So Adam's offspring live...

 

from Vis and Ramin 

So Adam's offspring live, and put away

The happiness and grief of yesterday.

Why should you grieve for what's gone by? Forget!

Why brood on things that haven't happened yet?

Grief won't bring back the past, and all your scolding

Will not prevent the future from unfolding.

Enjoy a hundred years of victory

But one day's all your lifetime here will be ;

Whatever riches you might hope to win

One day alone is yours--the day you're in;

The best course is to look for pleasure, to

Enjoy the single day that's given you. [p. 264]

 

-Fakraddin Gorgani (tr. Dick Davis)

 

Sections in Vis and Ramin often ended in a bit of general wisdom, with applicability (possibly ironic) to what just happened. Just before this is in the story line Vis and King Mobad had been reconciled, and Mobad had given a stack of gifts to both Vis and her nurse. It wasn't to last, of course, and we knew it wouldn't even before what I quoted. "The moon-faced beauty lied, Mobad believed her/And asked her to forgive him that he'd grieved her."

 

I had copied out some other sections as I was reading but they didn't fit in my earlier post. But now, here I am thinking about Iran again... 

Peter Dickinson's The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest

     "We've got a lovely little set-up here, all airy-fairy. Just the thing for Pibble, I said, the moment I'd seen the Kus."

    "Coos?"

    "Every single member of the household, my dear, is called Ku. They're a tribe from New Guinea, somewhere. Deceased's a Ku, suspects all Kus, witnesses all Kus. Except there aren't any."

 

This was totally bats. But I really mean that in the best possible way...

 

During World War II, the Ku tribe sheltered a downed Australian airman. The Japanese found out and killed everyone they could lay their hands on, and this included the British anthropologist studying the tribe. The anthropologist's daughter Elizabeth has brought the remains of the tribe to London, where they live in a house, attempting to keep up their tribal customs in an alien environment. They all take the last name Ku.

 

Then the chief of the tribe, Aaron Ku, is bashed over the head by a lefty at the top of the stairs.

 

Elizabeth has gotten her own Ph.D. in anthropology after the war, and this arrangement will enable her to keep up her father's work more comfortably, with the tribe arranged for viewing like ants tunnelling in a kid's glass terrarium. And one of the things she tells Pibble is that, while the Kus don't approve of murder, of course, if they were to murder someone, they would naturally use the left hand, because that's the hand of evil deeds.

 

Most of the clues kind of go like that. This is the first case (out of six) with Chief Inspector Jimmy Pibble by Dickinson, but in his world he's already got a reputation. We're told he's the one who gets these kind of cases. He interviews an old lag at one point:

    "Hope you don't mind me asking, but are you Pibble?"

    "Yes," said Pibble. "But how did you know?"

    "Kinky little case like vis. Vey wouldn't send one of the ver big boys out on it--too much to lose, nuffing to gain. Good luck, ven."

There is a lot of slang and dialect. Pibble himself uses "Crippen" as an oath amusingly enough, but a fair amount of it might be easier for a Brit...

A second murder is in progress when it's thwarted by Pibble discovering the culprit.

Pretty entertaining. I'd read another from the series. Do you know it? Is this representative? 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1968). Staircase. 

 

 

James Weldon Johnson's The Creation

 

The Creation

(A Negro Sermon) 

And God stepped out on space,


And He looked around and said,

"I'm lonely—


I'll make me a world."
And far as the eye of God could see


Darkness covered everything,


Blacker than a hundred midnights


Down in a cypress swamp.

Then God smiled,


And the light broke,


And the darkness rolled up on one side,


And the light stood shining on the other,


And God said, "That's good!"

Then God reached out and took the light in his hands,


And God rolled the light around in his hands


Until He made the sun;


And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.


And the light that was left from making the sun


God gathered it up in a shining ball


And flung it against the darkness,


Spangling the night with the moon and stars.


Then down between


The darkness and the light


He hurled the world;


And God said, "That's good!"

 
Then God himself stepped down—


And the sun was on His right hand,


And the moon was on His left;


The stars were clustered about His head,


And the earth was under His feet.


And God walked, and where He trod


His footsteps hollowed the valleys out


And bulged the mountains up.

Then He stopped and looked and saw


That the earth was hot and barren.


So God stepped over to the edge of the world


And He spat out the seven seas—


He batted his eyes, and the lightnings flashed—


He clapped his hands, and the thunders rolled—


And the waters above the earth came down,


The cooling waters came down.

Then the green grass sprouted,


And the little red flowers blossomed,


The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,


And the oak spread out his arms,


The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,


And the rivers ran down to the sea;


And God smiled again,


And the rainbow appeared,


And curled itself around His shoulder.

Then God raised His arm and He waved his hand


Over the sea and over the land,


And He said, "Bring forth! Bring forth!"


And quicker than God could drop His hand,


Fishes and fowls


And beasts and birds


Swam the rivers and the seas,


Roamed the forests and the woods,


And split the air with their wings.


And God said, "That's good!"

