Category: Uncategorized

When Changes For Television Make Sense

On By Christopher LansdownIn TV & Movies, Uncategorized, Writing4 Comments

I recently watched the Jeremy Brett version of the Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Red Circle. There were a number of changes from the original short story, as there inevitably are in translations of Holmes stories to the screen.

Some of these changes make perfect sense—these are generally of the form of filling in the minor actions which can be elided in prose, or creating dialog which was merely described. Of the former, an example might be greetings exchanged with a servant, the giving of hat and walking stick, etc. Of the latter, an author may write “he gave his consent enthusiastically,” but an actor must actually say specific words. These sorts of things are just a necessary act of translation of the written word to the performed word.

Some of these changes are mere additions. One such are things done to set the scene and tone. Examples of this might be showing the man merely described as a teacher actually teaching a class, or showing a blacksmith working iron. Another mere addition is padding. This is often an issue in the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes episodes based on short stories, as the short story really gave material for about half an hour, while the TV episodes were an hour. It varied from episode to episode, but some of them involve a fair amount of padding. A good example of this might be from the Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle—the TV episode begins with showing the lady who owned the gemstone coming to her hotel after shopping, going to her room, order a bath to be drawn for her, and finally discovering the stone to be missing. None of this appeared in the short story itself, but as presented it was congruent with it. It also served no discernible function beyond avoiding the credits being twenty minutes long.

Padding can be done well, though in later Jeremy Brett episodes the padding often consisted of revealing a good chunk of the mystery right at the beginning. An extreme example of this is the Jeremy Brett version of The Three Gables, in which the opening depicted the relationship between the dead man and the rich lady which was the reveal toward the end of the short story. I don’t think that there’s really any defense of this which can be given; it makes no sense to turn a Sherlock Holmes story into an episode of Colombo. That said, this is just a question of execution; padding need not hurt the story that is being added to.

And then we come to the changes which make no sense, in which something that appeared in the original story was removed and something else substituted in its place. I will draw my example from The Red Circle, since it’s what inspired this blog post. In the short story, Holmes meets inspector Gregson on the street as Gregson had been working with a Pinkerton detective to follow and try to arrest Black Gorgiano of the Red Circle, and Black Gorgiano was after the lodger that Sherlock Holmes had been called in to investigate. In the TV episode, Holmes met Inspector Hawkins (who replaced Gregson, presumably for casting reasons) at the murder scene of an invented character named Enrico Formani, and then the two joined forces. It might be argued that this was done in order to pad the story out, though, so I will move on to another, though shorter, change, as my example.

In the TV episode, Inspector Hawkins insists that Emilia and her husband Gennaro must be tried for the murder of Black Gorgiano, though he expects that they will not be convicted because it was self defense. He even takes tickets for departure on a ship from Gennaro. (There is also a post-script by Watson which says that they were aquitted and lived happily ever after in Australia.)

In the short story, Emilia surmises that it was her husband who killed Gorgiano and tells the story of what happened—how Gorgiano was following them to murder them, and how he must have come upon her husband and he defended himself. At the end, she asks, ” And now, gentlemen, I would ask you whether we have anything to fear from the law, or whether any judge upon earth would condemn my Gennaro for what he has done?” Here’s the rest:

“Well, Mr. Gregson,” said the American, looking across at the official, “I don’t know what your British point of view may be, but I guess that in New York this lady’s husband will receive a pretty general vote of thanks.”

“She will have to come with me and see the chief,” Gregson answered. “If what she says is corroborated, I do not think she or her husband has much to fear.

There was absolutely no need to change the ending in this way. It might be argued it followed from the earlier change of pushing the explanation from the scene of the death to Holmes going into Emilia’s room, but that change did not entail this one. Emilia could just as easily have asked if they had anything to fear this way. This change accomplished nothing except to slightly dehumanize the character of the inspector and create an element of fear for the couple which was immediately put to rest by Watson’s postscript.

I can think of no explanation for this sort of change except to try to make the story feel a bit more like a cookie cutter TV episode. The mantra of the time, in television (though more in the US than in the UK) was to “raise the stakes”. This was, more often than not, bad advice, though it made sense in the context of an era in which people had recently gained remote controls for their television and, with a much larger number of available channels than two decades before, people growing restless and changing channels was the TV writer’s greatest fear.

(Less talked about, but also interesting, was the concomitant effect on TV episodes that the writers had to bear in mind that the viewer at any given moment may not have watched the episode from the start and thus cannot be relied upon to remember what happened before the current scene. Keeping a viewer from losing interest and changing channels was of utmost importance, but keeping a viewer who lost interest in his original show and changed channels to yours was also very important, and this definitely had an effect on how TV shows were written.)

All-Cause Mortality Data for the USA

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Update: I’ve got a post with the most recent data (through April 3, 2021) here.

After much searching and asking friends if they can find the data, I’ve finally found a source for all-cause mortality data for the United States of America. It’s the CDC’s excess mortality data page. There is a ton of data on this page, and I recommend checking it out. Before I show you a screenshot of what it looks like at the moment, I’ll explain why this data is so useful.

Consider the following hypothetical: a person suffers from COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder). This is a deadly condition where the lungs are deteriorating, and it just keeps getting worse until the person dies from it. Suppose the person with COPD probably is sufficiently advanced that they only have six months to a year left, and then they get COVID-19, and die. Did they die from COVID-19 or from COPD? Different doctors, hospitals, and medical systems will answer that question differently, and all in good faith.

(To see how it can all be in good faith, how much the COVID-19 pushed them over the edge is something God knows, but man can’t know with certainty. Had they gotten something else, like the flu or a common cold, that might have pushed them over the edge instead. If they got a common cold and died, we would call it a COPD death, not a common cold death. This is just one example, there are a lot of cases which are legitimately judgement calls on which people disagree.)

This disagreement is especially a huge problem internationally. There’s absolutely no reason why doctors in Russia, China, Kenya, and Paraguay would have the same standards for things; it’s not like they would ever talk to each other, or report anything to the same place.

However.

Everyone diagnoses death in the same way, at least after a few minutes. Not being alive is a very difficult condition to miss, no matter what tests are common or what doctors are habituated to look for or what their beliefs or customs are on the primary cause of death. And what is true across countries is helpful across states, too. It doesn’t take much looking for find endless debate about whether COVID-19 deaths are being over- or under-counted; we can be fairly sure about deaths being accurately counted.

Or, rather, we can be after about eight weeks. One problem that we run into here is that the CDC has found that only about 60% of deaths are reported within 10 days of the death; it takes about 8 weeks to get completely stable numbers. This is a very long time to wait, so they have algorithms based on how long it typically takes each reporter that feeds into the CDC to report all deaths to predict, after 10 days, what the final count will be. It looks like lately they’ve been under-predicting deaths in the first week by (about) 15-20%, though it varies from week to week, and I don’t have enough data to say that with certainty. I’ve tracked it for 3 weeks now and the numbers seem to get reasonably stable (by which I mean changing by less than 5%) after a few weeks of being on the chart. That said, everything in the right-most 8 weeks does need to be taken as provisional, the further to the right, the more provisional, and bearing in mind that the provisional numbers have a bias towards under-predicting the final number of deaths per week:

As you can see, this spans a little more than 3 years. I’ve no idea what happened in January of 2018; I don’t recall any news items about excess mortality back then, nor anything that would have been an explanation for it.

I’m not, here, going to get into any sort of in-depth analysis. I think it’s a bit early for analysis, aside from a few observations. The first is that the excess deaths do, more or less, follow the same pattern as COVID-19 deaths reported by the CDC, which gives some confidence that those numbers on COVID-19 deaths aren’t wildly inaccurate.

The other observation is that COVID-19 is obviously not affecting mortality all that much. The worst weeks for excess mortality were about 40% excess deaths, but that only lasted a few weeks. Excess mortality quickly dropped to below 20% and often below 10%. Or you can just look at the area in blue under the yellow line versus the area in blue above it (that’s not quite perfect because there is a bit of uncertainty built into the yellow line, but not a lot). It did go back up again, in time with the second wave of COVID-19 cases, but it appears to have peaked. The peaking is within that 8 week window, but the CDC’s numbers on COVID-19 deaths show that they peaked back in august, so if all-cause follows COVID-19 deaths as well as it has in the past, it is likely that the peak in all-cause deaths we’re seeing is real. We’ll be able to be a lot more confident about that in November or December.

By the way, an interesting question, which we won’t be able to settle for months at the earliest, is whether there will be a discernible drop in all-cause mortality for a while. If there is, that would strongly suggest that COVID-19 mostly just hastened the deaths of people who were going to die soon anyway. It will be interesting to watch for this.

What a First Date Should Cost

On By Christopher LansdownIn Life Skills, Uncategorized2 Comments

On Twitter, I recently saw the following question:

I saw a post saying “Men should spend at least $1000 on a first date.” What ya’ll think?

The answer is, obviously, “no”. At least if that’s denominated in US dollars. But that’s not the interesting part. The correct answer to what a man should spend on a first date is: the price of admission to a museum, zoo, art gallery, or similar. And, as far as possible, during the day.

There are several reasons for this, mostly related to the function of courtship, but some of them are practical, too.

To get the practical reasons out of the way, one wants to make a good first impression on a person in a first date, and people are at their best when they have something to do. Even an excellent conversationalist does better with material to hand, and most people are not excellent conversationalists.

The other practical reason is that museums, zoos, etc. tend to make people comfortable. First dates can be awkward and a setting that will put both people at ease is helpful.

When it comes to courtship, the benefits are several fold. The first is that it is a demonstration of patience on the part of both parties. Marriage requires large amounts of patience; being willing to demonstrate small amounts of patience by being among people, and with a purpose, on a date, helps both to show this to the other. (Also frequently one has to wait for the people in front of one.)

Going to a museum, or to a zoo, or some such place will also inevitably involve some amount of minor inconvenience. How people bear up under minor inconvenience is extremely useful to know in marriage. How people bear up under great inconvenience may be more important, but most days involve minor inconvenience, and if a person handles it badly, that will add up to a lot of problems, over the years.

Zoos, museums, and the like also involve some amount of making joint decisions. If one wants to see the polar bears and the other wants to see the orangutans, the couple will need to work out which to actually go see, or at least the order to see them in. How good people are at making joint decisions—actually working them out and not merely something unsustainable like one always deferring to the other—is extremely valuable in marriage. (I would hope it would go without saying that if a person shows themselves to be selfish and demands to always have their way, this is a huge red flag; in case it doesn’t go without saying—it is.)

A final benefit is that most zoos, museums, etc. are physically large, and large amounts of walking will slightly tire people out. What people are like when mildly fatigued is also very useful to know, as much of marriage will be spent when one, the other, or both are a little tired. When they have young children, it will be spent when both are very tired.

When you sum these benefits up, a first date at a zoo, museum, or the like will work well to show both people whether a second date is worthwhile. It will teach both people a great deal about the other, but under conditions which are pleasant and favorable.

Oh, and while it is cheap in terms of money, going with someone to a zoo, museum, or the like is a significant investment in terms of time and effort. How much a person appreciates that is also useful to know in a marriage, both because effort is more important than money (especially above a certain minimum), and because in any case it is (very frequently) more available in marriage, too.

Family in Star Wars

On By Christopher LansdownIn Fantasy, Science Fiction, TV & Movies, UncategorizedLeave a comment

There’s an interesting complaint about what might be the most famous plot twists of all time: Luke and Leia being brother and sister, and both being the children of Darth Vader. The complaint, which is not entirely illegitimate, is that, though interesting, this also takes a galactic adventure story and turns it into a family feud.

There is, of course, an element of truth to this, but in another way it is actually a mistake. It is not true that everyone is related to everyone else, and by the time of Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader, Luke, and Leia are actually somewhat minor characters, with regard to the fate of the galaxy.

This is not as true in A New Hope, though even there, it’s mostly because Leia had been entrusted with the plans to the death star and Luke takes the critical shot which blows up the death star. If one doesn’t pay attention, it’s possible to get the idea that Leia is in charge of the rebellion, but it’s really not the case. Even Vader says as much; he objects to Leia saying that she was on a diplomatic mission for Alderaan by saying “You are part of the rebel alliance, and a traitor” (emphasis mine). She’s not the head of it.

Luke does take a critical role in blowing up the death star, and there’s no getting around that. However, his role fades after this. He spends much of The Empire Strikes Back training on Dagoba, then gets his ass handed to him by his father. (Not literally; it’s actually his hand which gets handed to him, except he doesn’t catch it.) His major contribution to the rebel alliance is to blow up a couple of AT-ATs, which doesn’t accomplish much as the AT-ATs destroy the shield generator anyway. In terms of his importance to the galaxy in this movie, he has none. In Return of the Jedi, it might be argued that Luke trying to save Vader distracted the Emperor, which is why the Rebels were able to destroy the second death star and kill the Emperor, but that’s actually quite unclear. The emperor was not omniscient, and everything had been proceeding as he had foreseen right up until it didn’t. The only thing we really know for sure is that Luke saved his father’s soul. (I will grant that he did help to save the team sent to blow up the shield generator from the ewoks, but for the most part all he did was levitate C3PO so that the ewoks would take his anger seriously; there probably was another way to get them to take C3PO seriously.)

Vader has a very interesting roll in the Star Wars trilogy. On the one hand, he is the apprentice of the Emperor and his right hand man. On the other hand, he only sort-of is even in the military hierarchy of the Empire. In A New Hope he takes orders from Grand Moff Tarkin (“Enough of this pointless bickering. Vader, release him.” “As you wish.”). Even Leia remarks on this, “I should have known I’d find you holding Vader’s leash.”

