Over at Alex on Film I’ve added my notes on Maxxxine, which (likely) brings to a conclusion Ti West’s X trilogy. I liked the first film, X, and really liked the second, Pearl, but Maxxxine struck me as a weak way to wrap things up. Still better than most of the new movies I see, but a disappointment all the same.
Short and sweet. The story is presented as a monologue, with Miss Marple addressing Raymond (her nephew) and Joan (Raymond’s wife). This is because it was originally commissioned for radio, where it was read by Christie herself. I thought this broadcast version was available online somewhere, but the last time I checked I couldn’t find it. I’m sure it’s out there though.
What we’re presented with is a “perfect murder” or locked-room mystery. A woman goes in to her bedroom and is then found stabbed to death on her bed a few hours later, even though the doors and windows to her bedroom are all locked from the inside.
When talking about magic tricks that seem impossible, the rule is that if there’s only one way it could be done then that’s the way it had to have been done (I’m getting this from a video I watched by Penn Jillette). In this case there is an out that’s presented and as soon as it is then you can probably figure out how things must have been arranged. But I did like the way the solution turned on how we can all look at things and not see them. It’s the cocktail-party effect, as we filter out everything that we may be aware of but that our brains tell us isn’t important. In this case it also comes with a class argument, which made me think of how Paul Fussell in his book Class describes homeless people as being invisible even as they’re living on the street in plain sight.
Quite a break from The Immortal Hulk: Breaker of Worlds volume. We left off that book with Cosmic Hulk smashing a planet and the sudden appearance of the Leader. There’s nothing like that going on here and the Leader doesn’t show up at all. Instead we have a political Hulk comic, with Bruce Banner (“an angry middle-class white guy talking about revolution”) on a crusade against corporate “crisis” capitalism. This means taking on the Roxxon Corporation and its CEO: a nine-foot-tall man-bull called (fittingly enough) the Minotaur.
Roxxon is the epitome of all kinds of capitalism gone mad, and Dario Agger/Minotaur is a great villain. He likes to drink espresso out of little china cups that he shatters. Because he’s a giant man-bull and they have a thing for breaking china. He also has a habit of crushing the heads of his underlings when they say anything that upsets him.
So when the Hulk destroys a Roxxon server farm, taking signature platforms like YouRoxx, Roxxface, and Yambler offline, the Minotaur decides to fight back by bringing in some recruits from Monster Island to have a showdown with the Hulk in Phoenix. With the level bad guy being Xemnu the Living Titan.
The cover to this collection is actually very misleading, as Xemnu only appears on the final page and we never see the Hulk and Xemnu fighting. I guess that’s coming up next issue. Unless they do another swerve like at the end of Breaker of Worlds and leave us hanging.
Overall I quite liked this volume of the Immortal Hulk saga. It stays in the here and now, without whisking us through the green door or out into deep space and the even deeper future. The main storyline was also pretty interesting, and I like the idea of a progressive Hulk. Though maybe he’s not really progressive since he basically wants to smash the world. The battle in Phoenix was a waste though, and the kaiju that the Hulk fights are a bore. And what struck me is that once again we have the business of characters being eaten. I’m starting to think Al Ewing has a thing for this.
In any event, things are looking good so . . . on we go!
Birthdays come and go. And so do birthday cakes. But when the people at my condo get together to celebrate a birthday there are always these amazing cakes made by one super cake-maker. Here are a couple of her recent ones. And keep in mind these are much bigger than they look in the pictures. Those are full-size plates and the cakes fed a table of six or seven with half the cake left over. I should also say that you can eat the flowers, but you’re not supposed to.
Volume 2 of Lady Killer is very much more of the same as Volume 1, but that’s a good thing in my book. Housewife/contract killer Josie Schuller is back trying to juggle a stereotypical 1950s home life (husband, two beautiful little girls, hosting Tupperware parties) with being a murderess for hire. Only now, having broken up with the Organization, she’s freelancing. But this only leads to more stress, and it seems likely that she’ll be taking up with a new syndicate until the re-emergence of an old partner-in-crime, a fellow who turns out to be a Marcel Petiot figure who is very hard to get rid of. I’d say he has a crush on Josie, but it’s not that kinky a comic. Meanwhile, Josie’s cranky mother-in-law is revealed to know even more about Josie than she learned in Seattle.
