Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson

This is a noir novel; I read it in the Library of America omnibus Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s. I don't know Edward Anderson otherwise, but I assume this novel is thought of as his best book: at least by the editor who put together this omnibus in 1997. (A chap named Robert Polito is credited with that.)

Thieves Like Us is set in the depths of the Depression, in the South (Texas and Oklahoma) - but more often talks about towns and counties than states. States are too big for these small-timers; they don't get that far and only think that big on rare occasions.

As the novel opens, three men have just escaped from prison: T.W. (T-Dub) Masefield, Elmo (Chicamaw) Mobley and Bowie Bowers. Bowie is the youngest, our narrator - he was in on a murder rap that would be accessory at best these days, as part of a botched robbery he fell into working as a carnie. T-Dub and Chicamaw are substantially older, and seasoned bank robbers. Three men is a decent gang for bank robbery - there's a discussion early how four would be better, but who wants to cut in a whole additional man? - so T-Dub and Chicamaw bring Bowie into the work.

It's a short novel, and all told through Bowie's voice, but Anderson gets a lot of specific details in: how they case banks, how they get away (buying cars with cash and burning the car that did the robbery, for one), how they hide out and how long, how they rely on a loose network of mostly relatives, particularly when the police attention is fiercest. He also quotes newspaper accounts of their crimes, as Bowie finds those papers, and gets some solid irony in how misleading, biased, and often just wrong those newspaper articles are.

The plot is loose and episodic; the novel covers a long span of months with three major heists along the way. The heists are not emphasized. Anderson tends to describe them quietly, nearly past-tense - they go well. Maybe because heists that don't go well in the late '30s meant that the heisters all get shot dead or immediately arrested.

So the book is more about Bowie becoming part of this world, and learning how to live with more money in his pocket than he ever expected. Chicamaw and T-Dub are both gamblers and womanizers, both with long-established ways to waste the money they steal nearly as quickly as they steal it. But Bowie is newer, and greener, and more innocent: he thinks he can save it up - at least between jobs - and go away somewhere to enjoy it. The three separate after jobs, to minimize the potential police heat or just to enjoy their money, and then catch back up at a pre-planned time, with T-Dub and Chicamaw having run through everything they stole.

During one of those pauses, Bowie connects with a girl, Keechie - actually Chicamaw's niece, though that's not emphasized, nor does Bowie try to hide the relationship - and the two of them think and talk about making a life together. At the same time, the police of two states are looking for Bowie - for what the papers call a vast number of bank robberies beyond the three they actually did. And newspapers get many things wrong, but, somehow, they found out about Keechie and Bowie, and that's a hot story, too.

Again, this is a noir novel. It's loosely inspired by Bonnie and Clyde. It's not going to end happily for Bowie and Keechie. It doesn't. Anderson has a lot of depth and insight in this short book; it's smart and cynical about people and newspapers and society. The title comes from a repeated refrain, especially early in the book - banks and police and others are just as corrupt, just as money-hungry, just as bad as the bank robbers: they're "thieves just like us."

That's the mindset and the world Bowie and Keechie are caught up in here; it's both roughly true and not at all helpful. In a noir novel, not only are the odds stacked against you, but those odds always come in - like real gambling, not like a happier kind of novel, because a million-to-one shot in real life never comes in.

Christine Falls by Benjamin Black

I've mentioned various ways of differentiating literary and commercial novels here before. They're mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I think there's always an element of truth in those quick dichotomies.

Today, the way I want to look at it is: commercial novels need to have a plot. Literary novels only need to have a theme.

Christine Falls is a novel, ostensibly in the mystery/crime/thriller genre, published as by "Benjamin Black," though all the publicity materials, then and since, also made it clear that Black was a pseudonym for the literary novelist John Banville. Banville's photo is in even in the paperback edition (US Picador, 7th printing but first edition) I read. Falls came out in 2006, and was the first of nine novels with the same main character, all as by Black.

I've read a number of Banville's novels, most recently Snow, which is oddly related to the Black series. Otherwise, my readings of his literary novels was mostly some time ago, in the '90s and Aughts, when I was reading at a quicker pace and spending more time analyzing stories professionally. I've also read the Black novel The Black-Eyed Blonde, about a decade ago - that was an authorized sequel to Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep which I thought was substantially more successful than other attempts at continuing Chandler.

So I came to Christine Falls intending to enjoy it. And Banville/Black, as always, is a lovely writer of sentences and paragraphs and scenes and moments.

But Falls, like the much later Snow, is largely a message book. That message is: "the Magdalene Laundries were bad, m'kay?" This was not a shocking proposition in 2006, a decade after the initial scandal and four years after a major movie about them.

On top of that, the main character of this book, and the whole Black series, is Quirke. No first name, no middle name, no other name. Just, apparently, Quirke Q. Quirke, the quirkiest quirk who ever quirked a quirk. There are a few moments when Banville/Black nearly stumbles or fails to paper over the fact that his hero has no first name in a world where all of the other characters - most of whom are part of Quirke's family and have known him for decades - do have first names and use them all the time.

So our hero is quirky, got it? Black/Banville wants to be very very sure that you understand that.

And the way that he is quirky is that he's a very large gentleman who drinks a lot - I'm not sure if Banville thinks of it as a lot, as fish don't always recognize water - who has worked as a pathologist in a big Dublin hospital for about twenty years, who was an orphan himself, and who had a wife that died, long ago. So He Is Sad, and has been living a very small, circumscribed life for a long time - doing his work, drinking at all hours, and living in a small set of rooms full of the same old crap he's had forever.

Oh, and it is The Fifties. No more specifics than that, but it is definitely The Fifties.

But then, one day, Quirke gets interested in the case of Christine Falls - not a portentous name at all, o no! -  a corpse in his department that he notices one night during a party for a nurse who is heading to a hospital in Boston. (Boston in the US.) His pseudo-brother/brother-in-law Malachy Griffin - Griffin's father the Judge raised Quirke after rescuing him from the orphanage, and the two married Boston heiress sisters Sarah (Mal) and Delia (Quirke) - was doing something suspicious with the paperwork for Falls, and the drunken Quirke was interested.

Quirke sort-of, more-or-less, intermittently, tries to figure out what happened to Falls. He fairly quickly learns that she died in childbirth, despite Mal changing the paperwork to say it was a heart problem, and learns that there's a big Catholic conspiracy, mostly bankrolled by his father-in-law, that moves what seems to be a vast sea of unwanted newborns out to deserving families, both in Ireland and among the Irish in America. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason for this to be illegal, but it's being run by gangsters, and Quirke is repeatedly threatened and eventually badly beaten.

This all happens very slowly. The reader, if that reader has any knowledge of the wider world, has already figured out nearly all of the plot, and has correctly identified the two possible candidates for the father of Fall's baby. But Banville/Black is writing in a literary manner, so we get a long section with the adoptive parents of that baby, over near Boston - the mother is mostly the viewpoint character, and is quiet and loving and more than a little boring, while her husband at first seems just a bit loutish but turns out much worse than that.

Anyway, Quirke (James Quirke? Seamus Quirke? Aloysius St. James Roberto Quirke?) learns a bit more about the baby, including that she was carried off to Boston by the very nurse whose going-away party was the occasion for Quirke's discovery of Falls in the first place. (In a literary novel, everything must be connected. There are no coincidences.)

Eventually, after about three hundred pages of thoughtful introspection from various POV characters, Quirke is in Boston, chaperoning his niece Phoebe - who in the minor B-plot was mooning after a totally unsuitable young man, Conor Carrington, who is shock! horror! Protestant - to visit her grandfather, who is near death. 

