The Roaring 20's

Raoul Walsh made some terrific pictures, some of them in fact great.  You can make a good argument for High Sierra, Pursued, and White Heat, but even the movies that aren’t obvious masterworks are pretty damn rousing: They Died with Their Boots On, Gentleman Jim, Colorado Territory, The World in His Arms, The Revolt of Mamie Stover.  He made four features with Cagney, and probably only Wellman, in The Public Enemy, had more to do with shaping Cagney’s screen persona.  He made ten features with Flynn, and while it’s safe to say Michael Curtiz invented the dashing Flynn swashbuckler most of us think of - Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk - it’s Walsh who gets more out of Flynn the actor. 

Another thing about Walsh is that he sets up bits of business that reverberate well past their actual time on screen.  There’s a throwaway gag fairly early in The Roaring Twenties that’s not only one of the coolest things in Walsh, it turns out to be one of the coolest things in the history of the movies.  (Since it’s a visual joke, I can’t really do justice to it, but here goes.)  Cagney meets Priscilla Lane and falls head over heels.  He squires her home on the late train, from midtown Manhattan to someplace out in the sticks, maybe Yonkers. Cagney mutes the trademark Cagney wiseacre, and delivers enormous yearning and charm.  In the end, she’s fated to wind up with the straight-arrow DA instead of the roguish bootlegger, but in the immediate present, you can entertain the same hopes he does.  The moment is suspended, a single note hanging in the air, like the chime of a wineglass, the two of them completely taken up with each other, a private physical space for themselves alone, but keeping a delicate distance, hoping not to break the spell.  They get to the last stop, where she’s going to get off, and he gets off with her, to walk her home from the station – because he’s still not ready to leave the moment behind – and here’s the kicker.  Cagney and Priscilla Lane haven’t been shot in close-up, i.e., a shot of his face, a reverse of hers, an alternating visual dialogue; they’re shot together, over the back of the seat in front of them, so you don’t get the feeling they’re opposed: they’re in the same frame.  Walsh also frames the scene, at the beginning and the end, in a longer shot, that shows the whole carriage, with Cagney and Lane about two-thirds of the way back in the nearly empty car.  Not entirely empty.  Toward the front of the car, closest to the camera, is a passed-out drunk, with his hat over his face.  When the train pulls up, and Cagney and Lane get off, the camera waits behind for a beat, and the drunk startles awake, realizing it’s his stop, and stumbles out of the carriage.  Your laugh breaks the spell.

This scene on the train prefigures Garfield and Beatrice Pearson in the back of the cab in Polonsky’s Force of Evil, and the even more famous scene between Brando and Rod Steiger in On the Waterfront.  You can see its influence in the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, when the camera tracks along the bar, and bumps over the sleeping drunk, and then settles back down to surface level – instead of effectively dollying through him, because in the convention or conceit of movie-world, the camera takes no notice of such physical obstacles, a wall or a window, a speeding car, a piece of furniture.  The camera, first of all, is omniscient, and secondly, it doesn’t exist in the same physical space as an object or an actor.  It’s a ghost, it isn’t present.

Walsh doesn’t break the Fourth Wall, that’s not where I’m going.  And he doesn’t call attention to himself.  He’s not doing a Hitchcock, inviting you behind the curtain.  He’s very straightforward.  In fact, the story goes that he’d turn his back on a scene, and then turn around and ask his cameraman if it went right, as if he were embarrassed to be a grown man, doing something this stupid to make a living.  But look at the way he sets stuff up, the scaling, the intuitive balance between the epic and the intimate.  Ward Bond has an amazing cameo in Gentleman Jim as John L. Sullivan, the bare-knuckles heavyweight champ that Corbett knocks out in the ring.  He comes, literally hat in hand, to the door of the victory party, and when Corbett asks him in, Sullivan says no.  He’s the past, he tells him, an old punch-drunk palooka with cauliflower ears; Corbett’s the future, what the Irish can aspire to.  The most astonishing thing about it is that you can easily imagine this with Ward Bond, or maybe Victor McLaglen, in the hands of John Ford, and watch it get grossly oversold.  It’s sentimental, but Walsh has the sense not to play it for sentiment. 

Another example.  Custer leaves for the Little Big Horn, in They Died with Their Boots On.  (Even in sympathetic biographies, Custer comes across as a bully, if never a physical coward; Flynn, interestingly, plays him as ingratiating and thick-witted, exaggerating his own least likables.)  It’s the last time Libby Custer will see her husband alive.  (Libby devoted her widowhood to promoting the Custer legend, the golden-haired Achilles of the Plains; she was remarkably successful.  Olivia de Havilland is a sympathetic Libby, but the real woman had ice in her veins.)  The way Walsh shows it, Custer kisses her goodbye and steps away, out of the frame.  The camera draws back slightly, a medium shot, Libby in the lamplight.  She’s standing stiffly, as if posed for a daguerrotype, her eyes wide, her mouth barely parted, one hand resting on the dresser next to her, the other clutched to the front of her dress, and then she crumples, all of a piece.  I think there’s a sudden pulled focus, just as it happens, a quick trick of the lens, that underlines her abandonment, but I’m not quite sure.  It might be something my own eye added.

And the justly famous tracking shot in White Heat, in the prison mess hall, first from right to left - Cagney asking how his mom’s doing, passed down the line of cons to Edmond O’Brien – and then back from left to right – the word that she’s dead, all of it done in pantomime, and then Cagney, zero-to-sixty, batshit psycho in a tenth of a second.  Word is, the scene wasn’t shot as written, Cagney and Walsh set it up without warning the extras, and Cagney took it to the bank. 

The Roaring Twenties was released in 1939, which was one hell of a year for pictures, and you can make a case that it caps the Warner Bros. gangster picture.  It hits all the marks, with plenty of vigor, but the movie’s a swan song for the genre. Cagney personifies this.  The Roaring Twenties is one of his most physical performances.  Mark Asch, in his essay for the Criterion DVD release, points out that he seems to think with his body, that he expresses all his energies and emotions with it, his hands, the balls of his feet, the way his eyes change.  He’s always restless, in motion, checking the threat environment. And as the picture winds down, he loses that intensity, that muscular purpose.  He turns into an old soak, living on memories.  His last gasp, when he comes out of hiding – from the promises he’s made himself – is like watching somebody try on a set of clothes that don’t fit anymore.  In the end, he lives up to his promises.

---

The Roaring Twenties is out on a new DVD restoration from Criterion, although not available on the Criterion Channel to stream. There’s a halfway decent print on YouTube, even if the subtitles are strange.

Prohibition Peepers part 3 — How to create closed captions

0085 00:03:48.800 --> 00:03:51.200
  Leigh, let’s wrap our slideshow how-to
  discussion talking about closed captions.