In The Empire Strikes Back, we are told that Vader is intent on pursuing the rebels as a sort of monomania because he is obsessed with finding young Skywalker. He is free to direct some imperial star destroyers, but not that many. He’s even forced to employ bounty hunters. He is a major character in this movie and a major driver of its events, but The Empire Strikes Back is, on a galactic scale, a very small movie. The rebels seem to be able to fit on a single planet, and not very much in the way of imperial resources have been dedicated to hunting them down at this point.

In Return of the Jedi, Vader has an even smaller role. He shows up at the new Death Star to oversee its construction. Other than that, he’s present when Luke surrenders and the Emperor tries to tempt Luke to the dark side. In galactic terms, he basically does nothing.

Leia’s ark is somewhat similar to Luke’s, though in a different direction. She starts out smuggling plans to the death star in A New Hope. In The Empire Strikes Back she’s clearly important, but at the same time doesn’t seem to be in charge in a highly practical sense. She spends most of the movie being chased aboard the Millennium Falcon. On a galactic scale, big whoop. In Return of the Jedi, she joins the special ops team led by (now general) Han Solo. The team does important work, but Leia is only a small part of that work, and not really critical to it.

So, when we really consider it, yes three major characters from the first movie turn out to be closely related to each other, but the curious thing about this is that while they loom large in the story, it’s because the story zoomed in and wasn’t so big. After A New Hope, no one in the Skywalker bloodline did anything of any real galactic importance, at least that would not likely have happened without them, and shortly afterwards.

Which is, actually, fine. The truth is that it’s people who matter, not nations or empires or republics or even rebellions.

I think that it was a mark of brilliance on the part of George Lucas that it was Lando Calrissian who fired the shot that destroyed the second death star, and with it, the Emperor. He wasn’t even in the first movie. This is, indeed, what life is often like. Most of the time, people only make one big contribution, and after that they tend to only help the next guy who makes the huge accomplishment. And Lando wasn’t even a major character in the second or third movies. He wasn’t in the movie poster for The Empire Strikes Back and barely made it into the poster for Return of the Jedi. And yet, he’s the guy who destroyed the second death star.

Life is often like that.

Empire Strikes Back Changed Star Wars

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized2 Comments

On Twitter I recently saw Misha Burnett say that The Empire Strikes Back was probably the movie which ruined sequels for him.

In isolation, Star Wars had a triumphant ending. The kid from the boondocks rose to the occasion and became a hero. He showed himself worthy in the eyes of the tough kid and the pretty girl and the wise old man, and he did something that would have made his father proud. Empire took all that away from us. As the first film in a trilogy (or film number whatever in a series) the story of Luke Skywalker goes from being a boy becoming a hero to a naive recruit becoming just another soldier. The final scene of Star Wars is a recognition of a hero who has saved the galaxy and won the admiration of the beautiful space princess. The final scene of A New Hope is just a bureaucrat entering a commendation into a personnel file. And that is why I don’t like series fiction. In a series, there are no happy endings because in a series nothing ever ends.

This is a very interesting perspective, and in one sense I think that he’s right. What’s really curious is that the reason that he is correct is also why anyone remembers Star Wars well enough to make this observation.

If you just consider Star Wars (later retitled to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) on its own, it’s a fun popcorn flick and possibly the second summer blockbuster after Jaws. It’s the basic Campbellian “hero’s journey,” which is fun but not very interesting. It’s not very interesting because it’s only a very narrow slice of life.

What happens in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi is that Luke has to deal with the fact that life isn’t over until you die, even if you accomplish something big. At the end of A New Hope, they defeated the Empire’s super-weapon, but didn’t defeat the Empire. And it’s true that there is always more work to be done. It’s in The Empire Strikes Back where we find out whether the seed fell on rich soil and will yield one hundred fold or whether it fell on rocky soil and sprung up quickly but then withered quickly when the sun came out because it had no root.

In A New Hope, there is a sense in which Luke got the girl. In Empire Strikes Back, we see the much more interesting action of Luke giving up the girl for a higher calling. Then in Return of the Jedi we see, after Luke’s rigorous monastic training, his self-sacrificing love saves his father’s soul. Luke went from a kid who wanted to grow up to an actual adult who had adult adventures.

Another way of looking at it is that look progressed from natural goods to supernatural goods. At the end of A New Hope, we see Luke bathed in glory. At the end of Return of the Jedi, we see Luke alone, burying his father who he alone knew the fate of, then joining the others but even there apart, having a religious vision which showed him the deeper reality that makes the celebration good, but only a small good.

If Star Wars had remained Star Wars instead of becoming A New Hope, it would have been forgotten as one among many stories of someone getting started in life. This is the adventure movie equivalent of the romantic comedy which ends with the couple getting married. (Or, if anyone told such stories, of a man becoming a priest ending with him being ordained.) The Star Wars trilogy is the far more difficult and thus far more unique story of describing adults. We see a working marriage in Han and Leia—fighting together through suffering and pain for the sake of something besides themselves—and we see a living priesthood in Luke.

Ultimately, in life, it’s cool to see the seed germinate, but all sorts of seeds germinate. It’s the seeds which turn into fruitful plants which stay with us.

(This, by the way, is why most sequels suck—instead of telling the different story of a seedling turning into a plant, they just reset everything and try to tell the story of a seed germinating again. That’s really when all of the progress of the original story is lost.)

Oh, and even considered in the trilogy, the end of A New Hope is a whole lot of people celebrating the two men and a wookie who just saved their lives. Princess Leia doesn’t become a bureaucrat just because she eventually stops clapping and gets back to the rebellion she was leading at the beginning of the movie and which clearly wasn’t over at the end of it.

Plastics, Then and Now

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently heard a song from the very late 1970s in which plastic was used as a synonym for “phony”. This made me remember how in my early youth, plastic was generally (though not exclusively) used as a cheap replacement for better quality materials. While at the time of this writing (2020) it is possible to find cheap things made of plastic, it is by no means the case that plastic is merely a cheap alternative. Often, these days, plastics are a superior alternative. PeX pipes are better and longer-lasting than copper pipes. Plastic pipes are strongly preferred to metal pipes for gas lines buried beneath the ground. I’ve got more than a few glass-reinforced nylon gardening tools and prefer them to metal ones. What is commonly called “carbon fiber” is commonly an epoxy plastic reinforced with carbon fibers, and it may be the pre-eminent high-tech material of our day.

It’s interesting to trace the factors which went into plastics becoming frequently superior materials, because it wasn’t just one thing. The introduction of new plastics, such as more advanced epoxies, clear polycarbonates (possibly better know as Lexan), and PeX had a significant impact. They enabled all sorts of new uses for plastics that hadn’t been possible before, and in some cases enabled new sorts of things. Bulletproof glass, for example, is frequently made as a laminate of glass and polycarbonate, the glass giving hardness and the plastic shatter-resistance. That’s very hard to do, in an optically clear way, without plastics.

Another advance in plastics was the development of economical composite plastics. The most famous composite is, of course, fiberglass, though not far behind it is carbon fiber. Another great one that’s been in common use for 10-20 years now is glass-reinforced nylon. Almost as strong as low-grade steel, it is far more rigid and doesn’t rust—it’s great for gardening tools. More generally, composite materials have made for all sorts of things both strong and light. Ladders, camera tripods, bicycles, shovels—anything where one wants weight and strength, it is usually the case that the cheap one uses metal and the good one uses composite plastics. (To be fair, there are some very advanced aluminum alloys, these days, though.)

Another improvement to plastics was simple experience with the making of things out of plastic. The making of things out of plastic is as much an art as a science. The exact temperatures used in injection-molding plastics has an enormous impact on the quality of the resulting part. In the 1970s and 1980s, widespread injection molding of plastics was near its infancy. Worse, since all it was fit for was making the cheapest stuff possible, there was not much money or incentive to make the stuff better. Eventually, however, people learned how to do it. How to design stuff made of injection-molded plastics was another area of improvement, with the right thicknesses, reinforcements, etc. being learned through experience as well.

To my mind the most interesting advancement in plastics, however, has been learning how to make them in ways that go beyond the chemical formula. A good example of this is how polyester went from being an awful but cheap replacement for silk in the 1970s that felt akin to wearing a garbage bag to a vastly superior fabric for athletic clothes. These days, if you’re going to do something that will make you sweat, you will be far more comfortable in a wicking fabric, which are mostly made of polyester. The trick is that when making the polyester strands, instead of making them thick, so that one is almost making the cloth out of fishing line, one makes the plastic strands incredibly thin. These are then spun together much like natural fibers, and produce a fabric which is light weight, breathes well, and tends to pull moisture away from the body and allow it to evaporate on the surface. On the flip side, making polyester in very thick sheets has created its use for things like unbreakable drinking glasses. Admittedly more prone to scratching than glass is, they never shatter when you drop them and they are much better insulators, helping to keep the drink at whatever temperature it started at.

Probably the best example, however, is Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene, sometimes sold under the brands Dyneema or Spectra. As a super-quick background, if you don’t know it, plastics are polymers, which means that they are a chain of simpler molecules known as monomers. These monomers are frequently liquids. The way plastics are synthesized is from a monomer stock, with a chemical reaction catalyzed by a catalyst that combines the monomers into chains, which form solids. Polyethylene comes in varieties, based on how many monomers are in the (typical) polymer chain. Low density polyethylene has a few hundred, and they tend to be in branched chains that don’t stick together well. This is the sort of plastic one finds commonly in grocery store bags. High density polyethylene has (typically) 700-1800 monomers in a polymer molecule, and arranged in much straighter lines, which stick together better. This is the plastic one finds in things like soda bottles. Ultra high molecular weight polyethylene has anywhere from 100,000 to 250,000 monomers in a polymer molecule. It has greater tensile strength than steel (by weight), similar abrasion resistance, similar friction to Teflon, and is highly chemically resistant to corrosion from acids and alkalies. It’s truly amazing stuff. And what’s really interesting is that (one of the more common forms) is made with a metal spinneret, in a matter not entirely unlike the way a spider spins its silk from its spinnerets.

In the early and mid 1900s, chemistry got most of the glory when it came to advances in technology, bringing us wonderful new materials. In the later half of that century, it turned out that chemical formulae were only a small part of the story. How you put things together is at least as important as what you put together. It’s an interesting lesson, not in the least because metals were often seen as so superior to biological materials, but it turns out that our best materials are often made by imitating biological materials.

Why Dorothy L. Sayers Stopped Writing Lord Peter

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized3 Comments

I’ve never seen a coherent account written down of why Dorothy L. Sayers stopped writing Lord Peter when she did. There are plenty of bits and pieces, of course, but I’ve not seen them organized into a coherent account, so I will endeavor to do so here.

The last piece of hard evidence that I know of was an essay she wrote about Gaudy Night in the book Titles to Fame, first published in October of 1937. Presumably Ms. Sayer’s chapter in it was written not long before, as she quotes from Busman’s Honeymoon, also published in 1937. Though, to be fair, Busman’s Honeymoon was originally a play which came out in 1936. In this chapter she says that she is often asked if Peter’s career will end with marriage, and she says (with some regret) that she does not foresee Peter’s career ever ending while she is still alive. How is it, then, that no more Lord Peter was forthcoming?

Actually, it’s not quite true that none was. After Busman’s Honeymoon, three Lord Peter short stories were written. Striding Folly and The Haunted Policeman were published in something called Detection Medley (I do not know whether that is a magazine or a book, though I would guess a magazine) in 1939. The short story Tallboys was written in 1942, though only discovered and published in 1972. But why were there no more novels?

There was supposed to be. In 1936, she began work on the novel Thrones, Dominations, which was to explore the married life of Harriet and Lord Peter, in part by contrasting it with other marriages. She never got more than about six chapters into it. One theory, which I find compelling, is that the abdication of King Edward VIII so that he could marry a devorcée threw a wrench into Ms. Sayer’s plans because this new environment would cause the book to be read very differently than she had intended. It is very believable to me that she would find the whole thing a mess and need some time to sort it out, and the more she tried to sort it out, the more of a mess it became while she was still trying to salvage the original form. And unfortunately, she didn’t have all that much time to sort it out.

England entered World War II in September of 1939, shortly after Germany invaded Poland. This was three years after she had begun Thrones, Dominations, but with Gaudy Night having been such a turning point in adding depth to her characters and Busman’s Honeymoon having been a strong continuation of that, it’s believable to me that she got bogged down by the more difficult task of making drama with a working marriage that needs to remain a working marriage at the end and thus cannot materially alter. The thing is doable, but it is far from easy, which is why most people don’t attempt it. Once World War II came, Ms. Sayers put down Lord Peter, except from some wartime propaganda to bolster morale (letters ostensibly from the Wimsey family about wartime conditions) and the short story Tallboys which wasn’t even published until after her death.

I should note, in passing, that Tallboys is not a bad story, though it’s really not much of a mystery. It explores, though briefly, Lord Peter and Harriet as parents, by contrast with a prig staying with them for the summer who is vocally against disciplining children, especially physically. The mystery is simply who stole Mr. Puffet’s peaches off of the peach tree in his garden, which Lord Peter does with some investigation and a clue furnished by his 8 year old son about another child’s missing fishing apparatus. It is worth reading, especially for a few more glimpses into Harriet and Lord Peter, though the two barely interact with each other in the story. Unlike The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head, it’s not really a story that one would read merely for itself. Basically, it’s not entirely shocking that the story remained unpublished until after the authoress’ death.

