Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

I've been reading a bunch of noir lately - the old stuff, mostly in Library of America omnibuses, because that's what I have on hand. And I figure that, if I was doing that anyway, I should really go back to the real beginning.

Well a real beginning. Nothing ever comes out of only one place, and nothing ever ends that cleanly, either.

But Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett's first novel from 1929, is as good a signpost for "noir starts here" as any other, and better than most.

Hammett had been writing short stories and novellas for the pulps for seven years at that point, and there were hardboiled writers before him - there had to be a market to sell into - but novels feel more impressive than a collection of stories, no matter how much we try to be dispassionate about it.

This is the first of two novels about Hammett's series character The Continental Op, a nameless functionary of that nationwide detective agency - a fictionalization of the Pinkertons, mostly - who had starred in about two dozen Hammett stories before this. He's smart but not fancy, a man with - as would be said later - a particular set of skills, a man who is good at taking things apart to see what happens.

In Red Harvest, he takes apart an entire town. Personville is a corrupt town, a small mining city somewhere in the American West, under the thumb of one aging industrialist, Elihu Willsson, and the gangsters he brought in to crush a strike a few years back. The Op was hired by Willsson's son Donald, supposedly honest and given the town's one newspaper to run - in a crusading, clean-up-the-town rabble-rousing style that was not specifically against his father's corruption but would tend to conflict with the old man's interests.

The Op hits town, and plans to meet Donald that night. But Donald is murdered before that meeting can happen. And the Op, for his own reasons, more-or-less blackmails Elihu into signing a contract to "clean up the town." The rest of the novel is the Op - not as systematically or coldly or deliberately as one might expect - pitting the major gangsters of the town against each other, fomenting chaos and getting them to knock each other off (along with plenty of others) as quickly as possible.

You see, the Op's job is generally to follow the law, to support established authority - even if that is corrupt, maybe especially if that is corrupt, following the Pinkerton model - and not to crusade to get hoodlums to murder each other. He's quite clear that his superiors, particularly "the Old Man" in San Francisco, would shut down his operations very quickly if they knew what he was actually doing.

So he has a limited amount of time, and only a quick knowledge of the major players, and an entrenched power structure used to crushing any opposition. The Op exploits small cracks, drops hints, plants rumors, points hotheads at each other, and generally just acts as an agent of random chaos, trying to stir up as much trouble as quickly as he can and trusting to his skills and to blind luck to come out the other side of it. He's aided by the fact that the gangsters tend to trust him - why would they think his purpose is to destroy all their operations? - and so he gets to meet with many of them repeatedly, to plant ideas and get them thinking that they're each about to be betrayed by the others.

It all works: the Op does "clean up the town," in the sense that there's a bloodbath (about two dozen murders of specific named characters, plus a certain number of random mooks and palookas) and all of the existing gang leaders are dead when he finally leaves town. 

We all judge success in our own ways: he did what he set out to do.

Red Harvest is still cleanly readable, and the Op's psychology modern enough that a current reader will be in sympathy with him, from the intention to clean up the town to his worries that he's getting too bloodthirsty along the way. It's a short book with propulsive energy: it may be a classic of its type but it has none of the stuffiness we associate with "classic."

(Note: as I implied up top, I read this in a Library of America omnibus, the Hammett Complete Novels. If you're going to read more than one Hammett book - and why not? - I'd recommend it.)

Portions for Foxes: The Yeah Yeah Yeahs

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

This series isn't all obscurities. I'm not deliberately being a hipster or anything. And I'm ending the year, and the series, with a song I bet anyone reading this already knows. (And likes, I hope: though tastes always do differ.)

To end the Portions For Foxes series, I'm turning to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and throwing the knob all the way to Zero, a great song from 2009 and their It's Blitz! record.

I can't tell you why this song sounds so positive and energizing when the lyrics are so dark:

You're a zero
What's your name?
No one's gonna ask you
Better find out where they want you to go

It's not mocking. It's not even "they call you a zero; are you gonna stand for that?" It's pure and straightforward - maybe we should take it as starting from zero, from the base, with nothing behind you and nothing expected.

There's a whole new year ahead of all of us, full of whatever. It starts from zero. Go for it.

Quote of the Hour: Ineffective Strategies

Perhaps George is vaguely aware that he is losing his wife to another man and that is why he decides to tempt her back with an exotic outing to a faraway place - the Chinese restaurant in Goodramgate. This is his first mistake, for Bunty does not like foreign food. She had not actually tasted any foreign food but nonetheless she knows she doesn't like it. His second mistake was to invite me and Patricia.

 - Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, pp.211

Quote of the Hour: Dillinger Was a Dreamboat

The corridors are hung with mounted research posters and color blowups of photogenic "nuisance" species: cormorants, ground squirrels, beavers. Wildlife management agencies and pest control websites do this too, and it always hits me as slightly off - it would be like the FBI decorating the hallways with headshots of good-looking federal criminals.

 - Mary Roach, Animal Vegetable Criminal, p.279

Quote of the Hour: What's the Deal with Airplanes?

For dinner we were offered a precise square of mysterious-smelling beef or mysterious-looking chicken. The stewardess had the face of a woman who'd once come in third in the Miss North Dakota contest.

 - Jonathan Carroll, Sleeping in Flame, p.95

Quote of the Hour: His Soul Support

But who had uttered these words? They had not frightened me, They were clearly audible to me yet I knew they did not ring out across the air like the chilling cough of the old man in the chair. They came from deep inside me, from my soul. Never before had I believed or suspected that I had a soul but just then I knew I had. I knew also that my soul was friendly, was my senior in years and was solely concerned for my own welfare. For convenience I called him Joe.

 - Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman, p.240 in The Complete Novels

Quote of the Hour: Literary Organization

Other people's books on the subjects one is writing about oneself are annoying sometimes, because if one has read them one must avoid saying the same things, and if one has not read them and says the same things readers think one has copied, and when one's book comes first, the books that come after it have either copied from it or not copied from it, and when they have copied they get the credit, as readers have forgotten who wrote it first, and when they have not copied they seem to be despising it and to be saying the opposite. It would be better if only one writer at a time wrote on each subject, but this cannot be, and when the subject is a country it would be unfair, as people rely on writing to get them about abroad and let them take money to spend there.

 - Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond, p.86

Quote of the Hour: Backswing Fantasies

All dads dream about the end of the world. It is a comfort to them. For some, the fantasy is blunt, vengeful, and aspirational. The zombie epidemic story, as one example, is consistently popular for a simple reason: when chaos consumes civilization, you can start over. You get to be young again., All your debts, real and emotional, are cancelled. Whatever your dumb job used to be, it has now been replaced with the sole, exciting occupation of survival via crossbow or samurai sword. You get to dress up and wear armor or an eyepatch. And since your neighbors have now been transformed into the idiot monsters you always believed them to be, the zombie epidemic offers you moral permission to shoot them in the head, finally.

 - John Hodgman, Vacationland, pp.7-8

Quote of the Hour: Boxes for Stories

Laurent had always preferred comedies to tragedies. In the comedies, everything comes right and then there is a stopping place that is not a true ending. The box that gives the comic story its shape is made, on purpose, too small. It cannot contain the true ending.

 - Kelly Link, "The White Road," p.110 in White Cat, Black Dog

Quote of the Hour: Gradations of Beefiness

The matchmaker [Al Weill] is of the build referred to in ready-made clothing stores as a portly, which means not quite a stout. There is an implication of at least one kind of recklessness about a fat man; he lets himself go when he eats. A portly man, on the other hand, is a man who would like to be fat but restrains himself - a calculator.