 
Then God walked around,


And God looked around


On all that He had made.


He looked at His sun,


And He looked at his moon,


And He looked at his little stars;


He looked on His world


With all its living things,


And God said, "I'm lonely still."

Then God sat down—


On the side of a hill where He could think;


By a deep, wide river He sat down;


With His head in His hands,


God thought and thought,


Till He thought, "I'll make me a man!"

Up from the bed of the river


God scooped the clay;


And by the bank of the river


He kneeled Him down;


And there the great God Almighty


Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,


Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,


Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;


This great God,


Like a mammy bending over her baby,


Kneeled down in the dust


Toiling over a lump of clay


Till He shaped it in is His own image;
Then into it He blew the breath of life,


And man became a living soul.


Amen.      Amen.

 

-James Weldon Johnson

 

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was an author, professor, and executive of the NAACP. This comes from his book of 1927 God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. That and the novel The Autobiography of an ex-Colored Man are generally considered Johnson's two major works.

 

I first read (or maybe heard) the poem in sixth grade. Mrs. Lydia Gaines was one my favourite teachers in grade school. But for the longest time all I remembered (and that not quite accurately) was "Blacker than a hundred midnights/In a cypress swamp".  

 

Jan Hilliard's Morgan's Castle (#readindies)

 "What a lot of ways there are to murder someone, she thought..."

Oh, what fun this one was! 

The sixteen-year-old Laura Dean had thought she might work at the local five-and-dime for the summer; there were supposed to be some college boys in town with summer jobs of their own. But her Aunt Amy has other plans, any local boy is bound to be heedless, and Laura's father Sidney is not to be trusted.

Aunt Amy's school friend Charlotte Morgan is writing a book about the Morgan family wine business and needs a secretary, she says; her daughter-in-law has recently died in a tragic accident and maybe she needs a new daughter-in-law, too. 

In fact there have been quite a few tragic accidents in recent memory at Morgan's Castle. And just how heroically well poor Charlotte Morgan has held up in the midst of all these *accidents*...it's no wonder everybody admires her so...

There's not a lot of mystery in this crime story--even if you managed to miss the word 'murderess' in the blurb on the cover--but there is a lot of humour. It's quite darkly funny, a bit Arsenic and Old Lace, though with more real suspense than that. You suspect somebody will be murdered during the book (and somebody is) but who will it be, and how will our murderess be stopped? That's assuming she is, of course.

There's also a fine romance budding, just not the one Aunt Amy and Charlotte Morgan have in mind. 

Jan Hilliard is a pseudonym for Hilda Kay Grant (1910-1996). She was born in Nova Scotia, but lived most of her adult life around Toronto. Morgan's Castle came out in 1964 and is set in the Niagara area. Her first novel won the Stephen Leacock Award for best humorous book of the year, and this one ought to have been in the running, too. The book was reissued last month by the Montreal-based independent Véhicule Press, as part of its Ricochet line of Canadian Noir reprints, edited by Brian Busby. 

Brian kindly supplied me with a copy of the book, and I am very glad he did.

February is #readindies month, hosted by Kaggsy at Bookish Ramblings. 

 

It also fits the My Reader's Block challenge: 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1964). Damsel in Distress.
 

van de Wetering's Hard Rain

 "It was a regular Dutch summer with heavy rain and fog."

There's corruption in the Amsterdam police force!

 

Martin IJsbreker is dead and it's ruled a suicide; a second bullet was spotted but somehow lost in the investigation. Three junkies died of a heroin overdose in a houseboat across the canal from IJsbreker's house on the same day, and those are ruled accidental death. You don't believe any of that, of course.

 

And neither did Grijpstra and de Gier. They go to their boss, the unnamed Commisaris, and he authorizes reopening the case. But soon the Commisaris is facing an investigation for financial misdeeds; Grijpstra and de Gier are nearly killed in an auto accident, and are then suspended because they were purportedly at fault. (The stop sign had been covered up.)

 

There's not actually much mystery. The bad guys corrupting the police force are big time drug runners; their leader is a childhood schoolmate of the Commisaris (and distinctly not a friend). The story is who can be trusted and who not, and how they're going to do down the bad guys. And it's a pretty good one! That's partly because there's more of the Commisaris in this, and I generally find him the most entertaining character in the series. We even learn his first name: Jan.

 

Janwillem van de Wetering wrote fourteen novels and two volumes of stories about the Amsterdam police detectives, and this, from 1986, is the 11th. 

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Silver Age (1986). Body of Water. 

Fakhraddin Gorgani's Vis and Ramin (tr. by Dick Davis)

And may there be no love at all unless

It's like this love, and brings such happiness.

How fortunate the lover whose sweet fate

It is to live in such a favoured state--

Truly, this is the way that love should be,

Good fortune, followed by simplicity!

How many days I've loved and never seen

A joy like that of Vis and her Ramin... 

Vis and Ramin is a poetic romance written by Fakhraddin Gorgani in Persian around 1050 CE, commissioned by the commander of Isfahan. It's the earliest surviving version of a story that takes place at some point in Persia under the Parthian empire (247 BCE - 220 CE).