It makes sense that in England in World War II, Miss Sayers found it impossible to write Lord Peter. The war was not a universal block to writing—Agatha Christie kept writing mysteries throughout it—but it makes sense that to Ms. Sayers, who had chafed under the constraints of writing detective fiction which was not also significant, in a literary sense, the pressures of World War II were overwhelming. How could she write a Lord Peter story during World War II without it being about what’s going on, but at the same time with things being uncertain and always changing, how could she write a Lord Peter story in that time period and be sure conditions would be the same when it was published as when it was written? She had already been bitten by this once with Thrones, Dominations and the abdication of the King.

So much for Lord Peter during the war, but what about after it? Dorothy L. Sayers lived for twelve years after the resumption of peace in England. From what I’ve read, though I can’t at present remember where in order to cite it, post-war England was just a very different place than inter-war England, and Lord Peter was a creature of the inter-war period. This was so in a number of ways; his defining characteristics were largely from the first world war, in 1946 he was now fifty six years old, and as the parent of several children and (with the plan to have Lord Saint-George die in the war and Gerald to peg out as well) with heavy responsibilities, his time would not be his own to run around investigating crimes in the same way as it used to.

This last part would not be so much of a problem if the goal was merely to preserve the character’s function in the story, but it would be a rather large problem with the humanization of Lord Peter that happened in the last few novels. In the end, I suspect that it was precisely the determination to make Lord Peter a fully human character that made Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon such great books which also made them the last books. The main concerns of the prime of Lord Peter’s life—his mid fifties—would be at odds with him being a detective, and moreover are not the sort of thing which lend themselves well to novels. Novels are a concentration of life; they are about moments which symbolize much larger patches of life. Simply put, novel-worthy events really should not happen to a successful man in his mid-fifties. They may happen to those around him, drawing him in to such a novel. He should have his life sufficiently well figured out at this point that he has fairly little personal growth to do.

That last point would not be generally fatal; it was not fatal to any of Agatha Christie’s detectives. Poirot kept detecting his whole life, and Miss Marple started detecting in her old age. Both were stable people who were swept into the troubles of others. Lord Peter got into detection because it was one of the few things which drew him out of the shell he grew in the shock of the first world war. I do not mean that this could not have been overcome, but it would have been difficult to overcome. Lord Peter novels almost entirely consisted in Lord Peter sticking his nose into other people’s business. The one major exception to this is Clouds of Witness, and even there it was, technically, his brothers’ business. People came to Poirot because it was his job; he hung out a detective shingle, as it were. To write Lord Peter mysteries in his fifties and beyond would require people to come to Lord Peter, since Lord Peter should no longer be seeking these problems out. I can say from experience that stories in which people seek out a detective are very different stories from ones in which a detective seeks out the problem; the structure of them is different. Someone must already have suspicions; something grave must be at stake to bring in a stranger. In short, to have kept writing Lord Peter stories after the second world war would have required significantly changing what a Lord Peter story was. I do not say that Ms. Sayers could not have done it. All I am saying is that it makes sense why she did not, in fact, do it.

When 2+2=5

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized1 Comment

There has been a really weird… phenomenon, I think mostly on Twitter, where some people referred to 2+2=4 as a basic, incontrovertible fact, and some other people have been invoking higher mathematics to say that sometimes 2+2=5. Since I’ve got a master’s degree in math, I thought I might as well explain what’s going on, and when 2+2=5.

To get an obvious point out of the way so as to avoid misunderstanding, in normal conversation, when people talk about 2+2=4, they are clearly referring to the natural numbers under one of the the ordinary definitions of addition (such as under the peano axioms, where addition is combined succession). Given that set and that operation, 2+2 equals 4, always, no exceptions.

Where higher level mathematics comes in is that a mathematician is free to consider any set whatsoever, and to define any operations on it that he wants. Most of these sets and operations won’t be interesting, but they will be valid. Let me give you an example of such a set with such an operation, so you can see what I mean.

Let us define the set F, such that F={2,5} (that is, F has two elements, one called “2” and the other called “5”). Let us define an operation on F×F→F (the cross product of F, mapping to F), called +. It is defined such that + of any two elements in F is the element “5” in F. Thus, 2+2=5. Under this definition, it is also the case that 2+5=5 and 5+5=5.

OK, so we now have a set F and an operation + such that in F under + as we’ve defined it, 2+2=5. Whoohoo. This is obviously a completely uninteresting set and operation. There’s nothing to say about it. There’s no reason one would ever want to actually define it, other than as a joke. (There is a certain similarity, here, to the classic set of outcomes to a coin flip, “heads I win, tails you lose”, if that is of any interest.)

But this is it. It’s not some great truth of higher mathematics, it’s a trivial side-effect of what is doable in higher mathematics which has generalized the more common mathematics.

I should note that there are very interesting sets and operations to define. For example, given a prime number m, the set of non-negative integers less than m, with addition defined to be addition modulo m, is quite interesting. (For those not familiar, modular arithmetic is basically doing arithmetic and if the result is larger than the modulus, you keep subtracting the modulus until it isn’t. Thus (2+6) % 7 = 1, since 2+6=8, but 8 is bigger than 7, so we subtract 7, and 8-7=1. You can also define modulus in terms of remainder after division.) These are quite interesting because the operation we’ve defined as + is closed, so every number has an additive inverse. It would take too long to explain why that’s interesting, but the short short version is that it’s the basis of many cryptographic algorithms, including some of the most widely used public key cryptographic algorithms like RSA which underly most encrypted web traffic.

Thus I hope it’s clear that it is not the case that higher mathematics is all uninteresting. It is only that the abstractions which are used in higher mathematics have boring side-effects. This is no different from the oddity of “Buffalo” meaning (1) an animal, (2) a city in NY and (3) to confuse someone allowing one to claim that “Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo” (meaning that buffalo from the city of Buffalo confuse buffalo from the city of Buffalo) is a perfectly valid English sentence. It is, but this is, at most, an amusing accident. It doesn’t mean that English is stupid, nor that people who study language are stupid. It’s just that complex things occasionally have odd quirks. What is true of the English language is also true of higher mathematics.

And none of this means that the people who say, “well, actually, sometimes 2+2=5…” aren’t intentionally missing the point.

In closing, let’s never forget the point in this XKCD comic:

The Problem of Thor Bridge

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized, WritingLeave a comment

The Problem of Thor Bridge was first published in 1922, making it one of the last Sherlock Holmes stories published in The Strand Magazine and towards the last of the Holmes stories published anywhere. (Only ten Holmes stories were published after, the last in March of 1927.)

By this time, other detective stories were well underway. Dr. Thorndyke had been solving cases for fifteen years, Father Brown had been solving cases for twelve years and Poirot for two. I don’t know whether Sir Arthur ever read any of these stories, or to what degree they influenced him. It seems possible, though, as this is one of the only Holmes stories in which there is a ingenious murder device, that is, with a clever and unusual method of committing murder. Far more common in Holmes stories are fairly ordinary means of committing murder that only left a few clues behind. (As well, there are plenty of non-murder cases entirely. Possibly the majority—I haven’t counted.)

Technically all the villain got away with, in the story, was self-murder, and merely attempted to murder the woman she hated by setting the scene to look like murder and framing her rival. It was still a very clever and original technique for murder.

For those who aren’t familiar with the story, Mrs. Maria Gibson was jealous of miss Grace Dunbar, the governess of her children, because her husband had fallen in love with Miss Dunbar. Mrs. Gibson made an appointment with Miss Dunbar for a certain time in the evening and had Miss Dunbar confirm it with a note. After Miss Dunbar came, Mrs. Gibson insulted her until she ran away. Once Miss Dunbar was safely out of earshot, she tied a heavy rock, with a long piece of twine, to a gun, and shot herself, with the note clutched in her other hand. When she fell dead, the rock pulled the gun over the edge of the bridge and into the water below. The final piece of evidence against Miss Dunbar was a duplicate gun, planted in Miss Dunbar’s wardrobe.

The absence of the gun was very strong evidence against suicide, and the timing selected gave most people, except for Miss Dunbar, an alibi for the time of death. It’s quite clever.

I find it curious that this means of murder has been copied so little. I couldn’t think of any examples, and the Wikipedia page mentions only two TV shows which have borrowed the idea, one CSI in an episode titled Who Shot Sherlock? The other is a Murder, She Wrote episode from the eighth season titled To The Last Will I Grapple With Thee.

I watched that episode of Murder, She Wrote, as I didn’t remember it. It’s a good episode, though a bit strange because most of the cast are Irish immigrants; most of the cast except for Jessica Fletcher and the Police Lieutenant speak with an Irish brogue. It’s one of the episodes set in New York City when Jessica is teaching classes as some university. There’s an Irish ex-policeman who moved to America to start a new life, with his adult daughter, and he’s pursued by a career criminal from Ireland, with whom he had a long history including having tried to win the hand of the same woman, who tries to frame the ex-policeman for his murder. He uses a weight on a string tied to a heavy weight to hide the gun in the open cavity of an unfinished wall, but Jessica spots the marks the gun made on the wall and deduces what happened. It turned out that the career criminal had an inoperable brain tumor, and since he had so little time left, he decided to make one last attempt to get back at his old enemy.

He is explicitly likened to Ahab in Moby Dick, and a part of Ahab’s final speech is quoted. It’s worth quoting in full (if you haven’t read Moby Dick, Ahab had dedicated his life to veangeance against the white whale, who has just rammed Ahab’s ship, the Pequod, and the ship is sinking).

I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,—death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!

The most famous of the lines is, of course, “to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee”. (It was also quoted very well by the dying Khan, in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, as Khan self-destructed his ship to try to kill Kirk. Ricardo Montalbán was a good actor.) You wouldn’t think that Murder, She Wrote could pull this sort of true drama off, but somehow it did.

I’ve never seen CSI and have no intention of seeing it, so I can’t comment on it, but I find it curious that the only place this murder device has been used was in long-running TV shows, which have a huge demand for material, and only after many years. And in the Murder, She Wrote episode they played somewhat fast and loose with the wall having an open cavity in it. They never really showed us that it had that feature.

I wonder why this is. Is it just that copying the greats feels cheap? But copying the greats is usually the best strategy for a writer, at least while making it one’s own. Mediocrity borrows, genius steals, and all that.

Perhaps it’s just that the disguised suicide of The Problem of Thor’s Bridge is so recognizable? If a body was found on a bridge with a chip in the stonework, a modern audience might scream if the detective does not immediately dredge the lake or stream for the gun. Yet, I have not seen even variants of this—murdering someone and then dropping the gun over a bridge with a rock on a rope to disguise the murder as suicide-disguised-as-murder. With modern materials one need not even use a rock a a counterweight. Elastics, springs, and other things would expand the range of hiding places for a murder weapon. It is, at least, an interesting direction to explore.

What Bad Guys Get Right

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized, Writing1 Comment

Recently, I wrote about Writing Villains and Satanic Banality and Bad Guys Who Think They’re the Good Guys. In the latter, I mentioned an annoying habit some writers have where they mangle bad guys thinking that they’re good guys into bad guys actually being good guys. This leaves them with the problem of coming up with who the real bad guy is, and they usually do a bad job at this since the real bad guy’s motivations and actions are (typically) an afterthought. The way I put it, when explaining how the good guy was convinced that another good guy was actually a bad guy, was:

There’s only one way to do this, and Miss Bennet hit upon it in Pride & Prejudice when she was trying to exculpate both Mr. Darcy and Wickham: interested people have misrepresented each to the other. But there is a problem with this. As Elizabeth Bennet observed in reply, if you cannot clear the interested people, one will be obliged to think ill of someone. It is not an accident that in this sort of story the good guy inevitably discovers that he’s actually working for the real bad guys. The only other way out is the way the X-Files took: behind each good guy who seems to be a bad guy is some other apparent bad guy responsible for the deception. Every time you peel the onion, there’s another layer. If one doesn’t go that sort of unsatisfying route—perhaps because one is writing in a book or movie and not a TV story with hundreds of episodes coming down the pike—then what we end up with are villains who had plausibly convinced the good guy that they were good guys who are performing their evil for no real reason. They always want to take over the world because it’s there, or kill off three fourths of the population of the world because by some convoluted logic this would drive the share price of their company up by fifteen percent.

I want to go into a bit more depth on why the bad guy killing three fourths of the world to drive a stock price up by fifteen percent makes no sense despite the thing making a bad guy a bad guy being a fundamental error about what is good. Or, in other words, I want to discuss what it is that bad guys get right. Having them get the things wrong that they would get right is as bad as having them get nothing wrong.

The key to knowing what mistakes a villain will necessarily make and those he would never make comes from knowing which other beliefs about the world the villain will hold at the same time as he is considering his fundamental mistake. I probably need to pause here to explain what I mean.

When a person makes a mistake about the world, they will inevitably believe something else which contradicts that mistake. That is because there is only one completely consistent set of beliefs about the world—the correct ones. But a person who makes a mistake is unlikely to make all of the mistakes required to be completely consistent with that mistake; in general that would involve believing all sorts of weird things, like dogs not existing or trees being a figment of one’s imagination. For those who have not studied logic, there is a problem that immediately arises: anything follows from a contradiction. What this means is that if you believe two contradictory things, you can logically derive, through entirely valid logic, any conclusion that you want. You can, but the thing is: people don’t actually do that.

There are various ways to work around the problem that anything follows from a contradiction (I discuss one of the more common ways in my post Kant’s Version of Knowledge), but they all have the basic feature that the world becomes fractured to the person who believes the contradiction. The fracture lines are the contradictions. On one side of the contradiction, the person believes a fairly consistent set of beliefs which they only apply when that truth value of the contradiction is relevant. On the other side is another fairly consistent set of beliefs, many of which contradict the first one, which are only applied when the other side of the truth value is relevant. It is the selective application of universal worldviews which is how the person avoids having to deal with the contradiction.

