reading books

Marple: Miss Marple’s Christmas

/ Alex Good / 14 Comments

“And what put you on to the Dashwoods?” Sir Henry Clithering asks Miss Marple, “mystified” at how she solved the mystery of the missing pearls. The answer is pretty simple: they were the only non-recurring characters at the “real old-fashioned Christmas” party hosted by the Bantrys. We know Arthur and Dolly didn’t take the pearls. Or Jane Marple. Or her nephew Raymond and his wife Joan. Which leaves the Dashwoods. I mean, a suspicious eye is rolled in the direction of the new under-gardener but we never so much as see him. So it will have to be the Dashwoods.

Knowing the literary background is also a help. A big clue is provided by the fact that Ronald Dashwood is reading Dorothy Sayers’s Hangman’s Holiday. Or just the name Dashwood itself, which is borrowed from Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. And of course the fact that Dolly just doesn’t like them very much. Once you factor all of this in, the stuff having to do with pins and mistletoe is almost beside the point. I wasn’t even sure what was going on there, but at the end I didn’t need to be.

What Ruth Ware assumes you’re not to be alerted by is the age difference between Major Dashwood, retired, and his wife, said to be in her “early thirties.” That’s just the way it was, back in the day. I did sort of scratch my head a bit though at Mrs. Bantry excusing Ronald, who appears to be a student, for his feeling bored at being “cooped up in the country with a lot of middle-aged people.” Who is middle-aged? I think Raymond and Joan are a young couple (she is revealed to be pregnant at the end). As noted, Mrs. Dashwood is in her early thirties. Major Dashwood and Colonel Bantry are both retired. Miss Marple is simply ancient. I suppose Mrs. Bantry is middle-aged, and maybe she’s just projecting onto the others.

Marple index

Saga of the Swamp Thing Book Four

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

Saga of the Swamp Thing Book Four

In my notes on Saga of the Swamp Thing Book Three I talked about how I preferred the back-to-basics Swamp Thing stories that played like X-Files “monster of the week” episodes to the epic storylines involving some grand cosmic battle between good and evil. I felt that way again here, as I really enjoyed the introductory stories about the druggies eating some sweet potato that has fallen off Swampy’s back and going on hallucinatory trips, and “Ghost Dance,” about the legacy of a gun manufacturer playing out in a haunted house (a story that was a personal favourite of Alan Moore’s). But once we get back into the preparation for a final battle between a newly awakened power of evil and the forces of light, I thought things weakened. Sticking with the comparison to the X-Files, you spend all this time building up the main storyline or “mytharc” about Fox’s missing sister and alien abductions and black oil, but when you finally go on board the mothership you know you’re going to be disappointed. I mean, where do you go from a build-up like what we get here: “This is ultimate dark, ultimate light. The forces and the stakes here are fundamental and absolute . . . and whichever side meets its final destruction this day, everything will be changed.”

That said, I thought the final battle was well choreographed. A host of characters are assembled. John Constantine is holding a completely useless séance with a group Neil Gaiman describes as “the detritus, the flotsam and jetsam of the DC occult universe.” Swampy is in hell (or thereabouts) and is joined by Deadman, Phantom Stranger, the rhyming demon Etrigan, and the Spectre. They’re trying to stop the aforementioned evil. Or maybe it isn’t evil. Maybe it’s just misunderstood. In any event, the glowing hand of God descends from heaven and the world just continues on its merry way. “Nothing has happened. Everything has happened.” Good and evil are necessarily linked, you see. Can’t have one without the other. According to Gaiman’s introduction, Moore thought this had something to do with the Manichaeism of American culture, and what happens is an answer to Swamp Thing’s questioning if there is “some truth . . . that may be divined . . . from the entrails of America.”

Well, colour me unimpressed with these flabby conclusions. Getting to them was a lot of fun though, even if Swampy himself remains a remarkably passive as well as ponderous figure throughout. I think maybe Moore came up with the character of John Constantine just to liven things up. I do like what Moore did with this series, but at the same time I don’t think he was ever as interested in Swamp Thing as he was in doing his own thing.

Graphicalex

The Owl and the Pussycat

/ Alex Good / 11 Comments

The Owl and the Pussycat

I’ve said before how much I love this Visions in Poetry series, and in particular how the illustrations really offer up new interpretations of classic poems. Stéphane Jorisch’s take on Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” is another great example, presenting the poem in a way that I’d never thought of before.

