The best reason for a revival of philosophy is that unless a man has a philosophy certain horrible things will happen to him. He will be practical; he will be progressive; he will cultivate efficiency; he will trust in evolution; he will do the work that lies nearest; he will devote himself to deeds, not words. Thus struck down by blow after blow of blind stupidity and random fate, he will stagger on to a miserable death with no comfort but a series of catchwords; such as those which I have catalogued above. Those things are simply substitutes for thoughts. In some cases they are the tags and tail-ends of somebody else’s thinking. That means that a man who refuses to have his own philosophy will not even have the advantages of a brute beast, and be left to his own instincts. He will only have the used-up scraps of somebody else’s philosophy; which the beasts do not have to inherit; hence their happiness. Men have always one of two things: either a complete and conscious philosophy or the unconscious acceptance of the broken bits of some incomplete and shattered and often discredited philosophy. Such broken bits are the phrases I have quoted: efficiency and evolution and the rest. The idea of being “practical”, standing all by itself, is all that remains of a Pragmatism that cannot stand at all. It is impossible to be practical without a Pragma. And what would happen if you went up to the next practical man you met and said to the poor dear old duffer, “Where is your Pragma?” Doing the work that is nearest is obvious nonsense; yet it has been repeated in many albums. In nine cases out of ten it would mean doing the work that we are least fitted to do, such as cleaning the windows or clouting the policeman over the head. “Deeds, not words” is itself an excellent example of “Words, not thoughts”. It is a deed to throw a pebble into a pond and a word that sends a prisoner to the gallows. But there are certainly very futile words; and this sort of journalistic philosophy and popular science almost entirely consists of them.
Some people fear that philosophy will bore or bewilder them; because they think it is not only a string of long words, but a tangle of complicated notions. These people miss the whole point of the modern situation. These are exactly the evils that exist already; mostly for want of a philosophy. The politicians and the papers are always using long words. It is not a complete consolation that they use them wrong. The political and social relations are already hopelessly complicated. They are far more complicated than any page of medieval metaphysics; the only difference is that the medievalist could trace out the tangle and follow the complications; and the moderns cannot. The chief practical things of today, like finance and political corruption, are frightfully complicated. We are content to tolerate them because we are content to misunderstand them, not to understand them. The business world needs metaphysics — to simplify it. … Philosophy is merely thought that has been thought out. It is often a great bore. But man has no alternative, except between being influenced by thought that has been thought out and being influenced by thought that has not been thought out. The latter is what we commonly call culture and enlightenment today. But man is always influenced by thought of some kind, his own or somebody else’s; that of somebody he trusts or that of somebody he never heard of, thought at first, second or third hand; thought from exploded legends or unverified rumours; but always something with the shadow of a system of values and a reason for preference. A man does test everything by something. The question here is whether he has ever tested the test.
—G.K. Chesterton, The Common Man, The Revival of Philosophy—Why?
It is, indeed, a problem that so many people have never put so much as a few minutes thought into their idea of what the world that they live in is and what are the things that they find in it. One runs into this constantly.
It is not new, of course. It is merely more obvious at present. It’s more obvious because modern cultures do not have any dominant philosophy of life and so unthinking people do not have that accidental consistency which can give the misimpression that they believe consistent things. Each “used-up scrap of somebody else’s philosophy” comes, in modern times, from a different somebody else, which makes this lack of understanding of what he is saying far more obvious.
Which is not to say, of course, that there never was a time and place where it was more common for people to be taught to think and actually do a little bit of it. One of the effects of modern culture being a muddle of many different people’s philosophies is that it discourages a great many people from doing any thinking, just as a storm discourages a great many people from going outside.
It is worth noting, though, that human beings have tendend toward not thinking rigorously since the fall of man. Times and places vary with how much people actually bother to think, but they var far more with how obvious it is that they haven’t.
There are exceptions to the rule that one should not quote ancient writers on economics, I’m sure, but I couldn’t tell you what they are. To be clear, I don’t mean that one shouldn’t read them—one should. I just mean that they shouldn’t be quoted. The problem is that the context is so different that so much explanation is required that any value in the succinct expression of the quotation is completely lost in all of the necessary explanation if you don’t want modern audiences to completely misunderstand it.
This necessary explanation comes from several places, including the modern context of communism distorting all modern economic conversations. There are many economic ideas which are not communism and are in fact antithetical to communism that can very easily sound like things that communists would say. This is, in part, because communists are dishonest and are constantly trying to trick people into communism, but it remains that anything which might sound like a thing a communist would say must be distinguished from communism unless you can rely on your anti-communist bona fides with your audience. Since there are few places in the modern world with context, one can rarely rely on this.
For all of the inconveniences of the evil of Communism, a much bigger cause of the need to provide context is the wildly different economic context of the modern world from the ancient or even the medieval world. (I talk about this at length in Usury and Lending at Interest.) The short version is that there is unimaginably more scope for investment and the creation of goods and services than there used to be. Ancient and medieval writers could neglect things like investing in a business to create wealth because, while it existed, it was such a small fraction of the economic activity which went on that it made sense to omit discussion of it from general discussions. Another major issue was the extremely limited quantity of non-human energy which was available. If work was to be done and it wasn’t a man doing it, for the most part it was a beast of burden. There were some minor exceptions but work was done primarily by labor. In modern times we have portable fuels (such as gasoline) which can directly power engines as well as electricity. Enormous amounts of work are done not by men but by machines. This work creates an enormous amount of wealth but also requires a great deal of careful management and maintenance. All of this produces an incredibly complex interdependence of many suppliers, craftsmen, designers, and service jobs. We have unbelievably efficient transportation networks that can move not only goods but even food over vast distances. All of these things are made more affordable and also more available by carefully planned storage of goods and foods at different places.
The principles of economics have not changed since the ancient world, which is why it is worth reading ancient and medieval writers about economic principles. However, the specifics have changed to an almost unimaginable degree. The sorts of quotes people like to pull out from ancient writers are always about the application of principles to specifics. You can draw useful lessons from reading these, but only when you are sufficiently aware of the context of the original to extract the principle being illustrated and translate it.
In economics, one of the central questions is: what should goods and services be priced at? The answer that generally works is “God knows but since He isn’t telling us by divine revelation, supply and demand will sort this out better than human beings can.” A competing theory is the “labour theory of value.” Like most bad theories, there are two versions of it: the one that people use, and the technical definition they fall back on when people point out how stupid the version they use is. Sometimes called a “Motte and Bailey fallacy,” this sort of thing comes up a lot whenever people want a conclusion that they can’t defend.
The popular version of the labor theory of value is that a thing’s value is the amount of labor that went into making it. This is ridiculously stupid (“if I pay you to dig a hole, I won’t pay you more because you used a spoon”), so when it is challenged, it tends to get redefined to Marx’s “socially necessary labor time.” In theory this is something along the lines the average amount of time workers currently take to produce something, or some such. It’s specifically defined in such a way as to be not rigorously computable. Its only real function is to give the labor theory of value sufficient wiggle room to get out of simple examples of how stupid it is.
One of the problems with stupid ideas is that, when people advance them, there isn’t anything to take seriously. This can become something of a defense for the person who advances it, since the only open question when an obviously false idea is put forward is, “why would a person ask me to believe something that he obviously doesn’t?” He can then retort with how you should consider the argument, not resort to ad-hominem fallacies. The basic problem is that much of the norms of civil discourse assume that all parties are acting in good faith. When someone does not act in good faith but lies and says that he is, the norms of civil discourse have to way of handling this.
That’s actually not true; it’s only true of the norms of civil discourse in the modern context. The context for which the norms of civil discourse originated relied very heavily upon a man’s reputation, which would be gravely harmed by propounding nonsense. In modern contexts, people do not have reputations and it is often considered bad form to consider them even if a person does have them. This is simply not a workable system; no civilization will survive where people have the unlimited right to waste the time of others.
The solution to this, by the way, is not any kind of censorship. It’s the restoration of taking into account reputation into discourse. I don’t mean ignoring an argument in favor of considering a reputation, but rather that the benefit of doubt is given on the basis of a person’s reputation. If a man makes a coherent argument from premises I accept, then I should consider his argument on its merits, because it stands only on the premises. The problem comes in when—as often happens—he makes it on the basis of premises I don’t know the truth value of, or invokes sub-arguments I’ve never heard of or considered. In these cases I cannot consider the argument on its own, but must do my own research, which may cost me significant time and effort. In that case, reputation is a very useful guide as to whether this time and effort would be well-spent.
When it comes to something like the labour theory of value, when someone will not present you with the arguments themselves but assures you that Marx laid this all out well if only you’ll go and read his books, the best thing to do is to decline to do this work and to assume he is just another in a long line of liars. You will not convince the Marxist this way, of course, but you weren’t going to do that anyway. You can’t argue a con-man into honesty.
