[Trumptets bare.] The 2019 Jackson award for the Best New Series of Krimis read in 2019 goes to …. Mamur Zapt (1988+) by Michael Pearce.
Political and police machinations in Cairo prior to 1914. It is a lost world brought to life.
The Shadow (1933)
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 3 minutes, rated 6.1 by 99 cinematizens.
Genre: Old Dark House (Honourary).
Verdict: It seemed longer.
N. B. This is not T-H-E Shadow of Mutual Radio though the time coincides with the eponymous Shadow. Confusing? This is a very British production quite independent of that radio program. Got it? Repeat after me: this is a shadow but not T H E Shadow.
The Set-Up: A masked figure has been blackmailing wealthy personages (see, it is a British film and they are personages, not just people), driving several to suicide. Wow! What did he have on them! I’d like to know. Where did he get it? Wikileaks? Pox News? Is there more there? These are all excellent questions that are never addressed by the stiffening lips. Instead the forces of order gather to protect these child molesting aristos. Nothing ever changes.
Clues and leads are few, but one Scotland Yard stalwart lays a cunning trap for this murderous Shadow. It is so cunning that One forgets to load his gat and the Shadow makes short work of him. Dick One is a dead dick in the first five minutes. Maybe not so cunning after all.
A Second Dick is assigned the case and sets about annoying dialogue with the Head of the Criminal Investigation Branch, Sir Forgotten Name. In the midst of the most terrible crime wave of the century (since if concerns wealthy personages being blackmailed for the heinous crimes they had committed) Name sets out for his country estate for the weekend to play golf. Hmmm. What does that remind me of?
Ah, at last, an Old Dark House, hoped the fraternity brothers.
For reasons unknown to the scriptwriter the Shadow is there, too, and for reasons unknown to the scriptwriter Second Dick knows that the Shadow is there, and rushes — ever so slowly — to warn Sir Name, when….! Second Dick is shot to death on the winding five-mile driveway of the country estate. Maybe a poacher shot him by accident, but is that likely? Well, yes in Midsomer, but the end result is: Two dead dicks!
Well, never mind, there are more dicks where those two came from and another middle aged, overweight, dolt is called to the country estate who confirms that Dick Two is dead. Enter the Third Dick.
In the Old Dark House are gathered the usual suspects: a butler, a scrumptious daughter, her unsuitable suitor, a toff of no apparent value who blunders about looking for the other two stooges, a maiden aunt who still hopes for the best, along with a sneak thief who passes himself off as a gentleman with an Eton tie, his girlfriend, and someone else whom I have overlooked. They do not add up to ten and soon subtraction begins.
There is also a ringer who passes briefly through the halls before being killed. This latter is the butler’s son escaped from a conveniently located nearby looney bin. (See any version of Hound of the Baskervilles for the prototype of this plot device.) Ringer makes the mistake of getting in the way of the Shadow and clonk he goes back to central casting.
The Third Dick with a body guard assistant muddies the waters. Much this and much that follows on the Dali watch. Frail swoons. Toff toffs. Plod plods. Name names. Butler butlers. Got it? Care?
Spoiler ahead!
Then Third Dick reveals all by means of reading the script off camera. In standard operating procedure screenwriting the least likely did it. No, wait, not the maiden aunt, but rather….[pause] the garrulous Toff. He transform from tiresome bore to tiresome villain. Now Richard Dix could have made this transformation worth watching but in this case one Henry Kendall could not and did not. We were all just glad to see The End.
There is one scene with some acting in it when Name comforts the Butler about the death of his psycho son, but that two minutes is not worth the rest. It has nothing to do with the plot.
There is also an oddity on the IMDb entry, where there are 184 photographs linked to this title. That is an extraordinary number for any film, let along one of this era, and from Great Britain. The Shadow Laughs (1933) has two photographs and that is a typical number, and this is the real Shadow, too!
The Best krimi I read in 2019 was Dark Winter (2002) by William Dietrich
The citation reads ‘What an incredible setting at the edge of space. I discussed this krimi in an earlier post on this block. Have a look.
Book of the Year
The book [drum roll] is Laurent Binet, The Seventh Function of Language (2015).
The citation reads ‘Who would have thought such delightful libel could be published.’ I discussed this book in an earlier post on this blog. Get clicking’ for more info.
Stay tuned as other awards will follow on this site.
The Casketeers (2018+)
IMDb meta-data is 14 episodes of twenty-five minutes rated 7.0 by 270 cinematizens.
