Mystery Science Theater 3000: A Cultural History by Matt Foy and Christopher J. Olson

For whatever reason, I've been reading books about the Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show this past year - Frank Conniff's movie-essays-cum-memoirs, the great '90s Amazing Colossal Episode Guide by the team, and, most relevantly for today, Dale Sherman's history of the show, The Worst We Can Find.

Today's book is in the same vein as Sherman's - luckily, they have very different focuses and audiences. Sherman's book was a show-biz history, for a show-biz publisher - heavy on the personalities and the work they did, and on connections to similar projects before and after. It also was a pretty general-reader-friendly history of the show itself, the careers of the major players since (they were all fairly young, and didn't have much of a career to speak of before, except for Joel Hodgson), and where "riffing" came from in popular culture and what has happened in that space since the show was first cancelled in 1999.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: A Cultural History is a more academic book, by two professors, Matt Foy and Christopher J. Olson. It seems to be a bit shorter than Sherman, but substantially denser, and vastly more interested in what riffing means - the stance of the audience to a creative work, the interplay between an existing work and commentary on it, and things like that. (Sample sentence: "The series also operates as a form of culture jamming, a type of protest used to disrupt media culture and its attendant cultural institutions such as corporate advertising" on p.46.)

It does also include the history of the show, with plenty of quotes from the major players from articles and publicity material of the time. It's just as well-researched as Sherman, maybe more so, with a nine-page bibliography and fifteen pages of notes in the backmatter. But it is vastly less concerned about what these people did and vastly more interested in the why of it and particularly what it all means.

Academics gonna academic, of course. And the subtitle is "A Cultural History" - this is part of a larger series from its publisher about what specific TV shows mean in popular culture, what they stand for or represent or indicate.

I generally agree with Foy and Olson's connections and find them interesting, while still thinking this book is a tad dry and much less general-reader-friendly than the others I mentioned above. If you want a general history of the show and its main players, Sherman is probably better for you.

But if you want to think about what it means for an audience to add their own jokes to an artistic work - or to seek out kinds of art that embed commentary on top of an existing work - this book will give you a lot of mull over. And if you are an academic, or have that background, it will be more familiar and accessible to you.

All of This and Nothing: Dr. Bill

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

I'm back to Obscure this week with Dr. Bill, a 2011 song from a band called 13ghosts. This is probably the first song of theirs I heard, and it got me to buy one full-length and an EP. I didn't like anything else of theirs quite as much as this one song, but there was some good stuff. And that's the way it goes, isn't it?

This is a ominous, noisy, compelling song, focused tightly on the singer's voice and the things he's telling us.

Well, maybe the things he's trying to convince himself of, if we're honest.

I like the instrumentation here, the way it starts with that slow, walking beat, punctuated with emphatic guitar chords and timed out with the spare, mostly single-hit drum sounds. Then the singer comes in, and the music builds slowly behind him - the drumming gets more complex, an electric guitar with a slightly more soothing sound to start out with, but then it all goes on, a little tenser each verse. 

I'm very normal
I'm very like everyone else

The singer is visiting Dr. Bill, we think. Some kind of regular checkup. And the singer is protesting, we think, that he shouldn't be there, that he doesn't need this, that there's absolutely nothing wrong with him.

We might even believe him, at first.

I've got it all
Nine days a week
I never sleep, I never eat
I'm a real breadwinner, a real go-get-her

But he definitely protests too much. We've probably done that ourselves. Everything is completely normal. There's nothing wrong with him. There's nothing wrong with us.

There are no voices in my head
Everything I hear is real
There are no monsters in my bed
Everything I dreamed is dead

Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 28, 2026

I got one book from the library this week, and, continuing the theme from last week, it is physically larger than I expected. I'm getting much more of an upper-body workout from my books lately than expected.

That book is the most recent graphic novel by Peter Kuper: Insectopolis: A Natural History. As best I can tell, it's a pop-science book in comics form telling the history of the vast phylum of Arthropoda. (OK, I'm cheating slightly. I was hoping Insects would have their own Kingdom, but they don't - they're Animalia like most of us. And Arthopodia includes things that aren't insects, who all sit within the Class Insecta. But that isn't nearly as much fun to type out.)

