Ten years or so ago I did a review of a book called What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund, which is all about what the title indicates. Mendelsund makes the case that reading only provides fragments that our imaginations have to fill in. If I recall correctly one example he uses is what Anna Karenina looks like. You might say Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh, or Keira Knightley, but that’s allowing for the influence of a more visual medium. When reading any text our response as readers is to create a “readerly vision” more grounded in personal associations and what we find significant. It’s a bit like reading a sentence with all the vowels left out and still having no trouble reconstructing what all the words say because our brains just automatically fill in the blanks. We don’t see what’s missing.

I think this is a profound idea. All reading involves a kind of skimming, and if we can’t say after we’re finished reading the book anything about Anna Karenina’s appearance, that’s because our brains have inserted a filler into that place in the text, or else we skip over it as not being that important.

What made me think of this while re-reading The Galton Case after many years was that there were a number of places in the opening pages where I caught myself doing this same skimming. Detective Lew Archer enters a lawyer’s office where a secretary sits behind a desk that has “a bowl full of floating begonias” on it. Normally I’d just pass over this bit of detail but for some reason I stopped and asked myself if knew what a begonia actually looks like. I realized I did not. So I went online and found out that there are many different kinds of begonias, varying widely in their appearance. This is not a flower I would have any confidence I’d be able to identify.

Later in the same paragraph Archer takes a seat in a “Harvard chair.” Again I paused. Was this a particular kind of chair? Apparently it is, being a style of armchair with a deep seat and railed back and arms. An official Harvard chair would also have the university’s seal. They were used in Harvard’s dining hall back in the day.

A couple of pages later we find Archer proceeding along a “black-and-white terrazzo corridor.” I just assumed a black-and-white pattern of tiling, but then stopped myself as I had with the begonias. What does terrazzo look like? So I looked this up as well and it wasn’t what I had thought at all. Terrazzo is a kind of flooring with chips of marble, quartz, granite or glass floating in a polished cement, polymer, or concrete binding.

Now I’m sure many readers, and indeed many people reading this, will know all of these, or at least two out of the three. But if I’d just been in my normal reading mode I would have only registered that Archer saw a flower on a desk, sat in a chair, and then walked down a corridor with some kind of black-and-white pattern in the flooring. I would have been skimming. And if you’d asked me what I saw when I was reading, the answer would have been far less than the information given.

On to the book. By which I mean not these details, but the story. Which itself displays a bias toward plot and against décor.

Macdonald himself considered The Galton Case to be his first complete Archer novel, figuring it had taken him a dozen years to get to this point. Which sounds about right, but also says something, and by that I mean nothing good, about how today we expect artists’ careers to be front-loaded. If you don’t have a hit with your first or second album, novel, or movie then it’s pretty much not going to happen for you. This is not the way it works, at least in most cases. It takes a while for someone to hit their stride. Faulkner, for example, didn’t give up after Soldier’s Pay and Mosquitos. I don’t think our current acceleration of the process does anyone any favours, but there you have it.

Anyway, Macdonald may have been more comfortable but he also wasn’t breaking much new ground here. Once again we start with Archer making a visit to some stately Californian mansion where the Grande Dame hires him to find a missing person. Money is no object, as “the Galton household had hot and cold running money piped in from an inexhaustible reservoir.” Meaning oil money, I believe. His investigation involves Archer wading through some tortured family history (“Nothing is lost in the universe”), fighting in a mostly friendly way with the law, and getting the crap beaten out of him by some bad guys who aren’t that important to what’s really going on. All of which was par for the course in an Archer novel by this point.

Stylistically there are the usual purple flourishes that rarely feel out of place. OK, the tires of a car that “shuddered and screeched like lost souls under punishment” is too much, but that’s an example of one that stood out. Better is the desk clerk at a seedy hotel who “had large sorrowful eyes and a very flexible manner, as if he had been run through all the wringers of circumstance.” I miss those desk clerks. But then, I’m not often in those sorts of hotels anymore.

