GoodReads meta-data is 206 pages, rated 4.0 by 113 litizens,
Genre: Krimi
Verdict: Most welcome!
On Wall Street in the early 1970s investment banker John Putnam Thatcher reluctantly is drawn into a fight over the appointment of a new partner in a client firm. In that family firm one partner has died and the workload is piling up until a new one can be found. Nothing new in that.
But in this case the head of the firm is an irascible game player in his 80s who cares not a whit for convention and has no heirs to drop anchor on him. His final beau geste is to appoint a black man to the firm and nominate him for a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. While the Board of Governors of the Exchange can be relied up to be colour blind in considering the nomination, not so the clients of the firm or other members of the exchange. The black candidate is a well-qualified and immensely successful banker himself.
But the southern clients react and the southerners in the firms go off the rails at the idea of working for ‘one of them,’ as an analyst says while slamming doors. The racism is visceral and pronounced. There is one grotesque scene at a gala at the Lincoln Center when a racists stock broker of some wealth berates one and all, but most of all the hapless Thatcher for treating with ‘one of them,’ though this apostle of purity does not use such an oblique term. The racist then descends into an incomprehensible rant that today can only bring to mind President Tiny.
Amid all this conflict another of the partners of the firm is poisoned and dies. While a sniper per the cover art takes a shot at the black nominee. Thatcher starts putting two and two together.
Needless to say the obvious candidates are too stupid, impetuous, incompetent to murder anyone but the language, civility, and reason. As is to be expected, the least likely one did it!
This is part of a long running series, many of which I read in paperback years ago, perhaps even this one, though the mists of time have closed over it. This time I had on Kindle. The setting is evoked but not with crushing pedantry, the characters are many and differentiated, there is mystery rather than gore, and the dialogue is acerbic and droll. While the police are never central, they are portrayed as competent, focussed, and determined, not figures of ridicule to make Thatcher look better. He has no need of straw men to look good. Miss Corso, Thatcher’s office retainer, is a marvel of indifference to everything but her duties and in this single-minded application she invariably makes Thatcher feel he does not live up to her standard. Enuf said.
Emma Lathen is a partnership of two Harvard graduates in business, Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart. They wrote twenty-four Thatcher novels and another seven set in Congress with another protagonist. The first appeared in 1961 but it was only in 1977 that their names became known. The secret had been successfully kept secret for fifteen years.
‘A Picture of Murder’ ( 2018 ) by T E Kinsey
Goodreads meta-data is 320 pages rated 4.31 by 2455 litizens.
Genre: krimi, period
Verdict: ambiguous.
In the heart of Little England at fictitious Littleton Cotterell in 1909 wealthy Lady Hardcastle and her redoubtable retainer Florence Armstrong, the maid of all work, including sleuthing, are settled in a Midsomer picturesque village in the southwest near Bristol. Flo narrates with a sharp eye and a sharper tongue.
Then the kinematographers come to the village, and by a mischance Lady Hardcastle offers them a roof. They had been scheduled to stay at a neighboring estate but a mysterious fire in the kitchen has made that impossible.
The kinematograpers screen an 18-minute film about the undoing of a witch to the protests of Republicans who see in filums the devil’s work. Meanwhile an aggrieved rival of the kinematographers appears at the pub with a tame journalist in tow. By the way the kinematographers include the film actors four. Finally some travelling musicians pop-in to muddy the waters and provoke a tiresome double backstory. Whew! Now that the cast is assembled, the mayhem can begin.
Because the kinematograph is the work of the devil, Christian vigilantes appears to picket, to protest, and cause trouble. The local vicar has some choice words to say about such pious thuggery that reminded me of many current tiny minds. For the Vicar God takes delight in the achievements of His creation. He’s sophisticated and wise and understands the subtleties of Man’s ingenious inventions. On the other hand, the self-proclaimed pious thugs exhibit resourcefulness only in their careful selection of scriptural texts to support small-mindedness, combing misquoted Bible verses and threats of eternal damnation.
