Category: Reviews

Review: Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Reviews4 Comments

Unnatural Death is the third Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novel which Dorothy L. Sayers wrote, following Whose Body? and Clouds of Witness. We are still several books away from Sayers’ best work—the Harriet Vane trilogy—but Unnatural Death is still very good. It is a solid, though flawed, mystery filled with interesting characters which Sayers writes extremely well.

The premise of Unnatural Death is that Lord Peter and Inspector Parker accidentally make the acquaintance of a doctor in a restaurant. Their interest is piqued when he tells them the story of trouble he had because he insisted on a post-mortem (examination) for a woman with cancer who died suddenly, several months at least before the disease should have taken her. No cause of death was found in the post-mortem but Lord Peter suspects murder and sets out to prove it, as well as to figure out who murdered her and why.

Unnatural Death is very much worth the read and I do recommend it, though it does have its flaws. The biggest of these flaws is that much of the mystery hinges on the murder method, and once it is revealed it would not work as described. However, something similar, if far less practical, would work, so I think that the book can be forgiven on those grounds. The pacing is also somewhat off. Progress is made in the case and then stalls out in an unsatisfying way, only to plunge us into an almost breathless final act. Patience with this is rewarded with a satisfying ending, however. In short it is not one of Sayers’ masterpieces, but if one goes into it with the right expectations it is a very enjoyable mystery.

If you like murder mysteries and especially if you like Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey stories, you might like murder mystery, The Dean Died Over Winter Break.

tddowb

(If you haven’t read the story and don’t want spoilers, stop reading here.)

(In what follows, I discuss the structure and execution of Unnatural Death with the purpose of learning from it because it is a good story. Everything I say should be understood as an attempt to learn from a master mystery writer. Criticism should in no way be taken as disparagement, as I dearly love the Lord Peter stories.)

Sayers starts out Unnatural Death in a manner she would repeat more than once in her short stories: by not naming Lord Peter for quite some time. If I recall correctly, Lord Peter’s name isn’t mentioned until the end of Chapter 2. I’m not sure what the purpose of this is within Unnatural Death as it’s fairly obvious who the pair discussing crime in a restaurant are. It’s possible that it was just Sayers being playful. Also possible was that it was meant to tell the story partially from the perspective of the doctor. This approach I really can’t figure out. I’ve never liked it when Sayers did it, but evidently she did given how often she used it. I can’t help but wonder at the purpose.

The first mystery which Lord Peter needs to solve is the identity of the doctor and his patient. This is an interesting choice on Sayers’ part because it didn’t serve any large structural purpose in the plot; Lord Peter would have had to send Miss Climpson to visit Leahampton anyway, so it was not necessary in order to bring her into the story. This may serve simply for realism, then, as doctors tend to be reticent to give details of their patients to strangers.

And of course Unnatural Death introduces us to Miss Alexandra Katherine Climpson, whose most famous performance is probably in Strong Poison. She is a very interesting character both in herself and in her broader role. For various reasons, a great many of the early detectives in fiction were male, though quite often written by women. In fact three of my favorite detectives (Poirot, Lord Peter, and Brother Cadfael) are male detectives written by women. But however good the reasons were for most of the very early detectives being male, they were not essential. Women are inquisitive and social, but what hey tend to lack that the detective requires is free time. One obvious solution to this problem is age: old women have social skills sharpened over many decades and quite a lot of free time to go with them. And with this observation, we have Miss Climpson. (Lord Peter put it in a more in-character way, but I think you can see the wheels turning in the authoress’s head as he explains it.)

It’s also interesting to note that Miss Marple would first appear in a short story a year after Unnatural Death was published and would first appear in a novel two years after that. The characters are not particularly similar past both being old spinsters, but it would be interesting to know if there was any influence.

Miss Climpson represents a very interesting complementarity to Lord Peter. They are both clever with great skill at conversation, yet they engage in very different conversations. Both also command instant respect; Lord Peter because of his rank and Miss Climpson because of her age. They are also both experts at sizing people up in a few sentences, within their respective spheres.

On the other hand, she might be better considerd a counterpoint to Charles Parker. Both of them get saddled with the grunt work of things like looking up every death certificate in a county or every lawyer in a London neighborhood. They are both at the direction of Lord Peter, though Inspector Parker has some modest independence.

Putting them together, I think that Miss Climpson is something new. Looking over the various roles played by people in detective stories, the roles her’s bares some resemblance to are partner and subordinate who gets stuck with the gruntwork. Yet her role is neither of those; she might be best described as a sort of sub-contractor. It’s an interesting role.

Speaking of roles within a detective story, Inspector Charles Parker’s role stays much the same as it was in Clouds of Witness and Whose Body?, though it is slightly diminished because there is not an official crime as far as the police are concerned. And here we come to a bit of a limitation of Parker as a constant companion to Lord Peter. Being a policeman grants him all sorts of privileges and access Lord Peter would not have on his own, but it also comes with limitations. If Parker were more of an equal to Lord Peter intellectually, this would not be a problem as Parker could at least converse with Lord Peter about the problem. And to be fair, a bit of that does go on, but Parker simply doesn’t contribute much. His main contribution is to throw cold water on all of Lord Peter’s conjectures. And that’s not really long-term sustainable.

That said, most murder mysteries do feature a body, so it’s hardly an insurmountable obstacle for Inspector Parker as a companion to Lord Peter. Ultimately I suspect that he was replaced by Harriet Vane because she was simply a better fit.

Miss Climpson’s investigations prove very useful, though the downside to her mode of intelligence gathering being gossip means that one needs to read through a fair amount of gossip. Sayers does a good job of rendering it tolerable, but at least to me it was not the highlight of the book.

With the advertisement Lord Peter puts in or the Gotobed sisters and the subsequent murder of Bertha Gotobed, the plot shifts gears. What had started as a cold case mystery suddenly became an ongoing mystery. I have mixed feelings about ongoing mysteries, though I should note that they’re popular for good reason. They are, however, not nearly as calm as mysteries about crimes which are completed by the time the narrative begins. Much of that will come down to mood and temperament on the part of the reader. Having, as I do, three young children, I always appreciate calm since every day of real life is an adventure.

In this case the ongoing murders make good something Lord Peter says several times in the book—that murderers can cover up their tracks so excessively as to leave more clues than had they not covered their tracks. And indeed this happens here, with each murder (or attempt) getting progressively more daring and sloppy. This is very well for Lord Peter and Inspector Parker, who in the end do not have enough evidence to charge Miss Whittaker for her original crime.

Which brings up the issue of the method which Miss Whittaker used to kill her victims.  It is true that air bubble introduced in the blood stream can kill a person, but from everything I’ve heard and read they have to be very large bubbles. Small bubbles—I was once assured by a nurse—are no problem at all and simply dissolve away without causing any harm. The reason why one always sees doctors (in TV, anyway), holding syringe up and flicking it to get the air bubbles out has to do with accurate dosing, not with the bubbles themselves being a problem. Ultimately I don’t know the exact quantity of air which would be necessary to kill a person, but it’s large. This is not an insurmountable problem for a murderer, as one could ultimately hook up a bicycle pump to an IV. Such an apparatus would be a bit silly and take away some of the sinister element of a merely empty syringe, but it would be doable. One would tend to suspect that such a thing would be detectable by the large quantity of air to be found in the circulatory system, but Miss Whittaker did tend to kill people in ways where their body would not be examined for some time, and I suspect that between blood settling and gas absorption, it seems at least plausible that such a method of killing would be hard to spot unless it was looked for.

On the other hand, I can’t recall ever having heard of this method of killing people since, either in fiction or in reality, which suggests that it is not really a practicable method of killing people. Which, it must be noted, is just as well, since it’s good for people to be hard to kill without leaving a trace. Both for the sake of fiction and for the sake of reality.

The other curious element of Unnatural Death is the way that in the end, Miss Climpson is very nearly murdered. What’s particularly curious about this choice is that she is both put in danger by a series of coincidences and saved literally at the last moment also by coincidence. Had Wimsey and Parker been sixty seconds later in breaking into “Mrs. Forest’s” flat, Miss Climpson would have been dead. Given that they had no idea that Miss Climpson was in any danger, this is very fortunate indeed. But on the other hand, it was pure luck that Vera Findllater had confessed to a priest that she had lied for Mary Whittaker and moreover written down notes to her confession complete with an street name in London, and moreover had dropped the note in a place that Miss Climpson found because she had dropped something in the same place. And had this string of coincidences not been enough, she still would have been safe had she not spotted Mary Whittaker (dressed in her disguise as Mrs. Forest) on the street. And that would not have been sufficient had Miss Climpson had an unerring memory for backs.

