Drury Lane's Last Case

    "Sure, sure," said Thumm in a trembling voice. A thousand dollars! Tears of joy gathered in his stony eyes. These were lean days. A thousand dollars for keeping a skinny envelope in his safe!

    "Second," and the man went swiftly to the door, "if I should fail to call on a twentieth, you must not open the envelope except in the presence of Mr. Drury Lane."

 

It's 1933 and Inspector Thumm has retired from the New York police to hang up his shingle as a private investigator. But when he was still with New York's finest he'd solved three earlier cases with the aid of Drury Lane, retired Shakespearean actor. 

On the 20th of May, Thumm receives the needed phone call, but on the 20th of June, nothing. He prepares to contact Drury Lane and open the envelope.

 

But in the meantime he's got another case. Donoghue, an ex-cop, but now a guard at the Britannic Museum, has disappeared. The same day that he disappeared, someone smashed a display case at the museum. At first it seems nothing has happened, but eventually it's discovered that someone replaced a 1599 printing of Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare with a 1606 printing from the same publisher. The 1606 printing is actually rarer, and presumably more valuable.

 

Are the two cases connected? Of course they are!

 

Well, what's in the envelope unsealed in the presence of Drury Lane? It's that note shown on the cover, on Saxon Library stationary, with the mysterious letters 3HS wM. The Saxon Library has just given that 1599 Shakespeare to the Britannic Museum, so there's your connection. But what do those mysterious letters mean? 

 

Actually that was the most disappointing thing about the mystery. Turn the picture upside down--well, since that may be a little difficult unless you're reading this on a phone, let me do it for you. 😉 Ah, now it reads Wm SHe. Since we're dealing with stolen copies of Shakespeare's poetry, you probably can guess the nature of the clue. But Thumm couldn't, and nobody else could either, except maybe Drury Lane, who was coy about what he knew.

 

A second somebody also disappears before a body is found murdered, blown up in a building. First they have to determine just who it is who has been killed, and then who did the killing. The ending was both surprising and satisfactory.

 

The cousins behind the Ellery Queen pseudonym wrote four novels with Drury Lane as the hero detective; they originally came out under the pseudonym Barnaby Ross, though eventually they fessed up it was them. The first two--The Tragedy of X and The Tragedy of Y--often show up on lists of all-time greatest mysteries. This isn't quite in the league of those two, but it's still pretty entertaining.

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Golden Age (1933). Book.
 

Quoting Walt Whitman

 

Tears 

 

Tears! Tears! Tears!

In the night, in solitude, tears.

On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck'd in by the sand,

Tears, not a star shining, dark and desolate,

Moist tears, from the eyes of a muffled head;

O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears?

What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch'd there on the sand?

Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries,

O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the beach!

O wild and dismal night storm, with wind--O belching and desperate!

O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and regulated pace,

But away at night as you fly, none looking--O then the unloosen'd ocean,

Of tears, tears, tears!

 

-Walt Whitman

 

I've been reading Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts. Miss La Trobe writes and organizes a pageant depicting the history of England at a country house. It was a benefit to fund new lighting for the local church. The pageant was held outside, and the weather mostly cooperated, but it did rain for a bit in the middle. (It is England after all.) After the pageant is over, one of audience says, "While we're waiting, tell me, did you feel when the shower fell someone wept for us all? There's a poem, Tears tears tears, it begins. And goes on Oh then the unloosened ocean...but I can't remember the rest."

 

More than I ever knew. I was somewhat surprised to discover it was Whitman. I almost titled this post Still More Weather, but I'm still a little uncertain whether the poem is about weather, comparing a storm to a person crying, or about a person, calm enough during the day, but crying in the night, and comparing that person to a storm on the shore. Not that one really needs to decide, of course.

 

Post coming soon-ish on Between the Acts. 

 

May Wrapup

Poetry Department

Richard Howard/No Traveller

From 1989, one of Howard's best collections. It opens with a wonderful sequence of imagined letters, set in 1953. Two young gay men, frenemies, are in Paris and they're both writing to somebody Roderick, back home in the U.S. Ivo is gossipy and tart; his great moment is when he sees the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Edward and and Wallis Simpson. Richard is more serious; he spies the poet Wallace Stevens, and insinuates himself as Stevens' guide to Paris.  

        "To hear her talk, as she does,

about her escape from France,

you would suppose she had swum the Channel,

with her maid between her teeth!"

 

From one of Ivo's letters, this is supposed to be Wallis Simpson talking about Lady Diana Cooper. Meow!

 

Just now typing this, it occurred to me that we have Wallis and Wallace. Deliberate? Oh, probably. It's all made up--Wallace Stevens apparently never got to Paris--but so very convincing. And so very fun.

 

7 Greeks (tr. by Guy Davenport)

 

The seven are Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman, Anakreon, Herakleitos, Diogenes, and Herondas. Numbers 5 and 6 are philosophers; the others are poets. I think Davenport is a great translator, and his introduction was superb. I do have doubts about translating scraps where all that survives is one word per line. (The same applies to Anne Carson's translation of Sappho.) That's what we've got, but it feels a bit like a romantic preferring the ruins of Tintern Abbey to an actual building.

