Conspiracy Theory

It’s one of the less happy conventions of the thriller or mystery story that when the whole thing unravels, it’s a letdown.  How many conspiracies turn out to be the brainchild of some pedestrian jerk-off living over his mom’s garage, playing 1^st-person shooter games?  (This is figurative, but once in a while literal.)  Snowpiercer, for example, is pretty lively for the first two acts, but when you get to the front of the train, and meet the sinister and over-sharing Ed Harris, it seems a little too familiar – the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.  You’re not the only one thinking, Is that all there is?

Bond villains after Thunderball are generally parodies, at least in the Sean Connery/Roger Moore pictures.  And once 007 penetrates the villain’s lair, he’s subjected to a data dump of verbal diarrhea, said villain expatiating on the weakness and complacency of humanity, and his own singular skills in exploiting them.  This is second cousin to the previous complaint. It demonstrates a lack of imagination. The guy had to publish with a vanity press.

Why is it that the quality of our villainy is so low?

I know Elon Musk is an ignorant and dangerous guy (and in fact I recently posted a Substack column about it:  https://gatesd.substack.com/), but he’s such a fatuous blowhard that it’s hard to take him seriously.  Much like Trump, another deeply frivolous windbag, neither one of them takes any responsibility for the drivel that comes out of their mouths.  As if they suffer from Tourette’s.  At the same time, their drivel can drive up the market in meme coin.  It’s both predictable and sad. 

You wonder why they take up all the air in the room.  It’s a hallmark of heavies, going back to Conan Doyle and John Buchan, that they won’t shut up.  They can’t switch it off.  Nayland Smith falls into Fu Manchu’s clutches, and Fu starts in with the triumphalist baloney.  Dr. No and James Bond.  It must be hardwired.  It’s the oddest God damn thing.  Is it just that Sax Rohmer and Ian Fleming themselves can’t help it?  Or is it in the character of these guys, to be the center of attention?  It’s more than literary convention.  Maybe it’s a tell, or a pathology.  The loudest voices usually have the least inner confidence.  They’re shouting down their own doubts.

There’s something funny about all this, and I don’t mean funny, ha-ha.  It’s disturbing enough that we’re persuaded to sympathize with Dr. Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs – the Tennessee jailbreak set-piece is a jaw-dropper not just because of its precision and discipline, and for its sudden reversals, but because Thomas Harris manipulates our expectations, and the biggest reversal is when we realize we’re hoping Lecter gets away with it – but it’s beyond creepy that Trump appropriates Hannibal Lecter, as a what, exactly?  An avatar, a role model, a dinner date?

What is happening, by the by, to our understanding of good and evil?  I was talking to a friend of mine, a few years back, about The Silence of the Lambs (her husband had recommended it to me), and I said something to the effect that your odds of being the victim of a serial killer were lower than being struck by lightning, you’re much more likely to be murdered by somebody you know, like your own husband (said husband being a very big and solidly-built guy), and she said, I’d really rather not consider that possibility.  She preferred the vicarious scares in Silence of the Lambs.  An epiphany.  I saw why somebody would prefer the vicarious shivers, and why you maybe don’t want to entertain the genuine threat, that the guy you’re sleeping with could murder you in your bed.  This is in no way to minimize the realities of domestic abuse, but only to say we recognize our comfort zone.  Silence of the Lambs is second-hand violence, once-removed from the immediate. 

From a safe distance, Trump and Musk seem as cartoon-y as Dr. No, or Snively Whiplash.  And perhaps their violence will be vicarious, performative and posturing, all bark and no bite.  But even the broadest of physical comedy depends on the laws of physics; the coyote runs off the edge of the cliff and hangs suspended in the empty air, and then gravity takes hold.  We look at these clowns, dressed in the plumage of affectation, and dismiss them as objects of ridicule.  Their malevolence is real enough, though, and gravity will bring us to earth.  The storyline’s a ribbon of clichés, but we greenlighted the picture before the script was finished, like Casablanca.  “You want my advice?  Go back to Bulgaria.”

