The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett

In some other world, this was the second of a long series of novels about The Continental Op, bringing Dashiell Hammett a steady income and some manner of fame and a continuing career. In our world, this is the last time we see the Op - Hammett wrote three more novels, more and more different from each other, then moved into screenwriting, and then seemed to give up the idea of working entirely for the last twenty-five years of his life.

But when we read The Dain Curse, we might as well be back in 1929, with Hammett and his main character coming off Red Harvest the year before, that unnamed private detective for the Continental outfit back in San Francisco and caught up in a few related cases over the course of a few months.

And it really is "a few related cases." Dain presents itself as a novel, but it's really three closely-linked novellas in a trenchcoat, or maybe a three-part serial. Each time, the Op solves the particular situation - and several people end up being murdered - but he doesn't untangle it all finally until the end.

The Op is first sent in to investigate the theft of industrial diamonds from the home laboratory of a Dr. Leggett. It turns out Leggett has a dark secret past: his current wife is the sister of his first wife, and there's a supposed curse on that family, the Dains. By the end of the first section, Leggett's daughter, Gabrielle, is the focus of the curse and one of the few main characters left alive.

In the second section, Gabrielle, who believes in the curse, has been caught up in a creepy religious cult headquartered in a renovated apartment building - with all manner of unexpected gadgets to cause various weird effects. The Op, this time hired by her guardian, comes in to keep an eye on her and ends up smashing the rotten cult when, once again, murder crops up.

Then we get to the back half of the book, the longest third section, where the Op is called in by Gabrielle's new husband to come to the usual corrupt small town, where they are honeymooning, and of course he finds one body immediately on arriving. Gabrielle is missing - possibly kidnapped, possibly fled as a murderer; different local officials have different theories - and the Op needs to find her and finally work out the details of this supposed "curse" before he gets himself killed, possibly by an amateur explosive device.

It does all come together in the end, and the Op has a nearly Agatha Christie-style long speech at the end explaining everything that happened, why it happened, and how this particular fiend manipulated it all. It's a fine bit of plotting, and does tie up the whole book in a bow, but it falls on the too-neat site of the great mystery divide, particularly when hardboiled books are typically much more comfortable with the messy and contingent and confused.

So Dain is slightly disappointing, coming after Harvest - it's less stark, less focused, more of a general mystery entertainment. And, as far as I can tell, all of those things made it much more successful at the time and put Hammett's career on an upward path - which his next novel strongly solidified. (That was The Maltese Falcon, if anyone doesn't know.)

Note: I read this is the Library of America omnibus edition of Hammett's Complete Novels; they also have a companion volume with all of the stories. As I said with Harvest, if you think you might want to read more than one Hammett book, that's a good package to get.

Space Circus by Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier

This is not Groo. But it is Groo-adjacent, I suppose: more work by the same people, with something of the same tone and sense of humor, aimed at a mostly young audience and telling a...let me say dependable story for them.

The book of Space Circus only came out at the end of the last year, but it collects a four-issue series from 2000 (for the first time, as far as I can tell). I have no idea why it took that long; maybe they just forgot about it for a while.

The story is written by Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier - I suspect it's something like their Groo working relationship, where Aragones could have done all of it, but Evanier polishes up the writing to make it all better throughout - and drawn by Aragones. Lettering is by Stan Sakai and colors by Tom Luth.

It's a story about running away to join the circus, basically - though this kid, Todd Cooper, does it accidentally and it's, as you might guess from the title, not an ordinary circus. It is in fact a galaxy-traveling space circus, the Doodah Brothers’ Astral Traveling Entertainment and Fun Brigade, which landed unexpectedly on Earth to make repairs after a run-in with pirates.

The pirate leader hates circuses, for the usual trauma-in-childhood-from-not-getting-to-go-to-the-circus reasons, and has a fiendish plan to take over the circus and use it to plunder the fat starships and worlds inside the otherwise impregnable Shield that protects Secured Space. All legitimate starships have a whoositz that lets them pass instantly through the Shield, which pirate ships can never, ever obtain...but pirates can steal entire other ships, which seems to slightly defeat the impregnability.

Anyway, pirates chase mostly oblivious circus. Circus picks up an Earth kid, who means well and is enthusiastic about helping out but whose lack of space knowledge leads him to make a series of unfortunate, large, and humorous blunders. Pirates manage to trick the circus to a planet where they can steal the circus ship, leaving the circus behind and using their vessel to plunder civilized worlds as if they were the circus.

