May 28, 2012

Charlie Chan in Rio (1941)

By Noah Stewart

I have to admit, I love almost all the Charlie Chan movies.  Certainly they vary in complexity and difficulty, and the occasional one (mostly from among the later ones with Roland Winters) doesn’t make very much sense. But I enjoy the character and the situations in which he finds himself.

Charlie Chan in Rio, a 1941 entry in the long series is, I’ve always thought, a particularly good one. Chan (Sidney Toler) is accompanied by number two son Jimmy (Victor Sen Yung) to Rio as he visits Harold Huber, whose clones are apparently police officials everywhere from Monte Carlo to Rio.  Singer Lola Dean  does a musical turn on a nightclub stage, gets engaged to a wealthy young man, then visits a sinister hypnotist, then invites all her frenemies back to her home to celebrate and to provide plenty of suspects when she turns up dead.  It all goes back to Lola’s boyfriend’s murder in Honolulu, which is how Charlie Chan comes in — and, indeed, this is a remake of 1931′s The Black Camel, which takes place on Honolulu and goes back to a murder case in Boston.

They find Lola laid out on the floor with an array of clues helpfully provided, neatly arrayed to one side.  The plot itself is quite intelligent and tricky, and you won’t be solving this one unless you keep a sharp eye on the characters’ comings and goings from the moment they arrive at Lola’s mansion.  And if you think the butler did it — sorry, no, he’s victim #2.  Mary Beth Hughes is particularly good as a drunken socialite, and Iris Wong is charming in a small role as a Chinese maid with whom Jimmy Chan falls in instant lust.  Kay Linaker (in blue, bending over Lola’s body), as Lola’s assistant, is so omnipresent that she should have had higher billing, and is quite convincing when she delivers her lines with an air of amused hyper-confidence.  Victor Jory is so wonderfully sinister as the mysterious hypnotist that he makes the rest of the suspects look bland every time he’s on screen.

I have to admit that the ending of this is a bit weak, and the film stops every once in a while for either a musical number or a bit of  ”comic” racist/sexist byplay between Jimmy and the maid.  But part of the charm of these old films is their attempt to leaven the action with levity, however mishandled (the later Chan films are responsible for bringing Mantan Moreland to prominence, which set race relations back ten years, and one early one, Charlie Chan in Egypt, features Stepin Fetchit, about whose performance the less said the better).  Here, there are no comic Negroes and Harold Huber keeps the eye-rolls to a minimum.  And one or two of the situations are actually funny.

It’s reasonable to assume that this high-concept film got greenlit easily (It’s a remake, we’ve already got the script, and this will cash in on the samba craze!)  Frankly, the samba part of it won’t be of much interest to a modern audience, whereas contemporaneous Americans were being encouraged to support South American culture.  And the central premise of hypnosis assisted by drugs is just unworkably silly.  But as both a piece of filmic history and an interesting mystery, it’s a diverting way to while away an hour.  And as the big running gag at the end — Jimmy Chan gets drafted!!  Which must have been hilarious in 1941, I guess, but the reactions to which are just incomprehensible to the modern viewer.  But everyone laughs, and the movie ends, and then they play a hot-cha-cha samba over the closing credits!!  Just the thing to burn the theme song into your brain and let you forget the plot immediately.

I’d recommend this one over a number of contemporaneous Chans, but there are better ones.  I’ve come across my archives of the old Chan films and I’ll be reviewing them sporadically here.

 

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May 24, 2012

My least favourite detective fiction writers (Part 1)

By Noah Stewart

“I finally felt that I was unpacking large crates by swallowing the excelsior in order to find at the bottom a few bent and rusty nails.”
Edmund Wilson, “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” The New Yorker, October 14, 1944

And so here are a few bent and rusty nails.  I will add that I have been asked privately for my comments as to which mystery writers I have not enjoyed, and I have been persuaded to give my opinion.  As always, if you find some merit in the work of these authors which I have been unable to share, more power to you.  That’s why opinions are like assholes — everyone has one, and most of them stink.

In my former position behind the counter of a murder-mystery bookstore, I have to admit that I was enthusiastic about very nearly every mystery ever written.  I could always find some virtue to recommend to an aficionado, even if I didn’t share that person’s interest.  For instance, I am not a fan of cats, nor of aimless plot-free meanderings into cutesy-poo territory where murder is treated as something that happens offstage and cats are both psychic and the best detectives in the book, but I would cheerfully recommend Lilian Jackson Braun’s endless series of “The Cat Who…” novels to a certain type of bright-eyed middle-aged woman customer who would quail at any type of literature that was, shall I say, more intellectually demanding.

Yet it is known, and self-confessed to boot, that I am particularly fond of the antique form of the Golden Age puzzle mystery.  And I also confess that it is obvious that this is not a demanding genre in the sense of appreciating the subtleties of characterization or the intricacies of how the theme links to the action.  The intellectual activity is in the solution of a puzzle and this makes it, as Edmond Wilson puts it, “a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking”.

To my mind, in order to be considered something more worthwhile than a crossword puzzle, a Golden Age puzzle mystery has to have something extra — a spark, if you will, of originality, of freshness, of a joie de vivre that communicates itself to the reader as sub-text.  Otherwise, as I have elsewhere quoted Mrs. Q. E. Leavis writing about the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers, they “present the appearance of intellectual activity to people who would very much dislike such activity if they were forced to undergo it.”  And that’s why, in general, I find what’s known as the Humdrum School to be less worthwhile than other efforts of the period.  Yes, Freeman Wills Crofts pioneered a certain kind of police procedural and there is a certain charm in the inexorable way that the detective’s efforts close the net around the obviously guilty party, once the elaborately faked alibi has been broken.  But I have to confess that Crofts’ work is the kind of book that will end up half-read on my bedside table for months while I read something, anything, else.  There, I’ve said it.  Freeman Wills Crofts is one of the most boring authors EVER, closely followed by E. R. Punshon (all but one) and J. Jefferson Farjeon (all but a couple).  Crofts’ magnum opus, The Cask, once you have negotiated the mild surprise of the opening chapters, is like overdosing on Valium.

