Mark Thomas's Blog, page 2

True Grit, by Charles Portis

Theoretically, first person narrators limit the effectiveness of a book. All humans have flaws so a believable first-person narrator must also possess a reasonable amount of selfish blindness. That’s dangerous, because a character’s racism or long-windedness, or stupidity could infect the book and make it an unpleasant reading experience. Creative writing classes call it “the imitative fallacy.”

TRUE GRIT, by Charles Portis, avoids the potential trap. Mattie Ross is certainly limited in her understanding of the world, but she isn’t devious, so readers easily see past her prejudices. Reading Portis’ book is like listening to a strong witness in a trial; the evidence is compelling, but you are always aware it is just one person’s version of events, that there is an over-arching truth.

TRUE GRIT is set in post civil war Arkansas. Mattie’s father is killed by a hired hand, Tom Chaney, while on a stock-buying trip. Chaney escaped with Mr. Ross’ horse and bankroll, and fourteen-year-old Mattie is determined to make him pay. She hires a US marshal named Rooster Cogburn to help her track him down.

That’s the plot.

The reading enjoyment comes from Mattie’s re-telling, starting with her decision to hire Rooster Cogburn. She asks the Fort Smith sheriff to recommend a federal marshal, and he gives an assessment of the people available: “William Waters is the best tracker. . .The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man . . . Now L.T. Quinn he brings his prisoners in alive. . . He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.” Mattie responds, “where can I find this Rooster?”

There is a lot of deadpan comedy like that in the book and it reminds me of Christopher Boone’s narration in THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHTTIME. Christopher interviews his neighbors, trying to find out who killed Wellington the poodle. One man answers his door and Christopher reports that his t-shirt says “Beer: helping ugly people have sex for two thousand years.”

Christopher’s autism doesn’t allow him to appreciate jokes, it’s all for the reader’s benefit.

The blurb on my edition of TRUE GRIT declares that Mattie is “eccentric, cool, funny and unflinching.” The description makes her seem like a spunky kid from an amateur production of ANNIE, but I think she is a lot like Christopher Boone, and if she were a student in one of my English classes, she would probably have a similar special needs designation.

Mattie is cleverer than most adults. Like Christopher Boone, she has a facility with figures that goes beyond mere arithmetic skills. Mattie has an intuitive understanding of accounting practices, but doesn’t value common politeness, she will blurt out her feelings, rather than filter or control them. She has a favorite insult word for people or things that irritate her: “trash.” She uses it a dozen times, to describe dirt in her porridge or the wild west celebrity Frank James.

Mattie is stubborn, and will insist on getting her way, even when it isn’t in her best interest. Her social interactions are transactional, and she doesn’t have any interest in romantic relationships, or marriage. Most significantly, her emotional reactions are blunted. The most obvious example is the extremely casual reference to her amputated arm near the end of the book. (That incident is left out of the movie versions because it feels so bizarre.)

I don’t mean to diminish Mattie with some half-baked educational designation. But saying that Mattie is “unflinching” implies that she is making a behavioral choice, when I think it’s more honest to say she is in the grip of a mania or compulsion. And is she really “funny?” I think Mattie, like Christopher Boone, doesn’t have a sense of humor. The NOVEL is “funny” because Mattie says unexpected things and occasionally gets the best of people who deserve to be bested.

In the same way, I don’t think of her as “eccentric.” Her unusual dress isn’t a stylistic choice, it is necessitated by the cold and her limited resources. Asserting herself in front of adults is certainly odd, considering she’s a young woman in the late 19th century; pursuing her father’s killer is even more unusual. But there is no whimsy involved, no deliberate flouting of convention. On the first page of the novel, Mattie says, “it did not seem so strange then.” Mattie is just doing what comes naturally.

To me, Mattie’s actions are more like responses to stimulus than conscious choices. When Cogburn and LaBeouf won’t let her cross the river on a ferry, she makes her pony swim across. Some people might call that “eccentric,” or “unflinching,” but I would characterize it as an insect-like tropism.

Mattie says she has “never been one to flinch or crawfish when faced with an unpleasant task.” She knows she is different from other people but tries to characterize that difference as something positive.

I’m not so sure.

Her dispassionate descriptions of violence make her sound like the anti-social criminals she is chasing. “Quincy brought the bowie knife down on Moon’s cuffed hand and chopped off four fingers which flew up before my eyes like chips from a log … My thought was: ‘I am better out of this.’ I tumbled backward and sought a place of safety on the dirt floor.”

One criminal hacks off another’s fingers to stop him from confessing. Mattie is reminded of something inanimate: “chips from a log," Then she calmly ducks out of danger. The only time Mattie gets excited during that encounter is when Rooster finds a California gold piece in Quincy’s pocket. Mattie cries, “That’s my father’s gold piece! Let me have it!”

In TRUE GRIT, Mattie is an adult, telling her version of a story made famous by the press. Supposedly, she is upset by incorrect factual details and wants to set the record straight. But it’s unclear what the press misrepresented. The only example Mattie gives is that her father was wounded in the “terrible fight” at Chickamauga, not the “scrap” at Elkhorn Tavern. That’s what I mean about her having a “blunted affect.” The location of her father’s war injury, and an offhand characterization of a battle as a “scrap” have absolutely nothing to do with her pursuit of Tom Chaney, but Mattie gets huffy about it. “I think I am in a position to know the facts.” Mattie has a lot of trouble assigning proper value to people and things.

That moral flatness is obvious when Mattie talks about her father’s killing. Tom Chaney shoots Frank Ross in the head, steals his purse, his horse, and two gold pieces that were hidden in his belt. Frank Ross’s murder was obviously the most serious offence, but Mattie harps on the two gold pieces throughout the novel. “They were a marriage gift from my grandfather Spurling in Montery, California.”

Okay, the little nuggets have sentimental value. But in the first chapter, Mattie mentions her father being shot twice and mentions the gold pieces being stolen three times. As the novel ends, Mattie points out that the second California gold piece was never recovered, and the one she retrieved from Quincy was lost “when our house burned. We found no trace of it in the ashes.”

To be fair, Frank Ross gets a mention in the last sentence of the novel: “This ends my true account of how I avenged Frank Ross’s blood over in the Choctaw nation when the snow was on the ground.” But her father’s death is in the middle of a list that includes Mattie's actions, the location and the weather.

TRUE GRIT is a fantastic novel, but I don’t find Mattie “funny” or “eccentric” or “cool” or “unflinching,” I find her somewhat sad.

Classic mysteries-Maigret and the Pickpocket, by Simenon

The Maigret books, set in Paris in the 1950s and 60s, are social history lessons as well as crime novels. Maigret doesn’t drive, and relies on taxis, public transport, or subordinates to get him to crime scenes. As a young policeman, affording a car was out of the question, and now that he is a high-ranking policeman (he has badge number 4) it seems too late to learn a new skill. In MAIGRET AND THE PICKPOCKET, the detective’s wife is taking driving lessons so they can more easily visit their little cottage outside of the city.

Maigret smokes a pipe, and comments that a lot of younger men foolishly choose pipes that are unbalanced, with too short a stem and too heavy a bowl. Maigret likes to ride on buses that have an open upper platform, just so he can smoke. He likes to start the day with a glass of white wine and often stops for heavy meals like steak and chips or duck á l’orange, and beer, during the workday. The sheer volume of booze and smokes is striking to a modern reader.