The Long Goodbye

 

Jackie Winspear’s new book, The Comfort of Ghosts, is her eighteenth Maisie Dobbs mystery, and the last.  You wonder why, and the author says she imagined a narrative arc to the series, as well as the storyline in each novel, and she felt that she’d closed the circle.

I say, God bless.  I’ll miss Maisie, as will huge numbers of other readers, but there comes a time.  I’d rather make the choice myself.  All too often, you don’t get to.  I’m still sorry Philip Kerr died, when there were many more Bernie Gunther stories to come; and Bruce Alexander stood us up, before his blind 18^th-century magistrate, Sir John Fielding, was ready to step down from the bench – what will happen to young Jeremy, ever on the prowl for that sinful Turkish brew, haunting Lloyd’s for both the coffee buzz and the maritime gossip?

The other side of the ledger, we have Conan Doyle famously trying to kill off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, and Agatha Christie wanting to rid herself of the “insufferable” Hercule Poirot, but market demand kept them going.  Speaking of, Tom Clancy shuffled off this mortal coil eleven years ago, but he keeps manufacturing product. 

I’m not a huge fan of publishers profiting off dead guys, although Ace Atkins has done a good job with Robert B. Parker’s legacy (plus the blessing of Parker’s widow Joan). Ace gets Spenser’s rhythm right.  You can’t say the same about Parker himself, and Raymond Chandler.  Poodle Springs isn’t a bad book, on its own; it is, however, dreadful as Chandler.  Parker clearly admires the master – Spenser, Marlowe, get it? – but he doesn’t have Chandler’s lapidary and Byzantine habit of mind, or Chandler’s precise and mischievous ear for language (to wit, “a couple of streamlined demi-virgins went by caroling and waving,” from The Long Goodbye).  I happen to be a big fan of Islands in the Stream, too, if only the first fifty pages or so, which I’m actually confident Hemingway himself wrote. 

I know this sounds mean-spirited, but the most specific thing about any writer is voice.  This is usually different from story to story, sometimes inviting and intimate, sometimes chilly, or arm’s length.  Homely and domestic can open out into the epic.  Larry McMurtry and Jim Harrison are very unalike, but Lonesome Dove and Legends of the Fall share an almost Arthurian scale of delivery.  On the other hand, A Narrow Grave, McMurtry’s essays, would seem to have nothing in common with Letters to Yesenin, Harrison’s poetry.  Two writers who are utter strangers to each other. 

Probably not, though, if they meet in heaven.

There’s an originality to any writer.  We have the dictum, write the book only you can write, which can be taken in more than one way, but for the moment, let’s say it means, this book, at this moment, couldn’t be written this way, by anybody else.  Somebody else could write a story about a nurse, in a combat surgery, behind the trenches, in the Great War.  But only Jacqueline Winspear is going to use her character, Maisie, to speak to the trauma of Jackie’s own grandfather, still picking shrapnel fragments out of his scarred legs in his seventies.  The specificity is everything.  War is never over, a character in one of the Maisie books says, it lives on in the living, in the guilt of the survivors.  The arc of Maisie’s story, in eighteen books, is a map of grief, and the consequences of loss.  It has a shape, like something stuck in your throat.  Maisie can’t be imitated, because she’s invented herself out of a certain, particular piece of the past – I mean Maisie, as a character in her own story, is self-invented, and Maisie, the character that Jackie the writer has invented, can only have become this Maisie. 

Jackie Winspear says Maisie will always be taking up space in her head, even if she’s longer writing about her.  I’d suggest that’s because Maisie is partly a vehicle, like any character – your characters are a way into the story – but also because she’s taken on, over time, the burden of responsibility.  You might say it’s a necessary plot device, which it is; Maisie, though, has become necessary to the author.  Not an avatar, or a second self, but a physical metaphor, for the gravity of hope.  Maisie carries the weight.  Jackie has lightened her own heart, and ours.