Marple: Death by Drowning

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

As with “The Affair at the Bungalow,” the sense I had here was of Christie having some fun with detective-story conventions. And again she comes up with a clever concept. A village girl has drowned after being pushed off a bridge. The police seem ready to arrest the most likely suspect, but Miss Marple goes to Sir Henry Clithering, Ex-Commissioner of Scotland Yard, and writes the name of who she thinks is the real murderer on a slip of paper that she gives to him. But we don’t find out until the final line of the story whose name she wrote down, and Miss Marple herself only briefly appears a couple of times in the story. Instead we follow Sir Henry around as he questions all the suspects, guided by Miss Marple’s suspicions since, being a veteran of the Tuesday Night Club, he knows she’s always right.

I enjoyed this story and thought it was one of the better Miss Marple mysteries. It goes about its business quickly and there’s a sweet twist at the end. There’s nothing much in the way of clues to follow though, and at the end I was left scratching my head as to the source of Miss Marple’s suspicions in the first place. I guess it just had some connection to a parallel case years ago, but we aren’t given any information. In other words, it seems to have been a pure hunch, even though she protests that “it’s not really that at all.” She knows but can’t explain her “specialized knowledge.” Meanwhile, the obvious suspect is so obvious – a somewhat dandyish modern architect from London described as a “Bolshie” with “no morals” – that the police going after him even strikes Sir Henry as a cliché: “He perceived a strong undercurrent of local prejudice. A new-fangled architect was not likely to be popular in the conservative village of St. Mary Mead.”

As for the Britishisms I like to flag, I took note of the local girl being described as making “a dead seat” at the modish architect. The term I’m used to is “dead set,” meaning focused and determined on a particular outcome, so I wasn’t sure if “dead seat” was a typo. But it might have another meaning. I just couldn’t find any explanation of making a dead seat at someone anywhere I looked.

I also shook my head at Sir Henry, who is staying with the Bantrys, “coming down to breakfast at the pleasant guestly hour of ten-fifteen.” Now I know I get up early, but at 10:15 I’m usually starting to make lunch. If someone was a guest at my house and they only came down at 10:15 I’d be long gone, and they wouldn’t be getting “a plate of kidneys and bacon” either, at any time of day.

Marple index

Taking it easy

/ Alex Good / 16 Comments

So a couple of days ago I went down one of those click-bait rabbit holes where you keep answering odd multiple-choice questions that are meant to determine your personality type. In this case the purpose was to be assigned a “spirit animal.”

Before long I started having regrets, as the questions just went on and on. I think it must have taken me at least ten minutes to click through all of them. And in many cases none of the choices were any good. But after a while I just figured it made sense to keep going seeing as I’d already invested so much of my precious time. A few minutes seems like an eternity online!

Anyway, from the pictures that kept coming up as I was doing the quiz, and just because of the nature of these things in general, I got the sense that my spirit animal was going to be either a tiger or, more likely, a wolf. Imagine my surprise then when I finished up and was taken to this final screen:

That didn’t seem very flattering! I mean, I wasn’t even a sloth but a “slot,” which sounds kind of indecent.

But the more I thought about it, the more I think the algorithm probably got it right. I am a lazy guy. And this is an animal named for its laziness! In Spanish-speaking countries, where they are native, they are even known as osos perezosos, which translates to “lazy bears.”

And the question I would ask is “What’s wrong with that?” Being cool and collected and letting nothing really bother you sounds pretty good to me.