There are a lot of mystery-novel-esque elements to close out the book, including a death that could be called murder if you want and a rape that is deeply thematically important. (2006 seems awfully late for a Significant Rape in a novel, but Banville is of the older generation.) The old man funding the whole scheme - Quirke's father-in-law, Phoebe's grandfather, who has a Big Sleep-esque hothouse and wheelchair, speaking of thematic elements - does die, as we all know he would. Quirke learns some things, including one shocking truth that is almost immediately retconned into something he always knew - so I suppose he drank it out of his mind for twenty years? Maybe you can do that if you're Irish enough - but does not solve any crimes or act like a detective in a detective novel at all.

In fact, he's very much a literary-novel protagonist. He's in the middle of a family situation that's more complicated than he realizes, he pulls at threads that lead to things he wasn't ready to learn about the people closest to him, and the most important changes in the book are internal to Mr. Quirke Q. Quirke, Lord of Quirkiness.

Again, Banville/Black tells this story in exquisite prose and has a fine hand for characterization - though Quirke himself is a bit more of a black box than he should be, to make those end revelations work. But it feels like a novella's-worth of matter stretched out to novel length for no good reason, to tell us all that something we already know about was Really Bad.

Um, yeah, OK, I guess. What else have you got?

Bech Is Back by John Updike

I like having omnibuses on the shelf, especially ones that collect books that can easily be read separately. I can pull them down when I get back to that shelf, read the next clump of whatever, and move on.

I used to be the kind of reader who would plow through one of those big omnibuses, beginning to end, over a few days, but that was when I read professionally. I'm pretty sure I could still do that if the professional side of my brain was still connected to capital-L Literature. (Though my bank account might not survive that; there's a reason I'm doing boring content marketing these days.)

So I got back to Henry Bech, John Updike's sad-sack writer character, recently. Bech first appeared in 1970's Bech: A Book, which I read last fall. The second batch of Bech stories were collected in 1982's Bech Is Back - a few scattered pieces from the mid-70s in the New Yorker and Playboy, then what seems to have been a concerted effort by Updike to add enough text to fill it out to book-length soon before that eventual publication.

Both of those are in the omnibus The Complete Henry Bech, along with one later collection and the last (otherwise uncollected?) story.

Bech is a Jewish writer, in the vein of Bellow or Roth, who published some big and/or well-received books in the '50s but had fallen into silence by the time of the mid-'60s and the first stories in A Book. I think Updike meant Bech to be satirical, which is how I can believe that a guy who wrote three novels twenty years before - novels which are taught but not hugely read - can continue to live on them and do nothing else productive.

(And that's the question in the back of my head throughout the Bech stories - how does this guy spend his days? We mostly see him in special moments, away from his usual life and milieu, but how does he fill up the endless days in his small New York apartment, for years and decades? He can't have that many affairs. We don't think he's a theater aficionado, or involved in any volunteer work, or sitting in front of a TV screen twelve hours a day. Does Updike mean us to believe he just sits and reads, all day every day, for twenty-some years?)

Anyway, we know this is literary fiction for a few reasons. First, Updike's prose is lovely and supple, which is a requirement. Second, Bech is a writer and the stories are deeply in his head - literary fiction is about people like their authors, grappling with the Big Serious Questions that writers alone have to face. And third - and possibly most importantly - the stories are also largely about where Bech wants to put his dick. Literary fiction, canonically, is about writer characters having affairs.

Sadly, Bech was not married - had never been married - by the end of A Book, so he was not able, technically, to have affairs. (He did make up for it in dalliances, though.) Updike does remedy that in this second book.

But first some travel. The first book saw Bech on a tour behind the Iron Curtain - it was the '60s - while this book sees him move more widely about the world. There's a story that bounces among three mostly-American trips, another that does something similar with trips to two African countries and South Korea, the what-it-says-on-the-tin "Australia and Canada," and two trips with the new wife he picks up along the way, to "The Holy Land" and to Scotland in "Macbech."

Again, the Bech stories, up to that point, are mostly about him going to some strange (often foreign) place, feeling a bit out of sorts, and trying to get into the pants of some attractive woman he meets there. (Generally at least ten years younger than him, of course - this is both literary fiction and the '70s.)

But then we get a novelette-length - the longest piece in the book and the longest Bech story to date - piece called "Bech Wed," in which our hero settles down in a big house in Ossining with his new wife (the stand-in mistress younger sister of the primary mistress from the prior book). There, she gets him to actually sit down and write every day - a crazy idea he has apparently never had before - and, lo and behold, he actually produces his fifteen-years-delayed fourth novel. It is a massive success, despite being not very good, which leads to Bech fucking his wife's older sister (his former mistress, remember) and blowing up his marriage.

It's literary fiction: characters can be successful or happy, but never both. And frequently neither. Besides, fucking the wrong people is what literary fiction is about.

The last story is a bit of a coda, with a newly-single-again Bech going to someone else's book-launch party, now that he's living in Manhattan again. He of course ends it going home with a lady mud wrestler, because those are the attractive women available at the event, and a literary-novel hero must Always Be Macking.

There are books I can enjoy reading even though I don't take them seriously: space opera, plot-coupon epic fantasy...and this-writer-is-totally-not-me literary fiction. Some readers might find take offense at that odd company for Updike; they can suck it. The Bech books are frivolous and untethered to anything in real life, but they can be enjoyable on that level.

Playback by Raymond Chandler

This is the last and least of Raymond Chandler's novels, written after the death of his wife Cissy and published the year before his own death. It's also, uneasily, a sequel to Chandler's previous (longest, best) novel, The Long Goodbye, which can make Playback feel even smaller and less impressive by comparison.

So Chandler didn't do himself any favors with this book. It's still Chandler: there's plenty of strong moments and descriptions and ideas in it, and the detective-plot, though not as robust or resonant as his better books, still works and is at the center of the novel. Playback is not a bad PI novel; it's just disappointing, since we know how much better Chandler could be.

It's about eighteen months after The Long Goodbye. Philip Marlowe, Chandler's series hero, is still mooning over Linda Loring, the rich heiress who got away in that book. Mooning more obviously here than he was in the previous novel, actually, which I (and many other critics before me) attribute more to Chandler's loss of Cissy.

Marlowe is hired by "Claude Umney, the lawyer" - that's how he inevitably answers his phone, and Marlowe does make a smart remark about it, but it doesn't take - to follow a certain person and report back. Umney is working, he says, on orders from unnamed but powerful forces "back East." The person to be tailed is, of course, a gorgeous blonde woman: Betty Mayfield,  traveling under an alias. Marlowe watches her arrive on the Super Chief train, hang about in the train station for a few hours, and then continue on to San Diego. He follows her there, and to the small community of Esmeralda.

Marlowe finds Mayfield attractive, and thinks she's being blackmailed - she was clearly confronted by a man in the LA train station - so he doesn't just report her location to Umney and finish up the job. Instead, he snoops about, pretending to be her jilted husband to the desk staff at the motel where she's staying, and eventually meets and talks to Mayfield.

Things get a bit more complicated from there, with some femme fatale business from Mayfield, a potential murder or death by misadventure but no corpse, the question of the whereabouts of that blackmailer, another PI sent by possibly the same "back East" people, and Mayfield's growing connection to the ex-gangster who owns half of Esmeralda. There's also some mostly-honest cops, and a tough hotel detective, who wander through near the end.

All the materials are there, but Chandler doesn't use them as effectively in 1958 as he did earlier in his career - the Kansas City connection between the second PI and the ex-gangster, for example, is mostly just shrugged aside as coincidence. In the end, Marlowe lets a murderer get away with a stern talking-to, and is rewarded for his bravery by a phone call out of the blue by Linda Loring, the One True Love of his life, who will come back to LA for him if he wants her to.

It's an incongruous ending that feels more like undoing and redoing Long Goodbye than doing up Playback. It might have worked if Chandler had done some work in the middle of the book to contrast Mayfield and Loring - though, frankly, they both seem to be to be cut from the same standard Chandler blonde-dame cloth.

