Holmes: The Adventure of the Priory School

/ Alex Good / 1 Comment

The canonical Holmes stories usually aren’t that difficult or even clever as mysteries. There are few clues for the reader to weigh and consider, as opposed to Holmes studying matters (sometimes literally) on the ground. Also, because these are short stories it’s not as though a full line-up of suspects can be introduced. So it’s usually obvious what is going on, with things made even more obvious by the way characters are presented. Of course some of this can be attributed to the fact that Watson is narrating, and he knows who the guilty parties are. They aren’t going to be presented in a good light, even in their initial appearance. That’s very much what happens here when we’re introduced to Mr. James Wilder, personal secretary to the Duke of Holdernesse: “He was small, nervous, alert, with intelligent, light-blue eyes and mobile features.”

“OK,” we say. “That’s the guy who did it.” I mean, what’s he so nervous about?

What Wilder did, specifically, is kidnap the legal heir to the Duke, a boy with the improbably noble name of Saltire. In heraldry and vexillology (the study of flags and their meaning) a saltire is a diagonal (or St. Andrew’s) cross. I’ve never heard of anyone being named Saltire, though Saltire is an English surname, deriving not from the heraldic symbol but from the profession of manufacturing or dealing in salt (that is, a “salter”).

Anyway, the boy has gone missing from the Midlands boarding school he’d been staying at and the headmaster, who has the improbably headmasterish name of Dr. Thorneycroft Huxtable, comes to London to enlist the help of Holmes. This Holmes does by the usual method of drawing precise conclusions from vague or slight physical clues. Instead of footprints we have tire tracks and hoofprints to be studied. Holmes can tell what direction a bicycle was going in from the impression left by its tires, the possibility of which is something scholars still debate. But all he really had to do was take a good look at Wilder as well as the Duke himself. Something is clearly not right with the Duke:

He was a tall and stately person, scrupulously  dressed, with a drawn, thin face, and a nose which was grotesquely curved and long. His complexion was of a dead pallor, which was more startling by contrast with a long, dwindling beard of vivid red, which flowed down over his white waistcoat, with his watch-chain gleaning through its fringe.

The word “grotesque” should trigger you, and the beard is the icing on the cake. Even though such full-length beards were the fashion around the time this story is set (possibly 1900 or 1901, according to most Holmesians), the clash between the vivid red beard and the white waistcoat is a remarkable image. “OK,” we say. “This guy is somehow involved in it.” And Holmes has no trouble fingering him for his involvement (the nature of which turns out to be something quite bizarre), while making sure in advance that Holmes is going to collect, in full, the reward money for finding the lost Saltire.

Holmes index

Moving in

/ Alex Good / 18 Comments

This is the week the students move back into residence at university, with classes starting next week. So lots of fresh-faced youngsters are bustling about, their eyes aglow with the joy of learning, full of idealism, hope, and a desire to change the world.

Who will tell them that nothing lies ahead but disappointment, despair, debt, and the crushing of all their dreams? Not me! That will come in time! In the meanwhile, long line-ups at the bank, the grocery store, and good luck finding a place to park at Wal-Mart. As I’ve shown before, this lot is usually pretty deserted. But not today!

Asterix and Cleopatra

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

Asterix and Cleopatra

Asterix and Cleopatra is one of the classic Asterix comics. Perhaps the best known and best loved. I’ll always cherish it for the scene where tiny Dogmatix jumps into Obelix’s arms and he says “Dogmatix! You nearly knocked me over!” This is funny because Dogmatix is so small and Obelix so big, but ever since, with all the dogs I’ve had, whenever they’ve come up to me for a hug I’ve always told them that they nearly knocked me over. That’s how tightly some throwaway line read in childhood can weave itself into your life.

Anyway, Asterix and Obelix, joined this time by Panoramix the village druid and the newly named Dogmatix, are off to a Cecil B. DeMille version of Egypt, where Cleopatra is having a torrid affair with Caesar. In an opening argument the Queen of the Nile makes a bet with Caesar that she can build a palace in only three months. In order to make this a reality her clueless court architect Edifis has to travel to Gaul and enlist the help of you-know-who. So once again we have the formula of a journey out and back (the pirates are thumped again, or rather scuttle their own ship rather than have to take a beating), ending up with a celebratory banquet back home. Along the way there’s a lot of local colour, from the imperial architecture (which I loved as a kid) to the clever way the Egyptians speak in hieroglyphics. These speech bubbles rhyme and even cross over with the always creative grawlixes, which aren’t just typographical characters but take the form of storm clouds and skulls.