Then the morning after celebrating until late tthe screening of the film, one of the actor is found, dressed in role, dead just as his character died in the film. The villagers were agog at seeing a film for the first time to begin with and the death — of course it had to be murder — drives one and all round the nearest bend. His death confirms the Christian thugs in their many prejudices.
The well meaning local plods are lost and Bristol CID sends in Inspector who is old mates with Her Ladyship and Strongarm. Since he has many other krims on the go back in the city, he more or less delegates the investigation to Lady and Maid.
Before you can say this is nonsense the leading lady is found dead, also in-role, in Lady Hardcastle’s very own kitchen! That makes it personal!
The Christian vigilantes make Prime Suspects. Then there is an artistic rival whose has dogged the steps of the kinematograpers across the land.
Along the way there are lessons about village life, the state of film-making at the time, the hills and dales around Bristol, and an insufferable load of banter between Hardcastle and Strongarm that pads out the story near to tedium. But they do some ratiocination to sort through all the parti-coloured herrings, which are many.
T. E. Kinsey
The approach is more didactic than I can usually abide but in this case the information is well integrated and tossed off in portions. However, I found the insertion of a lengthy double backstory first about the tender years of Strongarm and then the adventures of Lady Hardcastle distracting, tedious, and limp, the more so considering this is number four in the series. Likewise the two travelling minstrels who show up again are simply there to cue the backstories not to move this one forward, and their message about the menacing German is left on the cutting room floor, or should have been since it is not resolved. I expect it is a tease for the next volume in the series. Is it any wonder that some readers grind their teeth?
11 June
1183 BC Troy was sacked and burned according the calculations of Eratosthenes in 200 BC while he was the librarian at Alexandria. He also calculated the circumference of the earth with great accuracy for which he is recognised as a founder of geography. We have been to the site of the horse tamers.
1788 Russian explorer Gerasim Grigoriev Izmailov reached the Alaskan coast, sailing into Yakutat Bay searching for sea otters and other furred animals. He called it ‘Alaska’ from the Aleut word meaning peninsula.
1863 Sydney. In honour of the wedding of the Prince of Wales New South Wales Governor Richard Bourke arranged a demonstration of electric lighting on Macquarie Street, using arc lamps which burn very hot and emit noxious fumes.
1901 New Zealand annexed the Cook Islands. Today the Islands are a self-governing territory in association with New Zealand in foreign and defence matters, much like Tokelau and Niue.
1985 The unmanned Soviet space craft Vega 1 soft-landed a probe on Venus while it went to intercept Halley’s Comet at a distance of nine thousand kilometres and took five hundred pictures, showing a nucleus of fourteen kilometres in length with a rotation every fifty-three hours. Vega 1 now remains in orbit around the sun, causing some to worry that it is depleting the ozone layer.
12 June
1792 Captain George Vancouver landed at the site that is now Vancouver though Wikipedia does not mention him in the entry on the city. He had earlier claimed King George Sound near Albany Western Australia for the crown. Been to Rain City many times over the ages.
1912 Ottawa. The Chateau Laurier hotel opened. Its builder and owner was Charles Hays who had drowned a week earlier while travelling home the event on the Titanic. I stayed there once at a conference. Was it named for the incumbent Prime Minister, Wilfred Laurier? Does Mr Hays haunt it? Has the plumbing changed since 1912?
1923 From Appleton WI Harry Houdini freed himself from a straightjacket while suspended forty feet in the air upside down. He had toured Australia in 1910. He spent much of the latter part of his career debunking spiritualists and mediums who were defrauding the public. In do doing he clashed with Arthur Conan Doyle.
1931 The separate territories of North Australia and Central Australia were re-united as the Northern Territory. It had been entire until 1926 when it was split to make the vast real estate more manageable but sustaining two administrative centres (Darwin and Alice Springs) proved too expensive in the Great Depression. It has remained a vast singular entity since. We have been to Darwin twice and enjoyed it a lot and there is talk of visiting Alice Springs one day for the night sky.
1991 Bois Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian Federation. Sales of vodka increased. Now who does he remind me of today….? Is it President Tiny?
10 June
1752 In Philadelphia Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a lightning storm and collected a charge in a Leyden jar. His aim was to prove that lightning in the sky and electricity were one and the same.
