In this video I discuss the philosophical problem that all things are temporary and how one can usefully classify all philosophical systems and religions based on their answer to this philosophical problem.
Month: June 2023
Overseas Fortunes
I recently watched the David Suchet version of the Poirot story, The Clocks, and was reminded of a staple of golden-age† detective fiction: the overseas fortune as motive for murder. In some ways it’s not that different from any other fortune as a motive for murder, but it does have a few special features that I think are worth considering.
One of the great things about an overseas fortune that some character inherits is how mysterious the thing intrinsically is. The family structure and how people fit into it is something no one is very likely to know. This is a bit more true in golden age detective fiction when people in different countries rarely visited each other unless they were rich, long distance phone calls were either non-existent or prohibitively expensive (depending on exactly what year we’re talking about) and camera portraiture was was rare and special. Yet it is still true even in our age. For example, I have various (second, third, etc) cousins in Greece, one of whom I’ve even corresponded with on occasion and even seen pictures of on Facebook (years ago, before I stopped using it), but I could be fooled by nearly any Greek of the correct sex and age if they were to come over here. How much more true this is of my cousins I’ve never spoken to or seen pictures of!
The inheritance of overseas fortunes also, of necessity, involves execution of the will by people who only need to be fooled for a short time. Frequently this is done because the rich decedent had no (surviving) issue and so the will must be executed by lawyers as a final act for their client. This works well, but even if some cousin or nephew or some such were made executor of the will, they would have had little enough contact before the connection (the recently deceased relative) died, so they are likely to have even less afterwards. The decease of their relative and the naming of them as executor has placed a burden on them which has no compensatory convenience, so they will likely want to get it over with as quickly as possible. Common honesty will make them want some evidence that the person to whom they are giving the money is the correct person, but this is easily dealt with by an author since, after all, it doesn’t really make any difference to the executor exactly where the money which isn’t going to them goes.
This discussion of the execution of wills makes me wonder, now, what the mechanism of enforcement is for the executor. In the normal case, I believe that the principal beneficiary tends to be named the executor, and people who receive some portion can achieve enforcement through suing the executor. This does not really apply to the case of an overseas fortune, especially to someone who has no idea that they stand to inherit anything. The executor would take possession of the money or property or what-have-you, and there would not really be anyone who would know to object. Wills are relatively private things, after all. I need to research this further, but I suspect that there is some fertile ground for finding a motive for murder that consists of the executor of a will not bothering to find the overseas inheritor, and then coming across them and murdering them in order to avoid having to give up the inheritance (especially if a large portion of it that they could not repay is already gone).
There is another advantage which golden age mysteries had, which is the simplification of the laws of inheritance which has in some places happened after the golden age has limited the pool of suspects. I actually must confess that I have no idea how intestate inheritance works in the United States; the advice I’ve generally heard is that if you have anything to leave people, one should draw up a will. Neither, come to think of it, do I know how intestate inheritance works in the present-day United Kingdom. I do, however, know that in England the Administration of Estates Act of 1925 directed that aside from a few relatively close classes of relatives, the estate of someone who died intestate would go to the Crown (this formed a major plot point of the novel Unnatural Death). Still, it’s easy enough, I should think, to have some rich person write in their will that failing the main intention, all of their money should go to their closest living relative, and provide some funds for the finding of this relative.
The most obvious way to produce a motive for murder with overseas inheritance is for someone to pretend to be the inheritor; they will have a fairly good motive for killing anyone who would recognize the deceit. The other fairly obvious motive this can produce is a more distance relative whose relationship is unknown killing a closer relative, preferably before the knowledge of the inheritance comes in (potentially when the rich overseas relative is in his last months or on his death bed, rather than after his death). Something that can combine the two is killing the actual inheritor in order to pretend to be the person who will inherit. (This was done in Peril at End House, where the will only specified the inheritor by first name, and someone of the same first name killed the actual inheritor in order to pretend that she was the person named in the will. With the relationship having been kept secret, there was no one to say otherwise.)
Less obvious, but still viable, is a person committing murder in order to clear the way to marry the person who will inherit a fortune before it is known that they will. People are less on their guard against gold diggers when they believe they don’t have any gold.
If you’re willing to have the murderer be mistaken and kill without gain under the misapprehension that they would gain, then the overseas fortune is fertile ground for a thing. A person who believes a nearer relative to already be dead might kill the only remaining closer relative, only to be surprised that it was for nothing when the closer relative shows up alive. This can be great at disguising the motive since the person’s potential for inheritance will have been forgotten about, especially if all of this happened before the rich person actually died.