And, of course, the kid is instrumental in the plan to use the pirate ship to chase the pirates, get back the circus ship, and bring the miscreants to justice. All that, and he's home in time for dinner, with his meatloaf not even having gotten cold, because of handwaved time dilation. And he has, of course, Learned a Lesson About Life - not to spend so much time on videogames, actually, and I am not joking here - as required by the form.

There are other characters, mostly of the goofy variety: that pirate captain, his affection-starved henchmen, the two-headed circus owner, various good-hearted circus folks. They all do pretty much exactly what you would expect of them: this is a fairly short story, so it only has time to hit the high points in its plot, and that plot will not be a surprise to anyone this side of third grade.

Aragones, as always, has a detailed, cartoony, energetic style, crammed with details and interest, which breaks out regularly into spectacular two-page spreads. He's not the kind of artist that the comics world thinks of as a superstar, but he can draw pretty much anything - as long as it's in his style - and do it well. I tend to think he spends his efforts on stories that are...again, let me say something like reliable or familiar here, but it's made for a good long successful career for him, and this is a pleasant, fun-looking book that can entertain pretty much any person able to read the words.

An Embarrassment of Witches by Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan

This is not a sequel to Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell. It is, though, the only other project I know of by the team behind that webcomic, and it's set in a world very similar to Darwin Carmichael's. It may even be the same world, though not necessarily so.

Darwin Carmichael ran from 2009 through 2013 and then was collected into a book. Sophie Goldstein drew about 90% of it and co-wrote it all, as far as I can tell, and Jenn Jordan drew a few bits and did the other half of the writing.

An Embarrassment of Witches was a 2020 original graphic novel. This time out, it looks like Goldstein (the professional comics-maker and teacher) did all of the art, but the book is still vague about their roles, so I continue to assume they write it together, in whatever way. (Probably not Marvel Method. My guess would be some variety of co-plotting, with Goldstein maybe doing page breakdowns and then coming back together for dialogue.)

Darwin was set in a modern NYC where everything in myth was true - there were minotaurs on the subway and stoner angels were important to the plot. In Witches, we only see humans, but it's a world with industrialized, systematized magic - our milieu is the academic world around magic, focused on two young women and their post-graduate lives.

As required in a story about two people, they're quite different: Rory is impulsive, unsure, flitting from one idea to the next. Angela is driven, focused, serious. And the story is thus mostly about Rory, since she's more interesting and active.

They've both just graduated. Angela is about to start an internship with Rory's Type A mother, Dr. Audrey Rosenberg. Rory is heading off to work at a dragon sanctuary in Australia with her boyfriend Holden...who, just before getting on the plane, tells her that he wants to open up their relationship to other people. (We get the sense that this sort of thing happens to Rory all the time - she misreads signals, dives into everything headfirst, and gets hurt all the time by everything before bouncing off into something totally different after a big emotional scene.)

So Rory impulsively doesn't go to Australia, begs Angela to let her stay in the walk-in closet of their apartment - they've sublet her room to a guy named Guy for the summer - sells off most of her stuff, and then falls for Guy and decides to follow him into his new Interdisciplinary Magick program. (Every time Rory does something, you can assume the word "impulsively" is there. The narrative doesn't say she always does this about a boy, but the two cases we see here both fit that pattern.)

Meanwhile, Angela, in a somewhat more low-key manner, is one of six interns working for Dr. Rosenberg (Rory's mother, again), who is demanding and exacting and apparently has not one iota of human feeling for her employees or family.

They both crash, of course. Angela because she's been doing the boiling-frog thing, with pressure building up bit by bit probably since she was five, and she just cracks. Rory because that's what she always does: throws herself into something but only half-asses it, misunderstands other people and doesn't say what she wants or needs, and then collapses into an emotional wreck when it inevitably breaks apart. 

They yell at each other, they break their friendship...but only briefly, because it's that kind of story. They also have familiars - I think everyone in this world does, but the familiars are pretty independent and seem to wander off for weeks at a time - who kibitz on their relationship, squabble with each other, and help to mend everything in the end.

It's a story I've seen many times before - you probably have, too. One part quarter-life crisis, one part best friends assuming too much of their relationship. Goldstein and Jordan tell it well, and their quirky, specific world adds a lot of depth and intertest to what could otherwise be a pretty general and bland story. Rory would be deeply annoying in most stories; she's the kind of person who goes out of her way to step on every damn rake on the ground, over and over again.

In the end, they both move on to things that we think are good for them - at least, we hope so, and it is the end, so we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. It's a solid ending, open and forward-looking. I don't know if we'll get another story by Goldstein and Jordan set in a world of industrialized magic, but...if we got two, surely there's no reason there couldn't be three?

