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

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

Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult
By Ellen Huet

The crime:

Nicole Daedone, a Californian entrepreneur, began a movement in the early 2000s that centered on a practice she called Orgasmic Meditation (OM) and that eventually became a business known as OneTaste. Members of OneTaste took courses and workshops on OM and often lived communally in a manner that observers likened to a sex cult. What OM mainly consisted of was women having their genitals “stroked” to orgasm, most often by a man. In 2023 Daedone and OneTaste head of sales Rachel Cherwitz were indicted and after a lengthy trial both women were found guilty of federal forced labour charges, with Daedone being sentenced to nine years in prison.

The book:

At first this book seemed like it might be a near clone of Blazing Eye Sees All, as both were stories of female-led cults based out of northern California that emphasized lifestyle makeovers, with Love Has Won being more New Age while OneTaste tapped into the wellness market. And, needless to say given that I’m talking about them in the True Crime Files, they both ended badly. They even came with similar political footnotes, with a shift to the right and the convicted women here complaining to “right-wing media outlets” about “prosecutorial overreach” (the “witch hunt” defence) and courting individuals with access to Donald Trump to see if they could swing a pardon.

The differences, however, are instructive. As the famous line from Eric Hoffer put it, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” We may well ask though if OM and OneTaste didn’t begin as a racket. This isn’t to say that Daedone was wholly cynical, just that she went into it with a business plan. Her earliest discussions with an older fellow sex communard and mentor took the form of “long, meandering conversations about advanced clitoral stroking and how to build a commercially viable following around it.” The sales pitch would have to get with the times: “Since we are not selling the god hustle,” she was told, “what do we do? What we have to sell is an organically healthy lifestyle with sensuality and intimacy. . . . Sell sensuality, sex, good communication, hot ass, any ass, etc.” Since Daedone had a background in the sex industry she had an edge. She’d also had previous experience in similar sex movements whose followers were frankly described as “marks.” I don’t think she was ever under any illusions about what the point of all this was.

But the wellness angle wasn’t the only thing that made OM a timely project. This was San Francisco and Silicon Valley at the dawn of the tech boom, and Daedone

was surrounded by bright-eyed tech founders who believed that the most effective way to change the world and to improve people’s lives was to build a company. By the mid-2000s, even being a guru was a professional pursuit, something that required branding and business savvy.

Now as those bright-eyed tech founders turned into the current oligarchy of tech bros we have all begun to wonder just how idealistic they were about creating a better world, and the point I want to make is that Daedone should be judged by the same standard. In the environment of the time, faith and gold weren’t just hard to tease apart, they were seen as being the same thing. There was a new law of physics contained in Daedone’s philosophy that “money is just energy.” “The universe is made of love,” Deadone would tell her sales staff. “Sales is love. Therefore the universe is made of sales.”

“One look at her face,” Huet adds, “told you she really believed it.”

Was this attitude “uniquely Silicon Valley,” as one reporter covering the OM movement averred? I wouldn’t go quite that far, but OneTaste really was of its time.

A key quality of a cult is its ability to adapt with the times. Just as cults in the 1960s reflected the era’s countercultural movement, today’s cults don’t look like they did in the past. Now, they look like mission-driven startups and Fortune 500 companies with demanding schedules and rigid corporate practices. They look like fitness fads, YouTube celebrities, altruistic nonprofits, therapeutic psychedelic guides, and executive leadership training seminars.

Wellness is an industry; spirituality is a commercial product. There will always be people with a hole in their heart – and someone willing to sell them a cure. Those cures will be constantly evolving, and the characteristics of cult leaders will modernize as well.

This leads me to a second point that I saw as setting OneTaste apart as a cult.

Devotees of OM weren’t suffering from a hole in their hearts so much as a lack of meaning and purpose in their lives. Meaning, purpose . . . and excitement. Were they seekers of enlightenment, or just bored? Boredom is like a refrain in the lives of OneTaste’s members, their main point of vulnerability. Daedone’s first husband is described as being drawn to her because “he wanted to avoid a boring, off-the-rack life.” The “best marks,” Daedone had learned, “were eager to hand over cash in exchange for the promise of more sex, vigor, and fun in their lives.” Her earliest followers were “the perfect marks” because they “had money to burn and yearned for a more thrilling life.” Even after quitting OneTaste one former follower confessed to fantasizing with another ex-member about going back, only because they both felt “bored and lonely.” It’s all kind of sad. One 29-year-old member was drawn to OneTaste because she’d never experienced an orgasm. We are also told that this same woman had been on antidepressants for fifteen years. So since she was 14? And from some of the other pocket bios Huet provides it’s clear this woman was far from the most messed up person to join the movement.

Ironically, even Daedone herself wasn’t having a lot of fun. As OneTaste expanded she grew tired of the responsibility of running the company. Her cultivated detachment led to feelings of loneliness, and people in the organization at the end “noted how she seemed to get impatient and bored, even when OneTaste was thriving.”

It seems that even becoming a god was no cure for this emotional brownout. “Against boredom,” Nietzsche wrote, “even gods struggle in vain.”