  Leigh, let’s wrap our slideshow how-to  
discussion talking about closed captions. 

0086 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:53.225
  Sure, why not?

 Sure, why not? 

Closed Captioning

We return with the final how-to tutorial of creating a slideshow for Michael Bracken’s Prohibition Peepers. I doubted any of the tens of trailer viewers would rely upon subtitles, but I wished to expand my skills working within a non-critical environment I could share with you. This is largely technical, so feel free to read more interesting essays by my colleagues.

Subtitles include a multiplicity of flavors and formats. They presently have no one standard, nor even a mere two or three.  The most common kind is .srt, which stands for SubRip. I chose to work with its close cousin, Web Video Text Track. The .vtt format is newer, more featured, and natively supported by the HTML5 standard. It also uses the decimal point standard found in most English-speaking countries.

Subtitles can be married to videos in three different ways: physically separate files, embedding, and burning. YouTube and smart television programs can work with multiple files, usually bearing the same name but different suffixes:

ThePrisoner.mp4

ThePrisoner.srt

ThePrisoner.vtt

You might also see files for languages and variants, say, British and American English, French and Canadian français, Cuban and Mexican español. File names may be labeled like this:

ThePrisoner.en-UK.vtt	ThePrisoner.fr-FR.vtt	ThePrisoner.es-CU.vtt
ThePrisoner.en-US.vtt	ThePrisoner.fr-CA.vtt	ThePrisoner.es-MX.vtt

Burning Questions

Once you’ve created a closed caption file, then what? Depending upon your target platform, you may have three choices.

1. Associating Files

If you use a computer to peek closely at a movie DVD or a downloaded smart television movie, you’ll find numerous files. These include the movie itself in one or many segments, perhaps a preview, sound tracks in one or more languages, and closed caption files also in one or more languages. Separate files permit the viewer to adjust synchronization of sight and sound. YouTube also works with multi-file uploads, so I separately uploaded the slide show video and CC files, which YouTube accepted without complaint.

2. Embedding

Still curious, still expanding, I went beyond uploading multiple files to YouTube. I used an embed technique to create standalone videos, i.e, combined video and captions in a single .mp4 file. Videographers can embed subtitles with iMovie, independent apps like Shutter Encoder, or a web site that combines closed caption files with movie files. This results in a nice and convenient single file for viewers.

3. Burning

You may also see mention of ‘burning’, not to be confused with making DVDs. This method permanently overlays video images with text; that is, subtitles become an unalterable part of the picture. Only two advantages come to mind, (a) aiming for older platforms that don’t support closed captions, or (b) control over how subtitles look independent of the player.

Excelling

Throughout the audio/video process, I relied on spreadsheets in several ways. I used Excel for odds and ends like building an authors list, preparing scenes and maintaining the script, but spreadsheets turned out to be a key tool for closed captions.

Although the .srt format is older and therefore more common, the .vtt format has a distinct advantage for North Americans, Britons, Swiss, Asians, and Oceanians. We use a dot ‘.’ as a decimal point and a comma ‘,’ to visually group digits. Most of Europe, Africa, and South America do the opposite.

This quirk arises in subtitle files. A primary difference is .srt uses decimal commas and .vtt uses decimal points. More significantly, the English version of Excel understands the decimal dot, which means it works nicely with .vtt files.

In theory, we could work with a default time format, but a slight modification provides finer time codes. Select Custom from Excel’s number format window and use either of these format codes:

hh:mm:ss.000

or

hh:mm:ss.000;@

Thus, a one hour, twenty-three and three quarter minute time code might look like:

01:23:45.678

Nitty-Gritty

Closed caption files are plain text that can be opened in TextEdit, BBedit, WordPad, and so on. For the most part, white space consisting of blanks, tabs, and single lines of code are all treated the same. The following are equivalent:

86
0086 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:53.225
Sure, why not?

00086 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:53.225 Sure, why not?

Each of these is called a cue. Each cue is separated by a double-spaced blank line. Leading zeroes can be omitted, including the hour:

86 3:52.0 --> 3:53.23 Sure, why not?

Subtitles can be positioned on the screen, and they can be formatted with common HTML codes and CSS. I didn’t have a need for the latter, but I used HTML <i>italics</I> in a few places.

Down and Dirty

Some high-end programs and web sites offer audio-to-text timelines– usually for a fee– to build closed caption files. I wasn’t impressed and since my project was small, I stepped through the video and made notes the old-fashioned way– by hand.

In addition to the formatting above, the rules are straightforward. Obviously, the ending time of a cue must come later than the beginning. Likewise, each start time has to be greater or equal to the start time of the previous cue.

Although rarely used, the rules allow for cues to overlap or persist on-screen. That could be useful when off-screen action can be heard but not seen.

A number of closed caption apps can be found on-line, most still using the .srt format. If you happen to use one of these and want .vtt, you may be able to selectively scan-replace decimal commas with decimal points.

Try to save your captions as a .vtt file, but you may find it safer to save as a .txt file and rename it.

ThePrisoner.txt

➨

ThePrisoner.vtt

Adding closed captions is easier than it sounds. Consider it for your next video. And be sure to pick up a copy or two of Prohibition Peepers for Christmas.

More information follows.

Prohibition Peepers part 2 — How to create book trailer video

Love that cover!

Prohibition Peepers, the trailer how-to continues from last week. Visual presentation typically drives videos, but as described last week, ours is centered around a soundtrack of a 1932 radio news broadcast. Today I'll thread two paths, a how-to for those interested simple, quick video creation and, historical notes and thoughts as I’m constructing this castle in the air.

Tools of the Trade

Any straightforward graphics apps and video creation program will do. I chose simple apps, nothing fancy.¹

Apple’s iMovie assembled pictures along with last week’s sound track, which was handed off to YouTube. Any simple video builder should work; Windows offers several options. It should be possible to create a slide show with Microsoft Power Point, but its learning curve requires more patience than I have Adderal. I opted for a dedicated video program.

It is possible to create a presentation with nothing but YouTube, but maintaining files locally felt more comfortable.

For graphics, I used both raster (bitmap) and vector images. Abandoning high-priced Adobe, I switched to Serif’s Affinity suite. It’s a clean, easy to use, inexpensive panel of picture programs. One of the best features is that Affinity files are interchangeable, meaning any Affinity program can work directly with any Affinity file. It makes life easy.²

Finally, we’ll touch upon AI.

To Err is Human

Abruptly, I made my first mistake. In the past, I’d loaded a few items to YouTube, mainly a collection of Rocky King TV shows. Visual recordings of the era weren’t locked into any one size. Historically, aspect ratios have appeared as 1:1, 3:2, 4:3, and 16:9, but others proliferated.