Maigret is a minor celebrity in Paris. He is always featured in news stories about murders, and reporters have created a myth that he sees things ordinary policemen can’t. Maigret isn’t vain, however. He understands that he has a lot of power, and criminals—generally—don’t. Maigret knows that most crimes get solved because of criminal informants. The Paris police seem to have a lot of freedom to harass and intimidate people and apparently, it pays dividends. Maigret says that as a young officer he knew every pickpocket in Paris, even the foreign criminals who flew in for big special events. Habitual criminals treated arrest and incarceration as a natural part of doing business and regularly ratted on each other to lessen sentences.

But despite their inordinate power, the police are not heartless. In MAIGRET AND THE PICKPOCKET, two people could be prosecuted for procuring an abortion, but that’s never threatened or even considered. The young murder suspect, Francis Ricain, says he doesn’t want to go to jail because he is claustrophobic, so Maigret puts him up in a hotel for a couple of days. Maigret also buys him meals, cigarettes, brandy, and lends him small amounts of money.

To a certain extent, crime in 1960s Paris is homey and cozy. Maigret gets phone calls from magistrates who want immediate arrests but, generally, he’s allowed to operate as he thinks fit. Maigret’s subordinate officers are helpful and polite (a refreshing change from toxic British workplaces) Parisian citizens are cooperative, and no one begrudges the police their authority.

But murder is murder. Sophie Ricain is shot in the face, and the body is covered with flies when it is discovered. A special team is called in to decontaminate the apartment with formol, a particularly unpleasant chemical. Maigret observes that Sophie “was fairly ordinary, moderately pretty. Her toenails were painted red but had not been attended to for quite a long time, because the varnish was cracked, and the nails were not scrupulously clean.”

Even though Maigret has a lot of sympathy for the people involved, crime is grubby, and the inspector wears his moral superiority like a spring jacket.

Maigret’s investigative technique is to learn as much as he can about the people intimately involved in the crime. That involves interviews, certainly, but also simple observation of people interacting, during meals, for example. Maigret also frequently returns to the crime scene, just to hang around and absorb impressions from the physical surroundings.

The Ricains wanted to break into the movies, but they were at the mercy of unscrupulous producers like Carus. Carus gives Sophie a few walk-on parts then keeps her as a part-time mistress. Carus regularly “lends” Francis Ricain money and gives him some minor work as third assistant director but dangles the prospect of bigger and better things. Essentially, Francis is pimping his wife and Sophie hates him for it, even though she is a willing participant.

The Maigret books are a little like the Swedish Martin Beck series in that both principal detectives are plodders rather than superheroes. They’re quiet, calm, and unemotional. The major difference is that Maigret is happily married, without children, and the relationship is enough to sustain him. He doesn’t have close work friendships like Beck has with Kolberg, there’s always a clear division between Maigret, the boss, and his subordinates.

Maigret isn’t Sherlock Holmes. In A STUDY IN SCARLET, Holmes claims to be able to identify 140 different types of cigar ash. Holmes stores and cross-references data like a modern computer system. (And to be fair, Holmes is also imaginative in his interpretation of evidence. Toe prints found in THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES mean that Sir Charles was running away from something, not tiptoeing to eavesdrop, as the local police assume.)

Maigret doesn’t do any of that close forensics work, he delegates it to others. In MAIGRET AND THE PICKPOCKET he has frogmen retrieve a revolver from the Seine, dust the Ricain’s apartment for fingerprints, and canvas their apartment building for witnesses. There is a bullet trajectory reconstruction, and Sophie’s stomach contents are analyzed. That police work is valued, but Maigret closes cases because of his psychological insight. He is a little like Agatha Christie's Poirot in that respect.

Maigret wants to understand everyone involved in a case, and an important part of that is not being prejudiced just because he doesn’t approve of someone’s behavior. One suspect, Huguet, lives in the Ricains’ building. Huguet maintains sexual relations with his two previous wives, his current third, and he has slept with Sophie, the victim. Huguet seems like a perfect murder suspect: an over-sexed, narcissist. But Maigret questions him dispassionately, respecting his value as a witness, and it is during this conversation that the detective divines the truth. Ricain murdered Sophie because she confronted him with his true character. Ricain considered himself a genius, but he was powerless next to a middling influential man like Carus. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she called him a pimp," Maigret summarizes, "he could not tolerate a truth of that sort being voiced.”

After the killing, Ricain is frightened by looming consequences. But because he is vain, he is determined to get away with the crime. He steals Maigret’s wallet, then immediately returns it in an effort “to lead suspicion away from himself.” But Ricain’s vanity betrays him. He embellishes his story about Sophie’s last evening, including details about a supper, that contradicted stomach content analysis.

The novel ends with a debrief, like Poirot’s drawing room explanations, but it is short. Francis Ricain “would be too unhappy to be thought mad, or even only partially responsible. In the dock, on the other hand, he will be able to play the role of the exceptional being, a sort of hero.” After this brief assessment, Maigret turns towards the window “and gazed at the rain.”

That novel-ending phrase reminds me of the marvelous British TV series, MAIGRET, featuring Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) as the French detective. There’s no clowning around from Atkinson in this show, he is brooding and serious and wrapped in suits and overcoats to insulate him from emotional contact with others. But what I remember most about the series is the beautiful cinematography, how the colors are muted yet saturated, like Algonquin Park after a spring rain.

In a Lonely Place, by Dorothy B. Hughes

The title IN A LONELY PLACE refers to the M.O. of the novel’s protagonist, a serial killer named Dickson Steele; he must lure women to a secluded spot to rape and strangle them. But it also refers to the murderer’s inevitable self-loathing. After the crime, “he has to live with himself. He’s caught there in that lonely place.”

“Loneliness” is a natural byproduct of the compulsion to kill, because Dix “can’t risk an accomplice.” But Dix can’t be happy on his own, either. He’s intellectually empty, a pretend writer who mails a pretend manuscript to a pretend publisher; he’s desperately bored when left on his own and needs other people to distract and entertain him.

That’s why he hooks up with his old army buddy, Brub Nicolais. Brub is now a detective assigned to “the strangler” case and Dix enjoys cat-and-mouse discussions about the killer’s motivation and technique, over drinks and lunches.

Hughes’ book is a remarkably sympathetic portrayal of a deeply flawed protagonist. Dix Steele is probably suffering some type of PTSD from his wartime experiences because trivial mechanical noises like electric razors, coffee percolators, and vacuums—as well as foggy weather conditions—seem to trigger his violence. The smoky clamor of war is evoked and Dix, desensitized to violence because of his service, kills innocent people in response to those prompts.

But Dix is more than a sad war-casualty, he is also a lazy, misogynistic, sociopath, insulated by his outrageous vanity. He refers to men as “yokels,” “peasants,” “oafs,” and “lugs.” Women are “cheats,” “liars,” “bags,” “slatterns,” and “whores.” When Dix thinks about killing people, he sounds like an exterminator at work, doing his best to purify the planet. He takes a dislike to one of the Nicolais’ friends and contemplates killing her: “He took a deep breath outside to expel the odor of Maude from his lungs. He’d like to meet her on a dark corner. It would be a service to humanity.” Dix is living in Mel Terriss's apartment, but isn’t swayed by the generosity: “Stupid, sodden, alcoholic Mel. The world was better off without Mel Terrisses in it.”

