The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing

I've been reading random noir novels in various Library of America omnibuses over the past couple of years: this one is smack in the middle of the Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s book. It's by Kenneth Fearing, who was a poet before turning to writing crime novels, and this is his most famous book.

The Big Clock is from 1946, and is modernist enough that it feels - well, not exactly contemporary, but like it takes place in a world close enough to our own that we can still feel the texture of it and understand how it works. Fearing tells it in chapters from multiple points of view, but the main character, and viewpoint for about two-thirds of the book, is George Stroud.

Stroud is head editor of Crimeways, one of a group of sophisticated, strong-selling magazines from Janoth Publications in New York on various aspects of modern life. The whole group has a consistent style and method; they're not necessarily the very biggest magazines - they have notable competitors mentioned in the book - but they sell a lot of copies, pay exceptionally well, and pride themselves on having the best talent. (Think Time-Life of about the same era and you'll be close.)

Stroud is happily married, but...he's the main character of a mid-century noir novel, almost as smart as he thinks he is, and drinks about as much as any similar character. He falls into a brief affair with Pauline, the girlfriend of Earl Janoth, head of the whole operation - very brief, one overnight and then a weekend in Albany a few days later. On that Sunday afternoon, he drops her off at her apartment, watching her walk up to the building from across the street - and be met by Janoth, who came back from a trip to Washington, D.C. earlier than expected.

Janoth fights with Pauline up in her apartment, gets angry, and kills her semi-accidentally. He gets out of the building quietly and goes to see his second-in-command/fixer Steve Hagen. Janoth knows he saw someone drop off Pauline, but isn't sure who it was. That man could unroll his otherwise-solid alibi. Steve hints that he will have the man killed, if only they can find him.

So they set the entire apparatus of Janoth Publications to work to find this mysterious man, with a thin cover story about the man being the central figure in some bribery scheme. And the whole project is given to one of Janoth's most trusted and seasoned editors to run: Stroud.

Stroud knows the threads that could lead to him - a painting he bought with Pauline that morning, his physical description, a low-life bar the two visited, that trip to Albany - and does all he can to seem to be pursuing the investigation zealously while putting subtly wrong people on particular aspects of it and letting the results point as much away from him as possible. After all, no one expects that the clues will lead to him in the first place - he's potentially safe unless there's something really obvious.

But Janoth Publications is good at this, and they find multiple people who could identify the mysterious man - including the eccentric fine artist Louise Patterson, who painted and (coincidentally) competed with Stroud to buy the very painting he'd bought the morning of the murder. Stroud's long interest in her work - he has a Patterson on the wall of his office, and several at home - could potentially blow up the whole thing. And his wife Georgette is already worried that he's become distant, as he did once before during an affair.

This is a noir, so someone has to die. The last line of the novel explains who and how - I won't explain further. (It's a short book; just reading it would be quick enough.)

Fearing tells this, as I said above, in a modernist way, with multiple first-person viewpoints, though Stroud is the dominant voice. Each of them have their own quirks and foibles; they're distinct people, though we only spend a lot of time in Stroud's head. The only other repeat narrator is Janoth himself.

Fearing is also witty and interesting on the workings of Janoth Publications itself, including how big media operations will mold public conversation in specific ways - not the usual thing a reader would expect in a noir novel, particularly a short zippy one like this, but it's authoritative and interesting. 

Even further afield, there's a sub-plot about a scheme called Funded Individuals - in which some group of young people would be given support and roughly a million dollars to get started in life, something like a vague early sketch of a venture capital fund but much more general, official, and personal - which I don't think would work at all like Fearing's characters assume it would, but is interestingly quirky and turns up more in the book than I expected. It's the kind of book that feels like it has everything relevant that ran through the author's head while writing it: full of quirky sidebars and precise moments and arch opinions.

Ew, It's Beautiful by Joshua Barkman

Did you know there are at least two comics about animals that talk? (Random animals, out in the world, and not talking to humans, but to each other.) I say "at least" because if there's two, there's probably more than that.

The one I was vaguely aware of is called (unsurprisingly) They Can Talk, and has been running for more than ten years. But I ran across a book in my library app from a different comic, False Knees, and decided in my whimsical way to read that one.

For a reductive comparison, Talk has a lot of domestic animals (dogs, cats, and so on) who live around people, and occasionally goes wider. Knees is mostly about birds - lots of different kinds of birds, depicted as far as I can tell exceptionally accurately - with occasional cats. So choose your talking-animal strip appropriately.

Ew, It's Beautiful is the second False Knees collection; it was published in July of 2025. The cartoonist is Joshua Barkman, who lives in Southern Ontario and who I suspect sees a lot of the same birds that I do here a few hundred miles south in Northern New Jersey.

What I mean by that is that I can't necessarily identify all of these birds - I do see jays and crows and cardinals and pigeons and a whole lot of those small nut-eating birds of various kinds - but I do recognize most of them, thinking "I've seen dudes like that at the birdbath out the back window." Barkman gives them body language and speech - obviously - but he mostly keeps them birds; they're all recognizable, and, more subtly, the things they care about and the topics of the comics are very bird-centric.

Ew, It's Beautiful is funny, but not Borscht Belt funny - not funny like so many daily-style strips. The strips are deeply about how these birds (and others, poking through while writing this I saw a strip about a beaver and one with an ant) actually live and behave, slightly exaggerated for humor but not all that far. I don't think I laughed out loud, but I appreciated all of the strips: they're thoughtful and interesting and smart in subtle ways.