But then, the Humdrum School seemingly found a virtue in being exquisitely boring, and I have to admit that that sort of literature has its adherents.  Notably, Raymond Chandler was a big fan of Crofts, singling out his novels for praise because “they were unpretentious and because their mysteries were rooted in hard facts and not in false motivations cooked up for the purpose of mystifying a reader.” (http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.ca/2011/12/amateur-detective-just-wont-do-raymond_19.html)  So although I find the Humdrums relatively unreadable, I can nevertheless appreciate the motivations which produced them and the kind of person who is pleased by them.

These criteria are not met by the first writer on my shit list — Gladys Mitchell.

Gladys Mitchell

For the unfamiliar, Mitchell wrote 66 detective novels featuring Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, a psychoanalyst.  The first novel, Speedy Death, brought her to the public’s attention in 1929, and for the life of me I can only think the public must have been desperate.  The story begins in the traditional country-house mystery fashion; a house-party of the British upper classes is assembled and finds that one of the weekend’s lions, the celebrated explorer Everard Mountjoy, is missing.  A second-floor bathroom soon reveals Mountjoy, drowned in a bathtub — except that Mountjoy is clearly a woman.

Now, you may think this shows promise of being precisely the kind of novel I mentioned above, one that has “something extra”.  Eonism was not a staple of detective fiction until at least after the earliest work of Ruth Rendell and I can imagine that the reader of 1929 found this concept to be enormously titillating and fascinating. Which is why it is incredibly annoying that Mitchell does absolutely nothing with it. This is a person who got herself engaged to the daughter of the house at a time when same-sex marriage was not only illegal but completely unthinkable. The daughter of the house is said to be entirely ignorant of the true gender of her fiance and the idea that she might have been — oh, I don’t know, miffed? chagrined? — to find that she was about to marry a woman is left lying in the dust.  Instead, Dr. Bradley goes to great lengths to find some other reason why Mountjoy might have been murdered.  We learn essentially nothing about what might have driven this woman to eonism; the reader is free to speculate, certainly, but nobody else really bothers. It’s as if everyone concerned has a tacit understanding that although something outrageous has happened, it has absolutely nothing to do with the murder.

I have to say that the prevailing literary mores of the time would have prevented a description of the naked body in the bathtub, enabling the reader to figure out just what the hell was so shocking.  Indeed, Dorothy L. Sayers’s first novel, Whose Body?, suffers from the same problem in that it is impossible for anyone to say out loud that the body of the victim is circumcised and thus is probably of Jewish origin.  I understand that.  But Mitchell’s prose is so obfuscatory and so oblique that it is impossible to be sure that we have the correct information about what the hell is going on.  I recall years ago reading this novel and thinking that it was possible someone was lying — nobody had actually said, “Okay, the body is missing its penis and seems to have a vagina,” and I went off into long trains of thought about how it was possible for there to be an unmentioned opposite-sex twin, and the real male Mountjoy was hiding somewhere, yada yada.  All useless.  And all could have been obviated by the prose having actually been as clear as was possible for the time.  I admit this is only an issue for this novel in particular, but I have to say that my memory of as many of the 66 novels as I’ve read is that there is the same maddening lack of attention to detail.  You never get as much information as you want or need in order to have a chance to properly address the puzzle aspect of the story.

Anyway.  Mitchell’s mysteries suffer from the same issues as Sayers’s with respect to the linguistic depiction of members of the “lower classes” — she always has comic rustics tugging at their metaphoric forelocks, and maids and other servants are always idiots.  The plots are usually dull and it almost seems as if no one really cares whodunit, things just plod along until Mrs. Bradley comes up with an answer and astounds everyone, at which point everyone goes back to canoodling among the aspidistras or collecting stamps, or whatever the upper classes did with their lives of leisure.

I think my primary reason for disliking these novels — and it is indeed dislike, it’s not merely that I know that others appreciate these novels more than I am capable of — is the character of Mrs. Bradley herself.  She is depicted as being an extremely ugly woman, a fact which was obviously overlooked by the producers of a short-lived television series starring the glamorous Diana Rigg, who looks like a crocodile and cackles like a shrew.  She is also the possessor of a maddening speech pattern that, on film, would be accompanied by winks and grimaces to indicate the ironic nature of the utterances but, in print, leaves the reader frequently baffled as to whether she is trying to be serious or funny.  Mrs. Bradley hides things from the reader for no really good reason other than it helps Mitchell to keep the plot afloat for another few chapters.  Her moral boundaries are so lax that the astute reader is never really sure that she is a reliable narrator because it is occasionally mentioned that she herself has committed a couple of murders.  How can you believe what she has to say about any murder when she might be trying to hide her own involvement?  All things considered, Mrs. Bradley is too unpleasant and contrived in order to sustain a single novel, let alone 66 of the damn things.

I could go on.  Mitchell has a maddeningly poor command of writing dialogue and it is frequently unclear, especially in the later books, just who the hell is talking.  Her descriptions of surroundings are impoverished and it’s often like she is saying, “This is a country house, you fill in the details, you know the routine.”  She drags in the occult and spooky without any real intent of making it crucial to the plot, and the reader is entirely aware that s/he is being distracted from the main plot by a writer who is incapable of making anything suspenseful out of the occult and spooky events.  All the male characters are pretty much the same, and all the female characters are pretty much the same, from book to book.  Mrs. Bradley has an enormous array of convenient relatives who pop in and out, providing information and back story as required.  And she has a muscular chauffeur on hand for those occasions when she requires physical violence to be done, or a suspect to be intimidated.  (It’s this last bit that drives me mad no matter where I find it.  This is a way of moving the plot forward without soiling the hands of the detective, and it’s a big fat cheat.  Do your own dirty work or take credit for it.)