Readers will likely take Chandler's novels in order - there's only seven of them to begin with. You can stop after Long Goodbye is you want to; it's enough of an ending for Marlowe anyway. Playback doesn't retroactively ruin anything, but it is a smaller and lesser thing to come at the end.

Roughing It by Mark Twain

I've vaguely wanted to re-read Roughing It for a few years now. The last time the urge rose, I didn't have a copy on hand and read Life on the Mississippi instead, but, this time, availability and interest coincided. (I read it in the Library of America omnibus with The Innocents Abroad, which is what I linked from the title above.)

This will not be any kind of formal review or critical evaluation: I've been out of the editorial mills for two decades and, even then, was much more focused on commercial possibilities than literary analysis. But Roughing It is a wonderfully fun book, a collection of almost-random pieces by a young writer still discovering what he can do, and I hope I can inspire some new readers to pick it up.

As an old editorial hand, what struck me this time was how much of a second book this is. Twain had traveled to Europe and "the Holy Land" as a newspaper correspondent in 1867, then turned his newspaper columns into the very successful The Innocents Abroad.

Here I want to note that Roughing It has sometimes been published as The Innocents at Home, from which we can all take the lesson that publishers were always the same, ready to take advantage of any opportunity they could see or manufacture. (And good for them!)

Innocents was a major travel book, one that helped define what was a nascent genre in the late 19th century. It covered one trip, of about a half-year duration, with a consistent "cast" and something like a plotline supplied by the itinerary of the ship. Roughing It, on the other hand, isn't any of those things. To me, it reads like a publisher, or maybe Twain himself, asked "what else do you have like Innocents?" and the answer was "everything!"

Roughing It covers seven years of Twain's life - parts of it in greater detail than others. Mississippi, almost a decade later, went back to the years just before that, when he was a steamboat pilot on the big river, but the outbreak of the Civil War put an end to that career.

Twain doesn't mention either the War or his riverboat piloting in Roughing It. He begins with the journey - his older brother Orion was appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory, and Twain (in his civilian guise as Sam Clemens) was Orion's personal secretary. The trip across the country - and out of the country, because Nevada and nearby regions were all territories and not states in those days, half-wilderness and thinly populated - takes up the first fifth of the book, a long journey by stagecoach from Missouri, full of local color, stories about Indians and bandits, and lots of details of what that kind of trip was like, for an audience that was already forgetting it with the rise of the railroad. There's also something of a sidebar about Utah and the Mormons, since Twain and company stopped in Salt Lake City for a break on their way to Nevada.

From there, it looks like Roughing It will be the story of Twain's life in that Nevada territory, during the years of silver mania. Twain does some mining for silver himself, and - like most of the population - spends even more time and energy speculating in stock certificates from various mines and getting caught up in various manias, all of which are guaranteed to make him fabulously rich right up into the moment where the whole thing falls apart and he's left with worthless paper.

But Twain gets himself into newspaper work in the middle of this time, and the book starts shifting - first to various fictional or non-fictional stories about colorful figures of the area: miners, criminals, and lawmen. Then Twain himself heads off to San Francisco, for reasons that are clear enough to him at the time, and the last third or so of the book is very miscellaneous, covering the next three or four years in patchwork form. There's a long trip to the "Sandwich Islands" (Hawaii) that takes up almost the last hundred pages, which is the most like Innocents, though without the actual tour-company compatriots that Twain got so much material out of for the previous book.

So Roughing It is a book of parts: the trip West, mining in Nevada, newspaper work there and in San Francisco, and finally the big Hawaii trip. Twain papers over the discontinuities, which means many  chapters start with something like "After a three months' absence, I found myself in San Francisco again, without a cent." (From Chapter LXII) The early material - about the journey and silver-mining - are stronger and more focused than the back half of the book, so one can wish that some editor had been able to get Twain to a shorter, tighter book. (But how often is that the wish, with so many writers.)

I still think of Roughing It as my favorite Twain book: it has all of his strengths and little of the sourness that came into his work later in life. It's full of tall tales, real and invented, and details of life in several places and times of great interest. One thing the book won't tell you, but is fascinating in retrospect, is that during most of this period the Civil War was raging a thousand or so miles east of Twain and his silver-mining adventures. The world is big; even when there's an Obvious Story going on, individuals have their own stories - and they're often completely unrelated.

Writings & Drawings by James Thurber

This is the fourth of four posts on the big '90s Writings & Drawings omnibus of James Thurber's work, assembled about thirty years ago by Garrison Keillor and containing mostly excerpts from the books Thurber published during his life. Because the book is a thousand pages long, I took it in chunks: first The Seal in the Bedroom and My Life and Hard Times (plus some other material), then The Last Flower (plus other material), and then The 13 Clocks (yes, plus some other material).

This home-stretch of Writings & Drawings covers almost three hundred pages and the 1950s, the last decade of Thurber's life. It has some new pieces from the mostly-reprint collections The Thurber Album and Thurber Country, the introduction from Thurber's Dogs, five pieces from Further Fables for Our Time, one from Alarms and Diversions, six chapters from his New Yorker memoir The Years with Ross, and a small collection of uncollected work from earlier in his career.

It's more Thurber, mostly, from the era when he had become a household name - the titles of his collections show that clearly - and when his eyesight had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer draw. Like a lot of successful writers late in their careers, there's a lot of looking back in these pieces - essays about his great-aunt and his mother; one titled "The First Time I Saw Paris," in the mode that a few dozen other American writers essayed in the first half of the 20th century; the whole book about Harold Ross, creator and first editor of The New Yorker - which are pleasant but not core Thurber, to my mind.

Otherwise, it is much of the same kind of thing. The Further Fables are in the same tone and manner as the first batch of fables a decade and a half earlier. There are a handful of Thurberesque amusements, including "File and Forget," one of those sequence-of-letters pieces in which the main character can't get out of an increasingly-unpleasant situation; "Do You Want to Make Something Out of It?," about a word-game played at parties with friends; and the literary-criticism-adjacent "A Final Note on Chanda Bell."

The uncollected pieces are all fairly short, but strong - there's a reworking of the Clement-Clark Moore "A Night Before Christmas" into pseudo-Hemingway, and a kidnappee-charms-the-kidnappers story, and a couple of bits of Thurberesque "I'm no good at everyday life" pieces, with one about broadcasting and one actually titled "I Break Everything I Touch."

Looking at the book as a whole, it is still an excellent, well-rounded introduction to Thurber, even after thirty years. My sense is that it contains maybe half of his total published work, maybe slightly less. But my sense is also that there are a lot of Thurber This and Thurber That books from the second half of his career that overlap quite a bit, and no Grand Unified Thurber to seek out with everything. So my recommendation is still roughly the same. If you think you want to read all of Thurber, or want something not quite as daunting, grab, say, The Thurber Carnival or maybe My Life and Hard Times. But if you want a big book with all the Thurber most people will ever need, this is the one.

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There must be a reason.

(p.549)

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

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

The 13 Clocks by James Thurber

This is the third of what looks to be four posts on the big James Thurber Writings & Drawings volume from the Library of America. My reading rules and plans are a bit quirky: I keep track of books read, which (since every metric turns into a target, as marketers like me well know) means that I tend to prioritize both short books and discrete books. So when I wanted to read Writings & Drawings again, for the first time since the late '90s, the fact that it's mostly made up of excerpts from Thurber's various collections was annoying to me and threatened to mess up my carefully-organized system.

But! Thurber wrote a few short books, which were incorporated in toto into Writings & Drawings by the compiler, Garrison Keillor, and so I'm able to name the separate posts - and, more importantly, write down actual books finished in my reading notebook - after those books. So the first post was named after The Seal in the Bedroom and My Life and Hard Times, while the second was named after The Last Flower.