Genre: Documentary (according to the IMDb)
Verdict: Amusing, touching, informative, uplifting
The day-to-day activities of a funeral business in Auckland, specialising in Maori rites and rituals, might not be to everyone’s taste, but this is done very well, combining the human comedy of everyday life – will Francis ever find a way to sneak that fabulously expensive leaf blower past his accountant wife Kaiora? – with the solemn, sad, and serious business of death, loss, grieving, denial, injustice, and anger.
Francis is the micro-manager par excellence in his drive to offer clients a perfect service, right down to scrapping gum from the sidewalk in front of the business. He also likes boy-toys like that NZ $1,300 ultra, high-powered leaf blower, and then there was that white van. What was he thinking when he bought that bucket of bolts? Not even he knows. His conversation with the mechanic who tells him it is not worth repairing is classic when he says it is worth to him [to avoid hearing those four words he fears most from Mrs, viz. ‘I told you so’].
On the other hand Francis seldom asks for or gets the list price on the funerals he sells. More often than not at the sight of grieving relatives he offers discounts, adds extras at no cost, and volunteers more labour for nothing. The accountant grinds her teeth but draws the line at the leaf-blower.
It put me in mind of a marvellous Japanese film Departures (2008), discussed elsewhere on this blog. Click away.
By the way it offers a small window on Maori life and culture that is informative, compelling, and thoughtful. My faith in the enduring idiocracy was confirmed by reading the 1.0 ratings on the IMDb.
The Republic of Doyle (2010 +)
IMDb meta-data is 78 episodes of 55 minutes each, rated 7.2 by 2888 cinematizens.
Genre: PI
Verdict: Location, location, location!
It has all the clichés of the genre cosmetically refreshed by the location among the goofie Newfies in St John’s Newfoundland. Anne of Green Gables, Joey Smallwood, and Annie Proulx are nowhere to be seen.
A wannabe Jim Rockford approaching forty and living at home with father, much to the annoyance of stepmother, is PI together with Dad. It is all by the numbers thereafter without the laconic charm of Rocky, but at least there is no annoying Angel on the scene. Out hero is unkempt, unshaved, and childish, a clear case of arrested development that appeals to its like. His private life is a mess and dominates his professional life as a PI. He drives an old banger. All boxes checked. It is easy to imagine the checklist in the screenwriters manual consulted for this project.
Still the setting in and around St John’s Newfoundland is distinctive and the cinematography makes the place look attractive. It’s not, but it looks that way on film. The soundtrack, for once, also adds something to the ambience.
Despite my quibbles it is one thing many Canadian film productions are not. It is Canadian. It looks and sounds it. Many Canadian productions are so deracinated for the international market that they are anonymous, e.g. Street Legal, Da Vinci’s Inquest, Traders,…. [so anonymous that they are forgotten].
Robert Service, Lenin: A biography (2002)
GoodReads meta-data is 561 pages rated 3.83 by 1163 litizens.
Genre: Biography
Verdict: Superb.
In this biography the reader can see the man in the boy and the boy in the man. As a boy Lenin was energetic, determined, self-righteous, a loner, and never wrong. Just ask him. Even as an adolescent, youth, and young man as he became a Marxist revolutionary he was cold, analytical, and bloodless. It should be noted that the heavy hand of Tsarism was personal. His elder brother was executed for plotting the murder of the Tsar and he was indeed guilty. His older sister was later imprisoned for sedition. As a consequence, his family was proscribed and ostracised. Tsarist repression was personal not theoretical, and soon its weight fell on him.
While he turned to revolution to right the manifold wrongs of Russian society he had no interest whatever in most members of that society. He never met a peasant and was revolted by those he saw. He supposed that all peasants who had bettered themselves, the so-called kulaks, were capitalists whose successes would impede the revolution, and so in that way, they were the worst enemies of the Forces of Right.
When other revolutionaries proposed immediate practical steps to relieve the suffering of the victims of the regime, Lenin ridiculed both the proposers and the sufferers as anti-revolutionary. His Marxism was born from the page, not the reality. There would be no sewer socialism for this man to ameliorate conditions in the now.
He differed from many other opponents of the ancient regime with his abiding interest in organisation, committee, dicta, regulations, definitions, words and more words which he then wielded to overcome objections, isolate opponents, and excise the weak from the paper revolution he created in his flow of words. Like Jim Kirk, he was willing and able to talk anyone to death. Lenin was never one given to self-doubts even as he chopped and changed.