I keep finding references to Mitchell being one of the “big three” of female Golden Age detective writers and I have frankly always been at a loss to understand why.  If there is one of these 66 novels that has the ability to keep me reading and interested until the end, I have yet to find it.  Even the television adaptations couldn’t bring this material to life without infusing it with attitudes and details that are emphatically not present in the original.  It is boring, boring, BORING.

There.  (dusts hands metaphorically)  I feel better now.  I’ve wanted to get that off my chest for a long time.  I’ll have to consider my next victim, but I seem to be enjoying the process of telling you about the writers I don’t enjoy much more than the ones I do, so you can expect more of this vituperation.

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May 15, 2012

My first 30 terabytes

By Noah Stewart

This is far too well organized to be my collection, I’m afraid, but illustrative.

Just a brief segue while I work up some enthusiasm for another post about my favourite puzzle mystery authors.  Actually, I think I might start another series of posts about my LEAST favourite puzzle mystery authors, but I need to find a flame-proof suit first.

Last weekend, I catalogued my 5,555th DVD. I don’t know why in particular that number struck me as being significant — it’s not, to be honest, it’s merely memorable. I calculated that in my dozens of little shoebox thingies I have approximately 30 terabytes of film and television. I’m mostly interested in the areas of crime/detection, science fiction, and fantasy.  I should add here that for the most part this is stuff that I have recorded from television, but I do have a fair number of store-bought DVDs.

So, you may wonder what the hell I am doing with all this video?

Well, I suppose I am interested in some day writing a magnum opus of some kind — Noah’s Archives of Genre Fiction, or the like.  Perhaps this is its nascent form. In order to keep track of it all, as you realized from the last paragraph, I catalogue what I have.  Essentially, I have three types of holdings — well, four, if you count a handful of boxes of DVDs that I don’t know yet how to catalogue, but perhaps some day I will integrate them into my system. In the meantime, I have:

  • Programmes
  • Brands
  • Themes

Programmes is fairly self explanatory.  I collect TV programmes — or, as my American friends call them, TV programs. I try to get a copy of every episode of everything in which I have expressed an interest.

Brands is what some people call media platforms, whereby a character is the subject of books, movies, comic books, radio programmes, TV programmes, et cetera.  For instance, the Green Hornet.  I follow approximately 100 video-based brands at the moment.  Some of these I’m sure you’ve never heard of, and that is actually what interests me — that they are moribund ones.  Why don’t you know about Torchy Blane?  Why did that brand flourish briefly, then die?

Themes is the part of my collection that is not easy to explain. Essentially, I collect movies and  TV programmes that have a theme which interests me.  For instance — vampires.  I like vampire movies and have at least 100 of them.  Some day, I might just write a large article about vampire movies and television programmes, probably from the point of view of “What is it about vampire movies that makes this a durable theme?”  My choices of thematic subjects are not always so simple as merely “vampires”.  I collect films about hypnosis, transvestism, alien invasion, identity transfer, identical twins, amnesia, a wide range of disaster films (man-made, biological, ecological, subterranean, and space), “nature gone mad”, “children from hell”, “old dark house” — it’s a long list.  Perhaps I’ll transfer a copy of the list here; it would be a first step towards writing about them. I’m not sure if there is any call for a posting on, for instance, “nature gone mad” movies, which encompasses a range of films from Night of the Lepus to Piranha to Kingdom of the Spiders, or how the “natural monster” aspect of “nature gone mad” differs from the theme of “unnatural monster” movies like Godzilla or Cloverfield, and why werewolf movies don’t necessarily fit this structure because they partake of a different tradition. That’s the kind of thinking about themes which interests me. Not merely cataloguing the occurrence of films containing these ideas, but wondering about where they come from, what their characteristics are, what  the best theoretical matrix is that would contain them arranged logically, and why they persist or die.

I wonder if this will arouse any interest among people who have large holdings of similar material. Perhaps it will merely arouse pity or disbelief or suggestions that I should star in an episode of a TV programme about people with hoarding disorder.  If you have insight as to how to usefully catalogue a collection like this — I’m all ears.

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May 14, 2012

My favourite puzzle mystery writers (part 3)

By Noah Stewart

Here’s another of my favourite puzzle mystery writers.

Erle Stanley Gardner
Yes, the author of Perry Mason is one of my favourite mystery writers. I have to say my affection goes back a long, long time. I was a precocious kid who read his way through Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys at an early age and moved directly into the mystery section of the local library — which, since at the time I was living on a small Armed Forces base, was composed of a bunch of Perry Mason novels and some writers I’d never heard of.  Perry Mason was fairly tame to adult sensibilities, and when I asked my mother to explain why Perry Mason was so interested in Della Street’s ankles as she got in and out of the car, she knew my pre-teen self couldn’t come to much harm.  So I enjoyed them as mysteries and left the grown-up stuff for others.

Erle Stanley Gardner

Gardner is not generally considered a writer of puzzle mysteries, by and large.  His blueprint was simple.  Start with a strange situation that would catch the reader’s attention — something mildly sexual and unusual, for which the average person would want a good lawyer on their side.  Add Perry Mason on the side of someone reasonably innocent.  Bring the situation to a rapid boil and add a murder.  Arrest Perry’s client and spend the rest of the book having Perry run amok while trying to exonerate his client.  Pretty much the last half of all the novels takes place in a courtroom.  Finish it off with a dramatic resolution wherein the guilty party confesses on the stand (for the most part) and stir with a dash of humour at the end.  And, by and large, Gardner didn’t feel the need to add any pesky characterization to complicate the mix.  Most of the characters in Perry Mason novels are labelled with a job and saddled with an alibi, and that’s their only distinction from the next suspect.