And this one, which will cover almost three hundred pages of miscellaneous Thurber, including excerpts from Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated, My World - And Welcome To It, Men, Women and Dogs, The Thurber Carnival, and The Beast in Me and Other Animals, is named after the short 1950 fable The 13 Clocks, which is at the end of that sequence of stuff.

This clump of Thurber covers the Forties, and it's largely similar to the selections I mentioned in my first two posts: autobiographical snippets pitched in the humorous mode, officially fictional sketches that are often very similar in tone and matter to the aforementioned, Thurber's quirky simple drawings, light satire of various things.

The first big group of pieces are from the 1940 collection Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated, which is made up of two kinds of pieces, exactly what the title promises. First we get twenty-eight fractured fables, of the kind that others have done since but none done better. Among them is the famous "The Unicorn in the Garden," and a handful of others that might seem vaguely familiar, either from actually reading them or just because others have "borrowed" Thurber's ideas since. Then there are four famous poems, in the heroic mode - three of them are "Excelsior," "Lochinvar," and "Barbara Frietchie" - made somewhat bathetic by Thurber's drawings.

My World - and Welcome To It has a clump of the usual Thurber pieces, including "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." There's also "You Could Look It Up," a baseball story in light dialect that's reasonably famous and somewhat outside of Thurber's usual narrow bounds. Like earlier collections, some - like "Mitty" - are pitched as fictional and others, like "The Macbeth Murder Mystery," are framed as stories from Thurber's life, but both styles have very similar tones and styles and plots.

Next up is Men, Women and Dogs, which opens with a big group of captioned cartoons and also includes my tag-defining "The War Between Men and Women" and one other piece. The Thurber Carnival (which I think was partially reprint anyway, way back in 1945) with two pieces and The Beast in Me and Other Animals with four come next. Of these, "The Princess and the Tin Box" is interesting as either a late addition to the Fables cluster or a precursor to 13 Clocks, and "A New Natural History" is another one of the distinctive Thurber pieces that combines writings and drawings - in this case, using a lot of jargon or technical words and drawing the odd creatures Thurber thought appropriate for those names.

Then comes The 13 Clocks, which I expect was originally aimed at younger readers. Thurber's old New Yorker buddy E.B. White had published Stuart Little in 1945, which I think was a success from the beginning, which may have inspired him. (Or, as I see from some digging, it could be that 13 Clocks was the fourth of Thurber's eventual five books for younger readers, all in the fairy-tale mode, the first of which was previous to Stuart. So that's a nice theory that doesn't fit the facts.) Clocks is another fractured fable, told at greater length and with more detail. Somewhere unspecified and medieval, there is an evil Duke, in whose castle dwells the beautiful Princess Saralinda. As is typical, princes appear regularly to ask for her hand; the Duke either just kills them (slicing them from zatch to guggle) if they break his many and quirky rules, or sets them to impossible tasks so they never return.

But one prince - Zorn of Zorna, disguised as a wandering minstrel named Xingu - arrives, and is aided by a magical person called the Golux, son of a witch and a wizard, and not a mere device, in a tag that's repeated several times without ever becoming entirely clear to this reader for all its punchy specificity. With the Golux's aid, Zorn wins the hand of the princess, restarts the titular clocks - stopped at ten minutes to five years before by the evil of the Duke - and generally sets things right in the world. As a fable, it's substantially less fractured than the short ones, for obvious reasons.

This is another good clump of Thurber work, including several of his most famous pieces, including "Mitty," the "War Between Men and Women" and 13 Clocks. I'm still recommending the overall Writings & Drawings as a great single-volume Thurber; if you want more, though, you will have to go to the individual books and dig through for the pieces Keillor left out of this one. So the question for a reader is: do you want one big thousand-page clump of Thurber, or do you think you'll want to read it all? If the latter, probably start with Thurber Carnival or something similar, and then chase after all of the other books individually.

Spring Fever by P.G. Wodehouse

I am still zipping through P.G. Wodehouse books, hitting another one every two months or so. He wrote about a hundred of the things, so I still have some runway, but my unread-Wodehouse shelf is dwindling, and it may be time to fill it back up soon.

This time, I have a just-post-war comedy (well, they're nearly all comedies, once you get out of the first decade of his long career) unrelated to any of his major series, about a peer who looks like a butler and wants to marry his cook, get out of his stately pile, and settle down running a pub. That's Spring Fever, from 1948.

It also felt like another Wodehouse book that could have been adapted from a stage play, but I find from Wikipedia - which I have no reason to disbelieve - that it was actually the other way around; Spring Fever was adapted into a play, which was not produced, which was then adapted into another novel, The Old Reliable, which I've actually read recently.

Holding up the juvenile romance end of the plot are two young American friends. First is Stanwood Cobbold, a beefy ex-college football player not overly endowed with brains, sent by his tycoon father to London to extricate him from his entanglement with the mercurial movie star Eileen Stoker, whom he wants to marry. His smarter friend is Mycroft "Mike" Cardinal, junior Hollywood agent who is himself deeply head-over-heels with Lady Theresa "Terry" Cobbold, third and nicest daughter of the Earl Lord Shortlands, called "Shorty" by Terry.

Shorty is the aforementioned peer who wants to marry his cook. He owns the stately pile Beevor, in Kent, and hates it. Mrs. Punter, that cook, wants to marry a man with two hundred pounds to invest in a London pub, so she can get out of service and into business for herself. She has some standards for who that man will be, but is willing to be somewhat flexible in her ends. Shorty, sadly, doesn't have two hundred pounds, which torments him. Worse, his rival in love is his own butler, the wily and scheming Mervyn Spink, whose success at betting threatens to give him the financial leg up in their competition.

Mostly in charge at Bevor is Shorty's domineering eldest daughter Lady Adela Topping, married to the rich American Desborough, whose money keeps the castle as solvent as it's possible for an English castle in 1948 to be. The middle daughter is Lady Claire; she doesn't do much in the book but is heading towards marriage with a well-off but deeply tedious playwright currently staying at Beevor.

Also important is Stanwood's man Augustus Robb, a reformed burglar and current teetotaler. 

The last major piece of the plot is a fantastically valuable stamp, discovered in an old album in Beevor and squabbled over by Shorty and Spink. As part of their machinations, the two young men arrive at Beevor as impostors: first Mike, pretending to be Stanwood (who wanted to stay in London to be with Eileen, filming a picture there), and then Stanwood, pretending to be someone who can vouch for Spink's claim to the stamp.

There's a fair bit of plotting among various factions to get the stamp and further their schemes, some running about, the usual severed-hearts stuff, a failed safebreaking and related drunk scene, and other usual Wodehouse bits. In the end, both young couples ride off into the sunset (or, rather, the registry office) to get married as quickly as possible. Shorty finds happiness in a slightly different way, which is not usual for Wodehouse - generally, if he sets up potential marriages at the beginning of the book, he ticks off every single one of them at the end.

It's all slightly quicker and tighter than it could possibly have been - one reason why I thought it might have been a play - with opportunities for additional comedy material (such as the stuffy playwright) left almost entirely as suggestions. In my mind, Spring Fever is a three-hundred-page novel that would have been better off about four hundred pages, with possibly the addition of a policeman, bringing Eileen onto stage at least once, and some actual thefts of the stamp for spice.

But the book Wodehouse actually wrote is just fine and quite entertaining in his best manner, so that's a pure quibble.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

I don't usually do themed posts for holidays; I work five or six weeks ahead, and don't usually keep track closely enough to hit specific dates. But I've also had a copy of the Oxford Illustrated Dickens Christmas Books on my shelf for more years than I want to admit, and keep thinking, every year, that I should read one or more of them in the appropriate season.

Well, let me be honest: I generally think that at the end of the appropriate season, in the conditional past tense, that it would have been great if I had thought of it earlier.