Speaking of the long-lost relative who is supposed to be dead, overseas fortunes are also great for this since if the family is already spread over two countries, spreading them over three or four is no great stretch of the imagination. Golden age mysteries also benefited from being written around the height of the British Empire, when it would be normal for people to go off to dangerous places to seek fortunes and never be heard from again, presumably dead. Still, this sort of thing is not too hard to do in modern times, especially if one only needs family members to think a relative dead and not to have an actual death certificate.
This possibility could also go in the interesting direction of a person lying and saying that a nearer relative died years ago in another country when they hadn’t, only for the nearer relative to turn up years later. There certainly would be motive to kill this nearer relative when they show up, before anyone can find out that the wrong person inherited. Years later, few people would think of a connection between the money and the dead man.
The details of finance are boring to most people, which is a huge boon to murder mystery writers.
† I should explain that I include The Clocks as a golden-age story despite it being published in 1963 both because I think we can grandmother Agatha Christie’s later stories into the golden age and also because the Davis Suchet version re-set the story into the 1930s and it worked very well.
The Ice Cream Rhyme
It is surprisingly hard to get children to believe that the ice cream rhyme is:
I speak softly.
You speak softly.
We all speak softly
For ice cream.
If you are ever inclined to believe the rumors that children are gullible or trusting, just try to get them to believe that this is the rhyme. You’ll soon discover that they can make donkeys seem tractable and compliant by comparison.
A Mighty Wind
A Mighty Wind, directed by Christopher Guest and written by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy, is an interesting movie. Generally described as a “mockumentary” and in some days a direct descendant of This is Spin̈al Tap, it’s a fun and light-hearted movie which lovingly pokes fun at folk music.
I say lovingly because, while many of the songs are intentionally bad, they’re bad primarily in an over-the-top way and include a lot of good elements that make them fun. And there are actually some genuinely good songs, too. (When You’re Next To Me being my favorite.)
If you haven’t seen it, the basic plot is that in tribute to the death of a man who had been a major producer of folk music back in the day, his children decide to put on a tribute concert featuring three of the major bands which he had produced. Those three bands are The Folksmen, The Main Street Singers, and Mitch & Mickey. The Main Street Singers are made up of nine people and aren’t available anymore, but there is a group called The New Main Street Singers which currently plays (primarily on cruises and similar small venues) and is only too willing to take the place of their predecessors. The Folksmen happily re-form, not having seen each other in decades, but have little trouble getting back together. And then there’s Mitch & Mickey, whose relationship became explosive and eventually separated acrimoniously. Somehow they are talked into re-forming for the performance, and do. (Mitch & Mickey have the best songs of the three groups, btw.)
The concert goes off, and is fun, though there are all sorts of back-stage issues which are the material for a lot of gags. This culminates in all three groups, after the main performance is over, taking the stage and singing what is obviously an old standard, A Mighty Wind.
The people and groups are not simple copies of any real folk singers, though you can certainly see elements of this or that group in them. For example, Mitch & Mickey certainly have some elements of Simon & Garfunkel, for example, but they’re also very much their own thing, both in having had a romantic past and also in singing mostly in counterpoint rather than in harmony.
The songs, also, though strongly representative of their genres, are not merely versions of some other songs. For example, the song A Mighty Wind seems to occupy the space of Blowin’ In the Wind, but it’s a very different sort of song. While Blowin’ In the Wind was a lament, if sometimes sung as a partially hopeful lament, A Mighty Wind is triumphant.
It is interesting how much the movie is about one brief, unsustainable moment. All performances are temporary, of course, but this one is even more temporary since it can never be again: it is a tribute to a past which has gone. The musicians work hard for it—most of them even care deeply about it, because these sorts of moments were what their lives were once about and they’re desperate for one last taste of that feeling. And yet, somewhat ironically, it is all blowing in the wind.
That the world is temporary is in many ways the primary philosophical problem faced by humanity. If everything is temporary, how can anything be real? There are only a few solutions to that question, and the ones that answer it positively generally look like either Platonism, Christianity, or Hinduism. However, even people who do not know the answer to the question can experience the fact that things are real, even if it is a mystery how they are real in spite of their temporary nature. This is what the climax of A Might Wind is about. Within the pretend world of the movie, the people are genuinely happy for a few moments, even if they soon won’t be, again, and in spite of all rational calculation, that happiness is real.
(I probably don’t need to add this, but it would be a disaster for any of the people involved to try to cling to that reality as the source of reality; to try to live in it or for it. This is the sort of mistake a great many people make. If one is wandering in the desert and finds a canteen filled with water it is an amazing gift to be given, but if one then sets up camp and tries to live off of the canteen forever, one will surely die, and quickly.)