Let’s get back to our hypothetical bad guy who would do anything to raise the price of his company’s stock. His fundamental error is that he takes the price of his company’s stock to be a much greater good than it is. When he is worshiping at the altar of the stock market, he sets the value of human life at zero, or close enough to that. So why is killing three fourths of the population off not something this villain would do? Because it would cause the price of his company’s stock to plummet in the long term. When thinking about the exaggerated value of a stock price, the villain would certainly include those things which are consistent with valuing a stock price, and knowledge of what raises and lowers a stock price most certainly are compatible with exaggerating the value of the stock price. No one would worship the price of stock but ignore what actually affects the price of stock. In fact, his worship of stock prices would lead him to know better than most men what makes stock prices go up and what makes them go down.

There are two things that affect the value of stock more than the performance of the individual company. They are, roughly in order of importance:

  1. General demand for stock
  2. Market stability

If three fourths of the population die off, markets will be horrifically unstable. This will push what investors remain away from the stock market and into things with more stability, like gold. But in our apocalyptic scenario, and more to the point, if three fourths of the population of the world die off, there won’t be many people left to buy the stock and most of them will be putting all of their money into surviving the post-apocalypse hellscape, not into stocks, if the stock market were even to survive.

If you were to ask anyone, “would killing three fourths of the population of the world off be good for the price of a stock, any stock?” If they were at all knowledgeable about stocks, they would answer “no”. The more knowledgeable, the faster and more emphatic the answer would come. If you found a man so twisted by over-valuing the price of the stock of a company for which he works, he will answer your question before you’ve even finished asking it, since you are causing him to think about the thing which is to him the most painful in the world—the price of his company’s stock dropping like a rock.

None of this in any way contradicts that, at least when he’s thinking about his true love—stock prices—he would set the value of human life near zero. He might not care whether men live or die, but he would care very much what those worthless men would pay for his stock. Something that kills off a few people, he would not mind at all. Something that kills off enough people to affect the markets, he would not give a hearing to.

Now, to fully consider the nature of the fractured mind that results from moral error, none of this means that the villain would not care about the lives of people he interacts with in ways that do not affect stock prices. When that beloved subject is sufficiently far from his mind—and no one can concentrate on one thing forever—he will, mentally, live in a very different world. He will live in a world in which people have value apart from what they will pay for a stock. He might be quite fond of the person who makes the best smoothies at his favorite juicery. He might be quite fond of his wife, or children, when he is home and not working; he might be a dog lover when he is on vacation. He might be strongly in favor of welfare for the poor, when he gives them a thought, at a party.

None of these things are required, but they are all entirely realistic. I nearly said “consistent,” which they would not be. They would be a highly realistic inconsistency, though.

The final thing required, to understand this mentality, is to understand what happens when conflicts do arise between the two worldviews. What happens is that one will win, but it will very rarely win completely. The victory will look like a subordination of the less dominant worldview to the more dominant worldview. But to understand what this subordination will look like, it’s important to bear in mind that the mistake is real and thus the thing which is regarded with exaggerated value really is regarded as having that value. In our example, the villain really does believe that his company’s stock price is of truly enormous importance, far beyond individual human life. When the world view where the person who makes his favorite smoothie contradicts, such as the person being put out of work by a corporate merger, his love for the smoothie maker will subordinate to the value of the share price. That is, he will make out some way that this suffering has value, and that value given by the increase in share price.

Here, if one was writing this character, some knowledge of how corporations actually work would be quite valuable. Unfortunately, writers (especially Hollywood writers) seem to live in an almost perfect ignorance of the stock market, apart from having heard a few terms and know that stocks are bought and sold. There are only two ways in which the price of a company’s shares actually benefit the company, and only of them actually benefits the company. The first is that the company can raise money by creating new shares to sell (diluting the value of the existing shares, but in theory it being worth it to existing shareholders because the value created exceeds the dilution incurred). The other is that shareholders vote for the board of directors, who pick the CEO and determine his salary, and they have a strong tendency to reward CEOs who drive up stock prices and punish CEOs who let share prices fall. That affects behavior, but it doesn’t actually do the company any good. (There is also the fact that a sufficiently high share price protects a company against a hostile takeover, since no one would have the money to buy the company, but this is not typically very relevant.)

The person who worships the stock price will know that this allows the company to gain funds to expand the business, so he would probably rationalize the smoothie guy’s suffering as being for the greater good by pointing to how the increased efficiency makes more capital available to the corporation to grow and provide its services. The mere fact that growth and increased services are secondary goods to the stock-price-worshiper does not mean that he is unaware of them, and this knowledge will be very useful to him when trying to reconcile his love for the smoothie maker with his greater love for the stock price which was increased by the merger.

In short, when faced with this, he will not say that the smoothie maker’s doesn’t matter, but that his (involuntary) sacrifice is for the greater good, and so the smoothie maker, in accepting his fate, is noble and should be praised. He might even try to help the smoothie maker out, so long as there’s a way he can do it which won’t hurt his company’s share price.

A person worshiping a stock price is a somewhat silly example, though not so silly that it has not been done before in fiction. However that goes, it does serve to show how the villain’s thought process works. And if you ever wondered how Hitler could be a vegetarian who loved dogs and also a mass murderer, this is how. Rest assured, he had theories as to how his mass murder was really, truly, in the end, humanitarian. Villains always do.

These explanations that the villain has of how his villainy is really virtuous will always seem convoluted, but only to outsiders. They will not appear convoluted to the villain himself. They seem natural to the villain because he has learned to live with a fractured mind; to reconcile contradictory worldviews. It only seems convoluted to outsiders because they have not learned this mental agility.

Bad Guys Who Think They’re the Good Guys

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized, Writing2 Comments

This post is a followup to my post on Satanic Banality And Writing Villains. In it, I said:

These sorts of mistakes are often confused for rationalizations, that is, for excuses made to others. This is to mistake the nature of evil. The evildoer really believes these things, precisely because in his sin he has missed what he’s aiming at. When trying to write a realistic villain, this sort of mistake is not optional. Villains are villains precisely because they are wrong about some moral judgement. These mistakes will have consequences beyond merely doing evil, precisely because the villain actually believes these moral errors.

This phenomenon is why it feels realistic when the bad guy thinks that he’s the good guy. Unfortunately, that trope in stories is very often misunderstood by people who do not understand what evil really is. It is quite true that bad guys will often think that they are the good guys. What isn’t true is that they seem like the good guys to anyone but themselves.

This mistake has resulted in a great deal of bad storytelling, where the bad guys are shown to actually have a point. Instead of them having mistaken evil for good and thus be pursuing evil as good, they have, in fact, correctly having identified a good and are legitimately pursuing it. But if that’s the case, why on earth is the good guy in the story fighting these other good guys? There needs to be some explanation for why the good guy thought that the other good guy was actually a bad guy.

There’s only one way to do this, and Miss Bennet hit upon it in Pride & Prejudice when she was trying to exculpate both Mr. Darcy and Wickham: interested people have misrepresented each to the other. But there is a problem with this. As Elizabeth Bennet observed in reply, if you cannot clear the interested people, one will be obliged to think ill of someone. It is not an accident that in this sort of story the good guy inevitably discovers that he’s actually working for the real bad guys. The only other way out is the way the X-Files took: behind each good guy who seems to be a bad guy is some other apparent bad guy responsible for the deception. Every time you peel the onion, there’s another layer. If one doesn’t go that sort of unsatisfying route—perhaps because one is writing in a book or movie and not a TV story with hundreds of episodes coming down the pike—then what we end up with are villains who had plausibly convinced the good guy that they were good guys who are performing their evil for no real reason. They always want to take over the world because it’s there, or kill off three fourths of the population of the world because by some convoluted logic this would drive the share price of their company up by fifteen percent.

There’s rarely a satisfying explanation—in the sense of an explanation where the villains actions could plausibly be connected to his goals, even according to the mistakes he is making. To use the example of killing off most of the world driving the share price of his company up by fifteen percent, the fundamental mistake the villain is making, that is, the evil he is mistaking for good, is the share price of his company being all-important. This is a dubious mistake for someone to make, but it is possible. One can become idolatrous about almost anything. But given this mistake, it is not plausible that the villain would think that killing off three fourths of the world (say, with a bio-engineered plauge of super-locusts) would actually be good for the price of his company’s stock in a way that’s useful to his goal. Sure, in the extremely short term the stock would go up, but it would shortly thereafter crash when no one has the money to buy shares any more since they’re busy eating the rats which died of starvation. His mistake is about the good of his company’s share price, not about how markets work. In fact, his idolatry of his company’s share price would make him the last person who would misunderstand how markets respond to major events. The problem—apart from many writers not understanding how markets work themselves—is often due to the real villain’s character and motivation being an afterthought, because it’s all revealed in the last few pages (or last few minutes).

(It should be noted that this goodguy-as-badguy plotline is largely driven by misunderstanding why a badguy thinks that he’s a goodguy, but once this mistake was made it appealed to writers who want to personally rebel against goodness in order to indulge in some evil of their own, and so to make the world more comfortable for their evil they want to make readers (or viewers) distrustful of the institutions which exist to guard against the sort of evil they wish to indulge in. I think that they merely stumbled on this from the structure, rather than set out to undermine these organizations and incidentally got—partially—closer to a better plot.)

None of this sort of the-good-guys-are-actually-bad-guys would seem necessary if the writer recognized that evil is fundamentally a perversion of good. In grasping at the shadow rather than the substance casting the shadow, the one doing evil does not plausibly think that he’s doing good. He merely thinks that he’s doing good anyway.

The villain will have reasons for his evil deeds, but they will be bad reasons. This is necessarily so. It is not possible to have a good reason for a bad decision.

Lord Peter Short Stories: The Necklace of Pearls

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized2 Comments

The Necklace of Pearls is a short story about a pearl necklace given by Sir Septimus Shale by his daughter, its theft, and Lord Peter Wimsey’s finding of the necklace and catching of the criminal. It follows the general structure of a detective short story, giving us the setup, the crime, the production of clues, and then on the last page the solution, and as a puzzle, it is enjoyable.

One does not really read a Lord Peter story for a mere puzzle, and The Necklace of Pearls does provide some comedy of manners. The main point of comedy is the Christmas traditions of Sir Septimus. A brief quotation from the beginning of the story will make this clear:

Sir Septimus Shale was accustomed to assert his authority once in the year and once only. He allowed his young and fashionable wife to fill his house with diagrammatic furniture made of steel; to collected advanced artists and anti-grammatical poets; to believe in cocktails and relativity and to dress as extravagantly as she please;d but he did insist on an old-fashioned Christmas. He was a simple-hearted man, who really liked plum-pudding and cracker mottoes, and he count not get it out of his head that other people, ‘at bottom’, enjoyed these things also. At Christmas, therefore, he firmly retired to his country house in Essex, called in the servants to hang holly and mistletoe upon the cubist electric fittings; loaded the steel sideboard with delicacies from Fortnum & Mason; hung up stocking at the heads of the polished walnut bedsteads; and even, on this occasion only, had the electric radiators removed from the modernist grates and installed wood fires and a yule log. He then gathered his family and friends about him, filled them with as much Dickensian good fare as he could persuade them to swallow, and, after their Christmas dinner, set them down to play ‘Charades’ and ‘Clumps’ and ‘Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral’ in the drawing-room , concluding these diversions by ‘Hide-and-Seek’ in the dark all over the house. Because Sir Steptimus was a very rich man, his guests fell in with his invariable programme, and if they were bored, they did not tell him so.

This juxtoposition of modernist furniture in steel with an old-fashioned English Christmas is very hard to appreciate for an American in 2020. The traditional English Christmas is not my tradition, even in mutated form, and steel furniture seems almost the height of stupidity. We have some steel in our kitchen; an aesthetic whose aim is to suggest the appliances are fit for a commercial kitchen, where stainless steel is used because it is easy to clean and no one really cares whether employees have anything pleasing to look at while they work in oppressive heat. Other than that, steel is rarely seen in an American household, so it seems, rather than modern, merely in bad taste.

There is the further remove that people don’t really want to be modern any more. Even extremely modern things, like smart watches, almost go out of their way to at least partially disguise themselves in inconspicuous colors. In the 1930s, new technology was promising. In the 2020s, it’s commonplace and best known for its frustration, addictive properties, and general propensity for making people less social and less happy. (This is actually somewhat unfair, as technology does enable all sorts of great conversations to happen, but general regard is not always fair.)

The mystery itself is the disappearance of the necklace, and there are really two parts to this mystery:

  1. Where did the pearl necklace go?
  2. Who stole the pearl necklace?

The short story only concerns the first question. Lord Peter searches carefully, with Sir Septimus following him as witness. This turns up a small, fine pin, of the sort that an entomologist might use to pin a butterfly to a display board. Lord Peter asks if anyone has a hobby of collecting beetles, and when Sir Septimus says that they don’t, Lord Peter knows where the pearls are, and how they were hidden there.

This is where we come to the weakness of a comedy of manners in a short story—we have too many characters and with many of their interactions being governed by their rigid manners, we can’t really get to know any of them well enough to guess who stole the necklace, or why. To be fair to the reader, neither does Lord Peter, so instead he sets a trap. I think that the game here turns into who can spot the person falling into the trap first. The only real downside is that, since we don’t know anything about the culprit—just the name of the guy who shows up in the trap—it’s not very satisfying.