As an aside, Gardner did have one way of making his characters memorable; he gave the men unusual middle names. Possibly this was to protect himself from lawsuits because James Greevus Smith, banker, could be distinguished from almost any other James Smith, banker.  This didn’t happen so often with female characters, but married women often had an unusual maiden name.

Anyway, in terms of the traditional puzzle mystery, this lack of characterization is not a bad thing, by and large.  As I’ve remarked elsewhere, it was usually deliberate, in order to prevent the murderer being more noticeable by dint of being better characterized. It may well be, as I’ve often seen suggested, that Gardner was simply a writer who was unable to do much in the way of effective characterization, in which case his focus on puzzle mysteries was a mere fortunate coincidence or deliberate choice.  He was an experienced lawyer — it was unlikely for him to select the Western upon which to focus, let’s face it.

In his earliest novels, Perry Mason is more of a hard-boiled hard-punching lawyer who goes toe to toe against the villains and isn’t afraid to slug the occasional client-menacing gangster (for instance, The Case Of The Sulky Girl, TCOT Velvet Claws, TCOT Howling Dog, etc.).  But around the middle of World War II, he seems to have swerved in the direction of the puzzle mystery. I’ll suggest that the three most difficult puzzles in his oeuvre are TCOT Empty Tin (1941), TCOT Buried Clock (1943) and TCOT Crooked Candle (1944), but everything from about 1939 to 1947 is more strongly puzzle-oriented than the remainder of the novels. These novels actually have clues, physical clues, and are not merely sets of alibis against which to measure a set of circumstances.

And Gardner in this period avoids something that sustained his work in later years, which is to say the number of gorgeous women in sexualized situations is kept to a minimum.  By the 1960s, Gardner’s plots were pretty much what I call “femjep” — a beautiful woman is in physical danger fr0m a criminal, or is the object of a bizarre plot that she doesn’t understand, and Perry steps in and saves the day, while the novel stops to describe the heroine physically and fairly lustfully every once in a while.

If you’re curious as to whether Gardner could write a good puzzle mystery — your mileage may vary.  Certainly he had a knack for coming up with story hooks that drag you into the novel (Why is a pretty young woman being paid to put on weight?  Why would someone steal a man’s glass eye?  Why would someone bury an alarm clock set to sidereal time?).  When he’s at his most puzzling, these hooks are absolutely relevant to the plot and not just discarded as soon as they’ve done the job of getting you to commit to the novel.  (For instance, that stolen glass eye is found clutched in the hand of the corpse.)  And occasionally, Gardner steps out and adds as much characterization as he can manage.  For instance, TCOT Empty Tin has a nosy spinster who is played for laughs — unusual in Gardner’s work — but who turns out to play a vital role in the plot. TCOT Drowsy Mosquito (1943) has some interesting “salty prospector” characters. And TCOT Vagabond Virgin (1948) has an actual attempt at a rounded characterization in the person of the titular hitchhiking tramp — as well as an interesting puzzle at its core.

If you’re looking for a puzzle mystery, you could do worse than the novels I’ve mentioned here by name. The paperback editions are not so omnipresent as they were when I was a teenager, but a visit to a good used bookstore will usually net you a couple of dozen titles from which to choose — try anything with a copyright date in the 1940s and you won’t be far wrong.

PS: Gardner also wrote a series of novels as by A. A. Fair about the adventures of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, private investigators.  I can’t say that these impressed me as being anywhere near strict-form puzzle mysteries, but they are very enjoyable — more so than the last 15 years’ worth of Perry Mason novels, by and large.  These should be read chronologically.

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May 6, 2012

My favourite puzzle mystery writers (part 2)

By Noah Stewart

Here’s a couple more of my favourite puzzle mystery writers. It seems that most of these writers worked mainly in what’s known as the Golden Age, the 1930s and 1940s; as I said, this style of novel is very much out of favour these days. Its surviving relative is perhaps the cozy, although most cozy mysteries are not much on logical rigour.

Hake Talbot
This writer’s reputation rests pretty much on a single novel, Rim of the Pit. It’s a story that takes place in rural Canada, stars roguish gambler Rogan Kincaid, involves the legend of the wendigo, and features mysterious and apparently inexplicable events galore. The puzzle that’s at the heart of the novel is extremely difficult to work out — it helps if you’re a professional magician, and that’s all I’ll say on that score. There is a professional debunker of spiritualists in the book and he’s kept very busy. One of the things I most enjoyed about this novel was that, like John Dickson Carr, Talbot manages to infuse the proceedings with a strong air of the weird and strange, and makes it plausible that the events of the book could possibly have been instigated by some kind of supernatural being. Of course, to truly count as a mystery, there has to be a human at the bottom of it, and it is certainly so here. Rim of the Pit has always been a difficult book to obtain, although it has been published in paperback (including mapback) a couple of times; be prepared to spend some money to get a copy of this. Note that the illustration is from the most recent publication by Ramble House, although as near as I can tell the map on the back has been lifted from the 1940s Dell mapback edition.
Not quite so successful, and infinitely more difficult to obtain, is the author’s other claim to fame, The Hangman’s Handyman. I think it took me twenty years to track down a copy of this that I could afford, and I was forced to sell my first copy almost immediately; it was too expensive for me to hang on to. It’s recently been reprinted by Ramble House as well and you can get it at a tenth the price of the first edition at around $20. The Hangman’s Handyman is the name of a killer current that swirls around the coastline of a mysterious island; the obligatory creepy mansion plays host to a supernatural force called the odh that kills people and rots their bodies overnight. Rogan Kincaid figures it all out and gets the girl.

