Sarah Monette's Blog, page 34

epiphany

I realized this morning as I was brushing my teeth that Golden Age detective fiction would make ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT Jacobean plays.

(And revenge tragedies are also, in an odd way, almost murder mysteries.)

The deaths are grotesque and imaginative (I've been rereading John Dickson Carr's Henry Merrivale books, and trust me, Jacobean audiences would have loved this shit); the books always have a layer of meta (Carr and Crispin in particular); detectives love both acting and stage-managing (really, starting with Sherlock Holmes, but flowering emphatically in the 30s and 40s--and Ngaio Marsh named her hero for an Elizabethan actor, which is a clue I don't know why I didn't pick up on before), and I can easily imagine Burbage stomping up and down the stage and forcing, by the sheer pressure of his theatricality, the poor benighted murderer to give himself away.

It's perfect.

And now I want to write one.

things of the happy-making variety

1. The Plushie Ninja passed her annual physical with flying colors.

2. Today is my thirteenth wedding anniversary. I still feel lucky every day that I'm married to mirrorthaw , so I'd say that's working out well.

3. Publishers Weekly both liked and understood The Tempering of Men, and give it a great review.

Five for Friday

1. Simon's Cat has a website. Also, a new cartoon.

2. Life on White does absolutely stunning photography. All kinds of animals, vertebrate and invertebrate. ( oursin , I commend to you the hedgehogs.)

3. The Indianapolis Zoo has a baby dolphin. I recommend the video, especially if your own species is getting you down today.

4. Sadly, Cinnamon, the doyenne of Disapproving Rabbits, has died. She was thirteen, which is a darn good run for a rabbit. All my sympathy to her humans.

5. There are snow leopard triplets (and their gorgeous mom) at Zoo Basel.

UBC: Public Enemies

Burrough, Bryan. Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.


This book covers events from the Kansas City Massacre (June 17, 1933) to the arrest of Alvin Karpis (June 1, 1935): the rise of J. Edgar Hoover and the downfalls of the Barkers and Alvin Karpis; Pretty Boy Floyd; Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker; John Dillinger; and Baby Face Nelson. And all the astounding clusterfucks that took place along the way. The book is both lively and informative, and Burrough does his best to give both sides of the story, discussing the FBI as much as the criminals.

He does, however, have biases. He likes Alvin Karpis and John Dillinger, is essentially uninterested in Pretty Boy Floyd, and is weirdly contemptuous of Barrow and Parker. (He always calls them "Bonnie and Clyde," whereas the other criminals get the respect of being called by their surnames (except as necessary to distinguish between Fred and Dock Barker). Burrough does not, for instance, call John Dillinger "John" or "Johnnie" in his exposition. And he condemns Barrow and Parker with a viciousness that no one else in the book gets:

Art [the 1967 movie] has now done for Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow something they could never achieve in life: it has taken a shark-eyed multiple murderer and his deluded girlfriend and transformed them into sympathetic characters, imbuing them with a cuddly likeability they did not possess, and a cultural significance they do not deserve.
(Burrough 361)

Now, I'm not saying that Burrough is wrong about Barrow and Parker. But I don't see how they're any worse than Dillinger, Karpis, Floyd, or Nelson (especially Nelson, whom Burrough frankly describes as a psychopath). All of them left a trail of bodies behind them, even Dillinger, whom Burrough comes perilously close to valorizing. Burrough is contemptuous of Barrow because he never made it as a bank robber, but the thing this book makes clear is that all of these notorious criminal masterminds botched jobs, escaped through pure luck time and again, and in the end died cruelly pathetic deaths.

Overall, this is a very good book, and it does an excellent job of showing the astonishing confluence of bank robbers and G-men, each playing into the other's hands, in 1933 and 1934. You just have to be aware that Burrough is not impartial, because he won't tell you so himself.

UBC: Lost Prince / Little Charley Ross

Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser. New York: The Free Press-Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Zierold, Norman. Little Charley Ross: The Shocking Story of America's First Kidnapping for Ransom. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967.


I wasn't going to blog about Lost Prince, because Kaspar Hauser is clearly one of THOSE topics, like Jack the Ripper or the "Authorship Question" (which I put in quotes because there is no question, just a lot of people trying to make a fire out of smoke), about which the situation rapidly devolves into otherwise perfectly rational researchers start yelling at one another "WHAT PART OF PH'NGLUI MGLW'NAFH WGAH'NAGHL CTHULHU FHTAGN DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?" As rushthatspeaks so beautifully puts it.

