almost thirteen, uses her roller blades to good effect, to rescue ageing PI Leo from an unhappy client. Precocious does not begin to describe Serendipity. She reads a lot, and thinks more, and as curious, fearless, and street smart as only a tweenager can be.
The client was not even Leo’s but his office mate’s. The two are not partners but split the rent on the office, as Leo tries to explain to everyone but no one cares about this fine point. Their names are on the door of the Bradley Building office and that makes them partners. Period! Then Leo’s oily office mate/partner is murdered, and, well, a PI has to do what a PI has to do in the screenplay.
What follows is a pastiche of The Maltese Falcon (1940) as this odd couple — the precocious Serendipity with the battered Leo — look for a lost dog while by-passing Serendipity’s long errant mother. Her grandmother is in loco parentis but largely preoccupied with her career as a regular in a daytime television soap opera until a wall falls on her. How could that happen? Good question.
The plot concerns, ahem, illegal dog fighting and is just as unpleasant as it sounds. Leo and Serendipity meet a lot of deplorable enthusiasts for this bloodsport, and one sheriff who has made his mission in office to eradicate this disgusting exhibition on his turf. There are some vivid characterisations, like the hapless Botolo brothers, though their sister seems to have interchangeable names, Constanzia and Consuela. The body count is high, and not just dogs.
Dick Lochte
The plot is perfectly tied up in the best Ross Macdonald fashion, and the text even includes a nod to one of his titles for the cognoscenti. But what the plot does not reconcile is Groucho the dog, why he was taken in the first place with that reference to money.
IMDb meta-data is seven episodes of 30 minutes each, rated 6.7 by fifty-two cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: [Zzzzzzz]
Des Kinvig is the work-shy proprietor of a 1970s electrical repair shop on the high street in a working class town of the English midlands. Together with his layabout pal, he dreams of ETs, UFOs, and BEMs. Then one day the Queen of Mercury appears (or does she?).
Sounds better than it is. Nigel Kneale is credited as the writer of all seven episodes, and he is in the first rank of screenwriters for sure, but here he tried his hand at comedy, trusted to arthritic directors, with low-rent players, and canned laughter. Not all seven episodes were aired; such was the audience reaction. The rating above is nostalgia inflated by about a factor of ten.
It must be one of the most difficult to watch Sy Fy series ever (partly) aired. It makes Star Maidens look good, difficult though that is to believe.
IMDb 1 hour and 12 minutes (it seemed longer), rated 6.3 by 390 cinematizens.
That Hammer master of horror, Peter Cushing returns to Holmes twenty-seven years after he last donned the deerstalker in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) with John Mills (between the forest sideburns), the eternal Scotsman Gordon Jackson, a miscast Ann Baxter, a catatonic Ray Milland straight from Madame Tussaud’s, and Anton Diffring, as always the villain, in a 1913 London when war clouds gather.
Dead men without a mark start popping out the sewers. Taking Scotland Yard literally, Scotsman Gordo drags the scent across Holmes’s nose and stands back. The action is, well, by the numbers with a red whale, rather than a red herring, a gratuitous appearance of The Woman played by the dowager Baxter. There is some verbal sparing with The Woman, and one nice action scene when Watson dispatches a hooligan very economically on a moving train. Holmes’s major insight is that someone is lying.
Spoiler. The Aryan Anton, despite innocent appearances, has secretly been making poison gas down below so that when the war begins he can release it into the town gas that illuminated London. The dead men were production accidents.
The print I found on You Tube was terrible and that may partly explain why I found it boring.
GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages rated 4.28 by 125 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: A good start.
On New Year’s Eve 1949 at a midnight party in the palatial home of a British ex-patriate the host himself is murdered, though no one seemed to notice at the time. By some chance the investigating officer was the first and only woman in Indian policing. Sure. Everywhere she goes no one takes her seriously. No doubt this is true but to read it is repetitive and boring.