King Mobad is the ruler of all Persia; he meets Shahru, wife of Qaren, a minor king and mother of two sons. She's beautiful and he woos her, but she says, my lord, I'm married with two boys, this is inappropriate. But if ever I were to have a daughter, I promise her to you.

Vis was that daughter. 

Years later and Vis is now of marriageable age and at least as beautiful as her mother. Shahru ignores her promise (or maybe thinks it doesn't matter anymore) and Vis is married off to her brother Viru. 

The introduction assures us that sibling marriage was fairly common among Parthian royal families (as it was in Pharaonic Egypt for that matter). At any rate, the story doesn't treat it as icky as it is for us, or would be to the Muslim Gorgani for that matter.

But King Mobad hasn't forgotten that promise. Before the marriage with Viru is even consummated, he's launched a war against Qaren. Qaren is killed. Vis was happy enough to be pledged to Viru, but she has no interest in that 'old man' and writes to him:

And if Viru weren't mine, this doesn't mean

I'd love you or consent to be your queen.

You killed my father, he's in heaven now;

My self, my being, are from him so how

Could you become my husband or my friend? 

Vis tells her mother off for promising her away even before she was born. Viru manages a successful counterattack for a while, but it can't last: in the end she's married to Mobad. She's sent off to Marv, Mobad's capital.

She brings her nurse. Who happens to know a magic spell or two. And when Vis is no more impressed with Mobad upon seeing him, the nurse whips up a spell that makes Mobad impotent, and Vis' second marriage is also never consummated. 

Though well-done the nurse is a fairly stock figure in this sort of romance--Davis in his introduction mentions the nurse from Romeo and Juliet--and she's out to get Vis interested in and involved with somebody:

You've never truly slept with any man.

You've had no joy of men, you've never known

A man whom you could really call your own...

What use is beauty if it doesn't bless

Your life with pleasure and love's happiness?

You're innocent, you're in the dark about it,

You don't know how forlorn life is without it.

You'll have to decide just what it is.

 

Who's available? Turns out Mobad has a very much younger (and very much better-looking) brother named Ramin and he happens to have fallen in love with Vis as soon as he's seen her:

Half of my body burns, half of it freezes.

Has God created, and can heaven show,

An angel made like me from fire and snow?

Fire does not melt my snow, and who has seen

Snow coexist with fire, as in Ramin?

Ramin approaches the nurse to see what can be done and pretty soon Vis and Ramin are finding ways to meet in private.

 

Mobad is a king; he has responsibilities and has to leave town occasionally. Mobad goes hunting and Ramin falls ill; Mobad goes to war against the Romans, and Ramin, a prominent member of court and an important warrior in his own right, falls ill. Eventually Mobad catches on--a bit after everyone else in the kingdom--and leaves Vis behind in a locked castle on a mountain top with a guard outside the door. He comes back to discover that the well-guarded Vis has been enjoying herself with Ramin. Mobad is aghast. All these restraints and guards are like a belt:

A pretty belt's of no significance

Unless it's holding up some kind of pants!

Buckle your belt as tight as you can make it,

But with no pants to wear you're still stark naked!

The story quite often proceeds by speeches and similes; though it has a different tone and subject matter, think of something like the Iliad. Where the Iliad might compare its warriors to lions or boars, Vis and Ramin compares the lovers to cypresses or moonlight. The art is generally in the details of the comparison. About two thirds through Ramin and Vis break up, both half deciding this is the wiser course, each convinced by an adviser of dubious value--the nurse for Vis, a 'philosopher' for Ramin--but that doesn't last long, and pretty soon they're working their way back together. But it takes a hundred pages first of letters, then in-person speeches, full of recriminations and lament, self-justification and imprecations, and not much event. But it reads well in place, with lots of fun rhetorical flourishes.

But I am still the lover whom you knew

Whose like has never yet been seen by you;

My brightness has not dimmed, my musky hair

Has not turned camphor white yet with despair,

My clustering curls are still as black and tight,

My shining pearl-like teeth as strong and white,

My silver breasts as firm and opulent,

My cypress stature has not yet been bent.

My face was once the moon, it's now the sun

Admired throughout the world, by everyone!...

I never saw a man who didn't prize me,

So why should you reject me and despise me? 

Actually, in typing that out, it rather reminds me of The Song of Solomon.

 

The translation, by Dick Davis, is done in heroic couplets. He writes in the introduction that the original Persian is in couplets, and that the line length is close to that of iambic pentameter. The rhymes are mostly quite tame, and so don't draw attention to themselves, but he is capable of more extravagant rhymes, as in the comic outburst of Mobad quoted above. (significance/some kind of pants!) I'd earlier read Davis' translation Faces of Love, of three Shirazi poets, and quite liked it. This is different, and by design less showy at times, but still a lot of fun.