The act of killing is de-emphasized in this book (all the murders happen offstage, in time-gaps between chapters.) Hughes is interested in what a serial killer does when he isn’t in the act of strangling someone. In Dix’s case he spends a lot of time feeling sorry for himself. He thinks about obnoxious rich characters like his uncle Fergus, his friend Mel Terriss, or Laurel Grey's ex-husband St. Andrews. They hoard their money, refuse to share it, and aren’t even able to properly appreciate or enjoy the fine things they possess. Dix is enraged by the social injustice, and in a way, he’s got a point. Wealth is often random rather than meritorious.

But Dix isn’t especially deserving of wealth himself. He has a hard time dragging his ass out of bed before maid service arrives at 2pm. He’s a good-looking guy, and a snappy dresser, but he isn’t especially talented, ambitious, or creative. He just thinks it unfair that other people without talent, ambition or creativity are so much better off. Dix’s dream job would be to cultivate a parasitic relationship with a wealthy, successful person. But Dix isn’t even a good parasite. Ticks, mosquitos, and leeches can quietly feed off their hosts without killing them, but Dix had to murder his rich friend Mel Terriss. And Dix aggravated his uncle Fergus and Laurel Grey so much they swatted him away.

Some literary serial killers are split personalities, with one “self” completely unaware of what the other is up to. (Norman Bates in PSYCHO and Mort Rainey in SECRET WINDOW are popular examples.) Dix Steele isn't like that, he has a high degree of self awareness and takes pride in his success and notoriety. But Dix does manage to sublimate his responsibility for the murders. Partly it’s classic victim-blaming, but Dix also blames others because they haven’t made him sufficiently happy to control his insanity. “His hatred for Laurel throttled his brain. If she had come back to him, he would not be shut out, an outcast in a strange cold world. He would have been safe in the bright warmth of her.”

In the afterward to the 2017 re-release of the novel, Megan Abbott offers a feminist reading, pointing out that the female characters are emotionally stronger and cleverer than the men. That's true, but I’ll go farther. IN A LONELY PLACE reminds me of FRANKENSTEIN, in that a female author deliberately teases male vanity. Mary Shelly writes about the scientist Victor Frankenstein creating a new life, essentially giving birth, something women do millions of times a year, and making a hash of it. Hughes’ protagonist gets the urge to kill “about once a month,” but can’t figure out how to insert a psychological tampon.

Dix’s first murder was a woman named “Brucie” who loved him but resisted his advances because she was married to another young soldier. Memories of strangling Brucie are linked to the sound of nearby waves and “a voice hushed by fear, repeating over and over no. . .no. . .no.” Years later, Dix cruises Santa Monica roadways in his hunt for victims so he is within sound of the surf. And, presumably, the fear and refusal from his victims becomes part of a reenactment of that first crime. The scenario reminds me of a Stephen King short story “The Man who Loved Flowers,” where a serial killer buys a bouquet and presents it to a stranger, calling her “Norma.” When the stranger says “no” she isn’t Norma, the man beats her to death with a hammer. Clearly, King’s character is re-enacting the murder of a woman named Norma, a woman who rejected him.

In Hughes’ novel, Dix is aware of that particular trigger. When Laurel says “No. No, I’m not,” Dix thinks to himself “he ought to tell her to stop saying that—no,no,no.” He doesn’t want to kill Laurel and be plunged into the loneliness of his own company.

Laurel realizes that Dix is dangerous. It might be insight based on the intimate time they spent together, but it’s hard to say because the story is told from Dix’s perspective (and the 1947 publication date didn’t allow for sexually explicit descriptions.) At any rate, Laurel knew Dix hadn’t innocently taken over Mel Terriss’s life. She knew Mel Terriss, knew that he wouldn’t suddenly leave L.A. for a foreign job and let a college friend wear his clothes, drive his car and use the gold lighter Laurel had given him as a gift.

Sylvia Nicolais, the detective’s wife, says she knew there was “something terribly wrong” with Dix the moment they met. That seems a little unlikely since Dix was such a successful sociopath. Perhaps Sylvia reverse-engineered her opinion after victim fingerprints and clothing fibers were recovered from Dix’s car, forensically establishing his guilt.

But perhaps she was especially insightful. The second meeting with Dix (a dinner at the Nicolais’ club) was certainly creepy and Sylvia seemed to register danger that was invisible to her husband. Brub had to return to the station and Dix offered to give Sylvia a ride home later. Brub thinks that’s a great idea, but Sylvia manipulates things so she isn’t left alone with him. Sure enough, Dix was considering killing her that evening: “Fifteen minutes at the outside and Brub would be gone. He could go there then . . .she’d let him in . . . she wouldn’t be afraid—at first.”

Come to think of it, female characters in Hughes’ novels are pretty good at sensing danger, simply because they have to be. THE SO BLUE MARBLE begins with the female protagonist conducting a safety survey as she walks to her New York City apartment: “Her keyring was tight in her black gloved hand, her black antelope purse tight under her arm. No reason to feel nervous at night. . . Nothing ever happened to her kind of people.” But when Griselda is overpowered by two menacing well-dressed twins, she realizes there is nothing she can do. She considers appealing to nearby taxi drivers, but “suppose they didn’t stop it. And suppose they just laughed too, or ignored her, thought she was crazy.”

Hughes' books are an early primer for the "Me Too" movement, but the author isn't on a soap box. She is more interested in the peripheral aspects of weirdness.

Serial killers are like NFL linemen or bass fishermen in that they are all defined by their activities, even though they spend a very small percentage of their total lives strangling women, grabbing jerseys, or hooking fish. If you want to understand those people, you need to study what they do during down-time.

And, for that, Hughes is a master.

Assassins Anonymous, by Rob Hart

My grade three teacher once told me it’s good to try new things, so I recently read ASSASSINS ANONYMOUS, a 2024 release by Rob Hart.

The very first page bugged me. “For most people, when pain is screaming for attention like a starving toddler, everything is a senseless jumble of limbs and grunts.”

The narrator is a trained assassin, supposedly an expert on the subject of “pain,” but that first-page description struck me as incredibly silly. Pain isn’t monolithic, there are at least two types: chronic and acute. Chronic pain might cause one to crawl for the morphine vial, (and that’s sort of like appeasing a screaming toddler) but then, one wouldn’t be a senseless jumble of limbs and grunts, there would be a measure of bodily control. On the other hand, a spasm of acute pain might turn you into that senseless jumble, but there would be no screaming toddler, just utter incapacitation or loss of consciousness.

And how would the narrator know how “most people” feel? Logically, people can only be certain of their own thoughts. Empaths might hazard a guess, but are hired killers really sensitive to other people’s feelings?

A couple of pages later, there’s a huge improvement: “The adrenaline is doing its job. The pain is outside knocking at the door, but the disorientation is inside pouring a cup of tea.” Here “pain” is a more complex mixture of dread and confusion, and the self-deprecating tough-guy patter is entertaining.

But the quality is random. The first chapter ends with a bit of nonsense that would have embarrassed Mickey Spillane: “Hot blood gushes between my fingers. This wasn’t what I expected from the day.”