On top of that we get an endless mish-mash of backstories at the expense of any momentum in the front story. I did persevere, but only just.
Vaseem Khan
There is plenty of India but diluted by the didacticism. If Khan continues the series I hope he brings more focus to the front stories.
GoodReads meta-data is 427 pages, rated 4.12 by 58 litizens.
Verdict: so so.
Caught up in the regime change from many gods to one with Pharaoh Akhenaten, diplomat Hani unravels the murder of an Egyptian vassal in the troubled borderlands with the Hittites who are not good neighbours. The plot is convoluted and characters are no sooner introduced than killed off. Much about the theology that has little resonance with a contemporary reader is reviewed. Ditto the geography which the author does not help the reader with and I seem to misplaced my map of ancient Egypt.
Does the vast conspiracy reach all the way to the top? If so, is it a conspiracy?
First in a series. Perhaps the latter titles are less overwrought.
GoodReads meta-data is 223 pages, rated 4.22 by 120 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Diverting.
It’s 1898 and Watson has been kidnapped by a criminal mastermind (no, not him) in a plot to start a European war. His rescue is facilitated by his niece, Lucy, and Sherlock. Oh, and the latter’s smarter brother. There is rich period description of the Orient Express. The plot is as complicated as one could want. One distinction is the evident corruption, not mere incompetence, of the London police.
This is number seven in the series heretofore unknown to me.
GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.48 by 54 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: charming.
Humble, long-suffering Inspector Ganesh Ghote is sent to a cool mountain hill station in southern India, far from the mean albeit colourful streets of Bombay (as it was then). There he finds a ghost of the Raj, the private Ooty Club whose members, British and Indian (who are more British than the British in their tweeds and wingtips).
Into this self-contained and closed community murder has intruded. The drunken and conniving servant Pichu has been stabbed to death on the…billiard table in the night. Ghote’s investigation is dogged by Surinder Mehta, retired ambassador and friend to prime ministers past and present, who is an avid reader of Agatha Christie novels and sets about helping Ghote with a running commentary from the Great Dame’s novels. (For a time Ghote wonders what a dog has to do with anything.)
This is the seventeenth title in the Ghote series and it is light, diverting, and interesting as the best of them. How did Keating do it?
GoodReads meta-data is 339 page rated 3.61 by 103 litizens.
Genre: History.
Verdict: Grüezi
Switzerland became a state with central government only in 1848, but it has never been a nation-state. The largest nation is German but there is also France, Italy, and Romansh in those mountains. By the way, the Alps, unlike most other mountains, yield no metal. That is important because it meant no great power ever had an incentive to conquer them for gold, silver, iron, or anything else.
In the early Fifteenth Century isolated alpine communities made defensive alliances against maundering intruders, like Magyars, Avon ladies, and Huns. Schwyz was one of the first communities to do so. This alliance expanded when larger threats loomed from France in the west and the Germany (Holy Roman Empire) in the east. In time the alpine alliances added trade, and with trade came some standardisation, e.g., weights and measures, and some law to resolve disputes. Neither language nor religion inhibited these practical agreements. Or so it seems.
The Hapsburg dynasty started in Switzerland but moved east to richer pickings, and when the lords were gone, the vassals started to acted autonomously. While Swiss mythology turns around William Tell and stout resistance to tyrants, the author suggests a more gradual change occurred largely due to the indifference of the Hapsburgs and the internal preoccupations among the French. Italians were so disorganised that they never posed a threat.
Those who resided in what is now Switzerland were as riven by religious strife as elsewhere in Europe. Catholics enjoyed murdering Protestants, and when the Catholics were unavailable Protestants happily murdered each other over split infinitives. All of this was justified by minute interpretations of disputed Biblical grammar. There was the Thirty Years War, the Hundred Years War, the unnamed war, and more.
