Marple: Sanctuary

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

Fun fact, when this story was first published in the U.S., in serial form, it was under the title “Murder at the Vicarage.” This despite the fact that Christie had already written a Miss Marple novel with the same name. I wonder what was going on there. Was she being lazy? Forgetful?

Another bit of background: the story was auctioned as part of a Westminster Abbey restoration appeal. Maybe that explains why the body is discovered in a church. Because otherwise I didn’t find the explanation for that part very convincing.

It is a terrible story. The only good part was the description of Miss Marple and Bunch as survivors of the linen sale. This was the first of the Marple stories where I honestly didn’t care what was going on and so wasn’t paying much attention when it came time for Miss Marple to wrap things up. A waste of time even for her biggest fans.

Marple index

The new me-dia

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

No Oscar buzz . . . yet.

The release of the documentary Melania, which is about what the wife of Donald Trump was busy doing during the lead-up to his second inauguration, has been met with a predictable chorus of critical carping. Most if not all of which I’m sure is well deserved. Yes, the film itself was a $40 million bribe that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was making to the Trump family in order to curry favour. And I’m sure it’s every bit as bad and soul destroying a movie as reviewers have been saying. Here’s Mark Kermode, a reliably level-headed Everyman: “It’s horrible. It’s the most depressing experience I’ve ever had in the cinema and I’ve seen A Serbian Film, I’ve seen Cannibal Holocaust. I’ve never felt this depressed in my life in the cinema.”

That may be a fair take, but Melania is not a unique phenomenon. The way celebrities use their money and power to shape the public presentation of their lives is a subject I’ve been banging on about for years. Most recently I talked about how the tennis player Naomi Osaka was being lionized by the media for her attempt to assert “narrative control” of her public image, and related it to other sports figures like Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, and Venus and Serena Williams who had all been the subject of documentary and autobiographical films they had also been involved in the production of. As I put it then:

Everyone wants that kind of control. But who has that privilege? Only the most powerful. Billionaires. Those with “massive social-media followings.” Celebrities who own their own media companies.

Melania Trump is another figure in the exact same mold, and served as a producer on Melania. As I said over ten years ago in a post on celebrity biographies:

Whatever or whoever the subject, the same rules of the dance apply and the “sausage-making process” does its job. There’s nothing sinister or even wrong with that, but you have to always keep it in mind any time you’re getting access to a source that has a clear interest in spinning a story a particular way. Which is to say, any source. The story you’re hearing is the one they want you to hear. It may be true, but that’s beside the point.

I find the way people try to draft celebrities or billionaires onto different political teams ridiculous. Some rich and powerful people may be slightly better than others, but none of them are the friends or (shudder) “allies” of the common people, and their program when it comes to trying to “control the narrative” of how they are presented in the media is always exactly the same. To call it whitewashing or propaganda or advertising for their personal brand should go without saying. No one should be surprised at what Melania is like, not because of the kind of person Melania Trump is but because they’ve already seen this movie and read this book countless times already. If you’re not seeing or reading something that someone doesn’t want you to see or read then it’s just an ad.

Brrrrr

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

Weather updates for yesterday morning and today. It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t the case that it’s been like this for over a month. It’s that time of year when you start to feel like enough is enough.

The Return of a MAD Look at Old Movies

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

The Return of a MAD Look at Old Movies

I started off my review of The MAD Book of Mysteries by saying that since I’m a fan of both MAD Magazine and classic detective fiction it was a book that couldn’t miss.

Well, because I really like both MAD and old movies, when I was a kid this was another favourite pocketbook of mine, even though I know I didn’t pick up on many of the references. At least the more specific ones. I always wondered, for example, who Rhonda Fleming was, and even today I’m a bit surprised that she was a household name in 1970. But the send-ups aren’t of particular movies so much as genres. There’s a circus movie, a submarine movie, a pirate movie, a mad scientist movie, a historical biopic, etc.

There are strings of gags that I’ve remembered for fifty years now. Here is a police captain and his deputy busting into Dr. Fear’s Frankenstein-style laboratory.

Deputy (seeing the corpse on a tabe): This man has no pulse, Captain!

Captain (grabbing hold of Dr. Fear): Aha! And if my powers of detection serve me correctly, I believe this man is the thief! All right, swine, what did you do with that man’s pulse?

Deputy: You don’t understand, Captain! This man is dead!