ASSASSINS ANONYMOUS is about the world’s most prolific hired killer, “The Pale Horse,” someone who has wasted so many triad gang members, Hezbollah terrorists and Russian thugs that it is impossible to speculate about a total body count. He is a decommissioned navy seal who was recruited by a mysterious agency with a mysterious mandate to exterminate bad guys to “keep the world running.”

It’s real junior high stuff.

The premise of the novel is that Mark, The Pale Horse, doesn’t want to keep killing people (even though he’s incredibly good at it) so he joins a twelve-step program for prolific murderers. The members meet in a church basement, talk about resisting the latest impulse to slide another head in the crisper, and eat doughnuts. It has the potential to be a biting satire (the world’s best assassin is lactose intolerant) but it isn’t.

Mark says his membership in the group is “another small step on the path leading to the kind of life I want to build. The kind where normal things happen.” But that’s a silly, transparent lie. If “normal” was so worthwhile, the author would write a book about ordinary people rather than these characters. In ASSASSINS ANONYMOUS, “normal” people are pathetic buffoons, “tourists gazing like zoo animals at the sights.”

Super-Hero-Mark doesn’t want to hang out with normal people, he wants to be the center of attention in a small group of cool kids: bartenders who are ex-punk-bouncers, beautiful doctors who stitch up wounded assassins, print shop owners with secret labs for producing phony passports.

I think my problem with ASSASSINS ANONYMOUS is that it wants to have hipster self-awareness and genre street cred at the same time. It wants to be like THE PROFESSIONAL but ends up being a lot more like SCOOBY DOO! AND THE SAMURAI SWORD.

I’m guessing THE PROFESSIONAL was an exemplar for Hart because he uses a snippet of dialogue from the movie to introduce chapter two. But Léon, the hitman protagonist in that wonderful film, is poor, ugly, and stupid. That movie really does make a hired killer’s life seem dirty, petty, and pointless. No one in their right mind would want to be a Léon, someone who is easily manipulated by his mob boss, by Mathilda, his twelve-year-old co-star, and even by his houseplant.

Mark doesn’t want to be a Léon either. He wants to be Keanu Reeves in the John Wick series, reveling in the adrenalin rush as he kicks people across hotel rooms, separates neck vertebrae, and slices carotid arteries—all the while protesting that he’s thoughtful and sensitive, and wants to be “normal.”

Gawd.

Classic action/thrillers can be silly as hell, too. As a kid, I read Alistair MacLean’s PUPPET ON A CHAIN and burst out laughing when a group of Dutch peasants circled a deep-cover agent and rhythmically pitchforked her to death, like it was a folk dance. But there is an earnestness to MacLean’s writing that makes it compelling, his characters aren’t trying to BE John Wick and make fun of John Wick at the same time.

Mark pretends to be a sociopath who genuinely likes hurting people, but that’s impossible to take seriously. This legendary killer “The Pale Horse,” is too embarrassed to confess that “It’s a Wonderful Life” is his favorite movie but offers up “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” as a plausible replacement. He buys thoughtful presents for friends, is polite to the elderly, and owns a cat with a precious name: P Kitty. He likes his French fries “thin cut, crunchy on the outside, pillowy on the inside.” He feels bad for assuming the Mexican member of their support group works for the cartels. “Sorry. . .I was stereotyping.”

If Walt Disney Studios wanted to make a cartoon about a politically correct, lovable hitman, they could call it “The Pale Pony” and lift most of the dialogue directly from this book. If you want a REAL psycho, read the Leslie Charteris Simon Templar books, or Ian Fleming’s James Bond series. In CASINO ROYALE, 007 muses that a recent sexual escapade had “the sweet tang of rape.”

By comparison, Mark is a whiny privileged tween. He suspects that his love interest, Astrid, can’t appreciate the enormity of his life as a hired assassin. She thinks “this is a game. It’s not. It’s a terrible stupid thing and I hate this and I hate myself and I hate everything.” Wow. I wonder how he’d react if he got a pimple?

Obviously, there’s a strong market for this type of literature, and I’m a grumpy old person who doesn’t appreciate what’s currently cool.

If your interested, the biggest meanie in the book is a dorky Assassins Anonymous member named Stuart. He gets a knife in the eye and the surviving members meet at a bakery for red velvet cupcakes.

Seriously.

Red velvet cupcakes.

Cyril Hare and the classic British Crime Novel

In an earlier blog, I wrote about toxic marital secrecy in Sherlock Holmes stories and other British classics like THE MOONSTONE and MALICE AFORETHOUGHT.

Brits have a reputation for being reserved so I probably shouldn’t be surprised that literary husbands and wives have secrets. Still, I find it odd that Mrs. Neville St. Clair has no idea what her husband does for a living in Conan-Doyle’s “The Man with the Twisted Lip.”

Cyril Hare wrote a series of novels in the 1940s and 50s, and although he doesn’t have the name-recognition of Christie or Conan-Doyle he is considered part of the golden age of British crime fiction. To me, Cyril Hare is notable for two reasons. One, he is an obvious precursor to the wonderful Rumpole of the Bailey books written in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Secondly, Hare is a much more thoughtful observer and critic of British self-restraint than any of his predecessors.

In UNTIMELY DEATH, Francis Pettigrew and his wife Eleanor deliberately mislead each other, but their mutual concern is so obvious, it doesn’t seem poisonous. Frank discovers a dead body during a fall holiday in Exmoor and testifies at the inquest. It’s a traumatic experience, reminding him of a similar incident that happened when he was young, and he suffers a serious illness afterwards. The legal inquiry progresses slowly (like they do in real life) and both Pettigrews secretly follow developments without mentioning it, each hoping to insulate their partner from any distress.

The mild deception comes to light when an ex-detective friend sends the Pettigrews a gift ham, and Frank realizes the policeman has been giving Eleanor secret updates, leaving him out of the loop. “That was a kind thought of yours,” Franks says, while admitting he was closely following local newspaper accounts, without mentioning it. “But as it happened, I was anxious not to worry you.” The mutual concern is genuine rather than self-serving. (It’s not sleazy, like Donald Trump secretly paying a stripper $130,000 to spare his wife’s feelings.)

Hare isn’t naïve, however; he knows that family members aren’t always considerate, in fact, they often save their worst behavior for each other. When the case in UNTIMELY DEATH finds its way to Chancery Court, two of the principals “were ignoring one another’s presence with an intensity possible only to close relations.”

Hare’s characters aren’t afraid of introspection. Eleanor asks Frank if he enjoyed the famous Exmoor stag hunt when he was a boy, and he thinks “how hopelessly inadequate the word ‘enjoy’ was. One ‘enjoyed’ so many things—parties, theatres, the common pleasures of life. Hunting was a thing apart—a compound of excitement and terror, discomfort and ecstasy, boredom and bliss.” Frank was a sensitive, bookish boy but he finally admits: “Actually, it was rather fun.”

It's that type of observation that distinguishes Cyril Hare’s characters from those in the Sherlock Holmes stories. There’s little complexity, little emotion, when Neville St. Clair describes his transition from poor reporter to rich beggar in “The Man with the Twisted Lip”: “It was a long fight between my pride and the money, but the dollars won at last.”

It’s introspection that separates Hare from the Rumpole books as well. Mortimer’s couples have sitcom-adversarial relationships: Rumpole famously refers to his wife Hilda as “she who must be obeyed,” and assumes the role of henpecked husband, like an intellectual Fred Flintstone.