The Passing of Typewriters Was a Blow to Detective Stories
A type of evidence which came up, not infrequently, in murder mysteries from the golden age of detective fiction was the identification of typed notes to the typewriter they came from. Sometimes this was unimportant and often it was misleading, but the evidence was always strong and, moreover, was the sort of evidence which could link things that would have been hard, otherwise, to link. The advent of printers (which could not be identified in this way) was a real blow to detective stories.
That said, I do not know how uniquely identifiable typewriters actually were. It was stated in books from more than one author that each typewriter’s writing was as unique as a fingerprint, and though on one level it makes sense, it does also seem a bit implausible. On the other hand, manufacturing standards were not as strict and the output not as uniform in the early 1900s as they are today. It is plausible that there was a fair amount of variety in the exact shape of the letters, and with fifty two of them (including capitals) and ten numbers, there was a reasonable scope for individual variation.
That said, manufacturing standards weren’t abysmal, and there were an awful lot of typewriters sold. This may be why authors would sometimes give typewriters some more uniquely identifying characteristics, such as a character consistently out of alignment or another which was chipped. Chips, like scars, are fairly unique.
Be that as it may, the thing was certainly accepted in detective stories from the golden age and served their authors well. It could be very handy indeed to find out that a document could not have existed before a certain date because that’s when the typewriter which wrote it was purchased; it could be even more handy to find out that a threatening note was typed on the machine in a particular office to which—in theory—only a few people had access. It’s much harder to do that, these days.
Having said that, it does just occur to me that printers do occasionally leave unique imperfections in the documents that they print. It’s not common, but sometimes when they are failing they will start leaving streaks of various kinds that look the same on every page. I doubt I’d be likely to use this in any of my stories, though, since it’s far more obvious to the person writing the incriminating note than the minor variations used to identify typewriters. Still, it’s worth keeping in one’s back pocket.
Clue Has an Interesting Setup
If you’ve never seen the movie Clue (based on the board game of the same name), stop reading this post and go watch it. It’s a great comedy and a beautiful visual portrayal of a classic murder mystery setting.
Just as in the board game, there are six guests at a dinner party: Mr. Green, Miss Scarlet, Professor Plum, Mrs. Peacock, Colonel Mustard, and Mrs. White. Before long, Mr. Body is killed and the guests need to figure out who killed him.
While that’s enough for a board game, the movie does have a bit more setup and that’s what I’d like to discuss.
The movie is set in New England in 1954, and introduces several new characters. There is Wadsworth the butler, Yvette the maid, a cook, a motorist, a policeman, and a singing telegram girl. All of these except for Wadsworth eventually end up murdered as well.
While the board game doesn’t need to specify why the dinner party is happening or how well the guests know each other, the movie can’t be so threadbare. The guests are all strangers to each other and were invited to the dinner party because they were all being blackmailed by Mr. Body.
This setup solves several problems caused by the decision to make the guests strangers to each other. The first is why they’re all here; it is very rare to give a dinner party to complete strangers. True, it is also not the most common for everyone at a dinner party to know each other, but the reverse is even more unusual. Furthermore, if all of the people are strangers they will probably have some connection such as all being in the same profession, or all physicists working on the same problem, or something like that.
The other problem it solves brought up by everyone being strangers is that it provides a motive for murder. Strangers do not, as a rule, have a reason for murdering each other. Blackmail victims have, almost by definition, a compelling reason for murder.
The movie does not manage to incorporate the element of the board game of determining the room and murder weapon. While the former could be a bit defensible, so long as you have the body it would be almost impossible to not be able to tell whether someone was shot, stabbed, strangled, or hit by a blunt instrument. (It could be possible to be in some doubt as to whether the blunt instrument was a wrench, a candlestick, or a lead pipe.) The location of the murder is a bit more workable as an unknown, though even that requires a fair amount of creativity. Unfortunately, the movie setup, which keeps all of the suspects together until Mr. Body is found (definitely) dead, doesn’t really permit this ambiguity. A setup in which the guests mingled in different rooms and moved about would have lent itself far better to making it a question of in which room Mr. Body was killed.
All this taken into account, Clue did an admirable job of making a go of a premise that was designed for a board game. It’s silly, of course, but it leans into this silliness to make a movie which is a great deal of fun, while putting in a decent amount of effort to come as close as possible to taking its premise seriously. It has plot holes, to be sure, but they’re not gaping plot holes. And that’s a lot better than most attempts at this movie would have come.
Chris Lansdown 
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