Better Things: A Nail Won't Fix a Broken Heart

"Better Things" 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 or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

The Low and Sweet Orchestra was a supergroup, at least by my definition: a bunch of musicians who had other bands, and were reasonably successful in them, but they came together to do this project. And, like so many supergroups, they made one really good record and then disappeared entirely.

The record was 1996's Goodbye to All That. And, in a lineup of great songs, the one I want to praise the most is what was their single: A Nail Won't Fix a Broken Heart.

Wish we were dyin' holdin' hands
Alone just me and you
That's sad but it's true.

It's a breakup song, one of the purer ones. There's no animosity, no anger, no explanations, no history. It's just about the singer, telling us purely about his love and how it's gone forever. We don't even know for sure who initiated the breakup, though it's unlikely it was this guy - he's still smitten.

The instrumentation is gorgeous, in a folky way - the band was largely made up of members of the Pogues, backing the guy I knew as singer of Thelonious Monster - and it's one of those almost-perfect pop singles that sounds entirely like itself and nothing else.

And the title could be a saying you just never managed to hear before, something your grandmother might have said when you were young. (Maybe it was, maybe it is. It wouldn't surprise me.)

Maybe you'll find yourself saying it someday, giving advice or ruefully reminiscing. "A nail won't fix a broken heart, you know."

Quote of the Week: How The Other Half Lives

As I stood in my lonely bedroom at the hotel, trying to tie my white tie myself, it struck me for the first time that there must be whole squads of chappies in the world who had to get along without a man to look after them. I'd always thought of Jeeves as a kind of natural phenomenon; but, by Jove! of course, when you come to think of it, there must be quite a lot of fellows who have to press their clothes themselves, and haven't got anybody to bring them tea in the morning, and so on. It was rather a solemn thought, don't you know. I mean to say, ever since then I've been able to appreciate the frightful privations the poor have to stick.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, "The Aunt and the Sluggard," p.172 in My Man Jeeves

My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

My Man Jeeves is the first-published collection of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories - in fact, it's so early (1919) that half of the eight stories in it aren't actually about Jeeves and Wooster, but feature a proto-Bertie character named Reggie Pepper.

It is also, along with all of the material in it, solidly in the public domain. So although I read the Overlook Collector's Wodehouse edition from 2006 - I'm still planning to gather all of them, even though the first two or three dozen I bought and read and put lovingly on a shelf were destroyed by a flood in 2011 - this book, and some variations on it, are widely available in other forms.

For example, I recently read a still short but substantially longer book, Enter Jeeves, that contains fifteen stories - almost twice as many as My Man Jeeves - including all seven Reggie Pepper tales and the first eight Jeeves.

The two books have slightly different titles and texts for a few of those stories - I believe this is the difference between American and British texts; I noted that Enter Jeeves seems to use mostly American texts but is not entirely consistent - which can be slightly confusing. But everything in My Man Jeeves is in Enter Jeeves, though slightly differently presented.

So I can recommend either book, but definitely not both of them. Enter is probably cheaper, and definitely longer. My Man is more "authentic," and was assembled by the young Wodehouse himself, if that matters. I was going to recommend The World of Jeeves as an even better choice for Jeeves stories - larger, more comprehensive, with a jaunty cover - but I see it's firmly out of print and rather pricey these days, so it's no longer as convenient as it was when I found it in the early Nineties. There's probably some similar book out there: the idea of an omnibus of all the Jeeves short stories is an obvious one, so I imagine someone has done it recently.

Anyway, the Jeeves stories are among the best humorous fiction by anyone anywhere. The first few are a bit more sartorially-focused than the best of the series, but still energetic and full of Bertie's great voice. The Reggie Pepper stories are perhaps one step down from that, but still solidly amusing Wodehouse, and fascinating as an object lesson of how a writer works his way into the best version of an idea.

Fortune & Glory: The Musical by Brian Michael Bendis & Bill Walko

Brian Michael Bendis's Hollywood memoir-in-comics Fortune & Glory was republished about two years ago, for no obvious anniversary- or thematically-related reason. At the time, I thought it was just a random new edition, but now it's clear that it was setting up for what we might as well call a sequel.

Fortune & Glory: The Musical was published at the end of January - I don't think it was serialized first, which is a little unusual for a book written by a guy like Bendis and published by an outfit like Dark Horse - and it tells a different story of a younger Bendis getting pulled into writing stuff for other creative media. While the first F&G centered on trying to turn his creator-owned early noir GNs into movies - Spoiler alert! it didn't quite happen, though Bendis got contacts and contracts and some income for a few years and other things eventually did get made - this second one is about one project that we readers might not have known Bendis was ever part of.