The art is ink and gouache, for a soft organic look and bright natural colors. It might not need saying, but Barkman is very good at depicting specific birds; it's kind of his thing here.

Barkman has arranged this book in four sections according to the seasons, starting with Winter; there's about 130 comics here, so roughly one for every three days of a whole year. And you can go through it with these loud, demanding, millet-loving little fellas, if you like. They're not overly fond of humans, but I think you'll come to like them.

Brain Drain, Part 2 by Pierre-Henry Gomont

Stories don't have to be true to be good stories - frankly, it's more often the opposite. So it's no surprise that French bande dessinée creator Pierre-Henry Gomont took a lot of liberties when telling the posthumous adventures of Albert Einstein's brain.

As I pointed out when I wrote about the first half of the graphic version, Brain Drain Part 1, the real story was boring: a pathologist removed Einstein's brain and eyes after death - and against the physicist's wishes - and gave out brain segments to his colleagues what seemed like willy-nilly for the next twenty years until the public finally learned about it. No important research resulted.

Gomont seems to want to follow the general outlines of that story in this second volume, Brain Drain Part 2, without actually saying the dénouement takes place in 1978, as it did in the real world, or tying himself to that sad "no important research." It makes this second book expansive in odd ways, as readers who know the timeline start wondering if decades are passing between pages. In his fictional version, there's also a major scientific finding - somewhat parallel to the real-world research of Marian Diamond in the 1980s - by his fictional neurologist Marianne Ruby.

But let me start at the beginning. Pathologist "Stolz" is on the run with "Professor Albert," who appears as an older man with the top of his head missing and an empty cranium (he wears hats a lot, so people don't notice that), and with the brain of Einstein in a jar. The independent existence of the Professor - zombie? ghost? avatar? - is the central motif of the series and its defining fantasy element; Gomont never explains it: it just is. It is presumably 1955, the year Einstein died. The FBI is chasing them, for never-fully-defined hugger-mugger reasons - the Professor does not want them to get their hands on him, nor does Stolz.

Stolz is said to be married with children; they appeared only briefly in the first book and he has fully abandoned them in this one. He apparently never contacts them again after running away with the Professor. The narrative also blithely says that a doctor can always find work, given his skills - presumably to explain how Stolz has funds for this life. But a doctor can find work as a doctor because he is officially licensed, under his name, on large, maintained lists that detail his training and expertise. This seems implausible for a man officially on the run from the FBI.

Anyway, after hiding out for some indeterminate time, Stolz tries to broker a deal with the head of the Institute where the Professor worked, a man called only Otto. Gomont doesn't give all the details - and the Professor assumes the unqualified Stolz will be in charge of the overall project - but it seems that there could be a research project, blessed by the Professor's family and the Institute, under Stolz as a figurehead and with Ruby as the primary expert.

The Professor and Stolz do enlist Ruby, but the FBI is not a part of (or amenable to) this deal, and capture the Professor and his brain for presumably-unpleasant researches of their own. (This is the MK-Ultra era, though that was the CIA.) Stolz somehow rams the FBI agent's car to retrieve the two remnants of Einstein, and the three (or four, counting the brain separately) flee (in what must be another car but isn't explained), more deeply Most Wanted than before.

Up to this point, the Brain Drain story seems to be taking place basically in 1955 - possibly a few months have passed, but no substantial amount of time. From here, though, the calendar becomes much more flexible.

Ruby demands to begin the research, so Stolz looks up an old professor, Dr. Seward, who now runs an odd, out-of-the-way asylum in Kansas. There are a lot of brains there for Ruby's comparative anatomy studies, and Seward does his own LSD-based researches on the Professor, escalating to cloning the brain (!!!) multiple times and doing surgery on the original that leaves the Professor unable to speak. Stolz is sidelined this whole time, but finally breaks free with the Professor after Ruby finishes her research and heads out of the plot almost for good.

Some years seem to have passed, during which Stolz has not worked as a doctor. But he goes back to hiding out with the now-silent Professor for what may be another decade or so. And he eventually sends part of one of the cloned brains to Ruby, which allows her to expand her research and finally make solid, groundbreaking findings, which she releases in the standard scientific manner.

…which tells the public that Einstein's brain was preserved, and causes a media frenzy. This leads to the actual ending, which I think is meant to be in roughly 1978, as in real life. Stolz finally does what he should have done, back at the beginning, and Gomont's narration nods towards the outlines of real history.

That narration, by the way, is assured and supple and smart: Gomont is very much telling this story, and makes it clear several times he's diverging from history to do so. His art is equally enticing, with realistically lumpy people, sometimes impressionistic vistas, and detailed mid-century objects to ground it all.

I don't think Gomont's themes entirely line up with what actually happened in the real world, and I find his timeline a bit odd. He also seems to want this to be, in the end, the story of the posthumous friendship of Stolz and the Professor, which is entirely fictional - and, for the bulk of those years, the Professor was incapable of speech after the events of this book. It is a very odd and quirky thing. But I do appreciate that about it, and I think it's almost exactly what Gomont wanted it to be. And that's a great thing to be.