The cure for boredom, however, turned out to be worse than the disease. (Much worse, if, like me, you don’t consider boredom a bad thing in the first place.) Looking at it from the outside, OneTaste had the appearance of a gathering of sex addicts, only it was a movement that sought to deepen rather than diminish the effects of addiction. Participants were engaging in four or five “stroke sessions” per day, which I would have thought wearing after a while, even given the canonical time limit of 15 minutes per session (which I’m sure was rarely strictly adhered to). But then that’s the way most addictions work. Huet makes the link to edging, but I think the even more recent coinage “gooning” better applies. One woman explicitly compared the experience “to a drug-induced high,” while another never wanted it to stop. “When the fifteen-minute bell rang, she didn’t want to get up and go about her day, she said: ‘I just kept wanting to do it again, and again, and again.’” What is this if not a form of addiction? As every cult leader knows, sexuality is “the most intimate way you can control someone,” and who could resist a communion that made women’s genitals feel “like warm, buttery liquid caramel”?

Needless to say, there’s something depressing in all this. OM practitioners, who often did their thing publicly at training sessions, seem like the sex positives in the dystopian blue movie Café Flesh: putting on massage-table performances for the repressed or impotent. And everything about the movement fits with today’s porn culture, which is (to state the obvious) a mass masturbation cult. I’m not a prude, but I found the OneTaste commune to be a bit disgusting, like some kind of perpetual, onanistic orgy in a bawdy house hopping with bed bugs. There are people whose kink is exhibitionism though, so whatever turns you on . . .

And I think it’s the exhibitionist angle that made OneTaste as typical of its time as the Silicon Valley start-up ethos. One strong connection between Daedone and Carlson of Love Has Won is that both were extreme narcissists, obsessed not so much with attaining wealth and power as simply always being the center of attention. And in an attention economy, narcissists have a clear competitive advantage.

The attention economy at OneTaste was always in effect: “In OneTaste, attention was a powerful currency. Receiving someone else’s undivided attention felt amazing, and giving it to someone else could make them melt in your hands.” Literally melt, like warm, buttery liquid caramel.

It seems both weird and strangely familiar. A woman on a massage table, her legs spread and being stroked while a crowd of approving onlookers gaze in rapt attention, offering up their own commentary on how this makes them feel, is only a more sexually explicit form of the attention seeking of any Internet personality or podcaster chasing views, likes, and dopamine hits. That attention then being highly monetized. Today we’re all members of this broad church of engagement.

Noted in passing:

When OneTaste was starting out and they were looking for a San Francisco headquarters/communal residence, Daedone found “a dingy, newly vacant warehouse” that was available.

It was full of construction debris. Upstairs, there was some office space, and on the main floor, concrete floors and high ceilings. It looked like an industrial cave, and it was hard to imagine people living there.

Of course some renovations were necessary, but while a group shower area seemed to pass muster people were so unimpressed with there being only two toilets, side by side without stalls around them, that they went elsewhere. Most residents slept in a large main space that had beds packed in rows with thin curtains between them.

It sounds grim to me, like an urban summer camp for horny grown-ups, but the question I had was how it was legal. I could see setting up some apartments, maybe, but turning a warehouse into a commune housing fifty people would seem to involve some significant zoning and safety code issues. I don’t think anything like this would fly in my hometown. At the very least there’d be a year or more of public hearings. But maybe things are more relaxed in SF.

“To lead her defense, Nicole had hired an aggressive advocate: Jennifer Bonjean, a high-profile attorney who had represented Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, and the NXIVM leader Keith Raniere.” I think a client list like that establishes that you’re the go-to lawyer for cases involving sexual exploitation that come with a lot of media exposure, but didn’t all of those guys go to prison? Though I don’t know what role Bonjean played, at what stage, in their defenses. Apparently in Cosby’s case she got the initial sexual assault convictions overturned, but then she lost a later case where Cosby was sued for sexual assault so that might be considered a wash. In any event, it’s a line-up that speaks to Bonjean’s experience and I guess by the time these people were calling her things had already come to a desperate pass.

Takeaways:

If you have trouble getting yourself off you may need help, but you should first ask if maybe you’re just being lazy.

True Crime Files

A slow boat to China (or Hong Kong, which wasn’t quite the same thing at the time) isn’t where you’d expect to find Miss Marple, but aside from the setting Jean Kwok’s pastiche is well grounded and plays out in a familiar manner.

On the ship Miss Marple strikes up a friendship with a Chinese man who is returning to Hong Kong to visit his son. The man is soon found murdered in his cabin. The list of suspects is quite short (this is a short story), with the most prominent and suspicious-seeming being the man’s daughter. So we can feel pretty sure she’s in the clear. And the old man’s nurse with the one bad eye is a little too obvious as well. Which leaves the gossipy English couple, and while they’re obvious too they’re also very un-PC in a casually racist sort of way so you can’t count them out.

This throws us back on the one big clue or reveal scene, which I was happy to have interpreted correctly, having read more than a few of them in my time. I didn’t think the murder made a whole lot of sense, but in Kwok’s defence it held together a bit better than most of Christie’s plots. I haven’t read many successful Marple pastiches, but this one can at least be described as comfortable.

Marple index