As long as these larger European conflicts raged, Swiss moderated their own internal disputes, and surprisingly did not try to draw in larger forces. Only when the pan European conflicts subsided did internal conflicts become more intense, proving they were quite capable of cultural suicide if given half a chance.
By 2010 Switzerland remained insular but no longer isolated from broader currents in Europe and the world from AIDS to the GFC. The world had come to Switzerland, leaving it little choice but to integrate itself more with the world in trade, finance, migration, defence, health, and more. Watches are not enough, though the introduction of the Swatch was controversial in Switzerland for pandering to the market. Banking secrecy inhibits trade. The population is declining. The once sacred army is eating the budget to no discernible purpose. Swissair subsidies were bottomless. All of these have had to change.
Swiss isolation was useful to the major European powers, making it a source of agricultural produce, mercenaries, leather goods, and so on. Note that neutrality was a novel concept when it came later, and Switzerland more less invented it, and to affirm it worked hard at mediating conflicts among others and hosting organisations like the Red Cross, and later UN agencies and non-government humanitarian agencies.
How Switzerland stuck together remains a mystery to me, when other polyglot countries like Belgium, Canada, and Czechoslovakia have had so much conflict along language lines. The Swiss say their country is Willed. Does that mean that the television talk shows hum with ponderous opinions on ‘What it means to be Swiss?’ the way they do with ‘What it means to be Canadian on the CBC?’ Willed, often OK, but surely not always, and not ever to a same degree among the dominant Germans and minority French and Italians. The manifest expression of that Will are the numerous ‘votations’ (a term I had never come across before) in direct democracy and the concurrent majorities in the cantons, which they author does not spell out. The discrepancies in these votes show just how divided the country is just beneath the surface, but the author does not scratch this surface.
Randolph Head
There is an interesting sidebar here. The Swiss became a state without ever having had a royal ruler. One result of that absence was that the Swiss never had a queen, never had a queen who acted in public, never had a queen who mothered a king, never had a queen who acted as regent for a successor, never had a queen who succeeded a king even briefly, and so was one the few European countries in the Twentieth Century with no experience whatever of women near to or in a public and powerful position. That lacuna cast a long shadow over succeeding generations of women in Switzerland. Even when in 1979 women got the vote in Swiss national elections, they were still denied it in the local elections of many cantons. When the first woman took a seat on the Federal Council (cabinet) some other members quit rather than serve with her, and she was subject to a very blatant and hostile media campaign for abandoning her family…. Think Pox News and you have it. No blow is too low. No lie is too old. No distortion too fantastic.
Personal disclosure. I spent a fortnight in Switzerland a long time ago (1983) and found the smug complacence palpable.
GoodReads meta data is pages 292 rated by 3.93 by 4110 litizens.
Genre: thriller
Verdict: No thank you.
Set-up: Dresden December 1944. Max is a police officer with a gimpy leg from a World War I wound at Ypres. The privations of the war increase every day, but Max soldiers on, as does his wife Karen (a hausfrau without a personality). Their two sons are in the Wehrmacht and a constant source of worry, but there is no communication.
There follows the first of a series anatomical murders of a young woman. Others follow. The police chief is a Nazi zealot and does not care about the murders of these slatterns. He is pure cardboard, sent to stymie and annoy both Max and the Reader.
A police procedural follows as Max slowly traverses the highways and byways of Dresden after clues, thwarted by his Cardboard superior. There is a lot of Dresden, and even more on the human tide from the east as the Red Army surges ahead. Suppressed panic is the atmosphere.
More anatomical murders follow. Max stays at it as the world around him disintegrates. Karen spends all day scrounging food and fuel for the apartment.
Then it gets worse. The fire bombing occurs and there are gruelling descriptions with more anatomical details. These are well done but not to my taste. One injured and distraught woman Max encountered wandering through the rubble after raid of 13-15 February 1945 cries out, ‘Why are these devils doing this to us.’ Why indeed? Meanwhile, the few remaining Jews are eliminated along with anyone else whose Hitler salute is not crisp enough.