This year, I happened to look at that shelf a day or two before Thanksgiving, had that annual thought, and read A Christmas Carol on Thanksgiving. I might read the other four Dickens "Christmas Books" over the next four years the same way. But probably not; that's a level of organization in my reading life I just don't have. But I've now read the one everyone knows, at least.

We all know this story. Very few of us have read the book: I know this is the first time I got to it. The details are more particular, and more early 19th century, than the gestalt version of it we have in our heads, smoothed out by decades of first stage and then film and then video versions.

Ebenezer Scrooge is a merchant of some kind, in 1843 London. Maybe a banker, in a small way: we know he makes loans. But probably mostly moving goods about - which goods doesn't matter. He's well-off and miserly, working and living in cold, dark rooms because "darkness is cheap." He has one employee, the clerk Bob Cratchit. He holds onto all of his money with both hands, and, inasmuch as he takes any pleasure in his life in anything, he enjoys making and holding onto money. He's a fairly old man; probably in his sixties - his partner Marley, probably of a similar age, died seven years before.

On Christmas Eve, he rejects an offer for dinner the next day from his nephew Fred and the overtures of two local merchants collecting for the poor. Scrooge cares nothing for the poor, of course: that's the core expression of how mean and miserly he is. To Dickens, that's even more central than shunning his family: Scrooge does not have the giving spirit a Christian must have, especially in that season.

Scrooge goes home, and that night is confronted by Marley's ghost, dragging the chains he forged in life: "cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel." Marley says Scrooge still has a chance to avoid Marley's fate - to endlessly roam the world, seeing problems he could have solved in life, but now with no power to affect anything real.

There will be three more ghosts, which Marley explicitly says will come over the next three nights. (I wonder if there's been a scholarly fight about why Dickens has Marley say that: it's not what actually happens later, as we all know.)

Christmas Past is the spirit most often transformed in modern retellings; here, he's something like a candle turned into human form, carrying his own snuffer. And all three spirits show Scrooge more scenes than a movie interpretation puts onto film: Dickens can cover several scene changes on one page, but a movie crew needs sets and actors and props, all of which cost money. So the book has a wider scope; it more clearly shows the three spirits guiding Scrooge through a long ordeal, making him witness many things, not just a small handful directly relevant to him.

But, yes, there's first Past, and then the jolly gigantic Present - who here is implicitly born for this year, one of a series of similar spirits stretching back, as he says "over eighteen hundred years," and who visibly ages over the course of the Christmas he guides Scrooge through. (Which also seems to extend to Twelfth Night, in an element I don't think adaptations have picked up on at all.)

And last the barely-described, silent, creepy Yet to Come, who shows Scrooge several scenes of an unnamed dead man - who the reader knows instantly is Scrooge, of course.

The prose Christmas Carol shows Scrooge softening with each spirit, with clear regrets during both the Past and Present scenes. Adaptations sometimes follow that model, but more often save Scrooge's reformation for one big burst at the end, when he wakes up on what he doesn't yet know is Christmas morning and bursts to the window to yell out to that famously passing boy.

Here, Scrooge is clearly changed by his experience, a happier, outgoing, transformed man, focused on the happiness of others in that way Dickens always insisted was the true aim of humanity. And he's definitely more pleasant to be around for other people in his story, though the miserly early Scrooge is more fun as a character in a story.

The legend is both that Christmas Carol revived Christmas for Victorian Britons, where it had become a minor holiday, and that the third Christmas book, The Cricket on the Hearth, was the most popular during Dickens' life and for a few decades afterward. Perhaps both of those things are true; we'd have to ask a scholar of the period for a definitive answer. Christmas Carol has definitely become a durable, central story for the English-language world, and it's still a fine Dickens story, with many of his strengths shown well in a much shorter form than most of his best work.

The Mating Season by P.G. Wodehouse

You can think of The Mating Season as the finale of one of the greatest comedy trilogies of all time - it closely followed the wonderful Jeeves & Wooster novels The Code of the Woosters and Joy in the Morning, and the next time Jeeves appeared, it would be in the Wooster-less Ring for Jeeves.

It isn't, in any appreciable way, the end of a trilogy, mind you. But you can definitely think of it like that.

I just did, for example: quad erat demonstrandum.

And I have to immediately apologize, because reading a good Bertie Wooster novel puts the old grey matter into Bertie Wooster mode, and I start faffing off in all directions for no good reason.

The Mating Season was the new novel about Jeeves and Wooster in 1949, fifth of what would eventually be twelve novels (plus a passel of short stories, with four major collections and a scattering of others in miscellaneous books). That puts it towards the end of prime-period Wodehouse: he started writing at the turn of the century, got good at humor within a decade and magnificent sometime in the '20s, had a great run in the '30s and '40s that slowed in the '50s, and finished up with somewhat shorter, less complex books before he died, knighted and in his mid-nineties, in 1975. There are roughly a hundred Wodehouse books, just counting titles he published in his lifetime; if you include repackagings and similar things, the total is even higher.

But this is one of the best ones, even with the caveat that all of the Jeeves stories are good - oh, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (the last novel finished by Wodehouse in his life, published in 1974) isn't where I'd recommend starting, but it's just fine about mid-way through. Mating Season, similarly, I'd put a few books in - it builds on the earlier novels, and works better if you know some of the characters already.

Wodehouse worked with a number of common situations and plot devices, something like a formal banquet at a big country-house, so that the broad outlines would be similar but the details and recomplications are specific to the particular book. So this one has Madeleine Basset in it - she's always one of my favorites; so soppy - but mostly at a distance, and only showing up for one major scene. 

Someone has probably developed a schema for all of those Wodehouseian elements, but I haven't seen it. Mating Season is the one where Bertie Wooster, our narrator and hero, is visiting Deverill Hall pretending to be the noted orange-juice drinker and newt fancier Gussie Fink-Nottle, who is also present, pretending to be him. 

(The copy I read this time was missing roughly a signature - probably a binding error, since there's no gap in the pages - and it came right at the point where this switcheroo was explained. I vaguely remembered it from the last time I read Mating Season, and hummed over the rest.)

Along the way, there are four pairs of hearts who are sundered at least once during the narrative and need to be reunited, not least because one of them (the aforementioned soppy Miss Bassett) will attach herself to Bertie if he's not careful. And the reuniting, as always, falls to Bertie, with support from Jeeves.

Anyway, this is a Jeeves and Wooster novel: it's set mostly in a country house, there are impostors, and Bertie sums up the sundered and reunited hearts at the end to put a bow on up the proceedings. Jeeves is absent much of the time, meaning his counsel is not available at important moments and things can go wrong in amusing ways for a while. I still think Joy in the Morning is the absolute best Jeeves novel, but this one has a lot of great material - Wodehouse's writing is particularly amusing and sprightly here, with a lot of good lines in that goofy, slightly confused Bertie voice.

The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler

It had been six years since we last saw Philip Marlowe as The Little Sister opens. The world had changed, a war had ended and upended a lot of things: it was now a shiny new 1949 post-war world.

Marlowe, though, hadn't changed. He doesn't seem to be six years older - still somewhere in his late thirties, another one of those detectives who don't quite age as quickly as the calendar turns - and he's still living in furnished rooms and working alone in a small office in a cheap building. That's how hard-boiled detectives are, a lot of the time: their books don't really change them; they are who they are for the course of the series.

Little Sister has that traditional hard-boiled plot, the lying dame who hires the detective to find someone for reasons that aren't quite the ones she tells him. It's fairly traditional that she comes across as a naïf, as well, either honestly or schemingly. See The Maltese Falcon for one of the famous examples of the scheming sort; Orfamay Quest here is not quite as much of a naïf as she plays at, but she's, I suppose, over on the honest half of the scale.

Orfamay is looking for her brother Orrin, who worked an an engineer in Bay City but recently stopped sending letters back home to her and their mother in Manhattan, Kansas. She claims to be worried about him, and just wants to know he's safe.