As a comic it’s also very smart. You have to be on your toes to catch the jokes that are happening even in the margins. And then there all the Latin tags and historical winks. As Asterix is leaving he says to Cleopatra “If, one day, you want to build something else in Egypt, a canal between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, for example . . . well, then call upon someone from our land, by Toutatis!” This is a nod to the fact that it was a French company that was in charge of building the Suez Canal in the 1850s. I think most readers, especially French readers (and we’re talking about children here), would have got that in 1965. Today I’d bet against that sort of general knowledge.

I don’t know if this is my favourite Asterix story, but it’s the one that first comes to mind whenever the subject of Asterix comes up. Not all of these comics have kept their glow over the years but this one has and it made me happy that I decided to revisit the whole series.

Graphicalex

Zucchini jailbreak

/ Alex Good / 13 Comments

I was walking past this fence on my way to the grocery store and was impressed by a zucchini vine that was making a climb for freedom, escaping someone’s backyard.

On my way back from the grocery store I noticed that this little guy had found the mother lode and was getting busy. He didn’t even want to slow down to get his picture taken.

Tales from the Crypt Volume 2

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

Tales from the Crypt Volume 2

In my notes on The Haunt of Fear Volume 2 I mentioned how EC editor Al Feldstein had written every one of the stories in the collection, as well as the “The Old Witch’s Niche” and the text-only shorts. I also mentioned how he was doing most of the writing for the other EC bi-monthly publications. At least he was for Tales from the Crypt, because he again gets sole writing credit for all 24 of the comics in this volume and probably wrote all the short stories as well, though these are uncredited.

“So,” as I said in that earlier review, “if there are some duds in the mix here, or the action starts to follow a formula, are you surprised?” You certainly shouldn’t be. And I wasn’t. There are a number of recurring EC horror archetypes. Reduced to its most basic elements a classic EC horror story features a murder for gain with the victim returning from the grave (sometimes after being buried alive) in order to exact a gruesome revenge on their killer.

I think that synopsis might describe two-thirds of all the horror stories EC published. Now Feldstein did his best to add little twists. Like the first story here being about a man coming back from the dead, except it’s told in the second person. But there are few real surprises. Riffing on a Poe story is to be expected, and that it’s the less well-known “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” doesn’t change things up much. Nor is it that big a twist when a developer disturbs an ancient Indian burial mound and the spirits thus released come back from the dead to scalp him.

If I wanted to be really critical I’d also focus in on the letters in “The Crypt-Keeper’s Corner.” I thought that very few, if any, of these were real. They read like plugs for the very comics you’re reading. And the constant pitching from the three GhouLunatics to buy their pictures got a little wearing.

These caveats in place, I still enjoyed all of this. I liked the in-jokes and odd bits of humour in the background (like the ship the honeymooners are on being the S. S. Pinafore), as well as all the contemporary historical details. I think having a television in your living room in 1951 meant you were pretty well off, for example. Or the Black Widow murderer having to buy seven funeral wreaths for a total of $14 and leaving the florist muttering “Fourteen dollars! The beast . . .” I looked it up and a basic funeral wreath today will run you around $200. I guess that’s inflation. And there was one language reference I had to look up, when a pair of cops examining the body of a murdered husband refer to him as a “poor old gink.” “Gink” isn’t a word that’s encountered much nowadays, but it does, or did, have the meaning of a foolish or unfortunate person. I’ve never heard it used before.

But my favourite story was the one with two medical students who need a dead body to study anatomy on, or else they’ll never be able to graduate! Corpses are expensive you see, and aren’t covered by their lab fees. So of course they decide to dig a freshly-buried one up. But they can’t dig it up themselves, even though they’ll both be present at the exhumation, so they have to enlist the help of Clem, “the rather stupid college handyman.” This leads to further problems, as you might expect, but I just laughed at the notion of the two students being unable to dig up a fresh grave by themselves and needing to pay a general labourer the whopping sum of five dollars to do it for them while they watch. I mean, Feldstein needed Clem to deliver the punchline at the end of the story but it’s still funny how useless the would-be doctors are.