I had hoped for more on the cognitive dissonance of the last days, but there isn’t much aside from references to wonder weapons and innate superiority of Germans. Then it was over.
Then the war ends and Russians take over. The murders continue. The Russians are amused that Germans have been reduced to killing each other. When some Russian soldiers are living up to the stereotype and Max pleads with his Russian liaison officer to stop them, the Rusky has a good retort that silences Max. Partly it is mismatched buddy-story as Max and Rusky work together.
Frank Goldammer
I never did fathom the complications of the plot. Cardboard superior, zealot though he was, hid his one or was it two moronic (think drooling Republican congressmen and you have it) sons and…. Then there is kindly doctor upon whom no suspicion falls. Well, you know who dun it. Many others have things to hide and it all gets tangled. Why did Doctor and Zealot stay? No idea. Explanations are given but they don’t compute.
Both Max’s sons survive to give us a happy ending. Although the sons do not communicate with their parents each knows where the other is: One in a Russian POW camp and the other in a French prison. Telepathy?
It is rich in descriptions of wartime Dresden and daily life as the world ends. There is a continuous narrative and not the chopped and changed discontinuous narrative that thrillers have all too often instead of a plot. But it is over-plotted and almost incomprehensible because of that.
There is no mention of the countless French POWs worked to death in war factories in Dresden, nor any reference to the manufacture of poison gas in Dresden for use in the death camps. It was a key transportation hub east to west. There were also USA POWs there, too, namely Kurt Vonnegut and company. And one scene in these pages takes place in a slaughterhouse. Of David Irving’s exaggerations, fabrications, distortions, and more nothing will be said here.
Some time during my You Tube browsing, lately after three hours of physiotherapy, I came across DUST, a You Tube channel. Recommended. It features science fiction short films from five minutes to twenty-five minutes or so. Some are quite good, but not all.
The good ones have a story to tell and use some of the conventions of SciFi to do so. Some of the stories are imaginative, though not all. In the imaginative ones the SciFi element is central to the situation, the conflict, the paradox, …whatever.
I have scanned a lot of them, sometimes with the mute on without keeping track of the titles. But some of the good ones were these.
One concerned Nikolas Tesla’s discovery of time travel in nine minutes. Very amusing with the punch line at the very end. There are many films on DUST with Tesla so it will be hard to find. Found it : Room 88.
A second concerned an interminable traffic jam which executes population reduction without discrimination by random harvesting of motorists. Think of the Spit Bridge without warning raising at random times and all the cars and occupants on it are vaporised and you have it. This one I think was Danish. The Bridge?
Third, while most of the shorts are serious, some dead serious, and others worse, I came across one that was humorous, Alientologists. with tap dancing blue aliens. Great fun.
Four, Hashtag about the ephemeral nature of celebrity on social media. This one cuts to the bone.
Finally one concerned two astronauts exploring a dead world only to find skulls. Slowly we come to realise this desolate planet is in fact the Earth and the astronauts, despite the biped appearance and easy banter, are not human. The title is Unearthed.
All of these and many others are far superior to the overblown, CGI trash, incomprehensible, deafening, and pretentious marathons that come from Hollywood starring the same handful of actors. Yes, I am thinking of Christopher Nolan’s oeuvre. Among others.
Most of the dozens of shorts I have scanned lack a story. Many are shoot-em ups of one kind or another, and others are just talk, talk, talk, and more talk. They have the cinematography and the CGI down pat, but they have nothing to communicate except to display the technical ability of the producer. Perhaps they are film school projects. In any event, they are all form and no content, leaving it to viewers to interpret. Beyond the gates of film schools most viewers want the film to do the work of imagination.
Length is irrelevant some of the five minute ones have a story and some of the twenty-five minutes do not. Then there are the two and half hour flightless turkeys from Hollywood. More is no indicator of better.
DUST has an extensive web site for those interested.
