I’m really impressed with another review of my book Revolutions appearing online, this one by the novelist and critic Jeff Bursey. It appears in Galleon, a literary journal based in Atlantic Canada. Very in-depth and well worth reading, as Bursey makes a number of points expanding on and challenging those I made.
For other reviews see here.
Maigret is one of those detectives who care less about doing their professional duty than serving some more general idea of justice. This is something the mayor of Concarneau, among others, can’t get his head around, but it’s especially obvious with the bit of subterfuge Maigret pulls at the end of The Yellow Dog. We often miss this in discussions of mystery fiction. The point isn’t so much to re-establish a sense of order that existed before the crime, but to right any deeper wrongs, to pick winners and losers through the exercise of moral judgment.
Enter the trio of immoral losers (including one nicely captured momma’s boy) who find themselves being hunted in The Yellow Dog. It’s hard to feel any sympathy for them. And once again Maigret is cast in the role of class avenger. It all makes for a satisfying read, even if it does come off a bit rushed at the end. Then again, these books all move at a pretty crazy pace. Simenon really seemed to believe in the Elmore Leonard axiom of leaving out all of the boring parts. To the point where a lot of connective tissue also goes missing even in the basic mechanics of his prose. I keep coming to places where it isn’t even clear who is speaking, or to whom.
One interesting note: When Concarneau first goes under siege a newspaper article describes the “deathly still” atmosphere as “reminiscent of towns in northern France during the war when the air-raid sirens sounded.” I was surprised to learn by this that air-raid sirens were such a ubiquitous feature of life in France during the First World War that their use could be so easily invoked. I didn’t think towns had such alarm systems widely in place. The bombing of Guernica is usually cited as the first sustained aerial bombing of a civilian target, and there was an air-raid siren that sounded in that attack, but that was in 1937, twenty years later.
Update, June 26 2021:
I’ve read that in 1917 there was an air-raid siren system planned to give citizens of London a five-minute warning before an attack, but I’m not sure if it was put into use, or if it was ever adopted in France at the time.
Leonardo DiCaprio, looking even prettier than his costar in his film debut.
Over at Alex on Film I’ve been watching the five (thus far) movies in the Critters franchise. Widely seen as a Gremlins rip-off, these omnivorous furballs apparently were independently conceived, and the first two movies aren’t all bad. The others are garbage, though Critters 4 does deserve some credit for being, I think, the first horror franchise to expand from Earth into space (later, Hellraiser, Friday the 13th, and the Leprechaun franchises would all make a similar migration).
Critters (1986)
Critters 2: The Main Course (1988)
Critters 3 (1991)
Critters 4 (1992)
Critters Attack! (2019)
Recently there have been a number of high-profile cases of people getting in trouble for making what have been labeled anti-Semitic social media posts. Are they really, though? Or are they just wingnut crazy? Or totally innocent? Let’s take a look.
Marjorie Taylor Greene
In a rambling 2018 Facebook post Taylor Greene mused aloud/online over whether wildfires in California had been caused by a laser beam directed from space. It’s hard to tell from her post who she thought actually directed this laser, but the utility company Pacific Gas & Electric seems to be the main culprit. Since a later investigation held that PG&E powerlines had led to the wildfires this wasn’t too far off the mark, at least as far as culpability goes. However, Taylor Greene went on to draw attention to what she found to be the suspicious connection between PG&E and the investment firm Rothschild, Inc. (she names a man who was on the board of both corporations).
The media jumped all over this and Taylor Greene’s rant would go on to be universally referred to as the “Jewish space laser” post. This is because the Rothschilds have often been linked to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. That said, Taylor Greene herself never called the laser a Jewish space laser and reading her post I’m not sure what role she thought the Rothschilds were playing in all of this. Is “Rothschild” a dog whistle? I’m sure it is. And was the post crazy? Absolutely. But the anti-Semitism, while legible, seems kind of tangential to her (insane) theories.
Gina Carano
Former MMA fighter and actress Gina Carano was fired from the TV show The Mandalorian after posting the following on her Instagram account:
Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors . . . even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views.