 

Given all that buildup I was prepared for a tragic ending. The story is compared to Tristan and Yseult, and is sometimes considered a source for it, and I thought it could very well end with them dying in each other's arms in some foreign country. But it doesn't. Vis and Ramin live long and happy lives and produce two sons. (Though it does end less well for some of the other characters.)  How they get to their happiness, I'll leave as an exercise for readers...😉But it does mean it's a suitably seasonable book for a post, except I hadn't quite finished it yesterday.

This is a post about Ramin and Vis,

The ancient Persian epic, blogged by Reese,

A romance written in ten thousand lines,

With love and danger for your Valentine's.

A book off my Classics Club list. 

 

 

 

Jean Toomer (#poetry)

November Cotton Flower

Boll-weevil's coming, and the winter's cold,

Made cotton stalks look rusty, seasons old,

And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,

Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,

Failed in its function as the autumn rake;

Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take

All water from the streams; dead birds were found

In wells a hundred feet below the ground--

Such was the season when the flower bloomed.

Old folks were startled and it soon assumed

Significance. Superstition saw

Something it had never seen before:

Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,

Beauty so sudden for that time of year.

 

-Jean Toomer

 

This is from Jean Toomer's novel Cane of 1923; it's written in a mix of poetry and prose. This poem is in heroic couplets, but it is fourteen lines and can be viewed as a sonnet, though the turn comes after the ninth line. Brown eyes, as with Chuck Berry's 'Brown Eyed Handsome Man', stand in for brown skin, and loving without a trace of fear would probably be considered a rare enough moment for Blacks in rural Georgia (where the novel is set) at the time.

 

Poking around for pictures of cotton fields, I discovered that Marion Brown, the alto saxophonist, titled his album of 1979 'November Cotton Flower' and I have to assume he was thinking of this Jean Toomer poem. The title track from the album:

 

 

H. R. F. Keating's Inspector Ghote Draws a Line

     "'Threats to my life, Doctor? And how old am I? Eighty-two years of age. No, it is Allah himself who threatens my life now.'

     'Nevertheless, sir, the issuing of a threat to a person's life is a criminal offence.'"

It's the 1970s and Sir Asif Ibrahim is a former judge receiving death threats. He's long since retired, and is living in a falling down house a bullock's cart ride away from some place in India that's already nowhere. Sir Asif would just as soon live--or die--with no fuss. But his cousin is a member of parliament and the daughter who lives with him is worried. So Inspector Ghote is sent to see what he can do. He can expect no assistance from Sir Asif.

The threats reference the Madurai Conspiracy Case. Forty years earlier, just before the British finally quit India, a group planned to assassinate the governor of Madras but failed. Nevertheless, Sir Asif convicted and issued the death penalty for the conspirators. The death threats reference that ancient case.

 

There are servants in the house, but the main suspects are four: that daughter, still living at home; an itinerant Buddhist mystic who comes and goes; an American left-wing Catholic priest, foisted on the judge by a different cousin; and a local journalist who publishes the judge's musings, and is in love with the daughter. Remember that the house is remote. No one else could drop off those notes.

 

Is one of these four connected somehow to the Madurai Conspiracy Case? Or is that ancient case just a cover for some other motive? Or is it not even one of the four obvious suspects? And does Ghote save the judge in the end? Well, I'm not going to tell you any of that...😉 I will only note that the book does violate at least two of S. S. Van Dine's rules for writing mysteries...  

 

Despite those violations I found this pretty entertaining (though not amazing). Once upon a time I read Keating's list of the hundred best mysteries and like any serious reader of books approaching such a list I gobbled it down, while at the same time quibbling at the margins--The Green Ripper is the best Travis McGee book? How can you say that when it's actually the worst! etc., etc.--but this is the first of his mysteries I've read. If you've read him, how does it rank? 

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Silver Age (1979). Spooky House or Mansion.

And the winner is... (Classics Club Spin #43)

 ...number 2!

 

That's George Gissing's New Grub Street for me. I've read Charles Dickens: A Critical Study and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft by him before and liked them both, especially Henry Ryecroft. (Wonderful and underread.) This is supposed to be his masterpiece. 'Trials and tribulations in the lives of literary hacks' says the back of the book.

Have you read it? Did you spin and did you get something good? 

A Dream Deferred (#poetry)

Advice

Folks, I'm telling you,

birthing is hard

and dying is mean--

so get yourself

a little loving

in between.

 

-Langston Hughes

 

Testimonial

 

If I just had a piano,

if I just had a organ,

if I just had a drum,

how I could praise my Lord!

 

But I don't need no piano

  neither organ

  nor drum

for to praise my Lord!

 

-Langston Hughes

 

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

like a syrupy sweet?

 

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

 

Or does it explode?

-Langston Hughes

 

I feel like Langston Hughes has been in the air lately. A couple of my regular poetry sources have featured him.

 

Hughes (1901-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and moved to New York City in 1921 for college. (Columbia.) He became an important writer in the Harlem Renaissance. These three poems all come from his volume Montage of a Dream Deferred of 1951, which represents voices heard around Harlem in one 24-hour period. The last one quoted is probably the best known poem of the book. It supplied Lorraine Hansbury the title for her hit play, as well as the title for a poem I've previously quoted on the blog. 