I erred immediately. I had decided upon YouTube’s original default 3:2 as a compromise between stretching, cropping, and ‘letterboxing’, awkward ways of dealing with aspect ratios outside the norm. After creating an initial half dozen or so 1800×1200 images, I opened iMovie… and could not find the menu item for aspect items. Annoyed, I opened YouTube’s editor… and once again could not find the menu for screen rations. They were gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Demised.

WTF? (Lithuanian for Huh?) I googled and googled and finally learned in recent versions, YouTube and iMovie have settled upon a common aspect ratio, 16:9. Damn. Never guessing both Apple and Google had finally standardized, I’d wasted valuable time and effort. Let my error guide you.

Fortunately, the waste wasn’t as bad as first thought. Many of my source images were 1800 pixels high. I settled upon 3200×1800 as my working size in the Affinity programs. A multiple of 100 and a power of two facilitates quick, mental calculations. YouTube’s HD maximum is 1920×1080, so I was over-engineering.³

Action

I had numbered each paragraph of the script and appended that same number to graphics I intended to use. iMovie permitted me to load all at once and optionally space them n seconds apart. The final result would not be evenly spaced, but 5 minutes ÷ 28 slides allowed me to spread them across the timeline, meaning each was somewhat proximate to its intended position.

1. The first slide recognized the significance of border radio, chiefly remembered in songs by the Doors, Z Z Top and others, and at least one movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou.
2. Next we hear a sly evangelist trawling for donations. I had a little fun with the picture, an interrupted letter suggesting a small story in itself. Earlier in 1932, the post office had raised first class rates from 2¢ to 3¢. On the theory people like my mother might still have 2¢ stamps, I pasted a 1932 2¢ and 1¢ on the envelope.
3. Likewise, the $2 bill series date was consistent with 1932, but a sharp detective might notice oddities. The handwriting is feminine but looks a bit young or naïve. The Reverend asks for a dollar donation, but Prunella intends to send two dollars (value of $45 today) plus a letter. He suggests a plain white envelope, but our charming correspondent selects pink lavender stationery… you can almost catch a scent of perfumed powder in it. What might happen when the Rev read the letter?
4. Unregulated patent medicines were loaded with alcohol and opiates. Little wonder laudanum became the preferred energy drink, the feel-good medication sold by the doctor’s breathy assistant. Dr Cruikshank looks awfully familiar.
5. When I was a child, ‘Tear It Down’ and other Clyde McCoy pieces appealed to me. His lip control and wah-wah mute could almost make a jazz trumpet talk. The hotel interior pictured is the real McCoy… the actual Congress Hotel ballroom.
6. A teletype introduces the news with a silent movie news placard bearing ‘A Mixed Metaphor Production’, suggesting the irony of radio visual aids hasn’t been lost.
7. The news opening referring to the incoming president and that Congress just approved 3.2% beer is factual. The next part about Ness, Moran, and Capone appears in support of the events in my story ‘Dime Detective’. Likewise the next paragraph refers to John Floyd’s story, ‘River Road’, and the awesome Windsor Manor without giving away the plot.
8. Celebrity news comes next, homicides involving a dancer and an actress (‘Getting Away Clean’ by Joseph Walker and ‘Bearcat Blues’ by Susanna Calkins). Here we make an unusual departure. Neither pictured performer is real. Each is AI computer generated using ChatGPT teamed with Dall-E. I experienced a LOT of difficulty rendering the images. The programs has great difficulty with rendering eyes and counting fingers and arms.
9. An ad for Penny Mickelbury’s Bubba’s Gym in ‘The Devil You Know’ provides a transition to sports. The Chicago Bears playoff is factual, but of course Steve Liskow’s story, ‘Peace of Mind Guaranteed’, is fanciful.
10. Hugh Lessig returns us to a fictional page of mystery history in ‘Cloths of Heaven’, a sad tale of the first woman Prohibition casualty. Amazingly, I found a photo of an actual rum-runners boat seized in Virginia.
11. I slipped in a slide of a simple (and operational) crystal radio schematic where my real voice can be heard.
12. The wrap-up reflects the beginning. The outro pictures the actual Blackstone Hotel featuring homeboy Benny Goodman who, in 1932, hasn’t yet made a national splash. He plays as credits roll, wrapping up with the message that Prohibition Peepers can be found in fine speakeasies and bookstores everywhere.

 

 

 

  

© 2023 Prohibition Peepers

  

Done! I saved the file as an .mp4, ready to upload to SleuthSayers’ channel.

This article grew longer than I like, so next week I’ll explain how to add closed captioning.

Tables

Prohibition Peepers part 1 — How to create book trailer audio

Gorgeous cover!

Trailer Perq

Last time, I introduced my 12yo detective heroes, Penrod and Sam, taking on Chicago mobsters at the height of Prohibition and the depth of the Great Depression. That article revealed inspirations for characters and the story, one of fourteen tales in Michael Bracken’s Prohibition Peepers. This week I’ll describe how I created the audio for a book trailer (a preview) and next week we’ll discuss the associated video.

I grew up with antique radios and still have a few. I built a crystal radio at age 8, just a few odd parts. Unsurprisingly, radio plays a major role in Dime Detective. Penrod, my little hero, nightly tunes in a homemade crystal radio. That sparked an idea…

Different anthology editors devise different promotions, so I wasn’t sure what Michael might have in mind after Prohibition Peepers hit bookstores. A book trailer by James Lincoln Warren initiated a desire to create a preview for Dime Detective built around an old-time radio broadcast. Like many solitary writers, I’m used to doing things on my own, but the anthology is Michael’s project and we had another dozen contributors to consider.

We sent out a request for participants with stories fitting the time and place of Chicago 1932. With a half dozen participants and their stories, I mapped out a script centered around a newscast.

 

 

 

  

© 2023 Prohibition Peepers

  

We begin with homage to early radio, tuning in a half million watt Mexican ‘X-band’ border station, a radio evangelist (with hints that a listener has a romantic interest), and a patent medicine ad, before launching into a Clyde McCoy rouser. McCoy is considered the inventor of the wah-wah mute, a technique imitated by electric guitarists.

The nightly news intersperses fictional and factual items. The Chicago Bears playoffs must have been one hell of a game, one that set the stage for the Super Bowl, as hinted by the commissioner.

Items that didn’t fit the December 1932 Chicago setting I cast as wire stories, a historical reflection, or an ad. For the same reason, Penny Mickelbury led sports with an advertisement, a break from the rapid string of news.

The schematic following the newscast accurately depicts a real, operational crystal circuit. The video ends in a reversal of how it began, culminating with Benny Goodman playing through the credits.

How It’s Done

I’m a rank amateur when it comes to videos and some decisions reflect that. One example: Would recording the news in one or two long continuous takes be preferable to recording each segment separately? A single take could provide simplicity and consistency in sound quality, but I chose to manage about two dozen segments separately. It gave me more flexibility in article arrangement and sound effects.