The big deal here, for anyone not aware, is that insects are dying out in vast numbers, due to human activity, over the past few decades. And they are an important base level to a lot of ecosystems, which means the extinction of various insect species is A Bad Sign. Kuper has never been the most positive storyteller - he always seems to gravitate to things that are broken, lost, or horrible in various ways - so I expect this will be depressing in multiple ways.

Quote of the Week: Unexpected Surprises in One's Domicile

It is not easy to state offhand what is the last thing a young man starting out in life would wish to find on the premises of the furnished villa ready for immediate occupancy which he had just begun to occupy. Bugs? Perhaps. Cockroaches? Possibly. Maybe defective drains. One cannot say. But a large black pig in the kitchen would unquestionably come quite high up on the list of undesirable objects, and Jerry, as he gazed at Queen of Matchingham, was conscious of that disagreeable sensation which comes to those who, pausing to tie a shoelace while crossing a railway line, find themselves struck in the small of the back by the Cornish express.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Pigs Have Wings, p.204

The Alliance of the Curious, #1: Sapiens by Philippe Riche

French creator Philippe Riche had a two-part series called Bad Break - as far as I can tell, it came out in France close to twenty years ago, and was translated into English in the mid-Teens, as part of Humanoids' expansion. Riche also did a sequel series around the same time, which was also brought into English by Humanoids.

I can't find any newer related books, but Humanoids - which I think was Riche's publisher in France, too - has been having some troubles lately, particularly the US outpost, so he might have pivoted to different projects with more stable partners. (Or maybe not - creative careers are odd and contingent, so he could be doing something different but vaguely related, like art-directing or making animation, right now.)

I did read the two Bad Break books last year - see my posts on the first and second one - and now I'm jumping into the sequel series, called The Alliance of the Curious. Riche seems to have carefully made this second go-round so he could expand on it easily with more stories - so, to my cynical mind, it's only to be expected that he wouldn't have the chance to do so.

This first Alliance of the Curious book is titled Sapiens. It picks up some time after Bad Break, or perhaps slightly changes the premise to facilitate more stories. Simon and Rebecca, two of the three main characters of Bad Break, are now in a relationship, and Simon is still working in vaguely the same junk industry: he now cleans out storage units and sells what he finds there, or acts as a middle-man between, on the one hand, people who have a bunch of random old junk and, on the other, potential buyers. It doesn't seem to be a lucrative career, but there's no sign that Rebecca is working, so I guess it pays for their lifestyle, such as it is. (Rebecca was a porn actress in the first series - in a vague way, since we only saw a few advertisements - so maybe she retired or maybe she's still working at the same thing or maybe she's shifted to acting/modeling work with more of her clothes on.) The third member of the original trio, Ernst-Lazare, is still doing the same thing: high-end dealer in cultural artifacts, mostly those that are or incorporate human remains. 

Meanwhile, we also see a secret society called the Order of Saint Louis, including three wild young blonde women known as the Cocaine Sisters, a man named Louis who is the previously-presumptive heir to a mysterious "throne," and a grumpy middle-aged functionary, Grégoire De Tours. An old woman has died, and she is of a "purer lineage" than Louis, so her son will inherit whatever this is.

That son, Griffon De Martel, is a white-haired man with some kind of mental problem, and we watch him stumble through his life as well - losing his apartment when his mother died, having all of his stuff sold to a junk dealer, falling into a group of homeless people.

Simon gets Griffon's stuff, most of which is worthless crap. But there is a jeweled skull, which he passes to Ernst-Lazare for help identifying and finding a market for. Meanwhile, the Cocaine Sisters start searching for Griffon - why them isn't as clear, but they obviously want to kill Griffon so their boy-toy Louis inherits whatever there is to inherit.

All this is set during a massive summer heat wave in Paris, mostly for atmosphere though it also allows Riche to put his cast in fewer clothes (or none, as we saw in Bad Break).

The secret of the De Martels comes out by the end of this book, and I won't give that away, but this is a Dan Brown-esque secret society thing, with hidden people with unexpected and frankly unrealistic connections to ancient history. In this book, there's mostly a bunch of running around, some shooting, and a whole lot of Griffon being confused and muddle-headed.

This one is all set-up; I expect the second book will have more action, explain the deal of the Order, and maybe even see our heroes make a little money from their findings. Although they didn't make a penny in Bad Break, so that could be a standard feature of Riche's work.

His art is still Euro-stylish, though his women all tend to look the same. Translators Natacha Ruck and Ken Grobe put it all into idiomatic, clear English - it's a silly thriller plot, but that's the genre, not a complaint.  I tend to think this is slightly less engaging than Bad Break was - too much running about, with the Griffon scenes entirely separate from everything else - but it's in the same style, and I have hopes the back half will land the plane well.

Pigs Have Wings by P.G. Wodehouse

As the back-cover copy leads off by sublimely noting, it is pig-stealing time in Shropshire.

This is not the longest or the most complex of P.G. Wodehouse's novels set in and around Blandings Castle, and there's only one impostor, who is revealed fairly quickly. But it is the Blandings novel that sees two massive pigs stolen by the major competitors of that Fat Pigs competition at the Shropshire Agricultural Show, in either 1952 (the year the book was published) or the eternal, unspecified, Wodehouse year, where it is one part 1890s, one part 1920s, one minor part the decade it was written, and about five parts pure whimsy and invention.

Pigs Have Wings has some of Wodehouse's most inventive, fun writing - he several times pauses to talk about the details of writing the book, apologizing for not mentioning a particular character for a long time and noting at one point:

Stress was laid earlier in this narrative on the fact that the conscientious historian, when recording any given series of events, is not at liberty to wander off down byways, however attractive, but is compelled to keep plodding steadily along the dusty high road of his story, and this must now be emphasized again to explain why the chronicler does not at this point diverge from his tale to give a word for word transcript of Lord Emsworth's speech.

Every mature Wodehouse book is frivolous; the best of them turn that frivolousness into something  magnificent. This is one of those - it's also the book that features the line about the "unmistakable sound of a butler falling off a bicycle." [1] The plot is fun, but the language is even better.

You see, the Empress of Blandings has won that Fat Pig contest two years running. Lord Emsworth's great rival, Sir Gregory Parsloe, has imported a possibly even-fatter pig - in a shocking breach of ancient custom, though not actually against the rules - from Kent and named it the Queen of Matchingham. The contest is coming up swiftly, and the two pigs, each in her sty at the two stately houses a few miles apart, are snuffling up their recommended fifty-seven thousand and eight hundred calories a day, in a race to see who can get the fattest.

But everyone assumes Parsloe will cheat. And the current keeper of the Empress, a slightly wobbly pig-girl named Monica Simmons, is his niece, installed by the domineering Lady Constance, Lord Emsworth's sister, who is more interested in keeping good relations with the neighbors than with winning Fat Pig contests.

Of course, there's also a few young-love plots - as well as a not-quite-so-young-anymore love plot - to complicate things. And one impostor, in the person of one of those not-quite-so-young love interests, a former barmaid and current owner of a detective agency, hired to keep her presumably-beady eye on the Empress.

Eventually, both the Empress and the Queen are stolen, by forces from the other camp. And a pig is hidden in the kitchen of a villa, where a keen-eared pig-keeper - and a slightly less keen-eared local policeman - may hear its distinctive grunting.

This is a good first Wodehouse novel - it shows what he does well, isn't too long or too convoluted, and the series element is minor. (There's a fat pig, a dithering lord, and a couple of other bits of standard business - that's it.) The fact that it's a glittering, lovely delight makes it only that much better.

[1] As opposed to the unmistakable sound of a barmaid falling down stairs, which is from the Drones story "Tried in the Furnace."

Nocturnos by Laura Pérez

I like to read comics - or graphic works, however you label them - that work largely visually, that imply more than they say, that aren't looking to tell a single, straightforward genre story. Those kinds of books are rich and fascinating when done well, and I find them more impressive than any hugger-mugger plot.

Laura Pérez is a Spanish creator - most famous on my side of the Atlantic for creating the title sequence for the TV show Only Murders in the Building - whose comics are very much in that vein: moody, thoughtful, allusive, full of fleeting moments and emotional states among characters that we don't get to know very well at all. Because how well do we know anyone? (Even ourselves?)

Two of her books were previously published in English translation for the US market - Totem and Ocultos. This past fall, her 2019 book Nocturnos was also published in English, translated by award-winning translator Andrea Rosenberg.

Pérez's books are difficult to write about, difficult to classify. They're meditations or explorations more than storytelling exercises, books that wander through a visual space and a set of ideas rather than laying out a linear story for the reader to follow. Nocturnos is a book about night - mostly about dreams, but also all of the other things that go on under the cloak of darkness, creatures and feelings and connections.

Pérez works here largely with emotional states, with feelings - her night is not a place of danger, specifically, though she does start with showing a prehistoric woman (or a modern woman acting like one) and references to fears of what might be in the dark. Nocturnos follows a sequence of people - I think we see some of the same people repeatedly, at different ages in their lives, but we also see a lot of people, once or twice in passing, as the night rumbles on past them - and shows us their dreams, as well as what they see and what they do in the depths of the night.

It's mostly quiet; it's mostly low-key. These are realistic dreams - the kind where you just know things, and you can't describe exactly what happened or what it meant, but know it meant something important. There's a fine sequence a little more than halfway through where one character describes a dream in those terms, over Pérez's evocative art, and we don't really understand what he means, as the man he talks to also doesn't understand. And the things Pérez's characters get up to during this night - because I think this book is meant to depict a night, a particular time in a particular place - are mostly everyday as well. They read, they look out windows, they ride public transit, they sit in bars talking to the bartender, they drive trucks, they arrive at a vacation cabin. They live their lives, quiet moments in their lives, as the night envelops them.

Pérez's art here has a surprising brightness for a book about night; she has an almost glowing blue-green sky, flecked with stars, visible a lot of the time, and her people have faces that almost look illuminated. Black does envelop her pages much of the time, though, as if the night is surrounding each of these moments, making each of them distinct and separate, like beads on a string.

I can't tell you what Nocturnos means; it doesn't "mean" one thing. It's a sequence of ideas and thoughts about what night is, what night means, what goes on in our brains when the world gets dark and quiet and still. I found it fascinating and deep; I hope you will do the same.

Bridge Planet Nine by Jared Throne

I came into this book with almost no expectations, and was happily surprised - it's a taut, smartly-paced crime thriller in a lived-in SF universe. I'll try not to spoil what turns into a twisty plot with a lot of revelations, but keep that in mind.

Bridge Planet Nine is Jared Throne's second full-length graphic novel, and I think the first to be published by an established company - Top Shelf put it out in October. It's the kind of book that takes unabashedly genre materials, uses them well, and mixes them to make its own story.

It's the medium future. Humanity has expanded to some unknown number of other planets, and seems to be living under a mildly dystopian corporatocracy - well, about as dystopian and corporate-ruled as today, frankly. One of those corporations, Partna, has a string of "Bridge Planets" - uninhabited worlds used as refueling stations for automated transport ships. It sounds like the point is either to extract all of the mineral wealth from those planets or to degrade them enough that Partna can take full ownership for some other activity later - or maybe both.

Four people are planning a heist on one of those planets. Garrett was a VP at Partna before a scandal - which he claims he had nothing to do with - took him down, tossed him in prison, and ruined his life. He has the knowledge and the desire to hurt Partna. The other three are specialists: Hudson is a long-time criminal with a lot of expertise; Wes is the one who'll get them through digital security, with his reprogrammed drone Etta; and Pearl, Wes's sister, is the pilot. They have contacts so they can "borrow" a ship to get there and back - not in a lot of comfort, but good enough.

Garrett knows of a high-value ship, with extra security, coming into Bridge Planet Nine soon. The ship, and the planet, are completely automated - no staff at all. So the four heisters just have to get there, quietly take what they want, and get back out - a big payout for all four of them, minimal risk.