As with the first book, it’s not an overly complicated plot. It’s more the stunning vintage-style art that makes the sale. I love the way Joëlle Jones recreates this world, as though clipping it out of the pages of fashion and lifestyle magazines of the period, with great use of fabric as a design element. And while Josie’s obviously a sort of feminist icon taking a bloody revenge on various chauvinist types this is an angle that isn’t overly played up.
One nagging question I had right from the opening slaughter had to do with the running gag about how good Josie is at cleaning up the mess she makes when she bludgeons her victims to death with a hammer or whatever likely weapon is at hand. I get the joke (Tupperware really is handy!), but surely the smarter thing to do would be to not make such a mess in the first place. A professional with her amount of experience should have figured that out by now.
Well it’s a great comic and a lot of fun, even if it feels like it’s over too soon. The end would seem to hold out the hope for more to come, but seeing as these comics were first published in 2017 and nothing has happened yet on that front I suspect there may not be a sequel. Then again, maybe the release of a movie based on Josie’s character will create demand for more. It certainly seems as though the story has room to grow.
Ah, the National Book Festival. I remember it well . . .
Just kidding. Actually I don’t remember the NBF at all. But I’m not sure anyone else does either. I picked up these bookmarks celebrating the 1983 and 1985 festivals (forty years ago!), but I don’t recall attending any NBF events. Nor could I find anything about them on the Internet.
My guess is that they didn’t last that long, and were eventually superseded by the Word on the Street festivals that started in Toronto in the 1990s and are still going. Because how many book festivals can you have? Even the more successful ones that I know of don’t draw all that much attention.
Book: Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education edited by Jean O’Grady and Goldwin French
You know you’re doing a really cheap puzzle when the pieces don’t fit together properly, or when they’re so thin they bend or tear apart, or . . . when the box doesn’t even tell you what the picture is a picture of! This looks like something Mediterranean, but it could be in the South Seas for all I know. Probably an old picture too so the place may not look the same now. The Geolocator crews could probably identify where it is, but they’re way ahead of me. I just do puzzles.
The All-New (a.k.a. “original” or “classic”) X-Men continue trying to find their way in twenty-first century America, encountering the next generation of other classic characters (Lady Mastermind, Rachel Grey/Summers) as well as some now grizzled vets (Wolverine and Sabretooth still thrashing it out like the comic-book Monsters of Rock they are).
To be honest, I started to feel the storyline was getting tired here though. The plot Mystique was hatching with her gang is revealed to be not all that interesting, or even worth bothering with. Madame Hydra is both surprised and unimpressed by it. The subsequent battle is full of lots of mind games, and Wolverine’s classic “Now it’s my turn” fell flat. As for the rest of it, there was too much talk, even though the story does call for a lot of it as all the characters have to come to grips with who they turned into in the new timeline. The Avengers as the senior superhero body were unwelcome cameos. And like so much Marvel product at this time you just want to throw your hands up at the amount of backstory and other stuff you’re supposed to be totally up to speed on to fully make sense of it. I mean, I suppose every long-time X-Men fan has a basic understanding of the Dark Phoenix storyline from way back when I was a teen, but you also have to know about Cyclops killing Charles Xavier in the Avengers vs. X-Men storyline and other stuff that’s happened since. There are so many timelines, alternate worlds, and threads of the multiverse going on with Marvel now that it feels like it’s sinking under its own weight a lot of the time. I think this series does a great job dealing with the problem, but it’s still a problem.