“Oh, it’s so terrible that you just dismiss his arguments without considering them!” cries the pearl-clutching classical liberal.
No, that’s not what I did. I showed how the argument he actually put forward was demonstrably false. What I dismissed without consideration are the arguments which he did not put forward but assured me he could if only he cared to, but instead instructed me to go research. Is it possible he does in fact know of arguments he will not present, but I would find compelling if I spent the many hours involved in researching them for myself? Yes. Well, no, actually.
The just price of a good or service is determined both by the good that it can bring and also by the difficulty in obtaining it. A few minutes spent thinking about the topic makes that clear. If a good or service does no one any good, it doesn’t matter how hard it is to obtain, its just price is not high. If a thing brings great value but is very easy to obtain, its just price is low. If two things are easy to obtain and one brings more good than another, its just price is higher. This is complicated by the fact that a good or service may bring different amounts of good to different people, and thus the just price for each of them may be different. (E.g. Piano lessons are worthless to a person who does not want to learn piano, but may be valuable to one who does.)
Now, someone can assure me that there is some sufficiently complicated version of the labor theory of value which does not contradict this, but this can be of, at most, academic interest because this complicated version can’t do anything that a communist wants it to do. Is it possible that I’ve made some mistake and there really is a complicated version of the labour theory of value which legitimately points to a different system? Yes. It’s also possible that we’re all mistaken and the world really is flat, too. This kind of universal defeater can’t consistently be used without wasting everyone’s time and the selective use of a universal defeater is unprincipled. So for me to trust him when he tells me that he’s got something really good but can’t reveal it right now, I’m going to need some sort of reason to trust him like, for example, people that I trust telling me that he’s trustworthy.
That is, if someone I don’t know is going to ask me to trust him, he better have a reputation to back that up.
P.S. The main reason people propound the labour theory of value is in order to claim that factory owners don’t provide any value but steal it all from the people who work for them. Since owning equipment is taking on risk (as well as the obligation to keep it in good repair) that most people don’t want to take on, this is false. This makes any attempt to justify some sort of double-complicated ultra-secret labor theory of value twice as presumptively a waste of time. There can’t be such a theory, and even if there was, it couldn’t do what they want.
There’s no reason to venture into the jungle to find a mythical train that doesn’t go anywhere.
I’ve said before that Science Fiction is “fantasy with spandex”, though more accurately it might be described as “fantasy with military uniforms that don’t have buttons.” Another viable definition might be “fantasy that doesn’t make atheists uncomfortable.”
That last one may be the most accurate of all, but I think it can be refined a little bit: Science Fiction is fantasy which does not suggest the immortality of the soul.
Some evidence I have for this: no one suggests that Star Trek isn’t Science Fiction because of Q, but they do suggest that Battlestar Galactica isn’t Science Fiction because a character died and came back as an angel.
It’s been a few years since I reviewed the Murder, She Wrote episode Murder In a Minor Key. I recently re-watched that episode and re-read my review and while I don’t take back a single thing I said in the review, I do think that I missed something, because in spite of all of the cheesiness and the plot holes, there is something captivating about that episode.
On reflection, I think that for all of its foibles (such as a tuning fork being used as a murder weapon) and plot holes (a woman carrying on an affair and saying that her lover wasn’t involved because her husband was “her problem” killing her husband in a moment of frustration because he neglected her), it did capture the sense of excitement and adventure that golden age mysteries had.
The first element of this is that it had a sense of something unusual breaking into the ordinary. This is often missing from Murder, She Wrote episodes because there are, generally, long-standing hatreds and rivalries established early on. Here, we have an apparently placid environment which suddenly breaks down. That’s much more of a golden-age feel, and also produces much more of a sense of mystery. “Which of the people who hated the victim finally got him?” is a fine question, but it’s not nearly so much a golden-age question.
Another major element of the golden-age mystery is the helplessness of the police, to the point of them barely investigating. This can be taken almost to the point of being silly, and this was remarked upon even during the Golden Age. Consider the opening of G.K. Chesterton’s short story The Mirror of the Magistrate, first published in 1925:
JAMES BAGSHAW and Wilfred Underhill were old friends, and were fond of rambling through the streets at night, talking interminably as they turned corner after corner in the silent and seemingly lifeless labyrinth of the large suburb in which they lived. The former, a big, dark, good-humoured man with a strip of black moustache, was a professional police detective; the latter, a sharp-faced, sensitive-looking gentleman with light hair, was an amateur interested in detection. It will come as a shock to the readers of the best scientific romance to learn that it was the policeman who was talking and the amateur who was listening, even with a certain respect.
“Ours is the only trade,” said Bagshaw, “in which the professional is always supposed to be wrong. After all, people don’t write stories in which hairdressers can’t cut hair and have to be helped by a customer; or in which a cabman can’t drive a cab until his fare explains to him the philosophy of cab-driving. For all that, I’d never deny that we often tend to get into a rut: or, in other words, have the disadvantages of going by a rule. Where the romancers are wrong is, that they don’t allow us even the advantages of going by a rule.”
“Surely,” said Underhill, “Sherlock Holmes would say that he went by a logical rule.”
“He may be right,” answered the other; “but I mean a collective rule. It’s like the staff work of an army. We pool our information.”
“And you don’t think detective stories allow for that?” asked his friend.
“Well, let’s take any imaginary case of Sherlock Holmes, and Lestrade, the official detective. Sherlock Holmes, let us say, can guess that a total stranger crossing the street is a foreigner, merely because he seems to look for the traffic to go to the right instead of the left. I’m quite ready to admit Holmes might guess that. I’m quite sure Lestrade wouldn’t guess anything of the kind. But what they leave out is the fact that the policeman, who couldn’t guess, might very probably know. Lestrade might know the man was a foreigner merely because his department has to keep an eye on all foreigners; some would say on all natives, too. As a policeman I’m glad the police know so much; for every man wants to do his own job well. But as a citizen, I sometimes wonder whether they don’t know too much.”
This would be taken into account in later detective stories; it became common for the amateur to work with the police and leave to the police the things that the police are good at, such as knocking on every door for three blocks and asking everyone if they saw something until they find someone who did, or asking every hardware store within a hundred miles if they recently sold a large crescent wrench to someone who did not look like a plumber. Indeed, Poirot would come to say that it is for the police to assemble the facts and for Poirot to figure out what they mean. This is eminently reasonable and in some sense an improvement in the genre, but that development did trade something for what it gained: anyone might go and investigate for himself; the police will only cooperate with a select few.
Murder in a Minor Key had that feeling of the main characters doing something that anyone could do. Chad and Jenny were just college students who happened to be friends with the composer who was accused of the crime. They had no official connections with anyone, no credentials, and until the end, no cooperation from anyone. (How they got cooperation for the re-enactment is not explained because I don’t think it could possibly have been justified. The police detective who is present says that he’s only there because the school asked him to cooperate, but why on earth did the school ask him to cooperate?)
This sort of setup is very hard to do well, but it is also very exciting, and that can make up for a lot.
When looking closely at the plots of many murder mysteries one can see where a great deal of time was lost in there being mistakes in interpretation of the evidence which were made toward the start of an investigation. They can be explicit, like thinking that a clue belongs to one person when it actually belongs to someone else, but it can also be much bigger in scope—mistaking a murder for gain as murder for revenge, for example. It’s possible for the detective to spend the first half a book (or more!) laboring under this kind of mistake. It can be a useful way to spend time, and can also be the setup for the big reveal at the end which shows the detective to be brilliant.
However, it can, especially upon close inspection, easily seem a bit far fetched for the brilliant detective to get locked into an incorrect interpretation. Often the reason why people begin with one interpretation is trivial—it can be as little as someone making an off-hand suggestion, or even just someone assuming it. And, to be fair, it is the job of the brilliant detective to question all of the things that ordinary people take for granted. That said, even brilliant detectives are human. Human beings need some sort of interpretive framework to operate within, even if only held provisionally, and that framework will dictate what is and what is not conceivable. As long as the current evidence keeps the current framework plausible, it is reasonable for even the most brilliant of detectives to work within it. That is, until it stops working. That’s what’s being described by the phrase, “once you eliminate the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the case.”
The other issue that comes up with early mistakes in a murder mystery is that, if it’s not handled very well, it can easily diminish the re-reading value of the story. Now, I know that not everyone values re-reading as much as I do, but I tend to operate on the principle that if a book is not worth re-reading ten times, it’s not worth reading once. (Obviously, the only way to find out is to read it once, and there are plenty of exceptions.) So how do you make the first three quarters of a book a waste of the detective’s time without making it a waste of the re-reader’s time?
The answer, I think, is to make it not be a waste of the detective’s time, but that’s not obvious until you arrive at the full solution.
That is, during the early part of the book when the detective is laboring under a misinterpretation of the crime he must still be collecting clues that will help in the solution without understanding how they are. This is a very tricky balance; it can get frustrating when all of the clues point one way and the detective won’t even consider it because of one small mistake. It’s best, if at all possible, for most of the clues discovered early to work within the framework of the mistake but to work better within the framework of the truth. A really good example of this which comes to mind is in the Hercule Poirot novel Five Little Pigs (spoilers ahead).
There is a piece of evidence given which seems to fit in under the prevailing interpretation that Caroline murdered Amyas, but it works better under the theory that she didn’t. That is the wiping of the bottle. Until Poirot introduces the interpretation that Caroline was protecting her little sister, who she believed killed Amyas, her wiping of the bottle (as well as other actions) seem to indicate her guilt. Poirot’s collecting of this information did prove useful.
I think that this forms the ideal, though of course like most ideals it is difficult to achieve.
Incidentally, what we have said above would seem to suggest that red herrings are a problem for re-readability, and yet it is obvious that red herrings can work well in a detective story. Certainly, there is a place for red herrings, but I think that they must be used like a spice—too many of them can hurt a story. But how to use them?
I think that this principle we have laid out for early misconceptions in a detective story also points to the best way to handle red herrings. A red herring which is just a waste of time will not be satisfying on re-reading—unless it serves some other purpose. That, I think, is the key. The best red herrings will improve somebody’s life when they are cleared up. Lovers held apart can come together, a missing item of value can be restored to its owner, somebody in danger can be made safe—there are many options, the key thing that makes this a satisfying red herring is that it is a bonus. That in addition to solving the central mystery and putting things right that were put wrong through the misuse of reason, some other problem was set right too.
Hard to achieve, certainly, but I think worth striving for.
I only became aware of Andrew Tate about a year ago and having come across some of the things he’s said really make me wonder if his public persona is just performance art. Consider this one:
Most of you will never make your fathers proud.
Not truly.
Not deep in his heart.
Only victory in battle can do that. It’s evolutionary.
Your dad pretends he’s proud of your ecom store while wishing you were a champion.
Most of you will never make your fathers proud. Not truly. Not deep in his heart. Only victory in battle can do that. It’s evolutionary. Your dad pretends he’s proud of your ecom store while wishing you were a champion. You failed. Cowards.
The ridiculousness of this verges on well-crafted.
First, it’s just silly. Victory in battle doesn’t make fathers nearly as proud as building well-made things does. Just meet some fathers, or be one. But even on its face, being able to provide food to his family doesn’t make a man’s father proud? Seriously? It’s fine if they starve to death, all that matters is that he beat someone else in combat? Yeah. Right.
Evolution does not, in fact, favor the inability to keep yourself alive under normal circumstances†.
Also, I find it highly amusing that apparently a successful hunter counts for nothing, it’s only fighting other human beings that counts, according to evolution. Because it’s fine to starve to death because you can’t kill a deer, or to have your children killed by a jaguar that you can’t track down and kill, but if some other man beats you in battle and you have to pay taxes to him as a result, evolution just hates that.
Yeah. That’s plausible.
(There are a thousand ways to point out that this is wrong, I’m sticking to just a few that happen to occur to me first to save time.)
What’s also rich about this is that Andrew Tate has never, so far as I know, been in any battle. He’s played punching games for money under strict rules that prohibited the one guy (carefully selected for being no bigger than him) he was fighting from pulling out so much as a sharp stick, and which was actually surrounded by a metal cage to prevent the other guy’s friends from helping. But I can find nowhere in his biography that he was ever on a battlefield where people wanted to kill him and used every means at their disposal to try to do so.
The persona of Andrew Tate is almost perfectly pure bravado. He talks very, very big, but in ways that he obviously doesn’t measure up. According to him, he made is money being a digital pimp—running a camgirl business (i.e. basically, using internet video to do realtime pornography). But even more impressively, according to him the real money came from when he would have the naked woman handling the public chatroom while he pretended to be her in his DMs and then conned men into sending “her” their life savings, selling their house and giving “her” the proceeds, etc. That is, he made most of his money by flirting with men while pretending to be a woman.
This is the guy who lectures men on how fathers are evolutionarily programmed to only be proud of their sons if they cage fight.
It is possible, of course, that the man has this little an amount of self-awareness. But it’s starting to become more plausible that this is actually some elaborate piece of performance art.
†It would, technically, be more accurate to phrase this as: evolution does not place no value on the ability to stay alive under normal circumstances. That said, in the broader context, people who go looking for fights tend to suffer consequences and people who focus on one thing tend to neglect others, hence my original phrasing. It’s not wrong as a critique, it’s just not as accurate a summary of what I said immediately before.
Having recently heard a review that included a plot synopsis of the 2023 film Barbie, it’s a bit striking how much the film is genuinely misandristic. The thing I want to talk about is how genuine mysandrists also hate women, just as genuine misogynists also hate men.
(For those who don’t know, misandry is the masculine form of misogyny; andros coming from the Greek meaning “male” and gymnos from the Greek meaning “female.” Anthropos refers to all human beings and was the equivalent of the English “man” until we dropped “were.” “Were” was pronounced “vehr”, similar to the Latin “vir” from which we get words like “virile”. You can still see “were” it in the world “werewolf.”)
It is no accident that people who hate one sex will hate the other; it’s actually unavoidable. A person can start out only hating one sex but then they come up against the fact that whichever sex they start out not hating is complementary with the other sex. At this point they’re faced with a choice; they can either give up their hatred (which is unlikely) or they can start hating the other sex too. As a practical matter they will always hate only a large subset of whichever sex it is they just discovered needs its complement. In general they will find some unhealthy sub-set of their preferred sex and call that the real or true version of that sex and hate all of the members who are healthy. You can see this is man-hating feminists who also hate mothers, or red-pill misogynists who call fathers who marry the mother of their children fools (usually with more colorful slang). In both cases they may even hate the member of their own sex who violates their hatred more than they hate the opposite sex.
People whose lives tend to be defined by hatred tend to be alike. It is, I think, a natural consequence that a person who closes himself off to much of what is human cannot have much variety. Anyway, you will tend to observe in both mysandrists and misogynists the same tendency toward a deification of what they hate within their demonization of it. Misandrists hold that males have throughout all of history brutally oppressed women; misogynists tend to hold some version of women using men and spitting them out like the husks of sunflower seeds. Both varieties of this remind me of the reaction one has to an antisemite explaining how the Jews secretly rule everything—really, if they’re this much smarter, stronger, cleverer, cooperative and just generally better at winning than everyone else, they deserve to be in charge.
You can see what I mean, by the way, in the language that’s often used around power. It’s talked about as if power is something someone hands out to people, and it’s complained that it’s been handed out unfairly. This is to entirely miss the point of what power is: power is the ability to compel people to do things against their will.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Life is not about power, but about love. God pours being into us to the point of overflowing and we, in immitation of Him, pour this abundance into each other. That’s why we’re here in the same time and space and able to influence each other: in order to love each other. (Oversimplifying, of course.) If a person is worried about power, he’s missed the point and is guaranteed to be unhappy. (Again, overismplifying.)
But, that said, power is a coherent concept, and can be discussed on its own terms. And on its own terms, power is never something that can be shared. Power is force. It is strength. Someone can’t share their strength with you. You either have your own strength or you don’t. To complain that an enemy soldier who is trying to shoot you isn’t sharing his power with you is nonsense. Shooting you is his power.
You can coherently claim that women are as powerful as men, but for most of history wanted different things and so used their power to achieve different (possibly complementary) aims. That may be true or false, but it at least doesn’t contradict itself. You cannot claim that women are as powerful as men but men have always and everywhere oppressed women. If women were oppressed, by definition they were not as powerful. Similarly, you cannot claim that men are smarter than women and also that women constantly use males for their resources without the males realizing it. If women are always fooling men, it means that men aren’t as smart. (“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Fool me a hundred million times…)
In a competition, a good competitor can have a bad day. He can even have a few bad days. What a good competitor cannot do is always lose. If he always loses, he’s a loser.
There are exceptions, but a huge number of haters are in this weird position of claiming that their preferred group are losers who deserve to win by some merit other than the ability to win, while simultaneously claiming that they’re also not losers. Usually (when pressed) this is by claiming that they’d win if the other side would forfeit. Which is true enough, but also completely pointless. The stronger will only help the weaker out of love and if you’re appealing to love, you’re in a completely different framework where complaining about power makes no sense.
Of course, it is not a surprise that people who are using a false framework end up incoherent. If you start from a lie, you will inevitably contradict yourself. Still, it’s curious how it happens, and how often it happens the same way.
In the second set of six Miss Marple short stories which (together with a special extra story) comprise The Thirteen Problems, we get introduced to the character of Jane Helier. She is a beautiful and intelligent, though vapid, actress. I should say, stage actress. The stories she was in were published in late 1929 and early 1930; talkies had only just started dominating movies in 1929 and the superior experience of seeing color and hearing sound in plays probably made them preferable over silent films for people who could easily afford to pay to see plays.