 - A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science, p.27 in The Sweet Science & Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: Organizations and Titles Suitable for Appropriation by Anyone

REGALIA, n. Distinguishing insignia, jewels and costume of such ancient and honorable orders as Knights of Adam; Visionaries of Detectable Bosh; the Ancient Order of Modern Troglodytes; the League of Holy Humbug; the Golden Phalanx of Phalangers; the Genteel Society of Expurgated Hoodlums; the Mystic Alliance of Gorgeous Regalians; Knights and Ladies of the Yellow Dog; the Oriental Order of Sons of the West; the Blatherhood of Insufferable Stuff; Warriors of the Long Bow; Guardians of the Great Horn Spoon; the Band of Brutes; the Impenitent Order of Wife-Beaters; the Sublime Legion of Flamboyant Conspicuants; Worshippers at the Electroplated Shrine; Shining Inaccessibles; Fee-Faw-Fummers of the Inimitable Grip; Janissaries of the Broad-Blown Peacock; Plumed Increscencies of the Magic Temple; the Grand Cabal of Able-Bodied Sedentarians; Associated Deities of the Butter Trade; the Garden of Galoots; the Affectionate Fraternity of Men Similarly Warted; the Flashing Astonishers; Ladies of Horror; Cooperative Association for Breaking into the Spotlight; Dukes of Eden; Disciples Militant of the Hidden Faith; Knights-Champions of the Domestic Dog; the Holy Gregarians; the Resolute Optimists; the Ancient Sodality of Inhospitable Hogs; Associated Sovereigns of Mendacity; Dukes-Guardian of the Mystic Cess-Pool; the Society for Prevention of Prevalence; Kings of Drink; Polite Federation of Gents-Consequential; the Mysterious Order of the Undecipherable Scroll; Uniformed Rank of Lousy Cats; Monarchs of Worth and Hunger; Sons of the South Star; Prelates of the Tub-and-Sword.

 - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, p.596-597 in The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs

Quote of the Hour: Pertinent and Impertinent

However one may enjoy the possession of an intelligent animal, too much intelligence, too many pertinent and impertinent questions, and too much independence are always hard to put up with in others, and especially in a creature one keeps partly for the enhancement of one's own self-image.

 - Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog, pp.5-6

Quote of the Hour: Suburban Ennui

In the course of a letter to the South London Argus exposing the hellhounds of the local Gas Light and Water Company, Major Flood-Smith of Castlewood had once referred to Mulberry Grove as a "fragrant backwater." He gave the letter to his parlour-maid to post, and she forgot it and found it three weeks later in a drawer and burned it, and the editor would never have printed it, anyway, as it was diametrically opposed to the policy for which the Argus had always fearlessly stood, but - and this is the point we could stress - in describing Mulberry Grove as a fragrant backwater the Major was dead right.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Big Money, p.96

Quote of the Hour: Tragedy of the Commons

Here in the oil country you see quite a few places like the old Branch house. They were ranch houses or homesteads at one time; but wells were drilled around 'em, right up to their doorsteps sometimes, and everything nearby because a mess of oil and sulphur water and red sun-baked drilling mud. The grease-black grass dies. The creeks and springs disappear. And then the oil is gone and the houses stand black and abandoned, lost and lonely-looking behind the pest growths of sunflowers and sage and Johnson grass.

 - Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me, p.30 in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s

Quote of the Hour: Once You're Born That's When It Starts

The best days of her life had been when she was pregnant and the baby was still safe inside her. Once you were out in the world, then the rain fell on your face and the wind lifted your hair and the sun beat down on you and the path stretched ahead of you and evil walked on it.

 - Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?, p.271

Quote of the Hour: The Call of the Void

Here it was all cliffs and sharp curves and the sense that you might dive off into the sky around each upward bend. That the little thought that you always overrode - to stop turning the wheel to match the road - might not be stifled this time and you'd gun the engine and push on into the air, and snuff out every secret thing you knew and didn't want to know.

 - Jeff Vandermeer, Authority, p.316

Quote of the Hour: By the Fire

We would read together by the light of the fire, into which she often threw the letters that her husband sent her every day from the Front. Judging by their frequent expressions of anxiety I guesses that Marthe's letters to him were becoming less and less tender and less and less frequent. It was not without a certain disquiet that I watched those letters burn. For a second the fire became much brighter; the truth was I was afraid to see more clearly.

- Raymond Radiguet (A.M. Sheridan Smith translation), The Devil in the Flesh, p.42

Quote of the Hour: Just Drunk Enough

I continued to talk. As I say, I was lighted up. In my brain every thought was at home. Every thought, in its little cell, crouched ready-dressed at the door, like prisoners at midnight waiting a jail-break. And every thought was a vision, bright-imaged, sharp-cut, unmistakable. My brain was illuminated by the clear, white light of alcohol. John Barleycorn was on a truth-telling rampage, giving away the choicest secrets on himself. And I was his spokesman. There moved the multitudes of memories of my past life, all orderly arranged like soldiers in some vast review. It was mine to pick and choose. It was a lord of thought, the master of my vocabulary and of the totality of my experience, unerringly capable of selecting my data and building my exposition. For so John Barleycorn tracks and lures, setting the maggots of intelligence gnawing, whispering his fatal intuitions of truth, flinging purple passages into the monotony of one's days.

 - Jack London, John Barleycorn, p.936 in Novels and Social Writings

Reviewing the Mail: Week of December 28, 2024

I'm typing this on Friday, which means I may yet get mail today or tomorrow and have to revise this post. Such are the dangers of being a blogger.

The list below, at the moment, is all things I unwrapped this Wednesday, on the usual hegemonic festive winter holiday of my people. Several of them I bought for myself - as I've said before, it's the one way to be sure you get what you want - and I'm not going to tell you which ones.

Acceptance is the third of the original Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer from a decade ago - he has a new book in the same world that just came out a few months ago. The first two are Annihilation and Authority, and I'm reading them slowly enough, I'm sorry to say, that I got Acceptance in a completely different cover design than the first two, which physically pains me. I'm sure I'll live. And I'm going to try to read this relatively quickly; I'm vaguely trying to catch up on VanderMeer, even though he's pretty prolific.

My Brother's Keeper is a newish novel (from 2023) by Tim Powers, and sees him return to Stress of Her Regard territory with the untold secret history of the Brontë sisters. I'm a long-time fan of Powers, though I have to admit I did look a bit askance when he moved to Baen a few years back and had a three-book series about the same characters (I've read the first one, Alternate Routes). But writers gotta eat, and want to write stuff and get it out into the world, and sometimes you dance with whoever's willing to dance. So I guess I'll keep reading Powers books unless he starts going overly Baen and includes rants about the Trilateral Commission or something.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is the new novel from Haruki Murakami, who I've been reading since Wild Sheep Chase - almost everything he's had translated into English at this point. (There's a short book about music I haven't gotten to yet, and the bug-crusher 1Q84 sitting on my shelf and mocking me.) The City is shorter than 1Q84 - most books are - so I might tackle this one first. What's it about? Probably the same quirky things as any Murakami novel - which is to say, anything. I'll figure that out when I read it.

High Tide at Midnight is the sixth book in the Trese series, about a supernatural detective in the Philippines. I'm really happy to see that this attempt to bring the series to the US market seems to be working better than the first try did, years back - I saw the first two books way back in my SFBC days, and then there was a long drought before I saw more, even though new material was being published in the Philippines at least intermittently over those years. (There was an animated TV series a year or three back, which probably helped the books' profile - TV, even in these latter days, hits a vastly larger audience than any book.) Anyway: great series, great atmosphere, great art, really interesting supernatural world.