Nevertheless, sloths generally get a lot of bad press. In fact, they are kind of disgusting creatures, whose dirty habits I won’t get into. But sloth as a pejorative term is, I think, harsh. It’s rooted in ideas propagated by Christian moralism and the industrial work ethic: “idle hands are the devil’s workshop” and “time is money.” Meanwhile, I hang my hat on Blaise Pascal’s dictum that “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Seeing my spirit animal made me think back to the appearance of Idlenesse in the procession of the Seven Deadly Sins in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. In that poem the Redcrosse Knight visit the evil House of Pride, where he witnesses Lucifera (Pride) being pulled in a chariot by the six other Deadlies, each counselor riding a representative animal and holding an iconic object. This is how it kicks off:

XVIII

But this was drawne of six unequall beasts,
On which her six sage Counsellours did ryde,
Taught to obay their bestiall beheasts,
With like conditions to their kinds applyde:
Of which the first, that all the rest did guyde,
Was sluggish Idlenesse the nourse of sin;
Upon a slouthful Asse he chose to ryde,
Arayd in habit blacke, and amis thin,
Like to an holy Monck, the service to begin.

XIX

And in his hand his Portesse [a book of prayers] still he bare,
That much was worne, but therein little red,
For of devotion he had little care,
Still drownd in sleepe, and most of his dayes ded;
Scarse could he once uphold his heavie hed,
To looken, whether it were night or day:
May seeme the wayne was very evill led,
When such an one had guiding of the way,
That knew not, whether right he went, or else astray.

XX

From worldly cares himselfe he did esloyne [retire],
And greatly shunned manly exercise,
From every worke he chalenged essoyne [claimed exemption],
For contemplation sake: yet otherwise,
His life he led in lawlesse riotise;
By which he grew to grievous malady;
For in his lustlesse limbs through evill guise
A shaking fever raignd continually:
Such one was Idlenesse, first of this company.

Idleness isn’t just any deadly sin here, but the one leading the way and nurse to all the others! That said, this guy doesn’t sound like he’s representing sloth or idleness very well. He’s just another hypocritical churchman, of which there were plenty in the literature of the Renaissance. A truly idle man doesn’t save himself up for riotous living and party times. He can’t be bothered. Nor is he ruled by a shaking fever of passions. He is beyond care.

I’d write more on this subject, but I can’t be bothered. It’s too much effort. But thanks for making it this far, and if you did then you should know that you are not a lazy person at all and that your characteristic sin (or spirit animal) is no doubt something different. And probably much worse!

“Sloth” by James Todd (2010).

The Highwayman

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

The Highwayman

This is one of a half-dozen great little books in the Visions of Poetry series, each illustrating a popular poem taking the ballad (narrative) form. I really loved this series when it came out in 2006 and thought each book offered up a wonderful visual interpretation of classic texts. Unfortunately, they didn’t publish any more of them and looking around they seem to be hard to find today.

This instalment has the poem “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes illustrated by Murray Kimber. Like most of the poems in the series, “The Highwayman” has a repetitive, incantatory quality that draws you in right from the famous opening stanza. This is the sort of thing a generation of schoolkids had to commit to memory, and it did them no harm.

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

The poem is set in the 18th century but Kimber updates everything so that now the titular desperado is a biker outlaw riding an iron horse with a mustang logo through the canyons of Manhattan, and the king’s soldiers are FBI G-men. That’s quite a leap, but I thought it worked wonderfully well. I also thought Kimber did a good job illustrating the business of Bess the landlord’s luscious daughter being tied up with a musket pointed at her breast. That’s one of those things that’s really hard to visualize, and seeing it illustrated doesn’t make it any more believable, but that’s not on Kimber. I don’t know what Noyes was thinking. Otherwise, I had no trouble buying the outlaw as biker, even if the “tlot-tlot” of the horse’s  hooves in the poem made it seem like his bike had a flat. Noyes’s Highwayman is already a bit of a retro cliché anyway, especially given how he’s armed to the teeth with a rapier, two pistols, and a whip. He’s ready for anything, almost.

Kimber’s obvious influence was film noir and I thought the way the story is told like a storyboard, cutting between extreme close-ups and dramatic architectural settings, was quite effective. But then I was on board with all of his creative decisions here. This is a great book not just for kids but for anyone with a love of poetry.