But I made mistakes. I deliberately purchased an inexpensive microphone. Duh, you might say, you get what you pay for… but not what I hoped for. Early microphones suffered tinny, attenuated audio ranges and I was seeking that sound. Instead, the surprisingly solidly made cheap mic didn’t attenuate as hoped but merely responded dully. I bought a Snowball, which exhibited excellent range for the price and I thinned the voice by restricting frequency range after recording.

Macintoshes ship with iMovie video and Garage Band audio programs. Although most Mac users prefer Garage Band, I opted for Audacity. I had experience with the program, plus it’s cross-platform if for some reason Windows became a factor. I didn’t entirely abandon Garage Band;  as mentioned a moment ago, I created the tinny newscaster effect by tweaking Garage Band’s ’telephone’ filter.

Back on Track

In Audacity, I laid out three sets of tracks, two monaural tracks for voice and sound effects, and a pair of stereo tracks for music. The project didn’t require stereo, but imported sound came in stereo and I left it.

I edited three musical segments.

Sunny Side of the Street

Ted Lewis

Sugar Boogie

Clyde McCoy

Let's Dance

Benny Goodman

Listening to the trailer, you may easily miss ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’. It plays quietly in the background of Dr Cruikshank’s breathy advert.

To give the illusion of complete songs, I edited out the middles of Sugar Boogie and Let’s Dance, reducing the pieces to 20 seconds and 45 seconds respectively.

Noise

Static, tuning sounds, and a teletype constitute primary sound effects. A telegraph key beep-beeps in the introduction of the news that overlaps the telex. The music track quiesced emptily at that point, so I placed the Morse clip there, allowing me to maintain it separately without adding a track.

During my consulting career, I communicated by telex to offices in Europe. That oddly hypnotic clatter stuck in my head. I entered the project wanting to match that distinct teletype sound in my ears.

Dozens of ‘TTY’ clips were available on the internet, but that particular tone eluded me except for one YouTube video in which the owner incessantly talked all the way through it. And talked. And talked. I wanted to scream, “STFU!” which in Bulgarian means, “Please be quiet.”

Listening to the clip a few more times, I found a little less than 15 seconds where he actually fell silent. I captured those few seconds and replicated them several times for my purposes. The resulting teletype runs in the background under the news reader.

Voices in Secret

I’d planned for a professional stage presenter to handle the ballroom announcer, but he was on vacation in Europe and, unfortunately, he didn’t return in time to complete his part. Michael called time. He said, “Go with what you got, Sparky.” I’m pretty sure he said that.

Here’s a secret: I had created vocal placeholders with Macintosh-generated voices. In fact, Mac text-to-speech appears throughout, and I admit a couple I considerably liked. I wasn’t as keen about the big band ballroom voice, but without a professional announcer, we went digital.

Audacity blended all the clips together. Michael and the gang approved the audio draft, but then what? Next week: I inveigle the video.

Before departing today, I’ve created a timeline and jotted notes of our hearty pioneers settling the Great Plains and the role of radio in that lonely landscape. A bit backward, yes, but feel free to skip.

Sidekicks and Wingmen

Few things are more helpful to a detective than a good assistant. Dr. Watson ranks as the first among equals in this useful category, being not only a helper and the recording narrator, but also a stand in for the reader when the great man's mind gets ahead of the rest of us. He was followed up by the likes of Archie Goodwin of Nero Wolf fame and the obtuse but brave and cheerful Captain Hastings, friend of Hercule Poirot.

I have been thinking about assistants of one sort or another since I have recently watched several of the Cormoran Strike TV dramatizations while reading a number of Abir Mukherjee's mysteries set in 1920's India. Both feature lively and highly intelligent assistants who are crucial to the stories' success.

Strike, created by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling) is a fine character, a one legged Afghan war vet who hires pretty Robin Ellacott as his secretary and office manager and gets the bonus of a trained driver, a superb undercover operative, and a fine detective. While Cormoran has some rough edges and is not at his best in social situations, Robin is a smooth operator, although, in what I consider a retrograde touch, she doubles as the woman in jeopardy when the action lags.

Robin is well acted on screen and well drawn on the page, as is Mukherjee's Sergeant Surendranath (Surrender-not) Banerjee, assistant to another war wounded detective, Captain Wyndham. The Captain

is a man of the Empire, only partly disillusioned about the Imperial project after the horrors of trench warfare which have left him addicted to opium. That he evolves from acceptance of the colonial power structure to a considerably more complex attitude is due to his assistant, Sergeant Banerjee.

Banerjee, a Brahmin, was superbly educated in England (Harrow and Cambridge) and he has family connections with the top of Indian society and with supporters of Ghandi's independence movement. Both these circumstances make him an unlikely, as well as a conflicted, policeman in a colonial set up. Nonetheless, he is good at his job, if a touch naive, and he clearly foresees a need for good police work in any future India. 

Banerjee's education gives him perspective on both cultures. He is a key to Wyndham's (and the reader's) understanding of Indian politics, religious beliefs, and customs up and down the social scale. He is certainly better educated than his Captain and perhaps more intelligent.

What Banerjee does not have and what he will certainly learn from Wyndham is a more cynical and realistic view of human nature, especially of its criminal elements. And just as rapport with his Sergeant modifies the Englishman's view of the Raj, so the Captain's trust and their evolving personal relationship strengthens the sergeant's confidence in himself and in an independent India.

Signs of this evolution were very clear in their most recent outing, Death in the East, which also highlighted Banerjee's importance as a character. The Sergeant's arrival was delayed for more than half the novel, and at least to this reader, he was sorely missed. Wyndham with his bad memories and his addiction is best taken in smaller doses. His obvious affection for Banerjee lightens the mood of the novel, even as the Sergeant provokes him to reassess the done thing and British attitudes.

They are a good team, and Mukherjee, who was raised in Scotland and now lives in London, has himself the bicultural heritage and background to bring them both to life, as well as a host of Colonialists, revolutionaries, princes, opium purveyors, servants, and even ladies of the zenana.

***

The Falling Men, a novel with strong mystery elements, has been issued as an ebook on Amazon Kindle. Also on kindle: The Complete Madame Selina StoriesThe Complete Madame Selina Stories.

The Man Who Met the Elf Queen with two other fanciful short stories and 4 illustrations and The The Dictator's Double, 3 stories, 4 illustrations are available from Apple Books.

Widdershins

People have commented about what kind of entertainment is appropriate - if appropriate is even the word - for this odd time. Do we embrace it, Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, or Camus, or turn to escapism? Conventional wisdom has it that screwball was so popular during the Depression because it didn't reflect actual living conditions. On the other hand, during the polio epidemic, there was a brief vogue for the iron lung as a story element. Noir mirrors a specific postwar unease, which overlaps Cold War nuclear anxiety. Kiss Me Deadly or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Godzilla is the atomic metaphor writ large and reptilian.

