March Wrapup

My reading month in March:

Koren Shadmi's Graphical Biographies

The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television

I saw this reviewed in the New York Review of Books--yes, yes, I'm running behind--and ordered it from the library. I was never particularly a fan of The Twilight Zone--too black and white for me at the age I would have watched the show in reruns--but I liked the graphical style of the clips in the review and the book looked interesting. It was. In fact, really quite good--it got me interested and I might try to see some Twilight Zone episodes. It recapitulates Serling's life story in a narrative frame you might find in a Twilight Zone plot.

Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D (text by David Kushner)

Looking up Shadmi in my library's catalog, I also came across this. I was a fan of Dungeons and Dragons and so I got this one, too. Though it's Gary Gygax in the title, don't worry: Dave Arneson gets equal time. It was enjoyable, and even though it spoke to me more, I do think it was a less successful work than The Twilight Zone volume. The text is written as if by a dungeon master, or even more, as if it were from that early computer game Colossal Cave/Adventure. (That game's author Will Crowther gets a couple of pages.) "You are in a maze of twisty passages all alike." "You are likely to be eaten by a grue."

The Mystery Department

Michael Innes' Hare Sitting Up

An Inspector Appleby story from 1959. Take identical twin brothers, one a schoolmaster, the other a biowarfare scientist, add a rural lord half(?)-crazed with bird-watching, throw in a blackmailer and a pretty girl with a Ph.D., and you've got a story. It's mostly Innes in his silly mode, which I actually prefer, though Innes does want to say one or two serious things about the morality of WMDs. Not his best by any means, but fun.

Julie Campbell's The Gatehouse Mystery

Trixie and Honey find a diamond in the old gate house on the Wheeler property. Are they going to turn it into the proper authorities? Of course not!

This book has the first appearance of Trixie's older brothers, Brian--and Mart, the snarky one with a propensity toward Brobdingnagian vocables. Always my favorite character. I'm sure I don't know why.

The next in the series is waiting at the library for me to pick it up.

Chester Himes' Blind Man With A Pistol

The last of the Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones mysteries Himes completed, from 1969. This is a very ambitious book, bursting the bounds of Himes' already capacious sense of what a mystery can be. All in 191 pages. Several plots; several time frames. Pretty great & at some risk of sending me down a Himes rabbit hole--I've ordered up the recent biography of Himes from the library. But if you're interested in Himes as a mystery writer, you should probably start with something earlier in the series.

"'There ain't going to be any facts,' Grave Digger informed Anderson."

#BrianMooreAt100

Cathy at 746Books has organized a year long read of Brian Moore's books in honor of what would have been his hundredth birthday. 

Brian Moore's The Color of Blood

Political tensions in an unnamed East European country just before the fall of the Iron Curtain. I thought it was very good. More here.

Brian Moore's Fergus

That I enjoyed The Color of Blood so much led me on to read Fergus. Not as good, I said, though still good.

This month's Brian Moore is the great, but grim, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Will I reread it? Maybe, but I haven't yet.

The Poetry Section

George Bradley's Of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

This collection came out with Knopf in 1991. A living American poet (b. 1953). The first volume of his I've read--though a couple of these poems appeared in The New Republic in the 80s, so it's possible I read those before. I thought it was very good. Expect something to appear in a poem post in the future. Bradley's poem 'The Lives of the Chinese Poets' begins 'About suffering they were reticent,...' O my Auden! 

Georgi Gospodinov

Natural Novel, And Other Stories, The Physics of Sorrow

Contemporary Bulgarian novelist, poet, story writer. That's most of what of his is available in English. I think he's pretty good. More thoughts here, mostly on The Physics of Sorrow.

Hilary Mantel's Cromwell

Wolf Hall

I reread this for Brona's readalong, but I'm *still* organizing my thoughts on this one. Not very organized thoughts, eh? I should have finished rereading Bring Up The Bodies to be on schedule, but I haven't...

Shakespeare's Henry VIII

That sent me off to this. Not necessarily one of the better plays, but there are some great speeches--Buckingham's (Act II, Sc 1) on his sentence of death:

The law I bear no malice for my death
'T has done upon the premises but justice
But those that sought it I could wish more Christians

or Wolsey's farewell to greatness.