Of course it's not that simple.

Before we meet the heisters, there's what I might call a cold open. A group of people, on a planet somewhere, execute or sacrifice one member of their group by chaining him outside at night and removing the mask they all wear. Something in the environment kills him, unpleasantly, almost immediately. We don't know exactly where they are. But we can guess.

Garrett and crew do get to Bridge Planet Nine without trouble, and park their ship away from the transfer station they plan to hit. They take a ground truck over, marvel at the ruined buildings from when this was an inhabited planet, and get to work on the security at the transfer station. They know their jobs, are smart and organized, and have planned carefully. (This is roughly a third of the way into the book.)

Things go badly in unexpected ways, as they always will in a heist thriller. The mission shifts, there are revelations of what Partna did and is doing on Bridge Planet Nine, and, of course, there is sudden violence and death. There are other characters, too, of course. You need to have a larger cast than just four people to have enough deaths to make a thriller.

The borrowed ship does lift off from the planet at the end of the story; I'll say that much. It does return to Earth, with a crew and a pilot. The people on that ship are not unrewarded by their efforts on Bridge Planet Nine. It's a good ending, a satisfying ending - one that fits for both a heist thriller and a gritty anti-corporate SF story.

Throne draws this in an indy-friendly style, with sharp spotted blacks, crisply distinct faces, and a good eye for design - both of his pages and for elements in his world. Suitably for both the heist and grungy-SF genres, most of the background elements look worn, lived-in, half-broken - he draws a universe that's already seen a lot of activity, where the street has been making its own uses for things for a long time now. Bridge Planet Nine is impressive: it tells its cross-genre story well, with distinctive characters, a strong sense of place, and serious tension throughout.

All of This and Nothing: Such Great Heights

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

This week we're back to Famous, with a song everyone heard two decades ago in the movie The Garden State. (Yes, I saw it: I've lived in New Jersey since 1977, so I was legally obligated.)

It's a cover, though I'm not sure if I ever heard the original, by The Postal Service. Sometimes covers take over for the original - Hendrix did that with All Along the Watchtower.

And Sam Beam, aka Iron & Wine, did it with Such Great Heights.

I don't think I've written about quiet songs much on these Mondays - oh, sure, I talk about songs starting quietly, but I usually go on to talk about the loud parts. This one is all quiet, like a still pond, all focused on one man's voice and guitar.

It's a love song, a mostly happy love song.

Mostly. No true love song can be entirely happy, just like no person is ever entirely happy.

But everything looks perfect from far away

That's the core line of the song for me - this is a good relationship, a happy one, a fulfilling one. But it's not perfect, because nothing is perfect...but it, and the whole world, can look perfect from the right viewpoint.

This is also explicitly a "missing you" song - that's another thing that looks perfect from far away. I don't think that's meant as irony; I believe this is a heartfelt song, both as written and as performed by Beam. But any good song has tensions like that in it - ideas that could undercut themselves, phrases that could be taken different ways.

I'll leave it there: this is a quiet, meditative song, and I don't want to over-egg it. It's something to listen to, quietly, and think about how it reflects, or doesn't, your own life.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 21, 2026

I got three books from the library this week - along with the movie Caddyshack, for the weekly watch-with-my-kids Wednesday [1] - and all of them were larger than I expected. This complicates my life, for a silly and quirky reason you certainly don't care about.

You see, over the last few years, my reading time shifted. I used to read mostly while commuting, but now I work from home. And I also wanted to be more active once I was working from home - to get up regularly and spend time walking around. (I now aim to get 25k steps a day, and hit it except for very rare calamities.) So the question was: how do I both spend time reading and spend time walking? [2]

Yes, I do now read books while pacing in the house. Yes, my family thinks I am very weird. Yes, I have bumped into doors and walls more than once. But it does seem to work for me, though I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone else.

It does mean that larger or heavier books can be an issue, because I'm holding them up and walking about with them. Again, this is not a problem that I think anyone else in the world has ever had, and I don't expect anyone to commiserate with me - I'm just mentioning it.