Rumpole stories are famous for lampooning the wigged-and-robed British legal system, but I think Hare does an even better job skewering incompetence and pretention. In TRAGEDY AT LAW, a petty, self-important circuit court judge named Barber laments that there are “no trumpeters” in the official procession to the courthouse. He has a Rolls Royce, police escort, High Sheriff in regimental dress, Under-Sheriff carrying a medieval wand, Marshal, butler, and clerk, but he’s upset because wartime economy has robbed him of trumpeters. It’s all light-hearted and silly until the judge gets drunk after the day’s session and hits a pedestrian while driving back to the hotel (with expired license and insurance certificate).

Francis Pettigrew appears in this novel as well and is in the awkward position of helping the flawed judge because he thinks ‘British justice’ is a vitally important fiction for society. He’s a bit like Socrates, worried that undermining one aspect of the law will send the whole edifice tumbling. (Pettigrew also loves Judge Barber’s wife, Hilda, which is a painful complication.)

As an aside, I wouldn’t be surprised if John Mortimer lifted the name “Hilda” from Hare’s book and applied it to his own ultra-strong female lead, Hilda Rumpole. There are other name-echoes from Hare’s books, like a justice Pomeroy in UNTIMELY DEATH and Pomeroy’s wine bar in the Rumpole series.

All of Hare’s plots hinge on obscure legal issues. In AN ENGLISH MURDER, the crime occurs because House of Lords members are technically barred from serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer. So, the villain, Mrs. Carstairs kills Lord Warbeck and his heir Robert so that a cousin will automatically assume the title and give up his government position. The cousin’s job, Exchequer, will therefore be open to her talented husband. UNTIMELY DEATH is about a character “creating a base fee” so that an inheritance can pass to his daughters, rather than be “entailed” through the male line.

That sort of thing is interesting, I suppose, but it’s the honest introspection of characters like Pettigrew that make Hare’s books really enjoyable. In TRAGEDY AT LAW, Pettigrew sums up his feelings about justice Barber’s drunken traffic accident: “In a way, it gave him a certain grim pleasure to find his enemy in this undignified predicament, but that was more than counterbalanced by disgust that one of His Majesty’s Judges should have disgraced himself in such a way. There was probably not a judge on the bench whom Pettigrew had not, at one time or another, criticized, lampooned or held up to ridicule. . . He knew them too well, had studied them too closely, to have any illusions about them. But for the bench as a whole, he felt a deep unspoken respect. . . it was the symbol of what he lived by and for. . .”

As far as readers are concerned (especially modern readers) Justice Barber is just a pompous A-hole who gets exactly what he deserves: disgrace and, ultimately, death. But Pettigrew is a bit like Raymond Chandler’s idealistic heroes, a nerdy Phillip Marlow, who doesn’t mind fighting and losing, even when no one else seems to notice there is a battle being waged.

Sherlock Holmes and the classic English detective novel

In the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” Holmes is asked to find a missing person named Neville St. Clair. The man has no occupation but lives like a gentleman and has "an interest" in several companies. He goes into London each morning and returns home each evening. Apparently, Mrs. St. Claire can't be more specific about what her husband does. They breakfast together every morning, then he leaves for London, then he comes home. That’s all she knows.

I can still remember how shocked I was reading that.

My surprise was partly due to Mrs. St. Clair’s honest ignorance about a significant aspect of her husband’s life. I’d grown up hearing so many dinnertime work complaints from my own parents, I thought business-bitching, was the primary bond for newly married couples. What in the world did Mr. and Mrs. St. Clair talk about if that segment of the day was mysteriously off-limits?

Holmes’ and Watson’s placid acceptance of her ignorance was equally astounding. They considered it normal for husbands and wives to be intellectually estranged to that degree. Mrs. St. Clair doesn’t think it unhealthy. In fact, she feels a strong psychic bond with her husband, telling Holmes that she once sensed when he cut himself shaving, while he was in a different room. Not knowing anything about her husband's financial affairs, or daily activities is inconsequential.

“The Man with the Twisted Lip” is a remarkable story. It begins with Dr. Watson dragging an acquaintance from an opium den and taking him home to his worried wife. Now THAT’S a marriage I can understand, something riddled with problems and compassion. But Watson happens to meet Holmes in that opium den and readers’ attention is shifted to the strangely dysfunctional St. Clairs.

Mrs. St. Clair happened to see her husband’s face in a warehouse window when she went to London and, a second later, saw him being assaulted. Police eventually recover Mr. St. Clair’s overcoat from the Thames weighed down with pennies. They arrest a filthy beggar named Hugh Boone, assuming he murdered Mr. St. Clair then panicked, and tried to get rid of evidence by sinking the man’s coat, full of recently cadged change. They can’t find a corpse and Hugh Boone steadfastly refuses to talk.

Sherlock Holmes fans know that the great detective is remarkably uncommunicative himself. He trusts Watson with his life but never gives his friend early insight to the solution of a mystery. Here, Watson is just as gobsmacked as everyone else when Holmes washes Hugh Boone’s face and reveals that the beggar is really Neville St. Clair.

To me, “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” is a classic British mystery because it celebrates pathological reticence.

Mr. St. Clair doesn’t tell his wife what he does for a living and Mrs. St. Clair doesn’t bother to ask. Mr. St. Clair would rather be hung for murder than admit to his wife that he was making a fortune as a beggar. Holmes doesn’t tell Watson that he has solved the mystery. The police agree to cover up the whole affair if Mr. St. Clair agrees to give up his lucrative begging gig and return to his old 2-pound a week job. There’s no indication that Mrs. St. Clair will be told the true reason for her husband’s disappearance. Holmes tells Watson that they can make it back home for breakfast, if they hurry, and everything will be back to normal.

Presumably, Mr. and Mrs. St. Clair will sit across the breakfast table from each other and pass the clotted cream and rashers of bacon without mentioning double-lives, jail stays, or retrenchment because of vastly reduced income.

Here’s the most interesting byproduct of that anti-social silence: “The Man with the Twisted Lip” has spawned the stubborn urban myth that beggars are secretly rich. I’ve been told many times about a woman who takes a limousine home to her mansion in Hamilton when she’s done begging for the day in St. Catharines. I’ve also been told that mysterious criminal masterminds organize teams of beggars to blanket highway on ramps, reaping casino-like profits.

It should be easy to disprove those myths. For example, follow the rich beggar to her mansion in Hamilton and expose her. But people aren’t interested in that, they would rather use the myth as a license to insulate themselves from others. They want to live like the Neville St. Clairs, happily oblivious.

I remember The New York Times trying to dispel the rich beggar myth in the late 90s by following a man they considered the most aggressive panhandler in the city's subway system and tracking his receipts. They discovered that he maxed out at about thirty dollars, enough for a couple of crack rocks and a Happy Meal. New York City’s MOST aggressive beggar was working well below the poverty line.

But the myth still hangs tough. People desperately resist knowledge in case it forces them to care about others.

In British detective fiction, toxic family secrecy is the favorite defense mechanism. In an earlier blog, I mentioned the classic MALICE AFORETHOUGHT where Dr. Bickleigh secretly hates his wife, and Mrs. Bickleigh secretly tracks his extra-marital affairs. In THE MOONSTONE, hailed as the first detective novel, the entire mystery hangs on a fiancée’s refusal to divulge that she saw her future husband stealing a jewel. In this case, Franklin Blake is unaware that he is the thief because he recently quit smoking and sleepwalks after taking laudanum to ease his withdrawal pains. He can’t understand his fiancée’s silence, and she won’t explain it.