My own sense has always been that the Owl and Pussycat were an odd but natural fit. After all, opposites attract. Jorisch, however, emphasizes their difference, making them into a sort of Romeo and Juliet coupling. The beautiful pea-green boat takes them away from an apartheid society where dogs and cats and owls never mix. The other species look on at the Owl and the Pussycat and whisper. The couples that cruise by on the Chez Noah stare (no interspecies sex there!). Even the fish in the sea stick their heads out of the water to watch them sailing by. And so our happy couple, who only have eyes for each other, have to go to the land where the Bong-Tree grows to be married by a singular turkey, after buying a ring from a singular pig. Mythical beasts like unicorns and mermaids approve.

As I say, this is never the way I’ve read “The Owl and the Pussycat,” and I don’t think it’s a reading I’d adopt as my own. Jorisch does, however, very much make it his own and I thought the book another splendid entry in a series that never disappointed. I only wish they’d published more!

Graphicalex

Holmes: The Sleuths

/ Alex Good / 25 Comments

One of America’s best-loved comic short story writers does a Holmes pastiche. And there’s nothing funny about it at all. I wonder if this may have been the worst story O. Henry ever wrote. Even the detective’s name, Shamrock Jolnes, is a miss. Hemlock Jones in Bret Harte’s terrific “The Stolen Cigar-Case” was funnier.

As for the story, it’s about a man looking for his missing sister in the Big Apple. After being fleeced by a police detective, and Jolnes’s inductive method being exposed as a sham, the sister’s location is whimsically discovered by a third sleuth. First published in 1904, the jokes here haven’t aged well, to the point where for most readers they might need to be explained. Which means they aren’t jokes anymore.

Holmes index

Chew Volume Five: Major League Chew

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

Chew Volume Five: Major League Chew

When last we left off, Tony Chu’s daughter Olive had just been kidnapped by Mason Savoy. His reasons are at least generally clear: he wants to act as her mentor, bringing her cibopathic powers along so that she can aid him in his plans, which have something to do with uncovering the conspiracy behind the bird flu. And as bad luck would have it, Tony himself is also kidnapped at the same time, by one of Amelia’s coworkers, a guy who wants to feed him the body parts of long-dead baseball players so that Tony can spill the beans on their sordid sex lives. This will allow him (the kidnapper) to score a big advance for writing a sleazy book on the subject (Superstar Sluggers’ Untold Sex Tales) after which he’ll auction Tony off to underground figures who want to do scientific testing on him.

This volume doesn’t do a lot to advance the main storyline, but it does throw in a lot of the sort of madcap madness that fans will love. Tony is busted from the F.D.A. and becomes a traffic cop, leaving his former partner Colby teamed up with a cyborg lion while working for the lusty ladies of the U.S.D.A. And once again Colby has to hop in bed with the boss to help Tony out.

A lot of the regulars are sidelined. Tony’s brother and sister only pop in as cameos, and the redoubtable Poyo doesn’t appear until the triumphant final page. It looks like he’s had some work done and is even more of a mean fighting machine than ever. There’s also nothing said about the aliens or the vampires. But we do meet Hershel Brown, a xocoscalpere. This means he can sculpt anything out of chocolate so realistically that it exactly mimics its real-world counterpart. So a chocolate machine gun or samurai sword is totally lethal. Alas, this skill doesn’t save him from being cut into pieces by some Russians (or Serbians, or “some damn thing”).

Tony gets rescued by Amelia, Colby gets a new partner, and Olive is starting to grow into her awakening powers. I haven’t been disappointed by this series yet and look forward to what’s next.

Graphicalex

DNF files: Extreme Killers

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

Extreme Killers: Tales of the World’s Most Prolific Serial Killers

By Michael Newton

Page I bailed on: 18

Verdict: I’ve nothing against Michael Newton. I thought his Encyclopedia of Serial Killers adequate. But the fact is that he published “more than 339 novels and non-fiction books as of 2020,” and this more than suggests that he’d become a bit of a machine. In the author’s bio for his Encyclopedia (second edition published in 2006) the number given is only “more than 180 books.” In any event, he died in 2021.

I’ve also nothing against this Profiles in Crime series. I thought Killer Cults: Stories of Charisma, Deceit, and Death adequate, if only just. But as I said in my review of that volume, I didn’t see how there was much need for such books in the age of Wikipedia anyway.