All of This and Nothing: Down in the Valley

"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 think this is another case where the song I really like is from a side band or otherwise quirky project. Which is why I count it on the Obscure side.

But, this week, the song is Down in the Valley by a band called The Broken West.

(Some light Googling later: looks like this was the frontman's first band - he's a guy named Ross Flournoy - and the one that brought him and the rest of the group some attention, but they broke up fairly quickly. Flournoy formed another band, which also doesn't seem to have gone very far, and no one's bothered to update Wikipedia for more than a decade. As always, I hope he's out there making music and living off it, and no one around him has had the free time to update some random website.)

And I have no idea what this song is really about.

Sun down, blood horizon, now it feels alright
No one feels the darkness down in the valley tonight

It's all evocative, allusive - it sounds like a Western of some kind (or I may be latching on too hard to the band's name), but there's none of the usual Western trappings: guns, cowpokes, cattle, shootouts, Indians.

But, as I've said more than once in doing these song-based posts, you don't need to understand a song to like a song. A song is about listening, and feeling. This one has a great feeling, and sounds big and impressive: take it on that level.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 12, 2026

Hey, remember last week? This is the the rest of that stuff: books from a few authors that I ordered via Alibris, from a whole bunch of used-book stores, for various reading projects. I'll get to all of these over the next year or three, I expect.

So first I have three books from Donald E. Westlake's Dortmunder series:

The second in the series, Bank Shot, in which Dormunder and his crew steal (not rob) a bank.

The one that was my favorite the first time through, Drowned Hopes, a big book from 1990 about trying to retrieve a huge cache of valuables left buried thirty years ago - in a town that has since been abandoned, at the bottom of a reservoir.

Third from Westlake is Bad News, the 2001 novel about a casino heist.

I also have two more serious detective novels from Ross Macdonald:

What seems to be a brand-new, printed-on-demand edition of his 1956 novel, The Barbarous Coast, which isn't what I'd expected from a used-book dealer but I'll definitely take it.

The other one is The Blue Hammer, the last book in the series, from 1976. As I recall, the last two in the series are a bit thinner than the rest, but we'll see if I agree this time through.

And last are two books in the "Collector's Wodehouse" series - all of P.G. Wodehouse's roughly one hundred books, in a uniform trade dress, published in the early years of this century, which I half-collected once and lost thirty or forty of them to a flood.

First up is Kid Brady Stories and A Man of Means collects two story-series from very early in Wodehouse's career. I've never read them, and don't expect much, but the point of a complete library is to include weird little-known things like these.

And then last in this batch of books is Wodehouse's 1921 humorous novel A Gentleman of Leisure, which I also don't think I've ever read.

Quote of the Week: The Old Firm

The offices of the old-established firm of Marlowe, Thorpe, Prescott, Winslow and Appleby are in Ridgeway's Inn, not far from Fleet Street. The brass plate, let into the woodwork of the door, is misleading. Reading it, you get the impression that on the other side quite a covey of lawyers await your arrival. The name of the firm leads you to suppose that there will be barely standing-room in the office. You picture Thorpe jostling you aside as he makes for Prescott to discuss with him the latest case of demurrer, and Winslow and Appleby treading on your toes, deep in conversation on replevin. But these legal firms dwindle. The years go by and take their toll, snatching away here a Prescott, there an Appleby, till, before you know where you are, you are down to your last lawyer.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, The Girl on the Boat, p.109

The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

I think I read this back in the day, but my memory is fuzzy. I used to be in pretty regular touch with Colin Smythe, Terry Pratchett's indefatigable agent, in my job as Senior Editor of the SFBC, and Colin would pitch the odder Discworld books to us - after, I'm sure, the more traditional trade outlets for such books had already turned him down. (I could kid Colin, but he was a good agent for Pratchett, relentlessly positive but also, I think, with an underlying understanding of the vast difference in Pratchett's market profile in the US and UK.[1])

I know I read the first Science of Discworld book, and liked it. I thought I bought it for the club, but I'm not seeing a SFBC edition on ISFDB, or any edition in the US earlier than the trade-paperback series starting in 2014, so perhaps my memory is faulty. I also read the second one, and thought it was not quite as strong, and I think got to this one around UK publication in 2005 (thanks to Colin) and had a similar reaction.

There was a fourth book; I'm pretty sure I've never seen that one.

All of the Science of Discworld books are hybrid things. There's a fairly slim Discworld fictional story by Pratchett - about the creation by the wizards of Unseen University of what they call "Roundworld" (our universe) and their subsequent investigations and adventures there. In alternating chapters, scientists and science writers [2] Ian Stewart (math) and Jack Cohen (biology) explain the real science behind the goofy stuff the wizards get up to. I expect the three plotted out the whole thing together and then edited each other for consistency; it's a bit of an odd combination but it generally works on both a comic-fiction and a pop-science level.

So the first book saw the Roundworld created. The second one had the wizards needing to save it from an infestation of Discworld elves, mostly related to Shakespeare for sufficiently-good reasons.

And this third book, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch, came out in 2005 in the UK but not until a decade later in the US. It's the one about evolution, so I'm afraid Stewart and Cohen need to talk about the kind of anti-evolutionists they characterize as Christian fundamentalists from the Southern USA. (Not inappropriately, of course, and entirely honestly. But it might have been yet one more thing to give US publishers pause.)