Because E Is For Edward is particularly large, and I spent much of yesterday (Saturday, February 20th; I'm writing this the "today" of publication) walking about with it, and expect to finish it off today. I did whack it into doorframes at least twice. Anyway, this is a coffee-table book - the kind that normal sane people read on their laps in a comfy chair, or perhaps flip through as it sits on a table - about Edward Gorey, by Gregory Hischak, the current director of the museum made out of Gorey's Cape Cod house. It's full of Gorey art, and divided into a number of thematic chapters - designed to be a celebration of all his work on the event of the hundredth anniversary of his birth (last year).

Then there's Tongues, a large graphic novel by Anders Nilsen, whose similarly-large Big Questions I loved a decade ago. I did have access to a digital review copy of this almost a year ago, but it was watermarked in an annoying way, so I just didn't want to read that version. So, instead, I got the book itself, and will be maneuvering that through space in the near future and trying not to whack it into things in its turn. I have no idea what the story of Tongues is about and am deliberately not checking.

Last is the most recent book by Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx. Frazier is a longtime New Yorker writer, adept at both serious reportage (like On the Rez and Family) and humor (like Cranial Fracking and the great Coyote V. Acme). This is Frazier in serious mode, and, as the title implies, it's a history of Da Bronx. It's also over five hundred pages, which is more than I thought I needed to know about NYC's most blue-collar borough, but I trust Frazier and will read, I expect, all of it.

[1] This time around, it was clearly from a different era. Even more so, I was struck by how it's really just a random collection of scenes - usually pretty funny, at least for audiences in 1980 - thrown together based on the same vague premise and with occasional attempts at an ongoing plotline.

[2] I also now have a sit-stand desk for work and a walking pad I pull out some of the time, so I do quite a bit of editing of work whitepapers and similar activities while trudging forward at that desk.

Quote of the Week: Other Lives

The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss's daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich - small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.

 - Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, p.625 in Later Novels & Other Writings

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

This is the big one; if you read only one Raymond Chandler novel, it should be The Long Goodbye. It's almost twice the length of his earlier books and not structured like a traditional mystery - a loose, looping, allusive novel that can make the case, all by itself, that private-eye stories can be fine literature.

I don't know if the world needed to be told that in 1953. On the other hand, I don't know if "the world" has entirely learned it since then - the world is full of blindered people of all kinds. Some refuse to believe mysteries can be as good as any other novels; some read only private-eye novels.

I'm not going to describe the plot in any great detail - it's deliberately slow, and recursive, and is best experienced by reading it. I did flag a whole lot of quotes, and I might drop a couple of them in below, with some linking material, to give you a sense of the book.

But I can tell you it starts with Terry Lennox - a drunk, a man badly damaged by his WWII service, the once and future kept husband of a widely-ranging heiress, a man with his own notions of propriety and honor. Series hero and narrator Philip Marlowe rescues him one day - more or less from his wife - and comes to be his friend, in the way of men who don't get close to each other or ask each other many questions.

One night Lennox calls Marlowe and needs a big favor, no questions asked - to be driven to the airport in Tijuana. This is a mystery novel; Marlowe assumes and we the reader assumes that means someone is dead - and we're both right. It won't be the last death.

Somewhat later, Marlowe is hired - sort-of - to find the alcoholic writer Roger Wade, who has disappeared on what both his wife and his New York editor are afraid is yet another bender. The Wades live in the same rich town and mix in the same circles as Lennox's wife; Lennox's sister-in-law is prominent there.

Maybe this is a good point to throw in a quote - here's Marlowe talking to the novelist's wife, on p.502 of the Later Novels & Other Writings omnibus:

"Look, Mrs. Wade," I said finally. "My opinion means nothing. It happens every day. The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. Nice old ladies poison whole families. Clean-cut kids commit multiple holdups and shootings. Bank managers with spotless records going back twenty years are found out to be long-term embezzlers. And successful and popular and supposedly happy novelists get drunk and put their wives in the hospital. We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick."