I didn’t get far into this one. The first killer covered was Gilles de Rais, a French nobleman in the fifteenth century who may have been the original Bluebeard. The second was Erzsébet Báthory, the “Bloody Countess,” a Hungarian noble who may have been the original Dracula. Both figures have since entered into legend and the real nature and extent of their crimes is a matter of some debate. Their trials can’t be divorced from the historical context, where accusations of the most outrageous behaviour weren’t uncommon. Unfortunately, establishing that context takes time, and in an anthology like this that’s not what you’re going to get, with each chapter being limited to around 15 pages. So it just wasn’t adding up to anything more than what you’d expect from a quick Internet search and wasn’t any fun to read.

The DNF files

Doctor Strange: Strange Origin

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

Doctor Strange: Strange Origin

Yet another reboot origin story, this time for Doctor Strange. Except author Greg Pak doesn’t change up the original origin story (I had fun writing that) very much. It’s still Dr. Stephen Strange being an arrogant surgeon who loses use of his hands in a car accident and then seeking out the Ancient One, a mysterious figure who introduces him to the world of magic. While at the temple of the Ancient One, Dr. Strange meets Mordo, the bad student, and Wong, who will go on to become Dr. Strange’s manservant (he’s a little more independent than that here, but still fills the same role).

On the plus side it’s a pretty condensed retelling, with Dr. Strange getting up to speed just by memorizing a few incantations. After that, he and Wong and a sexy Italian sidekick are off hunting down the three rings of power to prevent Mordo from getting his hands on them. Yawn. Come on. We’re really doing this rings of power thing again?

At each stage there are portals opened and demons burst through that then have to be banished through an appeal to the Vishanti or else good ol’-fashioned fisticuffs. And Dr. Strange proves himself worthy to become a Sorcerer Supreme by renouncing the power of the rings and going back to the Ancient One to continue his training.

It wasn’t my thing. I liked the giant tiger of the Vishanti, and the art by Emma Ríos is distinct in a sketchy sort of style, but I also found it hard to read in places. The demons sometimes seem like balls of ectoplasmic yarn. And the story was underwhelming for the reasons given. Also included in this volume is a teaser for a different storyline (The Way of the Weird, which I already had a copy of), and that felt out of place even if it is just bonus content. The origin story there is presented as a flashback to the original, and not to the book we just read.

If you’re a Dr. Strange fan I’d give this a look mainly for the different style of the art, but otherwise it should be a pass.

Graphicalex

Archer: The Drowning Pool

/ Alex Good / 15 Comments

This was the second of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels and it reads a lot like a rerun of The Moving Target. A damsel in distress, a rich lady unhappily married into money, comes to Archer with a problem. He heads out to the big house and meets the dysfunctional, decadent family, which includes a kittenish daughter with an eye for the wrong kind of guy. There’s a subplot involving real gangster types that leads to Archer getting roughed up, but that has little bearing on the family’s moral disintegration. Archer is slow on the uptake, which leads to the deaths of some innocents. Though being innocent is a relative term, since there are no heroes. As Archer recognizes at the end of this book: “Everyone had done wrong for himself and others. Everyone had failed. Everyone had suffered.”

Finally, I’m not even sure if Archer gets paid. Certainly not enough for the beatings he takes.

It’s written in the same cynically ornate style that stays just this side of parody. As so: “The thin scarp of moon hung in a gap of the mountains, like lemon rind in a tall dark drink of Lethe.” And then there’s tough guy patter delivered up with a seasoning of self-deprecating wit:

There had to be a difference between me and the opposition or I’d have to take the mirror out of my bathroom. It was the only mirror in the house, and I needed it for shaving.

Of course, right from the opening sentence Archer is assessing feminine charms, taking Maude Slocum in from top to bottom: “If you didn’t look at her face she was less than thirty, quick-bodied and slim as a girl. Her clothing drew attention to the fact: a tailored sharkskin suit and high heels that tensed her nylon-shadowed calves. . . . About thirty-five, I thought, and still in the running.” Later on he’ll see Maude in a zebra-striped dress, with “her breasts pressed together like round clenched fists in the V of her neckline.” Trust Archer to be able to identity a physical threat.