1907 The Lumière brothers Auguste and Louis’s process for colour photography called Autochrome Lumière went on the market. It had been patented in 1903. It dominated colour photography until the 1930s when new techniques superseded it. Theirs was a slow and expensive method that produced a soft and blurred image like that below.
1935 Dr. Robert H. Smith of Akron and Bill Wilson of New York City founded Alcoholics Anonymous with a twelve-step program based on psychological techniques related to personality traits in guided group discussions. Today at least 80,000 such discussion groups are in operation with two million participants. The example has inspired other addiction groups.
1948 The US Air Force announced that test pilot Chuck Yeager had flown an X-1 aircraft faster than the speed of sound, i.e., Mach 1+ on 14 October 1947. He inspired Tom Wolfe to write about the Mercury program.
1978 One of twenty-one known copies of the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible sold at a London auction for $2.4 million. The state library of Baden‐Wiirttemberg in Stuttgart bought it before a room crowded with five hundred people in an auction that lasted two minutes. That is nearly $10 million today. Amen.
9 June
1534 Jacques Cartier sailed into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in search of a Northwest Passage to Asia on behalf of King Francis I of France. His explorations initiated French claims to Canada. He made two subsequent voyages to Quebec. He bears no relation to the watch-maker.
1549 The Book of Common Prayer was adopted by the Church of England, being the first prayer book written in English, and became the textbook for generations of learners as well as worshippers.
1891 Banker Paul Gaugin arrived in Pepeete, Tahiti to be a painter. Mario Vargas Llosha’s novel offers great insight into the painting and the man.
1915 Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned in protest at President Woodrow Wilson’s handling of relations with Germany in the hope of arresting the drift of the administration into war. His example may have delayed it. A biography of this great commoner is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
1928 Charles Kingsford Smith landed in Brisbane, having flown across the Pacific Ocean from Oakland California via Suva in Fiji in nine days with three others in the crew.
8 June
1869 Chicago, Technology. Ives McGaffey patented the Whirlwind sweeping machine, a vacuum cleaner of sorts. It was bulky device with a belt driven fan cranked by hand to create suction, making it difficult to use with only two hands, and it soon disappeared.
1887 Herman Hollerith patented a punch card calculator while working at the Census Bureau. He had devised it while completing a PhD in engineering at Columbia University. His devices were used well into the Twentieth Century around the world. Indeed I learned FORTRAN programming in graduate school using punch cards. Woe betide a mix-up of card sequence. Through mergers and buy-outs in time his company was ingested into IBM.
1940 Bangkok. A military coup changed Siam’s name to Thailand to signal a break with the past of absolute monarchy. The name Thai-land means land of the free. It also has ethnic connotations that excluded those of Chinese origins, while including some peoples from neighbouring Laos and Vietnam in a Greater Thailand. These latter ambitions made it an ally of Japan for a time.
1951 Alice Springs. The School of the Air began to broadcast via shortwave radio lessons to children in remote locations over one million square kilometres or more. Adelaide Miethke had proposed it in 1944 but it was impossible to do during World War II. Tests began in 1950 and it was formally inaugurated the following year. It continues now in Queensland, West Australia, and the Northern Territory using the internet. Miethke was a long time champion of schools and teachers in South Australia per the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
1987 Wellington. New Zealand government legislated against nuclear weapons and nuclear powered ships, effectively taking itself out of alliance with the United States.
7 June
1494 Brokered by the Pope to affirm Christian unity against the Ottoman menace, Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas to divide the world between them.
1654 Paris, History. Louis XIV was crowned king. He became known as the Sun King and ruled until his death in 1715. The palace at Versailles was his creation. ‘L’état c’est moi’ is one of his most famous bons mots. Another is ‘Après moi, le deluge.’ He was a master manipulator of fractious nobles. A double posed for him, since he was too busy making war to do it.
1893 Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. A young lawyer refused to comply with seating arrangements in the first class carriage of a train and was forcibly ejected. This was Mohandas Gandhi’s first act of civil disobedience. He had bought a first-class ticket but was directed to the third class car where the coloured people travelled. No sooner was he off the train than he started to organise protests by travellers.