Graphicalex

Doctor Strange Omnibus Volume 1

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

Doctor Strange Omnibus Volume 1

I felt sympathy for Stan Lee’s response to one of the fan mails sent to “Strange Mails,” the letters page for Strange Tales (the title of the comic Dr. Strange started off in). Lee admits that they “use the same characters over and over again” in the Dr. Strange stories mainly because it’s so hard to make up new names, and then adds parenthetically: “We can make ‘em up all right – it’s learning how to spell ‘em that’s the killer! We still have to look up Cyttorok, or is Cyttorak? – each time we use it!”

This is something I could relate to. The names are so off-beat and unrelated to anything I was familiar with that I had to keep looking up even recurring ones like Dormammu (or the “dread Dormammu” to friends, enemies, and indeed everybody). The flame-headed Dormammu is Dr. Strange’s archenemy, playing a leading role in almost all of these early comics, but when I started writing these notes up I was never sure how it was spelled.

The character of Doctor Strange was inspired by the radio show Chandu, the Magician, but he was always something . . . stranger than that. And he also evolved, even in the early days covered in this omnibus volume. Just in the matter of his looks, in his first few appearances he seems to have an oriental slant to his eyes, which remain nearly closed most of the time. It took a while for them to fully open.

His origin story plays to Marvel’s strength in creating less-than ideal heroes. Dr. Strange is an arrogant jerk who becomes a derelict after a car accident puts an end to his career as a star surgeon. A trip to the Ancient One, however, sets him on the road to recovery, not to mention becoming a master of the mystic arts.

But he remains a loner, occupying a mansion in Greenwich Village where he is attended by a rarely seen manservant. Otherwise he has no assistant or friends

He was also very much a second banana in these years. As noted, the comic he appeared in was Strange Tales, but despite the title he was never the headliner. First he was the B-player to the Human Torch, and then he took a back seat to Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. And I do mean a back seat. The main story line here has Doctor Strange seeking out Eternity, a figure who possesses the knowledge he will need to defeat Dormammu. When he finally encounters Eternity it gets a dramatic full-page reveal, but the issue where this climactic event occurs doesn’t even mention it on the cover, which (as usual) is given over to Nick Fury fighting the agents of Hydra. And in the one crossover appearance included, Doctor Strange again plays guest in another hero’s comic, joining forces with Spider-Man.

The actual employment of the mystic arts doesn’t amount to much. The all-seeing Eye of Agamotto is a handy device. Plus there’s a lot of ectoplasmic astral projection as Doctor Strange goes flying around in his spirit form. So much so that it starts to feel old pretty quickly. But what I enjoyed is the way our hero, like a good stage magician, so often just tricks his enemies with some simple stratagem that they’re not expecting because it doesn’t involve any invocations of supernatural powers at all.

The plots get repetitive as well, with Doctor Strange being whisked off to various weird dimensions to do battle with their rulers, or else just taking on another sorcerer (his most frequent adversary being Baron Mordo). But it’s the other dimensions that really set the Doctor’s adventures apart. Artist Steve Ditko went crazy creating a psychedelic ‘60s environment of colours and shapes that make it all seem like a druggy trip. It’s that trippiness that, at least in these early days, set Doctor Strange apart from the usual superhero fare. And fifty-plus years later, it’s what would make him a figure totally at home in the MCU’s plastic multiverse.

Graphicalex

Bookmarked! #60: Canoodling

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

I’ve had occasion to say before how bookmarks make such great collectibles because you can pick them up anywhere you visit. Or anywhere people you know visit. This past week my neighbours went to Algonquin Park and brought me back this peaceful bookmark. On the back it says “The haunting wail of the loon; your paddle gently slicing the still water; the sun rising through the mist; a perfect start to any day while interior camping in Algonquin Park. In Algonquin there are over 2,000 lakes for you to explore.”

Is there anything as Canadian as paddling your canoe on a lake while listening to the haunting wail of the loon? Not unless it’s some activity involving maple syrup. So here’s some pure Canadiana for you to enjoy.