But Archer is no dumb brute. Ross Macdonald had a Ph.D. in English literature, after all. So when Archer meets a broken gambler in Vegas he refers to him as “the young Dostoevsky,” assuming that the reader will make the connection. And I guess a reader of pulp detective fiction in 1950 might have made it. I suspect fewer people will get it today. When Maude will later tell Archer that her “fairy” husband has retired to his bedroom, there to “spend the rest of his life . . . like Marcel Proust,” and Archer responds “This Marcel something-or-other, is he a friend of yours?” she has no time for his games: “So now you’re going to play dumb again?” She knows he knows his Proust. Though I think he’s being honest when he tells Cathy that he hasn’t read Coleridge’s “Ode to Dejection.” Oh, those were literary days indeed in the mid-century. Archer can drop lèse-majesté and impotentia coeundi into sentences as easily as he can tap someone on the head with the butt of his .45.

It’s a fun read that moves quickly. So quickly that at points I lost track of where I was. Then when I went back I found that such information had simply been left out. Where does it say that Archer is being picked up by the police and taken back to the Slocum’s place? They just put him in the car and the next thing we know he’s there, even though we haven’t been told where they were taking him or where “there” is when they get there.

And underlying everything is Archer’s disgust with the circles, high and low, that he moves in. In The Moving Target he had seen L.A. as an “excremental river” and in this book he has a moment of peace and communion with nature while swimming in the Pacific that’s set against the mess men have made of things:

I turned on my back and floated, looking up at the sky, nothing around me but cool clear Pacific, nothing in my eyes but long blue space. It was as close as I ever got to cleanliness and freedom, as far as I ever got from all the people. They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through the mountains, cut down a thousand years of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn’t touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn’t be tainted.

Ah that was life in 1950 too. An ocean that couldn’t be tainted. Gone now, like everything else.

Archer index

The Uncanny X-Men: Red Wave

/ Alex Good / 14 Comments

The Uncanny X-Men: Red Wave

Another franchise reboot. Krakoa, the living island of misfit toys, has fallen and the X-Men have disbursed around the globe. Beast and Cyclops are looking for new digs in Alaska while Rogue, Gambit, and Wolverine get together to toast wieners and drink beer in the Louisiana bayou. Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters has been turned into Graymalkin Prison, a penitentiary for mutants run by Dr. Corina Ellis, which is where Professor X is currently being held. And Charles’s old flame Sarah Gaunt, after being turned into a Javier Botet/J-horror demon called the Hag, is out hunting for more mutants to add to Dr. Ellis’s collection. The Hag’s next stop is the bayou, where a foursome of young mutants, along with Jubilee, have found Rogue and company and are looking for protection.

I’m guessing none of that synopsis will mean anything to most people reading this. Suffice it to say that this is all about Gail Simone setting things up for a new X-Men run, with the usual generational dynamic. Right from the start with the X-Men there’s been the idea of educating and training young people in the responsible use of their powers. That looks set to continue, and the newbies seem like a fun bunch to follow. Especially emo-manga boy.

Also to the good is the character of the Hag. I didn’t like her backstory of romancing with Charles back in his Oxford days, but after her transformation in a hurricane that kills her kid she turns into a pretty fearsome foe, even taking down Wolverine handily. The way Rogue stops her though was corny as hell.

The romance between Rogue and Gambit was a little more advanced than I was expecting, but I guess comics are growing up. What I found hardest about having the two of them together so much was their silly accents. Rogue, a child of the Mississippi bayou, is all folksy (“I mighta coulda got a mite overconfident”), while the Cajun Gambit is all “dat” and “dem” and calling Rogue “chère.” A little of this goes a long way. Or, put another way, it soon gets annoying. Not quite as annoying as that silly script they started putting Thor’s speech into in his comics, but getting there.

Overall then a decent way of kicking off a new story cycle, with some good stuff and a few hiccups. Worth seeing what comes next anyway.

Graphicalex

Unspeakable

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

In his book Fire Weather John Vaillant, who is great at these kind of factlets, gives us this:

Words possess spell-casting, shock-inducing power, even in this jaded age, and the English language has accounted for this: something that  is “infandous” is a thing too horrible to be named or uttered.

I’ll admit that when I first read this I thought perhaps Vaillant had meant “infamous” and that there had been a typo. Even spellcheck tells me it’s a mistake. But no, infandous is a word. Dictionaries define it as something “too horrible to mention,” or “extremely odious.” It derives from the Latin infandus, “not to be spoken of.” Apparently Increase Mather spoke of things being nefandous, which meant the same thing but wasn’t as popular.

All of that was, however, long ago. The Oxford English Dictionary entry for infandous tells us “This word is now obsolete. It is last recorded around the early 1700s.” I did some digging and found where it had been used more recently than that, but I don’t think you’re likely to see it around much today.

Words, words, words