I must confess that I’m very dubious about the claim that while faces may be confusing, backs are unmistakable even in disguise. I’ve mistaken enough strangers from the back that this just doesn’t seem plausible to me.

So, ultimately, what to make of this string of improbably coincidences culminating in a last-moment salvation from death? Sayers did make it work, but I don’t think that it’s something to emulate. Improbably coincidences are most at home in comedies and Greek tragedies. The events starting with the faked gang-attack are probably my least favorite part of the book, as they really feel like they’re part of a different story. They’re well written, of course, but when I re-read Unnatural Death I tend to read this part very quickly.

In the final act of the story, Mary Whittaker kills herself. This seems to happen fairly often in Lord Peter stories, and I’m really not sure what to make of it. It’s seems far more accepted than makes sense for a putatively Christian society, though really devout Christians seem pretty think on the ground among people of action in Lord Peter stories. I find this part very distasteful, though I’m not sure that there’s much to learn from it other than “don’t do it”. Dorothy L. Sayers was, from what I’ve read, a devout Christian, so I’ve really no idea what to make of suicide coming up so often and so little remarked upon. Perhaps Brittain of the 1920s was more pagan than is appreciated today.

Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Reviews, Writing2 Comments

Clouds of Witness is the second novel featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, following Whose Body?. While my general recommendation is to start with Strong Poison, as my favorite Lord Peter novels are the Harriet Vane quadrilogy, Clouds of Witness would also be a good place to start with Lord Peter Wimsey if you’re new to him.

Clouds of Witness is a good, solid armchair cozy. There is a dead body in the first chapter, at an English hunting lodge rented by the Duke of Denver (Lord Peter’s brother) and occupied by several friends. The Duke was the first to discover the body, and is put on trial for having been the one who put it there. The victim was engaged to the Duke’s sister, and he can give only a very unsatisfactory account of his whereabouts at the time of the murder. In fact, most everyone at the hunting lodge contradicts the story of everyone else there. It is from this tangled situation that the title comes: the whole situations is fogged by clouds of witness.

Clouds of Witness has everything you expect in a Lord Peter Wimsey story:  detection, reasoning, speculation, wit, engaging characters, and 1920s England. I highly recommend it.

If you like Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries even half as much as I do, then you might enjoy my murder mystery, The Dean Died Over Winter Break.

tddowb

(If you don’t want spoilers, stop reading here.)

Analysis

(This analysis is an attempt to learn from a master. Anything which may sound critical should be read in the spirit of being a close examination of an excellent novel.)

Clouds of Witness is very interesting both as a second novel about a detective and as a followup to Whose Body?. There’s a lot to talk about, but what stands out to me the most is the character of Inspector Charles Parker. As in Whose Body? he is both Lord Peter’s sidekick and his partner in detection. This is a curious choice as the requirements of sidekick are different and to some degree contradictory to those of a partner.

That’s not to say that such a thing is impossible to pull off. Sayers pulled it off in the character of Harriet Vane, for example. But it feels like she hasn’t quite gotten the balance right in Charles Parker; one can never quite be sure which he’s being in any given scene. And the difference was really in the personality of the characters themselves. Or perhaps it would be better put that the difference was in their skill sets.

Harriet Vane was a mystery writer and her strengths were aligned with this. She understood human behavior well, she was clever, imaginative, and had a great command of language. She was quite intelligent, though not the match of Lord Peter. But the advantage which he really had over her was in experience. Being older and richer, he had a far broader experience of humanity than Harriet did. It made for an extremely good pairing.

Charles Parker’s skills were far more similar to Wimsey’s. Wimsey was established as being more observant than Parker, but Parker was observant. Wimsey had a lot of experience of humanity, but Parker—as a policeman—had a great deal of experience of humanity as well. Wimsey was skilled at research, but Parker was also good at research and had the resources of Scotland Yard behind him. There’s nothing in this which is inherently a problem, but it doesn’t allow the character to be strong at times and weak at times. Watson—the character who needs things explained to him—can’t be played by an equal. It will simply feel wrong that he needs explanations—or it will feel wrong when he doesn’t.

Now, I don’t want to overstate what I mean, because there is a significant personality difference between Parker and Wimsey—Parker is more methodical and cautious, while Wimsey is more inclined to speculate and take up theories provisionally. This has the benefit of making Wimsey need to prove his steps—to Parker, if not to himself—which helps to move the investigation along in a more orderly way which is easier for the reader to follow.

Above and beyond this, though, I suspect that Sayers became a bit surprised by Charles Parker. Especially in Whose Body? but continued in Clouds of Witness, it feels like his original purpose was to be an assistant to Lord Peter. Every writer of an amateur detective has the fundamental problem of why on earth the detective is permitted to go where he goes and do what he does. For much of the detection there can be trade-offs, because the amateur is not restricted by rules of evidence in the way the police are. But there are some places the detective really needs to go which are hard to explain. Viewing the body and scene of the murder being two of them.

There are a variety of solutions to this problem, but the author does need to solve it for the mystery to have any plausibility. And a friend in the police force who is in charge of the case does solve this problem very handily. And while in a certain (very limited) sense this is cheating, I suspect most readers don’t care because what they want to read is detection, not a spy thriller in a deerstalker hat. I know that, as a reader, I’m quite forgiving of improbable though logically possible things which let me get to the good parts.

And this felt like the role that Charles Parker was meant to fulfill. He had many of the requisite attributes—other than being a police inspector, I mean. He looked up to Lord Peter as a genius, thought Lord Peter highly likely to catch clues which he himself missed, and even told Wimsey about his cases.

But then a curious thing happened—Parker also turned out to be a close friend of Wimsey’s. This introduced a tension which built over the course of the novels: brilliant, well educated men don’t have dumb friends. And Parker wasn’t a dumb man. But the more intelligent Parker becomes, the less need he has of Lord Peter.

I want to say that Clouds of Witness was the high-water mark for Charles Parker, but I’m not sure why I want to say that because it’s not true, or at best true from a very narrow perspective. He features very prominently in the next book—Unnatural Death—in fact he’s on the very first page. But then a decent chunk of the book is about a detective in the employ of Lord Peter—Miss Climpson—rather than about Parker or Lord Peter.

After Unnatural Death comes The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, which also features Charles Parker heavily, but only in (roughly) the second half. Then comes Strong Poison, which is the last novel in which he really features heavily. He’s all but not in The Five Red Herrings and Have His Carcass. He is somewhat more present in Murder Must Advertise, then has a small role in The Nine Tailors. He isn’t in Gaudy Night and is only mentioned briefly in Busman’s Honeymoon.

So while Inspector Parker does have a fairly long run, he peters out in the end. I can’t help but wonder if his role as the official access-granter prevented the further development of his role as friend. The problem with being an access-granter is that he can’t be everywhere. A friend might visit a friend anywhere, but a police inspector would not have jurisdiction throughout the entire country and be assigned every interesting case throughout the country. It’s only a speculation, of course, but it’s something to think about in the construction of friends and assistants for a detective.

Setting aside the question of Charles Parker, the construction of Clouds of Witness is very interesting too. It begins with a brief connection to the previous novel, then jumps into a long recital of the facts of the case by way of a transcription of the inquest over the murder victim. This is an interesting approach to handling the exposition necessary in a mystery. Though it should be noted that mysteries have an enormous advantage over most other genres when it comes to exposition since at least some of the characters in a mystery don’t know what happened and want to know. So straight-up information dumps are often in-character.

But the same is true of a British inquest, at least as presented in Lord Peter novels, and that’s the device Sayers used. And I have to say that it was pretty efficient at communicating the setup in detail. Though not very quickly; it did drag on a little. It felt like we could have used a little more investment into the story before that many pages of facts delivered in rapid succession. Still, it is an interesting approach. In America we don’t have inquests, but we do have the grand jury which serves a similar function. Unfortunately, our grand juries our secret (I believe to protect the innocent in case the grand jury returns the verdict that there is not enough evidence to bring a trial). Probably the closest American version of this would be to have a trial end in a hung jury and a new trial scheduled. (Though Sayers had that option, too, in British courts and took advantage of it in Strong Poison.)

It is also interesting that given us all of the principle evidence, Lord Peter still has detection to do when he arrives. This is arranged in two stages because Inspector Parker has already done some of the investigation, but only after the local police have bungled the initial investigation, leading to the Duke of Denver being charged. This sequence of events sets up the main jeopardy of the story—the Duke’s life—while still putting the Parker and Wimsey in charge.