Once again, outside forces - it's not revealed until late in the book, so I won't say who, but it's another Pratchett villain - are interfering with the Roundworld's timeline, causing humanity to go extinct before it can lead a space exodus to colonize the larger Roundworld universe as of course humanity is destined to do. (Science of Discworld is more old-fashioned than some readers might expect.) This time, it's all connected to Charles Darwin, who is being channeled to instead write The Theology of Species rather than The Origin and to stay a good Anglican curate and not be so strident about the whole evolution thing.

The pop-science chapters are an odd mix of evolutionary biology (not quite as much as you might expect) and QED-derived alternate-world physics theorizing circa the early 2000s (because the changes to Darwin's timeline creates many different options, in none of which he wrote Origin). There's some other, even further afield science topics as well, but those are the two central ones: the ways species change and diverge over time, and the ways timelines might conceivably do the same. (They are connected, at least conceptually, but they come across as mostly-separate discussions.)

The short Pratchett chapters feature wizards - mostly Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, and of course Rincewind - having somewhat amusing experiences either watching Roundworld or traveling to it to interfere with its timeline, and talking about the science implications. Then the longer Steward/Cohen chapters go into more depth, non-fictionally, about those implications. It's all amusing, mostly light, and easy to follow: it's a fine pop-science book, if possibly slightly outdated now, twenty years later.

There's enough Discworld that you could read nothing else for quite a long time if you wanted to, and I suppose this series means that those who do - I'm fairly sure there are some anorak-wearing chaps named Kevin who come close, at least - get some actual science knowledge included into their humanistic humorous fiction. I found this one less focused than I'd hoped, but all of the pieces are solid, and they form an essentially coherent whole, so I'm mostly quibbling.

[1] This is complicated and changed over time. But, very generally, in the '80s and '90s, Pratchett was not just the biggest fantasy author in the UK, he was one of the top five or so authors of any kind in the UK, and a measurable fraction of all books sold had his name on them. That profile declined only slightly post-Rowling; I think he still sold basically as well, but others sold at similar or nearly-similar levels, too. Because of that, he could write or commission the kind of oddball line-extension books that were just not commercially feasible for almost anyone else: a cookbook, a long series of annual desk diaries, multiple actual printed-on-heavy-stock maps, an encyclopedic compendium in several editions.

In the US, by contrast, Pratchett sold like a decent upper-mid-level fantasy writer (comparing it to personal income, in the US Pratchett was like the well-respected name partner of a major law firm and in the UK he was Bill Gates) and was beloved in the SFF community. It was absolutely a solid level of success that most writers would be thrilled with, but Pratchett (and, more centrally, I think, Colin) saw the UK sales and thought "why can't we replicate that in the much larger and more lucrative USA?"

There's also the question of how well he was published in the US. I don't want to cast aspersions, but he was with Roc/New American Library at first, who perhaps didn't have the market muscle (or the desire to use it for Pratchett) to replicate the UK success. In the early '90s, he moved to Harper, which went through a confusing period - Pratchett was very prolific at that point, and Roc had gotten behind - where the books were not published in the same order in the US and there were some interesting cover designs in attempts to widen the audience. So, at the point where he was at his absolute peak of market power in the UK - say the late '90s - he was rising in the US after Harper got good at publishing his books but was still very much a genre author rather than a general-audience one. That has stayed true in the US since then.

And, frankly, Pratchett is deeply British in a lot of ways. There's no reason to believe he would be a general-audience author anywhere that doesn't have a solid British cultural identity.

[2] And science-fiction novelists; I read and bought their Wheelers - not for nepotistic reasons related to the title, I think - for the SFBC.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 11: Seasons by Stan Sakai

It can be easy to discount craft and consistency and clear storytelling, particularly at scale. Stan Sakai has been telling Usagi Yojimbo stories for forty years now; I've been reading them for two years, and I've only gotten through about the first decade.

(I may have been inspired to start reading this series by realizing that, after being vaguely aware of it the whole time, that the entire forty-some book series was available through my library's app. Actually, I'm not 100% sure that absolutely everything is available, but I'm now eleven books in and dozens stretch ahead of me, so it's darn close if nothing else.)

I have quibbled about some things about these Edo-period anthropomorphic-animal stories, mostly related to the fact that this is explicitly an all-ages series - and, in practice, that means that there's nothing in it that would be upsetting to a ten-year-old. It's a valid choice, and I think aligns closely with the way Sakai wants to tell stories anyway, but a vast amount of life is inherently upsetting to a ten-year-old, which means all of that is off-limits. Sex in more than the most vaguely implied sense, of course, but also a lot of the consequences of the violence that is central to a samurai epic. Usagi Yojimbo is a clean, somewhat sanitized view of a historical world, with a main character who is always true and honest and brave and on the side of right, where violence consistently solves problems and only occasionally leads to tragic ends, and where new humans appear somewhat mysteriously and relations between the sexes are either on the dynastic-connection level or a vague adolescent longing.

All that is still true of Usagi Yojimbo, Book 11: Seasons, which collects seven issues (including one originally in color; here presented in black-and-white just like the rest) and a few previously scattered stories, all from the mid-90s. It's eleven stories in total; this book was published in this format in 1999 and is still available digitally, though finding a dead-tree edition might be more difficult. (There's a newer reprint series, with fatter - but possibly smaller-format; that seems to be the way these things go - and fewer volumes, which may be easier to find.)