Captain: Dead? Then he doesn’t need his pulse! We came all the way out here for nothing!

And here’s a bit from the WW2 submarine story:

Lieutenant: Sir, this may sound like a scatter-brained idea, but why not stuff our clothes and some junk and a little oil into one of the torpedo tubes and shoot it to the surface? When they see the oil slick and stuff, they’ll think they got us!

Captain: Not bad, lieutenant, but I’ve got one even better. Why not wait till they hit us, then hold on to everything so that nothing floats to the surface, and drive them crazy wondering!

Credit Dick De Bartolo for the writing there, and Jack Davis for the art. This was a book of new material (that is, not stuff taken from the magazine) and as the title indicates was a sequel to A MAD Look at Old Movies. Unfortunately I never read that one or had a copy and they’re quite expensive now on the second-hand market (where I’m sure they’re not in the best of shape given how well-read they likely were). This makes me wonder why someone doesn’t republish these old MAD books and magazines in some new editions. I’m sure there’d be a market. Just look at how popular the EC Archives titles are. Get on it!

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Marple: Greenshaw’s Folly

/ Alex Good / 20 Comments

If you’ve read around in any of Agatha Christie’s work you know that one of the things that characterizes her mysteries is their theatrical nature. Murder is rarely a spur-of-the-moment sort of thing. It’s not just planned and premeditated but scripted, along with prepared costumes and very exact timings built into the plot.

If you’re playing along at home, these mysteries are often the most difficult to figure out. You may correctly guess whodunit but throw your hands up at how they did it because the “how” is so layered. One of the prime instances of this is Death on the Nile, but this short story is another good example. I think I knew right away who was going to kill Miss Greenshaw, and the way the murder was presented was so ridiculously dramatic made clear that it was being stage-directed, but I didn’t have it all figured out. In part because I don’t think that would be possible based on the evidence we’re given. As one critic remarked, this story is “a notable example of Miss Marple’s habit of drawing solutions from a hat, with hardly a trace of why or wherefore.”

At least the murderer had the good sense not to leave the body in the library. We’d already been down that road before with Miss Marple, and it was as much a cliché as it was then as it clearly is here. “The only thing the library needs is a body,” the collector of “monstrosities” opines. “Those old-fashioned detective stories about murder in the library” knew what they were about. So instead we settle for the drawing room. Bonus points though if you know what the reference to “Paul and Virginia” is to. They are, apparently, the subjects rendered in a “colossal bronze” found in the library of Greenshaw’s Folly. My guess is that they represent the lovers in an eighteenth-century French novel of the same name.

Marple index

Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The Avengers Volume 4

/ Alex Good / 20 Comments

Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The Avengers Volume 4

I read this shortly after reviewing the Marvel Epic Collection containing The Avengers #1-20. What we get here are issues #31-40, and while the line-up of heroes is mostly the same as at the end of the Epic Collection volume, and I think the spirit of their adventures is similar, things were under different management. Jack Kirby had been replaced by Don Heck and Stan Lee was in the process of letting Roy Thomas take over writing duties. And as much as Lee and Kirby are justly lionized for being two of the creative giants who got Marvel started, I don’t think there’s any falling off. In fact, I prefer what we get from Heck and Thomas over any of the Lee and Kirby collaborations. Comics were growing up fast.

The earlier issues have more of Lee’s hyperbolic salesmanship. “Read this yarn slowly – carefully! It’s just possibly one of the most deeply-moving, off-beat thrillers of the year, and we want you to savor every prize-winning panel!” I wonder what prizes he was referring to. Or there’s this: “Caution! Whatever you do, wherever you go, be sure to hang on to this irreplaceable ish, for it’s certain to become one of the most talked-about collectors’ items in the annals of comicophilia! We kid you not!” Lee said “I kid you not!” a lot, and I think it’s where I picked the expression up.

We’re also still in the days when The Avengers actually weren’t the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Captain America’s shield is just a regular metal disc that is easily bent or destroyed and then replaced. The Scarlet Witch only seems to know a few basic spells, and her “hex power” is underwhelming. The Wasp is pretty much useless, as always, and forever swooning over the hunky boys she meets. Goliath starts off being stuck in his giant size and one of the storylines has him having to figure out a way to get small again. And he still needs to work on other things. In the final issue the Wasp has to give him a ride because she has wings and he doesn’t and she asks an obvious question: “Why don’t you give yourself the power to gain wings when you shrink?” His lame reply: “Y’know, I’ve been so busy on other projects, I never thought about it! Maybe I will, one of these days!”