This also respects an observation of Chesterton’s (in The Mirror of the Magistrate):

“Ours is the only trade,” said Bagshaw [a police detective], “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.

By the arrangement of the local police bungling and Scotland Yard swooping in to help, the professional is given some of his due. It certainly is in keeping with the elements of realism Sayers weaves in to the Lord Peter stories. (Which, it must be said, form a counterpoint to Lord Peter himself, and keep him grounded.)

Parker and Wimsey of course find a number of clues which the local police overlooked, which is simply necessary to the story being a detective story at all. Their hottest clue is the footprints of Mary’s second fiance, Goyles, who wears a number 10 shoe, but I find it hard to be as enthusiastic as Lord Peter and Mr. Parker in their hunt for the fellow. It’s just not very plausible that a stranger came from far away to kill Cathcart whom he expected to find outside using the Duke of Denver’s revolver.

To some degree this must be chalked up to the eagerness of Lord Peter and Inspector Parker to exonerate the Duke of Denver, but I think it would have felt better if they were pursuing the owner of the number 10 shoes as an important witness since that was the overwhelming likelihood of what he was.

These investigations bring Lord Peter to meet Mr. and Mrs. Grimmethorpe of Grider’s Hole. Mr. Grimmethorpe is a curious character. He is a man so consumed by jealousy that he has become almost pure rage. I’ve always found him an intensely unpleasant character, though that is the point of him. And I suspect that he is actually realistic, given how often jealousy has led to murder.

I suspect that my dislike of the character is because he is a little out of place in an armchair cozy mystery. He is certainly not cozy. And he is important to the plot. He’s not quite central, but at the same time he’s not far from the center of the mystery and is at least tangentially related to (perhaps) half the plot. Given his relevance to the mystery, it would have been very difficult for him to be less involved in the plot. But there’s another reason why he had to show up once again towards the end, and it relates to the fundamental structure of murder mysteries.

A murder mystery is the story of a man who distorts the natural order by the wrong use of reason, put right by the detective’s right use of reason. It is the salvation of the world, in the manner of a medieval miniature. At the end of every good murder mystery, then, what is wrong must be put right. And Mr. Grimmethorpe of Grider’s Hole is very wrong. The book cannot end with him continuing to be the monster that he is, and it doesn’t. In the end he is killed trying to kill the Duke of Denver. (Or possibly Mrs. Grimmethorpe; I’ve read the passage several times and still can’t figure out exactly what happened.) There is not really any other possible outcome given the constraints of the situation.

Though it must be said that Mrs. Grimmethorpe is not right either. She has committed adultery. And indeed, so has the Duke. I find it odd how much this is passed over as inconsequential. Its only real significance seems to be that the Duke won’t say where he was when Cathcart was killed. Neither repents in any way of their sin; they basically simply agree to forget about it. Which is a resolution of sorts, but a very cheap resolution that is not really fitting. But leaving that aside, it’s rather strange just how cavalier everyone else is about the Duke having committed adultery. The characters all seem to think it inconsequential that he adulterates he marriage, and completely inconsequential whether news of his infidelity reaches his wife. No one seems to think any less of him for it.

I don’t know what to make of it. Perhaps it was plausible at the time. The 1920s is known as a very immoral time—a reaction against the stricter Victorian era, which was itself a reaction against the more morally lax Georgian period. (Clouds of Witness was published in 1926.) And that itself was a reaction against the era which came before it. And moreover every era is a combination of many threads; people are never uniform. (Also, curiously, the greatest saints tend to show up during the generally worst times.)

The conclusion of the mystery is also interesting, where Lord Peter tracks down Cathcart’s former lover in America then has a harrowing and dangerous trans-Atlantic flight to bring the evidence back to the trial. The audacity of this flight is, I think, lost on modern people who can safely travel the Atlantic in a jet which cruises several miles above the clouds for $100 per seat (one way, on a really good sale). As I mentioned, Clouds of Witness was published in 1926. The first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight was made in 1919 (and of the three teams making the attempt on the same day, two didn’t make it across). Charles Lindbergh had not yet become the first to cross the Atlantic solo—he would do that the next year in 1927. In 1926 going between New York and London by airplane was only just slightly more realistic than science fiction. It’s a curious thing to stick into a detective story. Consulting detectives are already quite unrealistic, though, so perhaps it does go together.

The one part of Clouds of Witness which I think was a mistake in what was otherwise an excellent book is the very end, where Inspector Sugg finds Lord Peter and Inspector Parker slobbering drunk—one comatose, the other talking with a statue. It’s not that I disapprove of drunkenness—I do, but that’s not my issue here—since after all saving the life of one’s brother after nearly dying excuses a lot. It’s that it’s very out of character for Lord Peter to want to lose himself in the manner that one loses himself in drunkenness. And if it’s out of character for Lord Peter, it’s even more out of character for Charles Parker. I suspect that it was meant as a comedic note to end on. Another possibility is that it was meant to humanize Lord Peter and make him more relatable. I don’t think it really does either. It would have felt far more in character if Lord Peter took Parker out to an opera or even if Parker invited Lord Peter to go with him to church and after all of the emotional exhaustion, Lord Peter went with him. (Of the two, the opera would be more likely.) Or even brought Parker to his flat and played music and sang into the wee hours of the night. And even if Lord Peter got drunk, Parker really shouldn’t have. A moment of sober conversation between Parker and Sugg over the drunk Lord Peter would have been more interesting than Sugg calling Peter and Parker a cab.

Review: Whose Body?

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Reviews, Uncategorized3 Comments

Whose Body? is the first of Dorothy L. Sayers’ novels featuring her justly famous sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey. There’s something which might almost be called a tradition in detective fiction that the first novel featuring the detective is not the place to start reading them, and though it is a good book, Whose Body? is not an exception. The author doesn’t really know his character in the first book, or more properly, characters—half of what makes a detective great are usually his friends and occasionally his enemies. As such things go, Lord Peter does come onto the scene in Whose Body? close to fully formed. Still, I would recommend start with Strong Poison or Cloud of Witness first.

With that out of the way, Whose Body? is a good mystery as well as a good Lord Peter story. It has a great deal of wit in it, both in wry observations as well as some excellent scenes involving Lord Peter’s mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver. The mystery unfolds at a good pace, with new things for the reader to think about coming regularly. There is also the pleasure of reading about Lord Peter’s 1920s luxury. Though set contemporaneously, they are now period fiction, and Dorothy L. Sayers paints the scene vividly enough to work as period fiction for the modern reader. It is certainly a must-read for any Lord Peter fan.

(If you don’t want spoilers, don’t read any further.)

Analysis of the Story

(Note: please take everything that I say following in light of Whose Body? being a good novel. The purpose of this section is to try to learn from a master (Sayers) at work. Anything which sounds like harsh criticism should be taken merely as economy of speech.)

In light of some of Sayers’ later triumphs—such as Have His Carcass and Gaudy night—in Whose Body? she is clearly still finding her way with Lord Peter and detective fiction in general in. It is important to bear in mind the relativity of that statement, because Whose Body? is still superior to most other writers’ polished detectives. But none the less, Whose Body? is more conventional and ultimately a little hesitant.

By more conventional, I mean that it follows the conventions of detective fiction more closely than do the other Lord Peter novels. Though that is a somewhat strange thing to say given that in 1923, detective fiction wasn’t that old. A Study in Scarlet (the first Sherlock Holmes story) was published in 1887, a mere 36 years earlier. Granted, detective fiction exploded after Sherlock Holmes, but the explosion was still in its relatively early days in the 1920s. But none the less there were plenty of conventions at the time, and Sayers did follow them more closely than she would later.

Part of this is also related to the distinction between short story mysteries and mystery novels. I’ve talked about his before, but the short explanation is that short story mysteries are quite commonly brain teasers, while novels are the story of a detective at work. This follows necessarily from the length. In the quintessential mystery short story, the detective comes onto the scene of a crime, takes in the clues, then realizes the solution to the problem and explains it. The shortness of the story allows the reader to take in all of the clues, then pause to consider them before finding out whether he guessed correctly. (This, by the way, is why in television shows the detective suddenly realizing the solution to the problem after somebody says something which stirs his imagination is so common. I.e. why there’s the classic, “wait, say that again. You’ve solved it!” moment. After laying out the clues, they had to give the audience time to think about it, and it can’t be a new clue which solves the case for the detective, so something has to be the trigger for the detective realizing who did it so we can get to the reveal.)

This is structurally impossible in a novel, however. If the reader is given all of the information he needs in order to solve the mystery in the first ten pages of the novel, the rest of the novel becomes pointless and the brilliance of the detective becomes impossible to believe when it takes him 200 pages to figure out what any intelligent reader already figured out. Accordingly, the clues have to be revealed slowly, throughout the book, for the book to remain interesting. That forces the book to be about the process of finding the clues, rather than purely about understanding the clues presented in a jumble.

(This, incidentally, is one of the problems in the first Filo Vance novel, The Benson Murder Case. The author presented us with all the evidence we needed to know who the murderer was in the first chapter, and so the rest of the book dragged on a bit. Granted, Philo Vance also figured out who the murderer was in the first chapter, which made it a little odd that he didn’t tell anyone until the last chapter.)

Whose Body? does not give us all the evidence we need up front, but it does give us enough evidence early on so that we can make an educated guess fairly early. This does not spoil the fun as subsequent evidence is required to really substantiate the guess, and we get the fun of finding it out along with Lord Peter. It does, however, lessen the impact of the red herrings. The biggest of which is Cripsham and his pince-nez which were found on the corpse. There are several pages spent on speculating about Cripsham after he answers the advertisement Lord Peter put in the newspapers, but none of it is really credible at this point. There’s far too much we already know and/or suspect about Sir Reuben Levy’s connection to the corpse in the bathtub, and the latter’s connection to—if not yet to Sir Julian Freke, at least to the hospital next door to the corpse. Granted, it’s a little unfair to hold against a book that it’s too well written to have the second half of the book make the first half of the book a waste of time, but mystery has always been a self-conscious genre. And it is, so the idea that the murder was committed by a character as yet completely unknown and wholly unrelated to anyone already in the novel is not really credible. The result is that the extensive speculations about Cripsham just feel like a waste of time. In fact the whole affair of the pince-nez was over-played. Since the body was clearly arranged by the murderer, it was not plausible that the pince-nez were any sort of solid clue. Since they had to be either a practical joke by, or an attempt at misdirection on the part of, the murderer, they were never going to lead anywhere directly. The only really plausible connection they could have to the murderer was pointing to the murderer’s enemy. As soon as the owner of the pince-nez was utterly unconnected with anything or anyone else in the book, they couldn’t really have pointed to the murderer’s enemy, so they had to be merely a practical joke.

The character of Inspector Charles Parker was very interesting in this book—it is perhaps his best role in any Lord Peter book. I can’t help but think that Sayers never really thought that Parker worked. He continued to appear in Lord Peter stories, but he got ever-smaller roles. I wonder whether this may have stemmed from the fundamental contradiction in the role which Sayers gave him and the way she began to characterize him. Parker read theology in his spare time, which was an extremely interesting thing for a police inspector to do. It also set things up wonderfully for him to be a contrast in personality with Lord Peter who, while well educated, was an instinctive atheist. As Sayers put it more than once, Lord Peter would have thought it an impertinence to believe he had a soul. That would be a fascinating contrast.

Unfortunately, Parker’s main role was to be the Watson to Lord Peter’s Holmes. What makes this so unfortunate for the characterization which Sayers started to give Parker is that the ninth rule of Ronald Knox’s 10 Commandments for Detective fiction is commonly held to be true:

The “sidekick” of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

That simply does not work for an interest in theology.

I should note that this is not actually a strict requirement for a Watson. The purpose behind this rule is that the detective must have some reason to explain himself. A beloved sidekick who doesn’t understand what’s going on and who constantly asks for explanations works very well for this job, hence it’s popularity. However, merely thinking differently will suffice. Thus an intelligent person with a different background from the detective works well. “I would have assumed it meant [plausible inference], but I’m guessing you conclude something different from it?” It’s more difficult since there must generally be two plausible inferences to pull this off, but it’s very doable. In fact, Sayers herself did this with the introduction of Harriet Vane. While not Lord Peter’s equal, she was generally the most intelligent person in any room he wasn’t in. But she had a very different background and personality from him, and so they complemented each other in just this way.

The only other thing I want to remark on was the interactions with Sir. Julian Freke. Lord Peter’s obsession with fair play and giving the murderer a chance to commit suicide before being taken was something I was glad that Sayers abandoned. I think she did it in only two cases. One was of course Whose Body? and the other was The Unpleasantness At the Bellona Club. It was perfectly fair to give Lord Peter his weaknesses, but this one just didn’t work. It wasn’t out of character, exactly, but neither did it feel like it was in character. Granted, Lord Peter tended to approach mysteries purely as a game, but  anguish at realizing that it was real was probably as unpleasant for the reader as it was for the character. The big problem being that this is all a game for the reader. Consulting detectives are not realistic. If one is going to indulge in them at all, one should see the fantasy through to the end. The detective has undertaken to put right, by a right use reason, what was put wrong through a misuse of reason. He may conclude that justice would be better served by letting the murderer go, but it is not right for him to conclude that justice would be better served by not serving it.

And to be fair to Sayers, she did abandon this line of thought pretty quickly. Whose Body? is the only time Lord Peter gave the murderer the opportunity of escape. In The Unpleasantness At the Bellona Club, he merely gave the murderer the opportunity to shoot himself before he was taken for murder and hanged. Granted, this is offensive to my Christian principles which holds suicide to be intrinsically evil, but it did at least still serve justice, if it served nothing better. And fortunately Sayers abandoned it entirely in her other stories.

Sir Julian Freke’s letter to Peter was also a little odd. First, it was strange he hadn’t prepared the bulk of it immediately after the murder on the assumption he would get away with it and the details should be preserved immediately for their scientific value. Second, it was largely a recapitulation of what we had already learned. Rather than being satisfying, I found it made for dull reading since we learned very little from it. It served in place of the denouement in an Agatha Christie where Poirot gathers everyone together and explains what happened, but with none of the revelation of when Poirot does it. There were no details commonly assumed to be one way but then put straight. There were barely any details even filled in—unless you count such trifles as the cotton wool placed under the surgical bandage to avoid bruising. Or that the bath running was to cover the sound of work rather than to actually bathe one of the corpses. And I think it’s telling that Sayers never repeated the many-page confession in her other books. Except possibly Inspector Sugg—who wasn’t really a character—no one learned anything from this confession.

In conclusion, Whose Body? is a fascinating first story for a detective. It clearly did a good job of introducing Lord Peter in 1923, and set the stage for some true masterpieces of detective fiction. It wasn’t uniformly great, as were some of Sayers later works, but where it was good it was very good. And I find it interesting that the character which changed the least in subsequent books was the Dowager Duchess. While Lord Peter took a little refinement through the books, Sayers really nailed the Dowager Duchess from the first page which contained her.

If you enjoy Lord Peter Wimsey stories even half as much as I do, please consider checking out my murder mystery, The Dean Died Over Winter Break.

tddowb

The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, ReviewsLeave a comment

The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba is a very strange Lord Peter story. It’s primarily an adventure story, though it has minor elements of mystery to it. The mystery is primarily about how Lord Peter plans to get out of the trap he walked into, so in a sense it’s backwards from the normal situation in which somebody has used their intellect to mess things up and the detective uses his intellect to put them back together; here Lord Peter has used his intellect and we watch the villains try to match wits with him. As I’ve noted in other reviews of short stories, this will contain spoilers. That said, I don’t think that the story will be all that surprising.

The story begins with the announcement of the death of Lord Peter Wimsey on a hunting trip in Tanganyika. I don’t really like that sort of device, myself, though it’s really just an annoyance because no one believes for a moment that Lord Peter was actually killed off at the beginning of a Lord Peter Wimsey story. But this device also stretches one’s imagination to the breaking point. It seems very out of character for Lord Peter Wimsey to pretend to be dead for over two years in order to catch a criminal gang. Granted, it is supposed to be a superlative criminal gang, but at the same time it is limited to 50 members who don’t know each other. And this presents real problems.

Even granted that most of its members are among the most capable in the world—and Lord Peter got in pretending to be an ex-footman whose only real value was in knowing the household routine of a number of great houses—fifty people is still not enough to silently carry out executions in prisons and other things like that. To carry out executions in a jail one would need at an absolute minimum two men on the inside. But they can’t work together if they don’t know each other, since they would have to act with the authority they have. The rule that no one knows who anyone else is (save Number One, who knows everyone) severely limits the sorts of conspiracies which can be undertaken. Also a problem for the gang is that there is more than one jail in London. I suppose this could be solved by having assassins who can sneak into and out of the jail to perform an execution, but that does nothing to restore credibility to the story. The society does not train people in secret schools and with only fifty members most of whom are skilled at performing robberies, they will have more than a hard time recruiting uber-assassins. The problems go on; fifty men can do a lot, but they can’t be everywhere, especially in England during the interwar period when telephones were relatively new inventions.

Which brings us to the science fiction element of the story: the voice-activated sliding door. Certainly this is very possible today, and if one is willing to stretch a bit it is possible that it could have been done using the technology of the 1920s. How one could do it using the technology of the 1920s that allows more than one try, I don’t know, and certainly the explanation of a needle tracing vibrations gives no clue. That mechanism could work once, perhaps by depositing a conductor. Actually, come to think of it, if the needle and the trace were conductive, the thing could be hooked up to a timer which will activate if the needle closes the circuit for a minimum amount of time. That could give most of the desired properties, though I will also note that the thing would require an enormous amount of precision. Granted, Lord Peter could pay for such precision, but delicate and experimental machinery is an odd thing to gamble a man’s life on. Granted, a very bad man. In any event such technology lacks the wow factor it would have had to readers in the 1920s. And further, it seems a bit gratuitous. Maybe it’s just a long history of wildly complicated plans in fiction together with most plans that are even mildly complicated going terribly wrong in real life, but the whole thing seems needlessly elaborate without having a corresponding coolness to make the reader not care about the over-elaboration. This may perhaps be related to the way that such a door would now just be expensive but not at all technologically difficult; that would remove the coolness but not the original elaborateness. Alas, not all stories are meant for the ages. On the plus side, the ones that aren’t tell us more about the time period they were written in, since they don’t transcend their time.

If you enjoy Lord Peter Wimsey stories even half as much as I do, please consider checking out my murder mystery, The Dean Died Over Winter Break.

Review: The Rage Against God

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Reviews, Uncategorized2 Comments

I just finished reading Peter Hitchens’ book, The Rage Against God. It’s an interesting book—and I do recommend it—but it’s very much not what I expected. For one thing, it’s a far more personal book than I expected. Which may well speak more to my expectations than to the book; the subtitle is “how atheism led me to faith.” But what I think I was more legitimately surprised about was how much the book was about culture.

The Rage Against God is divided into three parts:

  1. A Personal Journey Through Atheism
  2. Addressing the Three Failed Arguments of Atheism
  3. The League of the Militant Godless

Chapters 1-5 are about England’s (I suppose technically I should say Brittain’s, but I’m not sure) declining society, and how much Christianity was woven into England’s culture so that as people became disillusioned with their culture they threw Christianity out as well. In many ways in these chapters the eponymous rage against God seems to be primarily a displaced rage against parents. In fact Mr. Hitchens mentions something I’ve seen noted by many other rebels born in the generation he was: they never expected to get away with it. And they seem to carry with them a deep sense of betrayal that the adults let them get away with their rebellion. In essence, they are angry at the authority figures in their young lives for being so small. This is very specific to England, but while America did not suffer the decline of its status as a once-great power, it did suffer from the realization of how awful racism is that had a very similar effect in undermining authority, and at approximately the same time. And I’m told that other european countries had their own losses in confidence because of the authority figures who led them into devastating wars.

None of this is something I can relate to; having grown up in the 1980s there was no longer anyone left to respect so it was not possible to lose my respect for them, and I think that this is true of others of my generation as well. It is an interesting window into the atheism of an older generation, though.

Interestingly the three arguments which Hitchens addresses in part 2 are largely cultural ones:

  • “Are conflicts fought in the name of religion conflicts about religion?”
  • “Is it possible to determine what is right and what is wrong without God?”
  • “Are atheist states not actually atheist?”

The second question need not be cultural, but his answer is largely cultural, in that he draws the answers from failed societies. Which is, of a course, a legitimate and persuasive answer, but it is a social answer rather than a personal one.

The third part is a more in-depth look at what the viciously atheist regime of the Soviet Union was like, and the degree to which modern atheists seem to be calling for exactly what was done there, though without being willing to admit that it’s what they’re calling for. This is a problem I’ve encountered with atheists myself. They’re generally quite unwilling to think through their ideas and more infuriatingly often pat themselves on the back for being unwilling to do so, though usually with some sort of positive spin. But Mr. Hitchens brings up, if obliquely, a very pressing problem in a democracy, or really anywhere with changing demographics: how people behave when a minority may have no predictive value whatsoever as to how they will behave if they are in the majority. And as any even casual student of history knows, every regime requires an executive branch—whatever it is named—and that executive branch will be staffed not by the general population but by people who desire power. The question, therefore, is not what the average person will do if given power, but what they will tolerate a co-believer with power doing.

Review: A Not So Friendly Guide to the Ghetto

On By Christopher LansdownIn Reviews, UncategorizedLeave a comment

In a sense this is a companion review to my review of How to Catch and Kill a Crackhead.(check it out for disclaimers/full disclosure). You can get Ed Latimore’s A Not So Friendly Guide to The Ghetto in a bundle with How to Catch and Kill a Crackhead for $9.97 (at the time of this writing) here.

A Not So Friendly Guide to the Ghetto is an interesting book. Of course, I suspect I would find anything Ed writes interesting, so that’s not really saying anything which distinguishes it from his other books. However, unlike Ed’s other books, I’m not sure how to review this one. It seems to be one part travel guide, one part ethnography, and eight parts social commentary. The social commentary is about a community I’m not now, nor have ever been, a part of, so I don’t really have anything to say about it. It’s interesting to read because Ed is a thoughtful guy, but that’s about it, for me specifically.

The travel guide aspect of the book can be summarized very briefly: don’t go there. That’s also nearly a direct quote.

The ethnography aspect of A Not So Friendly Guide to the Ghetto is probably the most interesting part to an outsider like me, or at the very least the most accessible part. And it does not paint a pretty picture. The most noticeable characteristics described in the ghetto is the presence of extremely violent people who make life difficult and dangerous for everyone else. They are violent on a very high level precisely because they don’t lead long-term sustainable lives. Ed mentions that many of these violent people have a life expectancy of about 23. He doesn’t say so explicitly, but one gets the sense it’s that long in part because such people spend most of their time after the age of about 16 in prison where they don’t get to shoot or stab each other (nearly so often).

This reminds me of the Coolio song, Gangsta’s Paradise. All of it is an interesting song, but I’m especially reminded of the lyric, “I’m 23 now will I live to see 24 the way things is going I don’t know.”

Where this hyper-violence comes from is an interesting question. Ed doesn’t give answers, but he seems to (implicitly) reject the cycle-of-violence answer which a lot of people like. I don’t mean that he suggests it’s causeless, but rather he doesn’t seem—and this is my read of him, not anything he said explicitly—to believe that the violence is an unavoidable trap that those trapped by it can do nothing to escape. Some of the social critique may be relevant here, and can be more broadly applicable than just to the specific community being directly discussed by considering what behaviors and trends in the reader’s community—whatever community that might be—might lead to similar encouragements to violence in the least stable members of that community.

And while the book is certainly an interesting one, it is not without flaws. In the copy I bought the typography changed in chapter 7 and from then on the chapters had two numbers, both their correct number and a number starting over from 1. I asked Ed and he said that he would probably fix this going forward. It also feels like chapter eight might have originally been meant as the first chapter, in that it reads like an introduction that was not re-written when it was moved. I found that a bit jarring. It is also a short book—distributed in PDF format it has 35 pages, and would have fewer if the last third wasn’t double-spaced. And while I’ve certainly read enough business books to be appreciative of  an author not padding them out in order to justify a higher price, there were things I wish that Ed had covered. For example, he discussed in some detail how little money many of the bad-decision-makers he talks about come into possession of each year, but he never explains how they make it work. A person who takes in $5000 per year and has to pay $250 per month in rent has only $166 per month left over to afford food. If they make further bad decisions such as buying $2000 rims for their aged lexus, it’s unclear how they can survive since they now have $-0.67 per month for food and can’t photosynthesize. (Further, even if they could photosynthesize, the year-round uniform of sweatshirt, jeans, and timberland boots Ed describes would prevent sufficient light from reaching their skin.) Some explanation of how this actually works out in practice would have been very interesting.

Another fascinating question which gets no treatment here is why the normal human tendency in chaotic situations towards organization by a warlord doesn’t operate here. This of course is the problem with anarcho-capitalism, or really any form of anarchism. The moment you have anarchy, you will get government emerging in the form of weak people supporting the best warlord around, making him strong enough to subdue the other war-lords or keep them at bay so that the important parts of life which require stability (growing food, raising children) can happen. After a generation or two, the warlords will provide enough functions of government as to be indistinguishable from government. After a few more generations, they will simply be government.

The suggestion that no one in the hood has a job (which I take to be painting with a very broad brush) may account for not needing peace to grow food, but however critical Ed is of the parenting which goes on in the hood, parenting does go on, which means that a fair number of people have a huge incentive to support whoever will bring enough peace to let that parenting happen. So why doesn’t this work? Does the presence of police from outside the hood remove the preferable warlords inside the hood? Do the skills required to be such a warlord also enable one to just ditch the whole problem, leaving behind only those incapable of such organization? This last possibility has some resonance with Ed’s advice on how to deal with loud bad-decision-makers in a movie theater: go to a different movie theater. I think it would be grossly unfair to demand Ed have all the answers to why things are they way they are, but some speculation on the subject would have been very welcome since he’d probably have come at the problem from an interesting angle.

It would also have been interesting had there been a section on how people who don’t make exclusively bad decisions but who nevertheless grow up in the hood—people like Ed himself—navigate the violent environment they can’t escape from until later in their lives.

Before I conclude, the modern world being what it is, there is a warning I should probably give about A Not So Friendly Guide to the Ghetto. A good introduction to that warning is the disclaimer found at the beginning of the book:

Please note that the use of the term “nigga”, “nigger”, and other close synonyms are in reference to uneducated, unemployed, unmotivated, ignorant black individuals, not the African American race as a whole.

On the plus side, if this bothers you, I can report that according to my calculations the word “nigga” only makes up 2.5% of the words used (by contrast, 3.8% are “the”). That’s slightly misleading in that I didn’t count usages of variants such as “niggernomics” or “nig worth”, but it gives you a rough idea, I think. Basically, this is not a book for people with delicate eyes. (Nor delicate ears, if you tend to sound words out to yourself, I suppose, but in that case you could probably put your fingers in your ears when you see the words you dislike coming up.)

And all joking aside, it did make me uncomfortable. I’m not used to language like this and it is jarring to hear it used frequently. If you can’t guess, I’m a white guy who grew up in the suburbs where most everyone over the age of 14 got along with each other well enough that for the most part that the only thing the police did was give people traffic tickets. This fortunate circumstance does come with some limitations of experience, and in my relatively sheltered youth it would have been less shocking to hear someone declare their fealty to their lord Satan than it would have been to hear somebody sincerely use racial epithets as a criticism. However incomplete—or if you prefer, unrealistic—a view of the world this gave me as a child, it should speak to how weird it felt to me to read a book where at least 2.5% of the words were some variant of “nigger”. On the other hand I’m confident that Ed is not a racist and I was willing to trust him that there were good reasons for his choices. And having finished the book, I think that there were. I’d say it kept it real, but I don’t know if that would be using the phrase correctly. So instead let me quote the movie A Man for All Seasons, where Will Roper asked Sir Thomas More for permission to marry More’s daughter:

More: Roper, the answer is no and will be no as long as you’re a heretic.

Roper: Now that’s a word I don’t like, sir Thomas.

More: It’s not a likable word; it’s not a likable thing.

Ultimately, so long as people know what words mean, unlikable things will be described by unlikable words. So there’s some value in using unlikable words; it keeps one from getting too complacent in the mere sound of speech and forgetting what is really meant. Ed is describing the sort of people who have attacked him throughout his childhood and nearly killed him more than once. That’s not something one should be comfortable with. Plus, as Ed said later in his disclaimer:

Besides, I’m black. I think that means I can get away with it.

In summary, though it is a book with some production issues which is ultimately disappointing in its brevity, I recommend A Not So Friendly Guide to the Ghetto. Half of $9.97 is not much money to get a perspective on a part of America which (statistically) most of us have never experienced, written by someone who’s read Aristotle extensively. Unless you’re a superhero of thrift, you will probably have often spent more money to get less value. If you’re interested in following my advice and buying the bundle, instructions are here.

Review: How to Catch and Kill a Crackhead

On By Christopher LansdownIn Reviews, Uncategorized1 Comment

Ed Latimore’s book How to Catch and Kill a Crackhead is an interesting book. Currently it’s only available as an ebook bundle with A Not So Friendly Guide to the Ghetto, which I haven’t read yet. (As of this writing the bundle costs $9.97, available at the link above.)

To give context to my review, like many people, I’ve become familiar with Ed through Twitter. He largely tweets about what you might call self-improvement, if you can get past the hackneyed phrase. But to put this in context, I once asked him if he had a favorite Greek philosopher and he replied that he’s only read Aristotle and Seneca extensively. In my reading of him, he’s about achieving excellence (ἀρετή) by dominating one’s passions through reason, not blowing sunshine up people’s asses in the form of “motivation.” I rather like that. Also, he did an interview with me about making wisdom intelligible. So, if you can’t guess, I’m a fan of his. If you want to call that a bias, I won’t object to the term. I am, in general, biased in favor of anyone with wisdom to share.

How to Catch and Kill a Crackhead is, if the title didn’t give it away, not a serious book. It is properly called farce, I believe. Certainly much of its humor is intentionally absurd, which I enjoyed because I delight in absurdity. Ed also delivers it in a deadpan style somewhat reminiscent of British comedy like Monty Python. I happen to be very fond of deadpan humor, as well, so I laughed out loud while reading it more than a few times. In fact he pulled this dead-pan tone off so well that it took me a little while to figure out that it wasn’t merely an attention-getting mechanism prior to getting down to the serious part. Once I figured that out I started thoroughly enjoying myself.

The basic conceit of the book (stated nearly on the first page) is that crackheads are not mere drug addicts, but in fact an alternative sort of vampire. He takes this premise completely seriously throughout the book, describing the crackhead’s powers of flight and sleeping upside-down by their feet, and how to deal with the problems that can cause when one is in areas they inhabit. The  later part of the book is for aspiring vampire crackhead hunters, giving tips on required equipment as well as the ideal party to assemble for battling vampires crackheads.

There are amusing references to pop culture as well as role playing games, comic books, and literature, generally used to good effect, though I missed some of the pop culture references. A few of them are also dated; I asked Ed and he wrote his circa 2007. That also means that he wrote the book in his very early 20s, which does show occasionally in the humor. That is to say, the jokes are occasionally a little juvenile, though mostly I think in cases where Ed couldn’t resist the joke rather than as a crutch, which makes them less cringey since there’s a sort of innocence to them. (At he time of this writing I’m in my late thirties, so naturally I only have limited appreciation for jokes which speak most to late teenagers. We all have our weaknesses.) That said, this is a small minority of the jokes and I think the humor will appeal to most everyone with a sense of humor.

Some of the humor also seems to rely on some familiarity with what Ed calls—in this book—the ghetto. I can only say it seems that way since utterly lacking this familiarity I can only guess that such familiarity would help (that is, it would require knowledge I don’t have in order for me to know for sure). However, this is also a minority of the jokes, and though I sometimes felt like I was just missing something, the book was mostly accessible without this background. Certainly, it would be hard to speak English and have less familiarity than I do with “the hood,” so if you also lack such familiarity,  I wouldn’t let it deter you from giving the book a read. It might be better for someone with such familiarity, but it was still quite good without it.

The times being what they are, I probably should mention that there are some jokes which reference what might be called statistical observations about ethno-linguistic groups of people (both people of color and people of transparency). If you use a sensible definition of racism like “regarding an individual not primarily as an individual but primarily as a member of a group”, then there is nothing racist in this book, because Ed is far too sensible a person to make that sort of stupid, elementary mistake. On the other hand, if you use a definition of racism which is basically anything that professional tut-tutters would tut-tut one for, this might not be the book for you. On the third hand, if you use a definition of racism which involves formulas, then the fact that Ed identifies as black might be significant in your calculations, which I will leave to you to work out.

In summary, this is a unique and funny book which I recommend giving a try if you like absurdist humor with the occasional nerdy reference delivered with a straight face that wouldn’t be out of place in a poker tournament.

God’s Blessings on January 19, 2017

On By Christopher LansdownIn Rambles, Reviews, Uncategorized, Writing2 Comments

God’s blessings to you on this the nineteenth day of January in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017.

I recently read Brian Niemeier’s free short story, Izcacus. It was an interesting read, both while I was reading it and afterwards. It’s a good use of fifteen minutes. Unfortunately short stories lend themselves to short reviews, because (when well written) they’re so tightly written that talking about them gives away too much information. At least I have that problem. Russell Newquist would probably find a way around it, as he’s very good at writing reviews, I’ve noticed.

But I am going to talk about Izcacus, so this is your warning that there will be spoilers. If you don’t like spoilers, stop reading here (until you’ve gone and read the story, at which point please come back).

 

Or here, that would work too.

 

Even here, really. But that’s it. The next paragraph will have spoilers in it, so stop reading now if you haven’t read it and don’t want to encounter spoilers.

 

I should begin by saying that I went in knowing that Izcacus was written as an attempt to bridge the gap between religious vampires and scientific vampires. So I didn’t some at it with perfectly fresh eyes, as it were. That will naturally color my thoughts on the story, but probably it has a bigger impact on my reaction to it than my considered thoughts about it.

The first thing I find interesting about Izcacus is that it uses what my friend Michael referred to as epistolary narration. That is, several characters narrate the story in the form of emails, letters, blog posts, journal entries, and most interestingly letters to a dead brother. It’s by no means an unheard of device, but it’s not overly common, and as Michael reminded me, it is also the narrative device in Dracula, by Bram Stoker. I doubt that coincidence is accidental, though I haven’t asked Brian about it. He uses the device well and avoids its weakness—it can easily become very confusing to have multiple narrators—while taking advantage of its strength. In particular, it allows a lot of character development in few words, since the voice of the character tells you a lot about them. Not merely the words they choose or their commentary, but also what they choose to talk about and what they leave out. Editorial decisions tell you as much about a person as creative decisions, if they tell it to you more subtly.

Second is that one of the problems that every horror author is faced with in the modern world is that horror and modern technology don’t blend well. I don’t mean that they can’t, but a person with a cell phone can—in normal circumstances—call for help so that they won’t feel alone. Of course, that doesn’t always do much. (There was a news story a while back about a russian teenager who called her mother on the phone while a bear was eating her. She died before any help could arrive. More locally, there was a hunter who shot himself with a crossbow and called 911 but was dead before they arrived. If a broadhead cuts a major blood vessel, you can bleed to death in as little as about 45 seconds. I’ve seen a deer pass out in about 20 seconds.) But there is still a big difference in mood between knowing that help is on its way and won’t arrive in time versus not even being able to call for help. By setting the story on a remote mountain without cell service, and further where they had to trespass russian law to even be, this problem was solved very neatly. There are plenty of very remote places in the world and if you haven’t told anyone that you’re going there, no one will ever come looking for you there. (One reason why the Pennsylvania hunter safety course emphasizes telling people where you are going hunting and when you will be back, every single time.) Structurally, I really like this.

The mood is done well about isolation and danger and so on, but in general I’m far more interested in structure than mood—possibly because I have a very powerful and active imagination and can imagine the mood for myself even if it is not described, but my philosophical side rebels against plot holes. Pleasantly, there are no plot holes in Izcacus, which I appreciated. And the structure is very interesting indeed when we come to the central point of the story: vampirism. Izcacus, we find out, means “blood-drinker” in the local dialect, and the mountain climbers eventually find a cave with some old but suspiciously fresh corpses. And here is where Brian marries religious with scientific vampires. Vampirism is a form of demonic possession, but possession requires the cooperation of the possessed. And so the demons have created a virus—which walks the line between living and inanimate—as a means of entering healthy hosts. The virus acts in its natural fashion to weaken the host; by putting them in extremes of pain and weakness, the host becomes more willing to accept the possession which will rid them of the pain. And as the story (or rather, one of its characters) noted, after death the body becomes merely material. This is a very interesting take on vampirism, adding some very interesting technical detail to the mechanism of becoming a vampire. It’s not as blood-centric as vampirism traditionally is, and in fact one weakness of the story is that it isn’t made very clear why the vampires are called blood-drinkers at all. No one is exsanguinated that I can recall, and any wound seems to suffice for entrance of the virus. Granted, one of the characters was bitten on the neck, but another seemed to be infected by a cut on her shoulder. And this is somewhat inherent in the nature of blood-born viruses. If saliva will work for transmission, blood-to-blood contact will as well. (As will semen-to-blood transmission, but fortunately Izcacus is not that sort of story.) So while it’s an interesting step forward for the mechanics of vampirism, it seems to come somewhat at the expense of some of the (recent) traditional lore of vampirism. (Update: Brian clarified what I misunderstood.)

(That is not in itself bad, of course; I gather one staple of horror is re-interpreting older horror stories so as to create fresh lore; essentially producing a sense of realism by treating previous fiction as existing but inaccurate. Horror is not one of the genres I normally seek out, so I’m not very familiar with its conventions—or perhaps I should say its unconventions. And if you want to take that as a semi-punning reference to the undead, I’m powerless to stop you. But if you do, please feel a deep and lasting sense of shame because of it. That’s not really a pun.)

But, what it sacrifices in traditional vampire lore, it makes up for in the reason why anyone is going near the wretched things in the first place. My two favorite vampire stories are Dracula (by Bram Stoker) and Interview with the Vampire (the movie; I’ve never read the book, which a good friend has told me isn’t as good; the screenplay for the movie was written by Ann Rice who wrote the book, so it is plausible that her second try was better than her first). In both cases the vampires can pass as living men and come into human society on their own, though in Dracula he does at first lure Jonathan Harker to his castle in Transylvania by engaging his legal services. But it is really Harker’s legal services which are required, there, he isn’t interested in Harker as food (at least not for himself). In Izcacus the vampires are not nearly so able to pass in human society, so the humans must come to them. This is in line with other stories (most of which I haven’t seen or read) where the humans venture into the vampire’s territory. I think that there the lure is some sort of treasure, whether real or actual, but while greedy protagonists make for relatively pity-free vampire chow, they don’t make for sympathetic protagonists. In Izcacus there are really two motives which drive the characters; a noble motive which drives all but one of them, and a far more sinister motive which drives her. The official reason for this clandestine meeting is to recover the bodies of people who had died trying to summit Izcacus, while the hidden reason is to recover samples of the disease which was the reason the Russians sealed off access to Izcacus in the first place. Thus it is the backers of terrorism who are funding the expedition in the hope of retrieving such a virulent virus to be used as a bio-terrorism weapon (thinking of it only as deadly, and not as diabolical). I find that very satisfying because instead of a pedestrian tale like greed going wrong (who doesn’t know greed will go wrong?), it’s the much more richly symbolic tale of the problem with making deals with the devil. As Chesterton noted, the devil is a gentleman and doesn’t keep his word. The devil may promise power, but has no interest in delivering on it. I’m told there’s a line in one of the tellings of Faust where after selling his soul for knowledge, mephistopheles tells faust he doesn’t have that knowledge to give, whereupon Faust is indignant that he had been lied to. As I understand it, Mephistopheles basically said, “I’m a devil, what did you expect?” It’s one of the reasons why I’m so fond of the short form of the baptismal vows in the Catholic rite of baptism. “Do you reject Satan? And all his works? And all his empty promises?” It’s a terrible idea to expect the devil to keep his promises; it’s more his style to bite the hand he’s shaking.

Glory to God in the highest.

You Have the Right to Remain Innocent

On By Christopher LansdownIn ReviewsLeave a comment

I recently saw the news that the defense attorney / law professor who made the videos Don’t Talk to Cops (part 1, part 2) wrote a book on the subject. It’s called You Have the Right to Remain Innocent, and it’s a short and easy to read book which covers much of the same material, but in greater depth, with updates for recent caselaw, and without the speed-talking.

Since the basic thesis of the book is stated in its title, which is also a reasonably summary of the book’s actionable advice, it is reasonable to ask what is in the book which justifies opening the book to look at its pages. There’s actually a lot.

The book does starts with some caveats, perhaps most notably that he clarifies he’s talking about speaking with the police when they come to you, unsolicited, to ask you questions about the past. It is both a legal requirement and good sense to readily comply with the request to identify yourself and explain what you are doing in the moment, where you currently are. One of his examples is if you are breaking into your own house because you locked yourself out and a policeman asks you what you are doing, do tell him that this is your house and you don’t have your key. He mentions some other cases when you must talk with the police.

The other very notable caveat is that he takes some pains to point out that every member of society owes a great debt to the men and women who serve as police, who take personal risk to do a difficult job that keeps us safe. Throughout the book, he makes it clear that he isn’t talking about bad people, but (in the main) good people in a bad situation, which is the present criminal legal system in the United States. It is a system which sometimes convicts innocent people along with guilty people, and for reasons he makes clear throughout the book, his primary concern is giving innocent people the tools needed to avoid the pitfalls of this dangerous system. Good people make mistakes, and the mistake of a police officer or a prosecutor or a judge can cost an innocent person decades in prison. (He uses more than a few cases where the person convicted was later conclusively proved innocent by DNA evidence (often decades later) to show how wrong things can go for innocent people.)