Andre Alexis

Contemporary Canadian writer. He's four books into a series of five he's termed a quincunx. I read the first, Pastoral (2014). I thought it was very good. A newly minted priest takes up a parish in a small town near Sarnia, Ontario. The second one in the series--Fifteen Dogs--is the celebrated one; it won the Giller, one of Canada's two major novel prizes, as well as various other prizes. I might have more to say when I finish the sequence, at least as it stands now. I have the others on hand.

Euripides

Rex Warner (no relation?--though that first name could so easily slip into...) translated three Euripidean plays with strong female characters in the 40s & 50s: Medea, Hippolytus, Helen. I was interested in the Helen, but then I carried on. Medea, Phaedra, & Helen are all women who do bad or tricksy things and suffer at the hands of men. These are quite often read now as feminist or proto-feminist; would an Athenian of the time have thought so? Mmm. Certainly as Aristophanes presents it (Women at the Thesmophoria) Euripides wasn't popular with the ladies...but then, that's Aristophanes.

No longer the standard translations, but I thought they were quite good. I especially liked Warner's handling of the choruses. He's an interesting novelist (The Aerodrome) and poet, but best known now, I'm guessing, as the translator of Thucydides.

The books that were still around the house (at least when I took the picture):

I wrote most of this post a while ago. It was long past time to either delete it or publish it. Yet another month of much, but muddled, reading--I sometimes get embarrassed by the desultoriness of my reading. Oh, well. Any of these strike thoughts in you?

Chester Himes' All Shot Up

If Wikipedia is to be believed, Chester Himes' All Shot Up (1960) is the fourth out of nine novels that involve his Harlem police detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones. It is also the fourth novel of the series I've read, though my reading has been haphazard and not in order. But that's my loss: they're great.

In this one the first two chapters (ten pages in my edition) go down before Coffin Ed and Gravedigger appear; in those ten pages a gold Cadillac runs over a woman and kills her, but she gets up just in time for a black Buick to run her over again. A black sailor, Roman Hill, is driving that newly-bought Cadillac of his; his girlfriend Sassafras, and the dealer who sold him the car, Mister Baron, are in the car with him. The Buick, it seems, is chasing after them, and pulls them over; in it are three cops, two black and their leader white; they witnessed the hit and run, and they have suspicions about the purchase of the Cadillac. They're open to bribery, but in the end they simply attack Mr. Baron, take the cash paid for the Cadillac, which he's holding, and everything else he has, too, and then they take the Cadillac. After Roman Hill recognizes the cops are simply stealing his car, he takes their Buick and starts off in pursuit. The whole scene is witnessed by a black man stealing tires off some other car on the street. As a mystery reader, you figure he's the witness our heroes are going to have to find.

By the end of the novel, we learn that everything we've just seen can't be trusted. The Cadillac isn't really gold; the cops aren't really cops; Mister Baron isn't even a Mister. The woman who was run over once or twice wasn't a woman. And Coffin Ed and Gravedigger never talk to that tire-thief: instead he has his head chopped off in a traffic accident.

Is it any wonder I don't trust even Wikipedia anymore?

Coffin Ed and Gravedigger are the sort of cops who operate half outside the law while making sure that the right outcome occurs in the end, albeit with a little over-the-top violence along the way.

The main events circle around Caspar Holmes, an important, but corrupt, leader in black Harlem, and when the precinct lieutenant hears that Caspar Holmes has been found unconscious on the sidewalk in the company of two dead men, he calls in Coffin Ed and Gravedigger. The story moves along swiftly to a mostly surprising ending.

As you might guess from the men dressed as women and women dressed as men, the events of the novel take place around Harlem's gay subculture. The tone of the novel was surprisingly tolerant for 1960. But since I'd read Chester Himes' sex parody Pinktoes some years ago, that wasn't entirely surprising. But still, it was pleasantly, a little bit.

All in all, this was pretty good. I would start with an earlier one, if I was new to Himes. This one felt just a little like he'd fallen into too comfortable a groove. But not to be missed if you're a fan.

There's a dead body, a hat, a couple of broken objects (building, sidewalk) in the picture. But I think for now I'll go with the car/truck category, both of which appear on this Harlem street.

Silver Age. Car/Truck. My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt.

Also this book has been on the shelves here since 2012, so it also qualifies for my other challenge: the Mount TBR Challenge.