 

Here's an Archilochos poem in Davenport's translation that made it on to the blog before.

 

Karl Shapiro/Trial of a Poet

 

This is Shapiro's book of 1947. He'd been a clerk in the Army, serving in the Pacific for most of the war; his Pulitzer-prize winning book of poetry written from New Guinea, V-Letter and Other Poems, showed up on the blog earlier. This is still quite engaged with his war experience. Like a lot of American poets of that time his poetry is moving from formal to a more free verse; this is interestingly transitional.

 

And one of the poems, one that he uses for the title of the middle section, is 'The Progress of Faust':
 

He was born in Deutschland, as you would expect,

And graduated in magic from Cracow

in Fifteen Five.

 

Which brings us to:

 

 

 

Poetry Department (Faust Subdivision)

 

After reading a bunch of Goethe last summer, and traveling to Germany last fall, I'd been thinking about rereading Faust, which I've read before but not in forever. I read Part I in Kaufmann's translation and Part II in Philip Wayne's. Kaufmann only translated the first part; he says the second part isn't as good. Is that true? Well, it is true that in Philip Wayne's translation the second part isn't as good, but I remain uncertain about the German. Wayne is certainly the inferior English poet.

 

Goethe's house in Weimar from its garden

 

Christopher Marlowe/Doctor Faustus

 

But better than either as an English poet, of course, is Marlowe. I do think that Shakespeare is better at shaking a scene, but when it comes to bombasting out blank verse, Kit strikes me as fully the equal of William. One interesting bit from all the Faust/Goethe reading I've done is that Goethe (and most Germans of that era) first knew the Faust story from puppet shows, and that German puppet shows were based on Marlowe's version carried back over into Germany.

 

Literary Criticism

 

Erich Heller/The Artist's Journey Into the Interior and Other Essays

 

I was reading something about music the previous month--Peter Kalkavage's Music and the Idea of a World--and Kalkavage said one of the best books about Thomas Mann was Erich Heller's Thomas Mann: The Ironic German. My library doesn't have a circulating copy of that, but they did have this. Pretty fascinating stuff. Good on Thomas Mann (as was the Kalkavage) and also on Goethe.

Cooking

 

Clare de Boer, Jess Shadbolt, and Annie Shi/The King Cookbook

 

King is a restaurant in New York City.  I have to admit to not having cooked anything out of the book yet, but I scanned several pages before I returned it to the library... The recipe for Tunisian Chicken looks very tasty. One of the desserts is likelier to be first, though: our local farmer's market had local strawberries for the first time today, and their recipe for Eton Mess looked particularly yummy.

 

Mystery Department

 

Ovidia Yu/Aunty Lee's Delights

 

The first (2013) of a series of mysteries set in Singapore involving Aunty Lee. She's a recent widow who runs a tea shop, and has a murder on her hands to solve. Enjoyable characters, though I knew who the murderer was practically from the start. And while I would agree with Yu's politics I'm sure, they seemed a little dogmatic in a mystery novel. Still, I'm likely enough to carry on with the series.

 

At one point Aunty Lee says, explaining why she knows somebody convenient to solving the mystery, Singapore is a small town and everybody knows everybody. Pooh, I thought: I've been to Singapore; it's not that small a town. But then when I told a friend who's from Singapore I'd read the novel, she said, oh, yes, my brother went to high school with her, and that she had been a stagehand for one of Yu's plays.

 

Literary Novels

 

Four novels from Canadian publisher Biblioasis made it into this post.  The real find of those I felt was Alice Chadwick's Dark Like Under.

 

Richard Hell/Godlike

 

This takes the romance of French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine and translates it to 1970s New York City. I somehow missed it when it first came out in 2005, but it's recently been reissued by New York Review Books. I listened to a lot of Television and Voidoids back in the day.

 

Richard Hell came to Toronto's Appel Salon at the downtown library. It was a pretty good author event. Surprisingly for a seminal punk musician who took Hell for his stage name, he was a pretty genial guy. Unsurprisingly he's a bit hard of hearing. He said after his first novel had been taken as nothing more than thinly disguised biography, he decided to write about homosexual French poets for his second novel; then nobody would think this one autobiographical. Ha. He still gets told, I didn't know you were gay. (He's not.) But it is quite believable, and some of the drug-taking may have autobiographic elements, though he's supposed to have straightened up since.

 

Sent me off to read some Verlaine poetry. 

 

Comics

 

Quino/Mafalda

 

An Argentine comic strip about a little girl and her friends. The whole run (1964-1973) is being issued in an English translation by Frank Wynne in five volumes. This was the first and it came out last year; the second later will appear later this year. Quino only ended it because he felt it safer to flee the country. They're pretty great.

 

All in all a pretty good month's worth of reading. 

 

For the Commonplace Book 

 

"He [Caspar David Friedrich] was probably the first European painter to whom it happened that a picture of his was hung upside down." 

-- Erich Heller

 

"I don't see why/people can't look things up, I always do." 