What Carano is doing here (it might not be obvious) is comparing the plight of conservatives in the U.S. today to that of Jews in Nazi Germany. Crazy? I think we have to again say yes, though what Carano is saying isn’t quite as bonkers as the space laser. Anti-Semitic? That’s a harder one. Lucasfilm stated that Carano’s “social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.” I don’t see where she’s doing this. She’s really stretching to claim victim status but is identifying, at least to some extent, with Jews. You could say that her post was insensitive, but I don’t think it’s all that anti-Semitic.
Nathan J. Robinson
Robinson is, or was, a columnist for the Guardian newspaper and found himself in trouble when objections were made to a pair of linked tweets he’d posted about the miserliness of COVID relief in the U.S. budget as compared to the amount of money being given to Israel to buy missiles. In his tweets he said the following:
(1) “Did you know that the US Congress is not actually allowed to authorize any new spending unless a portion of it is directed toward buying weapons for Israel? It’s the law.” (2) “or if not actually the written law then so ingrained in political custom as to functionally be indistinguishable from law.”
Despite the fact that the part of the post where he says “It’s the law” was clearly meant as sarcastic, and immediately flagged as such, his bosses took objection to what they saw as the spreading of “fake news” and fired him for singling out Israel for criticism.
The response to Robinson’s post is typical of the way criticism of Israel is often targeted as being anti-Semitic. Is what he said anti-Semitic though? Or even anti-Israel? It mainly seems to be a criticism of American budgetary priorities. I don’t see where he’s blaming Israel for taking the money. But I guess if you were so inclined you could see it as critical of Israel too, in so far as it implies that the U.S. should be spending its money on other things. On the anti-Semitism charge though I just don’t see it.
So . . . the person who posted the craziest and probably the only legitimately anti-Semitic comments on social media faced no consequences or blowback (at least from her own party), and is still a sitting member of Congress, while the other two individuals were fired from their jobs. Is there a lesson in that? If so, it may be one representative of the Trump era: If you’re going to say something really dumb, you should always go big. Social media doesn’t handle nuance well, and rarely seeks to engage us in close reading. It’s there to trigger instant likes and dislikes, retweets and knee-jerk reactions. The medium might not be the message, but both are getting toxic in mutually reinforcing ways.
Georges Simenon lived on a boat for a while, and spent a lot of time travelling through the French canal system. So he was probably grinning at the idea of setting a novel in this environment, with Maigret looking “to absorb the atmosphere, to capture the essence of canal life, which was so different from the world he knew.”
Personally, I don’t know a thing about canal life. I have a general idea of how canals and lock systems operate, but that’s it. This made my ability to visualize some of the action in this one difficult, making me think of Peter Mendelsund’s book What We See When We Read (short answer: we make most of it up).
Canal life, however, is just window dressing here. The story follows what I guess, having read a few of these now, is the usual script. There is the juxtaposition of high life and low, with the yacht Southern Cross and the barge Providence representing different ends of the social-economic (but not moral) divide. There is the man, and in this case a woman too, leading a kind of double life, which requires Maigret to dig into their past. And finally the killer is revealed as someone we have sympathy for, their crime the last stop in a life lived downhill, full of disappointment and despair.
A good read, but the plot is based on a pile of improbabilities and coincidences. This is also par for the course. Maigret himself never seems to do much actual detective work aside from tracking a few leads to nail things down at the end. Instead, a wall cracks and the killers sort of crumble on their own.
You have a lot to answer for, Mr. Bond.
Over at Alex on Film I’ve been watching a bunch of spy movies from the 1960s (along with a couple of outliers at either end of that decade). Basically this means Bondmania: the Connery Bond movies and all their parodies, imitators, and correctives. Somehow Bond just hit on the perfect formula right from the start though, and no one could ever duplicate the success they had with it.