Edmund Crispin

Edmund Crispin
The nine detective novels featuring Oxford don Gervase Fen will be a delight to the reader. I can do no better than quote Wikipedia (I may have even contributed these phrases): they have “complex plots and fantastic, somewhat unbelievable solutions, including examples of the locked room mystery. They are written in a humorous, literary and sometimes farcical style and contain frequent references to English literature, poetry, and music.” Crispin’s reputation rests largely on The Moving Toyshop, but I cannot say I agree with the popular taste on this one — it is far less inventive than others. My own favourite is Love Lies Bleeding, where the setting is a private (“public”) school and the victim a schoolmaster named Love, but other excellent entries are Holy Disorders, Frequent Hearses and The Long Divorce. Frankly, they’re all very enjoyable, and I don’t really understand why people like The Moving Toyshop so much, it seems to me to be the weakest. Crispin (a composer of film music) is at his best when he composes around a central theme with multiple fantastic variations, and this novel has very little in the way of side excursions. (Also it will be easy to solve if you are a fan of early Ellery Queen, whereas the others are extremely difficult under any circumstances.) Gervase Fen is a kind of Sherlock Holmes on LSD, constantly making bizarre literary references and going off on wild tangents, and this reader at least enjoys being distracted effectively from the central murderous events by his antics. Twenty-five years after last setting down his pen, and shortly before his death from, among other things, chronic alcoholism, Crispin emerged with The Glimpses of the Moon (1977), which is far more farcical than his other work but also contains at its core a brilliantly complicated puzzle that will have you slapping your forehead when you finally realize what happened to the victim’s missing arm. The novels can be read in no particular order, but I often recommend chronological, which would have you starting with The Case of the Gilded Fly.

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May 5, 2012

My favourite puzzle mystery writers (Part 1)

By Noah Stewart

A still from “The Kennel Murder Case” showing Archer Coe’s dead body as seen through the keyhole of his locked bedroom. A great mystery film!

Years ago, I stood behind the counter of a murder mystery bookstore and recommended books to people. Those recommendations were based on my having read 25,000 of the damn things — yes, you read that right, 25,000 mysteries, and I’m not even the best-read person I know. My recommendations usually went down three specific lines. (1) “If you like this writer, you’ll like that writer.” (2) “This is an absolute classic that almost everyone enjoys.” (3) “If you’re interested in [fill in name of occupation, background, locale, whatever] you’ll like this book/author.” As you can see, most of my recommendations were based on memory… knowing that Joan Hess fans will usually like Joanne Fluke novels, for instance, after having read enough of each author’s work to be able to make the connection with a degree of certainty. Or remembering that the only murder mystery about croquet is H.R.F. Keating’s A Rush on the Ultimate.
Occasionally, someone was sufficiently interested to ask “But what are YOUR favourites?” I usually sloughed that question off since the answer was not likely to be helpful to the person who asked it. Frankly, my taste is for a particular kind of antique story that’s very much out of favour these days, the puzzle mystery — and to be precise, I like the subgroup of that set called the locked room mystery. (If you’re not grasping these definitions, try Wikipedia; I contributed to those articles.) These are absolutely not to everyone’s taste. For one thing, there’s a tradition in that genre that the characterization is more or less absent; all the characters are cardboard caricatures. They kind of have to be; the novels themselves are on the level of a game of Cluedo, and if the characterization is not all at the level of Miss Scarlett and Colonel Mustard, any characters who are more realistic stand out like a sore thumb and call attention to themselves as potential murderers. The classic puzzle mystery is more about timetables and maps and alibis than it is about who WOULD have committed the murder. (And, obligingly, most victims in antique puzzle mysteries have thoughtfully quarreled with everyone in sight and changed their wills twice on the day of their demise, just to make it possible for everyone to be a suspect equally.)
Why do I like this style? Oh, I suppose it’s the same instinct as leads people to do crossword puzzles. It’s like a two-handed game between the author and the reader, for me. The author tries to fool me or mislead me, and I try to see through the stratagems. It’s pretty much just based on the kind of mind one has, and the kinds of entertainment that particularly amuse that kind of mind. I like puzzle mysteries, duplicate bridge and crossword puzzles, and you can see how those things go together. If you don’t like that sort of thing, you just don’t — no harm, no foul. (Although I love to quote, or misquote, the esteemed critic Mrs. Q. E. Leavis, whom I recall as saying “The novels of Miss Dorothy L. Sayers present the appearance of intellectual activity to people who would very much dislike such activity if they were forced to undergo it.” Now THAT is my kind of bitch.)
Occasionally, I will encounter someone who shares my interest in the Golden Age puzzle mystery, and whom I sense will not be bored by recommendations of my favourite authors. So, if you’re one of those people — here you go. These are in no particular order and I’ll try to indicate the books that have most pleased me. You can find out more about these authors in Wikipedia, by and large, and I recommend you start there if you’re curious. Since this is likely to be a long list, I’ll only do a few authors at a time over the next while and make this a series of posts.

Christianna Brand

Christianna Brand
Ms. Brand is better known these days for having written the children’s books upon which the Nanny McPhee films were based, but she got her start writing mysteries. Her mysteries have always been difficult to obtain — one of them, Death of Jezebel, may take half your life to track down — but they are both delightful and nearly impossible to solve, although quite fair. (For instance, a vital clue to the solution of 1955′s Tour De Force is displayed openly, but in the opening paragraphs of the book, an excellent piece of misdirection; by the time the information is useful, you’ve forgotten all about it.) Green For Danger was made into a brilliant film in 1946, starring Alastair Sim, and is her best-known novel. It is certainly good, and I also enjoyed Suddenly at His Residence, London Particular and the three mentioned above. Heads you Lose and Death in High Heels, from the beginning of her career, are less successful; try not to start with them, if you can. One of the things that I find most enjoyable is that Brand has the ability to create characters who are quite realistic, and flawed, without making them stand out as being obviously guilty of the crime by dint of being the only realistic characters in the book. This set her apart from her contemporaries. Yet, the puzzles at the heart of the novels are so difficult and complex that you could never, ever guess the answers; these are mysteries that need to be solved with logic and observation, not intuition.