Book: Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited by Philip Eade

Bookmarked Bookmarks

Maigret: The Two-Penny Bar

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

Things get off to an odd start here, with Maigret visiting a guy on death row who puts him on the scent of a murder that had gone unnoticed some six years earlier. A trip to a hatshop to buy a new bowler gives him a clue to follow up and before long he’s getting miserably reacquainted with what the back cover describes as “the sleazy underside of respectable Parisian life.”

Familiar ground then for the detective chief inspector, but what struck me as strange is how the plot seemed to move ahead by a series of random coincidences. Though I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised at how a case comes together, as this one does, by “a combination of scientific deduction and sheer luck.” That’s the way a lot of life works.

The respectable Parisians also seemed odd to me. Doctors, business owners, tradespeople, engineers: they work hard all week and then hang out together every Sunday at a bar in the suburbs where they play dress-up and drink a lot. Is this something people did back in the 1930s?

Party time also involves a lot of adultery, which blows up in the usual way. Though Maigret is less interested in who plugged the poor cuckold than he is in who killed the mystery man six years ago. But the list of suspects isn’t long, and when you spot the biggest red flag in any Maigret case – a husband and wife living apart together, with “No hint of intimacy whatsoever” – then you’ll probably figure things out as quickly as he does. Such couples are the opposite of the happily married Maigrets who are always in touch and feel like they’re together even when they’re apart (as they are for all of this novel). So the real challenge here is for Maigret to prove what happened, which becomes a series of duels because nearly everyone he meets plays coy with him, starting with the condemned man at the beginning. They all let on that they know something he doesn’t, and then challenge him to find out what it is.

This wasn’t one of the better Maigret stories, and really the only thing that makes it stand out is the treatment of the scummy blackmailer at the end. This guy is such a piece of shit he even uses his terminal illness as leverage. That was an appropriate touch to further blacken his miserable character. It just seemed perfectly right. Meanwhile, the killer has no trouble deciding he’d rather go to jail than pay him off. Everybody has their principles, and blackmail is a dirty game that even cold-blooded killers can rise above.

Maigret index

The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics
Ed. by Paul Gravett

It’s interesting how the golden age of crime comics pretty neatly overlaps with that of noir cinema, peaking in the 1940s and 1950s. For comics, the body blow of the formation of the Comics Code Authority in 1954 effectively put an end to things. So it feels right that the comics reproduced here are in black and white, even though I’m not sure if that’s how they were all first published. Johnny Craig’s “The Sewer,” for example, from Crime SuspenStories #5 (1951), was. I think. originally in colour. But in any event, it feels right in black and white because that’s how we imagine all crime stories of the period.

The pieces collected here by editor Paul Gravett aren’t all from the golden age, but they look like they might be. Neo-noir and noir are indistinguishable visually. Even the fashions remain much the same. And. if anything, I think the stories were better back in the early days too. For some reason, I suspect fandom, Gravett bookends the material with two relatively recent stories by Alan Moore which I thought the two weakest pieces in the entire book. Neither is really a crime comic either. Nor did I think the entry by Neil Gaiman any better.

So it’s up to the old masters to carry the load. Luckily, they’re up to the task. The stories by Dashiell Hammett, Will Eisner, and especially Mickey Spillane are highlights, as is the aforementioned piece by Johnny Craig. They help make this a collection well worth checking out, even if you’re not a big fan of the genre. And one final thing I’ll note is how much fun I had sampling from a showcase of the letterers’ often invisible art. To be sure there’s some bad lettering in the mix – these were cheap pulps mostly, after all – but there’s a range of different styles here that show how key a role lettering could have in making a comic work. Sadly, noticing it so much here only made me aware of how it’s an art that’s in decline today, where so much lettering seems to be automated and generic.

Graphicalex

TCF: When the Moon Turns to Blood

/ Alex Good / 11 Comments

When the Moon Turns to Blood: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and a Story of Murder, Wild Faith, and End Times
By Leah Sottile

The crime:

Lori Vallow, her lover (and soon-to-be fifth husband) Chad Daybell, and Lori’s brother Alex Cox conspired to kill Lori’s then-husband Charles, Chad’s then-wife Tammy, and Lori’s two children, Tylee and J.J. Alex later died of natural causes, while Chad was sentenced to be executed and Lori to life in prison.