And last is Schtick Figures, the new book from Drew Friedman from this year. It collects over a hundred and fifty of his portraits - looks like comedians are the largest group, but with lots of random others as well. My sense is that this is the "odds & sods" collection, with all the Friedman work that didn't get into his more tightly-themed books. (US Presidents! Old Jewish Comedians! Comics pros! Great Mailmen! Well, maybe not that last one.)

Quote of the Hour: The Old Neighborhood

Grand Avenue takes you right out of Baconburg and into the suburbs. You pass through Porkington and Trottersville, and then you arrive in Hamfat. Starting in Trottersville, the road is lined on both sides with discount gas stations, fast-food restaurants, and stores with big parking lots. All the stores have huge signs you're supposed to see a mile away, except there are other signs sticking up in front of them - KIELBASA MART, FUDGE GIANT, SOCK CITY, UNDERWEAR WORLD, UNPAINTED SURGICAL APPLIANCE OUTLET, and CLAMS ARE US.

 - Daniel Pinkwater, The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror, p.461 in 4 Fantastic Novels

Quote of the Hour: The Anti-Anton Ego Manifesto

The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down,. Each day brings only two opportunities for field work, and they are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol.

 - A.J. Liebling, Between Meals, p. 557 in The Sweet Science & Other Writings

Quote of the Hour: A Profound Lack of Joy in the Morning

"Then I'm dashed if I'm going to do it," said Lord Topham. "Would it interest you to know how I feel about the human species? I hope it jolly well chokes. I don't mind telling you that I got a cable from my girl Toots this morning which has definitely turned me into a mis-what's-the-word. I mean one of those blokes who get fed up with their fellow men and go and live in caves and grow beards and subsist on berries from the bush and water from the spring. Don't talk to me about bringing joy into human lives. I have to do without joy, so why shouldn't the ruddy human lives? To blazes with them. Let 'em eat cake."

 - P.G. Wodehouse, The Old Reliable, pp.186-7

Quote of the Hour: Interpersonal Interactions

I'd have told her my name, but if she responded by making a dismissive sniff, I'd have probably killed her or something, and that wouldn't have advanced my plans at all, so I just nodded and wandered off.

Hey, I've gotten a lot less violent over the years, but I'm still me, all right?

 - Steven Brust, Lyorn, p.107

Quote of the Hour: When You name a Character General Grawk in 1969, You're Pretty Much Required to Describe Him Thus

Imagine a face as red and furious as that of a newborn child. Imagine sparse black hair like broken quills, lying this way and that around a bald spot the colour of a baboon's bum. Imagine the nose of a Pekinese but the upper lip of Peking man, and imagine moreover the former permanently wrinkled with disgust and the latter drawn back in a set sneer from yellow, crooked teeth. Add boiled, bulging eyes, an underslung jaw that needed a shave the day it was created, and the neck of a particularly obese walrus, complete with three folds of fat in back. Got all that? Now add black clots of eyebrow and asymmetric lumps as desired, set it all on a stumpy, strutting figure in uniform, and top it off - as Grawk now did - with a tall, tall cap loaded with silver foliage.

 - John Sladek, The Reproductive System, p.21 in SF Gateway Omnibus

Quote of the Hour: Fatalism

As someone whose dreams didn't work out, she sees the future as beyond her control, random, their lives at the mercy of chance, even if they do everything right.

 - Stewart O'Nan, Ocean State, p.32

Quote of the Hour: You Remember Those Guys - Weren't They Great!

The [Mississippi] river's earliest commerce was in great barges - keelboats, broadhorns. They floated and sailed from the upper rivers to New Orleans, changed cargoes there, and were tediously warped and poled back by hand. A voyage down and back sometimes occupied nine months. In time this commerce increased until it gave employment to hordes of rough and hardy men; rude, uneducated, brave, suffering terrific hardships with sailor-like stoicism; heavy drinkers, course frolickers in moral sties like the Natchez-under-the-hill of that day, heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one, elephantinely jolly, foul-witted, profane, prodigal of their money, bankrupt at the end of the trip, fond of barbaric finery, prodigious braggarts; yet, in the main, honest trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty, and often picturesquely magnanimous.

 - Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, p. 238 in Mississippi Writings

Quote of the Hour: The Writing Life

I did not then understand his elastic use of datelines; he holds that a writer is entitled to use in perpetuity the dateline of any place he has ever been in. Thus, in the summertime he will sometimes begin a column "Clubhouse, Belmont Park," when he has in fact spent the afternoon on the Hudson River, on the deck of a Bear Mountain steamer. "I have been to Belmont," he says. "I know what it is like."

 - A.J. Liebling, "Yea Verily," in The Jollity Building (p.478 of The Sweet Science and Other Writings)

Quote of the Hour: Opened Eyes

I dog-ear too many quotes to run them once a week, and I burn off the excess twice a year on Sundays near major holidays. It's that time again. I'm not going to try to link to older quote-batches this time; you can use the tag and go backward, if you want.

He had married on the rebound from the rotten time he had in college, and Frances took him on the rebound from his discovery that he had not been everything to his first wife. He was not in love yet but he realized that he was an attractive quantity to women, and that the fact of a woman caring for him and wanting to live with him was not simply a divine miracle. This changed him so that he was not so pleasant to have around.

 - Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, p.16

Quote of the Week: Made to be Seen

The residence of Mr Peter Pett, the well-known financier, on Riverside Drive, New York, is one of the leading eyesores of that breezy and expensive boulevard. As you pass by in your limousine, or while enjoying ten cents' worth of fresh air on top of a green omnibus, it jumps out and bites at you. Architects confronted with it reel and throw up their hands defensively, and even the lay observer has a sense of shock. The place resembles in almost equal proportions a cathedral, a suburban villa, a hotel, and a Chinese pagoda. Many of its windows are of stained glass, and above the porch stand two terra-cotta lions, considerably more repulsive even than the complacent animals that guard New York's Public Library. it is a house that it is impossible to overlook; and it was probably for this reason that Mrs Pett insisted on her husband's buying it, for she was a woman who liked to be noticed.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim, opening paragraph

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two by Emil Ferris

It took a few years longer than original expected, but the second half of Emil Ferris's major debut graphic project came out this summer: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two. (I wonder if, like Maus, there will eventually be a one-volume edition - my sense is this is all one story, and would read best straight through.)

The first Monsters was a complex evocation of a time and place - late '60s Chicago - from the point of view of ten-year-old Karen Reyes, who it's clear was informed by the life of her creator but is not just a fictionalization of Ferris's life. Karen's mother had died recently; her father was absent - we learn more about him in this second book - and she was in the care of her older brother Diego, aka "Deeze," an aspiring artist and a low-level local organized crime soldier.

We see all of this through Karen's eyes: she's smart and inquisitive and a budding artist herself but also prone to flights of fancy and self-delusional in the way of a child trying not to think about things that are too big to handle. She thinks of herself as a detective, and sets off in the first book to solve the death by gunshot of an older woman, Anka Silverberg, who lived in the same apartment building and was a friend of Karen's.

The first book introduced all of that - plus a bit, not very much, of Karen interacting with other kids around her age, finding other oddballs and quirky people she could connect with. This second book is a continuation, very much the back half of the same story, and Ferris doesn't spend time recapping for new or forgetful readers. (Another reason I think the books will be better when read straight through.)