I seem to be in retreat, myself, falling back on comfort food. Instead of post-apocalyptic, I set sail instead with Dorothy Sayers and her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.

Now, right up front, let's admit some of these are pretty lightweight. Whose Body?, the debut, is contrived and gimmicky. Clouds of Witness is stronger, mostly because the stakes are higher. Unnatural Death seems labored, to me, and basically unconvincing - although it introduces the estimable Miss Climpson. I don't think Sayers (and Wimsey) really hit their stride until The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, and I think also this is because Bellona is to some degree about the effects of the Great War on Wimsey and his generation.

Sayers wrote novels of manners; contrivance is less important than character. Wimsey is himself nowhere near the foppish dilettante he affects to present - this is a Scarlet Pimpernel device. (You can easily imagine Leslie Howard in the part, deceptively languid.) Wimsey was a major in the Rifles, and was invalided out. There's a scary moment in Whose Body? when he imagines hearing German sappers digging below, and Bunter has to talk him down and put him to bed. The relationship between Wimsey and Bunter is the spine of the stories.

The other thing we have to acknowledge, which for some readers could be a deal-breaker, is that the language of the period singes the present-day ear. You remember that the books started in the 1920's, so astonishingly, they're almost a hundred years old. This isn't to apologize for Sayers' vocabulary, or rather, the accuracy with which she reports the vocabulary of the British class structure. She doesn't necessarily share their prejudices, but you doubt she's inoculated against them. Then again, Wimsey seems to be playing a part, 'Lord Peter' a kind of self-parody, so how much of this is affectation? It's hard to distinguish between the narrative conventions and Sayers' personal feelings. She herself was apparently quite astonished when somebody suggested anti-Semitic tropes in her work.

The three strongest books are the late-runners, Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors, and Gaudy Night. Murder Must Advertise because it's so effectively mannered - as a novel of manners ought - and because Sayers makes fun of her own successful career as an advertising copywriter. The Nine Tailors because the mystery is so elegant, the bell-ringing so exact, and the surrounding fen country so beautifully evoked. Gaudy Night is an outlier, granted, because it's of course Harriet's book, not Peter's, but the atmospherics are extraordinary, overheated and claustrophobic.

I also recommend The Documents in the Case, which is a standalone, without Wimsey, but the forensics reveal at the end is worth it all by itself.

The other thing about the language in the books, though, is how much it represents a world of the past. Not the late Victorian era of Holmes, but a time we think we can almost reach, from our own experience. Not that many degrees of separation. The period between the wars could be our parents, or theirs. You remember hearing an expression, as a kid, that made no sense whatsoever, because the context belonged to a previous generation. "Clean your plate," my grandmother might say, "think of those starving children in Belgium." Her reference is the First World War.

My personal favorite in the novels is widdershins, which means counter-clockwise, but Wimsey uses it in a particular way, "We do no harm in going widdershins, it's not a church." This puzzled me, until I unearthed a more sinister definition, invoking malign spirits. Originally, however, it seems simply to describe a cowlick or a case of bad hair. And there's the charm.  

Local Color

When my late mother-in-law was very old, she developed a passion for Harlequin Romances. A booksellers dream, she ordered up what she called her “little books” by the case, and consumed them at the hair dresser, in the evening, waiting for a train or an appointment. They replaced her now arthritis-denied needlepoint for staving off tedium. She claimed that what she really liked about them was the local color. Her tastes ran to UK settings with local customs like afternoon tea (she had a sweet tooth) and a fair degree of pre-war quaintness.

Recently a couple of new mystery series have gotten me thinking, like my mother-in-law, about the charms of other societies, not just the geographic settings but the cultural ones as well. Sujata Massey has followed up her impressive debut, The Widows of Malabar Hill, about an ambitious young Parsi woman in 1920’s Bombay, with The Satapur Moonstone, set this time in a forested princely state outside the city. In both, the restrictions faced by middle and upper class women combine with carefully observed venues to add believable complications and challenges for her pioneering female lawyer and detective.

Perveen Mistry, apparently based on one of the author’s own female ancestors, has found a niche in the otherwise much-restricted legal system by catering to the legal needs of women in purdah. She, herself, moves relatively freely in her society, although possible pitfalls and dangers were vividly illustrated by her experiences in the initial novel.

In The Satapur Moonstone, Perveen is off in the hinterland, back when the term really had meaning. Parts of Satapur are cut off during the rainy season, with tracks only passable by palaquin – Massey gives a vivid account of the discomforts of this conveyance for both the passenger and the bearers – or on horseback. She also has to conduct delicate negotiations – neither too forward nor too deferential – with the males she encounters, including the Agent of the Raj, whose all-male station, she discovers to her dismay, is her only possible shelter.

The underlying mystery is neatly constructed, but I must confess that it is the curious customs, Perveen’s nicely-calibrated courtesy, and the picture of princely India with imperious royals, impoverished locals, and spectacularly crumbling royal estates that really bring enjoyment.

 If Massey’s Perveen Mistry is distinguished by her iron self control and her sensitivity to the different customs and values of Bombay’s heterogeneous community, Auntie Poldi of Mario Giordano’s Sicilian mysteries is off the charts in the opposite direction, a truly operatic character, or perhaps we should say, a Wagnerian character, because, though Auntie Poldi’s lamented husband was Sicilian, she is Bavarian. And larger than life.

In Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions, she decamped to Sicily intending to commit suicide. Her plan involved large amounts of alcohol and seemed easy to accomplish given her weakness for drink. But Auntie’s suicide required a house with a sea view. Renovating this property, along with the beneficent interference of the Sicilian relatives, not to mention the salutary influence of a local murder mystery, keeps putting Poldi’s termination on hold. With her fabulous black wig, her caftans, her hobby of photographing handsome Italian policemen, and her appetites for food, drink, and romance, Poldi is an over-the-top character. And kind of nice to see, given that she is in her sixties.

 My own preference would be for Giordano to scale her back just a tad, but as described by her would-be-novelist nephew, she comes across as a genuine force of nature. Forces of nature being best enjoyed in smallish doses, it is fortunate that the Aunti Poldi stories have a great deal of Sicily as well as a great deal of the Bavarian diva. Sicilian food– abundant, apparently delicious and the pleasing obsession of half the characters – is a big player, as is Sicilian agriculture.

The novels are full of lovely groves of olives and oranges, flowers, ornamental palms and horticultural specimens, and vineyards thriving in the volcanic soil. In Giordano’s books, the island is a paradise, marred only by those so useful snakes, Mafioso and greedy multinationals, both of whom covet the island’s water supply in the newest, Aunti Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna. The plot is silly but the scenery is top flight. As my mother-in-law knew years ago, local color and a touch of the exotic have their place.