Classics Club Spin #43

 

Once again it's time for a new Classics Club spin. The rules are here but that's old news & the fun is showing off a list of books, so...straight to that!

1.) Willa Cather/Sapphira and the Slave Girl

2.) George Gissing/New Grub Street

3.) Nella Larsen/Passing

4.) Sinclair Lewis/Elmer Gantry

5.) Jack London/The Iron Heel

6.) Jack London/Martin Eden

7.) Harry Mark Petrakis/A Dream of Kings

8.) Edgar Wallace/The Four Just Men

9.) Eudora Welty/Delta Wedding

10.) Mikhail Bulgakov/Heart of a Dog

11.) Simone de Beauvoir/The Mandarins

12.) Joachim Machado de Assis/Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

13.) Benito Perez Galdos/That Bringas Woman

14.) Robert Walser/Jakob von Gunten

15.) John Ruskin/Unto This Last

16.) R. L. Stevenson/An Inland Voyage

17.) Apollonius Rhodius/The Argonautica

18.) Luis Vaz de Camões/The Lusiads

19.) Nezami Ganjavi/Layli and Majnun

20.) Gotthold Lessing/Nathan The Wise

 

These are all from my current Classics Club list. Which look good to you?    

Washing Day

 

from Washing Day

The Muses have turned gossips; they have lost

The buskined step, and clear high-sounding phrase,

Language of gods. Come, then, domestic Muse,

In slip-shod measure loosely prattling on,

Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream,

Or droning flies, or shoes lost in the mire

By little whimpering boy, with rueful face --

Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded washing day.

...

Then would I sit me down, and ponder much

Why washings were; sometimes, through hollow hole

Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft

The floating bubbles; little dreaming then

To see, Montgolfier, thy silken ball

Ride buoyant through the clouds, so near approach

The sports of children and the toils of men.

Earth, air, and sky, the ocean hath its bubbles,

And verse is one of them--this most of all.

 

-Anna Laetitia Barbauld

 

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825) was a poet, essayist, literary critic, and a pioneering author of children's books. She was from a Dissenting family in the Midlands. 

 

The measure doesn't seem at all 'slip-shod' to me, but quite a solid blank verse. You can decide if you think she's 'prattling on'--I might say yes, but in a very amusing and ironic way. I've only quoted a quarter of the poem--the very beginning and the very end. You can find the entire poem here. The Montgolfier brothers were pioneers of flight by hot-air balloon.

 

I came on this because I recently finished reading Daisy Hay's Dinner With Joseph Johnson, which came out in 2022. Very good! Joseph Johnson (1738-1809) was an important left-wing publisher, also from a Dissenting background, who, in addition to first publishing Barbauld, was also the publisher of Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin (Charles' grandfather), William Cowper, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Johnson published early Wordsworth and Coleridge, and was William Blake's primary employer. (Though Blake published a lot of his own books himself.) Johnson was famous for his weekly dinners--Benjamin Franklin would show up, until the American Revolution got under way, and Franklin left England--and when Johnson was imprisoned for selling books the government didn't like in 1799, he continued the dinners in prison.

 

I don't think I'd ever heard of Anna Laetitia Barbauld before, but part of the poem was quoted in the book--"Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded washing day." and I decided I had to find the rest of it.

 

 

 

The Long Voyage (#poetry)

The Long Voyage

Not that the pines were darker there,

nor mid-May dogwood brighter there,

nor swifts more swift in summer air;

  it was my own country,

 

having its thuderclap of spring,

its long midsummer ripening,

its corn hoar-stiff at harvesting,

  almost like any country,

 

yet being mine; its face, its speech,

its hills bent low within my reach,

its river birch and upland beech

  were mine, of my own country.

 

Now the dark waters at the bow

fold back, like earth against the plow;

foam brightens like the dogwood now

  at home, in my own country.

 

-Malcolm Cowley

 

One last bit of Malcolm Cowley and then maybe I'm done for now. Cowley's own country where he grew up was rural western Pennsylvania; his first book of poems was titled Blue Juniata for the left bank tributary of the Susquehanna.

 

This poem together with three others by Cowley first appeared in Poetry magazine of October 1938, along with others by Kenneth Fearing, Stephen Spender, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1938, Cowley was living on the east coast, in Connecticut.

Death in Fancy Dress

"Blackmail on a tremendous scale? I see. A dirty business."

The Spider is running a blackmail ring right across England. Jewels are being replaced with paste and victims are committing suicide. The newest target seems to be Hilary Feltham, a young girl with a mind of her own, living with her stepparents at Feltham Abbey. Philpotts of the Home Office needs somebody unofficial on site, and Tony Keith, a lawyer and a World War I veteran has a family connection to the place. Could he just?

