The solicitor Mr. Petherick’s story for the Tuesday Night Club feels like the slightest, and it’s also the most obvious in its solution. The structure is meant to take your attention away from the clue, what with the all the discussion over the irrelevant distinction between suspects with a motive but no opportunity and those with an opportunity and no motive. It’s easy to see we’re being played by this, and the reveal that the murderer was making use of a child’s magic trick is a fitting note to end on.
Author: Alex Good
Porch bunny
In my ongoing attempt to capture all the various fauna living in my neighbourhood, I had this little fellow pose for a picture. After I thanked him, he slowly hopped away.
Fruity
This was one of two puzzles that came in one value box (but they were in separate bags, naturally). I already showed a picture of the other one, which was of a bunch of little cakes. This one probably had the same sugar content along with the same degree of difficulty. I can’t say either puzzle was a favourite and I’ve given them away so won’t be doing them again.
Bookmarked! #38: Bookstores No More II: The Bob Miller Book Room
This bookmark is a real nostalgia item. The Bob Miller Book Room was a bookstore located in the lower shopping level of a building on Bloor Street in fashionable Yorkville. They specialized in academic books and I often went there to buy books for courses I was taking when I was at university. It was like an unofficial university book store, at least for students in the Humanities. A lot of profs arranged to have books on their reading lists available there.
That was in the late 1980s and early ’90s, and to be honest I thought the Book Room closed down long ago. But when I found this bookmark I looked online and learned that it only closed in 2019, after being in business for almost 45 years. A pretty good run, given what was happening to the bookselling business at the time.
Book: Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow
More purple stuff
Another trip to the garden, to look at another flowering plant. Don’t know what this one is called either. It’s quite a tall bush. But whatever name it goes by, I’m always happy whenever I see these guys around because then I know some real work is being done.
Estate sale
You know what they say about how one man’s trash is another man’s treasure? And one man’s treasure is another man’s trash? Well, the truth of that adage is never more evident than at an estate sale. I helped out with one this weekend. Here are some highlights. Treasure, or trash? You decide.
A commemorative plate celebrating Canada’s centennial. It’s like owning a piece of history! I wanted this.
This tea towel celebrates another historical moment, though not one that’s worn as well. I would think this might be a collectible item, but the truth is there was so much Royal Wedding kitsch at the time it probably isn’t worth anything.
At first I thought this was probably just junk, but in fact it was the most expensive item in the entire sale. These classic sewing machines are really highly prized. Even though I don’t think many people know how to use them today. At least I asked everyone I thought might have some familiarity with one if they knew how to operate a sewing machine and only one person said they could. And she’s in her mid-70s. So another bit of history.
More history! We had a bunch of oil lamps around the house when I was a kid. Once when the power went out we actually tried to light one. Just could not get it to work. And I think we were doing everything right. But let’s face it, you don’t keep these things because they’re useful. You keep them because they’re pretty.
Who could resist these adorable salt-and-pepper shakers? Apparently pretty much everyone. They didn’t sell.
Surely the saddest remainder of all, however, was Xmas Teddy. And a bargain at only $2! This made me weep for him, for Christmas, and for all of us.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: The Crucible
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: The Crucible
This is another title, the second in the Archie Horror series, by author Robert Aguirre-Sacasa (who kicked the imprint off with Afterlife with Archie) and artist Robert Hack. I think it’s really well done, though I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as Afterlife. Why not? Because it’s so dark.
I don’t mean the art is dark. Hack has a sketchy style, but it’s not heavily shadowed or murky. What I mean by dark is that there is very little humour, quite a bit of unpleasant violence, and a whole lot of devil worship. The comic is rated as Teen + for “Violence and Mature Content” but I could almost see them putting some kind of “upsetting to those with religious beliefs” warning on it as well as they really lean on that angle pretty hard. The witches we meet aren’t nature-loving Wiccans but are instead the blood-thirsty servants of the Dark Lord himself. There’s some of the same vibe going on with witches as there was with the zombies, as we find out that the good citizens of Greendale/Riverdale are, beneath the surface, possessed by the same evil passions as those of Salem in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown.” Rip off the polite façade of Norman Rockwell Americana and you’ll find flesh-eating monsters and devil-worshippers holding black masses in the woods.