Brian Michael Bendis handles all this well, but it’s not a job I’d wish on anyone. There are just too many balls in the air, too many characters, and too much schmaltzy drama. I mentioned in my notes on Marvel Masterworks: The X-Men Volume 1 how the horny teen X-Men were all hot for Jean Grey and that even Charles Xavier was feeling thirsty. In the last comic included here we have Hank McCoy (the Beast) finally getting some romance action with her. I guess when you look like a comic-book superheroine (Covergirl looks, Playboy body in sexy outfits) you just have to learn to deal with all the attention, but you’d think she’d be starting to feel tired of having every guy she meets falling in love with her, in every different timeline.
The art by Stuart Immonen is solid in the Marvel house style at this time. David Lafuente does All-New X-Men #15 and he provides a nice change-up with a Manga-flavoured look (pointy noses, spikes of hair) that fits with the teenage vibe to that issue. I especially liked Jean in fuzzy pink slippers bumping into her daughter in the residence building. That was a great moment, nicely presented without any dialogue. In any event, at this point they were heading into crossover territory so things were about to get even messier with even more timelines coming into play. Which is not really what I was hoping for.
The crimes:
“Murder of Innocence”: Andrew Luster, the rich descendant of a cosmetics fortune, lived in California and spent his time surfing by day and drugging and raping women he picked up in bars at night. He also videotaped all of this. After jumping bail during his trial he was apprehended in Mexico and is now in prison.
“A Murderous Affair”: Mark Putnam, an FBI field agent in Kentucky, had an affair with an informant named Susan Smith. When Smith got pregnant Putnam strangled her. He pled guilty at trial and served 10 years of a 16-year sentence before being released for good behaviour in 2000.
The book:
I want to start off addressing a lot of things about this book rather than the book itself.
In the first place we have the name “James Patterson” on the cover. It’s not in quotation marks but I put them in because Patterson is a brand now and his name goes on the cover of a number of books that he oversees the production of but that he doesn’t write all of himself. In fact, I don’t know how much of them he writes or what the extent of his involvement is. In any event, Patterson is also the only name on the title page, and it isn’t until you get to the individual stories that you find they were written “with” Max DiLallo and Andrew Bourelle, respectively.
The cover also declares Patterson to be “the world’s #1 bestselling writer,” and that at least is a claim that is inarguable. He’s sold well over 400 million books and is the highest-paid author on the planet. You know the page at the front of some books where it lists “Other books by this author”? You don’t get that here, just a note telling you that “For a complete list of books, visit JamesPatterson.com.” I did. I couldn’t count them all.
In the “About the Author” blurb at the back of this book Patterson is also called “the world’s bestselling author and most trusted storyteller.” The first part of that statement is, as I’ve said, inarguable. I don’t know what it means to be a trusted storyteller though. Trusted to deliver a generic reading experience? Or trusted in some other way? And how do you measure trustworthiness? What would make Patterson more trusted than anyone else?
Patterson is, of course, primarily a novelist and this book is an exercise in growing the brand outside of his various fiction franchises into the lucrative world of true crime. Can we trust the author(s) not to be making things up? A note on the copyright page tell us this:
The crimes in this book are 100% real. Certain elements of the stories, some scenes and dialogue, locations, names, and characters have been fictionalized, but these stories are about real people committing real crimes, with real, horrifying consequences.
Whoa, there. You often read true crime books where the names have been changed to protect the innocent. That comes with the territory. But how much of these stories has been “fictionalized”? The “certain elements” mentioned – scenes and dialogue, locations, names, and characters – would seem to cover pretty much everything. I mean names and characters? There are people described here who don’t exist?
How can we even tell what is true and what’s made up? There are no notes on sources so no way to check any of it out. Did Patterson or one of the other authors do interviews? Did they do any original research? I don’t know.
I don’t ask these questions just as a knee-jerk response to true crime being written by novelists (which is how both of Patterson’s co-authors are also described). It’s also something triggered by the style of writing, which is very . . . novelistic. Here’s how the book begins:
Carey flutters open her eyes, but she can’t see much of anything.
Hot water is running down her fact. Swirls of rising steam engulf her.
Her head is spinning, and her legs and arms feel wobbly, like the Jell-O shots she and her sorority sisters make for their house parties.
Carey had been drunk before. And stoned. More times than she can count.