Of course he can. He brings along his friend Jeremy Freyne who intends to marry Hilary, even though she's already got two other fiancés in the offing, one of whom is Philpott's official man on site, Arthur Dennis.

It's the other fiancé, Hilary's distant cousin Ralph Feltham, who's murdered on the night of a fancy dress ball.

Was it one of those suitors did the job? Or was someone associated with The Spider's gang?

The solution surprised me, which is always a good thing, but on the whole the setup both took too long and was confusing. It was a hundred pages in (out of a novel of 220 pages) before we got on to events, and even then I had to make a chart of the family relations. I don't know Anthony Gilbert (a pen name for Lucy Malleson) all that well, but is this one of the more highly regarded ones? It did get a British Crime Classics Library reprint. But her more famous detective Arthur Crook came later (and from what I've read, seems better.)

This edition also had two short stories featuring Inspector Field of London. I enjoyed those more than the novel itself.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1933). Performer (Dancer) 

Brooms of Steel? Or Shovels of Plastic?

 

Looking northeast from my front stoop this evening

#1252 

 

Like Brooms of Steel

The Snow and Wind

Had swept the Winter Street -

The House was hooked

The Sun sent out

Faint Deputies of Heat -

Where rode the Bird

The Silence tied

His ample - plodding Steed

The Apple in the Cellar snug

Was all the one that played.

 

-Emily Dickinson

I searched for Emily Dickinson winter poem and this was what DuckDuckGo produced for me. I will have read it before but I didn't really remember it; it was suggested by this post.

 

It wasn't Brooms of Steel that shovelled that walk, but my nice kid (?25--that makes him a kid to me these days) neighbour to the north, who this morning not only shovelled his walk and the laneway between the houses, but then went on to do my walk as well. It continued snowing most of the day, but before I even got around to doing the touch up, he'd done it. I did manage to shovel the flat part of our roof--shovelling is not the worst of household chores I feel, and I--almost--missed having a chance to do it.

 

You might call what the city's snowplow has Brooms of Steel, I suppose. 

 

Our weather's been odd. Snow, a bit over a week ago, which suggested last week's Frost poem, but then everything melted again, and just today we had a significant new snow, so another snow poem was called for after all. The Deputies of Heat today were indeed fairly faint. (A high of 15F.)

Linda Sue Grimes, whose post I poached from, reminds that hooking is something one does to produce rugs (I can't give you any details) and suggests that the Steed the bird rides is a tree. Certainly the pine tree of our front yard in the picture is a welcome home to birds.

2026 Mystery Scavenger Hunt

This is a challenge I've done before but it's been a few years, and maybe it's time to do it again. It's hosted by Bev at My Reader's Block, and the idea is to read classic mysteries from the Golden and Silver Age and match them up against a series of images from their covers. The minimum level is eight, and I will aim for eight in both ages. 

No idea what I'm likely to read...

Here's the playing card with all the categories for the Golden Age:

Thanks to Bev for hosting this!

 

Malcolm Cowley

"...he was mounting one of the most important rescue missions in American literary history..."

Malcolm Cowley was American writer of poetry, essays, and memoirs, as well as an editor. Born in 1898, he died in 1989, thus seeing most of 20th century and watching American literature (as distinct from English literature) come into its own. 

What makes Cowley interesting or important? He's pretty obscure now. Why did Gerald Howard want to write this biography? Cowley's friends with Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Cowley's the literary editor of The New Republic in the 30s, and editor of the Viking Portables in the 40s. It's Viking Portable for Faulkner that Howard is referencing in the sentence at the top; Howard is unwilling to be decisive, but it's been said, and I think it's probably true, without Cowley there's no Nobel Prize for Faulkner.

Cowley was born the son of a doctor in the countryside near Pittsburgh. His Pittsburgh public high school was a good one. He got to Harvard, on scholarship, at an era when that was still a mark against, but he did well there, joining the staff of the literary magazines. But before he finished his degree, and before the US entered the war, he went to France to help out, as did Hemingway, Dos Passos, Cummings, except by the time he got there, there was an overabundance of ambulance drivers, so he drove munitions trucks. He sees only a bit of action as a driver, then returns to Harvard; later he interrupts his studies a second time to join the US Army, but he's still in officer training when the Armistice comes. In 1919, he's a Harvard graduate, but penniless.

What's a young person with literary ambitions to do in 1919? Go to Paris! Cowley wangles a graduate scholarship that pays for him and his first wife, the landscape painter Peggy Baird. He writes a thesis on Racine and improves his French, but he also meets all sorts of literary figures including the French surrealists, Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Tristan Tzara.

He returns to the US, scrapes by on book reviews and translation for a few years. His first book of poems comes out in 1929; he becomes proofreader, then editor, then the chief literary editor for The New Republic. While there he accepts and publishes John Cheever's first story, and sees that two others come out in The New Yorker. The New Republic, with a millionaire benefactor, pays decently well, and that continues even after the Crash.

In 1934, his memoir of the Lost Generation, Exile's Return, appears. 