The real payoff is the way in which the pearls were hidden. The villain cut them from the necklace and used the pins to hide the separated pearls among the mistletoe. At this point, I should note that European mistletoe has white berries, unlike the holly which is commonly used in the place of mistletoe in America, and is sometimes confused for it because of that. It’s an interesting technique for stealing pearls in a house so completely made of smooth, hard surfaces that there is nowhere to hide things.

Odd Short Stories

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized1 Comment

Having recently read through the collected Lord Peter short stories of Dorothy L. Sayers, I can’t help but notice that a few of them are fairly odd. The one which comes to mind as an example of this is the story where Lord Peter is driven in a car to a castle (or perhaps it was a mansion) to pick up some secrets from the scientist who lives there and upon entering meets another Lord Peter, whereupon the scientist proposes a wine identification contest to determine which Lord Peter is the real Lord Peter. (The real Lord Peter turns out to be the chauffeur. ) This is rather far off of the beaten track of Lord Peter stories. Granted, his expertise in wines does sometimes come up, but never before (or after) has it been critical.

Then it occurred to me: I have no idea where this story was published.

For all I know, Ms. Sayers wrote the story for a friend who ran a magazine called Wine Tasting Monthly. If that were the case, it would make perfect sense why she wrote such an unusual Lord Peter story. It would be fun for the (hypothetical) readers of Wine Tasting Monthly and would be very unlikely to confuse anyone who was merely an ordinary reader of Lord Peter Wimsey stories since they would be unlikely to ever see it.

I am, of course, just speculating. In fact, I doubt that I got it right; I think it more likely that not that this story was not written for Wine Tasting Monthly. It’s a good illustration, though, that there may have been context which makes oddities make perfect sense. Just to come up with another, to illustrate, perhaps there was an “adventure issue” of Detective Stories Weekly where the theme was seeing all of one’s favorite detectives but in an adventure story. The point is that with the right expectations, this story would be fun (and possibly funny) rather than just weird.

There’s a lesson in there…

Amatopia on Nihilism

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized3 Comments

Over at Amatopia, Alexander Hellene discusses nihilism, primarily in art. It’s a good post, worth reading. There’s one segment of it that I want to discuss, though, because I think that it somewhat misses the bigger picture:

But endless moping about the meaninglessness of everything isn’t a harmless amusement. It’s a dangerous idea that spreads despair and brutalizes people into looking into the sewer, metaphorical or otherwise, for meaning when they should be looking to something higher, whatever that may be. Instead of aspiring to lofty heights, those at the top would rather wallow in filth, and they want to drag you down with them.

There are two ways in which this misses the bigger picture.

The first is that, unless you believe in God, nihilism is true. That is, based upon one’s worldview, if there is no God, then nihilism is the correct conclusion. Atheists, as so much of the elites of American culture are, are either nihilists or lying to themselves.

This brings me to the second way in which it misses the bigger picture: if an atheist comes up with a meaning for his life, it will necessarily be an idol. You can see this in progressives/wokesters. They have decided that the meaning of their life is helping the downtrodden and oppressed. They would do far less harm, even to the downtrodden and oppressed, if they just wallowed in filth in the gutter. Everyone would be better off if atheists do not make up secular meaning in their life. That’s how people get to guillotines and death camps.

The biggest reason, though, that I think that it’s actually healthy to encourage atheists (who are the only people who can be nihilists) to take nihilism seriously is that it is here that they face their own beliefs directly and without disguise. It’s a commonplace observation that people rarely get out of self-destructive habits before they hit rock-bottom. Nihilism is atheists hitting rock bottom. The longer they go on pretending that everything is fine, the more entrenched in this mistake they will get.

In short, nihilism is a symptom, and it is a mistake to treat symptoms rather than the diseases that create them.

Just don’t let your kids watch the product of nihilistic artists until you’ve prepared them to see through it. But, you know, prepare them at an early age.

The Queen’s Square (A Lord Peter Wimsey Short Story)

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, UncategorizedLeave a comment

The Queen’s Square, a short story by Dorothy L. Sayers featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, is a murder mystery set at a costume party. It’s a great setup for a murder mystery, but for some reason it doesn’t seem to live up to this. It’s not a bad story, of course, but it feels a little bit like Miss Sayers is going through the motions.

To recap briefly, for those who’ve not read the story and don’t intend to, Lord Peter is at a costume ball, and a bunch of people we’ve never met before are dancing several dances and talking to each other. Then the fiancé of a woman discovers her corpse—she’d been strangled—and the police come and investigate. There’s a tangle of witness of who was where and when, then Lord Peter solves the case by figuring out that one of the guests was mistaken for another by a trick of colored light, the two guests costumes being identical except for color.

The initial part of the story gives atmosphere, a few introductions, and Lord Peter a chance to have a little conversation. Unfortunately, there are only two characters who are really introduced, and one is an older lady who has nothing to do with the rest of the story. The other is the victim, but other than being a “fast” woman, nothing revealed about her is relevant to the story.

The gathering of clues by the police is somewhat lengthy and in a way reminds me of The Five Red Herrings. That, too, was a timetable mystery in which the timetable was wrong, and therefore didn’t really matter. I’m being a little unfair, here, because the basic setup is that the victim was seen at a certain time, but couldn’t have been killed after it. Of course, that means that it was not the victim who was seen but someone mistaken for the victim, which means that the solution to the mystery revolves around who could have been mistaken for the victim. That said, it is an examination of the time table that shows clearly that this must be, so the timetable is not irrelevant.

I actually wonder if I’m not reading this incorrectly. It is overly tedious to commit all of these details to memory, but perhaps the reader is not supposed to. Such stories may be intended more like logic problems, where one is meant to construct a table that helps to keep track of the relationships and x out all of the squares that cannot be, with only a single stroke through the boxes that we have evidence against but it’s not conclusive. Those are fun to do, though having grown up in the 1980s I was used to the tables being drawn for one in the logic puzzle books.

Lord Peter figures out the solution to the puzzle in the darkroom, when he sees a red thing change color when the red darkroom light is switched off and the white light is switched on. There was a colored lamp which threw red light into the hallway in which the victim was last seen, and this made red costume which was seen appear to be white. Or, possibly, the white costume appear to be red. I don’t remember exactly, now, and either is possible depending on how much ambient light the witness saw.

It’s by no means my favorite story, but it is worth reading. Something seems a bit off with its structure, however, as the various parts give us time to meet characters who never do anything, followed by an information dump which is mostly unimportant, followed by Lord Peter and Bunter doing some photography and Lord Peter realizing the key to the mystery. The story is disjointed and we don’t get to have much fun with Lord Peter or any of the other characters. Had the cast been a little smaller and the best characters had some involvement during Lord Peter’s investigation, I think it would have been a significant improvement.

All of this said, I wonder if I wasn’t more correct in thinking that this was meant to be more like a logic puzzle and less like a story. There is a solution which is actually set off with some space, told as the policeman having told Wimsey about the criminal’s confession. One unfortunate aspect of the book in which I’m reading the short stories is that it gives no information about where they were originally published.

Benjamin Kit Sun Cheah on Wuxia

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized2 Comments

Over on Twitter, Benjamin Kit Sun Cheah wrote a very interesting thread on Wuxia (Chinese heroes) and the meaning of this genre. He kindly gave me permission to quote it in full here since that’s much easier to read than a Twitter thread if you’re not used to Twitter.

Among the hottest fiction trends today, and the genre I’m working on next. I’ve been looking into the genre for years, but everywhere I looked I found too many power fantasies, too few actual wuxia. It shows a lack of understanding of the genre. Wuxia should be the stuff of legends. Highly-skilled warriors in a milieu of danger and respect. Adventure in exotic realms. A world where you can earn your place with your sword. But beyond that, wuxia has one more element: Ethics.

It’s right there in the name. Wuxia is commonly translated as ‘martial hero’ into English. The meaning of ‘hero’ is well-known. ‘Martial’ has a neutral connotation. It means the ways of war. The meaning of wuxia seems obvious: a hero who uses martial arts. But this is not what wuxia means in Chinese. Chinese is a logographic language. Every ‘word’ is a written character that carries certain meanings. Every character in turn is made up of radicals. Radicals are smaller characters that convey pronunciation, and most importantly, MEANING. Keep this in mind.

Wuxia is a transliteration of 武侠. 武 carries the meanings of ‘martial, weapons, military’. 侠 means ‘chivalry, gallantry, hero’. But this is in English. In Chinese it carries a much, much deeper meaning. 武 is composed of two major radicals. 止: Stop 戈: A dagger-axe, an ancient Chinese weapon. (When used as a radical, the word loses a stroke.) Therefore, the true meaning of 武 is: to stop the dagger-axe. The English ‘martial’ has a neutral connotation. 武 has an innately noble purpose: to stop the dagger-axe, to defend and protect.

Morality is hard-coded into Chinese martial arts. The Chinese took it very, very seriously. Some Chinese martial arts masters worked as police officers, soldiers, and bodyguards. Others were civilians, but they assisted the police in arresting outlaws. Others ‘took back the art’ by defeating (and crippling or killing) bandits who had trained in martial arts.

侠 is an interesting case. This is the simplified version of an older word: 俠. 侠 has two radicals: 人: man 夹: squeeze, pinch, wedge, carry under your arm This implies that 侠 is ‘a man who wedges’ or ‘a man who carries’. 夾 from 俠 can be interpreted in two interesting ways. The ‘official’ interpretation I’ve seen is of two smaller men lifting up a larger man. My other, artistic interpretation is a large man wedging himself between two others. With this artistic interpretation, if we look at 俠 again, we see this: A man who places himself in between a tall man (on the left) and two smaller men (behind him). A big man protecting two smaller men with his body. What is the deeper meaning of 侠? A man who lifts up and supports other people. This is how the Chinese viewed chivalry and gallantry. Or, if you look at it artistically: A man who shields the innocent with his body.

Put these characters together and we get the meaning of the true meaning of 武侠: A man who stops the dagger-axe and supports others. Martial skill is thus used to protect the innocent, NOT to puff up your ego. To be a hero is to help others, NOT to merely be strong. Many stories tagged as ‘wuxia’ miss that. Without this element of ethics, of a hero willing to shield others from the dagger-axe with his own body, there is no wuxia. Today, there are ‘dark wuxia’ stories where the MC is a VILLAIN, which defeats the genre altogether!

With this in mind, let’s examine Xianxia. Xianxia is the transliteration of 仙侠. 侠 is known by now. But what about 仙? English says it means ‘immortal, fairy, sylph’. But that’s not quite what it means. 仙 has two radicals: 人: Man 山: Mountain A 仙, an immortal, is thus a man who goes up to the mountains. But why? Isolated in the mountains, free from the concerns of the mortal world, a man can tap into the abundant qi of nature. Through cultivation, a Daoist becomes an immortal. Through cultivation, a Buddhist gains enlightenment. They do not gain superpowers.

More precisely, these powers are NOT the point of cultivation. They serve as way markers. Confirmation that you are on the right path. And, if needed, skills TO HELP OTHERS. To pursue powers at the expense of your own development is to lose the Way and fall into delusion. Not only that, the archetypal xian is a hermit. He goes up the mountain AND STAYS THERE. Cultivation is a long, difficult, tedious process. He needs to be free of worldly distractions. Why would he climb down the mountain?

The answer, for this genre, is 侠. What is the deep meaning of xianxia? A man who goes up the mountain to cultivate himself and gains powers along the way, then climbs down the mountain to use his skills to help others. Modern-day xianxia show ‘heroes’ gaining power, beating up bad guys, attracting a girl, gaining more power, ad infinitum. This is a power fantasy, with optional harem elements. The purpose of power is not MOAR power. It is to be used to help others – or not at all. Without this moral element, a wuxia / xianxia story is not wuxia / xianxia. It is a mere power fantasy. But it is the dominant trope today. A mere aesthetic to dress up a hollow fantasy, no more. A shadow of the true meaning of the genre.

Only one thing left to do: Overturn the heavens and the earth. SAGA OF THE SWORDBREAKER, coming 2021 / 2022.

I have a small comment of my own to add, which is that you see the sort of perversion of a genre which Benjamin has described almost anywhere in which you see vivid world-building, no more than ten to twenty years later. It will inevitably come about when there are people who grew up with the world-building but who reject the heroism in it for the various reasons that people reject heroism. (Mostly it’s because they’re bad people and contemplating great virtue makes them feel bad about their vices, rather than encouraging them to increase their virtues, but that’s a topic onto itself.) These people, having spent so much time in such worlds in their imagination, long to tell their own stories in the same setting, though not at all to tell the same sorts of stories.

(This is a reason, by the way, that you will tend to see a golden age in which a type of new fiction has some particular excellence at the beginning, but then the genre becomes a swamp in which it is still possible to find diamonds. At first, people enter the genre to tell the sorts of stories this new fiction lets them tell especially well. Later, people who are used to the genre it want to tell all sorts of stories that have a superficial resemblance to the originals, and most of them are bad because they do not fit. The diamonds are those stories telling stories which do actually fit the genre.)

Hollywood Rat Race is Quite Interesting

On By Christopher LansdownIn TV & Movies, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Earlier I mentioned I got the book Hollywood Rat Race by Edward D. Wood Jr. of Plan 9 From Outer Space fame. I don’t have time for a full review now, but I do want to say that for people interested in the history of film, it is definitely worth reading.