But this feeling, what’s happening to her right now, is different.
Very different.
Carey gropes blindly for something to hold on to. Her fingertips make contact with a wall of wet tile. She claws at the slick surface, feeling dangerously shaky. Then she forces herself to take some slow, deep breaths. And think.
Well, there was a Carey and it was her complaint that led to Andrew Luster’s initial arrest. And from reading about Luster’s crimes in other sources I looked up it seems as though most of the story told here checks out, as does the story about Mark Putnam’s murder of Susan Smith. That said, a note like the one on the copyright page is disturbing. Time and again in both stories I found myself wondering how the action and character’s thoughts could be related so novelistically and still be credible. In the second story, which is written in a noticeably different style that leads one to suspect that the co-authors really were doing most of the work, we find a passage like this in the early going:
Mark and Whittaker step out of the car to wait. The wild grass in the clearing is two feet high, and grasshoppers jump from stalk to stalk. The air is loud with insects and birds. They hear the long, low honk of a semi in the distance, probably a coal truck leaving a mine. Mark closes his eyes and tries to enjoy the sound of the insects and the warmth of the sun on his face.
How does he (the author) know this? Did he measure the grass? Keep in mind that this is a 2020 book and the events being described occurred in 1987. There’s just no way. Perhaps something like this actually happened, but that would be the best anyone could say. And then the action gets hot and heavy with Putnam and Smith making out in his car:
Mark reaches up and gently guides her face down to his. Their lips meet, and they begin to kiss slowly. She tastes his tongue and the sweat on his lips. His stubble scratches against her chin.
I had a hard time finishing “A Murderous Affair” and this is the main reason why. I know I’ve given up on books for less. And remember: this is ostensibly a work of non-fiction. And we’re not talking about little things like the taste of a lover’s tongue either. As a reader you just have to toss up your hands at the account given here of the murder of Susan Smith, which goes on for several pages. I didn’t believe a word of the dialogue or any of the escalation to violence that’s described, and can only assume it’s based, somehow, on Putnam’s confession (as I’ve said, there is no note on sources). And this despite the fact that Putnam does deserve a lot of credit for coming forward to confess to the murder even when he likely would have gotten away with it and his lawyer was advising him not to say anything. But that doesn’t mean you have to buy all of his spin on what actually happened.
This particular book is a tie-in to a series of true crime documentaries that showed on the Investigation Discovery channel and it reads a bit like a novelization of one of those documentaries where actual events get dramatized by actors. Or, in the Putnam case, made into the feature film Above Suspicion (2019). I don’t like that style of documentary, and I didn’t like the way this book was written either. At some point when writing true crime, or any non-fiction, you have to draw a line as to how far you’re going to let creative license go. And Murder of Innocence crossed over any line I would have drawn.
Finally, while I’m still going over this preliminary stuff, I have to call out the lazy title. Sure, a lot of true crime books have generic titles that may or may not give you any indication as to what they’re about, but the title here seems particularly off base. It’s the title of the first story, which is about a rich guy who gives girls a date-rape drug and then films himself having sex with them. Nobody is killed and Luster isn’t a murderer. I guess you could say that it’s the innocence of the women he raped that was murdered, metaphorically, but that’s a stretch. The title is just a generic placeholder.
But I don’t want anyone to think I’m knocking Patterson, or “Patterson.” He’s a popular writer for a reason. He’s not a great writer, but he’s an easy one. Very easy. And that counts for something, at least for a lot of people. As I’ve said, I found the second story here hard to finish but I’ll chalk that up to my having higher standards. If you want, you can call me a snob. If you’re not a snob and don’t care how much the facts have been massaged in the interest of writing something more cinematic, than this is a book you might enjoy.
Having said all that, and I warned you it was going to be a lot, what about the crimes that were committed? One thing that unites them is the way they both highlight an attitude toward others grounded in a sense of privilege. They are, sadly, not exceptional in any other way. The use of date rape drugs is reported to be fairly common, and is a global phenomenon. What Luster did reminded me a lot of the case of Lucie Blackman as recounted in Richard Lloyd Parry’s People Who Eat Darkness. That book (which is excellent) involved a young man (Joji Obara) possessing a large inherited fortune who regularly drugged and raped women he picked up at bars in Japan. Like Luster he also videotaped the events.