Mystery writers Dannay and Lee, who wrote as — and about — Ellery Queen, and as Barnaby Ross

Ellery Queen
At the beginning of his/their career, between 1929 and 1936, the authors who wrote as and about Ellery Queen produced a series of ten puzzle mysteries that I’ll call the “nationalities” series. Each novel (except the last) has a nationality in its title and almost all of them are brain-crackingly difficult. At that point, the authors were tightly focused on creating difficult puzzles that admitted of only one logical solution. To that end, the books stop at a specific point and the authors issue a “Challenge to the Reader”; at that precise point in the book, you have all the information you need to solve the mystery. The nice thing is, you do. I find it hard to recommend any of these in particular, although The American Gun Mystery and The Egyptian Cross Mystery are probably the worst through being too histrionic and overwrought — the rest are uniformly brain-crackingly brilliant. 1936′s Halfway House was originally planned to be called The Swedish Match Mystery and its removal from the series signals an intention by Queen to stop writing this sort of novel, which is a shame from my point of view. Queen’s later mysteries tended to focus upon themes and to my mind were less successful. 1943′s There Was an Old Woman, for instance, sacrifices intelligibility for the purposes of fitting the book into the scheme of a nursery rhyme. You might enjoy the later works Calamity Town, The Door Between and Cat of Many Tails, which is actually a very early example of the “serial killer” novel. 1958′s The Finishing Stroke returns chronologically to the era of the earliest novels and makes it clear that the authors have really finished mining out that lode; their hearts aren’t in it and they never published another decent mystery that wasn’t ghost-written by someone else. 1970′s The Last Woman in His Life is so awful that it ought to be withdrawn from publication to preserve their honour.
PS: As Barnaby Ross, the authors wrote four novels, two of which are certainly worth your attention; The Tragedy of X and The Tragedy of Y. Y, particularly, is a brilliant piece of logic — these novels are only marred by the detective characters themselves, who are even more deliberately conceived as cardboard than was usual.

More soon — stay tuned!

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April 17, 2012

Top Chef Canada — a satisfying dish

By Noah Stewart

As far as “off the island” shows go, Top Chef — and its local variant, Top Chef Canada, now in its second season on Canada’s Food Network — is difficult to appreciate properly. It’s based on a concept that must be judged rather than simply viewed, unlike, say, Top Shot, where the one closest to the target is clearly the winner. Many such programs invite the viewer to judge right alongside the experts; did you like the dress as much as the judges of Project Runway? Do you think A is a better singer than B, or is C a better dancer than D? Everyone has an opinion, and part of the fun is agreeing or disagreeing with the results. But with food, you’re completely dependent on the judges because you just cannot taste for yourself. If the judge says the dish is too salty, well, you either play along or you don’t.  You have to trust that the judge’s resume is good enough to produce a worthy judge, and also that the contest isn’t rigged to produce a result that isn’t based on skill and talent.

And that is why I’ve given up on America’s Next Top Model, as I’ve said elsewhere, because the young woman who wins the contest is usually the one who sucks up to Tyra Banks the most thoroughly. But I am delighted to say that that is not how it goes down on Top Chef Canada.

I’ve just finished viewing the latest episode, entitled “Restaurant Wars”.  I’ve been liking Top Chef Canada because I like the underlying concept — now, I absolutely love it. Because it’s honest; the person who deserves to go home goes home.

You see, when Russell Hantz demonstrated on national television (Survivor) that he was a sneaky little bastard, it exemplified an idea dear to the hearts of reality TV producers. If you’re a nasty unlikeable competitor, they want you to hang around, because you’re good for ratings. People tune in hoping to see you lose. So in many cases the producers bend things as much as possible to ensure that you do hang around; this is really only possible when the underlying concept is that judges make decisions based on their personal preferences. Russell Hantz benefited only from Jeff Probst making some not-very-subtle nudges in his direction at Tribal Council, raising suspicions in one direction or another. But various design-oriented programs have kept argumentative bitches around long past their sell-by date, and it’s pretty clear how and why.

Top Chef Canada is populated with Canadian contestants, of course, which is to say that by and large they’re a group of friendly, polite and humble folks. But there was one bitch among them, a young sous-chef named Elizabeth Rivasplata who was pushy, arrogant and very unlikeable. (Attention, Art Gallery of Ontario; I’m never eating in your restaurant while she’s working there.) Of course I didn’t taste her food, but her interaction with her fellow competitors was enough to make me think that she deserved to leave, because you can’t be a top chef if you can’t get the respect of your fellow kitchen workers. Yes, competitors are in the game to win, but you also have to share the kitchen with others; if you hog the ovens, it’s like pushing your way to the front of a line — very un-Canadian.

And of course after her first out-and-out quarrel with a fellow competitor, I thought regretfully that she had now cemented her place in the final five, regardless of the quality of her work, because she would draw ratings. It seemed as though she would have won a vote for “least favourite” among her fellow competitors; probably why, when the episode of “Restaurant Wars” came along, she was named a team leader (in the hope that she would shoot herself in the foot).

Indeed, she fired a number of shots in her own direction and struck home every time. She failed to keep to the “Canadiana” theme of her menu and chose to show off by preparing octopus. She quarrelled and whined. She couldn’t keep the orders straight and failed to pass along crucial information about who had ordered what and how many at which table. Finally, one of my favourite competitors simply took over and ran the kitchen.

Her team lost. And in the post-mortem, she claimed to the judges things weren’t arranged the way they had been.  (A tip, honey — if you’re going to do that, be sure you’re not on camera at the moment you take responsibility for something.) It looked very much as if she was going to get away with it.

God bless the judges, they sent her home.

And of course, on the way out, she demonstrated that she just didn’t get it. “It’s all their fault, I was right, they were out to get me, they’re mean, nobody loves me, it’s not fair,” yada yada yada. In fact, she presented a portrait of someone who had completely failed to understand why she had lost the competition. They liked your octopus, Elizabeth — it’s your ability to run a kitchen that was in question, and you just didn’t measure up. Plus, you’re a big ol’ bitch.