It’s a weird book, which I suppose is no great surprise because it was written by a very weird man. Equally famous for Glen or Glenda, a semi-autobiographical movie about crossdressing in which understanding for people so afflicted is pleaded to the audience, Hollywood Rat Race more than once comments fairly negatively on men and women who dress in such a way that one cannot tell the difference between them, and also on men who wear women’s clothing. There’s something very curious there, because Ed Wood had publicly admitted to wearing women’s underwear many years before he ever started writing this book, so it’s not like he could have been trying to draw attention away from himself. (A lot of public hypocrisy around moral issues is frequently much less about actual hypocrisy and more a smoke screen by the vicious in the hope that publicly condemning their vice makes them less likely to ever be suspected of it.)

This is but a small part of the book, though. The various ways in which people who want to be stars are taken advantage of when they get to Hollywood is the main subject, at least by page count. It’s actually primarily financial predation, though he does talk about other types, as well. This is intermixed with advice on practical matters like having a 24 hour messaging service because you can’t carry your phone around with you in your pocket and how to get room and board cheaply. Some of this includes very practical advice, like taking into account the cost of gasoline to go to a further away grocery story with slightly better prices.

Also quite interesting is a section on just how great movies are. It begins by being against actors, writers, etc. who rail against Hollywood, and this section really shows just how much Ed Wood loves movies. I think that this is why people like me who love Mystery Science Theater 3000 so enjoy laughing at Ed Wood’s movies—we’d love to make movies too and if the best we could afford to do was a movie in which the grave stones are cardboard and the airplane steering wheels are artfully cut paper plates, we’d make that movie. To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, a thing worth doing is worth doing even if you can only do it badly. In laughing at Ed Wood’s movies, we’re laughing at a friend, and in so doing, we’re laughing at ourselves.

There’s also a very curious reminiscence of when Bella Lugosi felt bad because he learned fans didn’t know whether he was alive or dead, and so Ed Wood put together a public appearance for Bela, who used it as a springboard into comedic performances in Las Vegas. Just how much Ed Wood loved Bella comes across.

It’s a very quirky book. I’m not sure if it was ever edited past basic grammar. I believe it was unfinished at the time of Ed Wood’s death. For example, there’s a chapter in it which consists of three paragraphs, none longer than three sentences, all of which fit on a single page.

There is no earth-shattering insight in this book, but I none the less recommend it, at least if you like movies. It’s an unfinished and not-well-organized book about a bygone time, but it is very personal about a curious figure.

The Pleasure of Sarcasm

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Somehow or other, my ten year old son discovered my blog post The Least Jedi, wherein I make fun of one of the worst movies of all time, point-by-point. He’s actually having me read it to him in place of a bedtime story and finds it very funny. (This is not actually the first time; he made me watch The Last Jedi with him, and now has me reading it to him again.)

This got me to wondering why he’s enjoying it so much. I think that part of it is the same reason I enjoy Mystery Science Theater 3000—I’d love to be involved in making a movie so much I’d be willing to help make a bad movie. As G.K. Chesterton once said, “anything worth doing is worth doing [even if one can only do it] badly”. But I think that there’s another aspect to this, too.

Sarcasm is not polite. Sarcasm about a work of art, however, is (except in particularly grumpy company) not impolite. It can be very mean to make fun of a person, but it is not mean to make fun of a movie. And the problem with politeness, especially from a child’s perspective, is that you never quite know what people who are being polite really think.

I think, then, that part of the pleasure of sarcasm, especially for younger people—who, after all, are the people who generally enjoy sarcasm the most—is that one can take it far more at face value than most of the things one comes across. It is a vacation from veiled meanings and subtle hints. In sarcasm, we find good and bad openly called by their names.

There is a lesson, there, for people who write sarcastic things. They have a special appeal to children for a reason; it behooves us to make sure to write them very well, since children will absorb errors when they see them far more than will adults.

Twitter Has a Lot of Complaining

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized2 Comments

Something I’ve noticed about Twitter is that I frequently come away from it feeling less emotionally balanced than when I went to it. The obvious thing to do, therefore, is to figure out why, so that I can figure out what to do better, or at least how to approach it or whether it’s possible to approach it usefully. The first thing I notice when I consider this is that Twitter—by which, of course, I mean the tweets of the people I follow on Twitter—contains a great deal of complaining.

This is a little bit odd because I’ve generally selected people to follow on the basis of having said something insightful or something funny. So the first question is: what did I do wrong in how I’ve selected people to follow?

The answer there seems to have several parts. One of which is just that it’s far easier to complain than to come up with anything insightful to say. When people run out of insight, they may simply turn to complaining because it’s better than nothing. Another explanation is that there simple are people who one needs to turn retweets off for, because they will retweet things that they will not write. That’s easily done, and not the majority of what tends to cause my day to be worse after going to Twitter. I think that another part of it is that there are people who have valuable things to say, but minimal self-control when they themselves become upset. I don’t think that there’s anything practical to do with these people other than to unfollow or mute them. A happy medium is actually to only read lists, and just leave these people off of the lists.

There are also people who have valuable things to say, but fundamentally misunderstand the medium in which they are saying them. Twitter is called “micro-blogging” for a reason, though people frequently think of it as merely conversing with friends. This dissonance can produce things that would make sense if heard only by the person to whom they were written but are highly liable to misunderstanding in public, where they actually are. Much of the above about people with little emotional self-control does apply, though on rare occasions it may be helpful to point out to these people that they are making public statements that really are meant for private audiences; since this is, fundamentally, a mistake, they may possibly be helped.

There is also a problem with Outrage Quoting. This is harder to know what to do with; one thing that helps is to block the idiots who are frequently quoted. And, of course, using lists, muting, and unfollowing are all options.

Ultimately, I suspect that the correct approach is just to narrow down yet more carefully the list of people whose tweets I see and to double-down on my rule about only reading twitter via Tweetdeck using lists.

Still, I think it’s also worthwhile to do some introspection on why I’ve broken down on that rule I imposed on myself; what am I looking for? I’ve got more than enough to do, I certainly don’t need Twitter in order to stave off boredom. I’ve got enough to read (and write) that I shouldn’t have time to be bored in the next twenty years (God willing). It could be looking for human contact, or hoping to find people to help me think through some topics that I’m thinking about. I could just be craving a certain sort of stimulation, since the current environment requires more patience than I’m used to practicing.

Were Plays the TV of Previous Centuries?

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized2 Comments

Being, as I am, a fan of English Literature from previous centuries, especially of Pride & Prejudice and golden age detective stories, something I couldn’t help but note is that if anyone was near London (or another big city), going to plays was a common form of entertainment. Something else I’ve learned, in doing research about early detective stories, is that a lot of detective stories and tropes seem to be from plays more than novels.

Putting these together, I’ve begun to wonder whether plays were not, speaking broadly, the television of yesteryear.

In my own experience of plays, these are either some of the cream of English writing, as in the case of Shakespeare, or else are at least fairly time-tested things that are quite expensive and one travels a long distance to see. But plays are not generally talked of that way in earlier British fiction; they were as often a spur-of-the-moment thing as planned, and if planned, just an alternative to something like having people over for dinner. What is, or at least was, talked of like this in my experience is television.

Further, there are parallels. People usually didn’t seem to expect the plays to be very good, and they really didn’t expect them to last. And, indeed, most plays did not. As far as I can tell, the typical play had a short run in a small theater, and then everyone local had seen it and they’d move on.

If this is the case, it makes sense that plays would be frequently formulaic, since they were written on tight schedules and without any expectation of being remembered, and so it would be possible for the theater critic in the story What, No Butler? to say that in all the plays he saw, the butler always did it. (I’ve got a bunch of posts about the trope that the butler did it, btw.) This would be a lot like saying that in Murder, She Wrote the businessman’s wife did it. (There is, by the way, a hilarious formula for a typical Murder, She Wrote episode that illustrates some of what I’m talking about.)

Obviously, there are differences between plays back in the day and television today, even apart from the technology. Television shows have long runs of consistent characters, and occasionally the episodes try to be consistent with each other. (After Babylon 5, it became common to have a “show arc” where there was a long-running story that would make up some and occasionally all of each episode. In a sense these are just a return to the days of the serials, though.)

That said, I think that this might be a useful interpretive key to understanding the attitudes characters would show toward plays in older literature. Even more importantly, I think, it suggests that when trying to work out the development of genres like mystery, it means that by not having access to many of the plays people were seeing, we’re lacking one of the major influences on writers of the novels and short stories that we do have access to. In some ways, it might be like, in the future, trying to understand the development of Science Fiction through the present time without having seen Star Trek or Babylon 5. People who, in the early 2000s, write science fiction novels certainly have seen these influential things and moreover expect that their audiences to have seen them, too. It would be interesting to get a hold of some of those short-lived detective plays from the 1900s.

Video Games Are Great and Dangerous

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

A wag I know one described the characteristic masculine and feminine addictions on the internet as:

Men play video games to pretend to be good at doing things. Women use social media to pretend to have friends.

I’m going to leave the second half of that alone, but the first half is interesting. Video games, at least for males, are great and dangerous for really the same reason: they have a much lower effort-to-reward ratio than real life does.

I should clarify that by “real life” I mean skills that still work when the electricity is out. For example, lifting heavy things, carving wood, playing a piano, flying a kite, boxing, riding a bicycle (fast), shooting a bow and arrow, building a miniature ship inside of a bottle, dancing, building a fire from gathered wood and starting it, etc. All of these skills, and many, many more, take a very long time to get good at, typically with a long time at the beginning which has little result besides besides frustration.

In video games, by contrast, one can typically learn the relevant skills to get some rewards within an hour, and often within a few minutes. It is true that they will sometimes have skills which are difficult to master, but even those tend to only require hundreds of hours to master, not tens of thousands, and they almost never involve enduring physical pain along the way.

All this is correct for video games for their intended purpose: relaxation. Video games, used well, are fun. They are a restorative to a weary soul who has been ground down by the trials and tribulations of doing real things, in situations and environments which were not designed to be enjoyable. The quick fun and easy rewards help one to remember the slow enjoyment and eventual rewards of good work in the real world.

The problem is something that really is more dangerous to young men—it is possible to become so used to the ease and comfort of video games that the difficulty of real life becomes insurmountable. Without the rewards of accomplishment coming on the schedule a young video game player has been trained to expect them, he may face crushing disappointment. Instead of being a restorative to a fallen creature in a fallen world, enabling him to face the world in which he lives, it may be an impediment which makes it harder for him to do real things.

As in all things, the trick is to use things in the right way and to avoid their pitfalls.

Lepers And Social Distancing

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A curious thought occurred to me recently with regard to how we talk about lepers in the bible, and especially in the new testament. It’s fairly common to hear about how lepers were feared, had to stay outside of society, etc. and this is often connected to people in modern times who are on the outskirts of our society. Jesus was not afraid of lepers, and so we should not be afraid of those on the outskirts of society, either. (That this means that, among others, we should love neo-nazis and KKK members and the like is rarely mentioned, though, nor is the fact that love does not always look like acceptance, as it would not in those cases.)

What this modern approach seems to miss is that ancient people avoided lepers because lepers had a communicable disease. They weren’t outcasts because they looked different, or had a different culture, or pronounced words in a strange way; they were outcasts because being too close to them might cause one to catch a serious disease. That is, people practiced social distancing from lepers.

In these modern times of COVID-19, we have an exceedingly similar practice with people who have COVID-19, though with our modern understanding of diseases and the conditions of transmissibility, we do admit some exceptions who are wearing a great deal of anti-germ-armor (“PPE”). Medical personal in body suits with respirators aside, people with COVID-19 are outcasts, except we phrase it, “they should self-quarantine”. If someone with COVID-19 comes to a hospital, we expect them to call ahead to warn the staff, and to come through a different entrance, which is a slightly more technologically advanced version of clapping a bowl and calling out “unclean!”

If Christ were conducting his earthly ministry today, there would undoubtedly be COVID-19 patients who came within six feet of him hoping to be cured, and instead of lecturing them to maintain social distancing, he would, undoubtedly, cure them. But he would not come within six feet of someone with COVID-19 because he doesn’t recognize human prejudices and is not afraid of human superstitions—disease is not a human superstition and people with a communicable disease can actually spread it. He would come within six feet of people with COVID-19 because, as Lord of the world, he is Lord of diseases, too. As the one through whom all things were made and nothing was made apart from him, COVID-19 could not hurt him. The one who can make the blind see and the lame walk and clense lepers cannot be harmed by disease, unless he were to choose to permit it.

In short, Jesus did not care about social distancing with lepers because his miraculous power made him immune to communicable diseases. The closest parallel I can think of was when he angered a crowd who brought him to the top of a cliff to throw him off, but it was not his time, so he just walked away from them. This was a demonstration of Christ’s power, not an instruction that Christians should treat angry mobs as if they aren’t dangerous. In like way, Christ was not afraid of lepers because he could cure them, not because communicable diseases are, to use another modern phrase, fake news.

Murder She Wrote: When Thieves Fall Out

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, TV & Movies, Uncategorized4 Comments

The second episode of the fourth season of Murder, She Wrote, is titled, When Thieves Fall Out. It’s a very unusual episode of Murder, She Wrote.

The episode begins with the owner of a car dealership firing a drunk salesman. After that we meet a rather enigmatic character. I’m not sure whether to call him the protagonist or the antagonist, and in many ways the episode isn’t sure, either.

His name is Andrew Durbin. It’s a bit complicated, but we learn his backstory: he just got out of prison for a murder he claims he didn’t commit 20 years ago. He had been a hitchiker, and a wealthy businessman was giving him a ride. A car swerved almost into their lane and they swerved to avoid it, crashing. The businessman was injured and Durbin ran to a nearby farmhouse for help, but they didn’t hear his banging on the door. When he got back someone had bashed the businessman’s head in with a rock, and $100,000 in bearer bonds were missing. At that moment the police showed, and he was taken to be the murderer, and was convicted.