By this point, Sakai had a large recurring cast; two of the semi-loves of Usagi turn back up in this book, plus the inevitable roguish ronin Gen. (I didn't remember the exact detail of the two women, which were somewhat important, but the stories themselves inclue the reader enough.) Geography, though, is not a focus - Usagi does explicitly return to places in this volume that he'd been before, but those places don't get named or placed anywhere specific in Japan.

The stories are mostly miscellaneous; there's no central plot and it doesn't advance any larger overall motion of the story. (I don't think there is a central uberplot to Usagi to begin with; he has enemies and a tragic backstory but the Lone Wolf and Cub parallels don't go any further than that.) Each story is a well-told moment: a couple are vaguely sad, but mostly see Usagi setting something-or-other right or helping out someone in danger.

Sakai is a fine storyteller, with a clean line and exceptionally expressive faces. His pages are impeccably designed and his fight scenes vivid, easy to follow, and as visceral as they can be while staying ten-year-old-friendly. This is a fine series for what it is, and a lot of people would enjoy what it is.

The Once and Future Riot by Joe Sacco

I'm not really sure how Joe Sacco works. I suspect he has more than one project going at a time, particularly since his projects often take years to turn into books. But I don't know if he works on everything on and off, all the time, or if he goes through bursts on separate things, or some other organizational principle I'm not even thinking of.

For example, his new book last year was The Once and Future Riot. It's about a specific set of events in India's Uttar Pradesh state during August and September of 2013 - or, more precisely, the record of Sacco's investigations into those events a few months later. About midway between those investigations and this book's publication, Sacco had an entirely separate book, Paying the Land, about Indigenous people in Canada. I have no idea if Riot stalled on Sacco, so he researched, wrote and drew Land in the middle, or if Land was chugging along in the background during his trip to India.

It doesn't really matter, but I do wonder. Book-length comics take a while to make, which somewhat fights against the impulse for journalism to be quick and timely. And Riot is a book about a riot that comes a decade later. I haven't kept close track of Indian politics and Hindu/Muslim tensions, but I have to assume there have been other riots and (I hope, vastly more, and more productive) less violent movements since then: Modi is still in power, but there was an apparently-successful major youth protest over the past few weeks as I write this.

Which is to say: I don't think things have gotten better in Uttar Pradesh since 2013. They may well have gotten worse. Sacco's book isn't about long-term trends, though he does try to provide background: it's about this event, and primarily about his and his journalistic colleagues' efforts to untangle the statements from various officials and victims and local leaders to find the truth. (Spoiler: the local leaders, in Sacco's estimate, were mostly bullshitting at best, and Sacco all but accuses several of them of being leaders of violence in their villages.)

The spine of the book is Sacco's time in Uttar Pradesh: he's a character on most of his pages (as in his other books), but a viewpoint and an interrogator rather than a main character. Sacco and his colleagues - a translator/fellow journalist, mostly - are trying to dig into what happened on those days in September. Much of the book, like Sacco's other work, is made up of interviews, of refugees and community leaders and other witnesses, about what happened.

It's a complex situation: Muslims are a minority in Uttar Pradesh, but a fairly large one, and had traditionally been the swing voters that defined winning administrations. Muslims are also not uniform: there are two very different groups, one of very poor farm-workers, living alongside the Hindu Jats in villages, and another group of better-off homeowners and butchers and other more skilled trades, who tended to live in their own towns. The latter were the focus of the political power, obviously, and the former were the ones hit hardest by the riot.

But who started the riot? That's not clear, and there possibly was no one single "start" anyway. Tensions had been rising - fomented primarily by a group of Hindu nationalist politicians, in Sacco's telling, and using a crude but effective "they're seducing our young women to fuel plans to replace us" lie campaign.

Also, and under everything: India (or maybe Uttar Pradesh specifically) seems to be a deeply corrupt society on many levels. The police will respond to immediate large-scale problems - such as the riot of the title - but getting them to investigate day-to-day crimes requires either the payment of bribes or use of political influence from above the local police-station level. Sacco implies that the higher-level police leaders may not be personally corrupt in the way the local station leaders and cops are, but some of them are political creatures, tied to specific parties and with an interest in certain narratives and thus in investigating crimes to make them fit those narratives.

And, of course, if the local people - both Muslims and the Jat subsect of Hindus who are dominant in this region - don't think the government and police and other officials are honest and will investigate to find actual facts, they will be looking for other outlets for their anger and fear and hatred.

When two distinct groups live side-by-side, they don't necessarily conflict. But when political leaders see gain in that conflict, or have an aim to eliminate the other group, they absolutely will.

Riot is a book about an overdetermined outburst of violence. Sacco points out, several times, that this was not a huge violent upheaval. It ended in a day or so. Only a few score people died; only a few hundred were turned into refugees. On a global scale, that's small. (India may have seen worse since then; they certainly saw vastly worse, along the same ethnic/religious lines, during partition, and occasionally later.)

But it's a riot that came about because of longer-term trends, that was fed by leaders who do seem to be looking forward to larger bloodshed or expulsions (Jat mobs are said to have chanted "Pakistan or the grave" at Muslims during the riot), and that have not been solved or cured or made right. Those are riots that can recur, that can get bigger, that can expand. And, again, Sacco talked to a few people in the course of this book that seem to be hoping and working for that end. Hence the "future" of the title. It hasn't happened on that scale yet. It might still be avoided.