There's a lot of material here, a lot of things the reader has to realize - most of which, though possibly not all, that Karen realizes herself. Endings are always more difficult than beginnings: I thought Book Two worked well, and Karen is still compelling and unique, but I don't think the Anka flashbacks quite end as I hoped. (I kept waiting for one last Anka section that never came.) The very end, though plausible and reasonable, also runs away from a lot of what Karen has learned and done over the course of the two books.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, the two books together, is still a massive achievement, my minor quibbles aside. As a debut, it's astonishing: Ferris came out of essentially nowhere with this fully-formed, deep, thoughtful story, presented brilliantly in a style that mimics what Karen would have created herself at the time. I don't think we'll get a third Monsters, but I'm very interested to see what Ferris does next, what other kinds of comics stories she might have in her.

I Can't Remember the Title But the Cover Is Blue by Elias Greig

Elias Grieg worked at a bookstore in Australia - he doesn't say exactly which one, but it's on Sydney's North Shore - for a few years while working on his PhD. He'd hoped to find that bookstore customers were different than those at previous retail establishments where he'd worked, that they would be smarter, more thoughtful, just better.

Reader, you know he was wrong.

I Can't Remember the Title But the Cover Is Blue collects a hundred and eleven interactions Grieg had with customers in that unnamed shop - several times he seems to answer the phone with a name starting "North Shore," but that may be fictionalized - and his customers were just as weird, arbitrary, confused, bizarre, and annoying as those shopping for shoes. Additionally, someone's tastes in books can tell you things about them - Grieg mentions divorce and alludes to political issues; depending on the store the clerk might also find out more than he wants to know about someone's sexual proclivities or medical problems - that you would prefer not to learn.

This is a 2018 book published by Allen & Unwin; it looks like the Australian edition has made its way around the world without needing to be republished in other territories. I read it digitally, but the physical book is available for purchase in the USA, and my guess is also in the rest of the English-speaking world.

Grieg puts each of his vignettes in a script form, with dialogue and stage directions, and he's the kind of word-loving smart person who is good at providing telling details - though his cultural references, obviously, are Australian, and may be opaque to many readers (me, much of the time, for example).

Some examples of his customers:

• Righteous magpie lady and her drooping, sweetly bespectacled son
• Cheerful British chappie whom I've suspected as a Neo-Nazi since he ordered Mein Kampf last year
• Superbusy ninja mum who really doesn't need any extra frippery just quick service, thanks
• The saddest woman in the whole world, apropos of nothing at all
• Designer stubble in suit and tie (cologne strength = real estate agent)
• Rumpledmum and Fleecedaughter
• Elegantly dressed woman with an air of baroque, Continental gloom

Greig also comments on the interactions; I see some Amazon reviewers dislike that and wish he'd just written down what other people say and kept himself out of his own book. (Those people are wrong-headed, of course: viewpoint is always important.)

This is amusing and fun; I wished it was longer, which is a good sign for any kind of book. It will be most immediately loved by bookstore clerks, librarians, and other retail workers, but anyone who likes quirky thoughtful descriptions and overheard dialogue will find a lot to enjoy here.

Pink Floyd in Comics by Tony Lourenço, Thierry Lamy, and various artists

First of all, it's just the tyranny of the calendar that lands this book on this day: I'm working about six weeks ahead currently, and this is the book I read next, and this is the Wednesday the post will fall on. There is no plan to it being Christmas today.

Second, I need to get into the credits quickly, which are much more voluminous than I expected when I picked this book up. The title page credits (deep breath) Main editor Nicolas Finet, Comics writers Tony Lourenço and Thierry Lamy (Lourenço took the first half; Lamy the rest), Cover Christopher (no other name; this seems common in French comics, and I have no idea how they decide who gets what name), Articles Nicolas Finet, Graphic design Marion Lovila, and Translation Peter Russella. That doesn't include the artists of the twenty-eight chapters, who are listed on the following two pages - no artist does more than one chapter, and two of them bring (separate) colorists along with them.

This thus is a book that took thirty-five creators - Christopher also did art for one of the chapters, and Finet was both editor and article-writer - to bring into the world. That's not a record, since encyclopedias exist, but it's impressive for a pop comics biography of a psychedelic band.

You may guess from that list, and possibly from a prior knowledge of the "Music Legends in Comics" series from NBM (or, I think, Petit a Petit in their original French), that this is a dense book filled with detail. You would be correct.

Pink Floyd in Comics tells the story of the band from the early 1960s through the time of publication (2022 in France, 2024 for this English-language edition), in copious and potentially exhaustive detail. Breaking it into twenty-eight chapters allows every phase of the band - every album, major tour, and movie soundtrack, plus sidebars like Hipgnosis (the design company that did nearly all their covers) and Syd Barrett's short post-Floyd solo career, to get its own chapter. The breakup gets a couple of chapters, the various reunions and almost-reunions get a few chapters, too - we're only about two-thirds of the way into the book when we hit The Final Cut, which for many people is the end of the "real" Pink Floyd story. (For others, that would be A Saucerful of Secrets, which is arguable but not terribly useful fifty years later.)

Like the other books in the series, each chapter is told first in comics, in a narrative way, and then in an article, with more detail and references. It's a fairly long book for a comics biography to begin with, at 230ish pages, and nearly half of that is the prose articles, so it is longer and denser than even it seems. It may be too long for a bio of a psychedelic band, frankly - I think of myself as a fairly major Floyd fan, with detailed opinions on things like The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking (self-indulgent but great) and the post-Waters Floyd (not self-indulgent but also never great and often struggling to be good) and this was a bit too much for me. I didn't really care to get multiple pages about what it was like to work with Antonioni on Zabriskie Point, for example.

So my take is this: Pink Floyd in Comics will give you all of the Pink Floyd you can stand. Possibly much more than that. But, unless you actually are Roger Waters or David Gilmour, you will not want any additional details or background or context that this book does not give you. And, if you do want a comics history of Pink Floyd, or are intrigued by that idea in the slightest, this is not just currently definitive, but would be impossible to dethrone at any time in the future.

Piccadilly Jim by P.G. Wodehouse

The cliché is that P.G. Wodehouse created his own world, made up of one part Edwardian dandies, one part interwar froth, one or two parts traditional melodrama plots, and a whole lot of Wodehousian comedy and writing to tie it all together. It's mostly true: no one else wrote quite like him, and his mature books do have a consistent tone and voice, and circle a clear group of plots and ideas.

But, even more so: he reused characters and situations repeatedly. His main series - Jeeves and Wooster, Psmith, Blandings Castle - intersected with each other. I'm sure someone has already mapped the universe of Wodehouse, explaining how every character can be connected to every other character with something like a Bacon number.

So I should not have been surprised that the 1917 comedy Piccadilly Jim is, at least loosely, a sequel to Wodehouse's 1913 novel The Little Nugget. I was, just a bit surprised, in a happy way: the kidnappee of the older book, a horrible boy named Ogden Ford, is the kind of person you would never want to meet in real life but is a fine bit of spice in the right book.

Nugget was a transitional book, still basically taking its thriller plot seriously and having actual physical consequences and at least one scene with bullets whizzing by. Jim is a full-bore Wodehouse comedy, with an occasional concern about someone having to go to prison (played in a end-of-The-Producers kind of way) but mostly focused on the course of true love and the getting of enough scratch to set oneself up in life with the object of said love.

It's also got one of Wodehouse's most amusing impostor plots, with Jimmy Crocker pretending not to be Jimmy Crocker to woo the girl he loves but then posing as Jimmy Crocker to infiltrate her house. There are other impostors, too, of course - it's a Wodehouse comedy, and I believe they are required.

The plot is rarely the point of a good Wodehouse novel, but let me try to sum up: Crocker is a former New York newspaperman, whose father (a minor actor) has married one of a set of two formidable sisters, who have fallen out. Crocker, his father and stepmother live in London, where Crocker has a (very deserved) reputation as a hell-raiser, which is impeding the stepmother's attempts to get her husband a noble title.

