Some of What I've Read Lately

So...things have calmed down, Mom is back home after hip replacement surgery and a stay in a rehab home (not Amy Winehouse rehab, physical rehab), and I've dealt with the grief of her giving her sweet cat up to the Humane Society...an understandable decision, she can't care for him anymore, but still, it was like a kick in the chest for me. Hopefully the sweet little boy will be adopted soon.

So...here's a sampling of some of the stuff I've read lately...

I've heard so many people praise Edmund Crispin to the rafters, and I heard a review of this that made it sound intriguing, so I finally picked up a copy. I have to say it....I wasn't impressed. This isn't quite the puzzle mystery I was hoping for, more of a thriller, and it's full of self-referential humor and meta-zaniness that I find offputting. A man, wandering lost in town one night, enters a toy store that's mysteriously open, and finds a dead body. When he tries to go back with the police the next day...the body is not only gone, but the building is now a grocery store. What's going on? Well, it's a fairly complex story, and not very plausible, but at least it keeps moving. There's a lot of comical goings-on, a car chase, and other crazy stuff, but after a while I was almost screaming for the book to get to the point. (I had a similar problem with Charlotte McLeod as her series ran on, and devoted more time to comical zaniness than to things like story, plot, and character, to the point I walked away from her works, gave away the ones I owned, and wasn't even aware when she died from Alzheimer's.)

Edmund Crispin was really Robert Bruce Montgomery, a noted composer of film music. He died in 1978, but all his mystery novels were written in the 40s and 50s. He apparently had some serious drinking problems that got in the way of his writing, which is too bad. But while his style certainly wasn't for me, he still has fans galore, so don't let that stop you if you want to check it out. It's not a bad book, per se, just not for me.

Elizabeth Peters (real name: Elizabeth Mertz, and she also wrote as Barbara Michaels) was a friend of mine. I would hang out with her at Malice Domestic and occasionally when she did book signings near me, and I was stricken when I got news that she had passed away some years ago. Although her works are technically "romantic suspense", I enjoy them, because let's be honest....sometimes the difference between being classed as "romantic suspense" and a regular "mystery" or "thriller" or "spy novel" is the sex of the author. Really...read some Helen MacInnes and Robert Ludlum back-to-back. They're in the same style with similar content, but MacInnes' work was always classed as "romantic suspense" because she was a woman. Like how Mary Renault's historical novels of ancient Greece would be stocked as "romance" because...well....the obvious reason. OK, I'll stop ranting...

Published in 1968, The Jackal's Head is her first novel as Elizabeth Peters, and while it's rough, it's got a lot of her strengths in place. I love books with a sense of place, and Peters was great in giving life to her settings, which range from Egypt to Mexico to Scandinavia. Her books also generally involved archaeology and/or art history, topics I enjoy. And she's one of the more feminist of romantic authors as well, at least for the time. (Again, we're not in an eternal present.)

Althea Tomlinson, in need of a job, gets one accompanying a spoiled girl on a trip to Egypt. She holds back that she grew up there, the daughter of a controversial archaeologist. And as the plot proceeds, she runs into old friends and her father's colleagues, and slowly discovers that the treasure her father had claimed to have discovered is actually real, although he was forced to say it was fake. But the forces of evil are gathering....

It's nonsense, but it's slick, fun, nonsense, although it lacks polish. (Then again, I think it was only her third work of fiction. She was still developing her skills.) The denouement is a bit abrupt and I sat there for a while questioning why the villains did X when it got them nothing....but I just shrugged it off. The description of the final treasure (Spoiler: the tomb of Akhenaton and Nefertiti) is gorgeous and rings of expertise; Peter/Mertz was Egyptologist, and wrote two standard works on the subject, Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs, and Red Land, Black Land.

All in all, an enjoyable entertainment. You learn a little bit from it and have a fun, exciting story. My kind of thing.

Here's another comedy-thriller, from someone who normally wrote very serious thrillers. Published in 1944, Fire will Freeze is a classic tale of an ill-assorted group of travelers stranded by a snowstorm in a ramshackle old house...I mean, really, this sort of thing had been a staple of thriller novels and films since the 20s. But Millar seems to be having fun poking fun at the genre conventions, and it works better for me than Crispin's zaniness. Millar had remarkable ability with character, and this book's humor comes mostly from character rather than zany situations. The murders are treated with tragic seriousness, and the menace is always real. When murders start to happen, the reactions are plausible...for the most part, and the rationale behind it all is realistic. The characters are all drawn well, and the chilly confines of the house are truly menacing as the travelers, all driven by a distrust of each other, try to make sense of the bizarre situation they're in.

It's a fun read, and would be good for a cold snowy afternoon this winter, I'd guess. You can pretend to be an in an old-dark-house mystery of your own...

So, pick your favorite of the three...one wasn't for me, but I enjoyed the others.

A September Night at the Phantom Concert Hall

We're kicking off the fall season, and thumbing our nose at the dreary, rainy weather, by heading out to the concert hall again. Tonight's performance...Rheinberger's roiling, romantic piano concerto!