Meanwhile, men cheating on their wives is nothing new, and sometimes these affairs do end in murder. I think it’s more common for men to get rid of their wives to be with the new woman though. What made the Putnam case different was that he was reported to be the first FBI agent convicted of homicide. Like the rich rapists he probably thought he was untouchable, above suspicion. But as a note from Patterson that appears on the flyleaf puts it, in these cases “The bad guy always gets caught.” That’s another thing that’s shared by popular true crime titles. You want to see justice being served, especially when it involves people who seem to be above the law.
Privilege has become a moral and political pejorative of some weight in today’s discourse, and not without reason (see a good recent true crime example of toxic privilege here). But is privilege always such a poison? I don’t think so, but I do think it breeds a certain attitude towards others. The less privileged come to be seen as inferior or, worse, only there to be exploited. At the same time, having privilege gives one a sense of immunity from the consequences of one’s actions. People with privilege feel free of responsibility for any of the damage they might cause or any fear that they might be caught. Combine these two effects and you’ve certainly opened the door for all kinds of bad behaviour. A door that weak people will almost unconsciously walk through.
Noted in passing:
In my notes on The Count and the Confession I asked why lie detectors were even still in use. One answer I suggested was that they’re a $2 billion-a-year industry. It’s hard to understand why Putnam would have agreed to take such a test, especially given that the results would have been inadmissible in court anyway. I can only chalk it up to his wanting to be caught at that point.
Takeaways:
“True crime” is a genre label. It doesn’t necessarily mean the book is all true.
In my post on The Highwayman I said how much I loved this Visions of Poetry series. In a half-dozen volumes they came up with beautiful and distinctive illustrations of famous short poems, ostensibly for kids but (much as I usually despise the crossover) equally enjoyable for old folks. One of the things they had going for them was that most of these popular poems were narrative ballads, and the artists lean in to the way that pictures also tell a story. Sometimes even a different story from what’s expected.
Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” has been the inspiration of a lot of art, especially in its native nineteenth century. In this version by Geneviève Côté the setting is updated from medieval (or Pre-Raphaelite medieval) times to the same early-20th century as Murray Kimber’s “The Highwayman.” Sir Lancelot doesn’t drive by on a motorcycle, but he’s not dressed in resplendent armour either and the streets of Camelot (Paris? Montreal?) have automobiles in them. As for the castle, its “Four gray walls, and four gray towers” are the Battersea Power Station. You get the picture.
Côté’s re-interpretation of the poem has a lot more to it than this though. Giving it a feminist slant is nothing new – the lady shut away in her domestic drudgery and solitude, dreaming of a (sexual) awakening – but it’s presented in a fashion that’s both subtle and sweeping here. Subtle in the way the lady holds herself, looking more than half sick of shadows. Sweeping in her transformation at the end into a butterfly released from the pod or cocoon of her boat. That seemed so original and inspired a visual motif that I had to wonder if it had ever been done before. If not, hats off to Côté for coming up with the idea.
You could, and should, linger over every illustration. They make you alert to things going on in the poem that you may not have noticed or at least not thought much about. I hadn’t imagined the barley reapers as figures of death, for example, but presented here dressed in black and with sunglasses and scythes, that’s clearly the effect. Then there’s the line “Out flew the web and floated wide.” That’s the web of her weaving coming undone, but how does that actually work? It’s still unclear, but you see it here in the fine lines of colour that swirl around the lady when the curse is come upon her. An image that is dramatically repeated in a shattered version of a frozen moment as the mirror cracks from side to side. And her face looking back over her shoulder (at us?) in the same illustration is remarkable. A really unforgettable image done with only a few lines and a bit of colour.
So another great little book. I’m so happy I picked up the whole series of these when they came out. I only wish they’d done more.
Alex Good 