Or you could look to the inspiration for Afterlife and compare it to that of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Thanks to Romero, zombies have always had something a bit comic about them. But as Aguirre-Sacasa puts it in his Introduction, the models they were looking to here were films like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen, with a bit of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible thrown in (though that seems to have mainly just given the comic its otherwise obscure subtitle).
The story has it that amateur witches Betty and Veronica raise Madame Satan, a nightmarish figure with mini-skulls for eyeballs torn from the yellowing pages of Pep Comics in 1941 (one of which is included here as a fun bonus). It seems Mrs. S. got jilted by Sabrina’s warlock father years ago and then got sent to hell. And hell hath no fury like a woman burning in hell who’s there because she was scorned. Since Sabrina’s dad is imprisoned in a tree and her mom locked up in an asylum, Madame Satan decides to go after Sabrina herself for revenge. Sabrina, meanwhile, is living with her two witchy aunts and is about to give herself over to the Devil on her sixteenth birthday. But Madame Satan has other plans.
It’s a good story, and Madame Satan is a great villain, but I felt like it really needed to have some lighter moments. It seems very cynically grown-up, even down to drawing the thirteen-year-old Sabrina with a full figure and adult features. Then it ends with more of a cliffhanger than the rest of these collections. I’m sure I’ll read the rest of it because I’m curious how things play out, but it’s not really my thing. At least I can’t think of any other way of saying that I thought it was excellent but not something I liked very much.
Bookmarked! #37: Bookstores No More I: Classic Bookshops
This post kicks off a miniseries featuring bookmarks I’ve picked up from bookstores that no longer exist. Classics Bookshops was a mall-based chain of bookstores that was amalgamated into Chapters in the 1990s (with Chapters later being absorbed by Indigo). They don’t exist anymore, but they were big back in the 1980s. The bookmark on the left is one of the first bookmarks I had in my collection. The red one is a Christmas-themed bookmark. On the reverse it has To: and From: printed on it.
Book: Trust by Hernan Diaz
Marple: The Bloodstained Pavement
Joyce Lemprière tells what seems to at least some of the Tuesday Night Club members to be a simple ghost story involving her premonition of a woman’s death. (As an aside: Joyce is going to end up marrying Randy, though I don’t recall anything suggesting that in any of the stories thus far. But in this one she calls Miss Marple “Aunt Jane” before immediately correcting herself: “Miss Marple, I mean.” An understandable mistake for anyone to make, but one that her soon-to-be Auntie will pick up on in her Tuesday night story.)
I didn’t think much of this story because I thought I knew what was going on but the one clue is deliberately, indeed literally erased. It’s obvious that blood is dripping from the red dress on the balcony onto the pavement below, so why aren’t there any bloodstains when Joyce goes to check for them just a couple of minutes later? Even diluted, there should still have been some evidence of blood, and we’re told she “examined the pavement closely.” In my opinion this isn’t playing fair with the reader. Either she imagined the bloodstains or they were really there. You can’t have it both ways.
Balls of steel
Digging deep.
Over at Alex on Film I’ve just wrapped up my notes on the Phantasm series. This was a surprisingly long-lived franchise, running from 1979 to 2016 with the same core cast (except for the recasting of Mike in Phantasm II) and the same writer-director in Don Coscarelli (who wrote and directed the first four films and co-wrote and produced the fifth). Most franchises rebooted several times over the same period, but the Phantasmverse maintained a remarkable continuity. Off the top of my head I can’t think of many franchises, horror or otherwise, that managed such a feat. And I was happy they ended on what I felt was a high note. Here’s the line-up.
Phantasm (1979)
Phantasm II (1988)
Phantasm III (1994)
Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998)
Phantasm: Ravager (2016)
Alex Good 