This was incredibly satisfying to me because I had resigned myself to hating her for weeks to come. Instead, I gained a great deal of respect for the judges, not that I didn’t have it already. I mean, yeah, okay, the program is replete with product placement — you might say riddled with it. The chief judge is a chef named Mark McEwen and all the contestants do their food shopping at his personal grocery store named, oddly enough, “McEwen”. And the financial prize is supplied by a brand of paper towels, a shot or two of which shows up prominently in every episode. But that’s the way that goes in this business, I assume. What this episode demonstrated to me is that they’re not just tasting the food, they’re assessing the personalities and character of the individuals whom they’re testing. And Ms. Rivasplata came up well short of requirements for someone who would be representing their brand, so they put her on her bike and sent her home. And this was regardless of the demands for viewership that I’m sure such a format imposes. I’m pretty sure there was at least one producer who wanted to keep her just because she was so unlikeable, but sanity prevailed.

So I’ll be continuing to watch every week, happy as a clam in a delicate white wine sauce on a bed of wild rice, a deconstructed play on a satisfied customer. And since I think I can now completely trust the editing, I’m going to put my money on Jimmy Stewart from Whistler, B.C., to take home the prize.

Update (April 30, 2012): Jimmy Stewart got the boot last night. And I am happy to say that I didn’t feel it was absolutely foreshadowed by the edit, either. I guess I’ll just wait to see who wins.  There’s still a competitor left from my home town…

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April 16, 2012

2012: Ice Age

By Noah Stewart

I was recently asked why it is that I spend more time thinking about bad art than good art — at least, as far as blogging is concerned. There are a number of answers to this question. One is that there is a lot more bad art out there than good art, and it’s just as important to suggest to people what to avoid as what to experience. Another is that it is simply more fun to write about bad art because it allows the bitchy side of my nature to express itself, and apparently I please my readers more that way. The overarching reason is more complex; boiled down, it is that my feeling is one learns more about how to make good art by analyzing bad art than by analyzing good art.
For instance, in filmic terms, one can enjoy a film like Avatar because of reasons that are not readily apparent to the naked eye. The composition of shots, the excellence of the special effects/animation, the skill of the actors, the careful way in which the script is built from start to finish, the way in which the thematic underpinnings of the script accord with Joseph Campbell’s theories on heroism… all these things were created by people who are among the most skilled in the world at creating entertainment. It’s difficult to pick at an individual thread because the movie is so skillfully constructed, so seamless, that it’s just about necessary to be a master of the art oneself in order to appreciate the subtleties and outline them for others.
And then you have 2012: Ice Age, a 2011 made-for-TV movie from SyFy channel, which is possibly the polar opposite of Avatar.
Honestly, this film is simply so awful, so atrocious, that it’s like a lesson in how not to make a film. It’s the disaster-film version of Plan 9 from Outer Space, except that Ed Wood had better instincts than to make this piece de merde in the first place.
I wanted particularly to write about this because it is not often that I so thoroughly enjoy a movie — for all the wrong reasons. I was bellowing with laughter throughout the experience and, believe me, I don’t laugh that long and hard very often. Every single aspect of this work was so poorly done, so ill-considered, that it’s not just a product of too little money applied to too little imagination coupled with too little skill. This was the result of a staggering concatenation of bad choices; terrible production of a horrible script with inexperienced actors — I’ll be charitable and call them inexperienced — against a background of amateurish special effects and inexplicable cinematography. The sets are poor, the costumes are silly, the locations are ridiculous, the sound effects are poorly-timed. I’m willing to bet the production accounting was full of mistakes and the craft services truck was serving over-steamed hot dogs and tepid coffee.
The story itself is — okay, I’ll give it a shot. A pudgy little climatologist sees his daughter off on a plane from Maine to New York, only to realize that a volcano in Iceland has erupted. Apparently, in a process unknown to any science I’ve ever heard of, this causes 200-foot icicles to spray all the way to Maine and a wall of super-cold weather to freeze New York extras in their tracks. In a staggering display of idiocy, the climatologist, his wife and son decide to hop in the car and drive to New York to rescue the young woman, who has her own set of climate-induced problems. Needless to say, after multiple trials and tribulations, the day is saved and all’s right with the world. Every character acts as stupidly as possible, in order to increase the twists and turns in the story, and thus are constantly in danger, which results in a series of miraculous rescues and coincidental escapes that stagger the imagination. No, sorry. There is no imagination involved here. What this really is is a series of meretricious decisions based on “How little can we spend to fill some time?”
As I say, I roared with laughter throughout. How silly is this movie? One example will suffice, I hope. Near the beginning, the protagonist is dropping off his daughter at an airport. There is some “amusing” byplay whereby he’s about to be towed away from a no-parking zone, apparently in front of the main doors to a large airport. He drives away — and the camera pulls back to reveal what is fairly unambiguously a side street in an industrial area miles from any airport. Oh, and the location is completely different from what we saw seconds ago when he was being berated by a parking official; as is the degree of sunshine and the colour of the sky. (For all I could tell, they’re in a different vehicle.) The rest of this is filled with continuity errors and ghastly special effects lacunae of a similar magnitude. If you’re like me, you’ll cherish this movie as a prize of your collection; 99.9% of the viewing audience would be well-advised to stay as far away from it as possible. Consider yourself warned.

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April 14, 2012

The Teeth of the Tiger — missing the wisdom teeth

By Noah Stewart

ImageFrom time to time I step outside my comfort zone in light reading.  I have to confess that this is in many respects dependent on what I find at the local thrift shop that costs a buck, but that merely makes it easier to try something out.  I have actually read Tom Clancy before; not what you might think is up my alley, because my alley is lined with old mysteries and science fiction, but his earlier work is rather masculinist and interesting if you can buy into that world-view.  I’ve also enjoyed some of the films made from his work, which is usually hundreds of pages longer than need be and written in a kind of utilitarian prose that has a subtext of “Yes, it’s a cliche, and I don’t mind in the slightest, because I know you’ll understand what I’m getting at.  There’s no foo-foo pretty writing HERE, I can tell you.”  