His aunt (the other sister) is the mother of the previously mentioned Ogden and is married to a Wall Street financier - more importantly, connected to the financier's niece Ann, who is the red-headed spitfire Crocker falls for - and this whole crew makes a quick visit to London to attempt to get Crocker to come work for the financier, for reasons that are clear enough early in the novel but have not remained clear in my memory.

Anyway, Crocker falls for Ann - but she hates him, since, five years before, she published a slim volume of verse that was absolute glurge, and newspaperman Crocker interviewed her for a piece absolutely making fun of her. She remembers this vividly; he had entirely forgotten.

So he follows her back to New York, taking the same ship and pretending to be someone else called Bayliss. And he does eventually take up residence in his aunt's house, pretending to be himself. There, various criminals and international agents are not only circling to make another kidnapping attempt on Ogden, but also trying to steal a new powerful explosive, invented by one of the many "young and unrecognized geniuses" the aunt has gathered about her as a literary salon.

The explosive is stolen, Ogden is kidnapped, the impostors unmasked, hard-boiled detectives hired, and so forth - not quite in that order, but you get the idea. Crocker wins Ann's love in the end. And there are a whole lot of wonderful, funny Wodehouse asides and thoughts and business along the way. This may be over a hundred years old, but it's still great: one of the earliest clearly-mature Wodehouse novels. 

Portions for Foxes: Shannon Worrell

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

I don't have enough happy love songs in this series, so, as the year's closing out, let me get one more in.

Well, it's mostly happy. No lives are completely happy, so there's some worries seeping in around the edges. But this is a song about making the most of right now, about being in love with someone you know well, about finding your joy where and when you have it.

It's C'mon Catherine by Shannon Worrell, from the 2008 record The Honey Guide.

It's another one of those songs obscure enough that I can't find lyrics online, so anything below is from my listening and typing and rewinding - possibly wrong, but, I hope, well-meant.

C'mon Catherine
Let's bossa nova in the afternoon
Winter will be here too soon

There's repeated mentions of ending, which might be just the general "end" - not of this relationship, or anything else major like that. Just that life is short, and enjoying it is what we have to do now.

Driving 220 in the snow
Listening to the radio
Made me promise not to see that other girl again

But maybe not - the singer is hearing "a September song." This might be a song about love about to be lost after all, for all my optimism. But, even if it is, even if something is time-limited and fragile, it can be beautiful and true and wonderful while it lasts. That's what this song says. And it has a fine fiddle behind Worrell's lovely expressive voice to do it, and a sound like a hills ballad you've been hearing all your life.

Growing grapefruit
Lemons and tiny tangerines
This is the most a life can mean
On the terrace in the sun
We ate every single one
That was another year I swore I'd never leave

In this season, I hope you all have things in your own life that make you feel that way, that this is the most a life can mean.

Quote of the Week: But Not Flying

Hundreds of nuns are in town this week. I've seen nuns with green habits, pink habits. Bad habits! Nuns vaping, nuns cutting in line. Right now, nuns are running, laughing, elbows pumping and veils flying. The security gates on the north side of St. Peter's Square just opened, and a group from the front of the line are rushing for front-row seats at whatever services Pope Francis is about to hold inside the basilica.

 - Mary Roach, Animal Vegetable Criminal, p.232

Well, This Is Me by Asher Perlman

Asher Perlman is a New Yorker cartoonist, which I mention up top since it's divisive for some. I like that style of humor - arch wordplay, light cultural references, usually based in a modern urban lifestyle - but not everyone does.

Well, This Is Me is the first collection of his work, gathering about a hundred and fifty cartoons plus three new interstitial pieces (Introduction, Interlude, and Epilogue) in which a cartoon Perlman talks about his work in an deliberately humorous over-intellectual style to another character who gets fed up with that.

Back when I was a wee lad, cartoon collections like this just shoveled the cartoons in willy-nilly, and didn't show any evidence of organization. You got two hundred Charles Addams cartoons, in whatever order they were in after the editor dropped the file three or four times, and you liked it. Nowadays - my theory is because desktop publishing makes it easy to move things around, but that explanation is a good thirty years old now - cartoon collections tend to have thematic chapters, as if we all think "OK, I want to read a bunch of Peter Arno cartoons right now, but only if they are all about animals."

Whatever the reason for it, that's what Perlman does: there are four major sections. The first one is titled "Well, This is Work" and the others cover Play, Love, and Life. They are vague, and a really argumentative reader could probably find a few to insist they should really be in another category. But the categories are broad enough that we don't get, say, ten doctor's-office cartoons in a row.

Perlman is smart and funny and has both amusing wordplay and amiably dumpy people in his cartoons: he's good at all of the pieces of the cartooning gestalt. He writes funny and he draws funny. There are a dozen or more cartoons here that I let out audible noises while reading - maybe not a full guffaw, but some variety of quick laugh. And there are about as many cartoons where I thought the idea and the specific wording was brilliant - some of these are the same cartoons as the forced-me-to-make-noise ones, I guess.

Anyway: funny, smart, amusing. If you like New Yorker-style single-panel cartoons at all, you'll like this book.

Drafted by Rick Parker

I've grumbled here, a few times, about the ways comics memoirs get pushed to be "bigger." The market - or maybe just editors - want stories to be Important, to be Resonant, to be Striking. And creators, wanting to tell their stories, often bend to that market in one way or another.

But most lives aren't that big. What's interesting about them is the succession of small moments, the choice of paths, what it meant to the person at the time. Keeping that focus, and being both honest and interesting, can be tricky.

Rick Parker walks that tightrope with his memoir Drafted. There's material that lets the publisher (Abrams) be a bit expansive in their marketing copy: Parker was drafted in 1966, during the Vietnam era. As it happened, he never went overseas, but he didn't know that's how it would be at the time. And he's telling this in order, so on every page we only know what Parker knew at the time.

This was a brand-new book in 2024, so it's clearly Parker looking back a long ways. He wrote and drew this in his seventies, telling the story of himself at the ages of eighteen to about twenty-one. (To put it into personal perspective, Parker's entire military service happened up to about six months before I was born, and I am by no means a young man.)

It's a straightforward, crisply-told book. The young Parker was a bit naïve and sheltered - or, at least, older Parker presents his younger self that way - and there are multiple scenes where I wondered if young Parker didn't realize what other people were hinting about at the time, and Parker-the-creator resolutely doesn't explain or add context in retrospect. (In particular, on the day he musters out, there's a long, weird interaction with a fellow soldier and his wife that could have been a backhanded attempt at a threesome or a clumsy badger game - I'm not sure which, but young Parker doesn't seem to see either possibility, and Parker-the-narrator doesn't comment, either.)

Parker runs through those three years in the US Army chronologically, with a brief prologue about his childhood and seven numbered chapters for the major phases of his military career. He goes through basic, gets trained to drive a tank, is approved for Officer Candidate School and passes that, is commissioned as a first lieutenant and assigned to a missile program in the New Mexico desert, and does a few other odd assignments during his enlistment. It's all carefully observed, narrated with a lot of captions mostly in a factual vein, and in a precise, meat-and-potatoes style for both art and writing. Parker isn't trying to be fancy here, despite his long career as a fine artist. This is the clear story of what happened to him, with both the boring and unpleasant parts kept in for maximum transparency.

Drafted isn't quite what I expected, but it does exactly what it sets out to do, does it comprehensively, and tells a story that's both particular and general - Parker was one of more than two million draftees during the Vietnam era, so a lot of elements of his story will be familiar to many of those vets, and of interest to later vets and others.