This is not a story about only India, of course. It's applicable to groups that are not Jat or Muslim. Supremacists who make up lies about a minority to foment anger and try to get them thrown out of the country are common in many places. The future riot could be much closer to home - wherever your home is.

Abandoned Books: A History of Love & Hate in 21 Statues by Peter Hughes

It's been a few years, but I had to punt on a book again. I don't have to love a book to finish it, but I think if I find myself talking to the author, in my head: "Jesus Christ, Hughes, read the fucking room," then the book has lost an essential connection to me as a reader and I shouldn't try to make larger statements about it.

A History of Love & Hate in 21 Statues has a neat idea, and a strong pedigree. Peter Hughes is, his biography in this book tells us, both a philosopher and a psychologist with a PhD in the former and a membership in the British Psychological Society. He seems to be less of an academic and more of a talking head (which reinforces some feelings I have about this book) - I did a quick search now and found his site.

The book has, as you might guess, twenty-one chapters, each telling the story of one statue, which was created by someone at one point and destroyed by someone else at a later date. It is, I think, roughly organized by the date of the creation of the statues, though does not tightly fit that timeline.

I read about half of it. I was getting an impression in my head over the first half of the book, and I wanted to make it to the chapter on The Confederate Monument of Portsmouth, Virginia - eleventh, right at the mid-point - to see if my concerns continued to be borne out.

In the middle of the chapter on the Confederate Monument - one of the hundreds put up, mostly in the American South, around the turn of the 20th century to reinforce white supremacy and uphold the ahistorical "lost cause" myth - Hughes mentions another statue, which is like his chapter's subject but even more so. Called "The Good Darky," it was erected in 1927 in Natchitoches, seems to be just as horrible as you might be imagining, and was damaged and then removed in 1968.

Hughes chooses not to focus on that statue because, I think, it doesn't fit the overall point he's trying to make. And that overall point is what I was objecting to in the first half of this book. I don't want to mischaracterize his argument, but I will note this book was published in 2021, seems to have been written in 2020, and has many references to BLM protests as (roughly his repeated language) "protests after the death of George Floyd that led to calls to tear down statues."

Now, Hughes is writing a book about statues, so I don't mind him for focusing on his topic. But I found his framing more and more disingenuous as I went along, and I finally couldn't keep going. As far as I read, Hughes seemed to be saying that the biggest threat to civil society in the modern world are "fanatics," whom he tends to characterize in terms leaning to the left (authoritarians, references to communism, and so forth).

There's a version of this argument in many of the chapters; this one is from early in the book, about a head of Athena:

To be merciful and forgiving requires us to see the world from the point of view of another person. This leads to understanding and when we understand other people, we humanize them, we look for common ground and a way to build bridges. When, on the other hand, we need to be absolutely certain we are right, that our beliefs are the only true ones, then it becomes impossible to fins a common humanity with people who do not share our beliefs. As our world-view narrows and our frame of reference shrinks, we become desperate to justify our increasingly fragile identity. The result is violence and bloodshed.

That argument superficially seems even-handed and unobjectionable. But Hughes drops into these arguments at specific times, and with reference to particular actions - and not to others. Also note the word "identity," which I detect Hughes using repeatedly in a left-coded way. He isn't quite all the way to "abolish DEI," but he seems to be somewhere on that spectrum.

In particular, the Confederate Monument chapter does mention that it was put up in an era of repression and even gets a bit into how common lynching was in the era. But he uses the word "Black" never, "Negro" once, and never gets anywhere near "white supremacy." The generous view is that Hughes wants to avoid writing about specific ideologies, and keep his focus on being open and loving and merciful and forgiving.

The less generous view is that one side gets the benefit of that doubt over and over and over again, while the other other side is the reference for all of the aspersions and fear-mongering. In particular, Hughes, I am morally certain, is quite familiar with Popper's Paradox of Tolerance - he has a Philosophy PhD, let us remember - but he neglects to mention it at any point, even when it would be massively relevant.

Again, I only read half the book. Hughes may have turned the whole thing around in the back end and explicitly called out rising fascism worldwide. But I really doubt it. So I stopped reading.

All of This and Nothing: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

"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 was a boy in the 1970s; of course I liked AC/DC.

But I was more of a punk/new wave kid as a teen - more or less, and a few years late, since I lived way the hell out in dull suburbia - so it's specifically the Bon Scott era of AC/DC I connected to. A short window of time in the late '70s, sure, but loud and raucous and quintessentially Australian in a way that was very appealing to an American not sure of any of that stuff.

I only bothered to buy one AC/DC record in the CD era. (The enthusiasms of our youth might not always embarrass us, but it's the way to bet.) This is the one. I still like some of the other songs - Big Balls is a hoot, even in my fifties - but the title song is the one AC/DC song I'd save from the wreckage of civilization if given the choice.

It's always Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.

No fancy interpretations here: this is a song from the point of view of a "fixer" whose main business seems to be killing people. There's also, in best AC/DC fashion, a lot of double entendres that have confused several generations of listeners into thinking the service provided must be fucking, not killing.  [1] If you want to take it all that way, I don't think the band would care. Just bang your head along to the beat, and it'll all be fine.