He’s back in Cabot Cove because he recognized a kid in the car (in a prom outfit; it was prom night) that ran them off of the road, and he wants vengeance and to know who the driver is.

The kid turns out to be Bill, the owner of the car dealership.

Somewhere around here, the car dealership owner recognizes that some weird things are going and her husband is very scared, so she goes to Jessica for help.

Andrew Durbin goes to the car dealership and says that there seems to be some electrical trouble with his car.

Bill says that he’s busy and will need some time to get the repair done. He suggests that Andrew come back at 9pm to pick up his car. Andrew agrees. Jessica shows up and talks to Bill, but not much really comes from this. He denies everything. Jessica leaves, and Bill calls a confederate—presumably the other person in the car, that fateful night.

Interestingly for a Murder, She Wrote episode, while we’re pretty sure that someone is about to be murdered, we don’t really know who.

It turns out to be Bill, which is an interesting turn of events because it leaves the field so wide open for who the murderer could be. One obvious suspect is the man with whom he had an appointment at around the time he was killed, Andrew Durbin, but it turns out that Durbin has an air-tight alibi. He was eating dinner for 2 hours at a restaurant where several reliable witnesses could vouch for him.

The alibi is useful, structurally, but it’s also very curious that Durbin never showed up to the appointment. It’s somewhat implied, later in the episode, that this was really a setup; he expected this to stir up Bill’s confederate and get him to kill Bill. It’s never explained in detail, and doesn’t make all that much sense as a plan. Unless he figured that Bill’s killer would be sloppy and get caught, this plan would most likely result in the trail going cold and Durbin’s only hope of justice being extinguished. That said, for whatever reason he does it, he never shows up and is careful to have an excellent alibi for before, during, and after the murder is committed.

Convinced that Durbin is both innocent and telling the truth, Jessica interviews Bill’s old high school friends who were with him that night.

They lie to Jessica, of course, in order to protect Bill’s memory, and say that he was with them the whole time. Eventually it comes out that Bill was drunk and left early. There’s some further investigation and a sub-plot where one of Bill’s old football friends who is pretending to have been crippled in a car crash and is suing Bill turns out not to be crippled and to only be scamming.

I probably should have mentioned earlier that high school football was a big theme. All of Bill’s male friends from high school were on the football team with him, and they were the only team from Cabot Cove who ever won the state championship. This is important because it turns out that the driver, and the murderer both of Bill and of the driver 20 years ago was the beloved high school football coach.

There was actually a pretty good line from his confession, when he talked about how the business he had invested his share of the $100,000 into went bust almost immediately: “I guess I should have known that nothing good would come of that money.”

What really makes this episode special, though, is that it doesn’t stop here. Later that night, as Jessica and Amos are having dinner, Andrew Durbin shows up at Jessica’s doorstep to thank her.

Jessica says that she wishes he wouldn’t. She acknowledges that he was telling the truth and spent 20 years in prison unjustly, but he knew what would happen when he came. He replies that he did warn her that he was after justice.

Jessica acknowledges this, but says, “I can’t help but think that justice could have been served in a better way.” Durbin is taken aback.

After thinking for a moment he then delivers one of the all-time great lines in Murder, She Wrote. He says it slowly, thoughtfully, and very fairly.

“Oh? Well you give it some thought, Mrs. Fletcher, and when you figure out what could have been, you let me know.”

Jessica is at a loss for words. He turns and leaves, and she closes the door. She then leans against it, thinking.

And there the episode ends.

Something I touched on in my blog post about how Jessica Fletcher is an oddly libertine scold is that she has an extremely strong but highly selective sense of indignation. She deplores violence but not, in general, any of the things which tend to make it necessary.

She dislikes, tremendously, that people she cared about were made to suffer. This is understandable, but it is a fault in Jessica that she didn’t rise above her feelings and stick to her principles and acknowledge that Durbin was in the right. Instead, she resents being made to be the one to find them out. In short, she is entitled to grieve, but not to be indignant, and Durbin’s final line points out to her how little she is entitled to her indignation.

Jessica does not learn from this moment, of course. First, because she’s written by television writers. Second, because Murder, She Wrote was episodic, with episodes not being related to each other. Frankly, I think it’s really more the former than the latter, though. All that said, it’s pretty satisfying for Jessica to get a comeuppance, for once.

Apart from all this, it’s an interesting episode. Detectives investigating long-ago mysteries is interesting, because the evidence is so limited (at least when people don’t have oddly good memories about things long-past to which they hadn’t attached any great significance at the time). This is done much better in Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs, but it’s an unfair comparison. That was a novel. A forty eight minute long TV episode cannot be as good. It does partake of some of what made that novel so good, though, even if it takes the easy route and uses photographs instead of people’s partial memories.

Dorothy L. Sayers on Gaudy Night, Preliminary Thoughts

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized1 Comment

As I mentioned, I’ve gotten a copy of Dorothy L. Sayers essay in the book Titles to Fame, in which she discussed the creation of her novel, Gaudy Night. I’ve read it over twice, and will be writing a more in-depth analysis of it, but at the moment I wanted to give some preliminary thoughts.

One of the things which leaps out at me is that she described the nature of detective stories in the early 1920s as being very focused on plot, to the exclusion of character. They were not supposed to be “serious”. Especially interesting to me is that she gave, as the exception that proved the rule, G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries. He introduced philosophy into the detective story, but he was also an acknowledge master of paradoxes, and popular detective stories which were philosophical were simply one more paradox in his rather large bag of them.

She goes on to describe a trend, from the twenties into the thirties, of detective stories becoming more fleshed-out stories and less pure puzzles. This trend I find interesting, because, depending on whether you count the detective story as starting out with Sherlock Holmes or C. Auguste Dupin, it didn’t really start as a pure puzzle. In fact, even if you count the detective story as starting out with C. Auguste Dupin, you can still observe the trend of moving more toward pure puzzles, with the final Dupin story being entirely about reasoning from newspaper articles.

Be that as it may, it does raise an interesting question: why would people prefer detective stories that were pure puzzles, without real characters?

Before attempting to answer that, I think it worth noting that I’m not sure that Ms. Sayers was entirely correct. My evidence for this is hardly conclusive, but for example I can find no major support for it in the book Masters of Mystery, published in 1930. That was a few years too late to be in the full sway of what Ms. Sayers is describing, so it does not suffice. On the flip side of the 1920s, the 1907 The Red Thumb Mark and 1911 The Eye of Osiris Dr. Thorndyke novels were both almost as much love stories as they were detective stories. They are even further in time from the early 20s than Masters of Mystery was, though. The only thing with which I am familiar and which is right about that time is The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which was published in 1920 (in the United States; early 1921 in England). I am afraid I must confess that I haven’t actually read the book—I’ve only read a handful of the Poirot stories—I’ve only seen the David Suchet TV production of it. While it certainly is not a novel of manners, nor is it Gaudy Night, neither is it merely a crossword puzzle in literary form. That said, a handful of further exceptions will not disprove a general rule, and most of the detective fiction of the time period has been lost to us in the mists of time.

To return to the question at hand, I think that there is an excellent reason for detective stories to have moved, for a time, in the direction of pure puzzles: they were new and people had not yet worked out how to do the puzzles. This was true both of readers as well as writers; both were figuring out what the puzzle inside of a detective story was.

When something is new, there is, of course, the pleasure of novelty, but there is also the difficulty of novelty. The structures which make up the new thing are unfamiliar, which makes initial learning easy, but the unfamiliarity of the structures of the new thing also makes it hard to do anything else other than learn them. Accordingly, it makes sense to prefer the things in a purer form.

To give an example of what I mean, early on a person may not be suspected by the reader merely because his presence seems obvious, though it might not have been necessary. Once this is learnt, however, it becomes possible to trick the reader by casting suspicion on a character by the trick of obviously diverting suspicion from him. Once this trick is learnt, it becomes unclear what sort of trick is being played, and so the reader knows to suspend his judgement merely because a character appears innocent.

There are many such examples that can be given; writers and readers have gone through bluffs and double bluffs and triple bluffs, until finally the rules of the game have been pretty well learnt by both and it is interesting rather than taxing to add in other elements.

To put the thing in another way, it took a while for Fr. Knox’s Decalogue to come about. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the issue with fair play is not really about a guessing game between reader and writer, but rather that it keeps the writer honest and makes the story a much better detective story. Once the rules of detective fiction were worked out, the detective story became good enough to make alloys of it with other sorts of stories.

I do not know that this is what happened, of course, and still less do I know, if this did happen, that this is why it happened. If it did happen, though, this does seem to me the most likely reason why.

Materialist Detectives

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized2 Comments

One of the things which I disliked about the second Dr. Thorndyke novel, The Eye of Osiris, is that all of the principal characters were Materialists. (For those not familiar: materialism, in this sense, is the belief that the only thing which exists is matter and its interactions; it denies things like God, the soul, free will, etc.) While the characters were not religious in the first book, it was far more explicit here and the book was, in consequence, less enjoyable.

The main problem with Materialists as detectives is that their position is a false one with regard to the main activities of a detective. A detective detects, yes, but for a purpose. In a mystery, the world has become corrupted through the wrong use of reason, and the detective enters it in order to restore the world to its proper order through the right use of reason. It is true that detective stories sometimes aimed to be pure puzzles, as if they were a long-form version of a logic problem where “The baker is sitting next to the red haired man, and across from Sally”. That is simply false, though. The moment that there are characters who are moving through time, they must have motives; they must have a theory of the world and be acting according to it or against it, and thinking well of themselves or being self-reproachful. In short, once you have characters not not mere chess-pieces, they must be human. They might be failed human beings, as in the classic creature of pure habit who goes to work, comes home, watches TV until it’s bedtime, and repeats the process every day merely because it is his habit, with no more thought than we can perceive a rabbit gives to munching grass. But the very fact of telling us what a man does during the day tells us what he doesn’t do, by exclusion. In short, the pure puzzle does not work.

The Materialist cannot do anything other than a pure puzzle. To the Materialist, a human being is merely a clump of matter that happens to be more interesting than an equally sized clod of dirt for reasons of pure sentimentality. The mystery cannot actually be a problem, to the Materialist, because he has no theory of the world in which one organization of matter is superior to any other. He cannot be restoring the world to its proper order because it has no proper order. The Materialist, in truth, has no reason to do one thing instead of another; all he has are the tendencies he has inherited from men who did have a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

This problem is exacerbated in The Eye of Osiris because the person whom Dr. Thorndyke is helping cannot pay Dr. Thorndyke’s fee. Some reason must be put forth for Dr. Thorndyke helping, and since charity is not a permissible reason, as Materialists may neither give nor receive charity for reasons a little too involved to go into here, Dr. Thorndyke is in the absurd position of insisting that he is not in the least helping the old man intentionally, but purely as a by-product of satisfying his own curiosity in the case. In fact, he goes so far as to reject the old man’s thanks.

This is reasonably true to life; Materialists cannot actually exist in society with other Materialists, because their mutual philosophy leaves no room for human beings. It is not, however, interesting. The wretched state of the Materialist is true, so in that sense the book does embody a truth about real life, but it is an unpleasant truth. Unpleasant truths are not what we look for in mystery novels. We look to mystery novels, not for the temporary truth that the world has fallen, but for the eternal truth that the world has been saved. It’s hard enough to remember in this world of sin and woe; we don’t need our reminders of it to make it harder to remember.

The Eye of Osiris

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized1 Comment

So, I’ve read the second Dr. Thorndyke novel, The Eye of Osiris. I didn’t entirely expect to do that, but I was curious how Dr. Freeman introduced the inverted detective story (“howchatchem” as opposed to “whodunnit”). I didn’t find out, though, because it turns out that he didn’t do it in this novel, either. The villain was relatively obvious, but his identity was not revealed until the second to last chapter.

I doubt that there is a point to spoiler warnings on works so old that they were published before any reader of this blog post was born. Moreover, if one wants to read the story The Eye of Osiris in a state of total ignorance as to what the next page carries, it seems improbably in the extreme that one would read a blog post with that title, and whose first paragraph purports to be about that very book. That said, if such is your aim, dear reader, stop reading this post and go read the book.

Rather to my surprise, The Eye of Osiris is narrated, not by Dr. Jervis, but by another doctor whose name I forget. Whereas Jervis was unemployed and came into the employ of Dr. Thorndyke, this doctor—his name is Berkeley, I just looked it up—is filling in for another doctor, who owns a private practice, and who is now on vacation. Dr. Berkeley is young, and was taught in school by Thorndyke, which is how he knows him. Other than these variations, he fulfills much the same role that Dr. Jervis did in the first book. It is for Dr. Berkeley to become a friend of the household, to extract information about it from passing conversation, and to fall in love with the beautiful and intelligent young lady who lives in it. Dr. Jervis, presumably now married to the beautiful and intelligent young lady from the household of the previous case, has precious little to do in this story. This will sound more significant when the reader understands that about a third of each book is taken up with its respective doctor falling in love with its respective lady.

The mystery, itself, is interesting, though the chief of the mystery isn’t really who did it—there are only two plausible suspects, and one of them swears that the other didn’t know about the will which could be his only motive. To give the barest summary of the plot: a rich man, John Bellingham, called on his cousin, Mr. Hurst, after a month-long overseas trip, but when Hurst came home and checked in his study, Bellingham was not there despite the maid not seeing him leave. Hurst rushed over to Bellingham’s layer, Mr. Jellicoe, and together they went to Bellingham’s brother’s house, where Jellicoe found a scarab Bellingham always wore on his watch chain. Two years later, bones from an apparently dismembered body started showing up in pools and rivers in an area near to where the missing man’s house was. John Bellingham’s will left a few thousand pounds to Mr. Jellicoe, who shared Bellingham’s interest in egyptology, and left the bulk of his estate to his brother if he was burried within his family parish and to Mr. Hurst if he was not burried there. This bizarre will caused much confusion and trouble.