I’m not sure I buy all the coincidences in the plot that leave young John Galton right where he’s supposed to be in the end. More than that though, I didn’t care for the moral lens that Archer brings to the case. In the first place we get the harsh treatment of Gordon Sable. “You surprise me, Lew,” Sable tells him at the end. “I didn’t expect you to bear down so hard. You have a reputation for tempering the wind to the shorn lamb.” Now to be sure Sable is no angel. He’s one of those compromised older men with a young wife/lover, like Graves in The Moving Target. But in his defence, the guy has been through a lot, and the people he was dealing with were worse.

I just wrote “defence,” which is the Canadian spelling. This makes for the big giveaway clue here, as Galton Junior is revealed to be Canadian by his spelling of “labour.” I got a smile out of that. Macdonald himself was born in the U.S. but raised in Canada and his wife was Canadian. This is one reason people have seen a connection between Macdonald and Galton, and in fact he did admit to some autobiographical elements being present. Which leads me to the second part of the moral judging I mentioned. If Archer bears down hard on Sable he seems to let Galton off the hook a little too easily for my liking. Whatever the facts of the case at the end, Galton is a nasty little schemer, a violent drunk and guilty of at least manslaughter (and probably worse). But he ends up winning the lottery, getting both the money and the girl. Will he “take good care of her,” as Archer wishes? I don’t see any reason to be hopeful. This is a young man on the make. If there’s any justice it’s in the hints dropped earlier about how “money was never free” and the walls of a big estate can be like a prison. I don’t think that bothers John at all though.

Archer index

Reading A Dark Knight in Aurora I came across this description of the “Ultraception symbol” that mass murderer James Holmes invented. The Ultraception takes the form of “a circle enclosing an infinity symbol (called a lemniscate) that touches both sides, with a seriffed numeral ‘1’ through the middle.”

The word lemniscate (which, I note in passing, WordPress spellcheck does not recognize) comes from the Latin for a ribbon, or decorated with ribbons, and it derives from a Greek word meaning the same. Now if you’re a mathematician, which I am not, you’ll know that lemniscate has a more technical meaning, referring to a figure-eight shaped curve whose equation in polar coordinates is ρ2=a2 cos 2θ or ρ2=a2 sin 2θ. I gather from the Internet that there are different kinds of lemniscates named after different mathematicians. But I don’t know anything about that. I just thought it interesting that there’s a word for the infinity symbol, which is basically a figure eight turned on its side. That’s something I didn’t know.

Words, words, words

Feline lovers relax, there is no cat in a bag. It’s just a woman’s head.

This was a very silly story, full of coincidences and not much actual detective work. It even kicks off with a motorcycle race, and Lord Peter in his roadster is bringing up the rear. The first man in the motorcycle is looking to get away from the bag with a head in it. The second motorcyclist is trying to return the bag with the head in it. And Lord Peter thinks the bag contains some of his mother’s stolen jewels and not a head.

I assume Sayers meant it all as a joke, and taken in that spirit it works pretty well. Plus it made me look up what a charabanc is, as I’d forgotten. I swear I once knew, but that was a while ago and the word isn’t used much anymore. Apparently it’s pronounced “sharra-bang” in England and called a “charra” in Wales.

Wimsey index

The second Nancy Drew mystery, and one that was again extensively revised from its 1930 version for republication in 1959. And I do mean extensively. If you read a comparison of the two books you’ll see how not just the characters’ names but most of the plot has been changed. Mildred Benson, writing under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, considered this to be a personal favourite books but I don’t think I can make any comment on that since the book she wrote wasn’t the one I was reading.

As things kick off it seems as though there are two mysteries in play: a couple of old ladies (Helen Corning’s great-grandmother and great-aunt) are living in a mansion that seems to be haunted while Nancy’s lawyer father is involved in a real estate deal that is coming undone in ways that are too complicated to explain (and that I’m not sure make any sense). Is there a connection? Of course there’s a connection. But it will take a while before things can be sorted out.