The Teeth of the Tiger (ISBN -0399-15079-X, published 2003) is a later story in what Wikipedia calls the “Jack Ryan universe”. It chronicles some adventures of Jack Ryan, Jr., who was as yet unborn in earlier works but who is now in his 20s and working at a low level in the espionage game after his father, a former U.S. President, has retired.  He and two of his cousins take on some Middle Eastern terrorists who do things like shoot innocent children in shopping malls.  The Ryan family accomplishes this by having an 007-ish “licence to kill” and doing so with an injection of succinylcholine; to the mystery fancier, rather vieux jeux, but Mr. Clancy brandishes it as if it were cutting-edge technology.

The ideal audience for this novel, as with most of Clancy’s work, is an obese middle-aged male with an IQ around room temperature (okay, Fahrenheit) who is mentally certain he could kill terrorists if one were to present himself within easy reach in a position of extreme vulnerability, preferably bound and gagged. This man has had no power in his life and so thrives on fantasies about having physical, mental and political prowess — also sexual, social and many other forms of excellence.  The self-aware reader will chuckle at the juxtaposition of a photo of the portly and pasty Mr. Clancy, complete with military baseball hat, with the frequent references to strenuous exercises on the part of the characters.  One might almost term some of the prose “exercise porn”.  (It reminded me of the jacket photos of the late Robert Parker, with an enormous belly, wrapped around the exploits of the highly physically active PI Spenser.) Similarly, the characters are disdainful of the activities of beautiful whores, have enormous expense accounts and stay only in the very best hotels, etc., etc.  Kind of like James Bond without any of the wit, charm, class or intelligence.  

The writing, as noted above, is utilitarian and untroubled by any attempt to do more than sketch in the outlines of locations, characters’ appearance, etc. (But vehicles and weapons are described minutely with a kind of fetishistic drooling.)  Young men speak in the cliches of men 50 years their senior and there is no inherent irony.  Villains are simple-minded wogs who, despite the advantages of birth, money and education, while they are slavering over white women and murdering blue-eyed blond children in a shopping mall, fall like targets in a shooting gallery to muscular young Americans with military connections.  The right wing is the only wing, military might equals moral right, and a character with a strong belief that capital punishment is wrong is depicted as a nitwit. The few female characters are either whores or mothers, or cardboard victims.  Difficult exercises in illegal computer access are executed with delightful, if unexplained, ease. If you are not the above-noted inactive middle-aged American male, you will find this all rather unbelievable, but believe me, this material is lovingly and precisely designed for its target audience.  A gentleman of my acquaintance congratulated me for having found him a book that he could be bothered to read, since he had not managed to finish one in decades.  (It took him nearly a year, his lips moving all the while.)  

The odd thing about this particular novel, to my mind, is that it seems to be missing Act III.  480 pages is a large novel to many, but Clancy fans are accustomed to immense thousand-page tomes that serve to hold doors open very ably — this one ends abruptly with a small triumph for the Ryan family, they having murdered two or three terrorist allies, but the head of the terrorists’ org chart, although intimated, is entirely absent.  In terms of video games, which this somewhat resembles and with which Clancy is intimately familiar, having been responsible for a couple of them, the climax with the “big boss” is strangely absent and merely prefigured.  I honestly thought it was possible that Clancy had died at this point in writing the novel and Putnam published what it had, but that is not the case.  I have no idea why the novel ends so abruptly. Perhaps Clancy hoped to publish a sequel of equal size, but it’s been 9 years and two supervening novels and nothing so far has enlightened the reader.  Those of us who are not struggling to prop this large novel up on our enormous bellies while settled into our favourite La-Z-Boys with a Budweiser may mind; I do not.  I was tired of this book’s simplistic jingoism and bored with the author’s inability to create realistic characters, settings or plot events.  The tiger in question may never have a full set of teeth, even with the aid of a ghost writer, and most of us will consider ourselves blessed at the absence of complete dentition.   But your portly middle-aged father-in-law may well find this pitiable exercise delightful, and if you can find one for a dollar, as I did — it’s likely you’ll be able to at any well-stocked thrift shop — you may well find yourself the apple of his eye for having provided it.  

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April 13, 2012

Top Shot — unobtrusively interesting

By Noah Stewart

Since I’ve just finished crapping all over a bunch of “one by one off the island” reality programs, I thought I’d briefly mention one that I’ve been liking a lot lately. It’s called Top Shot, hosted by Colby Donaldson — yes, THAT Colby Donaldson, who came so close to winning Survivor 2 by being the nicest guy in the history of Western civilization, more or less.
Top Shot is about marksmanship. They start with a double handful of people who have pre-existing qualifications at some kind of target-shooting thing, ranging from biathlon to Army snipers to more out-there stuff like archery, and get them to compete in situations where their expertise with a particular weapon isn’t all that relevant. The results are fun and interesting, Colby is nice to look at (and, man oh man, his voice is soooo sexy it would peel the underwear off, say, ME), charming, and a reasonably good host, and the artificial conflicts are held to a reasonable minimum. It’s not boring, but there are no teenage-girl adolescent cat-fights, to my relief.
I managed to catch nearly all of Season 1 in a single day — Season 2 is currently underway. If you like this sort of thing, you’ll like Top Shot. It’s on the History Channel, and I gather they justify this by doing a lot of “weapons from the past” competitions like flintlock rifles. One thing I enjoyed is that the quality of the photography is very, very high, which I suppose is necessary if you’re going to show, say, a tomahawk in slo-mo in flight. So, check it out.

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