She doesn't mention her other sibling, a sister who has a burgeoning career as the rising starlet Mavis Weld. Or that Orrin had been in touch with Mavis. Or their connections to a club owner named Steelgrave, who may have been a mob figure back in Cleveland under a different name.

Marlowe investigates Orrin's former rooming-house, discovering a marijuana-packaging operation (which he doesn't care about) and stumbling upon a murder, which is more of a problem for a private detective. As is traditional for PI novels, it's only the first murder - Marlowe finds at least two killed by ice-pick, which strongly suggests a connection.

Marlowe talks to the police, but doesn't tell them as much as he should - this is common in a lot of the novels of the series; it's one of the major ways Chandler manages the plot and the flow of information. Along the way, he learns of Mavis and goes to visit her, also meeting another rising starlet, Dolores Gonzales. And he gets the material that the murders were committed for: a picture of Mavis and Steelgrave in his club, with a newspaper proving it was on a day Steelgrave was supposedly held in jail and a mobster was murdered.

So Marlowe knows this was a blackmail scheme, and thinks that Orrin took the picture - was blackmailing his own sister. He tries to get through - to keep his license and protect his client and maybe even see justice done.

I found the very last chapter to be almost tacked on - it does close the last few loose ends, but it also felt like an editor - or maybe Chandler's internal voice - wanted someone to pay for the crimes of the novel, and this was the only way he could figure out to make it happen. If I'd been his editor - twenty years before I was born; so this is purely blathering - I'd have urged him to be parallel: start with the little sister, and end with the little sister. But he's Raymond Chandler, and I'm not, and maybe I want things to be too neat.

I found Little Sister to be even more quotable than the novels immediately before it - it has that famous "you're not human tonight, Marlowe" sequence, and a half-dozen other lines and thoughts almost equally powerful and true. Hard-boiled fiction doesn't get better than Chandler - and that's not primarily because of his plots, or even his people, but because of the insights into the world he gets to along the way.

(Note: I read this in the Library of America Later Novels & Other Writings. I don't think there are any textual discrepancies in editions of Chandler, but I'll always recommend LoA for American writers, particularly if you think you'll want to read more than one book.)

Bech: A Book by John Updike

This is the first John Updike book I've ever read. (I'm mildly surprised: I would have expected I'd grab a random book of his essays first instead.) I also have the big fat Rabbit omnibus on my shelf, but, instead, I pulled down the slimmer omnibus of novels about a very different main character.

Bech: A Book was published in 1970; it collects seven stories [1] about the literary (and fictional) writer Henry Bech, in his forties and the world's Sixties, the first three of those stories concerned with an extended government-sponsored trip behind the Iron Curtain. Bech is a Jewish writer, more Bellow than Roth but somewhere in that vague territory, with a big famous first novel (Travel Light), a disappointing short second one, an attempted epic third that landed oddly at best, and close to a decade of silence at the time these stories are set.

I'm pretty sure Updike knew in 1970 that would not be enough to sustain an income and a "grim if roomy Riverside Drive apartment," but the Bech stories are closer to satire than to realism, so readers have to assume that writing a few books that are lightly taught and generally well regarded from the '50s are enough to sustain life for a grumpy man and his succession of mistresses in the late '60s.

And, yes, I said mistresses - that's the word Updike (or perhaps I mean Bech) uses. He's not married and has never been married, so it's not the world I'd use, but I suppose in 1970 "mistress" clearly implied that he fucks them in ways that "girlfriend" might not have.

Bech is not a particularly admirable person, in that traditional literary-novel way: he's self-obsessed and windy when talking about literature, treats women in ways that were reasonably enlightened for his day but come across as deeply sexist now, and has trouble getting out of his own way (or his own head) most of the time. He's not bad, though - or, at least, I didn't find him so. Bech is not a "look at this horrible person" book; it's more "it's this kind of guy, you know the type, and let's see what amusing things he'll get up to this time."

So Bech visits Russia and "Rumania" (it was 1970) and Bulgaria; summers on an unnamed "Massachusetts island" with his current mistress and her younger sister, his next-in-line mistress; spends a few days at a Virginia all-female college as a feted visiting writer; goes to London for a launch of a new collection of his work and takes up with a woman who turns out to be a newspaper columnist; and, finally, is invited to join an august body of litterateurs that he had respected and worshipped in his teen years.

Updike's prose is amusing and fun - he tends to write in long, convoluted sentences and paragraphs for this project (I don't think he did that generally, but, again, this is my first Updike) that struck me as appropriate for Bech and probably a light parody of specific real writers of that kind. Bech is not so horrible that the reader doesn't like him - at least, I should say, a male reader who is old enough to remember the world Bech lived in, which may be an important caveat - and the things he gets up to are all literary-world interesting, if from a very different era.

[1] The introduction by Malcolm Bradbury has a lot of words, but nowhere does he talk about where or if the stories were originally published separately. My guess is not; that this was created as a novel in stories. But Updike did write short fiction, and there was a thriving market for it in the '60s, so maybe these were in Playboy or Esquire or places like that.

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

Writing about a book you last read at the age of about fourteen feels like returning to book-report days. Maybe even more so when it's clear why that book is given to so many fourteen-year-olds: it's short, focused entirely on one character, and its themes are so high in the text even relatively dull readers can identify them and, one hopes, write semi-coherently about them.

I picked up The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane's most famous bit of literary output, largely because I'd just read a batch of Ambrose Bierce stories about the Civil War, and this Crane novel - in the form of the Library of America omnibus Prose and Poetry, which I think is basically the complete Crane - was on the next shelf. Secondary reasons include the fact that it is short - and I'm all about short books these days, to keep myself motivated - that I hadn't read it since the mid-80s, and that I'd been vaguely thinking about reading a recent graphic-novel adaptation, so it was already in my head.

This is the story of one young man, Henry Fielding, during two days of an unnamed battle sometime towards the end of the US Civil War. Crane is remarkably vague - I should probably say deliberately non-specific, but it often comes across to the reader as vague - throughout, with Henry consistently called "the youth" and other characters named once or twice at best but regularly tagged as "the tall soldier" or "his friend." I assume Crane did this to maximize the Everyman-ness of Henry and universalize his experience; it came across to me, reading it as an adult, as well-meaning but a bit clumsy and convoluted.

Red Badge is also from that 19th century stream of writing that tried to present colloquial speech through typography and spelling, which was a valiant effort but can lead to things such as this (on pp.198 of the edition I read):

"Well, sir, th' colonel met your lieutenant right by us - it was damndest thing I ever heard - an' he ses: 'Ahem! ahem!' he ses. 'Mr. Hasbrouck! he ses. There, Flemin', what d' yeh think 'a that? 'Who was th' lad what carried th' flag?' he ses, an' th' lieutenant, he speaks up right away: 'That's Flemin', an' he's a jimhickey,' he ses, right away. What? I say he did. "A jimhickey,' he ses - those 'r his words. He did, too. I say he did. If you kin tell this story better than I kin, go ahead an' tell it. Well, then, keep yer mouth shet...."

A little of that goes a long way; the part I quoted goes on for another fifteen lines. Red Badge is a short book, but every time one of its enlisted-man characters speaks - the officers have dialogue that's a bit easier to follow - it's like that.

But Red Badge, again, is not difficult to read: the dialogue does take some getting used to, but it's straightforward and mostly clear. Once a reader realizes "the youth" is our hero, and that term is always used for him, Crane's prose is close enough to the modern American idiom that even those legions of fourteen-year-olds can understand it all without too much effort.