It’s fairly clear from the description—which also involved Mr. Jellicoe being the last person to see John Bellingham alive before his trip—that it was Mr. Jellicoe who committed the crime. Murderers really should be more careful than to find chance evidence themselves. (It was also clear that when “Mr Bellingham” called on his cousin after his trip, no one who would recognize him actually saw him.) What is unclear, though, is why the body was cut up into so many pieces, and why it was done with medical precision—it was severed in places an anatomist might sever it, and moreover it was done without any scratching on the bones. Why did the murderer take such care to dissect his victim?

Having some experience of butchering large vertebrates (deer), and hence being familiar with why one would cut the arm with the shoulder blade rather than at the ball joint, I partially guessed at the answer: the victim had done a good deal of rotting prior to his body being dissected. It turns out that the egyptology was more relevant to the plot than one might have suspected, and the body was not that of John Bellingham but instead a mummy which Bellingham had gifted to the British museum. John Bellingham’s corpse had been concealed within the cartonnage that concealed the mummy.

The grand reveal, here, was done with x-ray photography of the mummy, revealing various features of John Bellingham such as a tattoo of the eye of Osiris on his chest as well as silver wire in his kneecaps from when they were surgically repaired after being broken. I think that this was a much more exciting reveal in 1911, a mere 16 years after x-rays were discovered and while they were still very much in their infancy as a technology.

Overall, The Eye of Osiris is a somewhat strange book. It’s enjoyable to read, though I did find myself skimming some of the more melodramatic parts of the romantic plot. Dr. Jervis, who was the best developed character in the first book, barely appears. Even Dr. Thorndyke shows up less than he did in The Red Thumb Mark. The scientific evidence, which in this case essentially means the medical evidence—is emphasized to an enormous degree over all other kinds of evidence. I suppose that this makes a certain amount of sense with a doctor both as the actual writer and the fictional writer of the story, but medical evidence tends to be the least interesting sort of evidence there is, with the possible exception of accounting evidence. And then there is the very strange ending where the crime is revealed, not to be murder, but merely to be concealing the body of a man who died by accident, together with casting suspicion upon innocent people for the murder of the man who wasn’t murdered. This was a very strange decision, since the book goes to some lengths to show just how uncaring of his fellow creatures Mr. Jellicoe was, but then instead of the strange events being the plot of Jellicoe they are merely his best attempt to avoid being convicted of murder for the accidental death of his friend.

I should note, though, that The Eye of Osiris, like The Red Thumb Mark before it, has the occasional clever wordplay. In fact, it may have a bit more of it. For example, in a probate court in which an interested party is trying to get John Bellingham declared dead:

“…As the time which has elapsed since the testator was last seen alive is only two years, the application [to presume death] is based on the circumstances of the disappearance which were, in many respects, very singular, the most remarkable feature of that disappearance being, perhaps, its suddenness and completeness.”

Here the judge remarked in a still, small voice that, “It would, perhaps, have been even more remarkable if the testator had disappeared gradually and incompletely.”

I doubt that I would recommend The Eye of Osiris to anyone, though neither would I counsel anyone to not read it. It is pleasant enough and is, at least, curious as an element of history.

Historical Research is Interesting

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized1 Comment

I recently paid approximately $10 to get a copy of a chapter that Dorothy L. Sayers wrote in the book Titles To Fame, which is an anthology book in which “Ten eminent novelists … give us the ‘biographies’ of their most successful books” (supposedly, according to the forward). I applied to and filled out a form with the Marion E. Wade Center to get the copy of that chapter. It was a most curious feeling, finding a document mostly forgotten that sheds insight into a subject which is not forgotten.

There was even a certain fitting aspect to this, in that the chapter is about the book Gaudy Night, which is about scholarship, and its plot even turns on a document which was found and stolen in a remote library. Further, Harriet’s cover story for her presence in Oxford is research into the life of the victorian era novelist Sheridan Le Fanu. (Le Fanu was an Irishman best known for ghost stories; I’ve only been able to find a little bit about his mystery stories, and I’m not sure, from the descriptions I’ve seen, that they’re really in the same sort of genre as what we commonly call mystery, i.e. where there is a detective and an explanation to which the reader comes to know. I suppose I will need to find some of his works and actually read them to find out for myself. That said, as an interesting tidbit, Le Fanu was writing primarily from the 1830s to the 1870s; Harriet investigating him in 1935 is actually rather like me researching Dorothy L. Sayers now, that is, in the year of our Lord 2020.)

I’m going to write at least one post and possibly several on the contents of the chapter. For the moment, I just wanted to mention the curious feeling that accompanies digging up things which have been mostly lost to time. It’s got a certain exhilaration to it which is often rendered accurately in golden age mysteries which feature Egyptologists and archaeologists more generally.

Servants in Mysteries

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized, Writing3 Comments

An extremely common feature of golden age detective mysteries is the presence of servants in a household. They acted as witnesses for the police, to place people at the scene of a crime as well as to provide alibis. They were also invaluable sources of information when discretely pumped. It is very difficult to come up with any modern equivalent, though, at least outside of exceedingly rich households.

In real life, servants occupied a curious niche in British culture during the early 1900s; with the rise of the middle class servants were relatively commonplace, since the middle class was comparatively wealthy and the transition from farms to a modern economy was still underway, supplying a large number of people who had few specialized skills but just as much need to earn a living as anyone else. This made servants affordable, and the middle class’s pretensions to be like the aristocracy, combined with a lack of the modern labor-saving devices, made servants indispensable of one could at all employ them.

From the detective writer’s perspective, they were enormously valuable, since they lived intimately with families to whom they rarely had any great allegiance. A brother might lie to protect a brother, or a mother her son, but there was no reason to suppose that a valet would lie to protect his master or a cook to protect her mistress. I can’t recall a single instance of anyone supposing that a charwoman would so much as j-walk for an employer.

In books, servants were not omniscient; it was possible to fool them or even to hide a body on the premises and dispose of it without their seeing. Neither were they disloyal. They would answer the questions of the police, so far as they were legally obliged to, but they did, in general, hold that repeating what they saw to strangers was no business of theirs. Discretion was important no less in maids than in doctors. However close to reality this was, it was plausible—if for no other reason than in keeping with other fiction from the timer period—and phenomenally useful to the detective writer.

The writers of mysteries has two opposing problems, and they arise out of the two principle characters of the mystery story. On the one hand, there must be sufficient evidence of the crime that the detective can detect it. On the other hand, there must be sufficiently little evidence of the crime that the murderer is willing to commit the crime at all. The near-ubiquity of servants, combined with their limitations, answer this need quite admirably, which goes a long way to explaining how frequently they showed up for the purpose.

Times have changed and servants no longer make any economic sense, outside of the homes of the unbelievably rich. The most significant factor here is that the transition in farming is mostly complete. In the United States, approximately 2% of the population are farmers; mechanization has taken its toll and the toll has been paid. Immigrants do supply a small stream of unspecialized labor, but even here the economy as a whole has developed enough jobs for people who can learn specialized skills that they do not concentrate in any particular industry. Even where they do show up in service jobs, these service jobs tend to be done on a contract basis. People no longer employ gardeners but lawn services. People rarely have maids though they may have a cleaning service. Much of the work a maid might do has been rendered doable in a short time by a washing machine, a dryer, or a vacuum cleaner. In short, live-in servants are no longer plausible. Are there any other professions which might fill the role?

I fear that, for the most part, there are not. Where people congregate they tend to pack in too closely, for the sake of efficiency, to make it easy for someone to slip something by the witnesses. Where people do not congregate, they tend to live only with people whose testimony is worthless for an alibi.

There are, of course, exceptions. Resorts will have people who work at them and at least temporarily live there, but who live in sufficiently low density that they will not observe everything which goes on. Museums, art galleries, libraries and the like also (sometimes) have approximately the right density of impartial witnesses, though they tend to be closed outside of business hours and over-packed with guests during business hours. That said, they will have slack times, of course. There are also some academic settings, such as a laboratory, that may work for the purpose, too.

All of these substitutes will have their peculiarities that will, perforce, change the stories set with them. This is no disaster, but it will make some of the spirit of the golden age mysteries harder to recapture because part of that spirit was the ordinariness that the extraordinary events took place in. One cannot make an extraordinary setting feel ordinary. Even if an volcanic observation post has the same density of impartial witnesses that a Victorian home might, it will need to be filled with the sort of odd people who might live an work in a volcanic observation post. Nearly anyone might be forced into the circumstances which make a job as a cook the only job they can get, but few people are forced by the need to avoid starvation into being a librarian. Modern writers, if we try to recapture the atmosphere of golden age mysteries, are forced to turn the characters who in the original would have been comic relief into everymen. Circumstances having changed, we must work very hard to have both the circumstances and the humanity that golden age mysteries had.

It’s a Hot Day Today

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized2 Comments

According to the tribal witch doctors we call weathermen, it’s going to hit 90 degrees today. Yesterday wasn’t too far from that, and where I live it tends to be at least fairly humid most of the time. Plus, I’ve just always dealt better with the cold than with the heat. But this put me in mind of something interesting—why people used to get up so early in the day.

There was a tree that had sprung up in the middle of a large bush and went unnoticed for long enough that its trunk was now about 4 inches around. This is close enough to the neighbor’s house that the tree was growing over the fence and getting in the way of her lawn crew. Both to be a good neighbor and for the sake of the lilac bush it was growing it, it was time for the tree to go.

I don’t own any kind of powered saw; when I remove small trees and thick branches, I do it with my bow saw. It’s not that hard, but it is work, and work creates heat. Generating a lot of heat isn’t much fun on a cold day, and it’s miserable on a hot day, so I decided to saw the weed tree down in the morning, before work, and before the heat of the day settled in. This got me to thinking about why it was that farmers—who for most of history was most of humanity—would get up at the crack of dawn. If you’re going to be doing a lot of manual labor, it’s far preferable to do it early in the morning, before the day has gotten hot. Once the day gets hot it takes a long time to cool off again, and often doesn’t cool much before the sun sets.

Whether or not people actually kept working throughout the day, there would have been basically no way for them to have continued to work at the same level of output as before it got hot. The human capacity for work is dependent on the environment. Of course where it gets really hot people have a tendency to eat a big meal then take a nap during the hottest part of the day. As the saying from tropical regions goes, only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. Even outside of hot regions, though, it makes sense to take advantage of the times when one can actually put in hard work, rather than just slowly suffer.

This, I think, helps to explain why waking up late is so associated with laziness. If a man who works outside waits to get up until it’s hot, he’s not going to be able to get much nearly as much done in a day. There is, also, the issue of light availability; one does not do much farming by lamplight. I don’t want to entirely discount it, but especially in summer, there is just a ton of daylight available. Outside of farming and other outdoor labors, the issue of heat, in the days before air conditioning, is far more pressing than the issue of light. Even inside of buildings, it gets quite hot on a hot day. It may be delayed by an hour or two from how hot it gets outside, but having put in work inside of an unairconditioned building in summertime, it doesn’t stay cool nearly as long as one would like. Granted, one can still write as quickly in the heat, but many of the other trades still involve moving and pushing and pulling; things that generate heat.

I’ve no way of knowing if this really was it, but it does strike me that someone who waits to get out of bed until one can no longer reasonably expect him to do work would seem very lazy, and indeed might well be very lazy. (Programmers, who always work in air conditioned environments and who move exceedingly little while they do so are notorious for preferring to work at night, rather than during the day. Having a wife and children I’ve mostly adapted to working during normal hours, but it would be very easy to slip back to a more natural way of working…)

[Update: Paul, in the comments, pointed out that I got the phrase about mad dogs and Englishmen. It comes from a 1931 Noel Coward song, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, and contains the refrain “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun”, as well as descriptions of how everyone else is too sensible to go out in the midday sun. You an see Mr. Coward performing the song on YouTube.]

Does Anyone Use the WordPress.com Reader?

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized2 Comments

I’m currently hosting this blog on wordpress.com, but since I rent my own server anyway, I’m thinking of doing the work to move over to hosting my blog on my own server. WordPress does make a plugin for integrating in the wordpress social features, like the wordpress.com reader. It’s about $40/year to use, so, I’m wondering whether anyone actually uses the wordpress.com reader to read this blog. If you do, could you leave a comment letting me know?

Having a Character Read a Book

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized, Writing1 Comment

I had a reasonably major character who was waiting someplace for some other characters to arrive, and she was reading a book to pass the time. Then I decided to go for it. Not only am I going to actually say which book it is, it’s going to be Pride and Prejudice.

Not only is she going to like the book, I think she’s going to talk about it with the brothers.

For some odd reason, this feels almost transgressive. I don’t know why; there’s no rule against having a character read a good book. In fact, there are plenty of instances in golden age mysteries of characters talking about other fictional detectives. There’s no reason I can’t have the characters talk about an interesting subject on occasion.

From the Archives

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, UncategorizedLeave a comment

For those who started reading in more recent years, back in 2016, I did a series of posts on the old trope, The Butler Did it. I put a bunch of time into researching it, and it turned out that the butler may have done it, but he didn’t do it very often. This series started with my post, The Butler Did It?

You can read the rest on the tag the butler did it. I went through the stories I could find by searching which actually had a butler as the villain, as well as one radio play.