It is obvious; it is cartoony; it is a lot of fun, especially if you first heard it at an impressionable age. I did.

[1] To be pedantic about it: verse two is clearly fucking; verse three is clearly killing; verse one is vaguer but pretty solidly killing. And the outro is all murder methods. I think the evidence is clear.

Books Read: August 2026

It's been another month, so time for one of these vaguely-index-like posts. As always, I'll add links later, once the posts go live. This is what I read this past month:

Pierre-Henry Gomont, Brain Drain, Part 2 (digital, 8/1)

Joshua Barkman, Ew, It's Beautiful (digital, 8/2)

Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock (in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s, 8/2)

Alejandro Jodorowski & Mœbius, The Incal, Vol. 5: The Fifth Essence - The Dreaming Galaxy (digital, 8/8)

P.G. Wodehouse, Nothing Serious (8/8)

Gus Gordon, Into the Bewilderness (digital, 8/9)

Zidrou & Jordi Lefebre, Glorious Summers, Vol. 3: Little Miss Esterel (digital, 8/14)

Bob DeGroot & Turk, Leonardo the Genius (digital, 8/15)

Walter Mosley, Blonde Faith (8/15)

Benoit Feroumont, The Kingdom, Vol. 1: Anne (digital, 8/16)

Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet, Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 3: Resurrection (digital, 8/22)

Joshua Kendall, Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography (8/22)

Juan Berrio, Seven Places Without You (digital, 8/23)

Kay Sohini, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City (8/29)

Donald E. Westlake, The Hot Rock (8/29)

Hope Larson, All My Friends (8/30)

Xavier Dorison & Ralph Meyer, The Undertaker, Vol. 3: The Ogre of Camp Sutter (digital, 8/31)

John Hodgman, Medallion Status (8/31)

I plan to keep reading books in the coming months, too.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 5, 2026

I ordered a big batch of used books recently, from multiple sellers. (I'm using Alibris these days, as the one not owned yet by a giant hegemonic behemoth.) About half of them have come in as I type this, so that seems like enough to throw into a post. These are mostly from authors I have "reading projects" about - which means I'm reading a series, or their whole body of work, either in order or over time as I get to it.

Projects can be fun things!

Anyway, here's what's reached me so far, and which I will read at some point (if I don't get hit by a bus).

I read Jimmy the Kid, somewhat puckishly, as part of my Starktober project - reading the whole works of Richard Stark - a decade ago. You see, Jimmy is a book by Donald E. Westlake, in the Dormunder funny-caper-novel series, that is inspired by a book that does not actually exist, Child Heist by Richard Stark. (Donald Westlake also wrote under the name Richard Stark, to make the connection clearer.) I got that one from the library, I think, since I didn't have a copy of the book in the house and I used an old hardcover image for the Jimmy post. (I try to use the cover of the actual edition I read, for pernickety personal reasons.) I'm now planning to read all of the Dortmunder books in order, so I need to have this third book available.

I've been reading P.G. Wodehouse in the "Collector's Wodehouse" series from Overlook Press for ages - I started before my 2011 flood, but, since then, I'm only counting the ones I've read since then and have on a specific shelf. (It gives me an excuse to buy and read books again, especially since I don't have any records or a good memory of what I had pre-2011.) I got two of them in this batch of books.

First up is Ring for Jeeves, a 1953 novel - based on a play, I think - that is the only Jeeves story not narrated by or featuring Bertie Wooster at all. I probably read this when I read all of the Jeeves books in the '90s, but I don't remember ever hitting a Jeeves book not in Bertie's voice, so I dunno.

The other Wodehouse book is Blandings Castle, which I do remember reading - I got to the Blandings books right after Jeeves, I think largely on the recommendation of my former boss Ellen Asher. (She thought Jeeves was OK, but Blandings was sublime. These days, I don't disagree but I really love the Bertie Wooster voice, and also might make a dark-horse recommendation for Uncle Fred.) This isn't (I think) the first time Blandings appeared, but it's pretty early - it's a 1935 collection of stories that's about one-third Blandings and two-thirds "Elsewhere." And from right in the middle of Wodehouse's best period, too, which is a bonus.

I'm also reading through Ross Macdonald's mystery novels about detective Lew Archer - I hit the first one, The Moving Target, this summer, and will probably continue roughly quarterly until I get through them all. But I was missing a few, so I just got:

The 1952 novel The Ivory Grin. I read this one, way back when I was getting into mysteries as a youngster, and I couldn't tell you anything at all about the specifics of this one. I have a vague soup of Lew Archer in my head, and it will be interesting to see what came from which book and what was my own confusion in my teen years. (The only one I have any specific memory of is The Underground Man, which I still think of as the peak of the series.)

The other Macdonald was the 1961 novel The Wycherly Woman, for which all of the random blather above is also true. Blogger wants each image to have enough text to wrap around it to keep it away from the next paragraph, so I'm just typing a bit here to reduce the amount of unsightly white space below. (Probably not enough blathering, though. Never is.)