His first marriage breaks down at the end of the 20s, not helped by affairs and too much drinking on both their parts. His second marriage is a success and lasts until his death.

In the 30s he's not a member of the Communist party, but he's pretty much the poster boy for Fellow Traveller. He goes to Spain and fails to see what the Stalinists are up to, even though Dos Passos tells him they killed my friend Andrés Nin. He signs a letter saying the Moscow show trials were justified and that the victims were indeed guilty. Eventually he changes his mind on Stalin, but it's late. He's eased out of The New Republic and when he takes a job in Washington during World War II, he's almost immediately hounded out of it. 

Then come the Viking years, editing the Portables. He also works as acquisitions adviser, and sees On The Road into print (which required a fight) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (which didn't). He publishes several other books, mostly late in his life.

He dies at the age of ninety.  

Howard's biography came out last year. I read both a positive review and an excerpt from the book and they convinced me to read it. It's an extremely well done biography, good on both the positive things Cowley did, but also solid on Cowley's dismaying relationship to Communism. And I did wonder if Howard wasn't half thinking of himself when he wrote about that rescue mission up above. If you're interested in the history of American literature in the middle of the 20th Century, it's an excellent book to read.

So then I went on to reread a couple of Cowley's more famous books:

Exile's Return

Exile's Return is his history of the Lost Generation ("You are all a lost generation"--Gertrude Stein, the epigraph to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises). It's part memoir, part history, part literary criticism, an easy enough mix because Cowley was in the center of it all.  They all go to France; they all come back. 

How aware of money it was: book reviews paid a dollar each for fifty or hundred words, but you only got paid when the reviews appeared. Meanwhile you could sell those half-dozen review copies for thirty-five cents each, and with the $2.10 in your pocket from six books, "you would buy bread and butter and lamb chops and Bull Durham for cigarettes and order a bag of coal..."

The book ends with a discussion of the suicide of Harry Crosby, a minor literary figure now mostly forgotten, but treated by Cowley as representative. Cowley had access to Crosby's journals and it's sad and touching, but as Cowley admits in the introduction to the second edition of 1951, he mostly wrote about Crosby because he couldn't bear to write about Hart Crane, a much closer friend who also committed suicide.

The Dream of the Golden Mountains

Then I went on to reread his similar memoir of the 30s, which comes out in 1980. It's a much more explicitly political book; well, the 30s were a more political decade. Cowley himself is more involved in the fights over Stalin and Trotsky, whether there should be a Popular Front and if the Socialists were friends or enemies; in the book, which comes out in 1980, he a bit regrets his obsessions of time, and discusses the events of FDR's administration on the literary scene, particularly the Federal Writers Project. 

Another fine memoir.

The View From 80

Well, I put that in the picture, but I'm saving the reread of that one for a few years yet...  😉

Dust of Snow

 

Dust of Snow

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

 

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

 

-Robert Frost

 

When I first thought of this poem a few days ago all the local pines were well-dusted in snow, but it rained all day yesterday and today was sunny and well above freezing. There's not much snow left. So I used an AI image generator for my picture. I never would have gotten a convenient crow anyway.

 

I'd like to think I'd behave like Frost and be cheered up in such a circumstance, but it's quite possible I'd just look up and think, stupid crow...more likely to have been a squirrel here in any case. 😉

Back to the Classics 2026

Like others, I've been lamenting the demise of Karen's Back to the Classics challenge, so I've decided to simply do it this year myself.

Half the fun of the old Back to the Classics challenge was conjuring up a list of classics to match the prompts for the year--and then proceeding to ignore all those stated intentions. (And commenting on everybody else's plans.) At first I was going to make my own list of categories, but then I saw that Deb Nance at Readerbuzz had created a set of categories and I decided to just steal hers. So here we go--and my tentative matches against each category.

The old challenge required that the books be at least fifty years old, and I'll honor that. 

19th Century Classic

George Gissing/New Grub Street 

20th Century Classic

Eudora Welty/Delta Wedding 

An Award-winning Classic

Ursula K. Le Guin/The Left Hand of Darkness (Nebula, Hugo) 

A Classic Journey or Travel Narrative, Fiction or Non-Fiction

R. L. Stevenson/An Inland Voyage 

A Classic by a Woman Author

Rebecca West/The Fountain Overflows 

Humorous or Satirical Classic

Machado de Assis/The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas 

Classic Detective or Mystery Fiction

Edgar Wallace/The Four Just Men 

Classic Children's Book

Horatio Alger/Ragged Dick 

Banned or Censored Classic

Mikhail Bulgakov/Heart of a Dog 

A Classic in Translation

Simone de Beauvoir/The Mandarins 

A Non-fiction Classic

John Ruskin/Unto This Last 

Free Choice

Nazami Ganjavi/Layli and Majnun

 

I just formalized a new Classics Club list, my second, so I had a ready list of classics to choose from.

If you've been missing this challenge & put together a Back to the Classics list, mention it in comments and I'll be thrilled to go find yours. 