The famously...um, troubled Broadway musical of the early Teens, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark [1], had a book attributed to director Julie Taymor, playwright Glenn Berger, and (after a hasty rewrite during previews) playwright and comics scripter Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. But it was no secret that other writers, including several comics writers, had been part of the project earlier. And Bendis was one of them, having been pulled in by Marvel head Avi Arad in 2004 to meet with Taymor and, everyone hoped, write the book of this musical.

(The music and lyrics were always going to be by Bono and The Edge of U2, and they were.)

The Musical is written by Bendis and features him as the main character, with roughly the same character design as the Bendis-drawn original F&G. But this time the art is by Bill Walko, with colors by Wes Dzioba and letters by Joshua Reed. It is the story of his involvement with Turn Off the Dark - which is actually pretty short and minor - as well as loosely-related material about his youth and the usual how-I-got-into-comics stuff.

Bluntly, Bendis took a couple of meetings with Taymor (one by phone, one after being flown down to LA), where he was impressed by her energy and passion but reacted really badly to two major pieces of her vision. First, that the musical should end, like a comic book, with a big "To Be Continued!" message - but he thought he could finesse that. Second, and more seriously, that she wanted to change Spider-Man's origin from the standard radioactive spider-bite, so that instead Peter Parker got his powers by praying to the Greek goddess Arachne.

(That stayed in the final work, more or less, so it clearly was a deal-breaker for Taymor. I'm more surprised that Marvel allowed it; they could have fired her instead and gone with another director. But I suppose this was post-bankruptcy, pre-Iron Man Marvel, a company more willing to take a crazy chance on someone who was well-known and successful in her area of expertise.)

So Bendis wrote up a treatment, and had another meeting to pitch it. He did not include the Arachne origin, and got only about that far into the pitch before Taymor blew up, and Bendis's involvement in the project quietly ended. (Bendis thought the project ended, and was surprised when the musical popped back up a few years later.)

That, as I hinted above, is only one small thread in The Musical - maybe 15% of the pages at most. It's not a long story, and not a lot happens. Most of the book is flashbacks to Young Bendis, dewy-eyed and obsessed with comics, bugging people like Walt Simonson and making crappy comics as a teenager and, eventually, forging an indy self-published crime-comics career in his twenties.

I don't know if anyone will come to The Musical for that story, but, if you're a Bendis fan, you'll probably enjoy it. It's the standard story of a lot of fans-turned-pro, and Bendis tells it with a lot of self-awareness and humor. Walko brings a slightly cartoony, caricatured line that adds energy and big facial expressions to pages with lots of captions and dialogue.

The Musical does not provide much background on Turn Off the Dark; Bendis was only involved briefly and inconclusively several years before it actually happened. But it's an amusing "creative people are obsessive weirdoes with quick tempers" story, and the rest of the material in the book is at least loosely and vaguely connected to that story.

[1] I actually saw Turn Off the Dark on Broadway with my two kids. Sadly, I saw it after the retool, when it was just kooky and not full-on insane. I  didn't write about it at the time, and that was fifteen years ago, so all I have are vague memories. It was very technically impressive and full of excellent on-stage talent doing impressive things, but the story was...well, I don't want to say "a confused mess," since that would be insulting, but it wasn't the most clear and understandable thing I've ever seen.

Down There by David Goodis

I read a cluster of David Goodis novels back in the 1990s, in the striking Black Lizard editions - probably coming to him from Jim Thompson, like so many other readers for the past three generations. Looking at this blog, I don't seem to have read any Goodis over the past twenty years - that's the way a reading life can flow: you read "everything" of someone, get to the end of it, and put it down for a while.

But maybe you always come back, eventually.

Down There is probably Goodis's most famous novel, because it was adapted into Francois Truffaut's film Shoot the Piano Player - which title the novel has had, more often than the original, ever since. And it was included in the Library of America book Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, alongside books by Thomson and Chester Himes and Charles Willeford and Patricia Highsmith. I've been going through that omnibus, and so it was Goodis time again.

Eddie is the piano player in a Philadelphia dive bar, Harriet's Hut, sometime in the mid-50s. He's quiet, withdrawn, meek - like he's given up on life, just keeping his head down and getting through each day, with no desires or dreams. But one day his brother Turley shows up after three years with no contact, on the run from two thugs, and begs for Eddie to help him, to hide him. Eddie doesn't do what Turley asks, but he does intervene when the two thugs arrive, giving Turley a little time to run away.