And last is a Library of America book: Writings by S.J. Perelman. I've spent years grumping about the LoA's tendency to do "good parts" versions of writers I wish they'd do "complete editions" of - Lovecraft is worth keeping in multiple volumes; that old fraud Henry James is not - but I'm clearly an outlier. And I guess I've mellowed a bit over time. I still wish they'd do official omnibuses, because I like to read "books" that I can make posts about here and put down in my reading notebook and count as metrics in a pointless, silly exercise. But a nearly 600-page collection of Perelman - wait, only 600? my old Franklin book is twice that size! - is still a good thing, despite my grumbling. Anyway, Perelman is one of the great funny New Yorker writers, and I think the most distinctive and odd of that crew. I haven't read a big chunk of Perelman for a long time, and I lost my shelf of his individual books in the 2011 flood, so this is a nice thing to have.

Next week, I expect there will be a very similar post, with different titles by many of the same writers, as the other books from this order trickle in. Come back to see if I manage to say anything different - or interesting!

Quote of the Week: Vanishing Passengers

Most men, having started out in a car with a lady friend and discovered at journey's end that she was no longer there, would have felt a certain surprise at this shortage and probably asked a lot of tedious questions. To Lord Emsworth, woken with a respectful prod in the ribs by Albert Voules at the door of Blandings Castle and finding himself alone, it never occurred to wonder about what had become of Maudie en route. He seldom worried about things like that. If women vanished out of cars, they vanished. There was nothing you could do about it, and no doubt all would be explained in God's good time.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Pigs Have Wings, p.167

The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories by David Small

My first thoughts are trivial, distracting: how long do werewolves live, anyway?

I mean what we might call the Metric Standard Werewolf, beloved from folklore, and not any modern author's bespoke version, for greatest applicability.

Because The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories is a collection of three stories largely about being old, and I have a nagging sense that werewolves don't get old.

Of course, in traditional werewolf stories, they don't get old because they are abominations before God who must be destroyed as soon as they are discovered - but I thought they would live a long time if they could. Or am I conflating them with other Universal Monsters? Vampires are clearly immortal, and mummies generally are, too. Reanimated corpses are already dead - I guess this covers both zombies and Frankensteinian creations - and so presumably don't continue to age in their second life.

This time-wasting activity has not brought me a comprehensive answer, sadly. Mister Google is happy to tell me the details of specific fictional universes - his new shiny AI buddy will synopsize a bunch of them for me - and give vague pointers for continuing research. But the answer seems to be...yes, maybe, no, it depends?

Werewolves can be very old if the story needs that: in some traditions, it's even common. Old and decrepit, not as often - but it's a big folkloric world, and it's rare we can say "that's just not allowed."

I did say my initial thoughts were distracting.

Werewolf at Dusk has three illustrated stories by David Small, author of the graphic memoir Stitches most relevantly, and also a long-time illustrator, mostly of books for younger readers. (He has a Caldecott and several other awards; he's kind of a big deal in that world.) The three stories were created for this book, and they're similar to a comics format but not quite the same: Small's text is set in type on the pages, more like narrative than captions, and his art sits borderlessly on the pages, often just one image per page. But there are comics-style panel transitions between pages, and on pages with multiple images - large parts of this book do read like comics. But it also looks a lot like an illustrated story, of the kind most commonly seen for young readers.

The three stories are: "The Werewolf at Dusk," from a flash fiction written and performed by Lincoln Michel; "A Walk in the Old City," somewhat modified from a dream Small had; and "The Tiger in Vogue," from a 1948 story in French by Jean Ferry and presumably translated by Small here.

The first story is about, as you might have guessed, an old man who is a werewolf - a tired, weak one, with mangy fur and aching joints, after a long life of spending the full moons attacking and killing people. Now, sadly, he can barely tackle "an injured squirrel."

The second story has been transmuted a bit, but still retains that dreamlike feeling: an old man, a psychiatrist who suspects he's starting to go senile, is prone to wandering strange districts of his home city, and has gotten lost. He meets another old man, who at first seems helpless, and encounters some very symbolic elements that make him analyze the dream while still inside it - but he has misunderstood some essential aspects of the situation.

The third story features another old man, but the situation - from a surrealist story set in early 1920s Berlin - is more important than the man himself. He attends a music hall, hoping to avoid one particular act he has come to hate and fear - but that act inevitably plays, every time. A tiger, somehow mesmerized and standing upright in a human-style tailored suit, is led by a redheaded woman through a burlesque of the audience experience in that very theater, sitting in a prominent box, using opera glasses, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, a "little man with tired skin and pale eyes" in the next box - who Small unsubtly draws as Hitler, in case any reader his missed the metaphor - is the real controller of the tiger, sweating and mentally straining to keep him in control. Every night, the act finishes as planned, and the tiger is gotten offstage before he reverts to his animalistic nature and is shoved back into a cage by stagehands. He never actually eats the baby he inevitably is given to hold and coo over.

Again, the Ferry story was published in 1948, with the benefit of hindsight. Small's version has another near-century of hindsight. I don't think the metaphor entirely makes sense, but that's surrealism for you: it is ominous and creepy and feels significant.

The three stories have somewhat different concerns, but all circle old age in one way or another; they work pretty well as a themed collection. I suspect this book might have been bought by a lot of youth librarians going on Small's reputation - and the reps at the publisher, Liveright, might not have tried too hard to dissuade them - but that actual young readers might not have strongly loved this book about age and infirmity and regrets and the impending horrors of WWII.

Then again, I could be wrong. Perhaps the children yearn for stories of old werewolves and ominous tigers. Stranger things have happened.