2025 Reading Year in Review

Another year of reading done & it was a good one. Some highlights:

First Time Reads 

Percival Everett/James (2024)

I hadn't read much Everett before and really the thing I knew the best about him was the film American Fiction. But I suspected I would like this, reread Huck Finn in advance to prepare, and I was not disappointed. While I had some quibbles about the reveal at the end of the book (but no spoilers!) it still sent me off to read a half dozen other Everetts this year. Assumption was probably my second favorite, but So Much Blue was also awfully good.

 

Ferdia Lennon/Glorious Exploits (2024)

Lennon's an Irish writer, but this, his debut, is a historical novel set in Sicily after the Athenian campaign to conquer Syracuse fails (413 BC) during the Peloponnesian War. The captured survivors from the Athenian army are thrown into a quarry with the intent of enslaving them; instead they're left to starve. Lampo and Gelon, two lower-class Syracusans are thrilled that Athenians have been defeated, but they're fans of Euripides and maybe some of these Athenians know the plays? A sad, but also funny, tribute to the power of art.

Stuart Dybek/I Sailed With Magellan (2003)

I'd long known of Dybek, a Chicago writer, but had never read anything by him--I'm not sure why. A mistake. This is a collection of linked stories about Perry Katzik's coming of age on the South Side of Chicago. Think a male, urban Del Jordan (of Lives of Girls and Women). A friend from Chicago and I then drove each other on to read most of Dybek. I think he preferred The Coast of Chicago--also a very good story collection--but I stuck with this as my favorite.

 

Rudiger Safranski/Goethe: Life as a Work of Art (2017) 

A recent German biography of Goethe, superbly translated into English by David Dollenmayer. It gets the facts--of course, you would hope that--but it's also well-structured and sensitively done. 

The one on this list that actually got a post! 

Gerald Howard/The Insider (2025)

Subtitled "Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature"--and that's a good overview. It's a model literary biography, and Cowley's fairly obscure these days so he needed one. Howard doesn't soft-pedal the bad things Cowley did, and there were some, but definitely reminds us how important Cowley was to the rising status of American literature during the 20th century.

The last book I read of the year, and I'm thinking it's going to get its own post soon.

First Book of the 2026

Why, as it turns out, it was a reread of Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return, which Howard says, and I agree, is Cowley's masterpiece. Look for that post.

Some Exceptional Rereads 

Mark Twain/Huck Finn

 

Thomas Mann/The Magic Mountain - I reread this before reading Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium. The Tokarczuk was fun--two of her books have ended up on best of year lists for me before--but not this time. The Magic Mountain is a great novel.

 

Susanna Clarke/Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - There was a new Clarke out early last year The Wood At Midwinter. It was fine; my primary complaint is that it was too short. So, of course, I had to reread her first. My third time and just as good as the first two. 

 

Oh, yeah, and all of Charlie Chan. 

 

Number of Slender Mysteries

 

19 

 

Number of Chunksters

 

11. 

 

Percentage of Non-Fiction Books

 

30%. That includes three graphic non-fiction books, and seven (!) books of aphorisms, if one counts those as non-fiction... 

  

Percentage of Books Written by Women

 

16%. Hmm. Not very good.

 

Percentage of Books from the Toronto Public Library

 

47% (Hooray for the TPL!)

 

Percentage of Books in Translation

 

24% - original languages were German, French, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Czech.

 

Plans

 

What me plan?  I signed up for the European Reading Challenge again this year. I'm going to try to write more blog posts--to which end maybe I'll sign up for a few more challenges.

 

A good reading year. Happy New Year to you and may your new reading year be good, too! 

European Reading Challenge Signup 2026

 

Time to signup for Gilion's European Reading Challenge for the new year. Hers is one of the best challenges going as far as I'm concerned, and I won't be missing it this year. The idea is to visit unique European countries by book, and I'll sign up at the Five-Star/Deluxe Entourage level once again for five books, but suspect once again I'll go past that. I never know what my books are going to be but I'm pretty sure the first country will be France, because I'm likely to finish Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return about the Lost Generation authors in France later this evening.

Any European books in your future? 

European Reading Challenge Wrapup 2025

 

I read my last European book a while ago as it turned out, but you never know...

I visited nine countries by review this year, over the five I pledged for the challenge, but not all the countries I did visit--some reviews never got written. But here's the ones that did:

1.) Anabel Loyd/The Dervish Bowl (Slovakia)

2.) Volker Weidermann/Ostend (Belgium)

3.) Angus Wilson/Hemlock & After (U.K.)

4.) Janwillem van de Wetering/Tumbleweed (Netherlands)

5.) Rüdiger Safranski/Goethe: Life as a Work of Art (Germany)

6.) Tim Blanning/Augustus the Strong (Poland)

7.) Ford Madox Ford/Parade's End (France)

8.) Patricia Moyes/Death on the Agenda (Switzerland)

9.) Cesare Pavese/The Moon and the Bonfires (Italy)

 

No new countries visited this year.  The standout visits this year were Germany and France.

 

Now to post the signup for the new year!