But Sherlock Holmes stories are the gold standard of dysfunctional marriages.

The St. Clair’s are my favorite example, but the Feguson’s in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” are a close second. Mr. Ferguson married a Peruvian second wife, so there are cultural and linguistic barriers to honest communication in addition to the usual British reserve. Mr. Ferguson catches his wife sucking blood from their infant son’s neck, and she refuses to explain her behavior. Of course, Mrs. Ferguson isn’t really a vampire. She sucks poison from the baby’s neck after her evil stepson, Jack, stabs him with a poison dart. Mrs. Ferguson would rather die than reveal the truth, all in the name of love. She knows her husband loves Jack, and learning his son’s true character would be painful.

In Sherlock Holmes stories “love” rarely co-exists with honesty. In a way, it shouldn’t matter if two people are happy deceiving each other like the St. Clairs. But the behavioral pattern has broader negative consequences, sort of like the “rich beggar” urban myth.

If marital secrecy is normalized, then so is abuse. In “The Solitary Cyclist,” Violet Smith is abducted, gagged and forcibly married to a criminal who only wants her inheritance. Luckily, the marriage is performed by a defrocked priest, otherwise Violet would be legally yoked to the criminal Woodley forever, and their breakfast conversations would be even more stilted than that of the St. Clairs.

It’s no wonder Holmes never married.

Dangerous Memories, by Charlie Angus

Charlie Angus is a rare politician—he talks about issues without demonizing people who disagree with him. He refuses to spew talking points and will even defend members of opposing parties when they are subjected to ridiculous, American-style personal attacks. He’s been a punk rock musician and grass roots social activist, and member of Canada’s parliament, representing Timmins-James Bay for 20 years.

DANGEROUS MEMORY deals with the founding of Angelus House with his wife Britt, in the 1980s, and their attempt to help homeless and/or addicted people by offering them a safe temporary place to stay.

I like Charlie Angus for a lot of reasons, but I have to qualify what I said earlier, about him being relentlessly civil. CNN recently goaded him into insulting Trump (he’s like “Al Capone in his syphilitic stage”) but Angus is MOSTLY about policy rather than person.

Anyway, a reasonable amount of imperfection is one of the things that is most endearing about Angus. When he writes about touring the sketchy biker-bars of southern Ontario with his punk band L’ Étranger, there is a degree of nostalgia. But he admits he was oblivious to the plight of strippers who were working on adjacent floors in those bars. In fact, he writes that nostalgia is a product of “privilege.” Angus didn’t have much money during the 1980s, but he still came from an intact supportive family; he had dependable friends, and a wonderful wife. He was, relatively speaking, privileged and therefore oblivious to the hardships some others endured. But he was willing to learn and quickly developed empathy for people who’d been steamrolled by circumstance.

One of the reasons I like Angus is that we share a left-leaning view of the world. I remember being horrified by one of the 1980s events he mentions: Conrad Black removing $40,000,000 from the Dominion employees’ pension fund. To me, it was symbolic of how the business class always operated: take as much from the till as possible when times are good, then when times turn bad close stores and lay off workers. Union-management relations have always been adversarial, and unions usually get blamed for the bad blood. But ownership is unreasonable and greedy to the point of being criminal. Eventually, Black was compelled to repay some of the misappropriated pension money, but he didn’t actually go to jail until he stole $6,000,000 from other rich people, American stockholders of the Hollinger corporation.

I wasn’t surprised when Trump pardoned Conrad Black and delivered the good news with a personal phone call. Rich guys stick together.

And that’s the sad history lesson in Angus’s book. Gross economic disparity has been an ongoing cooperative project, and enabled by politicians of all political stripes. You can’t solely blame individuals like Conrad Black, Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien or Milton Friedman (the Chicago economist who advocated de-regulation and privatization of government assets).

There’s lots of betrayal to go around.

Charlie Angus modeled Angelus House on exemplars from The Catholic Workers Movement. But the Church wasn’t a reliable ally. The Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandals were revealed in the late 1980s. And after Cardinal Carter spent his career destroying the social justice wing of the Canadian Church, he was rewarded with an appointment to the Board of Directors of Conrad Black’s Argus corporation.

The only hope for social improvement comes from the bottom: grass roots social activists who aren’t cowed when they are fired, beaten, ridiculed, arrested or ex-communicated. The “Dangerous Memory” of the title refers to times when social activism in the 1980s actually worked, despite long odds against success. Angus recounts the improvement in gay rights in Toronto, from the days of bath house raids and brutal rides on “the Cherry Beach Express” to today’s Pride celebration. He reminds us that tens of thousands of ordinary Germans dismantled the Berlin Wall. Canadians successfully protested against ICBMs being tested in Canada, and ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons were banned.

The status quo is only maintained by the charade of invincibility: people are told that nothing can be done, so you may as well let the wealthiest one percent do whatever they want. Memories of the 1980s are dangerous to billionaires, because ordinary working-class people are reminded that something can, indeed, be done, that despair is just another weapon used against them.

If you want to criticize Charlie Angus, you could call him a commie, or say he’s drunk the naïve Pete Seeger folksinger’s Kool-Aid.

But at least that Kool-Aid hasn’t been filtered through a billionaire’s kidneys.

Spider, by Patrick McGrath

SPIDER is my favorite horror novel.

It’s atmospheric, and full of self-inflicted psychological terror rather than monsters or gore, so it’s not to everyone’s taste. The book is ostensibly a journal written by Dennis “Spider” Cleg, describing his memories of a bleak childhood spent in east London in the 1930s, and (eventually) a re-telling of the terrible event that led to his twenty-year exile in “Canada.”

In the introduction to his classic novel THE SHINING, Stephen King declared that the source of all horror lies within “the family.” That’s certainly true of SPIDER. Mealtimes are especially horrible for the young narrator because his downtrodden, working-class father unleashes his disappointment and rage on his helpless family: “I cast a quick fearful glance at him; and in the way his jaw worked I knew what he thought of the pair of us, his gangling, useless son and his mutely reproachful wife.”

Spider’s mom is wonderful: quiet, patient and loving. “Her sweetness of temper persisted against all odds.” Mrs. Cleg plays “imagination games” with her awkward son, providing Spider with his only happy childhood memory. Mr. Cleg spends most nights at the local pub to avoid his family, and when he returns home drunk, the abuse intensifies. “Oh I hated him then! Then I would have killed him were it in my power—he had a squalid nature that man, he was dead inside, stinking and rotten and dead.”

At first, Spider’s emotional trauma seems to be the typical baggage we associate with poverty and crappy parenting. But readers gradually come to understand that the narrator’s problem is more profound. He becomes “uncoupled” (his polite euphemism for “crazy”) when his father murders his mother, buries her underneath the potatoes in his allotment garden, then invites a neighborhood prostitute into the house to take her place.

Young Dennis is expected to believe that his mother has gone to visit her sister in Canada, even though she never mentioned that branch of the family before.

At this point in the novel, the “horror” seems to be a natural byproduct of young Dennis’ helplessness in the face of outrageous falsehoods. The stress of living with competing realities splits the young man’s personality. He has to pretend “that fat tart, Hilda Wilkerson” is his mom, all the while knowing his real mom’s corpse is buried in the allotment garden.