Pick-Up by Charles Willeford

It's difficult to write about this book without giving away the sting ending. I'll do my best, but I may imply something, and you may guess. But Pick-Up was a 1955 paperback original, so you've had almost seventy years to be spoiled already.

This is a noir novel, I should say. Actually, I'd qualify that: it starts out a fairly straightforward, well-framed story of life on the bottom rung, wanders into noir as stories that like often do - particularly in mid-century, when there was a huge market for such - but then veers again, in the late chapters, to what I can only call anti-noir.

In a noir novel, everything conspires against the hero. The entire world seems to bend to hurt him, to break his will, to force him to do the unforgivable thing, to destroy him utterly in the end. There is no way out, no matter how much he struggles - whether he gleefully engages in crimes, or tries to stay honest and keep his head above water, it will come out the same way in the end: he will either die at the end of the book or be on his way to death.

Charles Willeford follows that model closely in the middle chapters here, but then - and I really can't put this any other way - turns it absolutely inside out at the end. That's the anti-noir bit, as if the universe is conspiring to clear this protagonist, to move obstacles from his way in much the same unexpected, doom-laden way as traditional noir. And that sting ending makes the anti-noir turn that much more puzzling: I don't want to overexplain or hint, but the sting is the kind of thing that would have fit much more comfortably in a traditional noir, the way the book was going already.

Pick-Up is the story of two alcoholics, who meet in the first chapter. Harry Jordan is the first-person narrator, a former painter and currently working at random odd low-level restaurant jobs in San Francisco. He would say he's not an alcoholic, and maybe he's right, technically. But he spends most of his time drinking or waiting to get to the next drink. Helen Meredith is an heiress, who spent her whole life under the thumb of a domineering mother and had a brief, horrible marriage. She's much worse than Harry, needing to drink vast quantities every day.

They meet, they fall in with each other, and Helen moves into Harry's flat in a roominghouse. They're happy, more or less. Harry paints a full-length nude portrait of Helen; we think this could potentially be the spark that puts him back on a good path, doing something more productive with his life.

But they're alcoholics. Helen much much worse than Harry: the kind of mid-century woman drunk who wanders off with any man (or three Marines, in one scene) willing to buy her drinks. Harry can't leave her alone, even to go to work for the day, and they're dirt-poor.

They're both also mildly suicidal: they have one shared attempt early in the book, which leads to a stay in a local mental hospital that doesn't help either of them. And this is noir, so things keep getting worse, more constricting. Until there only seems to be one way out.

It doesn't go the way they hope: things get worse for Harry. And then there's the turn at the end.

I suspect Willeford wrote Pick-Up to deliberately tweak the standards of its genre. I don't know how consistent he was in that. And I'm not a major scholar of his work: I read his late PI novels, and a bunch of his early noir, in the 90s when he had a revival soon after his death, but nothing since then, and I didn't make a particular study of him at the time.

This is a quirky, gnarly noir novel that does interesting things with the form. It has a weird ending, which readers sometimes react strongly to, one way or the other. And it's short, told quickly in the first person, in that traditional noir style. So it's a book that you might as well just read, if any of the above sounds intriguing. I knocked it off in two or three hours: it's worth at least that much time.

(I read this in the Library of America omnibus Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s. As far as I know, the text is the text, no matter what edition. The cover above is what it looked like the last time I read it, in the Black Lizard/Vintage Crime edition in the '90s. I suspect it doesn't look like that these days; books don't keep covers that long.)

The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber by Juni Ba and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

Knowing what needs to be said in a story, and what can just be implied, is always tricky. We can all think of works that fail in both directions - overexplaining, or leaving things too murky.

I think The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber doesn't quite explain all of the things it should have - but it's close, and some readers might find the way it implies its world is just fine. So let me just note that, and note that this is writer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou's first graphic novel, and point out that traditionally ties go to the runner.

I have no quibbles about the art by Juni Ba, which is detailed in quirky, grotesque ways that fits this world perfectly. Also, I should say that the lettering is by Otsamane-Elhaou - the sound effects are particularly fun, and he makes the captions and dialogue slightly italic to give the book a distinctive look, too.

I don't know if this book is specifically for younger readers, but it has a vibe that upper-elementary-school kids will probably enjoy, and the professional-wrestling influences also tend to make the violence stylized and bloodless in ways that are young-reader-friendly.

We're in a world of monsters - think Monsters, Inc., where everyone is a slightly different kind of creature, and you'll be close - where strength and fighting ability seem to be prized above all other traits. (Or, at least, this story deals with that side of this world.) A young, small monster named Felix is timid, bullied by a gang of other monsters from his school. They dare him to ring a random doorbell; he does. A craggy old monster answers the door, and seems to want to talk to this random small interloper for reasons that are never clear. He grabs at Felix, who runs away immediately, and loses his backpack to the old guy.

This is all heavily narrated, mostly in ways that tell us things we can already see on-panel rather than adding detail to the world - it's a very story-book voice, as if telling the story many years later.

Anyway, Felix is bullied at school and browbeaten by his parents and denigrated by his teachers: he's the usual mousy little guy who needs to learn to stick up for himself. In trying to get his backpack back, he accidentally stows away in the old guy's car - I suppose I should make it clear that the old guy is Macabber, the other half of the title - as he goes back to the town of his birth.

Macabber is the former World Champion of Monstering, hugely dominant in his era. Monstering is basically pro wrestling, only in a society of monsters where everyone has completely different bodies from each other. He left this town to go off for the big fights, leaving his former best friend behind. He never returned - until now, of course - in however many years it's been.

The town is a dump now, which everyone living there blames Macabber for. There's no reason for this I can figure out: it's a weird mix of "you're supposed to support the old neighborhood" and "you left us behind." And everyone is much more likely to resolve interpersonal conflicts by punching rather than talking about things, which may be one reason why we don't get any clear, or convincing, explanations.

Anyway, the local hooligans - little guys in knight's armor - find and harass and then recruit Felix, again for murky reasons. Macabber meets his once-best friend, sort-of apologizes for having a successful career elsewhere, and feels guilty. We get a lot of flashbacks to Macabber's fighting career, which was zippy and action-packed.

That portion of the story doesn't exactly resolve, but we flash forward suddenly, to see that Felix also goes into Monstering, and is even better at it than Macabber was - we get a few of his fights, too - but we mostly see him at the end of his career, rich and successful and done with it all.

Felix does not seem to have run away from any towns, or beaten up any of his best friends to do so, or run his career in any ways that would make us dislike him. But he has the same sad attitude at the end of his career Macabber did - not sad because it's over, not sad because he stomped over people to get there, but just generally sad because he's not sure if he's a good or bad person, I guess.

I want to say that the lesson Unlikely Story is trying to make - or the lesson it comes closest to making - is that fighting people for a living is a bad idea; that violence is never the answer, little trooper. But it's so clearly a book about how Monstering is fun and exciting and awesome that doesn't really seem to fit.

So I'm puzzled by Unlikely Story. It seems to want to give me a Lesson About Life, but its two characters are not parallel in any ways that reinforce the Lesson it seems to want to push. What they have in common, at the end of their careers, is a habit of speaking in vague circumlocutions - this may be more Otsmane-Elhaou's writing style - and a sense that they are sad because it's all over and they're no longer Monstering Champion of the World anymore, which, um, yeah, would be sad, wouldn't it?

Portions for Foxes: Tracey Thorn

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

As we get into the cold time of the year, here's something appropriate: a song of sadness and lost love and broken promises, about how everything gets worse, more complicated and more difficult as you get older, written by a great songwriter and sung by a great singer.