I don't know enough about Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Kaspar Hauser, or Kaspar Hauser scholarship to make an informed judgment about Lost Prince, so I was just going to leave it alone, but then I read Little Charley Ross and realized that Charley and Kaspar make a very weird, very sad pair: the little boy who vanished into thin air and the young man who appeared out of thin air.

Charley Ross was kidnapped from outside his Philadelphia home in July 1874. His kidnappers wrote to his father, and wrote some of the longest and most bizarre letters in the history of crime. Negotiations about paying the ransom went on for months, and at least twice the kidnappers failed to show up to take payment. And then the two men believed to be the kidnappers were killed trying to rob a house in Bay Ridge, New York.

Charley Ross was never found, although his father, mother, and siblings investigated quite literally thousands of possible Charley Rosses. (One of the very few bright spots in the story is the number of boys, either orphans or kidnap victims themselves, who were rescued from abusive situations--one of whom was reunited with his father in exactly the way Charley Ross never was.) No one knows what happened to him.

(Yes, "Listening to Bone" is based very loosely on the mystery of Charley Ross.)

Zierold's is pretty much the only book on the subject. It's fine, although I wouldn't go farther than that. He doesn't footnote, and there's no sign that his research dug very deeply beyond the obvious sources (although he gets massive credit for sorting out the newspaper coverage). And whereas many true crime books suffer from excessive authorial intrusion in the form of whacked out theories, this book could actually have used a little bit of meta discussion. What happened to Charley Ross?

I can see four basic possibilities:

1. Like the Lindbergh baby, Charley Ross was dead before his kidnappers first communicated with his father.

2. The kidnappers kept Charley alive for a while, but he died (whether of neglect or murder) before Mosher and Douglas were killed.

3. Charley was still alive when Mosher and Douglas died, but was then killed by the (unknown) people who had been holding him.

4. Charley survived, but for some reason was never found.

Given the national obsession with Charley Ross (which Zierold does do a very good job of demonstrating), I find #4, sadly, the least plausible of the bunch. If he had been alive after December 1874, someone would have put him forward as a candidate for his own identity. #3 has nothing either pro or con. My personal feeling is that it's either #1 or #2, as this explains the excruciatingly drawn out correspondence and the kidnappers' failure ever to follow through on their plans, even though, since they died in committing a burglary, they obviously needed/wanted money.

Mosher and Douglas were clearly amateurs (the rest of their criminal career was based on burglary, and mostly burglary of opportunity). They worked out a quite good plan for the actual kidnapping (they made friends with Charley and his older brother Walter over the course of a week before kidnapping Charley), but they failed: (1) to confirm that they were kidnapping the son of a wealthy man (they weren't), (2) to work out an equally good plan for collecting the ransom, and (3) to keep control of Charley's father. Also, as their own letters demonstrate, they had no more sense than to believe the things they saw in the newspapers. Their persistent refusal to offer any tokens of Charley's continued survival, and the fact that the things they reported him saying (worried that he wouldn't get home in time to be taken to visit his mother in Atlantic City) were always things that he would have said in the first twenty-four hours, plus their obsessive, repetitive anxiety that Charley's father, Christian Ross, would not keep faith with them and their equally obsessive insistence that though they were bad men, he could trust them, suggests to me that Charley didn't survive very long in their custody.

But I don't know. It seems unlikely anyone ever will.

I'm not going to write the time-travel story in which Charley Ross, having been kidnapped in Philadelphia in 1874, falls through a wormhole and ends up as a young man called Kaspar Hauser in Nuremberg in 1828. It seems disrespectful to both Charley and Kaspar. But it would, at least, explain both of their stories.

As I said, I don't know enough about Kaspar Hauser to talk knowledgeably about Lost Prince. I can see that Masson believes passionately that Kaspar Hauser was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and that he was murdered on the orders of the earl of Stanhope because he was the true heir of Charles, Grand Duke of Baden. But I can also see, even from Masson's biased account, why some people at the time, and other people ever since, have been suspicious of Kaspar and his story and especially of the idea that he was a lost prince. Too much of Masson's evidence (for example, the discovery of the dungeon where Kaspar was kept, including his toy horse) looks like the kind of thing you see in forgery cases, where A says, "I could prove X theory if only I had Y evidence," and B says obligingly, "Oh, you mean like this?"

