Holmes: The Rape of the Sherlock

/ Alex Good / 4 Comments

In his introduction to this squib in The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories, editor Otto Penzler says that “To describe it as trivial overpraises it. It is included here as a curiosity – nothing more.”

Small praise indeed! But understandable, given how slight a story it is. Its main claim to fame is that it was written by Winnie the Pooh author A. A. Milne, who was also a mystery writer himself. It was first published in October 1903, making it contemporary with Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Empty House,” which was the story that brought Holmes back from the dead. So here we have Holmes appearing to Watson like a ghost and explaining that he’d been in hiding since apparently falling from the Reichenbach Falls. The title has no relation to anything, not even Pope’s poem. As for Moriarty, “There is no such man. It is merely the name of a soup.”

That’s not much of a punchline, and it’s not much of a story. I include it here only as a curiosity.

Holmes index

Criminal 1: Coward

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

Criminal 1: Coward

Coward is the first volume in the Criminal series of semi-standalone neo-noir crime stories by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. I say semi-standalone because each can be read independently but they’re set in the same fictional “universe” (as we have to call these things nowadays) and they share recurring characters and themes.

The coward of the title is a thief named Leo Patterson, though his reputation as yellow is partly a disguise. It leads people to underestimate him, and the fact is he isn’t so much cowardly as careful, always thinking of the ways a job can go wrong and planning in advance. His caution keeps him out of jail and makes him a survivor.

There is a plot here involving some crooked cops enlisting Leo to help them with a heist, but the way it works out is pretty much just the regular sort of thing, with double-crosses and fallings out. What I thought set Coward apart was the character of Leo, who feels authentic and well-rounded. He grew up in the trade, and now cares for his elderly uncle Ivan, who is both a junky and suffering from Alzheimer’s. Though despite this Ivan is still mostly functional, or functional enough to be a problem.

We’re very much in Sin City-style territory here, and if I had a gripe about Coward it’s that the ending is so clichéd and predictable. But it’s still better than most contemporary crime comics, thanks to Brubaker’s writing and Sean Phillips’s thick lines, shadowed faces, and signature starburst gun flares. I’m sure the rest of the series will be more of the same, but I’m down for it anyway.

Graphicalex

Curb appeal

/ Alex Good / 29 Comments

Hats off to the people living in this house, which I often walk by on my way to the bank. All of these flowers are planted outside their backyard fence, so they can be enjoyed by pedestrians. That just makes the world a nicer, brighter place. (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)

Hulk: Gray

/ Alex Good / 13 Comments

Hulk: Gray

This was a six-issue miniseries by the all-star team of writer Jeph Loeb and artist Tim Sale that was first published in 2003-2004. It’s an oversize comic, on the scale of Marvel’s Grand Design series, though I believe it came out before that series started.

I loved seeing Sale’s art blown-up to this size, though I could have lived without the wide side borders on every page. The full-page and double-page spreads are like movie posters and they’re used really effectively throughout. The Hulk is a big dude and he can fill a page any size. Sale has a great sense of space and he can move from epic vistas looking like Monument Valley to close-ups of the Hulk’s mouth full of rocky teeth. You can tell Sale had a lot of fun with those teeth.

As great as it is to look at, I’ll admit that after a while I was just turning pages without reading it very closely. I thought Loeb, whose The Long Halloween is probably my favourite Batman comic, really mailed this one in. It’s a tired story that basically retells the Hulk’s origins, covering the 24 hours after Dr. Bruce Banner was caught in the explosion of the Gamma Bomb. The Hulk steals away into the desert with Betty Ross, and first Iron Man (in his vintage yellow “tin can” suit) and then General “Thunderbolt” Ross (Betty’s father) chase after him. The whole thing takes the form of a flashback, with Bruce relating these events to the superhero shrink Dr. Leonard Samson. It’s a narrative device that didn’t serve any real purpose, as their back-and-forth didn’t add anything and the ending was the flabbiest part. I guess it’s a breakthrough for Bruce to realize that Betty Ross really loved him as both monster and man? I don’t know. It all seemed pointless to me.

So a great comic to look at, with nice lettering too by Richard Starkings, but the effect is almost like a coffee-table book that you just want to pick up and flip through. I ended up doing that a lot. But I wasn’t into reading it.