The true horror, however, is much more complex because Spider’s mental illness actually predates his mother’s murder, it didn’t suddenly develop afterwards. As an adult, Dennis Cleg has paranoid fantasies about malevolent creatures living in his rooming house attic, taunting him through the crackling light bulb in his ceiling. He imagines that his intestines have wrapped around his spine like a snake, and his anus has migrated to the top of his skull.

In the novel’s “present” (1959) Spider is living in a half-way house following his release from an asylum for the criminally insane. Early generation anti-psychotics seem to be available, but Spider hoards the pills instead of swallowing them.

Eventually, the reader has to be like Porter Wagoner and face the cold hard facts: Spider’s father did NOT murder his mother, the crime was just one of Spider’s psychotic delusions.

Spider’s journal is full of events that he couldn’t possibly have witnessed. When Mr. Cleg has his first sexual encounter with Hilda Wilkerson, Spider says they hid at the bottom of a slimy canal stairway where they COULD NOT BE OBSERVED. Mr. Cleg grabs Hilda’s breasts and she jerks him off into the filthy water. Spider describes the scraggly sperm in the canal water from his father’s point of view.

Similarly, Spider admits he remained in his room the night his mother was murdered, yet he claims he witnessed the act, because he accompanied her in some golem-like way. Of course, there is no physical evidence of the murder, because Spider maintains his mother rose from the grave so she could sporadically comfort him.

What actually happened was quite different. “That fat tart, Hilda Wilkerson,” was Spider’s real mom, his only mom. He invented another mother that he liked better, probably after discovering that his mom was a sexual being (he regularly spied on his parents through the crack in their bedroom door.)

The wonderful-mom was another delusion, complete with backstory. Supposedly, that mom “married down” and had a wealthy cultured family who gave the Clegs their house on Kitchener Street as a wedding present. But that family mysteriously never appears in the novel, and Spider never considers them as a possible refuge when he periodically escapes the terrors of home.

Spider’s interaction with his mom was never idyllic, he was like an egg sac deposited by an arachnid. Imaginary-mom gives him the biology lesson: when a mother spider finishes laying her eggs, “she just crawls off to her hole without a backward glance. For her work is done.” There’s no nurturing. “She’s all dried up and empty. She just crawls away and dies.”

Spider eventually admits that his trip to “Canada” was really a prolonged stay in an institution for the criminally insane. He was placed there after HE killed his mother. He ran a string from his bedroom to the knob of the gas stove and opened the valve when his parents staggered home from the pub, drunk.

Spider seemed to be targeting his father, because he mentioned hearing Hilda’s footsteps heading upstairs to the bedroom. But if that was his intention, he messed up. Hilda passed out in the kitchen and his father escaped death upstairs.

I think Spider was deliberately careless and killed Hilda to preserve the illusion of a caring mother.

Spider’s delusions can be sourced, bit by bit, as the novel progresses. It’s like the movie THE USUAL SUSPECTS, where Kevin Spacey’s character improvises a story based on random articles in a Customs officer’s cluttered workspace.

The “fat tart” character was inspired by Spider’s halfway house landlady, Mrs. Wilkerson. Spider's perception that his intestines are wrapped around his spine was suggested by a design on a doctor’s tie: snakes entwined around a staff. And neighbors on Kitchener Street regularly used the “trip to Canada” excuse when they swapped one wife for another.

Patrick McGrath once worked in the top security unit of the Penetang Mental Health Centre in Ontario; he’s empathetic and knowledgeable, not trying to perpetuate the myth that people with mental illnesses are psycho-killers. I think the mid-century setting of SPIDER is important because the various diseases were less well understood then, and much “horror” is derived from being trapped in an unenlightened time.

Spider’s father is genuinely baffled by his son’s odd behavior. “Is that what you really think, Dennis? That I done her in?” Mr. Cleg realizes that berating his son or beating him with a belt isn’t helpful but, at the time, there’s little else in the playbook.

MALICE AFORETHOUGHT by Francis Iles

I ordered a copy of MALICE AFORETHOUGHT because it appeared on one of those lists: “most influential Crime/Mystery stories ever written.” I loved the book when it arrived because it was a little hardcover gem, small like a hymnal, with the page ends painted gold and an attached ribbon for a place-marker.

MALICE AFORETHOUGHT was first published in 1931, and reading detective fiction from that era is a little like taking a trip in a time machine. The main character, Dr. Bickleigh, is a GP who lives in a country house large enough to require a servant and host tennis parties. But his wife is used to better: “Julia would consider it middle-class manners to ring a bell herself when there was a man in the room to do it instead.” The Bickleighs summon their servant with a bell, and they have a tennis court on an expansive lawn, but they still consider themselves to be in straightened circumstances financially. “…somehow, there never seemed to be quite enough money…”

It's like reading about the barristers and judges in Cecil Hare or John Mortimer novels. Readers might consider members of those professions to be fairly well-off but, in those books, they just scrape by from fee to fee, and time payment to time payment, feeling sorry for themselves.

I don’t think the authors of period detective fiction are being deliberately provocative, trying to fan working class anger. They are more likely tapping into that Downton-Abbey brand of curiosity where readers enjoy seeing people with servant-bells and tennis-nets struggle, as if they were ordinary humans.

“It was not until several weeks after he decided to murder his wife that Dr. Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter.” The novel’s very first sentence reveals it to be a Colombo-style mystery, where the reader is well aware of who the murderer is. There isn’t the traditional unraveling of clues that comes in a puzzle mystery or standard courtroom drama. The tension comes from watching the murderer avoid capture as long as possible, even as his paranoid little community starts to suspect the truth.

But there is no brilliant Colombo figure in this novel, in fact, Dr. Bickleigh gets away with murdering his obnoxious wife. So, Francis Iles manages to establish a new style of story-telling and immediately subvert it within the same volume. There is justice for Dr. Bickleigh, but a number of plot twists make that justice almost impossible to anticipate.

Physically, Dr. Bickleigh is unprepossessing, to put it kindly. He is a little worm who fancies himself a ladies’ man and is, occasionally and inexplicably, successful. He now wants to pursue a relationship with a young, rich neighbour, Madeleine Cranmere who lives alone, without a chaperone. Dr. Bickleigh impresses Miss Cranmere with his sketching ability, and is allowed to hang around her mansion, more or less, as a suitor.

But Mrs. Bickleigh knows what is going on: “’Oh you needn’t bother to pretend to me,’ cut in his wife… ‘I know perfectly well you’re not to be trusted with any decent gairl. Normally, I’ll think you’ll admit, I don’t interfere with your amusements. If a gairl is fool enough to be taken in by a man like you, she must learn her lesson. But in this case, I warn you, I will not permit it.’” Mrs. Bickleigh thinks Miss Cranmere is a mentally unstable liar, and not a proper mistress for her husband. If he finds someone more suitable, however, she’ll actually consider a divorce.

Because the novel is focused on Dr. Bickleigh’s POV, there are a series of shocking reactions like that from other characters. Dr. Bickleigh is quite self-absorbed, so he is apt to be surprised when other people exert their right to exist, and readers are surprised as well.

Dr. Bickleigh kills his wife by turning her into a morphine addict then administering a fatal dose, making it appear to be a self-inflicted accident. That’s a complex, long-term scam. He secretly medicates his wife with a product that causes severe headaches as a side-effect. Then he prescribes morphine to relieve them. He makes sure that his wife is dipping into his morphine supply, and that her sister is aware of the burgeoning addiction.

Dr. Bickleigh doesn’t even wait for his wife’s corpse to be discovered, he runs to Miss Cranmere’s house and blurts out that his wife has died, before he is actually informed of the fact, via telephone call and maid. But Miss Cranmere had already decided to end their affair and is, in fact, engaged to an age-appropriate young man named Denny Bourne.

It seems like Dr. Bickleigh committed his murder for nothing. But he realizes that Julia was right about Madeleine Cranmere, and he’s glad to be free of her. And life without his nagging wife is exceedingly pleasant. But that good outcome is ultimately undone by self-righteous anger and jealousy. One of Mr. Bickleigh’s former girlfriends, Ivy, is now married to an abusive lawyer, who deeply resents the previous relationship. He is determined to re-open the investigation into Julia Bickleigh’s death as a form of romantic revenge.

Dr. Bickleigh decides to kill Madeleine Cranmere (now Bourne) and the lawyer, William Chatford. He cultivates botulism in a home incubator, using a sample taken from a patient. The botulism is introduced into potted meat sandwiches, which the victims eat at a tea party. They don’t die, but Scotland Yard has become interested in the rumours surrounding Dr. Bickleigh, and he is ultimately charged and tried for his wife’s murder.

The novel then morphs into a courtroom drama, with Madeleine ultimately discredited as an unstable liar on the witness stand, just as Mrs. Bickleigh had prophesied. Mrs. Bickleigh’s corpse is exhumed, but it contains no element of arsenic, which the prosecution had suspected.

Not guilty.

There was, however, typhoid found in Mr. Bickleigh’s home incubator. That means he is immediately re-arrested and charged with murder in relation to the village’s only recent typhoid death: that of Denny Bourne.

Madeleine’s husband actually contracted the disease because of her mansion’s poor sanitary and water services, and Dr. Bickleigh had absolutely nothing to do with it. In fact, he had strongly suggested remedial measures, when he was still courting her.

Dr. Bickleigh is hung, protesting his innocence to the last. But as this novel demonstrates (along with 13 Miss Marples from the same era) English village life is full of barely repressed violence. The homes of Wyvern’s Cross and St. Mary Meade are teeming with it, like dishes in an incubator, and you can’t be completely surprised when random infections spread.

WE by Eugene Zamiatin

To a certain extent all literature is about “disaffection,” a sense that one is fatally separated from one’s community. After all, books are written by solitary authors, scribbling away on desert islands, hoping their 80,000-word SOS notes will some day be stuffed into bottles and floated towards an unseen audience.

But in “genre” fiction (sci fi, crime, horror) the division between individual and community is even more pronounced, more obviously central to the work.

In the Russian sci fi classic WE, by Eugene Zamiatin, the conflict between the individual and a larger society is expressed in the two-letter title. The “We” is a lovingly-repressive “United State.” There are millions of inhabitants within the United State, but they aren’t really individuals, they are more like microbes, tiny insignificant organisms that make up a single large body. There is no room for individualism in this society. Walls are transparent, every hour is strictly regulated and everyone chews each bite of petroleum-based food fifty times before swallowing. Occasionally, the doctrine of self-negation is expressed in ancient religious terms: “resignation is a virtue, and pride a vice; that ‘We’ is from God, ‘I’ from the devil.”

The protagonist, and first-person narrator of WE, is D-503. He is a male “number” whose work function is to build a rocket ship called The Integral, which will carry the message of sublime submission to other, more primitive worlds. As The Integral nears completion, D-503 writes a journal that will be part of the rocket’s inspirational payload. The novel is comprised of those journal entries.

D-503’s problem is his poet’s soul. In his journal, he regularly re-purposes work-imagery to describe a burgeoning internal struggle. At one point, he is an over-heated machine, whose bearings are about to fail; he tries to save the mechanism with the cool water of logic, but that remedy just turns to steam and evaporates. D-503 can’t stop his mind wandering like that, when it should be exclusively focused on the task at hand. He dreams that an ordinary chair comes to life and walks like a horse across the room to climb into bed with him. He imagines falling through the surface of a mirror into a completely different reality.

Of course, The United State thinks such “fancy” is a dangerous disease and devises an X-ray treatment to excise it from peoples’ brains.

D-503 is a complex little microbe. In a way, he is like modern readers who, presumably, value intellectual freedom. D-503 notices little things, like a teardrop stain on a piece of paper, or the dimple on O-90’s wrist, and is emotionally overwhelmed. On the other hand, he is strangely unmoved by a workplace slaughter, when The Integral test fires its engines. “At the time of the first explosion, about a dozen loafing Numbers from the docks stood near the main tube—and nothing was left of them save a few crumbs and a little soot.”

D-503 also has a violent sexual fascination with I-330, the female Number who leads a rebellious cabal against “The Well-Doer.” D-503 isn’t a romanticized tiny cog in a big machine, and he isn’t just a flawed character; he is an inconvenient set member. If you advocate freedom for all, you have to include dangerously selfish intellectual weaklings like D-503.

He is both hero and villain.

WE was first published in 1924, and it’s easy to see specific criticism of totalitarian Russian society, with its uniforms and badges, pre-determined elections, and outrageous formal expressions of love for an oppressive leader. But there are also obvious threads running from WE through George Orwell’s 1984, to the illogic of our present political discourse, where dissent is no longer tolerated. My Facebook account is currently plugged with video clips assuring me that the only true “free thinkers” in our society are those people who blindly worship ultra-right-wing, anti-woke content producers.

Both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of limiting “free speech” to whatever agrees with their leaders’ talking points. But, to my mind, the “right” is most Orwellian in the subversion of language. To re-purpose focused hatred as “free thinking” is, of course, ridiculous. Unfortunately, many members of our present science-fiction world think it’s perfectly acceptable.

At a certain point in the novel, the word “we” refers to the rebel group, rather than the state. The rebels want to take over The Integral and use it as a weapon to reunite Numbers within The United State with their primitive doppelgangers, a race living in the wilderness, outside thick glass barriers.

That seems like a reasonable goal, but the rebels aren’t uniformly good people. I-330 has clearly been sexually manipulating D-503, just to gain control of The Integral, and she callously proposes using the rocket’s thrusters to vaporize potential pursuers.

For a while, WE seems like a template for Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM, where the revolutionaries are just as bad as the leaders they depose. That ends up not being the case, however. The rebels aren’t greedy for power, they just aren’t very good at sedition, probably because they have grown up chewing each bite of food fifty times.

The real heroes of the book are un-named characters who spontaneously disobey in response to acts of cruelty. Several individuals intervene when others are being unfairly harassed by the “Guardians,” and they riot as a group against a horde of zombie-Numbers trying to marshal them into auditoriums to be lobotomized. Thousands vote against the automatic re-election of the Well-Doer, and some manage to blow up a section of the glass wall.

There’s no specific act of treachery that derails the rebellion; The United State prevails because of a heavy inertia that is difficult to overcome. D-503 was in a position to change the outcome but he was ultimately too self-absorbed, wallowing in his own poetic confusion.

“Hope” for a better world still exists but, typical of dystopian novels, only in wilderness areas outside the shiny glass walls.