His activities soon made him suspect, and he was exiled first internally and then abroad, and for seventeen years moved hither and yon, rootless and restless, but always pronouncing dicta, writing calls to arms, manoeuvring to dominate emigré publications, and vying for legitimacy among tiny leftist groups. Most of that time was spent in Switzerland.
At times he saw revolution an inevitable, like an earthquake, and when it happened the group that was organised, disciplined, ruthless, and prepared would prevail, no matter if the group was large or small, or played any role in precipitating the earthquake. But it had to be be ready, and he was the man to ready it.
During the disastrous Russo-Japanese War when thousands of hapless conscripts were dying in Manchuria, and the Russian fleet was sinking with all hands on board in the Pacific, while St Petersburg reeled after the massacre of the Father Gapon’s innocents before the Winter Palace, Lenin’s bottomless supply of invective, energy, abuse, derision, malice was aimed at half a dozen rivals on an obscure émigré publication in Geneva who threatened his status. Such were his priorities. As always he schemed, he plotted, he undermined his many rivals 24/7 like a relentless force of nature that never tired, never needed a rest, never took a break. (Yes, he did take vacations but rarely.) At times the Tsarist secret police monitoring émigré groups funded Lenin’s sect because he was so disruptive and destructive of the wider body of wanna be revolutionaries that it prevented any unified action. Lenin’s implacable self-righteousness would keep the opponents of the regime from coalescing, and it did.
Likewise, later Germany facilitated his return to Russia in 1917 in the hope that he would destabilise the Provisional Government after the abdication of the Tsar. There is considerable circumstantial evidence that even while he was in Petrograd, Germany was funding Lenin’s coterie. The German assumption was that Lenin’s agitation would be further pressure to get Russia to leave the Great War on terms dictated by Germany, and it was. Bolsheviks could hardly admit the German aid at the time and subsequently many records were destroyed, and with later purges reduced the number of eye witnesses.
In these pages the October coup d’état is anti-climatic and Lenin had no association with it on this telling though as soon as Leon Trotsky announced it, Lenin pounced on the opportunity, and the rest became history. While his years of exile had made him cautious, once in power the emotions he had long suppressed came to the fore, namely, his hatred for the imperial order and all who had served it.
His earlier theoretical studies had led him to the conclusion that a European wide social revolution would occur and events in Russia were just the beginning. He clung to that belief as an article of faith thereafter despite the contrary evidence. He always believed what he said, once he had said it, and could never admit error. Yet he did change his tune at times but never with a mea culpa.
After he had been shot in an assassination attempt, while a British Expeditionary Force had occupied Murmansk, as White Russian forces threatened to overwhelm the Red army, starvation was general, industrial production had fallen to zero, the Czech Legion turned on the Bolsheviks, an American Expeditionary Force landed in Vladivostok, Poland made war on Russia to secure borders, Ukraine agitated for independence, what then did Lenin do? He turned to writing a refutation of the detested Karl Kautsky’s The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx. Theory almost always came first for him. Millions might die of starvation, disease, and economic breakdown, while thousands of others might die defending the Revolution from the British or the Whites, but exposing Kautksy’s intellectual errors took priority over such matters. The few dozen readers of Kautsky’s turgid and vague book had to be set straight with Lenin’s turgid and vague prose.
While Comrade Number One was civil to rivals, opponents, and allies in the Party he casually consigned thousands of others to state terrorism, arbitrary arrest, torture, imprisonment, murder, exile, forced labour without even the pretence of a fair process. All this and more was justified in his mind by the need to embed the Revolution and the Regime. This was a judgement only he could make, according to him. He turned loose a generation of thugs and they reproduced themselves in the coming generations.
He was a valetudinarian for decades, and perhaps there was something to it, though the many doctors, physicians, and specialists consulted, including some imports from Germany and England, could make no diagnosis. His workload was punishing because he was a micro-manager who found it difficult to delegate, because he did not trust any of his comrades to be as perfect as he thought he himself was. Age wearied him and as he strength failed he tried to cement his regime. Comrade Jospeh Stalin was there and Lenin saw him as a rival to Leon Trotsky for succession. Few others, including Trotsky, realised that Stalin had the ambition and ability to push himself forward. Ah huh.