Graphicalex

Montalbano: The Snack Thief

/ Alex Good / 13 Comments

I didn’t much care for The Snack Thief. There are actually a couple of different mysteries in it, hinging on the character of a Tunisian woman named Karima. The first mystery has to do with the murder of a merchant whose stabbed body is found in the elevator of an apartment building. It turns out that Karima was his mistress. The second mystery involves the killing of a terrorist, who happens to be Karima’s brother. Now the first mystery was the kind of thing I’d put more in the Maigret vein, involving different fraught family relations and a murder that was half an accident. The apartment building setting also put me in mind of Maigret. I thought this was interesting. The second mystery, however, was a complicated business involving Italy’s secret police and international intrigue. It all takes some time to explain in the end when Montalbano has a sit down with the nasty little guy who was behind the operation, and I didn’t like any part of it.

Now the two plotlines are connected, which is what confuses Montalbano, but whenever you have two stories like this and, as a reader, you find one is a lot more interesting than the other, you have a book with a problem. But I had other issue as well. As in The Terra-Cotta Dog Montalbano’s big crack in the case comes about entirely by circumstance, in a manner that reminded me of the boy seeing the photo of the police in the movie Witness. Then we have Montalbano’s character further developed through his relationship with Livia and (something new) his dying father, and though Camilleri does this to make him a very human and even relatable figure what this also means is that he comes across as a jerk a lot of the time. He’s nasty and mean (“ornery as hell” as one of his lieutenants buts it), vain, jealous of Augello, self-righteous, anti-social (a gourmand, he hates talking to anyone when he’s eating), and in the end not that interested in his job, which a perceptive old man tells him is his escape from reality. He likes to solve cases without any practical result, you see. Except, in this case, for himself.

Now you can say that a lot of famous fictional detectives are difficult types. Holmes. Poirot. Wolfe. But in all those cases the reader has a friend who is more likeable (Watson, Hastings, and Goodwin). In the Montalbano novels we’re stuck in closest proximity to Montalbano himself. This makes a difference and can be pretty uncomfortable.

So not the book I wanted it to be. I wanted the focus to be on the dead man in the elevator and got the terrorist plot instead. I wanted more about Montalbano’s relationship with his father and less about Livia adopting Karima’s son. I wanted to see Montalbano actually solving a mystery instead of getting lucky with clues being dropped in his lap. But having said all that, I still thought this was a decent story that did a lot to fill out Montalbano’s world and it kept me on the hook for what would come next.

Montalbano index

Lowering Higher Ed

/ Alex Good / 11 Comments

In a story out of England that has gotten a lot of attention online a Cambridge professor named Jason Arday resigned last week after it turned out that he had plagiarized some of his work, including his Ph. D. thesis, and was a fantasist in telling the story of his life.

There’s no good way to spin this story for Cambridge University. Arday is both Black and claims to be neurodivergent, though I doubt the latter diagnosis. (I’ve used this site as a soapbox in the past to point to the shameless way that autism, a very real affliction and disability, has been turned into a scam by grifters.) As a dual threat in the game of victim credentialism, these were used by Arday to advance his career in a predictable way that I still found a bit surprising. I hadn’t thought the rot had progressed this far.

From the accounts I’ve read, Arday’s research was thin and he wasn’t highly regarded as a teacher. In the video clips I’ve watched he either talks in jargon or seems lost. And yet he impressed the faculty at Cambridge so much with his unimpressive qualifications (unimpressive even if true) that he became the youngest Black professor in the university’s history and went on to receive several honorary doctorates (!). Then, when exposed, Arday made things worse for himself by claiming he was the victim of racism in all this. Apparently calling people out on their bullshit is white privilege.

As an aside, and lest anyone think this is a left-wing mind virus, the playbook here was written by the Whiner-in-Chief with his incessant cries of “witch hunt.” Avoiding responsibility for one’s actions is an imperative today, no matter what your politics.