And that starts to make his small, constrained life start to come apart. The new waitress at the Hut, Lena, wonders about this changed Eddie. The bouncer, an ex-wrestler named Wally who has been harassing Lena despite being common-law married to Harriet, the bar owner and tender, also wonders what's going on.

And then there's those two thugs, who know Eddie's connected to Turley somehow - and soon learn how. Turley and Eddie's other brother are criminals, though we don't learn the details of this particular operation until nearly the end of the novel. But we do know they have the old family home - more of a hide-out, as everyone keeps saying - out in the South Jersey barrens, and that's where the thugs want Eddie to guide them. They want to "talk" to Turley, of course.

We readers think Turley might even survive that conversation, at least early in the novel.

Eddie used to be someone else, of course - no one is born a bottom-tier barroom piano player - and we learn those details, of his upbringing in that hide-out house with two wild and criminal older brothers, how he got out, his classical-music career and marriage, what happened after that, and how he ended up at the Hut.

This is a noir novel, so Eddie's past is tragic and his future is constrained. He's broken and damaged, though it looks for a while like he might have the skills he needs to get through this and end up on the other side with Lena. But, again, it's noir. Happy endings aren't in the cards.

Goodis tells the story through Eddie's eyes, after a quick opening sequence following Turley. His thinking is contingent, complicated, twisted, all options that he can't see himself taking and memories he doesn't want to remember. He's often thinking like he wants to convince himself of something, or keep himself settled in his current life, his current way of thinking - not return to any of the men he used to be in the past. But the hero of any noir novel doesn't get to choose what happens to him, or how he reacts to it, or even whether he'll make it out the other end.

Sharky Malarkey: A Sketchshark Collection by Megan Nicole Dong

As far as I can tell, this 2018 book is the only collection of the "Sketchshark" comic - more than that, it's creator Megan Nicole Dong's only book to date, and "Sketchshark" was the title of her (long-abandoned) Blogspot site and maybe the original title of the (only mildly abandoned) related Tumblr, which now uses the book's title.

On the other hand, she's got a day-job in animation as a director and storyboard artist (including what looks like three shows this decade, one upcoming for 2027), which probably takes most of her artistic energy and drawing time the last bunch of years.

Sharky Malarkey feels like one of those "throw in everything to fill up a book" collections, divided into chapters with somewhat different kinds of cartoons. There's a twenty-page introduction, which I think was new for the book, in which the creator is picked up for a rideshare by her shark character (Bruce), incorporating what may have been a few separate individual strips about Dong's life and cat. That's the only major autobio material; Dong doesn't seem to be the kind of creator who wants to talk about herself.

The first chapter, Malarky, has a bunch of general cartoons  - people on phones, anxiety issues, other life issues and relatable content, and a bunch of comics about butts. (Millennial cartoonists cartoon as much about butts as Boomer-era cartoonists did about tits - though the millennials are more gender-balanced, both the cartoonists and the butts they draw.)

Then we get the Bruce-centric chapter, There's a Shark in Los Angeles. Bruce is shallow, self-obsessed, and a minor celebrity (at least in his own head). The fact that he is in Los Angeles is definitely not random, and I wouldn't be surprised if Dong started doing this character when she began looking for work in Hollywood. (The book includes some pieces - older, I assume - in which the main character is still in art school, too.)

Next up is Ladythings, which somewhat heads back to the general humor of the first chapter - but focused on physical or cultural issues that are female-coded. (Often in weird ways, because Dong is a cartoonist and they have goofy ideas; there's a short sequence about prehensile boobs, for example.)

Then comes The Animal + Plants Channel, which is pretty random. For most cartoonists, a chapter about animals would imply pets - dogs and/or cats, depending - but Dong's work is wilder than that, with a lot of squirrels and horses, plus whales and a few returns of Bruce. And, yes, there are strips about plants as well.

Fifth is A Toad Makes New Friends in the Forest, which starts out as a picture-book-style story and morphs over into more traditional comics as it goes. It's also an unsubtle racial allegory, and runs into the final section, Some Sort of End, in which Bruce returns for one last time to lead the big kids-movie all-singing, all-dancing ending. (Dong spent most of the first decade of her career making animation for kids - I'm not sure she's entirely moved beyond that now - and is deeply familiar with the story beats and particular bits of laziness of that genre.)

Dong has an organic, appealing style, with bright colors enclosed by confident black lines all basically the same weight. And her humor is quirky and specific - the jokes and ideas and setups in Sharky Malarkey aren't derivative, or ever obvious. It would be nice if she had time and energy and enthusiasm to make more comics like this, since her work is so distinctive, but it looks like animation has been taking her creative energy since the book came out - and probably paying much better. But time is long and Hollywood is fickle; who knows what will happen next? Maybe she'll make more cartoons and be a massive success at something unexpected. 