Crane runs his hero through a lot of experiences in those two days, back and forth both alone and in company, as the army moves forward, engages the enemy, pauses, fights again, and maneuvers some more. Henry runs away from battle once - that's the great theme and motif and concern of the novel; how a fighting man can know, before the fighting first starts, if he's brave enough to stand up or if he will run away. (Crane, I think, was trying to show all sides of the story, so Henry both runs and is brave, in turn: that may be the point, of course, than all men run away sometimes and stand up other times, and the difference between those times may not be clear or explicable to anyone.) So there is a lot of both activity and philosophizing, as Henry waits for things to happen, and engages when they do happen, and thinks, all the time, of what he should and will and did do. His psychology is also modern and specific enough that a teen reader of today or the 1980s will understand what Henry is worried about and why.

I don't know if Red Badge is a great novel, in world-historical terms. It's a pretty good American novel of its era, tied to a major event in national history (though written three decades later by a young man born after the war), with a lot of hooks that makes it easy to teach and useful for pedagogy. So I expect it will continue to be served up to fourteen-year-olds for quite some time: it's not a novel most Americans of the past couple of generations needed to go out of their way to read; they'd get it, whether they wanted it or not.

In the Midst of Life by Ambrose Bierce

I'm not the only one to remark that Ambrose Bierce really was the writer some people think Mark Twain was: a San Francisco resident, a cynic, a misanthrope, beset by family tragedy, mostly a journalist, uncompromising to the end. He spent most of his career as a critic - of literature but even more often of the world at large - and columnist, for Hearst newspapers during most of his career and at the time when working for Hearst meant working for Mr. Hearst.

In the Midst of Life, initially published as Tales of Soldiers and Civilians in 1891, was his first book under his own name - in the 19th century fashion, he'd had a few books of his criticism and satire come out in London in the 1870s, while living there, under the name "Dod Grile." I read it in the Library of America Bierce omnibus The Devil's Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs, which uses texts from the 1909 Collected Works. (Bierce selected, edited, and corrected all the texts for that twelve-volume set, so that's a good choice.) This version of Midst has twenty-six stories; a few that had been in the 1891 edition, or added in subsequent editions, were moved to the Can Such Things Be? collection for the 1909 text.

There used to be a good Doubleday edition, edited by Ernest Jerome Hopkins, that collected all of Bierce's stories - I used it when I wrote my thesis on Bierce back in my college days - but I can't find that, or any similar thing now. There's a lot of shovelware editions of his writing, mostly digital, since Bierce is solidly out of copyright. At this point, I recommend the LoA edition for Bierce, unless you have access to a library with the 1909 Collected Works. Though I also recall those books being a fussy size and format; not terribly pleasant to read decades later.

As the initial title hints, Midst is made up of two sections: first fifteen stories of the Civil War, and then eleven more various stories set in civilian life at various points in the previous forty or fifty years. But, more fundamentally, the stories are all about death. The war stories obviously so: war is always largely about death, and the US Civil War was one of the first mechanized, industrial-scale "modern" wars. The civilian stories tend to be psychological, about people in unusual situations, from which they do not necessarily emerge.

Bierce was both a decorated veteran of the Civil War - he worked as a topographical engineer, sketching and detailing landscapes that would very soon be the locations for battles, racing just ahead of or in between armies on the move - and a dark, cynical writer with a mania for concision and precise language. The war stories are generally stronger here; I found the civilian stories often rely on specific superstitions that are no longer current, making more of an effort for the reader to get into the right frame of mind, while the war stories are about their time and place in ways that make them universal.

The stories are all dark - Bierce's most famous story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," is second here, and many readers may know that one. The war stories have a similar tone and style: precise, unadorned, factual, like a dispatch from the actual war, in which horrible things happen inevitably because huge groups of trained and well-equipped men are working very diligently to kill large numbers of each other. Or, more accurately, because men, as Bierce saw them, are stubborn things animated by counterproductive ideals that drive them to do horrible actions against their own best interests.

I won't talk about details: the endings of these stories are not exactly surprises, especially after the first one or two, but they're generally snappy, tight summations or reversals, and listing them would be dull and mostly pointless. 

Bierce was one of the great short-story writers of the late 19th century, and the first person to both fight seriously in a modern war and write well about it afterward; his stories, especially his war tales, are very much still worth reading now. But you might need to be in the right mood for them; they are dark and uncompromising.

The Man With Two Left Feet by P.G. Wodehouse

It can be odd to think of a book like this - a decade and a half into the author's career, his second collection of short stories and roughly twentieth book overall - as being part of the extreme early phase of his career. But that's what happens when you live to 93, publish a hundred books, and have a career stretching from 1902 to 1975.

The Man With Two Left Feet is an early P.G. Wodehouse book, from the era where he was transitioning from his early school stories into the frothy comedies he's best-known for. It was published in 1917, collecting a baker's dozen stories that appeared in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic in the previous years. It's cast most in light-magazine mode, with stories the reader is meant to take seriously but humorously, and there are a few elements and plot details Wodehouse would re-use later to better effect.

It does have the first Jeeves story, "Extricating Young Gussie," so early that Bertie has not yet developed a surname. Other than that, there are no recurring Wodehouse characters here - there are two linked stories told from the POV of a dog, under the title "The Mixer," but that's as close as we get. 

As with a lot of Wodehouse, the plot structure tends to be romance - young men pursuing young women with mostly pure motives in mind, or young women going about their lives and having young men pop up and romance them. There is a bit of larcenous behavior, especially in the first of the stories narrated by the dog, in the mature-Wodehouse manner and light tone. And most of the stories take place in New York: Wodehouse was successful for about a decade before this book by writing stories about exotic New York for London audiences and (less often) about exotic London for New York audiences.

So this is transitional Wodehouse, a little more conventional and pat-ending than we're used to - "At Geisenheimer's" in particular has a snapper of a mid-teens magazine ending that is just fine but doesn't feel particularly Wodehousian. I wouldn't recommend it to any reader who isn't at least forty books deep into Wodehouse; this is one of his works to save for the back half of your reading spree.

Dante's Inferno by Paul & Gaëtan Brizzi

The last time I read a comics adaptation of Dante, it was by Seymour Chwast. This one, you might say, is from the opposite end of the picture-making spectrum, all soft pencils in a detailed, almost photorealistic style as opposed to Chwast's bold colors and carefully-designed simplicity.

And clear, obvious distinctions like that are good: living in a world with multiple graphic adaptations of Dante, you want to be able to define them against each other as clearly as possible.

Dante's Inferno, unlike the Chwast book from over a decade ago, just adapts the first and most famous of Dante's three sections of the Divine Comedy. Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi - brothers who have mostly worked in animation together for the last few decades - use some of Dante's words, but mostly present this story visually, in cinematic full-bleed pages packed with striking images and magnificent effects. They have animators' eyes for gesture and expression and, in particular, for the large arresting image - the book irises out from the usual four-to-six white-bordered panels per page to full-page or full-spread images at least once per Circle, for maximum effect.

The relative lack of text keeps the focus on the main characters - Dante himself, journeying through Hell to find his dead love Beatrice, and his guide, the classic poet Virgil. Most of the text in the book is their conversation: Dante's wonder and fear, Virgil's explanations and some of his negotiations with all of the strange doomed creatures they meet.

That's the story of Dante's poem, for anyone unfamiliar with the original. The author himself is moping about a forest near his hometown of Florence, since his great love Beatrice has recently died. Virgil appears - long-dead author of The Aeneid and Dante's poetic role model - and says he will lead Dante to her. But Virgil does not reveal that the trip will go through literal hell until they're within the gates. (Seems like a thing one's mentor would want to mention at the outset, so one could be properly prepared with strong footwear, the right mental attitude, and some appropriate traveling snacks.)

Anyway, Inferno is the journey down through the nine circles of Hell, in Dante's poetry filled with lovingly-described scenes of the torture in various inventive ways of all sorts of people, particularly those he knew and loathed. It's followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso, covering Dante's journey through the other two portions of the Christian afterlife. The other two bits are less popular, and I see no indication that the Brizzi brothers intend to continue this work to adapt them - though, of course, they might.