That's the core point of any mystery novel - the why of a specific shocking violent act. And the best mystery writers, Chandler at their fore, make it clear that we can say some things about any particular act, especially in retrospect, but that people are strange and contingent and unexpected. Long Goodbye is a novel about people, the things they do and the ways they bounce off each other - often violently.

This is also the book where Chandler has the "main story" cool down repeatedly, almost as if his plot is dying out, as Marlowe goes on to other cases, other parts of his life, before looping back to that cluster of Lennox and Wade and the rest:

So passed a day in the life of a P.I. Not exactly a typical day but not totally untypical either. What makes a man stay with it nobody knows. You don't get rich, you don't often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money.

"Come in, Mr. Thingummy. What can I do for you?"

There must be a reason.

(p.549)

As I said, this is a long novel - especially for a mystery, especially for 1953. Marlowe isn't really investigating any of the deaths, and, for a long time, he's half-heartedly trying to get away from the bits of this puzzle he's entangled with. But this is what he does: he worries loose bits of string until he gets to the knot and untangles it.

In the end, we do learn what happened - to Lennox and Wade and all of the others, to the cops and crooks and millionaires and their daughters. This is a magnificent American novel, on the short list that everyone should read at least once. I'll leave it at that.

Usasgi Yojimbo, Book 9: Daisho by Stan Sakai

As I've warned before, my posts about series tend to get shorter and more perfunctory as I have less and less to say. I may end up rambling below, but I doubt I'll have anything particularly profound this time.

I'm still reading my way through Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo series, a mildly fantasy-tinged adventure series set in a dramatically heightened version of Edo-period Japan, pitched at a level appropriate for middle-grade readers...oh, and all of the characters are anthropomorphic animals, because Sakai started this series in the '80s for the Critters anthology. Anthropomorphic characters also suit his art style quite well, though there are all the usual questions of how multi-animal worlds work - are all these races interfertile? If a rabbit and a fox have children, are they hybrids, or are the boys rabbits and the girls foxes, or what? Do the races code specific positions in society, or geographic origins, or something like that?

In this series, they're mostly just animals because Sakai wanted them to be animals. Individual characters are kinds of animals that make sense for them specifically; I haven't made a study to see how families connect. Usagi himself clearly gets the hots for babes who are not themselves rabbits, for one data-point.

The ninth collection of that series is Daisho, collecting some stories from issues 7 and 8 of the 2nd series that weren't in vol. 8 (Shades of Death) and the full issues 9-14; it reaches almost to the end of the Mirage series (Usagi started with Fantagraphics, had a short run with Mirage, and then settled in at Dark Horse for twenty years and 160-ish issues); the current edition came out in 2010 but seems to be an only very slightly updated version of the original book 9 from about 1995.

The stories here mostly flow into a continuous narrative, though those two lead-off stories are both closing off loose plot threads from earlier volumes. Most of the book sees Usagi caught up in helping out a town taken over by slavers, and then chasing their leader after "General Fujii" steals Usagi's swords. After that, we get a flashback to another great lost love of Usagi's life - we're only up to Lost Love #2 at this point, but we're also only twenty-some issues in, with a hundred and sixty to go, so Usagi could have a hot anthropomorphic babe in every town by the end of the series if I'm counting correctly.

This particular Lost Love is the We Could Never Be Together type - she's the daughter of a major lord, he's the bodyguard delivering her to the arranged marriage, and they're on the run from the forces trying to murder her before that can happen. You've read that story before, but Sakai does a solid version of it here.

That's generally my take on Usagi, this volume and this previous ones - Sakai is professional and solid, telling stories well in a clean style, with solid dialogue and engaging plotting. There's nothing groundbreaking or surprising here, and it is all pitched so you could hand it to a ten-year-old. Is that enough? Every reader has to decide that - so far, I'm enjoying the stories, while finding them inherently limited.

Wandering Island, Vol.2 by Kenji Tsurata

Everything I said about the first volume of Wandering Island is still true for the second: it's a laconic, quiet story with a lot of Miyazaki influence, driven by images, with a thin plot and only one real character, the floatplane pilot Mikura Amelia. (Who, as you can see from the cover, spends a lot of her time in borderline fan-service-y poses either in that tiny bikini or, for a sequence here, entirely naked.)