Isn't it great? One of those lovely pieces that flies under the radar. I love finding these obscure little gems.

Sorry to be late with this and not posting for a while. My elderly mother took a fall and broke both her shoulder and hip, and my sister and her husband have moved cross-country to Seattle. I had to be on hand when Mom underwent surgery and helping arrange for assistance while she's in a rehab facility. And then Mom decided she couldn't take care of her cat any longer so she had him surrendered to a local shelter, which upset me quite a bit as he's 10 years old and shelters have problems adopting out older cats. And I haven't talked about this on the blog, but over the summer I was hit by an unexpected depression and I went into therapy. I'm slowly coming out of it but it's taking a while, as it usually does.

So, the past couple months have been difficult, to say the least, and while I slowly get my groove back, bit by bit,I hope to get back to regular posting.

THE HORROR CHAMBERS OF JULES DE GRANDIN by Seabury Quinn

Finally, the last volume of Popular Library's reprint series! And just in time as the complete ebook reprints are now available....making these books pretty much obsolete. I spent years and tons of money hunting these down, and now...well, at least I enjoyed the chase, I guess.

Seabury Quinn apparently was a bit of a progressive in some ways, as you may have seen from my previous reviews of his works. He's sympathetic to minorities (sometimes) and some of his stories have centered on sexuality. And that continues here...

"The Gods of East and West" concerns a woman under the influence of an idol of Kali, and de Grandin, not able to help her out himself....so he brings in a Native American shaman to exorcise the spirit. The story leaves one with an odd feeling; Quinn may have been trying to be pro-Indian but at the same time it comes across as a sort of fetishization of the Noble Savage sort of thing. A strange story.

"The Poltergeist" has another young woman be the center of poltergeist activity. It turns out to be the work of a ghost, namely that of another woman who was plainly a lesbian and in love with the living woman, and who is now jealous of her upcoming marriage. OK, kinda homophobic, to be sure, but that's pretty much to be expected from a story written in 1927.

The story after that, "The House of Golden Masks," is a non-supernatural tale of white slavery. But after that is an eyebrow-raiser, "The Jest of Warburg Tantavul." A young couple are being tormented by the vengeful ghost of the husband's guardian, an eerie phantom whose malice is palpable and who is handled memorably...and even dispatched in a rather modern way. But the thrust of the story, that the man in life had sought revenge on someone else through the couple, is made clear when the reader realizes (and is finally revealed) that the couple are unknowingly brother and sister. And at the end, de Grandin remains silent, seeing that they are happy together. A weird way of ending a tale, and definitely not something that would work today, but oddly compassionate.

"Stealthy Death" is another non-supernatural tale, but with a weird element. A series of people are murdered, and a strangely beautiful but robotic woman keeps cropping up. Who is responsible and why? It turns out the murderer is a Hindu man avenging his sister, who was seduced, robbed, and sold into prostitution by an American missionary. The man's deeds are heinous but it's clear that he has a legitimate gripe.

The final story, "A Gamble in Souls," is a weird sort of tale in which the soul of a man being unjustly executed is put into the body of his evil twin brother. Again, we have some exoticism here as a Middle Eastern "philosopher" is brought in to effect the changeover. It's progressive in a tiny way, but also dripping with pulp-fiction nonsense.

So...are these good? Well, they're fun, to be honest. I'm probably being a little unfair as my modern eyes and modern sensibilities aren't the target audience. It's important to remember the times in which something was written, and the audience it was intended for, when reading older works. We don't live in an eternal present. And while the exaggerated exoticism that goes on in these tales may seem cheap and offensive to many readers today, at the time this was exciting and novel to many American readers. And also, Quinn introduces elements that rouse the reader's sympathy, in taking a brief look into the evils of imperialism in "Stealthy Death" or introducing powerful minority sorcerers in "The Gods of East and West" and "A Gamble in Souls." Even the homicidal lesbian spirit in "The Poltergeist" would at least introduce the concept to people who might not have even been aware such people existed. (And let's be honest...we're in an age now where we can acknowledge that LGBTQ people are just as capable of being dark and twisted as anyone else...) So, really, the fun is in the chills, and there are chills to be had, especially in "The Jest of Warburg Tantavul" which is one of the more dark and twisted pulp tales outside of the exploitative "weird menace" genre. This is pulpy fun and recommended if you can get into the mindset.

A Steamy August Night at the Phantom Concert Hall

We're out at the symphony tonight! And as it's a hot night, we're going to listen to some pretty hot music...de Falla's remarkable "The Three Cornered Hat"!



"The Three-Cornered Hat"is actually a ballet, a rarity for its time for working mainly with traditional Spanish styles of dance, rather than classical ballet. But there days, it's mostly known as a concert piece. I love the use of castanets and all the ways in which the music disdains the conventions of the normal Western classical tradition, while at the same time being an exceptionally lovely piece on its own.

Let's have a drink after, shall we?

THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ARSENE LUPIN, GENTLEMAN-BURGLAR by Maurice Leblanc

This is it. A landmark work, not only in crime fiction but also in the Dust & Corruption pantheon. Arsene Lupin's first published adventures. It doesn't get any better than this.

First published in 1905 (and now public domain) this sets the standard. Sure, other sympathetic crooks were around before. most notably A. J. Raffles, but Lupin was much better written and simply more fun. The stories were originally published in the magazine "Je sais tout," starting in July of 1905 (113 years ago!) and grew to encompass 24 novels and short-story collections. I want to read as many as I can.

I mean, how can I resist a burglar who leaves a note in a noble's home, reading, "Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar, will return when the furniture is genuine"? On one hand, it's almost a parody of the snobbish criminal who won't stain his hands with reproductions....but it's also a blast at the vulgar wealthy who try to maintain an appearance of taste and culture. I get a sense that Lupin wouldn't have mocked him if the noble had been more honest about himself.

So, to run down...

The first three stories make a trilogy. "The Arrest of Arsene Lupin" introduces the character and has him sneaking aboard a cruise ship from France to America, and also makes it clear that he's got a weakness for beautiful women. (But of course....) "Arsene Lupin in Prison" has him announcing a daring burglary while in prison, and actually pulling it off despite everyone's doubts. "The Escape of Arsene Lupin" has one of the more amusing, and more complicated, prison-escape plots I've ever seen, and makes for zesty reading.

"The Mysterious Traveler" is a first-person story from Lupin's viewpoint, in which he captures a murderer on a train. "The Queen's Necklace" is intriguing as it gives us a potential origin story for Lupin, and has him committing dashing thefts even as a child.

"The Seven of Hearts" is one of my favorites, as it introduces us to a narrator (presumably Leblanc himself) who tells of how he first met Lupin, and also gives us a bizarre and intriguing mystery with Gothic overtones. Who's breaking into the journalist's apartment? What are they seeking? What's the meaning of the playing card poked full of holes?

In "Madame Imbert's Safe," Lupin meets his match in a pair of con artists. "The Black Pearl" has him starting on a daring jewel robbery....only to find himself in the middle of a murder. And the last story, "Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late" is perhaps one of the more interesting of the bunch, in that it's good and early example of the literary crossover, in having Lupin go toe-to-toe with the Great Detective himself. There were copyright issues, though, and in future appearances he showed up as Herlock Sholmes, fooling nobody but appeasing the law. Imagine...all that crossover fanfic on the web has a legit source...

This is an excellent read, and on the Required Reading shelf. This is available in cheap editions, and can be downloaded for free from the 'net. There are also good audio versions available. "The Classic Tales" podcast did a version a while back that may still be available. You owe it to yourself to become acquainted with Arsene Lupin. Go do it now.

THE MANSION IN THE MIST by John Bellairs

I'm back!

Ah, that wonderful Edward Gorey artwork! A Gorey cover, and the Bellairs name, are almost a guarantee of a good time.

At the beginning of The Mansion in the Mist, Anthony Monday, Miss Eels, and her brother Emerson are vacationing on an island in a lake in northern Canada. One night, Anthony finds a wooden chest in a back room of the house they're staying in, and feels a strange urge to get in. The lids snaps shut, and when he opens it again he's in a misty, twilight world of moving plants and a huge, menacing mansion. He makes his way back, and at first his friends don't believe him, as the chest is now gone from the room. But after a while it shows up again, and other sinister things start to happen....

This is late Bellairs, and has some of his strengths and some of his failings. It's got atmosphere to spare, and some quirky humor, and the Canadian lake setting is reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood. But it's got too-convenient coincidences, a ghost showing up where the person is alive and with no explanation, and a plot that needs more background. As it is, the villains of the piece are great. They're a group of wizards who call themselves the Autarchs, who inhabit a vast mansion in a parallel pocket dimension, who plot to draw our world into it so they can rule it. One weakness they have is that the Autarchs are powerless in our world, which makes for some interesting intrigue.

I have to admit...while I found the story wanting in some ways, the ideas behind it are interesting and linger in my mind. The misty, shadowy pocket dimension is a great setting and could be expanded. This would be good for someone doing a role-playing game or something.

This is the last Anthony Monday book; unlike his other two series, this was not extended after Bellairs' death. Soon, I plan to start on his third series, about New England adventurer Johnny Dixon.

I'm back! A Phantom Serenade for July

Sorry to have been away for the last month. Some work-related anxiety issues, and some on-and-off health issues, and gay pride, and a few other things, kept me from concentrating on blogging. But here I am!

It's a lazy summer evening; we've had a lovely light dinner at a friend's house and lingering in the back yard, chatting and catching up while the sun slowly sets. And from nearby, we hear someone playing the piano with their window open, as if serenading us. We all pause in the conversation to listen...



Lovely piece, eh? And just the thing for a quiet summer evening....