It seems academia is intent on digging its own grave by doubling down on all of the worst excesses that its critics (mainly on the right) have been accusing it of. What was the hiring and celebration of Arday but virtue signaling? And to what end? What I’ve never been able to understand about the death spiral higher education has gone into is why they are following this course when there isn’t any public or student demand for it. I’ve nothing against teaching critical race theory if that’s what students want to learn about. But it isn’t. In a long essay appearing in The Atlantic, “Why I Quit the Tenure Track,” Tyler Austin Harper observes “I had long privately believed that the specter of student demand was being used as justification to pass legislation that only senior administrators and a few tenured radicals were excited to see put in place.” Exactly, and it’s been that way since this started.

Things were already going downhill when I was in university, back in what I think of as the first wave of political correctness. The old guard of the professoriate, stuffy white men who fell asleep sometimes in seminars (honest!), were being replaced by modish tenure-hungry radicals who were, like Arday, seen as “stars” because they were media-friendly and always said the right things. Professionally, they may not have been great scholars but what they were good at was networking and exploiting the academic spoils system. Gender, race, or (now) neurodiversity were just part of their toolkit for getting ahead and milking higher education for its few remaining rewards.

If you have a system that rewards this kind of thing, more of this kind of thing is what you’re going to get. Which, in turn, makes universities look even worse at a time when their public reputation is already in free fall. It also smears the otherwise commendable goal of achieving diversity, inclusion, and equity with the taint of wokeism.

Arday, once the poster boy for diversity, has now become “professor plagiarism”: the poster boy for the sort of cynical careerism that, always a part of academia, has metastasized in universities everywhere under the false flag of progressivism. This is what end-stage higher education looks like: as the ship goes down the last on board will be the worst products of the system, trying to grab anything that’s left of value and still be on the last lifeboat. I don’t like saying it, or reading about it, but there’s no turning away from the miserable sight.

(The title for this post derives from the book Lowering Higher Education, which I reviewed here.)

Asterix and the Banquet

/ Alex Good / 13 Comments

Asterix and the Banquet

Or Le tour de Gaul d’Astérix, as it was first published in French in 1965. But either title works, as the plot has to do with Asterix and Obelix making a circuit of Roman-occupied Gaul to pick up foodstuffs from all the different cities they visit so that they can then take it back to their little village for a banquet. This is to win a bet with a Roman inspector (Lucius Overanxious) that a palisade built around the village would never be able to fence them in. I only mention the change in title to note the free hand translation can take. On a couple of occasions in the text this also came up. A version of a Roman tow-truck (a tow-chariot) arrives at one point and it’s called TOWSRUS TOWS, which I doubt the French said, even though Toys “R” Us had been a brand in the U.S. since the late 1950s. Then on the last page, at the banquet, Asterix launches Lucius Overanxious with what he calls “the village specialty,” which is PUNCH! I take it this was a reference to the ad “How ‘bout a nice Hawaiian Punch?” which first aired in the early 1960s, so again it’s possible. But I don’t have the original French-language versions to compare. I could probably find them in the library but I’m too lazy.

Anyway, as I said in my notes on Asterix the Gladiator, the template for these stories had already been set, “with Asterix and Obelix (the latter still without Dogmatix) leaving the village for some foreign adventures and then returning home for a banquet.” This is, as I’ve already outlined, the whole story here, with the difference being that it is in this volume that Dogmatix is introduced (though not named yet). Dogmatix decides to tag along with the two outside a deli in Lutetia, and is a silent presence throughout all the rest of the comic, always visible but completely ignored by Asterix and Obelix. That is, until the final page, where he finally lets loose a “Woof! Woof!” at Obelix, who notices him for the first time. Picking him out from the goings-on is a bit of fun throughout, and makes the point that you have to spend some time with Albert Uderzo’s art, seeing as there’s so much put into every frame. When they visit Nice, for example, they’ walking along the seaside promenade and, despite their being central, it’s easy to miss the two very modern and stylish blondes walking past in their miniskirts, but they have a little white dog that’s barking at Dogmatix while a Gaul twirls the ends of his long Gaulish moustache and looks at them. The final panel, now becoming a signature sign-off, also has a checklist of items to see: the banquet in the distance, Cacofonix bound and gagged so he won’t sing, a centurion trying to revive the punched-out Lucius Overanxious, and Dogmatix running away with a bone and winking at us.

There’s lots of action here, though I didn’t think this was one of the better Asterix stories and there are no interesting new characters, aside from Dogmatix. It’s still a good time though, and even as the series was becoming more familiar it was far from growing stale.

Graphicalex