Better Things: Cuckoo

"Better Things" 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 or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

My "rules" for these song-series have so far said each artist gets only one song. It makes me focus, and keeps me from being self-indulgent in one specific way. But, like any rule, it can be gamed - there can be bands that change names, or frontpeople who go solo, and so on.

So I had a one-word-title song from Kristin Hersch's band Throwing Muses last year: Sinkhole. For this year, I have a one-word-title song from Hersch's solo career, which I am claiming is something entirely different.

This week, my song is the short, folky, one-woman-and-her-guitar song Cuckoo, from Hersch's 1992 record Hips and Makers.

Oh the cuckoo she's a pretty bird
She wobbles when she flies
She don't ever holler cuckoo
Till the fourth day of July

I say "folky," but I think this is an actual, authentic, old folk song, the kind where we don't actually know who originally wrote it. And so I'm not going to try to explicate the meaning - it's an old song about a bird, and has probably been meant as symbolic in a dozen different ways by a dozen different singers over the past century or so. I'll just leave it here: a short, quirky song performed well, to mean whatever you think it means today.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of May 3, 2025

My eye doctor used to be really convenient. (I promise this is relevant.) I started seeing her about twenty years ago, when I worked at Bookspan. One quick subway ride downtown - really easy. Then we moved to Madison Square, and it was even easier: just a walk. From Wiley's Hoboken offices, just a hop on the PATH - the office was down the street from the 14th Street stop.

Thomson Reuters brought me back into the city, and the subway ride was a bit longer, but still pretty straightforward. Then I was back in Hoboken briefly, and the PATH hadn't moved.

But then I was declared full-time work-from-home - my office was closed, which was OK, since I was only there a few days a month anyway - and suddenly my eye doctor is at the other end of a long train or bus ride.

So my annual checkup now needs to take up its own day, basically, and I try to take at least a little advantage of being back in the city on that day. This time, I hit the Strand - a bookstore you may have heard of - which is right in that neighborhood. And here's what I found:

Transcription - a 2018 standalone novel by Kate Atkinson. I've been reading her "Jackson Brodie" mystery series - well, they're not exactly mysteries, and it's not a traditional series, but you know what I mean - and I recently decided I really need to read all of her books. (And started that project with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a few months ago.) I'm actually reading another Brodie novel right now. But this book is a historical novel, about spies during WWII - or, I think, about one young woman who gets a low-level job at MI5 - and the years soon after.

The Keep is the novel Jennifer Egan wrote just before her big breakout award winner, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I think is still the only book of hers I've read. And that was ten-plus years ago. So I stopped at the shelf with her books on it, poked through them a bit, and picked out this one, which is about two cousins trying to renovate a medieval castle and which may have odd elements (thriller or supernatural or both or neither) in it.

Nightmare Alley is a1946 noir novel by William Lindsay Gresham that I thought I might already have in one format in the house, but I bought it anyway. Reader: I do have this novel about carnies and freaks in a Library of America omnibus, but I guess the good news is that now I have double the chance to read it.

The Midnight Examiner is a 1989 novel by William Kotzwinkle about tabloid journalism that I think I've had on my "look-for-it" list since then. (I may have had a copy of the paperback before my flood, but I'm pretty sure I never read it.) Kotzwinkle is an odd, quirky writer who was genre-adjacent for a lot of his career - he won a World Fantasy Award; he was a bestseller with two books based on the E.T. movie - and this has always sounded like my find of thing.

In the Walled City is a collection of stories by Stewart O'Nan, whose novels I've been reading more slowly than they deserve. In the traditional manner of literary writers, it was his first book - before the novels - and I don't think he's written short fiction since.

Cluny Brown is a novel by Margery Sharp from 1944; I only know Sharp from the "Rescuers" books for children, which I read as a child. But I saw some appreciation or other of her adult novels a few years back - maybe when this and a clutch of others were republished; the cover design is very familiar. This one was, I think, one of her most popular: the story of a parlor-maid just before the war.

Thurber: Writings & Drawings is a big Library of America collection of, yes, the writings and drawings of James Thurber. I would have preferred a big Thurber omnibus that had complete books, rather than the excerpts this mostly traffics in, but it's what was available, and a great big wodge of Thurber is a great big wodge of Thurber.

Last is Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. I just read a travel book by Waugh, which reminded me I read his novels back in the '90s (except Decline and Fall) and maybe it's time to hit a few of them. This one, you might know, is about a journalist, and seems to be based on much of the material that he also wrote that travel book about - so I hope to get to it soon enough to compare them. 