What's really frustrating about Masson's book is that I know work has been done on the effects of isolation on childhood development and that Masson never refers to such work, even though it is pretty directly relevant. (I.e., Kaspar's ability to learn language indicates that he must have been isolated after he learned to talk.) This failure makes me uncomfortably suspicious about Masson's scholarship, and leaves me feeling that the case of Kaspar Hauser is a morass into which I do not want to wade any farther.

visual reference: Bonnie & Clyde

(Okay, yes, apparently I need a Bonnie-and-Clyde tag. Gibsland, Louisiana, is approximately where they died (unless it's Sailes), and that's the only point in their careers when you can really pin them down to a location.)
Clyde Barrow's mugshot.
Clyde lifts Bonnie in one arm (Clyde was 5'5", Bonnie was 4'10".)
Bonnie pretends to be menacing Clyde (here's Dunaway and Beatty re-enacting the same pose)
Clyde poses with a V-8 Ford, his vehicle of choice, and some of his many weapons
Bonnie poses with the V-8 Ford
another shot of each
Clyde poses with a road sign he shot himself
Bonnie pretends to be a cigar-smoking, gun-toting moll (she did not smoke cigars, and whether she actually used any of Clyde's many guns is apparently a matter of some controversy)
Bonnie and Clyde
Post-mortem photographs.
And a deeply creepy group shot (I presume the men behind the corpses are some of the posse who killed them.)
the car they died in
It's now in Las Vegas (another angle)--and is more shot up than the car in which the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated
Clyde's gravestone (he's buried with his brother Buck, who died--essentially--because he couldn't say no to Clyde)
Bonnie's gravestone, with its stunningly inappropriate doggerel (Bonnie and Clyde were not buried together, at the insistence of Bonnie's mother.)


For further browsing, there's the Barrow Gang Collection at the Portal to Texas History. (This picture of the site of the Grapevine shootings is beyond fabulous.) Also, the FBI has put nearly 1,000 pages of material from their investigations online.

UBC: Bonnie and Clyde

Schneider, Paul. Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend. New York: John MacRae-Henry Holt and Co., 2009.


This is a very good biography with an affectation. I'll get to the affectation in a minute, but I want to state for the record that, really, this is a very good biography. Schneider uses primary sources, and he uses a lot of them. He extrapolates a little, but he doesn't theorize. He lets Bonnie and Clyde (and W. D. Jones and Blanche Barrow and Frank Hamer, prison guards and petty criminals and victims) speak in their own words, and he does a bang-up job of showing how Clyde Barrow became what he was, both the parts that he chose and the parts that he didn't. And Schneider writes very well.

However. As I said, this is a biography with an affectation. The affectation is that most (though not all, which makes it, if anything, worse) of the sections about Clyde are written in second person. (E.g., from a page chosen at random: "Two days after the killing of Howard Hall, Sheriff Reece puts out a wanted poster with your picture on it, offering two hundred dollars as a reward for your capture" (204).) Sometimes, this strategy is very effective, and I know why Schneider did it, because the last section of the book, after Clyde and Bonnie are dead, is a second person extrapolation of Clyde's reaction to his own death, ending:

Oh yeah, folks reach in and pull pieces of your clothes off, grab for souvenirs. One guy even gets his pocketknife out and is cutting at your ear. Even your stinking dead ear is famous now and the fellow wants it.

You would like to see him try that when you were alive. Ha! But there's nothing you can do about it now. And come to think of it, who cares? Hell, buddy, that doesn't even hurt, getting that ear cut off. Try chopping a toe off, or takin' the Texas bat on your backside with two fat trusties sitting on your head and feet. Try a half dozen bullets here and there over the years, pulling them out yourself or getting Bonnie to pull them. Try a whole arsenal all at once. Try hearing Bonnie scream like a panther in the seat next to you.

You don't need that old ear--go ahead and take it, friend. Take Bonnie's jewelry, too. Sure, take those guns, Captain Hamer, they might be worth something someday. You don't need any of it now. You and Bonnie are around the corner and out of sight.
(344-45)

And I can see why he wants to get there, why he thought this piece of stunt writing would be a good idea. (Writers are just as susceptible as anyone else to the magnetism of bad ideas.) And for the most part, he executes his bad idea quite well; there are places where it's intrusive and fake-sounding, but it does generate the illusion, by the end of the book, that we as readers have some idea of what it was like to be Clyde Barrow.

On the other hand, it's an illusion. We don't know any more about what it was like to be Clyde Barrow than we know about what it was like to be Bonnie Parker, and the effect of the stunt writing that I most deplore is that, by spotlighting Clyde, it shoves Bonnie back, making her a second-class citizen in Bonnie-and-Clyde. (Which fits with Schneider's belief that Clyde was the dominant partner, but is still . . . what's the adjective I want? Annoying? Disappointing?) And frankly, of the two of them, Bonnie is the one who's harder to understand. It's not hard to see how Clyde became what he was, to trace the steps from petty theft to bank robbery and murder and to see why, after a certain point, Clyde thought he didn't have any choice except to continue as he was. And Schneider does an excellent job of showing those steps. But he never really digs into the question of why Bonnie chose to follow Clyde. He leaves it at "love" and leaves Bonnie an enigma.

I think I would be less annoyed by this if he'd just called the book Clyde Barrow and not pretended it was about Bonnie-and-Clyde. But it does make me want a good biography of Bonnie Parker.

5 things

1. Ten months and two days out, I have had my last orthopedist appointment. (This is the ten-month anniversary of my ankle surgery, which was two days after I broke it.) The orthopedist is very very pleased. There's no sign of the fracture, the joint is symmetrical, the talus is nicely contained by the tibia and fibula. (He pulled up the original ER X-rays, in which, yeah, the tibia has ceased to contain anything and the talus is kind of drifting off out of the joint in a way I find even more horrifying now than I did at the time. In some circumstances, opiates really ARE your friends.) Unless the metal in my ankle starts to cause me pain, they don't need to see me again. Three loud cheers.

2. kate_nepveu pointed me to this lovely review by rushthatspeaks of The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow (written by Opal Whiteley, edited by Benjamin Hoff). Reading the review is its own reward, but I need to quote the first paragraph, which is what made Kate think of me:

The best way to describe the reading experience I had with this book is to say that it resembled what might happen to a perfectly innocent person who does not know much about history while looking up newspaper headlines from 1880s London. Which is to say, there you are researching away, doing nothing particularly ominous, and suddenly all of the scholarship on Jack the Ripper lurches out of its cabinet and starts gnawing on your leg. Up becomes down, dogs and cats start living together, the definitive works on the subject are written by people who do not have a personal interest so much as a personal ideological obsession, and otherwise perfectly rational researchers start yelling at one another "WHAT PART OF PH'NGLUI MGLW'NAFH WGAH'NAGHL CTHULHU FHTAGN DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?"

Of course, what it says about me that this paragraph evokes me to my friends is . . . perfectly deserved.

3. The Lindorm is still at the Saab place, but they promise I will be able to pick it up today.

4. Menstrual cramps continue to blow dead bears.

5. The Drabblecast has sent me an engraved brandy snifter and a murder weapon blunt instrument MASSIVE PLAQUE to commemorate "Mongoose" (written by matociquala and me) being their Story of the Year for 2010. ( matociquala will be getting her own PLAQUE and snifter because The Drabblecast is a class act like that.) I love only slightly more than the fact that this plaque looks like it belongs in a Clue-for-Writers game (Miss Scarlet*, in the Conservatory, WITH THE PLAQUE!) the fact that both snifter and PLAQUE are engraved with a tentacle not unlike this one:

Honestly, I think sffh has the best awards: rocket ships, tentacles, H. P. Lovecrafts, the Jackson Awards' rocks . . .

---
*Did anyone else, as a child, suspect a secret affinity between Miss Scarlet and Scarlett O'Hara?

WisCon Reading: After the Dragon

For anyone who was at the reading Saturday and would like to read the rest of the story, it's "After the Dragon" and it's here.

the curse of the ... ?

For comprehension of the following saga, it will help to know that mirrorthaw and I have three cars: the elderly psychotic Swedish car, otherwise known as a 1997 Saab 9000 Turbo, the truck, and the Zipzop, a Miata convertible which I do not drive because I can't drive stick. (That's not quite true. I can drive stick, technically, but I'm always terrified that I'm going to rip the transmission out of the car, so I drive stick Very Badly.)

Mostly, I drive the elderly psychotic Swedish car because I am very fond of it.

Saturday night I am driving home from WisCon at 11 p.m. when suddenly the exhaust becomes approximately nineteen times louder. A few miles later, I realize I can hear a new and ominous sound, which I have the horrible suspicion is the tail pipe dragging against the surface of the road.

Driving home from WisCon is a wee bit of a hike for me, and much of it is through relatively unpopulated areas. Also, I read In Cold Blood at a particularly impressionable point in my adolescence. I keep driving until I can find a well-lit, though deserted, parking lot, and get out to look, and oh yes indeedy, that would be the tail pipe hanging down from the car like a dislocated limb.

I call mirrorthaw . We agree that since I've gotten most of the way, I might as well drive the car home and then take the truck the next day.

Please notice: this is 11 p.m. on a Saturday on a holiday weekend. The Saab has a magnificent sense of timing.

The truck is a truck. I can drive it, though not gracefully, and I hate parking the son of a bitch. But it's all good, and I drive in for the Sunday of WisCon.

Sunday night I am driving home from WisCon at 12:30 a.m. when suddenly there is a police car in my rearview mirror with all the lights going.

I am two fucking blocks from home.

The nice young policeman asks if I know why he's pulled me over. I have no idea and am smart enough not to try guessing. He tells me the left brake light is out, and also I used enough of the road in making the turn that put me in front of him that I think he suspects I might be drunk. Also when he asks for proof of insurance, the card I find is expired. Despite this, he decides I am not drunk and gives me a verbal warning.

I drive the last two blocks home and am possibly a little snippy with mirrorthaw --undeservedly, since it turns out there is a whole side quest here about the truck's left brake light which mirrorthaw is still questing.

So if you've been keeping score, you will notice that we are now down to the Zipzop, which I do not drive and which has a trunk that is quite possibly smaller than a breadbox. That's going to become relevant here in a moment.

Happily, mirrorthaw is willing to come in with me on Monday, since there's not all that much WisCon left in WisCon, so we drive in. I have agreed to help kate_nepveu by mailing the con_or_bust t-shirts back to her, since Memorial Day interfered with her original cunning plan to get them in the mail herself. There are rather more t-shirts than I was expecting. Which would not be a problem if I were driving the Saab! As I had fully intended to be!

...

We now know how many t-shirts it takes to fill the trunk of a Miata. Or we will if Kate counts them when they make it home to her. Because seriously. Snakes-in-a-can full of t-shirts. But mirrorthaw got the trunk to close.

Blessings upon the Zipzop, it did not do anything interesting either going or coming.

Monday evening, mirrorthaw took a stab at tying the tail pipe back up, but the undercarriage of the Saab defeated him. Which brings us to today. I have the Saab, the Miata, and two enormous boxes of t-shirts that I really want to get in the mail. I called a local repair shop. They can't get me in until tomorrow, and the guy said dubiously, "A Saab? Well, I can look at it." I called the Saab place. They allowed as how a person might want this issue resolved and said they'd try to work me in during the afternoon. We also agreed that driving the car with the tail pipe dragging on the ground was contraindicated.

I called my acupuncturist and canceled the appointment I'd had for this afternoon.

Then I called AAA, wondering if the tow-truck guy would be persuadable to stop by a post office, and if he'd let me bring two enormous boxes of t-shirts with me in the cab of his truck. Happily, I didn't have to try that charisma roll, because the awesome tattooed tow-truck guy, equipped with a jack, a coat hanger, and a lot of experience in these matters, tied the tail pipe back to the car in such a way that it did not, in fact, fall off again as I drove it to the Saab place.

(Meanwhile, mirrorthaw is working on that side quest about the truck's left brake light.)

Shaking a defiant fist at the perversity of inanimate objects, especially cars, I stopped at the post office on the way to the Saab place and got the t-shirts in the mail.

I don't know how many of you have driven cars with mufflerfail, but it's really rather like driving a small annoyed dragon. Perhaps not surprisingly, the faster you drive, the less annoyed the dragon becomes. The elderly psychotic Swedish car's new name is Lindorm.

It is the muffler, the Saab place is ordering the part and gave me a loaner Saab 9-3 (I find it kind of cute how hard the 9-3's dashboard is trying to look like a airplane cockpit), and I have found the receipt from the last time we had the muffler replaced, in 2006, which means that most magical of all words, warranty, is relevant.

But thank goodness WisCon ended before I ran out of cars.