North by Northwest (1959)
Dr. No (1960)
From Russia with Love (1963)
Charade (1963)
Goldfinger (1964)
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965)
Thunderball (1965)
Arabesque (1966)
The Quiller Memorandum (1966)
Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die (1966)
Torn Curtain (1966)
Our Man Flint (1966)
Funeral in Berlin (1966)
Murderer’s Row (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
Casino Royale (1967)
You Only Live Twice (1967)
In Like Flint (1967)
Billion Dollar Brain (1967)
The Million Eyes of Sumuru (1967)
Deadlier Than the Male (1967)
Some Girls Do (1969)
Topaz (1969)
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
The Kremlin Letter (1970)
Diamonds are Forever (1971)
When the historian Henry Adams met President Grant the shock upset years of his “education,” a term he used to cover his entire intellectual heritage as an American:
Grant fretted and irritated him, like the Terebratula, as a defiance of first principles. He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar, a man like Grant should be called—and should actually and truly be—the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as common-place as Grant’s own common-places to maintain such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.
I always think of this scene whenever I hear anyone speak of meritocracy in America. In the country where Donald Trump became president? Grant had at least been a successful general. Trump couldn’t even run a casino. Doesn’t Trump’s election make the notion of rising through one’s merits, however broadly defined, ludicrous? Does it not seem like a defiance of first principles?
Things I was thinking of recently while reading Twilight of the Elites by Christopher Hayes. If not evolution, in the strict Darwinian sense, I think we’ve at least put paid to the notion of there being much progress in human affairs.
Three books in and I’m starting to detect a pattern. At its center we have men, haunted by demons and drink, who have come to the end of the line. Simenon is the poet-psychologist of disappointment and downward mobility. This one starts off with another such down-at-the-heels fellow, a “desperate soul,” checking in at a cheap hotel and then, “both enraged and overcome by his fate,” blowing his brains out.
An opening act like that wouldn’t seem to introduce much of a mystery, but Maigret feels personally responsible (which he certainly is!) and so decides to investigate further. This gets him into a really improbable back story, apparently having some relation to Simenon’s own youth in Liège and which plays a bit like a Belgian Crime and Punishment. And again one has the sense that the real original sin was a class mixture that didn’t take. Rich and poor are like two different species. When the suicide’s wife comes to see Maigret he notices a resemblance right away: “Not a facial resemblance, no, but a similarity of expression, of social class, so to speak.”
I don’t know where Maigret himself fits in on the class ladder. His father was a bailiff or estate manager. Being a top investigator seems like a pretty big deal, but in 1930s France? Most of his authority comes from the way he physically dominates a room, which is often attributed to his “proletarian” frame or “peasant” stock. I don’t think this is meant to be flattering. He is described here as appearing “bovine” a couple of times, and as seeming like an elephant. In many ways he is a sort of anti-type to the eccentric fictional detective, who is often something of a dandy. Maigret doesn’t speak much, has a face not fully molded out of clay, and either affects or genuinely feels bored a lot of the time (in The Flemish House he’ll let it drop that “when in the presence of a possible culprit, I make a point of acting like an imbecile”). Instead of the thrill of the hunt he has only a weary sense of duty. And yet dramatically it seems to work.
There are few groups that have been as widely mocked and vilified in the media during this COVID-19 pandemic as anti-maskers: angry gangs of ignorant yahoos and assorted scofflaws who decry the pandemic as a Chinese hoax and who just want to party or go to church without Big Brother telling them to wear a “face diaper” or in any way limit their freedoms of speech and association.
Much of this sneering contempt for the unmasked is well deserved, though I have some sympathy for those among them whose lives have been more than just disrupted by the impact of serial lockdowns. I find much less has been said, however, about a group I think of as the double-maskers: the officious and righteous who use the cover of fear as an excuse to act like idiots and jerks.
A lot of blame has to be laid on the media, which gets the currency of attention by beating the drum of fear. Every day begins with reports of new risks we can’t afford to ignore and new precautions we need to take. The latest of these has been the call to double mask. This struck me as overkill, a feeling I had no reason to change after hearing Dr. Fauci on the subject: “if you use common sense and say, until we get the data, if a physical barrier with one mask works, it makes common sense that two layers or three layers — and you should have a double layer mask in one mask anyway — but if you want to put an extra mask on, there’s nothing wrong with that. . . . We can’t formally recommend it because we don’t have the science behind it. But I would not hesitate to tell someone if they want to wear two masks.” Hm. So no science, but it can’t hurt. Fauci himself wears two masks, but only because he likes the way they fit.