The Girl with the Golden Gun

by Leigh Lundin

I’m seeing another woman. She’s stunning, vivacious, rich and generous, and… she can dance.

I told my girlfriend. Surprisingly, she doesn’t mind, which is saying a lot given her antipathy towards the Antipodes. Not our Stephen Ross’ New Zealand, mind you, that other country down under that does horrible things vis-à-vis soccer, rugby, and the purported game of (yawn) cricket, but that’s another story.

Anyway, about my new Australian darling…

But wait. First I’ll tell you why I longed to murder Lawrence Welk. I’ll tie this together, trust me.

Ever since I was a little kid, I despised that dastardly big band leader and his insipid Champagne Bubble Music™. His primary talent was outliving the really good musicians of the swing era, Count Basie, the Dorsey brothers, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Glenn Miller, King Oliver… pretty much everyone other than Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway. Welk’s idea of pop was pap and pablum for the masses. His flaccid phonographic flummery almost ruined the music of the 1920s and 30s for me, one of the most creative eras in the 20th century, and we're not talking Stravinsky, Schoenberg, or Shostakovich. Imagine a modern Clyde McCoy on trumpet, Tommy Dorsey muting a trombone, Viola Smith thumping tom-toms†…

Listen to this as you read on:

This piece was not written nearly a century ago during the 1920s flapper era… it was written practically yesterday by Greg J Walker for the Australian television production of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. I wouldn’t normally write about television mysteries when I haven’t read the original books, but I confess I’m doing exactly that. That’s how smitten I am and it’s all Dixon Hill’s fault.

original Phryne

MFMM is, if you haven’t guessed already, a period piece and to my eye… and ear… dazzlingly done. It features wealthy flapper Miss Fisher, christened with the appropriate given name of Phryne. (You may recall the suitably scandalous Phryne (pronounced like Friday with an ’n’ instead of ‘d’) from classical studies.)

The rest of the ensemble includes Phryne’s ever-fluid household, primarily comprised of Mr. Butler, Cecil, her ward Jane, and especially gentle Dot. The police presence includes newly minted Constable Hugh Collins and Inspector Jack Robinson.

The young constable is earnest although inexperienced, but the inspector proves highly intelligent and smart enough to give Phryne her head: Her charm, wit, money, and standing in society allow her to access social circles he can’t. As Phryne gives an entirely new meaning to ‘man eater,’ he’s sufficiently wise to let her do the romantic pursuing.

If you’re guessing characterization is key, you’re dead on. Phryne is engaging and entrancing. She carries a gold-plated revolver and is slightly reminiscent of Emma Peel. Inspector Robinson manages to be both firm and lenient with her and sensibly underplays his rôle. Phryne’s imposing Aunt Prudence– every family needs a matriarch like her– is an old dear who represents old school and old money. And then there’s Phryne’s companion/assistant, little Dot– she steals scenes and everyone’s heart.

Lady Detective

Before I stray too far, I must mention that Dixon Hill wrote the original article that intrigued me a year and a half ago. Curiously, two of my female friends expressed no interest in the series but one of me mates (oops, I've been overdosing) has started watching Miss Fisher from the beginning. Miss Marple she’s not. One review said Phryne ‘sashays’ through the stories, something a guy notices. Clearly we males find Miss Fisher fetching.

The historical detail is impressive. I admire many cars built in the 20s and 30s and Miss Fisher drives a beautiful Hispano-Suiza. Other viewers will applaud the costume of the era and Phryne wears at least a half dozen each episode. Indeed, one of the mysteries takes place in a house of fashion.

Sometimes writers imprint our present-day morals and values on the past, often imbuing a protagonist with a superior outlook. Not much of that shows through here– by nature Phryne is open-minded and the flapper era was daring, progressive, and sexually expressive. Thus Phryne’s physician friend Mac who dresses in men’s clothes comes off as genuine rather than contrived, not so much butch but a don’t-ask-don’t-tell person you’d like to know.

The plots? They take second place to the characters and costuming, but even when you guess the culprit, you enjoy how Fisher and Robinson get there.

And the music? Most of it’s straight out of the 1920s and early 30s and thoughtfully offered in three albums (thus far). Wonderful stuff. I’ll leave you with Duke Ellington’s dirge, East St. Louis Toodle-oo.

---

† Legendary drummer Viola Smith is still among the living at age 103½!

Professional Tips– S S Van Dine

I’d planned a different column for today, but due to a technical glitch, we were unable to get an important part of the article working, the audio mechanism. We’ll try again at another date. In the meantime, enjoy the following advice by the author of the 1920s-30s Philo Vance series, S.S. Van Dine, pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright.

Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories

by

S. S. Van Dine

Stern Winter loves a dirge-like sound. — Wordsworth

The detective story is a game. It is more– it is a sporting event. And the author must play fair with the reader. He can no more resort to trickeries and deceptions and still retain his honesty than if he cheated in a bridge game. He must outwit the reader, and hold the reader's interest, through sheer ingenuity. For the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws– unwritten, perhaps, but none the less binding: and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to them.

Herewith, then, is a sort of Credo, based partly on the practice of all the great writers of stories, and partly on the promptings of the honest author's inner conscience. To wit:

1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.
2. No wilful tricks or deceptions may be played on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.
3. There must be no love interest in the story. To introduce amour is to clutter up a purely intellectual experience with irrelevant sentiment. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.
4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It's false pretenses.
5. The culprit must be determined by logical deductions– not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. To solve a criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader on a deliberate wild-goose chase, and then telling him, after he has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker.
6. The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a detective is not a detective unless he detects. His function is to gather clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty work in the first chapter; and if the detective does not reach his conclusions through an analysis of those clues, he has no more solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the back of the arithmetic.
7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader's trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded. Americans are essentially humane, and therefore a tiptop murder arouses their sense of vengeance and horror. They wish to bring the perpetrator to justice; and when “murder most foul, as in the best it is,” has been committed, the chase is on with all the righteous enthusiasm of which the thrice gentle reader is capable.
8. The problem of the crime must be solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic séances, crystal-gazing, and the like, are taboo. A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective, but if he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio.
9. There must be but one detective– that is, but one protagonist of deduction– one deus ex machine. To bring the minds of three or four, or sometimes a gang of detectives to bear on a problem is not only to disperse the interest and break the direct thread of logic, but to take an unfair advantage of the reader, who, at the outset, pits his mind against that of the detective and proceeds to do mental battle. If there is more than one detective the reader doesn't know who his co-deductor is. It's like making the reader run a race with a relay team.
10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story– that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest. For a writer to fasten the crime, in the final chapter, on a stranger or person who has played a wholly unimportant part in the tale, is to confess to his inability to match wits with the reader.
11. Servants– such as butlers, footmen, valets, game-keepers, cooks, and the like– must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. It is unsatisfactory, and makes the reader feel that his time has been wasted. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person– one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion; for if the crime was the sordid work of a menial, the author would have had no business to embalm it in book-form.
12. There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed. The culprit may, of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter; but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders: the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature.
13. Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story. Here the author gets into adventure fiction and secret-service romance. A fascinating and truly beautiful murder is irremediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability. To be sure, the murderer in a detective novel should be given a sporting chance, but it is going too far to grant him a secret society (with its ubiquitous havens, mass protection, etc.) to fall back on. No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such odds in his jousting-bout with the police.
14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific. That is to say, pseudo-science and purely imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated in the roman policier. For instance, the murder of a victim by a newly found element– a super-radium, let us say– is not a legitimate problem. Nor may a rare and unknown drug, which has its existence only in the author's imagination, be administered. A detective-story writer must limit himself, toxicologically speaking, to the pharmacopoeia. Once an author soars into the realm of fantasy, in the Jules Verne manner, he is outside the bounds of detective fiction, cavorting in the uncharted reaches of adventure.
15. The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent– provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean that if the reader, after learning the explanation for the crime, should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the face– that all the clues really pointed to the culprit– and that, if he had been as clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going on to the final chapter. That the clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes without saying. And one of my basic theories of detective fiction is that, if a detective story is fairly and legitimately constructed, it is impossible to keep the solution from all readers. There will inevitably be a certain number of them just as shrewd as the author; and if the author has shown the proper sportsmanship and honesty in his statement and projection of the crime and its clues, these perspicacious readers will be able, by analysis, elimination and logic, to put their finger on the culprit as soon as the detective does. And herein lies the zest of the game. Herein we have an explanation for the fact that readers who would spurn the ordinary "popular" novel will read detective stories unblushingly.
16. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no "atmospheric" preoccupations. Such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action, and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude; but when an author of a detective story has reached that literary point where he has created a gripping sense of reality and enlisted the reader’s interest and sympathy in the characters and the problem, he has gone as far in the purely ‘literary’ technique as is legitimate and compatible with the needs of a criminal-problem document. A detective story is a grim business, and the reader goes to it, not for literary furbelows and style and beautiful descriptions and the projection of moods, but for mental stimulation and intellectual activity– just as he goes to a ball game or to a cross-word puzzle. Lectures between innings at the Polo Grounds on the beauties of nature would scarcely enhance the interest in the struggle between two contesting baseball nines; and dissertations on etymology and orthography interspersed in the definitions of a cross-word puzzle would tend only to irritate the solver bent on making the words interlock correctly.
17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story. Crimes by house-breakers and bandits are the province of the police department– not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives. Such crimes belong to the routine work of the homicide bureaus. A really fascinating crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted for her charities.
18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide. To end an odyssey of sleuthing with such an anti-climax is to play an unpardonable trick on the reader. If a book-buyer should demand his two dollars back on the ground that the crime was a fake, any court with a sense of justice would decide in his favor and add a stinging reprimand to the author who thus hoodwinked a trusting and kind-hearted reader.
19. The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plottings and war politics belong in a different category of fiction– in secret-service tales, for instance. But a murder story must be kept gemütlich, so to speak. It must reflect the reader's everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.
20. And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective-story writer will now avail himself of. They have been employed too often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime. To use them is a confession of the author's ineptitude and lack of originality.
1. Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect.
2. The bogus spiritualistic séance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away.
3. Forged finger-prints.
4. The dummy-figure alibi.
5. The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar.
6. The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person.
7. The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops.
8. The commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in.
9. The word-association test for guilt.
10. The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unravelled by the sleuth.

What are your thoughts?

Resetting the Clock

Today, on the Ides of March, I’d like to welcome Janice Law, SleuthSayers emerita, mystery writer and painter, to guest blog. Janice was nominated for an Edgar Award in 1977 for The Big Payoff, her first Anna Peters novel. And in 2013, she was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Mystery for Fires of London, the first in her Francis Bacon series. She won that award the following year for its sequel, The Prisoner of the Riviera. She writes frequently for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and many others. So, take it away, Janice.

—Paul

*~*~*~*

Resetting the Clock

by Janice Law

(Many thanks to Paul D. Marks for kindly giving me his column space this week.)

My family always insists that I don’t take advice. This is only partially true. I rarely take advice immediately, but that’s not to say that I reject good ideas entirely. Case in point: my new Francis Bacon trilogy, which debuts April 5 with the opening volume, Nights in Berlin.

And what is this good advice that I’ve taken? To revise a character’s age downward. I did not do this with my former detective, Anna Peters, who retired with her bad back in her early 50’s. But I have now reset Francis’ age, from forty-something in Moon over Tangier, back to seventeen.

I had a couple reasons for doing this.

By the time he’d reached his early forties, the historical Bacon was on the verge of being both rich and famous, and some of his less pleasant, and more destructive, habits were going to become prominent. More important, he had lost Jessie Lightfoot (Nan in the books) and she, along with a knowledge of painting, was crucial to my understanding of his personality.

Characters one invents are almost by definition comprehensible. They may or may not be the fascinating, successful creations we all hope for, but the chances are good we’ll feel we understand them. If we don’t, if the character doesn’t in some way “make sense” to us, he or she will surely wind up in the out-take file or scooped up and eliminated by the handy delete button.

Historical figures are another matter. They are known, sometimes to the general public, sometimes only to specialists, but either way there certain irrefutable facts and circumstances about their lives that must be respected. To be honest, some of these facts are awkward. I personally love country living and all animals. Not so Francis. Music is important to me; Francis was tone deaf. And then there is his sexual preference – promiscuous gay sadomasochism – and his affection for the bottle.

Clearly, if one is going to write about a character this far from one’s own tastes, interests, and experience, a character, moreover, whose biography is known and available, one must find a way into his personality. My entrance to Francis’ psyche were via Nan (my mom had emigrated as a nanny and I grew up on a big estate that employed one) and his art (I’m a keen semi-pro painter).

With those two anchors, I’ve been able to navigate my fictional character’s taste for city life and rough trade, not to mention his reckless genius. Still, by the time I finished Moon over Tangier, I felt that the character I had been following for a dozen fictional years was complete, and I was ready to end the series.

But some interesting facets of the man’s life remained, especially his decision to close a reasonably successful design business (one capable of supporting both himself and Nan) and to embark on the precarious path of serious painting. That decision could, I saw, be the finale of a new trilogy.