Books Read: April 2025

This is the monthly index of the blog, basically - it exists to make the search function more useful (for me, I think) and possibly less useful (for you, assuming you are not me, as you search for something and find both an index and the thing itself).

More prosaically, it's the list of what I read, since Antick Musings long ago turned into a book blog. Links get added later, once the posts go live.

Here's what I read in April:

Michael Avon Oeming, William of Newbury (4/5, digital)

Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour (4/5, digital)

Paul Milo, Your Flying Car Awaits (4/6)

Wulff & Morgenthaler, WuMo: Something Is Wrong (4/12, digital)

Thomas McGuane, Something To Be Desired (4/13)

Craig Thompson, Ginseng Roots (4/14, digital proof)

Matthew Klickstein & Rick Geary, Daisy Goes to the Moon (4/19, digital)

John McNamee, Just Act Normal (4/20, digital)

Jack Vance, The Dirdir (4/20, in Planet of Adventure)

Greg & Fake, Santos Sisters, Vol. 1 (4/26, digital)

Kayla E., Precious Rubbish (4/27, digital)

Tim Glynne-Jones, compiler, Witty Comebacks (4/27)

Daria Tessler, Cult of the Ibis (4/28, digital)

Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun (4/28)

Look for a similar post in about a month, covering the stuff I'm reading in May.

Quote of the Week: Natural Enemies

Every actor has a natural animosity toward every other actor, present or absent, living or dead. Most Hollywood directors did not understand that, any more than they understood why an actor might be tempted to withhold the rapt devotion to the master which they considered essential to their position of command.

 - Louise Brooks, "Pabst and Lulu," p.97 in Lulu in Hollywood

Cloud Hotel by Julian Hanshaw

This is not a true story. But its main character is a version of the author and it's based on something that happened to him as a boy - so it's not not a true story, either.

One other thing: it does take place largely in a hotel, which is up in the clouds. There's no sign anywhere naming it Cloud Hotel, no management that could make that an official name. I don't think anyone even calls it that during the book. It's more of a tag, or a description, that an proper name.

I think Julian Hanshaw usually, or maybe just often, works with SFF elements in his stories - maybe he'd call them surreal or slipstream or some other term, but both this and his most recent book, Space Junk, feature elements outside of normal life - science fictional in that case, fantastic in this one. But he's made a half-dozen books I haven't seen yet, so I'll leave that as a "maybe" for now: a creator's work is often more complex and distinctive than it may seem from one or two books.

Cloud Hotel was Hanshaw's fifth book (I think; he did some collaborative works and a collection of short stories, so there could be arguments about how to count), published in 2018. It's set during a few scattered days in the spring of 1981, in and around a town in Hertfordshire, England. (For my fellow Americans: one of the Home Counties, immediately north of London.)

The main character is a boy, about twelve, who says his name is Remco - cutting off another name that he almost said, starting with "Jul." Again, he's not exactly the author, but we can assume his name is really Julian. He's riding bikes in the woods, with his friend Luc. We learn, in more detail later, that kids have gone missing in those woods regularly - not all the time, not lots and lots of them, but a steady stream of kids, one at a time over what seems to be many years, some of whom later reappear and some of whom don't. A blue light surrounds him while Luc is a short distance away, lifts him up - the traditional UFO abduction thing.

Remco finds himself in that hotel up in the sky. It's slightly shabby but fully appointed - arcade games that work, rooms for anyone living there, food that just appears, vending machines always fully stocked, a big library with mysterious books related to the people there, a pool, and more. He's met by the two other kids in that hotel at the moment - Philip and Emma.

It's one of those places where things happen certain ways, and the people just know it - or, perhaps, tell each other, as one enters and another leaves. There's a pay telephone in the lobby. It rings, and it rings for a specific person. They know, instinctively, who it is ringing for. When it rings for you, you answer the phone, have a short conversation with someone, and then go through the doors next to the phone, never to return.

The phone is ringing when Remco arrives. It's ringing for him. He refuses to answer it: he wants to stay. He just got there. He rips a piece of wallpaper off the wall - this is important somehow, maybe symbolically, but Hanshaw never explains it - falls to the floor, and seems to pass out.

He wakes up back in Hertfordshire, a day later. His grandfather, who may know or understand the Cloud Hotel better than most, or may just be a conspiracy theorist, finds him, and brings him back home.