Another example of overkill are the social distance police in grocery stores. If everyone is wearing masks already and there is no physical contact, what are the chances of your getting infected by just walking past someone? And yet I’ve seen people yelling at other people to “stand back six feet!” Or getting angry because you walk down an aisle the wrong way. Most grocery stores now have aisles for which directions are indicated and I’ve never understood what the purpose of them is. I mean, in the first place there’s usually only two or three people in an aisle anyway, most often stopped and turned toward one or the other side. Second: what difference does it make if someone passes you in the aisle from behind as opposed to passing you going in the opposite direction? Why do people get exercised over this?
I’m sure there’s a common-sense middle ground. Every day I walk through a park where a group of people meet so that their dogs can run and play together. There’s usually anywhere from 5 to 10 people, including a couple of small children. People stand a little bit apart. Maybe six feet. Nobody wears a mask, though I’m sure they all do whenever or wherever one is required (as do I). And everyone is friendly and sociable. I know most of them and have never heard of any of them getting sick. Meanwhile, the people who (literally!) run away from you on the street, or who go into fits in the grocery store just strike me as so many bitter and anti-social assholes. A month or so ago I was walking toward one woman on a sidewalk and she scrambled in a panic through a snowbank to get away, tripping and sprawling awkwardly into the street. I was amazed and disturbed at the performance. People like this are deeply disturbed. I also suspect most of them are total hypocrites and don’t follow “the rules!” nearly as strictly as they expect other people to. Then again, a contractor I know told me that at one house he’d been hired to finish a basement in the owner had refused to allow his assistant to enter, which resulted in a doubling of the quoted price for the work to be done. Why? Both workers would have been wearing masks and gloves when in the house, and the contractor and his assistant shared a “bubble” so allowing the one in the house but not the other made no sense. But like the woman falling into the street, panic and anger had taken over.
The depressing conclusion I’ve come to is that between the anti-maskers and the double-maskers, and I know people in both camps, I actually like the anti-maskers a little better. They’re crazy (one of them I’m friends with honestly believes COVID-19 was developed by Bill Gates as a method of population control), but you can at least talk to them about other things and they seem, on balance, to be a lot less angry than the people who are going into hyperanxious, paranoid meltdowns and looking to phone the police every time they look out the window. The anti-maskers may be a bigger health threat, hating government and the medical establishment, but the double-maskers strike me as hating their neighbours, which I think is worse. Put another way: anti-maskers are nuts, double-maskers are nasty.
The other depressing thought I have has to do with the oft-asked question of what things will be like when people start getting vaccinated. How will these double-maskers ever get back to “normal”? Their special reality now seems rooted so deep in anger and fear I don’t think they’ll ever be able to pull back out. They’re mean and sad, and there’s no vaccine for that.
Antonia Fraser, in the golden age of author photos.
Sometimes when you’re reading you come across a line in a book that makes you lift your eyes from the page and go “Hm.”
This happened to me recently while reading Antonia Fraser’s biography Mary Queen of Scots. One chapter in this classic work is given over to an account of the murder of Mary’s husband Lord Darnley. It’s one of the more celebrated, and complicated, murder plots of all time, but Fraser goes a step further in calling it “the most debatable, as well as surely the most worked over murder in history.”
By “worked over” she means worked over by historians. And to be sure, there’s been a lot of study and analysis of the event surrounding Darnley’s death. But “surely the most worked over murder in history”? I will give Fraser a mulligan for the Kennedy assassination, as her book came out in 1969 and Kennedy might not have been “history” yet, and while there’d been the Warren Commission things hadn’t gone totally crazy. But for other murders having as good or better claims I would submit the assassination of Julius Caesar and the murder of Rasputin. I think historians have probably worked over both those events more than the killing of Lord Darnley, though in the case of Darnley there may be more mystery still attached. Moving away from politics I might add the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. That probably still ranks as “the crime of the (twentieth) century” though it’s not as well remembered now.
Food for a moment’s thought anyway.
Alex Good 