1905 Oslo. Norway parted from Sweden. It had been Swedish since 1814 and before that Danish. The territorial legislature in Oslo voted to secede in the picture below. Many Swedes became bellicose but in the end a peaceful dissolution was negotiated.
1914 Central America. The first vessel passed through the Panama Canal, making the United States a two-ocean power as never before. It was the SS Ancon pictured below.
6 June
1683 The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology opened in Oxford University. Elias Asmolean donated his collection of curiosities to seed the museum, which was then organised for teaching purposes. The building was designed by Christoper Wren. Feasted my eyes there.
1816 The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia caused the year without summer. On this day ten inches of snow fell in Massachusetts. The eruption was rated a 7, the only eruption on that level. It blew 150 cubic kilometres of matter into the atmosphere and killed 10,000 in the immediate vicinity. The debris reached forty-three kilometres into the stratosphere. The subsequent effects on agriculture, health, and trade have led to the conclusion that perhaps 90,000 people died as a result. There is a superb episode of Lord Bragg’s ‘In Our time’ about this apocalyptic year.
1844 In London George Williams founded the Young Men’s Christian Association to offer low cost housing to youths migrating to cities for work, as alternatives to taverns, pubs, brothels, and boarding houses. Bible reading and physical exercise were offered to keep things in order.
1859 Queensland separated from New South Wales to make it a self-governing colony. It quickly thereafter established the first parliament in Australia. Ever since Far North Queensland has agitated for separation from Brisbane.
1949 Eric Blair published ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ He insisted that the number be spelled out, but I, for one, don’t know why, though I have read and re-read Bernard Crick’s magisterial edition, and had the pleasure once of seeing Crick discuss the book at Oxford. (Years later when I has Head of Department I found some discretionary funds to contribute to Crick’s visit to the University of Sydney.) People who have never read the book use some of its terminology, like Thought Police, Big Brother, Memory Hole, Thought Crime…. It all sounds like President Tiny as below.
5 June
1851 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery story, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly’ began to appear in serial form in an abolitionist newspaper. It was published as a book in Boston in the next year and sold an astonishing 300,000 copies in twelve months. By 1857 more than two million copies had been sold, making her and the publisher very rich. She gave most of the money to the abolitionist cause. Simon Legree is a violent, crude, and corrupt slave owner in this story, and a Republican voter.
1929 Ramsey MacDonald formed a second minority Labour government in coalition with Lloyd George’s Liberals. The first had lasted nine months in 1924. MacDonald appointed the first woman to cabinet when Margaret Bondfield became Minister of Labour. Oswald Mosley was also in this cabinet. MacDonald offered self-government to India, short of independence. In reaction to the stresses of the Great Depression, the Labour Party split, expelling MacDonald who then lead a National Government dominated by Conservatives until 1935! No one in Britain would consider deficit spending as recommended by John Maynard Keynes and adopted by the Roosevelt administration across the Atlantic.
1933 Washington DC. The United States went off the gold standard, denying creditors the right to be paid in gold. It was one part of a general plan to accumulate gold reserves. In 1974 the Nixon Administration ruled that the US would never return to the gold standard and it has not.
1947 In a commencement address at Harvard University Secretary of State George Marshall laid out the need for what would become known as the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe. He described the parlous conditions he had seen in post-war Europe in contrast to the thriving USA. A biography of this giant is discussed elsewhere on this blog. By the way, his only son was killed at Anzio.
1956 Premier and First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev denounced Comrade Josef Stalin to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in a closed session. This was the so-called secret speech, lasting four hours. He detailed the scope, depravity, cruelty of Comrade Stalin and his many acolytes and supporters, some of whom were in attendance and sat in a stony silence. Though not published, the secret speech was widely circulated, e.g., a young Komsomol officer named Mikhail Gorbachev read it. There was considerable reaction from Stalin’s defenders and later they claimed that the speech encouraged the revolts in Poland and Hungary. Secret or not I found three different dates on the internet for it.