They're both the same person: Tracey Thorn. The song is unironically titled Oh, the Divorces! and it's from a record called Love and Its Opposite, which is mostly about the opposite.

It starts like this:

Who's next?
Who's next?
Always the ones the ones that you least expect
They seem so strong
It turned out she wanted more all along

The singer is not the one divorcing, which is unusual for a song like this. She's watching, seeing her social circle change and break - and there's an undertone of "how can I know I won't be next?"

Oh, I know we shouldn't take sides
But that one was his fault
This one is her fault
No one gets off without paying the ride
And oh, the divorces!

It's a quiet song, the kind of quiet that's all-encompassing and devastating. It's just Thorn's voice, close and confiding, over piano at first and then some light strings later, like you're listening in on her internal thoughts.

And it's a deeply adult song, in a way that feels rare: a song talking about a stage of life and a worry that's just not part of normal pop music. You have to walk down a lot of road to get to a song like Oh, the Divorces! That's one of the things I love about it.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of December 14, 2024

Four books this week, from the library, for complicated-but-silly reasons. (Those reasons, in more detail than you want: my twentysomething kids and I watch a movie together every Wednesday, while The Wife is off at Bingo. I'm basically the one who picks the movies. I get them from the library a lot. This week, it was Die Hard for obvious seasonal reasons. Since I was placing one hold, I also put holds on some books I wanted to read, and these are them.)

I'm already halfway through Oliver Darkshire's Once Upon a Tome, the 2022 memoir of bookselling by the guy who runs the Twitter feed for Sotheran's, a venerable London antiquarian bookshop. (Well, I think he still runs it, and I think it still exists after the X-odus, but I'm petty enough not to give Musk any traffic right this second by checking.) Darkshire has a great smart-but-not-fussy, self-deprecating style that always feels quintessentially British to me, and it comes through in the book as it did in shorter Internet posts.

Everything Is Fine, Volume 1 is the first collection of a Webtoon by Mike Birchall, who is also coincidentally British. I thought it was somewhat more of a complete story than it turns out to be - it has the first sixteen (says the back cover; though it has nine chapters inside) episodes of what I see already has ninety episodes in three seasons and is not done yet. (Webtoons seems to have something of a manga model: shortish episodes weekly for as long as the audience can stand it.) This is some manner of horror comic, set in a neighborhood of people who all wear giant cat-head masks, are subject to continuous surveillance, and must stay resolutely positive at all times, even though <something creepy that's not clear yet> has already happened and/or is still happening.

Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy is a teen romance comic by Faith Erin Hicks from 2023. She always does good stuff, even if most of it seems to be aimed at teens these days. (No serious complaints there: it's a big audience, especially for graphic stories, and I like creators to have careers that let them eat and live indoors and all that stuff. And I usually find those stories fun, even if I am very far from being a teenager these days.) I think the title gives all of the important details, but I'll see if I agree after I read it.

And last is Norse Mythology, Vol. 1, which is a comics adaptation of the first half (I think) of Neil Gaiman's book of that name. P. Craig Russell did the adapting, and several of the sections, with other artists joining in: Mike Mignola, Jerry Ordway, David Rubín, Jill Thompson, and several more.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: What Do All the People Know

It had snowed continuously for two days, and this morning everything appeared to stand in hushed amazement before the spectacle of such expanses of unbroken whiteness on all sides. People said it was unheard of, that they had never known weather like it, that it was the worst winter in living memory. But they said that every year when it snowed, and also in years when it didn't snow.

 - John Banville, Snow, pp.13-14

Quote of the Week: Never Disappointed

Nell wasn't a great one for compliments, she didn't like people getting above themselves. Nell had adopted the philosophy that, generally speaking, things tended always to get worse, rather than better. This pessimistic outlook was a source of considerable comfort to her - after all, unhappiness could be relied upon in a way that happiness never could.

 - Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, pp.85-86

Snow by John Banville

Snow is officially a mystery novel, by a literary writer. To add a wrinkle, author John Banville has written mysteries before - has written mysteries in what I think is this exact same milieu - under the name Benjamin Black. But I think this is the first novel to both be called "a mystery" and published as by Banville.

I suspect that means this was an offshoot of the Black series - about a pathologist in 1950s Dublin called Quirke, who is mentioned but never appears in Snow - and that Banville, or his agent, or his publisher, decided somewhere along the lines that it was different enough that it would be a Banville book rather than a Black book, but that they would also call it a "mystery."

The main character is a detective, as is tradition for the form: St. John Strafford. (Pronounced "Sinjin," as he has to repeatedly note. With an "r" in the last name, ditto.) We are mostly in his head, in a limited third person narration, with a few literary-novel eruptions into other viewpoints that work but made me wonder if they were necessary. (Literary novelists sometimes err in the direction of expansiveness, trying to show all the world and make clear all the issues. And sometimes they err in the direction of hermeticism, leaving only clues and breadcrumbs to be as pure to their concept of the story as possible. Banville leans towards the former pole here.)

Strafford has been sent to a big manor house in the Irish countryside - Ballyglass House, in County Wexford (Banville's own birthplace). A priest, Father Tom Lawless, has been murdered there in the night. It is a few days before Christmas. (To the title: it has been snowing, and it continues to snow, off and on, throughout the novel. As Strafford literarily puts it "Snow was general all over Ireland.")

There are two kinds of mystery novel: the ones in which a good person was murdered, and ones in which a bad person was murdered. Tom Lawless was a priest in Ireland in 1957, and is the murder victim in a novel that came out in 2020. I'd say I'll let you guess what kind of victim he was, but a Catholic priest in a 2020 novel is 99% certain to be a villain. And he was, as we eventually learn.

Banville's deviations from his focus on Strafford - an opening two pages, detailing the murder, and a coda about three-quarters of the way through the novel, flashing back to Lawless a decade earlier (though, somewhat inconsistently, pretending to be a document he wrote sometime soon before his death) - are largely to make that villainy more obvious, especially that heavy-handed coda.

So we the readers start off with one question: why was Lawless murdered? If we are as cynical as I am, we quickly figure he was diddling someone, and then move on to the next obvious question: boys or girls?

Fairly early on, we learn that Lawless spent some years at a "school," and I'll avoid giving details to leave the previous question somewhat open. But Lawless, we eventually learn, was a piece of work, the kind of murder victim we are happy to see put in his grave.

But Strafford still has the job of finding out who and why, which he pursues through the aristocratic Catholic Osbourne family, Father Tom's hosts the night before, and through the local town. Neither group is particularly forthcoming, as is to be expected of a small town and an aristocratic family in a mystery novel. And Strafford declares himself not to be all that good at this detecting thing, as well - perhaps false modesty, since he does figure it all out by the end of this short novel.

Banville is a fine writer as always, but Snow has some deeply obvious things at its core that are somewhat unfortunate. His style keeps it from being the kind of thumping dullness that another writer might inflict, and the question of who actually killed Father Tom - in best mystery-novel fashion, nearly every character has a decent reason to have wanted to - is solidly mysterious until Banville reveals all at the end. But I thought Banville was trickier than this: the story of the murder of a sexually deviant Catholic priest in 1950s Ireland is the kind of thing I thought he'd leave to the more sensationalist crew.

Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol. 4: The Bell Warden by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima

There is nothing particularly special about this fourth volume of the Lone Wolf and Cub series: no new revelations about our hero, Ogami Ittō, or his enemies the Yagyū clan, no flashbacks, nothing unexpected. There are four long stories here - each one seventy or eighty pages - in which our hero meets someone and then kills them, often with some Buddhist philosophizing along the way.