There is a splendid closing chapter about Lenin’s afterlife as a symbol that is worth reading on its own. In short, much of the promotion of Lenin as the Saint of Communism served as a smokescreen for Stalin to out manoeuvre and oust rivals for supreme leadership. By reprinting all of Lenin’s innumerable publications, carefully edited with hindsight, by naming Petrograd after Lenin, by naming streets for him here, there, and everywhere, by putting Lenin’s name on the masthead of Party publications, preserving the body, building a temple for the cadaver, storing the deceased’s brain that science might one day understand his genius, putting Lenin’s profile on stamps, rubles, and bus tickets, Stalin was acting as the conservator, curator, and heir to Lenin’s legacy. That includes the display of the embalmed body, which we trooped by in the Kremlin as 2016 after a forty-five minute shuffle in the line.
But that was about the only thing left. Leningrad is now St Petersburg again. Nowhere did I see any sign of the First Comrade. There were plenty of fellows dressed and made up as Stalin selling photo ops to tourists but not one Lenin. Still less were there any of his likenesses anywhere. I saw only one Hammer and Sickle symbol on the flag at a tennis club. On many buildings I could see the shadow of that symbol which had been removed or sandblasted off. Instead the national iconography was Romanov and Imperial — the last Tsar and the double-headed eagle — whom and which Lenin hated beyond reason.
An astounding irony of history emerges in these pages. When Lenin was a high school student preparing for University entry examinations in 1886, the headmaster of his school in Simbirsk in the sticks on the south western Volga about 900 kilometres from Moscow and twice that far from St Petersburg, wrote a testimonial. This writer was Fyodor Mikhailovich Kerensky whose own son Alexander was five years old at the time. The cognoscenti will know these rest.
Thirty-one years later in October of 1917 the names of Kerensky and Lenin came together again. In the long fallout of the February 1917 upheavals Alexander became the Prime Minister of the Provisional Government of Russia and Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov whose code name was…Lenin became his successor.
*L During the summer hiatus of In Our Time (BBC 4 podcast) I came across an old episode on Vladdy and became interested in this title. After all I had seen Vladdy in Red Square a couple of years ago, looking as bad as the fraternity brothers on Sunday morning, or much like Jeremy Bentham these days.
Wellington Paranormal (2018+)
IMDb meta-data is 19 episodes of 25 minutes to date, rated 7.5 by 101,362 Kiwis.
Genre: Horror
Verdict: 3D (Dry, Droll, and Deadpan)
Tip One: Watch in sequences. You’ll see why. Tip Two: The delivery is often fast, there are asides, and sotto voce comments that are best appreciated by turning on subtitles. We have seen all the episodes and we are watching them again but to be specific these comments concern Season 2, Episode 6 Mobots.
Sergeant Ruawai Maaka briefs the duty watch at Wellington Central Police for the morning. Once again he urges officers not to use of pepper spray on lunch! Too late for those who tried it for breakfast but had the nozzle turned the wrong way around. Captain Frank Furillo never had this problem.
After the others have their assignments, e.g., assisting the spray victims to the medic, changing the channel on the television, making tea, Sarge turns to the crack Hardly Normal Squad of Officers Karen O’Leary and Mike Minogue. These secret squirrels retire to the concealed room behind the bookcase in the back hall. What’s going down? All over the Mt Victoria area old mobile phones and other discarded electronics have disappeared from kitchen drawers, sheds, garages, under stairs, attics, coat pockets, and closets. First these items disappeared into these recesses and then they disappeared from them. Wow!
Thereafter Sarge Maaka offers the running commentary of a police reality television show as O’Leary and Minogue scope the doings, starting with O’Leary’s mum who lives in the area. Yes, this is Mrs O’Leary without a cow. The cow turns up in another episode.
There is a delightful scene with a snake, sort of, and a taser that makes Davis Quinton of Dog River look responsible.
To assist the field officers Sarge has called in a tech head, who begins by undoing everything his predecessors did, reinstalling all the software, and then rebooting in the middle of the operation for beta testing. Doing all this gives Tech time to pick his nose.
Loved the interrogation with the transformer. Updates are indeed dangerous. Try this IOS, Punk! After seeing this object lesson, for the moment I am holding off Catalina.
So far we have had no references to the Bee Hive in Wellington, though surely that is a tempting target.
Bramton Wick (1952) by Elizabeth Fair
GoodReads meta-data is 208 pages, rated 3.95 by 150 citizens.
Genre: Chick Lit
Verdict: Ditto
The Set-up: Post war life in a picturesque small village in Little England is the locale. There is much description of the settlement, the weather, the railway embankment, the culverts, along with the habits and peculiarities of the residents. Two long established families have been forced in the last generation to sell their properties. One house was bought by a wealthy titled lady, while the other by a parvenu businessman.