The book:

I’ve already gone over a lot of the facts in this case in my notes on John Glatt’s The Doomsday Mother. Both books came out before either Lori or Chad went to trial, but I don’t think they miss a lot. There are pros and cons with being timely. All too often true crime books spend far too much time on trial coverage, but trials do add information previously unknown to the public and it would have been nice to read an account of this case that took us to closure. In any event, I don’t expect more books about these events anytime soon so it looks like Glatt and Sottile are the last word. Public attention has moved on.

What makes this book different from Glatt’s is the focus Sottile places on the religious and cultural milieu that Lori and Chad were a part of. Here’s how she sets it up:

In one interview with a podcast about the Vallow/Daybell case, the managing editor at East Idaho News said people had made the case out to be a story of religion, when it in fact had everything to do with sex and greed. And to an extent, that became an early theory of the case, the reason two children were found dead in the yard of Chad Daybell was actually quite simple: two people wanted to be together and killed the people in their way. Even Lori’s own father seemed to imply that was his theory in his email to me.

But the more I sunk into the world of Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell, the more clear it became that their story could only have happened inside a culture that festers in the LDS Church: a cancer that even men of God cannot seem to cut out.

Does Sottile make good on this claim? Well, she does her best. Personally, I think this was, mainly, a case of sex and greed. But those motives were mixed with religious views that take some time to unpack.

While they were both part of the LDS (Mormon) Church, Chad and Lori’s personal belief system was more a kind of pop-culture amalgam of stuff ranging from the Bible and the Book of Mormon to the Left Behind and Harry Potter series of novels. I don’t know if Chad wanted to be the head of an end-times cult or a bestselling author, or if there’s a distinction to be made there. There’s really no sorting any of it out, what with the possession by light and dark spirits, people being transformed into zombies, and a magic crystal on a pendant used to do readings.

Two things stand out however as key ingredients in Chad and Lori’s peculiar personal religion, and both are pretty familiar to cult watchers. In the first place there’s the idea that the members of the cult are among the saved. Chad took his lead from the Book of Revelation in figuring that only 144,000 individuals were going to be counted among the elect, which in a global population now of 8 billion is around 0.01 percent of us. Considering that all the immediate members of Chad’s circle were among this elite, that’s a serious sense of exceptionalism.

That exceptionalism is also seen in the way that in their past lives cult members enjoyed a lot of upward social mobility. Throughout all of human history, the vast majority of humanity have been peasant farmers or labourers who have left behind no material or historical record of their ever having existed. But if you’ve ever listened to anyone talk about their past lives all you’ll hear is of how they were Napoleon or Cleopatra. And so Chad, according to his own testimony, had previously lived as James the Just (the brother of Jesus), while Lori had been James’s wife Elena. Nor did it end there. “Almost everyone but Chad and Lori was a granddaughter or a spouse of a saint – some peripheral biblical character. But Chad and Lori were special, more important. Lori, in yet another life, had been married to Moroni, the Nephite warrior who appeared as an angel in a blinding holy light at the bedside of Joseph Smith.” That’s Mormon royalty for the rest of us.

As always when reading about the operation of a cult one is left wondering just how much of this anyone really believed. Tragically, I think in this case they believed a lot. But one can understand a lot of the psychological and cultural factors at play. Everyone has the need to feel they’re special, if not one of the elect. Having been a king or a saint in a previous life fills the same need to think that we’re somehow destined for greater things, that we have some biological marker that makes us better than the herd.