The Brizzis show us a lot of the creatures and people in Hell - at least one group per circle - but they've quietly simplified the presentation and removed the long Dantean descriptions of various groups of sinners, the horrible things they did in life, and how they are being tortured in inventive ways in Hell. Those who have read Inferno know quite a lot of it is made of that catalog - oh, here are the simoniacs, who are in the third of ten ditches in the eighth circle, Malebolge, and they are evil because they sold holy things, and they are punished by being left head-down in holes in the burning landscape with only their feet showing. It's all a bit like Medieval Mad Libs: the SINNER TYPE is in the REGION OF HELL because they committed VERY SPECIFIC SIN and are punished in INVENTIVE WAY.

Dante sees all of this, and is horrified and/or gratified - the latter when he sees people he knew, and is happy to see them being tortured in Hell - at all of it. Eventually, the two of them make it to the bottom of Hell, where a gigantic goat-like Lucifer breaks out of a frozen lake (the thermodynamics of Hell do not bear close scrutiny) and our heroes are able to jump onto his head to get themselves to the exit.

(Rather convenient of the King of Lies, I'd say - provides good service to visitors. Five stars.)

The Brizzis make compelling pages here, and they have a fantastic, world-famous story full of striking images to work from. Their version of Dante loses the tedious catalog of sins and torments for visual grandeur and a near-epic feel. It may disappoint some hard-core Dante fans, who want more details on exactly how the murderers are tortured, and what the virtuous pagans are up to, but, for most readers, this is either a fantastic introduction to Dante or a gorgeous reminder of his work.

The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler

This is the middle one, though no one knew that at the time. The Lady in the Lake was published in 1943, the end of the first burst of Raymond Chandler's novels and the fourth of an eventual seven about private detective Philip Marlowe. After publishing those four books in five years, it would be six more before The Little Sister appeared in 1949, and four and five more years between his his last two books.

This is also the end of the war-time Chandler - again, only in retrospect. But Lady is a war-time book, with references to rationing and limited supplies and a heavily-guarded dam that is crucial at the very end of the novel.

Marlowe is hired by a businessman, Derace Kinglsey, to find his wife: she ran away, he thinks with the man (Chris Lavery) she's been having an affair with, leaving their mountain cabin on Little Fawn Lake about a month ago and telegraphing from El Paso, apparently on the way to a Mexican divorce. Kingsley would be fine with a divorce, but his wife is a bit wild and has her own money to be wild with - he wants to make sure she's not getting into anything serious while she's still married to him.

So Marlowe heads up into the mountains - one of the stories that Chandler "cannibalized" into Lady in the Lake was "No Crime in the Mountains," a title I always remember fondly - to investigate the disappearance of Crystal Kingsley. He discovers that another woman disappeared the same night: Muriel Chess, wife of the caretaker Bill. More dramatically, he and Bill discover Muriel's body in the lake - she's clearly been in there since the night she "disappeared," and the note she left for Bill might have been a suicide note.

The local police, led by the local sheriff-like constable, Jim Patton, think that note might be older than Chess says it is, and Chess is the obvious first suspect in the death of his wife. Marlowe isn't sure how this death relates to his actual case, but he still hasn't found Crystal Kingsley. He spends the rest of the novel between Los Angeles, where Kingsley lives; Bay City, where Lavery lives; and Little Fawn Lake. 

Bay City is corrupt - we saw that in Farewell, My Lovely and it's still true now - and Marlowe gets into some trouble with a detective there named Degarmo, who is also caught up somehow with a pill-pusher doctor, Almore, who coincidentally (or maybe not) lives right across the street from Lavery in a neighborhood devoid of other houses. There's also another woman, missing for a longer time - Mildred Haviland, Almore's former nurse. And another dead woman, also a longer time ago - Almore's wife, who conveniently committed suicide by car exhaust after a wild night that led Almore to bring her home and put her to sleep with a sedative.

All of that is connected, in the end. Crystal Kingsley is not as central in her own missing-persons case as she seemed to be. And there will be more bodies before it's done, as always.

I tend to clump Chandler's novels: Big Sleep and Long Goodbye are the best, with Goodbye clearly on top. The four in between them, including Lady, are all very strong, and only one small step down. I try to be polite and not mention Playback. On this re-read, I didn't see anything to shake that hierarchy: Lady is still a fine detective story, with an interestingly twisty plot, and doesn't rely too heavily on Marlowe being sapped on the head and left in danger. And Chandler's prose is as evocative and thoughtful and resonant here as his best.

(Note: I read this in the Library of America Later Novels & Other Writings. I don't think there are any textual discrepancies in editions of Chandler, but I'll always recommend LoA for American writers, particularly if you think you'll want to read more than one book.)

Ninety-Two Days by Evelyn Waugh

I doubt there is a travel book with as much of a throw-my-hands-up title as Evelyn Waugh's Ninety-Two Days. It's as if he was saying, "Look, I went to a place and spent some time there, and this is the book I wrote about it. Can't say it any more clearly than that."

I'm getting the sense that Waugh's travel books were often, perhaps always aimless and faintly mercenary - his older brother Alec had, I believe, already made a successful career as a travel writer, and maybe it took some time for Evelyn Waugh's novels to be seen as the magnificent things they are. [1] Whatever the reason, his travel books can be close to the pure old-fashioned "I am an Englishman, one of the world's aristocrats and a deeply cultured individual. I will go to This Strange and Foreign Land and tell you about it."

See my post, earlier this year, on Remote People, for some more detail. That trip had a slightly more obvious trigger, and yet also involved a lot of random bumming around in search of local color.

In December of 1932, Waugh went to Guiana, more or less because it was a British colony in a different part of the world, and he wanted to see how things there compared to what he'd seen in British Africa (in Remote People). He traveled up-country, by horse and foot, crossing the border into Brazil, and then came back, via a somewhat different route that also included some boats.

The point was not to visit some particular place or person, though he did pass by the famous Kaieteur falls, or to understand local government, or even any obvious anthropological interest in the people of Guiana. No, it purely seemed to be "this is a part of the world my people own; I want to take a look at it." And so he did, spending, as he noted, ninety-two days doing so.

If one were cruel, one would here note that there is no point to Ninety-Two Days. Waugh didn't plan to learn anything specific, and he succeeded at that. He wandered around what seems to be a fairly harsh, somewhat depopulated wilderness for three months, battling insects and heat and dehydration, meeting only a few particularly colorful characters (all white settlers), and spends most of his pages talking about logistics, privations, and hardships. He was supported by a variety of porters and guides and assistants, and makes some effort, in that very eugenics-era way, to make clear which of them were natives and which were black and which were various "mixed breeds," using the local terms and explaining them. But most of those people are just names, sometimes a few traits - usually that this one was lazier than Waugh would prefer for a local hired for a pittance to carry heavy burdens through a tropical wilderness - and that's it.

Of course, all this is written by Evelyn Waugh, who even this early in his career was a master of prose and deeply entertaining. It's an often-true cliché that travel books are better the more uncomfortable they were for the writer, and this trip was deeply uncomfortable for Waugh. There's a lot of insight and fine writing and thoughtful sentences throughout: the whole thing might seem vaguely pointless, but it created a deeply readable book, of the kind where the reader is happier the greater the contrast between Waugh's travails and the reader's comfort, perhaps in a nicely overstuffed chair.

Waugh's novels are more important than his travel books, and I suspect (only having read a few so far) that this is one of the least of his travel books. So I would not recommend coming to Ninety-Two Days early in one's Waugh reading. But if you've already read about a dozen Waugh books, it will definitely suit.

[1] There's a point in the book where Evelyn Waugh points out that he and Alec have divided the world between them - well, I think it's more that Alec declared particular regions (like North American and the Caribbean) as "his" and warned Evelyn off his turf. Guiana is allowed, but his journey there was out of bounds.