Among the cast are two spinsters who keep, breed, and sell dogs in a disheveled house that belongs to the landlord farmer, whose own finances are precarious. He is also the landlord for some others.
There is a young war-bride widow who never thinks of the past, along with her younger sister and the two of them live with their mother in another property rented from the farmer now that they have had to give up their erstwhile manor to the titled lady buyer.
Nearby is an irascible major who treats his wife like a slow-witted subaltern, and she loves it, with a nephew in residence who mopes around like an impoverished member of the Lost Generation of 1919.
Her ladyship of the newly-bought manner has a ne’er-do-well son in tow. He had been in the army but that is barely mentioned. [Whatever you do, don’t mention the war.]
These characters amble about, occasionally ricochet off each other and carom here and there for two hundred pages before the two sisters get paired off with the parvenu and the farmer, while the nephew and moper continue to ne’er-do-well and to mope.
This is the first of half a dozen novels set in Bramton Wick, and I suppose the characters continue, but I will probably not find out for myself. While the book is very well written and the dissection of the various characters is gentle and insightful, there is no momentum in it.
None of them has any ambition, any desires, any blood, any purpose, any mission, any thing to motivate them for the day ahead, or the reader for the pages ahead. It is as though each waits off page to come on and act out the prescribed role and then retire to the wings. That social type has been exemplified for the time being now on to the next.
It is, however, a study in the managing social relationships and that gives it the title Chick Lit. Most of the management is done by the sisters and it is through manipulation, not communication, but it is amusing, mild, diverting, and well intentioned, if utterly pointless. I hasten to add that Chick Lit does not have to be pointless, Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend and the Overdue Life of Amy Byler, both discussed elsewhere on this blog, are certainly Chick Lit and they have momentum. Barbara Pym’s comedies of manners, several of which are discussed on this blog, also have a claim to the genre Chick Lit avant le mot, and her characters have vitality and meaning that seems to lack in the book under review. Likewise, the Jon Hassler novels that feature Miss Agatha take the label Chick Lit proudly and let me tell you Miss Agatha has purpose.
The Terrornauts (1967)
IMDb meta is 1 hour and 17 minutes, rated 5.1 by 332 cinematizens
Genre: SyFy
Verdict: Incomprehensible
Somewhere in middle England Dr Joe uses a radio telescope half an hour a week. This access infuriates the Director who tries to KPI Joe off the ear piece. There is much gobbledegook about the radio telescope for connoisseurs. It seems a storm in a screenwriter’s teacup.
Doc has a loyal secretary who is sometimes Sandy and at other times Zena. Continuity editor please note. He also has an underling to order around.
But (what a surprise) a few hours before the plug is pulled Dr Joe gets a call: from outer space! He answers the call. Big mistake. He was warned not to do so by the Carry On accountant who just happens to be there for annoyance.
Next thing you know a Dalek on an asteroid sends a robo-ship to Earth to space-nap the lot and plonk them down in a one room set and they end up donning shower caps with USB cables on them. No Hollywood ego would have put those on, although it was amusing to imagine it.
Once they plug in they become Eggheads! No, they become the Solar System’s first and only line of defence. Oh? Let’s review this A-Team: Doc who cannot get a research grant, underling who waits for loser Doc to tell him what to do, a secretary who doesn’t know her own name, a Carry On accountant, and the cleaning lady (who sensibly refuses to wear a shower cap). This is it. This is the best we’ve got. Only they can save us from a Republican apocalypse. We’re doomed! Doomed!
There is an unrelated aside with human sacrifice, as per the marketing tg line cited above. Ho hum. The knife man moves so slowly the fraternity brothers fell asleep during this episode. Really he will never fulfil his Killing Performance Indicators at that speed and doesn’t.
They play a PAC Man arcade game with the unnamed, unidentified, and unknown invaders — probably Europeans looking for terra nullius — and win! ‘Fire!’ is repeated eight times in this segment to give the illusion of action. [No sale!]
Journeyman Sy Fy author Murray Leinster wrote the story which was adapted into a screenplay by John Brunner. That is a good pedigree but it hardly shows in the finished product. Admittedly there is some awareness of the laws of physics in contrast to so much Sy Fy: There is a lag in signals. The angle of declination is determinate. Yet we have flames in space.
More importantly, we have a title that makes no connection to the story and some very poor acting.