Well, one thing is different, I suppose. I said I thought this would be a two-book series, that the plot was thin enough that I didn't see how it could run more than another couple of hundred pages. I was mistaken; a visually-driven series can keep going, I'm coming to see, as long as the creator has more images to put on the page.

Wandering Island, Vol. 2 is not the end. It needs at least one more volume, maybe more. According to an afterword by editor Carl Gustav Horn, the fifteen chapters here appeared in the Japanese  monthly Afternoon magazine between October 2012 and December 2017, with the Japanese tankōbon also copyright 2017, so probably appearing the same month as the last chapter it collected. This English translation, by Dana Lewis, arrived in January 2019.

On the other hand, I can't find any indication that creator Kenji Tsurata has published any further chapters of Wandering Island in the past eight years, so this may be entirely abandoned. Caveat lector.

The first volume ended with Mikura flying off to find the mysterious, moving Electric Island - she'd tracked its movements, and was sure she could catch it on this go-round through the North Pacific. The first chapter here is mostly "where is that wandering island?" but she does get there, landing right next to it despite the locals firing cannon at her.

She has a package to deliver, after all. She needs to give it to "Miss Amelia."

Most of this book is Mikura wandering, mostly silently, around the semi-ruined town that takes up most or all of the island, trying to map it so that she can figure it out. It's made up of buildings jammed together, with narrow, winding streets rising and falling up and down the hills - very Mediterranean, very Miyazaki. She sees some locals: mostly semi-hostile old men (the ones who fired that cannon, we think), one old lady is who slightly more helpful, one kid near the end.

We don't learn any of their names. None of them get more than a few words of dialogue. None of them explain anything, talk about this island, or advance the plot at all. They mostly all just tell Mikura to get the hell out of there, that she's not wanted.

Oh, and "Miss Amelia" is dead. The place she lived is entirely a ruin; she may have died a century ago.

At the very end, as Mikura is running out of the food saved in her plane, and wondering what she can possibly do next, that kid just happens to mention that there's "a store" on the island, of course in what seems to be the highest point. Mikura goes there, sees the shopkeeper...and this volume ends.

We don't see the shopkeeper clearly - we see his body, but not his face. He seems to be familiar to Mikura. I'm going to guess that it's her dead father, since it's that kind of story, and because there are so few characters that's an plausible guess. If there are ever any further chapters, maybe I can find out if I'm right.

This is a lovely book, with great images. I can recommend it on that level. Anyone coming to it hoping for answers to the questions raised in the first volume, though, will be deeply disappointed, and need to be ready to continue waiting - perhaps forever - for those answers. Anyone deeply interested in plot will also want to stay far away.

Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol.8: Chains of Death by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

About a year and a half ago, I decided to re-read the Lone Wolf and Cub series, a masterpiece and towering achievement of gekiga manga, created by writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima in the 1970s. I figured I could get through the the twenty-eight volumes at least one a month, so it would take a couple of years.

Well, I'm now up to volume 8, so I think it will take a bit longer than that. And, as I keep saying for each book in turn, I doubt I'll have much to say: each book is very much like the one before; their strengths are their strengths; these are amazing works but what has to be said about them has been said, many times, over the past fifty years.

So I just read Chains of Death. It contains six stories. As throughout the series, they're all sequentially numbered - these are 39 through 44.

My sense is that this series went through phases or clusters - some groupings were more concerned with the central plot, some with one-off stories. They also take place in different parts of Japan, not that I'll be any good at explicating that. This book has a group of stories that take place during winter: snow and cold is important in several of them. It's also closer to the main plot; we see Yagyū Retsudō scheming in several stories, and get a flashback of his son's duel against our series hero, Ogami Ittō, for the position of the Shōgun's executioner.

The pleasures of this series, as always, is that odd mixture of the quiet moments of beauty - Kojima is masterful at depicting natural and everyday life - and the sudden interruptions of that life by extreme violence, which is what the audience, then as now, is here for. Otherwise, see what I - and many other commentators - have said about Lone Wolf and Cub earlier; it is what it is.