I expect most of the volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub will be like this: fine storytelling; intricate, dynamic art; deep psychological insight; inventive fighting implements used in interesting ways; glimpses into a distinct, particular historical world seen clearly and unsentimentally; stories of sudden violence about a man seeking vengeance in a dark and corrupt world. Those are all excellent things; the series is known as a masterpiece for a reason. But they won't be new things.

In the first, title story of Lone Wolf and Cub, Vol 4: The Bell Warden, Ogami Ittō is hired to "test" the three sons of the current bell warden of Edo - the man responsible for the network of towers that toll the hours and tell everyone what time it is. In typical fashion for this era and this people - or maybe just in this series; I don't have a separate deep knowledge of 18th-century Japan - the warden takes his role very, very seriously. (In this series, there are the good people, who think that what they do is the most important thing on earth and are willing, even happy, to die in the commission of their duties, and the bad people, who do absolutely anything and are driven by their desires.) So he is basically making a bet: at least one of my sons will be skilled enough to beat and kill one of the premier swordsmen in the entire country, and thus be worthy to continue the family line.

Spoiler! He loses that bet. Of course. The premise of the series is that Ogami Ittō wins. Every time, one way or another, up until the final battle with his ultimate enemy. And "winning" in this context always means killing the other guy. A samurai adventure series could hardly operate differently.

The three other stories have similar depth, and are similarly entangled in that Edo-era conception of propriety and right action and inevitable glorious death. It is, of course, a very dark, gloomy series at its core, set among men who dedicated their lives to slaughtering each other mostly for the benefit of a few feudal leaders. I'm finding reading one of these books about every six weeks to be about right: going much faster than that would be too much, a flood of stories too similar in tone to stand out from each other at that pace.

Hope It All Works Out! by Reza Farazmand

It's so nice when it happens good, as a great man once said. I saw this basically brand-new book somewhat randomly, thought "Hey! I've seen those cartoons before! They're funny!" and read the book. That's how it's supposed to work, and I hope this book finds success thousands of times that way.

You may have seen Reza Farazmand's Poorly Drawn Lines comics before - I seem to mostly see it on Facebook, because I Am Old, but I think it has an even larger presence on Instagram (which is probably also tending to the older side these days). Anyway, there's a website, and comics are posted and reshared in the usual social places, and then the great unwashed grab the comics they like and repost them all over the place - which is what I've mostly seen.

Farazmand self-published a few collections of the strip over the years - looks like four of them - but Hope It All Works Out! is the official fancy debut big-company collection, published by Simon & Schuster on September 24th. I see they're also doing a desk calendar for 2025, which I point you towards if you want Poorly Drawn Lines on a daily basis in the new year.

(You may say, "Andy! I thought S&S was a serious, literary, words-on-paper kind of publisher. Isn't this out of character for them? Aren't they too stuffy for cartoon publishing?" And I would smile and gesture vaguely at you, like the old guy on Kung Fu, because I know the ancient secrets - S&S was founded to make a buck as the first people to publish crossword puzzles in book form, and was famously trend-chasing in their earliest incarnation. So this is entirely in character, and shows they are still in touch with their deepest, most primal impulses as a business. Namaste.)

Poorly Drawn Lines is a gag-a-day strip, which are hard to write about - you may notice I'm vamping and throwing in my own gags here, which I often do with books that don't have a clear narrative I can just describe - but, basically, it's another modern strip with a cast of oddballs and a mildly sarcastic tone. In the modern straightforward way, the main characters are Mouse, Snail, Turtle, and Bird, who are each those things. Mouse is the Charlie Brown of the strip, I guess: he seems to be the closest thing to a central character, and the most introspective.

Farazmand's drawing is crisp and straightforward - thin lines, clear colors, almost design-y in its instant readability - as a frame for his mostly wordplay-based humor. I'll throw in an example here - it's on page 155 of the book, for those following along at home, and also available on the aforementioned website.

I say regularly that I wish there were more gag-a-day strips - that the energetic, fun ones online had a higher profile and the tired, zombie ones in the paper could be rejuvenated by new talent (a la Olivia Jaimes on Nancy) or just taken out back behind the barn. This is one of the ones that should be known better: it's good, funny stuff by a cartoonist who is actually alive and working on it right now, which sounds like a thing that shouldn't need to be specified but we live in a strange world.

So check it out. Or don't. I'm not your mother.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

My cynical take on the literary novel: a literary novel is one where you the reader don't understand something important. To turn that into a positive, it's a novel big and complex and strong enough that there's more than any reader can exhaust in one reading - that there will be more to it every time you come back.

But it does leave you with at least that one big question.

In this case, for me it was: what does the title mean?

Behind the Scenes at the Museum was Kate Atkinson's first novel, winning the Whitbread in 1995. It's not about a museum.

It's set mostly in York - the old one, in Yorkshire, in the north of England - where there's a locally-famous York Castle Museum, I find doing some searching after reading the book. York Castle seems to be more focused on ordinary people's lives than the typical museum, which is one clue to the title. But I've never been to York, much less seen the museum exhibits. And my mental image of "museum" is big and old and probably just a bit dull, monumental stones and ancient gewgaws and random bric-a-brac once owned by some guy famous for killing a bunch of people.

This is not a novel about anything like that kind of museum. Again, it's not about any kind of museum. But it's a family saga, which means a novel about several generations - and, as usual for a family saga, mostly about the women, and often about the things that go wrong and how they struggle through life.

It's told by Ruby Lennox, starting with the moment of her conception in 1951. She is our omniscient narrator - well, omniscient when telling us about what's going on when she's in utero, and omniscient in the alternating Footnote chapters, which tell stories of other family members of the past, up through their own ends. She's not omniscient in her own life, in the numbered main chapters that march forward in time from 1951 through the next two decades.

Her voice is candid and discursive, friendly and engaging, immediate and funny. It's much stronger in the numbered chapters; she drops back a bit into the background when telling us about people who aren't Ruby Lennox.

I said this was a family saga, which back when I was in publishing we used to joke was code for "three generations of women." It's not quite code, and not quite three generations, but that's broadly true: this is the story of several generations, mostly of women, seeing them both as daughters in their childhoods and then as mothers, after their inevitable not-quite-right marriages and they try to raise children but turn out to be temperamentally bad at it. We see the men, too, but more from the outside - as fascinating, attractive figures as young men and as infuriating, often-unfaithful liars in their later years.

This is a big family, with a couple of dozen major characters across the three or four generations. But don't worry: a lot of them will die young. That doesn't mean they become less important, or stop being mentioned - the narrative bounces through timelines as it goes back and forth between the forward motion of the main numbered chapters and the historical Footnotes. And the dead are always there in a family: always remembered, as real as the people left behind.

Atkinson is amazingly funny here, particularly for a book with so much death and sadness in it: the historical timeline includes the two World Wars, both of which wallop this family, and plenty of smaller, more personal calamities. Multiple family members run off, never to be seen again. Several hallowed family stories - two of them about deaths - turn out not to be actually true.

You might have guessed I'm not going to give a plot synopsis. It's not the kind of book where that would be useful, and even the question of what order to tell things in would be fraught. But this is a big, funny, sad, true book, both mournful and joyful, that ends on a perfect note and is told beautifully in a glorious voice. I can easily see how it won an award, and I can easily see the strengths Atkinson brought to the later novels I've already read. As long as you accept that women's stories are worth telling, and telling well, in a literary novel - I don't think that should be controversial, but there are still troglodytes lurking here and there - this is a major, impressive, wonderful one.