Nancy herself is feisty, fearless, and formidable. You don’t mess with this girl. If she sees a suspicious man (a man with an “athletic build” and cauliflower ear) checking out where she’s parked her car in an isolated field she takes off chasing him! Her friend Helen may be nervous about ghosts, or about ancient passageways crumbling down upon them, but Nancy just charges and barges ahead. And all this unarmed! In the 1930 version she’s packing a revolver, but here she only has a flashlight. When the police tell her she’ll never break the witnesses they have in custody she wins them over in mere seconds. There’s really no stopping her. And when it comes to noticing things she’s more machine than detective. I had to wonder, reading this passage, if she was perhaps being ironic. But I don’t think so.

“What did he look like?” Nancy asked.

The officer described the man as being in his early fifties, short, and rather heavy-set. He had shifty pale-blue eyes.

“Well,” Nancy replied, “I can think of several men who would fit that description. Did he have any outstanding characteristics?”

“Harry didn’t notice anything, except that the fellow’s hands didn’t look like as if he did any kind of physical work. The taximan said they were kind of soft and pudgy.”

“Well, that eliminates all the man I know who are short, heavy-set and have pale-blue eyes. None of them has hands like that.”

“It’ll be a good identifying feature,” the police officer remarked.

Maybe people noticed soft hands more 80 years ago. It’s certainly the case that today you wouldn’t feel a radio “to see if it were even slightly warm to prove it had been in use.” (“The music wasn’t being played on this,” she determines, “finding the radio cool.”) And how many teenagers today would be able to use a buttonhook even for its intended use, much less to open a secret wooden panel in the ceiling? I had to look up what a buttonhook was.

I shouldn’t be too hard on the Nancy Drew novels. After all, they’re YA fiction, directed primarily at girls, and written very much on an assembly line. Just as the end of almost chapter gives us a cliffhanger, so the end of each book hooks you into the next in the series, the title of which is already helpfully provided.

That said, aside from the historical interest I have to register that I don’t care for them very much. The plot in this one anyway I found hard to follow, with far too many secondary characters and the legal stuff, as in The Secret of the Old Clock, just a lot of fudge. More than that though, the writing struck me as lazy. To take just one example, on page 101 Nancy is referred to as “the young sleuth.” She’s called this again on page 103. On page 109 she’s “the young detective” and on 112 she’s the young sleuth again. And she’s the young sleuth again on pages 117 and 119. This list isn’t meant to be exhaustive, even for these twenty pages, as I know I’m missing some. But you get the point.

So these books are interesting as cultural touchstones. And I also found something compelling in the family dynamics at play. The housekeeper Hannah Gruen is usually presented as a kind of surrogate mother figure, but most of the time Nancy herself seems to be her father’s partner. It has a bit of the air of Haworth Parsonage about it. But even that doesn’t make me eager to read a lot more.

Drew index

A fun squib by Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie. Barrie was a friend of Conan Doyle and, as with the other Holmes parodies he penned, “The Late Sherlock Holmes” has the flavour of a shared joke.

The story takes the form of a breathless newspaper report on the death of the great detective, with Dr. Watson being arrested for murder after the events at Reichenbach Falls described (from Watson’s own point of view, of course) in “The Final Problem.” Drawing on the evidence presented in that story, which is heightened for humorous effect, the report makes the case for why Watson may have wanted to do away with his famous former companion. “Latterly,” we’re told, the two men “have not been on friendly terms, Holmes having complained frequently that whatever he did the other took credit for.”

On the other hand, the suspected accomplice [Watson] has been heard to say “that Holmes has been getting too uppish for anything,” that he “could do very well without Holmes now,” that he “has had quite enough of Holmes,” that he is “sick of the braggart’s name,” and even that “if the public kept shouting for more Holmes he would kill him in self-defence.”

Then the screw gets turned a little further as Barrie plays on Doyle’s own desire to do away with Holmes, introducing the author himself into the story as a “dark horse” candidate for Watson’s accomplice. And if you’re a real Holmes aficionado you’ll like the reference to the Ardlamont murder case, the trial for which took place the same year, 1893, that this story was first (anonymously) published. One of the expert witnesses at the Ardlamont trial was Dr. Joseph Bell, the man who inspired the character of Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes index