More embossed leather bookmarks from my (one and only) tour of the U.K. in the year 1976. And yes, I was wearing short pants.
For some reason I seem to have picked up a lot of these in Scotland, even though I don’t remember being there very long. I’ll have to see if I can find my (one and only) journal from the trip and post pics.
Book: Black’s Law Dictionary
The backstory here is more interesting than the case itself. Arthur Whitaker was a contemporary of Conan Doyle’s who sent the (typewritten) manuscript of the story to Doyle in 1911 to be published as a collaboration between the two authors. Doyle apparently sat on it and it stayed in a chest of family documents until 1948, when Doyle’s son Adrian agreed to have it published and credited as having been written by Doyle. Whitaker, however, was still alive and after threatening legal action was acknowledged as the sole author.
There’s a whole science of stylometrics that looks to be able to identify authors through a close analysis of patterns in their writing. In what is probably the most best-known example, scholars lean on it heavily when it comes to identifying what parts of other, non-canonical plays Shakespeare might have had a hand in writing. As it turned out, Whitaker had kept a carbon copy of the manuscript for this story that made his case, but without that I wonder how many people would have felt that this wasn’t the real deal. It didn’t feel authentic to me, but that was only a very subtle sense I had on a first reading. “Proving” it wasn’t written by Doyle would involve a lot more work.
This introduces a more contemporary issue. What if you wanted a pastiche of a Holmes story and gave the task to an AI, asking it to write it in the style of Doyle? Presumably the program would be able to pass a stylometric test. And given the pedestrian nature of the plot here (hinted at in the bland title) I doubt the AI could do much worse. The mystery itself is mostly solved off-stage, when Holmes has managed to ditch Watson. That’s a device employed often enough by Doyle, so the results apparently satisfied most fans, who weren’t too disappointed. And they’d been the ones clamoring for the story’s publication in the first place. But you have to wonder. If AI is going to take over anywhere it’s going to be in the writing of formulaic genre fiction with an established voice, and that’s the Holmes canon to a T. So watch this space.
It’s fine. Just nothing special.
A vintage spy story, set in 1973 but in James Bond’s Europe, so definitely not the disco era. There’s a spy organization known as ARC-7 that only a graphic in the corner of one of the cover pages tells us stands for the Allied Reconnaissance Commission. So sort of like the Five Eyes? I don’t know. Their headquarters is in London. James Bond again.
One of the ARC-7 superspies is gunned down in the streets of Paris, which sets off alarms back at HQ. It seems they have a mole. The chief suspect is one Victoria Templeton, a mid-40s beauty with a shock of white hair who works as the personal secretary of the Director. Ms. Templeton is, however, a lot more than a secretary, being a super-spy herself. And now she’s on the run.
Exotic settings. Luxury acccomodations. Gunfights. Martial arts. Car chases. Victoria in lingerie and swimsuits. Like I say, it’s fine. But really generic and just not that interesting. Maybe the next volume will throw in some change-ups, because that’s what I think it really needs.
So for those of you who enjoyed my previous post showcasing the wallpaper on display in a house that had been recently listed, here’s another. Actually a beautiful house and for the most part nicely turned out. The wallpaper in this bathroom though . . .
The crime:
Fotis Dulos was charged with the murder of his wife Jennifer, a wealthy heiress whose family fortune had funded Fotis’s business (building luxury homes) and playboy lifestyle. The two had been involved in a bitter divorce battle, including a fight over custody of their five children. Jennifer’s body, however, was never found and Fotis committed suicide before he could be brought to trial.
The book:
You don’t have to look to hard to see what made this case such a media sensation at the time, with the courtroom surrounded by broadcast anchors and sound trucks. “It was the wealth and privilege, the beauty of the participants, that made it tabloid fodder. The mansions, the money, and the unsolved mystery: Where is Jennifer?” But these same factors also created a backlash:
Some criticized the dozens of national news stories about the case as overkill, saying they were published only because Jennifer was beautiful, wealthy, white. They even had a name for the phenomenon: “missing white woman syndrome.” But it was more than just the surface details that made the story mesmerizing. It was the horror, the universal nightmare, the way death arrived amid the quotidian details of an ordinary American morning. Jennifer had restraining orders, bodyguards, and every possible resource, but when someone is determined to do you real harm, no amount of money can protect you.
I’m not sure though that there was much more here than the “surface details.” Or, as Rich Cohen puts it in his note on sources, “the granularity of the status markers.” Without that backdrop of money, or what Jennifer’s family called “bank” (the privilege, the status, the elite lifestyle) this was one of the oldest, perhaps the oldest, true crime story in the book: angry, controlling husband kills his wife in the midst of bitter divorce proceedings. Nor would I take the case as standing for the proposition that “no amount of money can protect you” in such situations. Yes Jennifer had some security, but she could have used more. This was premeditated murder, but Fotis wasn’t some criminal mastermind with a foolproof plan.
The everyday nature, however tragic, of the crime itself leads to the question of why we find the suffering of rich people more interesting than those of others. We don’t live like them and so can’t relate on that level. So maybe we just like to see how dysfunctional our socioeconomic elites are. To have all that wealth and privilege and still be trapped in such an unhappy life does make you consider what’s really important. It’s interesting that one of Jennifer’s early boyfriends, Tom Beller, recognized this and described her life as the proverbial gilded cage:
Life was too easy with Jennifer, explained Tom, who believe in the upside of the downside. Discomfort builds character, giving you the needed material to write. There was no grit with Jennifer, no sand in the gears. That bothered Beller; the relationship felt like a trap, like a feather bed he couldn’t escape.
I think money, or the good life more generally, really is this kind of a trap. But of course that has never stopped anyone from trying to get more of it. Certainly one such person was Fotis Dulos. An ambitious Greek immigrant, the good life in America (and he first met Jennifer when they were students together at Brown) turned his head completely. “He wanted the most and the best: big houses, luxury travel, power boats, yachts.” But for all of his talk of being an Old World and Old School man of traditional patriarchal values, he was really just a Eurotrash gigolo who liked to play at being a playboy and man of business. In fact, without Jennifer’s (and specifically her father’s) money he would have been a quick bankrupt. I honestly don’t know what women saw in him, but I guess he was cute and had charm. I wouldn’t have thought that was enough to get him as far as he got though.
In the case of Jennifer it seems to have been most obviously a case of “baby rabies.” She was a woman in her 30s who wanted to settle down and have a bunch of kids. This meant she was “just about out of time” and had to get going. Fotis was available. Indeed not just available:
A psychopath is a chameleon. He sees what you want, then becomes that thing. It’s unfortunate that Jennifer Farber met Fotis Dulos when she was vulnerable, when she feared her window on motherhood was closing. Fotis’s talent was to recognize Jennifer’s problem and turn himself into the solution.
That said, Fotis seems to have had no trouble pulling other attractive women anytime he felt the need. Were they just stupid? “How crazy is this dumb girl?” one observer asked of the lover who took Jennifer’s place. Were they chasing notoriety? Or were they like the woman who became his girlfriend after his arrest, a graduate magnum cum laude with a successful career in wealth management who was attracted to the “doomed, forsaken, damned, and dangerous”? The technical term for this is hybristophilia and it’s just one of those things you have to shake your head at.
Fotis’s own psychopathy took some odd turns as well. He went to his grave with a suicide note insisting on his innocence (the murder was “something I had NOTHING to do with”). I thought this strange in at least a couple of ways: to still be claiming innocence when his guilt was obvious, and for killing himself. But according to one expert Cohen interviewed it makes sense, or is at least “typical of the behavioral profile of a psychopath. No remorse. These are people who see the world through the filter of narcissism – no matter what, they are the victims.” Or, in terms we’ve all become more familiar with: “It’s like a suicide note written by Donald Trump. It’s everyone’s fault but his own.”
Another psychiatrist further observed: “That is what makes them [narcissistic psychopaths] suicide risks. You would think somebody so egotistical would not kill themselves, but they will if it’s to protect their ego and self-image, which to them is more important than living.” That’s something else you have to shake your head at. Their self-image is more important than their life. The image becomes a sort of idol that they worship, something greater than the self. I think this is connected to the way some narcissists go on about their “legacy.” What they really want is to be immortal, and a legacy is the only way this can be accomplished. So they become willing to sacrifice anything to that end. In life, the one thing they can’t stand is being ignored. In death, the worst fate they can imagine is to be forgotten, or to leave the stage with any stain on their reputation.
This is a good book, in large part because Cohen is writing about a world he felt connected to. This makes him different from his audience. As I began by pointing out, few of us have any real awareness of how the very rich live, and so we can’t relate to them on that level. But Cohen can, and it’s what drew him to the story:
Though the world is big, the world is also small, and while reporting this story, I kept running into reflections of my own experience. Maybe that’s why I became so fixated not only on Jennifer’s disappearance and death but also on her life. In reading about her, in visiting the places she had been and talking to the people she had known, I felt like I was seeing the story of my own generation in a convex mirror – distorted but recognizable.
I don’t know which of the two worlds Cohen says Jennifer inhabited – uptown or downtown – he identified with the most, but in both cases he manages to present himself as something of an insider. Not in any kind of a gossipy way but just as someone who knows the lay of the land, the rules and the roles. I found the insights he provided, particularly in the behaviour of Jennifer’s father, to be of real value in coming to a fuller understanding of the case and its tragedy.
Noted in passing:
“A mistress is more expensive than a wife.” Well, it depends. A mistress is certainly cheaper than an ex-wife.
“According to Wikipedia, J. G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash is the story of ‘car-crash fetishists who become sexually aroused by staging and participating in car accidents.” According to Wikipedia? Come on, Rich. Read the book. Or at least watch the movie.
Before Michael Jordan shaved his head in 1988, men clung to their hair, no matter how little of it they happened to have. If three wisps remained, they prized those wisps, which they gelled and combed back to front. Such men were in search of “coverage.” In some cases, that meant long in back, spare on top. In others, it meant miracle treatments, Rogaine, implants, or hair plugs. But after Michael Jordan shaved his head and appeared on TV as a chrome-domed futuristic warrior, a certain sort of man, seeking to join the ranks of the powerfully neat, shaved the wisps and faced the world pure and bald – on the field, in front of students, and in the courtroom. For the most part, these bald professionals tended to be of a certain class – aspirational graduates of schools not one but two tiers below Ivy. They were strivers, the last believers in the dream. They drove BMWs and Audi 2000s and played adult softball on the weekend. While others downed Gatorade or talked about stocks on the sideline, they wiped the seat from their bald heads with a single confident towel stroke.
Sure this is a caricature, but caricature works by exaggerating some truth. That said, I felt it was being a bit mean.
There was some good news to come out of this sordid affair, and it has to do with a situation that I’ve noted several times already in these True Crime Files.
Just to cut and paste a bit of background: in two previous books by John Glatt (Love Her to Death and Tangled Vines) I’ve made mention of how bad an idea it is for women to meet up with their exes, or soon-to-be-exes, on their own. In both of those books the wives in question ended up being murdered. In The Doomsday Mother there was a gender reversal in that it was Lori Vallow wanting to meet with her estranged husband Charles. Charles had a bad feeling about this, and even mentioned to Lori’s brother Adam some misgivings. He ended up being shot to death by Lori’s other brother Alex.
In this book Fotis had befriended another fellow, named Mawhinney, who was in the midst of a bitter divorce. They may have entered into some kind of agreement, with Fotis getting rid of Mawhinney’s wife, a woman named Monica, if he would return the favour and take care of Jennifer. To this end Fotis met with Monica at a restaurant and tried to convince her to come back to his house where, he told her, she could meet with her husband and reconcile. Since Monica had taken out a protective order against her husband she sensibly wanted no part of this, and turned the offer down despite Fotis’s insistence. When she got home she reported what had happened to her lawyer and to the police:
“Dulos abruptly paid the bill and left when [Monica] “felt she was being ‘baited’ and was uncomfortable with the fact that Dulos kept inviting her back to his residence. She stated that she believed that Dulos was ‘indebted’ to Mawhinney and that she believed Dulos was working on behalf of Mawhinney to get rid of her. She believed ‘Mawhinney wanted her dead.’”
You think? In fact, there was evidence that they’d already dug a grave for her. So just to underline a lesson that’s now come up several times: don’t agree to meet an ex on your own! When it’s over, it’s over.
Takeaways:
I know it’s a double standard, but a consciously hypergamous man is always a contemptible figure. What’s more, they know how other men view them and that just makes them worse.
I like these DC Arkham volumes (and Marvel does something similar with their MCU tie-in books) because they show the evolution of a villain through time. And when I say through time I mean a lot of time. The character of Hugo Strange first showed up in 1940 and the last comic collected here is from 2016. So it’s been a slow evolution.
In Dr. Strange’s debut Batman describes him as “the most dangerous man in the world! Scientist, philosopher and a criminal genius . . . little is known of him, yet this man is undoubtedly the greatest organizer of crime in the world.” This makes him sound a bit like a DC version of Professor Moriarty, which may have been the original idea. As things went on, however, he turned into something a little more specific. I assume he’s still a great mind and polymath, but in his later iterations he seems more specifically to be a psychiatrist or psychologist. His appearance also became more distinct: coke-bottle glasses or goggles, bald and with a beard, and a grin that flashes both top and bottom rows of teeth. It’s also revealed that he’s quite buff, to the point where he can fill out a Batman suit well enough to pass as the caped crusader, only hairier. Or even go toe-to-toe with the champ in fisticuffs, if need be.
This made the data page provided as a bonus at the end of this volume all the more surprising when it gave his personal stats as 5’10 ½” and 170 pounds. Do you know anyone else who is 5’10 ½” and 170 pounds? Yes you do! The fellow writing this review! And I can tell you, I don’t have a superhero’s build.
Another quick aside: Why is he Professor Hugo Strange? I assume he has a Ph.D. from somewhere, and so could be called Dr. Strange (albeit not of the mystic arts), but the title of professor usually means someone who has a teaching position somewhere. I don’t see any evidence of that in these comics, and I’m not sure how it would work for Hugo, given his criminal record.
In any event, like a lot of shrinks (and yes, I’ve known a few), this Dr. Strange has lots of his own mental issues to work through. The chief being an obsession not just with defeating Batman but becoming Batman himself. Hence the way he keeps dressing himself up as Batman, which seems almost like a kink. When Robin asks him why he’s so into cosplay we get this explanation: “Batman is more than a person, child. Batman is a force, a power of archetypal potency! The Bat is in all of us! I am the Bat! He has no right to keep the mask to himself! No right!”
I don’t know if that makes any sense. It probably does to him, but as Robin realizes, he’s not someone who knows himself very well. I mentioned, for example, his thing for dressing up as Batman being a sort of kink, and there were a few points in these comics that reinforced that notion. In his debut for example, when Professor Strange captures Batman he ties him up and starts whipping him. Or, in his words, giving him “a taste of the lash!” This struck me as kind of weird. Then in a later comic there’s a two-page wrestling match between a totally nude Bruce Wayne (fresh out of the shower, you see) and a “mandroid” version of Robin. This made me think of Saturday Night Live’s Ambiguously Gay Duo. Is there some homoerotic fascination then that Strange has for Batman/Bruce Wayne? (For years Strange was the only villain that knew Batman’s real identity, which he discovered by the simple expedient of taking off his mask when he captured him.) As for his dating preferences, his data page gives his marital status as single and whatever else he envies about Bruce Wayne’s lifestyle, it’s not having hot girlfriends like Silver St. Cloud, who he finds to be a nuisance.