Take the matter of Chad’s “zombies.” These were imagined to be people whose souls were dead and who were inhabited by evil demons. But zombies are a big part of contemporary media culture (books, movies, videogames), fitting especially well with our sense of living at or near the end times. As I’ve argued at greater length elsewhere (see my review of Glenn Kay’s book Zombie Movies), what the zombie represents is simply other people, the apocalypse is only the revelation that all these creatures that look like human beings that we encounter every day aren’t even truly alive, or at least not as alive as we are. And so it’s no surprise that in addition to Chad’s theory of evil possession, Lori’s father also argued that anyone who paid taxes was a zombie. “Like hypnotized zombies the general population systematically and begrudgingly allow the IRS operations to steal their hard-earned money,” he wrote in a book. General population = zombies. Which means the elect, those 0.01 percent, are like the gang of survivors in The Walking Dead. And from here, how big a step is it to just getting rid of (that is, killing) other people? I mean, they’re already dead anyway.

The impression I had is that Lori was a hot mess from the get-go. Her family was likened to a psychological “hornet’s nest” that may have involved some form of sexual abuse. As early as 2007, more than ten years before the killing started, a court-appointed mental health examiner assessed her during custody proceedings as being someone whose “belief system is riddled with ghosts and seemingly fanatical religious dogma.” Once she fell in with Chad’s end-times cult she was casting witchy hexes and curses on her enemies by way of texts and seeing all kinds of bizarre spiritual phenomena operating in her daily life. It should go without saying that none of this had anything to do with Mormonism. I’m no apologist for the LDS, but you can find wingnuts in every religion, and at the end of the day I was left unconvinced by Sottile’s argument that there was something peculiar to the Mormon Church that gave rise to a case like this. Lori and Chad “had grown up with some elements of the far-right fringes of Mormon culture in their lives.” But while she mentions the Rafferty brothers (whose story was told by Jon Krakauer in Under the Banner of Heaven) and Warren Jeffs, and it’s true they based their crimes on what they took to be divine direction, there have always been people of every faith you can think of who have justified bad behaviour in such a way.

At first, the story of Chad and Lori and their missing children looked like a complicated version of a stock true-crime trope: a love affair gone wrong, a story of sexual desire so intense it drove two people to kill. They collected the insurance money from former loved ones and ran away together. But the story is so much more complicated than that. This is a story of faith, and of all the things we allow ourselves to believe.

I just can’t get totally on board with this. Yes, faith played a role in what happened, but it wasn’t “so much more complicated” than the stock true-crime trope. This was a case, primarily, of sex and greed. And failure. Lori and Chad were a pair of not very bright losers who wanted more out of life but felt they’d come to the end of the line. I found it most telling that neither of them invited any friends or family to attend their beach wedding in Hawaii. That just seemed sad. Then, recognizing that they’d come to their own, personal end of the line they projected this onto the rest of the world, seeing this as the end times. It’s the narcissistic apocalypse, and speaks very much to the spirit of the age.

Noted in passing:

It’s not clear what happened the morning Charles Vallow was shot and killed by Alex Cox (Lori’s brother). Charles and Alex are both now dead, as is Tylee, who may also have been present. And the only other possible witness is Lori, who says she wasn’t there. The story that Lori and Alex came up with, and that Tylee went along with when questioned by the police, is that Tylee had grabbed a baseball bat and tried to come between Charles and Lori when Charles was threatening his wife. Charles then wrenched the bat away from her and she ran out of the house. Alex then shot Charles after, he said, Charles started swinging the bat at him.

I don’t think this is what happened. It doesn’t seem to fit at all the kind of guy Charles was, or the frame of mind he was in. But Sottile takes it as established that Tylee “hadn’t flinched to stand between Lori and Charles Vallow with a baseball bat, ready to protect her mother.”

I was really surprised to read this. As I’ve said, I don’t think there’s any way now we can be sure of exactly what happened, but I really doubt it went down like this. I think it more likely Lori coached Tylee what to say, and even then their stories didn’t agree with each other anyway. There were plenty of reasons to be sceptical about it then, which is something Sottile should have registered.

Takeaways:

If you think everyone else is a zombie, perhaps you are the zombie.

True Crime Files