-- Richard Howard's 'Love Which Alters" (voicing Proust)

 

"And yet he himself did not seem to think as a matter of free choice, but rather yielded philosophy as a cow yields milk--in helpless bondage to a dispensation of Nature." 

-- Erich Heller (of Hegel)

 

Mephistopheles: "I am the spirit that negates."

Mephistopheles: "Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint."

--Faust, Part I, l. 1338, English by Walter Kaufmann

 

Faust: I am too old to be content to play

Too young to be without desire

 

Faust: Ich bin zu alt, um nur zu spielen

Zu jung, um ohne Wunsch zu sein

-Faust, Part 1, l. 1546-7, English by Walter Kaufmann

 

Faust: A petty case of paltry legacies

-Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Act I, sc. i, l. 27

 

(I feel like somebody needs to write a mystery novel with that as the title.) 

 

Mephistopheles: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.

-Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Act I, sc. iii, l. 75

 

One wrong will not balance against another: to be honorable and just is our only defense agains men without honor or justice.

-Diogenes 39, English by Guy Davenport

(Why does this one seem especially relevant?)

Give up philosophy because I'm an old man? It's at the end of the race you break into a burst of speed.

-Diogenes 124, English by Guy Davenport

 

The books still around the house

 

How was your month of reading?

Leonie Swann's Three Bags Full

 

George Glenn, an Irish shepherd, has been found dead in his pasturage with a spade driven through his chest. Miss Maple, the cleverest sheep in Glennkill, and possibly the world, says, "I think we ought to find out what kind of human. We owe old George that. If a fierce dog took one of our lambs he always tried to find the culprit. Anyway, he was our shepherd. No one had a right to stick a spade in him. That's wolfish behavior."

Turns out there's a suitable list of suspects: an earlier unsolved murder in the village, the drug trade passing through since Glennkill is on the coast, George had a complicated love life. The elements of a decent mystery story are there.

The gimmick, of course, is the sheep, and when I got the book from the library, I wasn't entirely sure I was going to read it. There are a number of ways it could have veered off into ridiculousness. But it does pretty well. The sheep still feel sheep-like, and the different point of view is fun. In fact, if you were looking for an easy-reading, but pretty perfect example of defamiliarization, this would do nicely. 

The sheep also fill the Watson role in an interesting way. Watson sees and fails to understand; it's important to keep the story hidden; the sheep, who live with humans, see them pretty closely and quite often fail to understand the things humans do. (How can they not smell that!) 

It's my visit to Ireland for the year...

 

...but the novel orignally came out in German in 2005, and was translated by the late, great Anthea Bell.  I'm not sure now where I saw mention of the book, but there's a movie version just come out titled The Sheep Detectives, so I'm sure it had something to do with that.

More Weather

#315

He fumbles at your Soul

As Players at the Keys

Before they drop full Music on --

He stuns you by degrees --

Prepares your brittle Nature

For the Ethereal Blow

By fainter Hammers -- further heard --

Then nearer -- Then so slow --

Your Breath has time to straighten --

Your Brain -- to bubble Cool --

Deals -- One -- imperial -- Thunderbolt --

That scalps your naked Soul --

 

When Winds take Forests in their Paws --

The Universe -- is still --

 

-Emily Dickinson

 

It's possible thunderstorm weather for us, sticky, though now there's a breeze picking up.  Fainter Hammers have indeed been further heard. So far not any nearer. It's still possible any actual rain will blow right past us.

 

Emily Dickinson, of course, didn't title her poems with numbers--they had no titles--and the numbers I use come from the Thomas H. Johnson edition of 1955. It's popular and it's what I have. He numbers the poems in the order he believes they were composed. Last week's poem was number #316, and he assigns them both to 1862. Assuming his dating is right, she was working out a theme at the time. And just what was the weather like in Amherst in June of 1862?

The Wind

 

#316

The Wind didn't come from the Orchard -- today --

Further than that ---

Nor stop to play with the Hay --

Nor joggle a Hat --

He's a transitive Fellow -- very --

Rely on that --

 

If He leave a Bur at the Door

We know He has climbed a Fir --

But the Fir is Where -- Declare --

Were you ever there?

 

If He brings Odors of Clovers --

And that is His business -- not Ours --

Then He has been with the Mowers --

Whetting away the Hours

To sweet pauses of Hay --

His Way -- of a June Day --

 

If He fling Sand, and Pebble --

Little Boys Hats -- and Stubble --

With an occasional Steeple --

And a hoarse "Get out of the way, I say,"

Who'd be the fool to stay?

Would you -- Say --

Would you be the fool to stay?

 

-Emily Dickinson

 

This just seemed to fit the season. The wind frequently leaves Bur/pine cones on our doorstep, though I moved this one up a couple of steps to get the door in. We know where those come from: there's a giant pine tree in our front yard, so I Declare I have been there. Our backyard Orchard is two apples and a pear--none of which bear much fruit, alas, too shady and too many squirrels--but if we get blossom smells, which we did last night, it's from the lilac bushes of our neighbors to the north.

 

The Mowers have been busy this season, and we get plenty of Clover smell, too. So far--fortunately--no occasional Steeple has landed in our front yard, though the Anglican church is only a block away...