The book has more than a few interesting insights into problems with the criminal justice system—perhaps most notably being the way that no living person has any idea even how many crimes are defined by the law, let alone what they all are—but I think its greatest value lies in the examination of particular cases where he goes on to show how even very trivial statements, which are true, can become damning evidence in light of other things which a person may not know and has no control over. The case where a man admitted to having dated a woman some time before the crime he was convicted of happened, in the neighborhood where that crime happened, helped to send a man later exonerated by DNA evidence to prison. Coincidences happen, but not all juries believe that they do.

And it is this sort of thing which is the main value of reading the entire book, I think. It is so very easy to slip into the mindset of wanting to give into the urge to cooperate, to be helpful, to be willing to answer any question which is not directly incriminating (and if I’m innocent, how could any question be directly incriminating?) which takes more than a little beating down by seeing over and over again how even minor admissions of completely true and innocent things can be disastrous. The book presents information, but I think equally reading it constitutes training. If one were ever to face a police interview it would be a very stressful situation, and when stressed we tend to forget what we know and fall back on our habitual reactions. Only through training ourselves by seeing many situations we could all too easily be in is it likely that we will remember to do what we should.

The final two chapters of the book, which are much shorter than the first, deal with the specifics of how to go about exercising one’s right to remain innocent in a practical sense. He covers many instances of how people have accidentally incriminated themselves when invoking their fifth amendment right, as well as how people have accidentally failed at refusing to talk to the police and asking for a lawyer. And again, it’s not so much knowing what to do that’s the real benefit of reading this book, but learning what not to do, and why not to do it.

The book is a short, easy read which is well written, and I think valuable for anyone living in America. I found it a valuable read even after watching the videos I linked above, and strongly recommend it.

Review: The Benson Murder Case

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Reviews1 Comment

Having become interested in American writers during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction (primarily because of research into the phrase The Butler Did It), I came across S. S. Van Dine and his detective Philo Vance. Since Philo Vance had been described as one of the most popular American detectives of the 1920s and 1930s, I bought a copy of The Benson Murder Case. Though I thought that it was merely OK as a story, it was certainly historically interesting.

The first thing which struck me about Philo Vance was how very reminiscent of Lord Peter Wimsey he is (Whose Body was published three years before The Benson Murder Case). Vance was educated at Oxford, at around the same time as Lord Peter, and has many of the same mannerisms, such as ending a declarative sentence with the question, “what?” Vance also uses a monocle, though he doesn’t wear it constantly as Lord Peter does. He is fashionable, wealthy, travels in high society, and dresses extremely well, just like Lord Peter. Whereas Lord Peter is knowledgeable about art and his real passion is music, Vance is knowledgeable about music and his real passion is art. Both like to quote classic literature while investigating cases. If so far the main difference between them seems to be their name, that is misleading. There is a significant, though subtle, difference, and I think that it traces back to their authors.

Willard Huntington Wright (S.S. Van Dine was a pen name) was a Nietzsche scholar. Dorothy L. Sayers was a devout Anglican, and even published some theology. Both detectives seem to lack any belief in God, and Sayers even went so far as to say, in private correspondence, that she thought Lord Peter would think it an impertinence to believe that he had a soul. Yet there is something religious in the character of Lord Peter. He did not believe in God, but he did believe in beauty. He might have been a worldling, but he knew somewhere in the back of his mind that it wasn’t true that the world is enough, and it saddened him because the better thing which beauty hinted at seemed unattainable. By contrast, Philo Vance might have been a celebrated art critic and collector, but he gave no indication that he actually saw any beauty in the world. The proof of it was that there was no sadness in his character. Lord Peter had suffered; Lord Peter’s heart had been broken, not just serving in World War I, but in other parts of life, as well. Philo Vance, by contrast, seemed to have an intact but very small heart. He does not seem to have suffered anything besides boredom, and as Rabbi Abraham Heschel said, “The man who has not suffered, what can he possibly know, anyway?” Joy is a greater wisdom than sadness, but there is no wisdom at all in being bored. As Chesterton put it:

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

There is also the curious element in the story of how Philo Vance lectures his friend, the district attorney, on the nature of investigation. This was a common feature of early detective fiction, especially contrasting proper investigation with how the police went about investigating. It started with Poe’s explantion of C. Auguste Dupin’s ratiocination in Murders in the Rue Morgue,  was a common feature of Sherlock Holmes stories, and featured in a great many others of the time, too. So much so that Chesterton wrote a very interesting conversation about the very phenomenon in The Mirror of the Magistrate, published in The Secret of Father Brown:

“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…”

Philo Vance takes it one step further than this, claiming that the police methods are not just ineffective, but counter-productive. It’s a theme which Vance hits upon so often as to come across as supercilious. Typical murders are not fiendishly cunning, and forensic evidence, though circumstantial, is actually useful. (I’m going to get into spoilers at this point, so if you want to read the novel for yourself without knowing who did it, I suggest you go read it now.)

Much of Vance’s point is made by the police being rather unbelievably thick-headed. Their first suspect is a woman whose handbag and gloves were found at the scene of the crime, and who chucked two cigarette buts into the fireplace. The victim, Benson, was known to have gone out with some woman the night he was killed (he was killed shortly past midnight), and that’s the sum total of evidence which the police have upon which they conclude she must have murdered him. That plus she got home at around 1am, might possibly have gotten the murder weapon from her fiancé, who presumably owned a military colt automatic pistol because he had been in the Great War.  Oh, and Benson was known to make inappropriate advances to women. Somehow this added up to her cold-bloodedly shooting him in the forehead from six feet away while he was seated. Had he been killed defensively, this might have been plausible, but why a woman who went to dinner with him would execute him in this fashion is never so much as broached.

There is also the evidence of who the real killer is, which is rather conclusive. Benson normally wore a toupee and was never seen without it; ditto his false front teeth. Both were on his nightstand, and he was wearing his comfortable slippers and an old smoking jacket on top of his evening clothes without a collar. (In clothing of the time, collars were separate items from the shirts, and would attach by a button. It was therefore possible to take the collar off, and in fact when someone was at leisure and didn’t need to be presentable, they would often do that very thing for comfort’s sake.) The housekeeper is positive that the door was locked, for it automatically locked, and moreover that the doorbell was never rung. The windows were barred against break-in. Despite all of this evidence that the victim was on intimate terms with his murderer—he let the murderer in himself while in a state of comparative undress, without bothering to put his toupee and false teeth back on and was sitting down and even reading a book when he was shot—the police never ask what any of this evidence means, even when Vance more-or-less points it out to them. No explanation for this incredible thickness on the part of the police is given, except when Vance mentions that there are height and weight requirements to joint the police force, but no intelligence requirement.

This also basically gives away who the murderer is. This goes doubly so because of the form of the fiction. Vance is a genius who is always right, and Vance declares he knows who the murderer is five minutes after looking at the crime scene. Granted, it is revealed later on that Vance knew the murderer for many years, and thus knew his personality—which I would normally call cheating—but the evidence which points to the murderer is so clear apart from odd psychological theories that this foreknowledge on the part of Vance is fairly irrelevant. As of chapter 2 or 3, I forget which, there is only one suspect, and all that remains for the rest of the book is to watch Vance disprove the red herrings for the district attorney. In general it would be possible for some other character to be introduced who also knew the victim on such intimate terms, but since Vance was always right, and Vance knew who the murderer was, that possibility was foreclosed.

It is especially interesting to consider this in light of Van Dine’s Twenty Rule for Writing Detective Stories, published in 1928 (two years after The Benson Murder Case). You can argue that he violated #3 (no love interest) because there was an affianced couple who would have not been able to marry had either of them been executed for the murder. He borders on violating #4 (none of the official investigators should be the culprit), since the old friend who asked the district attorney to personally investigate turned out to be the murderer. He violates #16 (no literary dallying with side-issues) a few times blathering on about his theories on art at such a length I skimmed the section. Also curious is that his adherence to rule #15 (the clever reader should be able to finger the culprit as soon as the detective does) made the book rather anti-climactic. In essence he took a short-story murder mystery and then inserted an entire book’s worth of padding in between the investigation and the revelation of the murderer.

As an addendum, as I was googling around to see whether anyone else talked about the similarity between Vance and Lord Peter, I found this blog post about S.S. Van Dine and his sleuth Philo Vance, which is a different take than mine, to be sure, and has some interesting historical information in it.