Leaving all that aside and just focusing on the comics, I thought the two-parter from 1977, and 1986’s “Down to the Bone” (that reads a lot like Frank Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again storyline, which came out the same year) were both very good. Do you know what elite status markers were in 1986? Yachts and . . . VCRs! Alas, “money is not just yachts and VCRs,” we’re also told. So I guess I wasn’t that rich after all. Moving along, the four-part “Transference” story from Gotham Knights though struck me as poor and the final story, the climax of the “Night of the Monster Men” arc, wasn’t worth including. In other words, the storytelling hit a peak in the ‘70s and ‘80s and has been in a trough since. That’s not really an issue with the evolution of the character of Hugo Strange though, but says more about the declining quality of writing everywhere.
Many bookmarks come with tassels. They just seem to go together.
Book: The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall by Eliot A. Cohen
By the time of “The Musgrave Ritual” I thought the Holmes stories were in a definite skid. All the more credit to Doyle then for arresting that and coming up with this little gem.
It’s not a typical Holmes story in that it’s almost entirely narrated by Holmes himself, by way of explaining items that turn up when Watson encourages him to clean their apartment. While being fastidious in most things, Holmes is also a bit of a slob you see. Anyway, this structure is the same as was used in “The Stockbroker’s Clerk,” but the results are far more satisfying. This is one of the three or four classic cases in the canon and one that’s always been a personal favourite.
The actual puzzle-solving is nothing special, but it’s well packaged, down to the little catechism that even impressed T. S. Eliot. That blending of popular and high culture was important to what’s come to be called High Modernism. And it cuts both ways. The modern isn’t (always) being diminished in comparison with the classics, and I think Eliot respected the pulp royalism here as a bit of found poetry.
I also liked Holmes’s respect for the treasure-hunting butler Brunton. Faced with the difficult problem of calculating the right spot to dig with a missing variable (the elm tree that had been removed), he is resolved “that if Brunton could do it, I could also.” This isn’t a put-down. Later he will explain how his “methods in such cases” is to put himself in the criminal’s position, after first having gauged their intelligence. And then he, remarkably, states that this didn’t require “any allowance for personal equation, as the astronomers have dubbed it,” since Brunton is a man of “quite first rate” intelligence. In other words, he saw Brunton as an equal. That’s high praise indeed coming from Sherlock.
This was a tough one! As you can see, it took me down to the wire. But I got lucky and landed it on the final guess.
Alright, we’re rolling again with my go-to comic for a good time. This volume contains issues #11-15, with #15 marking the quarter mark for the team of author John Layman and artist Rob Guillory as they had originally planned a 60-comic run.
I think this gives some idea of the forethought that went into the series and explains the way hints keep getting dropped as we go along to characters and events that didn’t seem all that important at the time, or that we might have thought we were finished with. To be sure, I knew that Gardner-Kvashennaya, the arctic observatory that hosted a vampire bloodbath, was going to play a big part in what was to come. Ditto the “Frog Man” Montero (so-called because he breeds frog-chicken hybrids). But I wasn’t expecting the return of the killer rooster Poyo, or the introduction of new characters like a mysterious food taster, Tony’s sister, and all the rest of his family, including his daughter(!) and one very weird ex.
The other thing about planning so far ahead is that it allows Layman and Guillory to play with the arrangement of the narrative blocks. This happens in almost every issue, as we begin with a scene (often the aftermath of some act of violence) that only gets explained later. They know what they’re doing here, as they even make fun of it in issue #12, which begins with the editorial note “The pages got shuffled out of sequence. This is actually page 18.”
Given all this preparation I feel confident that I’m not going to be disappointed in how things turn out. In the meantime, I’ve enjoyed everything so far, down to all of the little background gags you really have to be on your toes to catch (and a few of which I’ve missed). On to the next course!
Alex Good 