She’s an interesting character, especially because she is played mostly for laughs until the final story of the six, The Affair At the Bungalow. When I said that she is beautiful, I don’t mean merely that she is above average. She is described as having been argued as the most beautiful woman in England. She has that kind of beauty which makes all of the men around her gallant even where they have no romantic interest in her. I think Agatha Christie plays this part as much just for realism as for laughs. And I say this even though Jane Helier is mostly played for laughs, especially how much she doesn’t understand. That said, there is an interesting dynamic between her and Miss Marple—who, at the beginning of the evening, Jane doesn’t know from Eve.
Miss Marple was invited to dinner to round out the places at table. She was recommended by Sir Henry Clithering, former commissioner of Scotland Yard, because Dolly Bantry (the hostess) needed an extra guest to round out the dinner table and asked Sir Henry who she should invite. Sir Henry remembered Miss Marple vividly from the year before when he’d attended the dinner party of Miss Marple’s famous writer nephew, i.e. from the first run of six Miss Marple stories, in which each guest told a story of a crime they had learned about personally and the rest were to guess the solution. (Only Miss Marple could, for every story, of course). This second six stories features the same dinner game, though with different guests. Until the very end of the dinner party, Jane underestimates Miss Marple. Miss Marple, of course, does not underestimate Jane.
During the course of the evening, there were a great many things that Jane didn’t know, but she did have one insight which Miss Marple praised. That was in the second-to-last story, and it it we also learn that she has had grief in her life, related to being betrayed by a man. In the second-to-last story, she had somewhat more intelligent things to say about who might have been the murderer, though only Miss Marple figured it out. Then, finally, we come to Jane’s story.
I will have to discuss the solution to discuss the story, so if it is necessary: consider this, dear reader, your spoiler warning.
Jane begins by telling her story about “a friend” who happens to also be a famous actress. Everyone guesses—correctly—that this friend is really her, and in only a few sentences she trips up and says “I” instead of “she”, and a moment later quotes someone as saying “Miss Helier” instead of “Miss Helman.” She is embarassed and says that it’s so difficult to do it, and everyone is very sympathetic, so she goes on telling the story about herself.
It’s an elaborate story about a young man getting drugged at a bungalow and a theft being committed, and he identifies the woman who drugged him as Jane but she had an alibi. At the end of it, there are various solutions offered, except by Miss Marple, who says that it seems to have a personal element in it and a deliberate attempt to get the young man into trouble, though it’s not really a satisfactory explanation. A little later she remembers Mrs. Pebmarsh, who was a laundress that stole an opal pin from one woman and put it on the blouse of another woman. Instead of offering a solution, she says that she has none and that the real moral of the story is that in a crisis, women must stick together. Jane explains that she doesn’t know the solution and hoped that the people assembled would, since they’re so clever. They’re annoyed at her since this explicitly went against the rules, but there’s nothing anyone can do. The time is late and Miss Marple departs, but before she does she whispers something in Jane Helier’s ear which causes her to exclaim.
A little later, Dolly Bantry accompanies Jane Helier to her bedroom (she’s staying with them) and Jane asks if there are many people like Miss Marple, and Dolly says that she supposes every village has one. Jane is disappointed by this. It comes out that Miss Marple did in fact guess the real solution but wouldn’t say it in front of the men. Jane had, in fact, committed the crime in the story, with her understudy as her accomplice. She had played the parlor maid and her understudy played her.
Except that this never actually happened. Jane was planning to do it in a few months and was “trying it on the dog.” She was very encouraged that no one had come up with the solution except for Miss Marple, but was discouraged to hear that there probably was a Miss Marple in every village. And then there was the advice which Miss Marple whispered in her ear right before she left.
I shouldn’t do it if I were you, my dear. Never put yourself too much in another woman’s power, even if you do think she’s your friend at the moment.
What’s really interesting about the way that Jane Helier reveals that she was not as dumb as everyone thought:
Mrs. Bantry sat down and groaned.
“Oh! my poor head. And all the time—Jane Helier, you deceitful girl! Telling us that story the way you did!”
“I am a good actress,” said Jane complacently. “I always have been, whatever people choose to say. I didn’t give myself away once, did I?”
It’s an interesting twist on the character. She is still not brilliant, to be sure, but she is not nearly the airhead that she seemed to be. This is an interesting commentary on the nature of extreme beauty, especially when coupled with narcissism, or at least selfishness. She does not bother herself to be interested in things which do not grab her, which is why there are so many things she doesn’t catch. She doesn’t pay much attention to the people around her because she doesn’t need to—they will treat her well regardless of how she treats them. If she smiles and speaks nicely, people will assume her lack of interest and attention were inability, rather than self-absorption. Indeed, beauty will help out in this regard in another way, too, which is that people tend to assume that a beautiful face means a beautiful soul. That is, a face which shows little trace of the fall of man often fools people into thinking that the soul is as unfallen as the face, and so people are unlikely to suspect moral defects.
It is interesting that making her smarter than she seems also makes her worse than she seems, and indeed this is born out by the scheme of revenge which she was contemplating and testing out. It had none of the sweetness of her manner.
Agatha Christie is often given credit for the cleverness of her plots, but not often given credit for her understanding of human nature. I think she is not often given this credit because her writing is plain and not literary. It certainly was not nearly so literary as another of the Queens of Crime, Dorothy L. Sayers. Yet I think, in this, she is underrated. Her characters did not leap off the page. They did not dazzle the reader with their complex psychology. But the truth is that human psychology is almost never as complex as it likes to pretend it is when it is defending itself from realizing its own faults and Agatha Christie’s writing was far more concerned with the psychological truth than with peering into the veil of lies a person tells themselves.
Jane Helier is an interesting character study, if you pay attention.
On the sixth day of November in the year of our Lord 1988, the episode Mr. Penroy’s Vacation aired. It was the third episode of the fifth season of Murder, She Wrote. (Last week’s episode was A Little Night Work.)
Jessica is back in Cabot Cove.
The episode opens with the perpetually re-election-minded mayor of Cabot Cove, Sam Booth, walking his bulldog, Winston.
As he’s walking Winston along the coast he notices Mr. Penroy and strikes up a conversation with him. Not surprisingly, for those who know Sam, the subject of the conversation is about voting. Specifically, he couldn’t help but notice that Mr. Penroy hadn’t yet registered to vote.
Mr. Penroy thanks the mayor for reminding him, saying that a man needs to put down roots. Sam pretends to reluctance at running again, and Mr. Penroy is sufficiently complementary that Sam feels confident of Mr. Penroy’s vote, so he takes his leave.
Mr. Penroy only gets about thirty feet along the path when a young man named Daryl jumps over the short wall. They emphasize his thuggish nature by having him pull out a switch blade.
He then uses it to clean his fingernail, but the point, as it were, was made.
Evidently the two know each other; Daryl was not supposed to show up for another two days. There is some oblique reference to something valuable made which seems to be in Mr. Penroy’s safekeeping. Daryl showed up early to make sure that it was safe, though the subtext seems to be that he showed up early to make sure that Mr. Penroy wasn’t going to skip town with whatever the valuable thing is.
Darrel says something solicitous but insincere about Mr. Penroy’s health, then Mr. Penroy dismissively tells him to keep out of sight and walks off.
While this happens, some guy looks on.
The scene then shifts to Jessica’s house. She’s wrapping presents on her kitchen table when Seth Hazlitt knocks on the door. He’s there because Jessica said she would help him wrap his present for Morris Penroy’s birthday party.
Jessica asks where on earth Seth bought it and he replies that he didn’t buy it. Amos Tupper gave it to him last Christmas. This causes Jessica to start reminiscing about Amos, who has retired. He’s been gone for a month, and went back to Kentucky where his family is.
I’m not sure that we ever knew that Amos was from Kentucky. (It’s possible we did learn it in the episode where his family came to visit him but I don’t recall it being mentioned.) He seemed to me to be played much more as a Cabot Cove native. To be fair, he didn’t have a Maine accent, but then the accents on the show were all over the place. Sometimes it’s suggested that this is because many of the residents moved in decades ago but often times no explanation is given. About the only two (recurring) characters who had Maine accents were Seth Hazlitt and Sam Booth.
Be that as it may, this is an interesting way to introduce the fact that Tom Bosley left the show. (He left in order to take the starring role in Father Dowling Mysteries.) This is a problem that all long-running shows face and they deal with it in a variety of ways. I like that they sent the character off to a peaceful retirement rather than killing him off. They never brought him back, but it was nice that there was the possibility, and in any event it’s good that the character got a nice ending to his story. One becomes fond of characters. Amos never appeared in the fifth season; over the four seasons he did appear he showed up in nineteen episodes. That gives us a decent approximation of the number of Cabot Cove episodes: roughly five per season.
The conversation shifts to the new sheriff, Mort Metzger. He took early retirement from the police force of New York City. Jessica remarks that, paying what they do, they’re lucky to have gotten someone with police experience. Seth then brings up Mort’s wife, Adele. Adele will form something of a running joke in the series. She will never show up in an episode, with Mort often making excuses for her not being present, and other people being relieved because she is extremely talkative. (She is a retired Marine.) The joke is introduced, here, with Seth remarking that Adele was in to see him with a sore throat, which didn’t surprise Seth because he’d never heard someone talk so much before.
The scene then shifts to Mr. Penroy going home to the room he rents in the house of the Appletree sisters. Before he can get in the gate, he’s accosted by someone by the name of Cliff.
Whatever scheme Mr. Penroy and Darrel are in on, Cliff is in on it as well. Mr. Penroy is as short with Cliff as he was with Darrel, and tells him to make himself very scarce.
The scene changes to the center of the market district of Cabot Cove, where a bus stops. A woman gets off of it and a man who is waiting there asks her if he can help her with her bag.
She’s uninterested, so he says that he’s new in town but thought he could recommend a place to stay as he’s found a place which is inexpensive but clean. She tells him to go there, get a cold shower, then call his wife. She walks off without further words, and he looks after her pensively.
The scene shifts to later in the day when we finally meet the Appletree sisters.
Helen is on the left and Lilian is on the right. If they were in a marvel comic book, they would be described as living embodiments of spinsterhood. More accurately, though, they’re doing their best impression of Abby and Martha Brewster from the 1944 Cary Grant film, Arsenic and Old Lace.
As you can tell from the shovel in Helen’s hand, she’s digging and Lilian is bringing her some lemonade to refresh herself. They bicker and Lilian goes inside to make a cake. Later on, she’s almost done when Helen comes in. Lilian says that she’s frosting it with chocolate, which is Mr. Penroy’s favorite. Helen dismisses this, saying, “What difference does it make?” and asks Lilian to give her a hand. We find out with what in a moment:
The camera pans down and confirms that it is, in fact, Mr. Penroy’s body which they are dragging.
They put him in the shallow grave which Helen had dug during the day, then cover him with their best tablecloth which Helen embroidered herself, and bury him. Lilian excuses herself to bring up some cider for Mr. Penroy’s party the next day.
The scene shifts to the party the next day with Jessica and Seth arriving. There is small talk, and the Appletree sisters explain that Mr. Penroy isn’t present because he got a phone call for a sick friend in Peoria—Helen corrects Lilian that it was Phoenix—and had to rush off to be with him.
Amid small talk and Seth discussing the gossip about Mr. Penroy having romantic interest in one of the Appletree sisters and possibly having left because he got cold feet, the Mail Man arrives and delivers the mail to Helen, carefully announcing each piece of mail to everyone around, including the fact that her electric bill is a second notice. Handy for us the audience, but I would expect a postman to be more discrete than this.
As an interesting tidbit, Jessica thanks him for covering her postage due the other day—she was three cents short. The smallest coin she has on hand is a nickel, so he replies that he’ll put two cents into her mailbox the next day, with a receipt. Inflation certainly has had an effect—my recollection was that in the late 1980s a letter stamp cost $0.25 while at the time I’m writing this they cost $0.63. That said, it’s not that huge a jump. If we do a rough adjustment for inflation, it would be as if Jessica were short nine cents, gave him fifteen cents, and he promised to leave six cents in her mailbox with a receipt. To modern ears it’s weird that either of them are expending any energy over this trivial an amount of money, but I think it is a cultural thing—both characters would have grown up during the Great Depression and it was deeply ingrained in them to never waste anything, no matter how trivial.
Next Cliff shows up, but dressed as a clergyman.
This is just a disguise so I don’t expect accuracy, but I wonder what kind of minister he’s pretending to be. Lutheran, perhaps?
He introduces himself as Reverend Wilford Smythe, an old friend of Mr. Penroy, from Albany. He says that Mr. Penroy had written to him and invited him to stop by if ever he was in town. They explain, to his consternation, that Mr. Penroy has left to visit a sick friend and won’t be back for some time. He gives them a blessing and leaves.
That night the sisters are discussing their overdue bills and decide to endorse Mr. Penroy’s pension check over to themselves since he won’t be needing it. They then hear a rattle upstairs and decide to deal with it because they don’t trust the new Sheriff.
The scene cuts over to Sheriff Metzger paying a visit to Jessica. The last thing that Amos Tupper told her before he left was that if he ever needed help he should ask Jessica, so here he is. Amos left him the parking plans for the Founder’s Day picnic, but he can’t read Amos’ handwriting. Jessica admits that she was never very good at reading Amos’ handwriting either, but between the two of them they’ll try. They then fall to small talk in which we get some character building for Mort. His wife, Adele, who is very talkative, had spent two years in the Marine Corps and he is very happy to be away from New York City in which he was constantly worried about being caught in the middle of a gang war on his way home on the subway. His closing remark, in the scene, is that in a quiet little town like this he practically feels like he’s stealing his paycheck (i.e. that he has no work to do to earn it).
Back at the Appletree sisters’ house, Helen is digging another grave, this time for Cliff, who is lying dead on their lawn with a pitchfork stuck in his chest.
The scene shifts to the next day where the Appletree sisters are discussing the events of the night before. They agree that they did the right thing and couldn’t have turned to the new Sheriff. They then go inside the bank to cash Mr. Penroy’s pension check, and run into Jessica. They make some smalltalk, but mostly this scene exists to have Jessica witness them cashing Mr. Penroy’s pension check.
Right after the Appletree sisters leave, Jessica notices the guy who was hiding behind the tree at the beginning of the episode (he still doesn’t have a name) lurking in the bank, watching the Appletree sisters and her. When he notices her noticing him, he leaves.
Jessica then runs into Sam Booth who is trying to train his bulldog, Winston, to heel. When given the command, Winston runs off. Sam shrugs and says that they’re just getting started, then starts to ask Jessica to serve on the town council, but she’s already served three terms and with all of the traveling that she does, she doesn’t want to serve another term. Sam says that that’s what he wanted to discuss. He was thinking that Morris Penroy would be an ideal candidate. He’s only been here a year, but people like him and he’s retired so he has time to attend the meetings.
At this point Winston runs off to the Appletree sisters yard and digs up Mr. Penroy’s hand.
Finally, things can get started.
The scene shifts to later when the police have arrived and dug up the body. Doc Hazlitt estimates that Morris has been dead for about forty eight hours, but there are no obvious signs of the cause of death. He refuses to speculate as to the cause of death, saying that they’ll have to wait for the coroner’s report. He did, however, find a key on a thin chain hanging around Mr. Penroy’s neck.
Sheriff Metzger tells Doc Hazlitt that he wants the coroner’s report “code blue,” whatever that’s supposed to mean and for whatever reason he thinks that Doc Hazlitt will be involved in the coroner’s report coming to him.
Sheriff Metzger then interrogates the Appletree sisters, but they get upset and go to their house to get the Sheriff refreshment. After they leave, Jessica counsels the Sheriff to be more gentle and he gratefully accepts her advice, then wanders off to talk to someone (it’s unclear who). Jessica follows the Appletree sisters, but on her way notices the tablecloth that Penroy was buried in (it’s bagged as evidence, and sitting in plain sight).
Inside, Jessica gently interrogates the sisters. She’s more subtle than she usually is—she doesn’t make a single thinly veiled accusation—and the Sisters decide to confide in her.
Outside, Sheriff Metzger is talking to the Mayor, who advises him that if he has any difficulty in clearing up the murder that he should go to Jessica for help. Metzger remarks that he’s not the first person to say that. He then goes inside and starts bullying the Appletree sisters again despite having been grateful to Jessica for her advice to be more gentle.
His bullying of them is interrupted by Floyd coming in and announcing the discovery of the other body the Appletree sisters burried (Winston has been a busy little bulldog). The Sheriff looks at Jessica, Jessica looks at the Appletree sisters, the Appletree sisters look at each other, and we go to commercial break.
When we come back, Seth is on the phone. It’s with Sheriff Metzger, who is impatient for the coroner’s report, which apparently would go to Seth because… I don’t know. Doctors stick together?
Anyway, he’s got the Appletree sisters in his office and after putting down the phone, demands answers. They deny everything. Metzger confronts them with the fact that Penroy never took the bus and their house never received a long distance phone call all that week. Lilian says that if he’s going to raise his voice, they’re not interested in continuing the conversation and he has them locked up.
He then gives Jessica a lift somewhere and they drive there in glorious rear projection.
Jessica explains to Mort that she’s known the Appletree sisters since she was a young woman and she can’t believe that they just turned into a pair of serial killers, though she agrees that they are lying. She brings up their cashing of the pension check at the bank, which is suspicious given that the check was delivered yesterday during the party and Penroy was already dead by then. Metzger says that he will look into this right after they’re done searching the Appletree sisters’ house.
At the house they find Penroy’s luggage, which contradicts the Appletree sisters saying that Penroy had packed his bags. They wisely don’t dwell on this, though, because there’s no need to belabor the reasoning behind what the audience already knows because we were shown it.
Downstairs on the main floor, Jessica notices something suspicious in the fireplace.
I know I’m a bit of a stickler for details, but I’m really curious how the sisters managed to build a fire that entirely consumed the wooden handle of the pitchfork that was standing up but left two logs at the bottom unburnt and covered in ash. It must have been a roaring fire indeed to burn a stick several feet up in the air, and it’s curious to use fireproof logs at the base of it. (You do want something fireproof to keep the combustible material off of the ground so oxygen can more easily get to it, but that’s what the iron grate that the unburnt logs are on top of is for.) Also, my hat is off to them for building a fire that burnt so completely that everything (except the fireproof logs) burnt completely to ash and there are no charred bits of wood that fell off as the fire consumed the wood. When I build fires I always get little black cinders that burned incompletely and went out before turning to ash.
Sheriff Metzger recalls that Doc Hazlitt said that the corpse had four stab wounds in the chest, and says, “looks like we just found ourselves a murder weapon.” Jessica has an interesting reaction to that:
This feels a little out of character for Jessica. Normally when evidence surfaces against someone she likes, she is quick with indignation and alternate interpretations.
Someone knocks at the door and it’s the woman who got off of the bus and was given advice by the strange guy on a good motel to stay at. She asks if this is the residence of Morris Penroy, and when she’s told that he’s not at home she says that she’ll come in to wait for him.
She introduces herself as Marilee Penroy, Mr. Penroy’s wife. She says that they were married a little over a year ago, before he came to Cabot Cove. They then break the news that Morris is dead. She faints and Sheriff Metzger catches her.
Back in the Sheriff’s office, they discuss the pitchfork end a bit, then the guy who met Marilee at the bus stop and offered her advice on hotels comes in. He introduces himself as Bart Clapper, special investigator for the Boston & Western Railroad.
Apparently, five million dollars were stolen about a year ago. Three armed men overpowered the baggage clerk and took the money. Mr. Penroy was that clerk. Clapper knows who the three men were—he hands out photographs and gives their names. They were the three men who showed up to talk to Mr. Penroy the day before his party. Clapper figures that there must have been a falling out among thieves and they murdered Penroy and Cliff and burried them in Penroy’s back yard.
Seth interrupts this—he got the call from the Coroner’s office—and gives the news that it turns out that Penroy died of a massive heart attack and wasn’t murdered at all.
Jessica objects that many things don’t make sense, including why Mr. Penroy concealed that he was married. Clapper says that Penroy wasn’t married, and after receiving a description of “Mrs. Penroy” identifies her as Cliff’s wife. The Appletree sisters ask if they’re free to go, and the Sheriff says that they are. Jessica follows them.
At home they decide to tell Jessica the truth. Mr. Penroy came back from his walk in a good mood, told the sisters that he was expecting to come into some money, and asked Helen to marry him. She set him straight that her kindness had no romantic aspect—in the flashback she beat him with a hand towel when he grabbed her to kiss her—and that’s when he had the heart attack.
Jessica asked why they buried him in the back yard. It turns out that they got used to having the rent money, but after what happened, they didn’t want to rent to another bachelor. And it would have all turned out OK if that fake minister hand’t come poking around.
Jessica says that she shutters to ask what happened to the minister, but the Appletree sisters don’t really know. They heard someone bumbling around int he room upstairs and threatened him through the door that they would call the police. He went out the window, then they heard Cliff shout “Holy!” (Helen thinks it was calling out the name “Foley”.) When they found him outside, dead, with their pitchfork in his chest, they figured it would be better to cover it up.
When they straightened up the ransacked room, they did find that Mr. Penroy’s baggage claim check collection was missing. Jessica surmises it has something to do with the missing money, then says that she has to run along.
Sheriff Metzger finds Daryl Croft and Ole Korshack talking and arrests them. (They had a brief conversation before the arrest where each wondered if the other had the money.) Back at the police station, Jessica comes in and hears the news of the arrest. She doesn’t think that they know anything, and figures that he doesn’t have much to hold them on without the money. (It’s not obvious what they could be charged with even if Jessica and the police do find the money. Merely being in Cabot Cove is not a crime.)
Sheriff Metzger calls the railroad company and asks about a reward, and learns that they’re offering a 10% reward for the return of the money—half a million dollars. He also finds out that Bart Clapper doesn’t work for them anymore.
Jessica then notices the key that had been around Morris Penroy’s neck. “This may be a bit obvious, but, uh, you know, this key looks like one I have for an old trunk.” Metzger replies that it’s obvious, but worth checking out.
The scene shifts to the Appletree sisters’ house, where they’re looking in their basement for the old trunk which they had stored there for Mr. Penroy. They break it open and find the money. Their discussion of whether they need to mention it to Jessica is interrupted by Bart Clapper, who had been watching their house all afternoon. He has an interesting line when, after some discussion, Helen asks if he means that he’s going to steal the money: “It’s an imperfect world, Ladies. We all have our weaknesses.”
They try to dissuade him by saying that they’ll tell Sheriff Metzger, but he merely indicates he’s going to murder them to prevent that. As he threateningly approaches them Sheriff Metzger, standing at the top of the basement stairs, orders him, at gun point, to stop where he is.
The scene shifts to Jessica catching up with Marilee next to the bus stop. She gossips about the recent goings-on and in passing asks if it’s OK for her to call her “Lee.” Marilee says that all her friends call her “Lee.” Jessica says that as soon as Sheriff Metzger finds the checks which Cliff stole from Mr. Penroy’s room that will be the final evidence needed for a conviction. Marilee responds that she doubts that Sheriff Metzger will find the baggage claim checks, Clapper would probably have burned them.
Having thus revealed her guilt, Jessica pounces. She expects that Cliff had run out on Marilee and she followed him because she’d found out about the intended money split. It was her name he called out when he came down the stairs with the briefcase full of baggage claim checks. More specifically, he said, “Oh! Lee!” Jessica then observes that it must have taken a great deal of frustration and rage for Marilee to do what she did.
The red strap shows how big the shoulder pads are. Ah, the 80s.
“Being married to Cliff was like being on a burning roller coaster… He was always in trouble with the law and when he finally made his one big beautiful score, he left me. You understand, don’t you?”
Of course Jessica doesn’t. She only has unlimited understanding for sexual sins no matter how bad; she can never comprehend how someone could stoop so low as murder.
The final scene is back at her house, playing chess with Seth. Jessica tells him that they returned the money from Mr. Penroy’s pension check and the Sheriff was kind enough to not press charges. Seth remarks that it’s only saving the taxpayer money, as any good lawyer could have gotten them off due to diminished mental capacity. Jessica replies that she suspects that there’s not much wrong with the Appletree sisters’ mental capacity, and Seth answers that he was talking about Metzger.
And with that, we go to credits.
Like most gimmick episodes, this one wasn’t great as a mystery. The first half of the episode is either an homage to Arsenic and Old Lace or uses Arsenic and Old Lace as a huge red herring, or possibly both. (At the date of first airing, Arsenic and Old Lace was forty four years old, so similar to, in 2023, making reference to Alien, Moonraker, The Life of Brian, Rocky II or Star Trek: The Motion Picture.) The result is that we only get about half an episode to have a mystery in, and in fact we get less because we waste about ten minutes of it not knowing that Morris Penroy died of a heart attack.
Once we learn that Penroy died of a heart attack and shortly after that the Appletree sisters didn’t kill Cliff, the suspects that we’re left with are all barely characters. Daryl, Ole, Marilee, and Bart Clapper had about three minutes of screen time between them.
I think that—based on Marilee and Jessica’s conversation at the end—it’s supposed to be a red herring that Bart Clapper announced his intention to murder the Appletree sisters in order to steal the railroad money. If it was, I didn’t catch any indication that he was involved with any other murder. No one brought it up and he said nothing that would have suggested it. It’s not that it would be a plot hole if he did it—the story didn’t really point to anyone—but since Jessica in no way figured anything out that pointed at Clapper, it didn’t feel like the reveal in a Murder, She Wrote, and consequently felt like eliminating the character from suspicion. (Not that Jessica couldn’t have visited him in jail and showed the evidence that he committed the murder, but that would require a separate scene.)
You can do the same basic thing with some of the other possible suspects—idneitify some scene that contained a scrap of a hint that they were the murderer—but no one’s actions had any consistency to them. All of Mr. Penroy’s co-conspirators showed up two days before the distribution of the money because, ostensibly, they feared that Penroy would flee, taking all the money with him. But why on earth, if he was going to flee, would he wait for two days before the distribution? He even points this out himself when talking with Cliff. “If I was going to run out on you, I’d have done it months ago.”
This really applies to everything that the suspects did. How did Marilee know to come to Cabot Cove? No idea. Why did Burt Clapper offer to suggest a hotel to her? No idea. Why was the getaway driver (Daryl) aggressive while the muscle (Ole) was timid and fearful? No idea. Why did Cliff show up to the birthday party dressed as a minister when it was still a day before he was supposed to show up and Penroy had told him to make himself scarce? No idea. Why did Cliff search Mr. Penroy’s room when he believed Penroy had skipped town with the money? No idea. How did Marilee know to wait for Cliff at the bottom of the ladder outside the Appletree sisters’ house with a pitch fork? No idea. Why did she resolve to murder him but didn’t bring a weapon? No idea.
Also, while the pitch fork wasn’t quite as bad a murder weapon as the tuning fork in Murder in a Minor Key, it still seems more than a little unlikely that a small woman in her forties who looks like she’d need help to open a jar of peanut butter could plunge a pitchfork deep enough into a man’s chest to cause instant death. What I’ve been calling a pitchfork was actually, technically, a garden fork. Its tines are thicker, flatter, and more blunt than a pitchfork because it’s meant to be plunged into the ground and used to break up the soil. This is usually done by pushing with one’s foot, using one’s weight on top to drive the fork into the ground because it requires a lot of force. To do that standing, sideways, with just one’s arms, and through clothing and skin, would require quite a lot of power. There are women who have that size and power, but Marilee did not look like she would be one of them.
So, if this episode wasn’t much of a mystery, how was it as an homage to Arsenic and Old Lace? I don’t think that I can fairly judge that. I’ve only seen clips from Arsenic and Old Lace and I do not have the nostalgic attachment to it that many people watching this episode in 1988 would have had. Some episodes of Murder, She Wrote transcend their time period and some do not. I think that Mr. Penroy’s Vacation is firmly in the latter category.
As a detail, the title is wrong. Mr. Penroy never went on vacation, even according to the cover story from the Appletree sisters. Mr. Penroy’s Sudden Departure would have been a more accurate title, as well as being a better one because of the double-meaning.
Next week Jessica takes to the slopes in one of my favorite episodes: Snow White, Blood Red.
I’ve written before about how murder mysteries with a clever twist are less popular than they were during the golden age (see Ingenious Murders, Alibi By Recording, and Dorothy L. Sayers and Clever Murders.) There is a variant of the clever twist which I would like to consider more specifically: the trap. For the purposes of this blog post, I’ll consider traps any method of murder where the murderer does not need to be (immediately) present at the time of the murder.
The first thing to get out of the way is that there is one kind of trap which remains as popular as ever: poison. We don’t tend to think of poison as a trap because it doesn’t have any mechanical parts but it functions exactly in the same manner as a shotgun in a closet whose trigger was on a string to the door. It’s just smaller and you have to trick the victim into eating it, which is rarely necessary with a shotgun.
The main problem that traps have, from the perspective of the murderer, is that they make most alibis useless. Unless the time the trap was set up is very tightly constrained, it requires a very long alibi to ensure one could not have set it up. It’s difficult to both be a character in the story and to have an alibi for several days straight. (People can, of course, lie about when they arrived in the country, but it’s too easy to check the dates on their passport.)
There is a solution to this, though, which is to disguise the trap so that it appears that a murderer was present at the time of the death. One very popular method is for the murderer to be the first on the scene and remove critical evidence of the trap, e.g. to remove the shotgun and the string. This is very risky, though, since the police tend to take strong notice of the person who discovers the body, especially if he has any real connection to the victim.
This is a solvable problem, though. One approach to not having to be the first on the scene was done in the Sherlock Holmes story The Problem of Thor Bridge, where a simple machine hides the murder weapon. This approach has the downside of working best for disguising suicide, so it’s only available to a fairly small number of murderers.
Another solution to the problem of not having to be the first on the scene can be found in a Dr. Thorndyke story: the construction of a highly atypical weapon. In the story I’m thinking of, somebody fixed up a chassepot (a french rifle from the 1860s) to shoot a small dagger. The murderer then shot his victim from across the street. When the police looked for a man who entered the building to stab the victim—since knives or normally close-quarters weapons—various people in the building could swear that no one had entered the building since before the actual murderer was last seen in public, giving him a cast-iron alibi. This works, though its solution could easily be too technical to be widely enjoyed. The other problem with this kind of solution is that the murderer must either be very lucky and trust to his extreme luck, or else he’ll have to spend a lot of time, in private, perfecting his weapon for it to be reliable enough to be accurate at twenty or thirty yards. Accurately launching projectiles is simply not easy. If the first approach is taken, the story will lack plausibility. If the second is taken, the murderer will need access to a lot of private space for a decent amount of time, meaning he must have a fair amount of resources at his disposal. This reduces his possible motives for murder, since it can’t simply be money (it could still be money in a complex way) and whatever the motive, it must be a very long-lived one for him, not only to go to so much trouble, but to consider murder a viable solution to his problems for so long a period of time.
Of course, if all this seems too complicated to the murderer, a trap which is undisguised can be paired with framing someone else for setting the trap.
I suppose I should mention the other possibility, which is to attempt to hide the trap. This is viable so long as the trap causes death in a way that can look like something else. An example of this would be a trap that hits someone on the head at the top of the stairs, causing him to fall down the stairs. The blow to the head could easily look, post-mortem, like an injury sustained during the fall. The murderer will need to construct the trap very carefully to not be obvious, at least for a time. It’s a great risk to permanently leave the trap in place, but if it can pass without notice for a few days, that would give the murderer an opportunity to retrieve the incriminating bits later, after attention has faded from the murder scene. (Alternatively, the trap can be made with biodegradable pieces and put someplace that water or wind will eliminate the evidence.) This last part can be fun because the bits that don’t quickly pass away can catch the eye of the detective while looking like not much of anything to people with less imagination.
Considering it all, I think that, for all their difficulties, traps are still workable in a modern mystery. A fair amount of care will need to go into the construction of the murderer who employs a trap. It can easily seem unjustified. This is, to some degree, a result of murder mysteries being primarily novels rather than short stories; in short stories you can leave enough of the character up to the imagination of the reader that he can simply trust that the character’s backstory makes sense for doing murder with great self-control and resourcefulness. (This last part can be ameliorated somewhat by having the murderer copying something he read about rather than coming up with the idea himself.) Novels require greater consistency in their characters since there is more of the character in a novel than in a short story. Still, I think it can be done.
If God did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him.
(This is often rendered a little more euphonically in English as “man would have invented him” or “man would have invented him anyway.”)
This is one of those statements which is often quoted as if it is profound, and not merely profoundly stupid. To show why, I will give a parallel”
If the Sun did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent it.
You see, if there was no sun, some explanation would be necessary for why there is light during the day, why you can get sunburned during the day but not the night, and as our understanding of astronomy increased, why the planets orbit around a central point as if there was some enormous mass there.
Of course, if the village atheist walked by he’d remark that if the Sun didn’t exist there wouldn’t be light during the day, you wouldn’t be able to get sunburned during the day rather than the night, the planets wouldn’t orbit around a central mass, and if he was especially clever, we wouldn’t even be here to “invent” the sun to explain these things that wouldn’t need an explanation because they wouldn’t happen.
And, if this hypothetical village atheist came by, he wouldn’t realize that he’s merely stated the point. Village atheists are strange people.
(He’s probably reply, “but I can see the Sun” and wouldn’t understand at all if you explained that this is why you chose that analogy, because in general they don’t understand analogies since analogies rely on the ability to apply logic. He will also completely misunderstand if you point out that he believes in the gravity of the Sun despite not being able to see (touch, taste, feel, etc) gravity. It would be utterly lost on him if you pointed out that you can’t actually see the Sun, you can only see the light coming from the Sun, and infer the Sun that produces this light.)
A problem that has come up recently in movies that are sequels to beloved movies, but also in more long-running books, is the problem of how to write the heroes now that they’re older and have already gone through a character arc. The standard Hollywood approach is to just reset the character so they can go through the same arc again, since (approximately) the only thing Hollywood writers know how to write is the coming-of-age story which is sometimes called the Hero’s Journey, loosely modeled after Joseph Campbell. This sort of mistake is not limited to Hollywood writers, though.
The problem that all of these writers have is that they don’t understand that human beings have life stages. (As an aside, this is also why they tend toward stupid political philosophies that would work great if everyone was born, lived, and died in their twenties.) The Hero’s Journey as it is usually described is by no means a universal story for heroes, but it is an archetypal story in that it is (very approximately) the adolescent maturation process. This is why the call to adventure has supernatural aid to overcome threshold guardians and find a mentor; people must be called to adulthood by someone other than their parents, who erect a barrier (a minor barrier, if they’re doing it right) to ensure that the child only starts when they’re ready. Once they cross this, they must then find a figure who can teach them how to be an adult (using the preparation which their parents gave them). The descent to the underworld/death & rebirth is something everyone does when they are finally acting like an adult and try and fail and pick themselves up and learn to deal with real failure. Etc.
All of this is proper to the maturation process of an adolescent. That is where it stops, though, because the point of it is that at the end of it the adolescent is now an adult. This makes any attempt to do this with an older hero fundamentally wrong. (The desire to do this also explains why so many older heroes are portrayed as broken and dispirited old men; it’s putting them in the position to go on this kind of maturation process again.)
This is not to say that an older hero can’t learn and improve. They can. What they learn and improve at are things appropriate to what they already know. There are several possible areas for this, but they all involve a focus on others. The short version is that an older hero can learn to be a leader, a mentor, or a parent. He is someone who has learned to achieve what he sets out to do; now he must pass this on and help other people become people who can achieve things worth achieving.
In all of these variations of passing on what one has learned there are two key features to development as a teacher. The first is what would properly be called condescension, from its etymological root of “coming down to be with”. That is, he must learn how little an inexperienced person knows. You can view this in high theological terms of being an image of God taking the form of a slave, if you like, but even if you don’t, it is a truism of teachers that they must learn to (imaginatively) put themselves in the position of someone who is ignorant. That is, to teach someone, they need to be able to squint and see the subject they have mastered only dimly, as through a mirror, darkly. That is, they need to be able to imagine being someone who knows so little that he needs to be taught, while still remembering what he knows about the subject so he can teach it. In some metaphorical sense, if he is to save his pupil from ignorance, he must unite two natures in one person: the lower nature able to reach the pupil, the higher nature able to lift him up.
The second key feature in a master becoming a teacher is that he must love his student. I mean love in the sense of ἀγάπη (agape; Latin: charitas)—willing the good of the other for his sake. Condescension is a challenge of skill that the master faces; loving is what makes him vulnerable, and thus interesting in the story. Loving his student is also what will make the relationship between master and student complex. Since the master wills the good of his student for his student’s sake, this necessarily means that his actions are beyond the student’s understanding. It is exactly his mastery of the thing he’s teaching which means that he can see goods his student cannot see, and so his actions must be mysterious to the student. This creates work for both sides; the master must win the trust of the student while the student must have faith in his teacher. The student must act in faith because his teacher must do some teaching as well as winning of his trust. (I’m using “faith” in the ordinary sense, that is, believing what one knows to be true when the evidence for it is no longer present.) If all the teacher ever did was win the pupil’s trust, the pupil wouldn’t learn anything†.
As I alluded to above, all of this holds whether the older hero is a leader, a mentor, or a parent. The exact responsibilities of each will vary, but all of them have these two overarching characteristics that will form the main points of interest in the story. A parent changing diapers is not interesting; neither is a mentor setting up the targets before the student practices aiming and neither is a leader doing paperwork so that everyone clearly knows what his orders are. Getting his child to be on time may well be the greatest challenge a parent faces, just as completing his paperwork done may be the lion’s share of labor for a leader. None the less, they are not interesting, and they are not interesting because they are easy for a human being to remember. It is the truths that we have difficulty holding onto that we enjoy being reminded of.
This, then, is how older heroes should be written. It is far more difficult to write than it is to write a coming-of-age story, for the simple reason that it is far more difficult to be a good teacher than it is to come of age. It’s not impossible, however, and if you want to write older characters well, it’s the only option‡. All of the other options consist of writing characters who never grew up. They’re not interesting, they’re just sad. And people don’t really want flawed characters.
†This, incidentally, is what makes parts of The Karate Kid so great. Is doing household chores actually a good way to learn how to fight? Of course not. But it is symbolically perfect. Daniel does things whose relationship to his goals are completely unintelligible to him—except for seeming to be selfishness on the part of his teacher—and it is only through acting in faith and patience that he receives the benefit of Mr. Miagi’s knowledge. It would have been far more realistic had Mr. Miagi made Daniel strong through having him lift and carry heavy things which Daniel didn’t see the point in, but it would not have been nearly as symbolically intelligible. And The Karate Kid was a movie, not an instructional manual. The job of movies is to teach big truths in a short time, not to teach a large number of small truths in a long time. If you want to know how to actually get good at fighting, you’ll need to hire a teacher and spend years.
‡ I am assuming that the character is too old to still be a hero in the more direct sense. If that is not the case and he can still best opponents in direct combat—or whatever version of that is appropriate to the kind of hero he is—then it is also quite viable to tell the simple story of one of his adventures. Indeed, this can be quite fun, especially with people assuming he can’t do what he is perfectly capable of doing. An excellent example of this is the Miss Marple stories. People assume, because of her age, that Miss Marple has no idea what’s going on. In reality her wits are still sharp and she’s a better detective than any of the younger people around her, and her constant besting of them is quite amusing. The same thing could easily work for a wizard who only comes out of retirement when younger mages can’t get the job done. You can probably stretch this for a sword master, but only up to a point. I would trust a fifty year old fencing master to carve up a thirty year old swordsman, and I don’t think it’s stretching credibility too much for an especially talented sixty year old master of the blade who has kept in practice to beat a thirty year old mere proficient. I think this begins to lose credibility once the old hero is pushing seventy. That said, it is widely reported that Jack Dempsey, at the age of 74, knocked down two young guys who tried to mug him as he was getting into a cab, so you never know.
I was recently watching some commentary on movies in which someone trotted out the complaint that none of the main characters in poorly written movies are flawed, and therefore they are boring. If I recall correctly, Rey from the Star Wars sequel trilogy was an example. I know I’ve heard this complaint many times about the main characters in Star Trek: The Next Generation, too. I’ve heard it about many boring movies and TV shows, and it’s wrong.
The first and most illustrative problem with this critique, though not the greatest problem, is that all of the characters invoked are flawed. On first meeting Finn, Rey chases him rather than trying to talk to him, hits him with a staff rather than using the minimal amount of force necessary to get him to stop fleeing, and consents to BB-8 electrically torturing Finn in order to get him to talk when he hadn’t even refused to talk. The TNG cast would be too detailed to go into, so just to use Picard as an example, the man was extraordinarily arrogant, treating a vastly superior being (Q) as a mere annoyance and trying to bully him into doing what Picard wanted. (This directly led to Q introducing Star Fleet to the Borg, and in consequence getting an extraordinary number of people killed when the Borg came to invade.)
These are not flawless characters. They’re deeply flawed characters.
What they are is uninvolved characters.
They don’t care about anything, they just do whatever is necessary in order to move the plot forward. This is to say, they are not vulnerable. Rey is a boring character because nothing is at stake for her. She will do whatever the plot requires because she’s just a puppet dancing on the writer’s strings. Picard and crew were, likewise, uninvolved, acting only for the sake of moving the plot along.
Oddly, but very interestingly, the one exception to that in TNG which I can think of is Lt. Commander Data. He did, occasionally, want things. The two examples which come to mind are The Ensigns of Command in which Data struggled to figure out how to convince primitive settlers to abandon an outpost before it was wiped out by advanced aliens in a few days, and Deja Q, where Q becomes human and Data tries to teach him how to exist as a human based on what Data has learned so far. These examples are important precisely because they are not vulnerabilities within Data, but in his love for others. (I use love, here, in the sense of the Greek ἀγάπη (agape)—willing the good of the other for his sake.) Data is not vulnerable because he will, personally, be diminished if he does not achieve his goals. He is vulnerable because the object of his love may be diminished if he does not succeed. This is also why Data is far and away the most interesting character on all of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
What was true in TNG is true elsewhere. Where you find boring characters, you don’t find flawless characters. If nothing else, writers who can’t write interesting characters sure as hell can’t write perfect ones. No, where you find boring characters, you find invulnerable characters. They are invulnerable because there is nothing that they want which they are not sure of getting. Mostly, all they want is to do whatever it is the writer needs them to do in order to move the plot forward, though there are some variants. For example, some characters only want whatever is necessary in order to set up the current joke.
In short, boring characters are boring because they are not, properly speaking, characters. They are lifeless puppets, a mere locus of dialog with a convenient label. They are boring because they have no will of their own. There is no breath of life in them. But it is important not to mistake this; having a will of one’s own does not mean being selfish. Indeed, the most interesting characters are those who love—who will the good of those who can receive good from them. They are the most interesting because they have the most at stake. Fools who are being selfish are not nearly so interesting because—painting with a broad brush—they would usually be better off if they don’t get what they want.
So can we please stop with this nonsense about flawed characters? We don’t want flawed characters. We want vulnerable characters.
Chris Lansdown 
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