What about the 600 or so pages needed before I could get to that point? Here, the real Francis’personal history came to my rescue. As a teenager and young adult, he lived in three different cities, each at a crucial and fascinating time: Weimar Berlin, where he was taken by a peculiar uncle – my character Uncle Lastings is, aside from his sexual habits and the circumstances of the German trip, a total invention; Paris at the end of the Roaring Twenties; and London in the Thirties after the party stopped.

Berlin and Paris were extremely important for the real painter’s later development. Bacon never went to art school and what little formal instruction he had in oil painting was picked up from one of his lovers. But in Berlin, he saw the cutting edge European art of the moment, Bauhaus design, Expressionism, Dada, and the New Objectivity as German artists struggled with the machine age and the devastation of the world war. For a young gay man, it also didn’t hurt that Berlin was liberated sexually in ways undreamt of in England.

Paris, like Berlin had galleries and new art, most importantly for Bacon, the works of Picasso, as well as the great public museums. Surrealism was in the air, and writers and artists from around the world had come to work – or to live the artistic life – in the metropolis. As for London, the art scene was tame compared to the excitements of the Continent, but London was, first and foremost, where his heart was. All his artistic life Bacon had trouble working anywhere but in the city along the Thames: he was a London man first and foremost.

Of course, three novels, even short ones, about the making of a painter are not going to set mystery lovers’ hearts a-flutter. Fortunately, history as well as biography now comes to the rescue. Berlin had gangs both fascist and Red; an enormous vice industry, fueled by the collapse of the post-war economy, plus public and private violence and misery of every sort.


Paris had rich foreigners flinging money around and indulging their whims, while poor foreigners scraped for a living and struggled to recover from wars and revolutions further East. The underside of Parisian artistic creativity was imaginative larceny, including successful attempts to sell the Eiffel Tower. As for London, by the mid-Thirties, the city saw Hunger Marchers, waves of homeless, desperate immigrant Jews, British fascists like the Black Shirts, and ever-increasing fears of yet another war.

Who could let all this go to waste?

I declared Francis seventeen again and started Nights in Berlin.

The Joys of Miss Fisher

Leigh's recent quips about cricket, coupled with Rob's mention of a "sexy cozy" triggered this post about Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, an ABC (um … that's: Australian Broadcasting Company, in this case) television series, which I've been watching on NetFlix.

Kerry Greenwood

This two-season (so far) TV series -- which I think could be accurately called a sexy and humorous cozy -- is set in Melbourne and based on a series of books by prolific Australian author and defense lawyer Kerry Greenwood.


Ms. Greenwood has penned no fewer than 20 books about Miss Fisher, plus several more novels spanning the YA, Sci-Fi and mystery markets.  If Wikipedia is to be believed, she's also a playwright.

The series' titular "Miss Fisher" is, point in fact, Miss Phryne ("Fry-nee") Fisher, a young upper-crust Australian woman of the 1920's who evidently served in the ambulance corps during the First World War.  It seems that the horror she encountered there stripped away her innocence, baring a wry and often humorous cynicism that I, as a viewer, find delectable.




In a word, I'd say she's "cheeky."
Delightfully so!

Dot quietly feels
Miss Fisher drives
far too recklessly. 

Having returned to Australia from England, in the first episode, young Phryne pronounces herself a lady detective.

And – stylish detective that she is – she even sports a gold-plated revolver, when needed. As well as a gorgeous Hispano-Suiza, which she drives at breakneck speeds.

The mysteries here are not mind-bendingly difficult to solve.



Nor do people running around with fancy metal-plated weapons usually entice me to watch a show.  Quite the opposite on both counts. But, if I'm honest, I'll have to admit I don't watch Phryne to test my wits against hers, as I might with a good Sherlock or Miss Marple. And, the fact is, the gold-plated revolver works in this case.  It's just the right weapon, with just the right feel of "decorative accessory," that would make it seem likely to strike the character's flair for the unique and stylish -- two things Phryne Fisher definitely personifies.  But, I really don't watch shows because of weapons.


So, why do I watch Miss Fisher?

Frankly, because the show is so much fun.

The characters are delightful.  First, there's Phryne's friend and assistant, Dorothy, often called Dottie or Dot.  Little Dot is devoutly religious, and frightened by technology.  One of my favorite scenes, which occurred in the first episode, involved Dot trying to answer a telephone.

.

As the young woman had earnestly explained to Phryne earlier, the priest at her church had told everyone that the electricity in the phone lines was building up in the center of the earth, and that – one day – one telephone connection too many would be made, causing the world to explode. Thus, as Phryne's phone rings, Dot, charged with answering it in Phryne's absence, is torn between doing her duty to her friend and employer, and her fear that answering the instrument might trigger a cataclysm that  destroys the entire planet.
The results had me rolling.

Then there's Phryne's female doctor friend: Dr. Elizabeth "Mac" Macmillan.  The good doctor dresses in men's clothing, as many women of the time actually did.  It had nothing, necessarily, to do with their sexual leanings; it was simply a style fad in the post-war years, according to my professor at ASU, when I took a class on this time period in Europe's history.

This taste in clothing may actually be associated with the view that women with bodies that looked "good for breeding" were thought of, at the time, as being similar to cows, or even "breeding machinery" (a connotation much distrusted in the wake of a war that saw the horrific effects of combat mechanization for the first time).  Consequently, "le garçon" arrived on the scene in Europe -- women whom the French called, literally: "the boy" because of their thin hips, flat chests and "masculine" behavior (such as smoking in public).  The wearing of men's clothing, according to one line of thinking, was an extension of such new social norms.

On the other hand, there is strong evidence (albeit off stage) that "Mac" may enjoy the company of women in her boudoir – something that bothers Phryne not one whit.  Mac also harbors a deep grudge against the male establishment, which would be perfectly understandable for a female M.D. of that time period. She's quick to anger, slow to trust, but is fast friends with Phryne, whom she evidently trusts implicitly.

Detective Inspector John "Jack" Robinson carries on a – so far – unrequited love affair with Phryne, though the femini Phryne doesn't appear to let this interfere with her bedroom gymnastics with other, more immediately willing, partners.  Robinson is quite conservative, but he clearly can't get this remarkable woman out of his mind.  And, the fact that she keeps showing up at the scenes of crimes that he's charged with investigating does little to alleviate this problem.

Robinson is assisted by Constable Hugh Collins, an innocent new police officer who soon begins dating Dot.

Add in Bert and Cec, two rather rough-around-the-edges manual
laborers with hearts of gold, who do some of Miss Fisher's heavy lifting, and Phryne's dowager aunt Prudence, along with a few other characters, and you've got a gold mine of humor, conflict and fun.

I highly recommend the show, if you haven't seen it already.

Phryne Fisher: Not only can she drive, and fly a plane…
She's also not afraid to fan dance!

See you in two weeks,
—Dixon