As a result, they need to focus on teamwork to fight off the bad guys they face. Especially the mighty Ixar (“the Invincible”). Or the Thinker and his team of B-listers. I kind of liked how the Thinker wasn’t some superhero but just a computer nerd who tries to calculate the best way to take down the Avengers. A computer nerd must have seemed cutting edge at the time. Then in the final issues Hercules unofficially joins the team and he adds some much needed muscle given that Thor and the Hulk are out. Giant Man never seems to pull his weight as a clean-up hitter.

So this is quite entertaining in the mid-‘60s Marvel way. I enjoyed seeing the word “sawbuck” for the first time in a long time, and then realized I’d never had any idea what a sawbuck was. It’s a $10 bill, in case you were wondering, so called because the Roman numeral X looks like a sawbuck, which is a style of sawhorse. Timely trivia aside, the Avengers were on their way here to becoming the franchise they would become but they still needed a lot of work before they’d be fully assembled.

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Sometimes a monument is just . . .

/ Alex Good / 11 Comments

At one point in the book Pale Horse Rider Mark Jacobson describes the scene in Oliver Stone’s JFK where crusading DA Jim Garrison (Keven Costner) gets a crash course in conspiracy theories from Mr. X (Donald Sutherland) while they sit on a bench with a view of the Washington Monument. Painting a picture of the setting, Jacobson has them “dwarfed by the upward thrust of the lingamic monument.”

I’ve often heard the Washington Monument described as “phallic” but “lingamic” was a new one for me. For once, a knowledge of Greek or Latin won’t help you. The word derives from the Sanskrit lingam, which is an aniconic phallic representation traditionally worshipped as a symbol of or in connection with Shiva. Or, in a secondary meaning, it’s a penis. So basically the word means phallic. But it’s most often used in reference to religious statuary: “a short cylindrical pillar-like symbol of Shiva, made of stone, metal, gem, wood, clay or precious stones.” These pillars also usually have a circular base, which the Washington Monument does have if you see it from above.

I suspect Jacobson just wanted to avoid the cliché of a phallic Washington Monument so he went with a word that had a more exotic flavour. And he certainly got that, as I don’t think lingamic is an adjective you see used very often. And I can’t say I’ll be adopting it anytime soon myself.

Words, words, words

Sherlock Holmes: The Final Problem

/ Alex Good / 16 Comments

Sherlock Holmes: The Final Problem

Most graphic adaptations of classic literature are massive disappointments. They tend to either go with a generic comic-book look or adapt the work in some way that makes a mess of the source material, often without even being interesting.

Swiss artist Hannes Binder’s illustrated version of Conan Doyle’s “last” Sherlock Holmes story, “The Final Problem,” is a wonderful exception. I put last in quotation marks because this is the story where Holmes was supposed to be killed off, falling from the Reichenbach Falls, only Doyle had to bring the great detective back due to popular demand. Even though it’s not really much of a story, it’s always been a favourite among illustrators because of the iconic scene where Holmes and Moriarty grapple at the top of the falls before plunging to their supposed deaths. That’s a moment you get here as well, though I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s not an event that is ever described in the story itself because in fact it never happens.

Binder’s black-and-white scratchboard technique is well suited for evoking mists and smoke and spider-webs, as well as hinting in a way I can’t really explain at a sort of aural quality. I think this latter is something Binder is conscious of too, as the full-page drawings of a screaming mouth and then an ear point toward the same thing. The mouth and ear are also suggestive of vortices that, like Moriarty’s sinister web, draw us in to our doom. Then the illustrations of a falling brick or a utensil shattering a dessert explode in ways that don’t require any textual effects. We can hear them well enough.

The text is abridged and adapted quite a bit, but in a way that I thought was remarkably efficient. And I liked the way Moriarty, a figure almost entirely absent, at least as a physical presence, from the story, shows up as a glowering atmospheric presence, a demonic eye of God. Binder isn’t just doing his own thing here but is making something distinctively in his own style while respecting the source. Holmes has been illustrated by a lot of different artists, right from the first published versions of his stories, but Binder doesn’t take a back seat to any of them.

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