So it’s another entertaining collection, though I wouldn’t recommend reading a lot of these all at once since EC horror was pretty much of a piece. Just dipping into them every now and then is the way to proceed.

Graphicalex

Holmes: The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist

/ Alex Good / 11 Comments

Doyle himself wasn’t happy with “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist” and I don’t think that’s a judgment many readers would disagree with. In his prefatory remarks Watson says he’s writing it up for public consumption because of “the ingenuity and dramatic quality of the solution,” but then immediately adds that it does “not admit of any striking illustration of those powers for which my friend was famous.” In fact, the main powers Holmes displays are his pugilistic skills, which he gets to use in a tussle in a pub. Otherwise, the detection is of the order of what Holmes notices when Violet Smith first comes to visit him. He immediately determines that she is a musician, as her “spatulate finger-ends” either come from typing or playing piano and “there is a spirituality about the face . . . which the typewriter does not generate.” Hoo-boy. Miss Smith is on firmer ground when she deduces that her employer has romance on his mind when he looks at her because, despite his being a gentleman, “a girl always knows.” I’d take that to the bank ahead of any noticing of spirituality in someone’s face.

It’s a wildly melodramatic plot, with a young couple’s path to matrimony being blocked by a sinister conspiracy hatched in a far-off land (South Africa in this instance). It’s remarkable how often Doyle returned to this same situation. Luckily for the young lady here the bad guys have a falling out, with the nice one (the gentleman) not being able to bear the thought of the ruffian “owning” Miss Smith. By which he means marrying her. I don’t think there’s any irony intended in that verb. That’s what putting a ring on it meant in 1903.

So there are the aforementioned fisticuffs. And some bicycle chases through the countryside. And one great exchange at the end:

“You’re too late. She’s my wife.”

“No, she’s your widow.”

His revolver cracked, and I saw the blood spurt from the front of Woodley’s waistcoat.

Don’t worry, Woodley isn’t dead. But he’ll go to prison when he recovers. That comeback though should have been fatal.

Holmes index

Trout: Bits & Bobs

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

Trout: Bits & Bobs

A dream, or nightmare, set in some fantasy realm where a little boy or large baby named Trout is cared for by an old man named Giuseppe Lint, head of the Lint Brothers’ Turnip Works.  Trout doesn’t speak but in the first story he has a repressed memory that comes to life and starts eating up an entire town. In the second story a traveling puppet-show monster steals the souls of all the town’s children and turns them into tadpoles.

I didn’t know what to make of the story. It really wasn’t my thing. I did like the art though (Troy Nixey both wrote and illustrated, so he takes praise and blame). There’s a spiral motif worked throughout, from the long sleeves of Trout’s pyjamas to Giuseppe’s handlebar moustache. The faces and figures of people and monsters (there’s no clear dividing line between them) are quite original and there’s no denying the unique world Nixey has conjured up, but it all feels a bit like an elaborate doodle. I gather Nixey really had his heart set on making movies anyway. I’m not sure how many more Trout comics he did but while I could appreciate some of this, there was enough of it here for me.

Graphicalex

There goes the neighbourhood VIII

/ Alex Good / 22 Comments

As noted in my previous post, this place won’t be ready to move into on September 1. I’ve heard they’re having to put the students who signed leases up at a nearby hotel.

This weekend they had the road out front dug up, leaving quite a hole. I took this picture from across the street, so the hole basically takes out the whole road. You have to take a detour as there’s no driving around it. The people who live on this street must be loving it.

Tree or bush

/ Alex Good / 15 Comments

Along the back of a small, sunken area we have at the front of our condo development we planted some Rose of Sharon bushes a couple of years ago. They’ve been coming along, but slowly. This year saw the first actual flower.

I like these bushes. I walk past one nearly every day that looks like this.

Now when the maple tree in front of my house died a few years ago I was asked what I wanted planted in its place and I asked for either a Rose of Sharon bush or a lilac bush. Is that what I got? No. I got a serviceberry tree. Why? Because it was free except for the planting. Once it gets going it will look nice . . . for maybe a week or two every spring. I took this picture back in the spring (hence the dead leaves) and you can see some of the white blossoms. Give it another ten years and it might actually look impressive. Plus the birds like the berries. There were berries for the first time this year. So we’ll wait and see.