Over the next couple of months, Remco travels repeatedly to Cloud Hotel - pretty much at will, I think. It seems like his body is still on the ground as well, though - as if, to observers, that he just falls asleep. Time may also not flow at the same rate in the two places. Philip gets a phone call and leaves, but Emma doesn't. Emma has been there a long time - the longest in memory.

And something is going wrong with Cloud Hotel, first slowly and then swiftly. It's probably because Remco refuses the phone call, or maybe that's just one element. But Remco is sure Emma's body is somewhere on the ground, and that he has to find and save her. He investigates the books in the library, both the ones with his name and Emma's, for clues. He's also diffident, avoiding answering questions from Emma and his parents and his friends and anyone else - as if he's not sure what he's doing, or why, or just that he doesn't want to or can't put it into words. The same way he doesn't give Emma his real name, I suppose.

Other things happen: life goes on in the regular world, and things decay and break up in the Cloud Hotel. Remco does go from just wanting to explore and spend time in the hotel to wanting to save Emma - realizing her body must be somewhere in those woods.

It all comes to a head in the end. Remco, finally, does what he has to do, and we have basically the happy ending we expected.

We still don't know what the Hotel is. We don't know what they hear on the phone, who or what speaks to them. Something greater than natural, clearly - but what?

Cloud Hotel is a book of mood and atmosphere. Hanshaw draws people in a quirky way, often blocky - Remco has huge black squares around his eyes, for example - making this a distinctive, specific world, one that does not look like what we expect to match the ways it doesn't work like we expect. It's resonant while still being distant, as if the message is coming from a long way away, garbled by static on the line or twisted by time.

Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks

I don't want to pretend to give advice to someone dead for forty years. That's the temptation with anyone's memoirs: it's so easy to see other people's mistakes, and point them out in clever or cruel ways, to show how they could have had much better, more fulfilling lives, if only they'd known to do...whatever.

Louise Brooks was a star in early Hollywood. She made two dozen movies, mostly from 1925-1931, including a couple considered major classics, but her career faltered around the time of the transition to talkies and she went on to a long life doing other things. She was born in 1906, in Kansas, and had a short career in New York as a dancer and actress on Broadway and with the Denishawn company even before Hollywood; she wasn't even twenty when she first starred in a movie. And she lived to 1985, with her later years in Rochester, New York, mostly because there was a film archive there she became associated with.

Starting in the late 1950s, she wrote a series of essays for various film magazines around the world, seven of which were collected in a 1982 book, Lulu in Hollywood. An expanded edition of Lulu came out in 2000, including an eighth Brooks essay, "Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs," and replacing the original introduction by The New Yorker's William Shawn with a 1979 Kenneth Tynan profile of Brooks from the New Yorker, "The Girl in the Black Helmet." Both editions also include Brooks' filmography and an afterword by German film historian Lotte H. Eisner; this one has two extensive sections of black-and-white photos as well. (I imagine the 1982 book had some photos - possibly the same ones, possibly fewer, possibly more.)

Lulu, especially this Expanded Edition, is an assemblage - it was not conceived as a single thing, and it was assembled when, reading between the lines, Brooks was deteriorating and not able to do any editorial work on the individual essays or the collection. So Tynan's introduction tells us things that are in the essays - including extensive direct quotes - and the essays themselves overlap a bit as well.

The reaction to the essays and then the book seems to have been largely astonishment, that a gorgeous girl who ran away from Kansas to be a dancer in her early teens was actually quite intelligent and incisive, a keen observer with a definite point of view and complicated motivations that she somewhat understood and somewhat was willing to explain. It was the old surprise that the beautiful can contribute anything other than their beauty; I suppose the rest of us think they've already been blessed once and getting any more than that is really not fair.

But Brooks was smart, and writes interestingly, if somewhat fragmentarily, about her youth and people she knew (W.C Fields, Humphrey Bogart, Marion Davies' niece) and some movies she made in New York and Hollywood and Berlin.

Again, there are a few major moments in her career - when she was offered initial contracts by two studios and chose the one a mogul advised her against, when she refused to come back and record dialogue for a movie retroactively turned into a talkie, and a couple of others - that an outside observer a century later thinks were not the best choices, and that Brooks might even have known that at the time. But young people will do impulsive things, and Brooks is clear-eyed about how young and impulsive she was - and, even more, about the specific things that led her to make those decisions. We might wish she had done otherwise - it could have led to a longer career, which I think we all would have wanted - but the past is the past. 

Lulu in Hollywood is interesting but not definitive, an assemblage rather than a work created as a single thing, a mosaic (or a collection of small, semi-disconnected mosaics) rather than a portrait. It's got some good insights, and Brooks was a fascinating character, so I do recommend it for anyone interested in the era.