MarysLibrary

Kissed a Sad Goodbye

Kissed a Sad Goodbye by Deborah Crombie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Deborah Crombie is one of my favorite mystery writers. Usually when I find an author I like (Donna Leon, say, or Charles Todd) I read the books very slowly, waiting six months or longer between them. I just don’t have the self-discipline to do that with Deborah Crombie’s Gemma James and Duncan Kinkaid series. I’m gobbling them up at a rate of one a week.

Kissed a Sad Goodbye was as usual very well plotted. The characters, including of course James and Kinkaid, are complex. And the setting is terrific: the east end of London, Docklands, Canary Wharf, Greenwich (across the river by tunnel). The murdered woman was the head of an old family tea-importing company, which I found no end interesting. And the book employed flashbacks, a device I particularly like.

We follow a young boy as he is evacuated from his loving home in the Isle of Dogs to an upper-middle-class household in the country where he is given an opportunity to get an education he would never have had in London. Flash! We are in 1999 London interviewing the officers of the tea company who are very worried what will become of them without the hard-charging CEO who has been found dead in Mudchute Park.

Back to World War II and the friendship that develops between the evacuee and the young people who live in the country house. Flash! Back to London and Gemma’s interview with a most unlikely busker. And on it goes. I love it. I put it down and immediately picked up the next book in the series.

2011 No 94 Coming soon: A Finer End

Son

Son by Jack Olsen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In 1980 there were 127 rapes in the city of Spokane. In 1978 there had been 49. Most of these crimes were being committed in the neighborhood where I now live and they bore certain similarities. The rapist was reported by many victims to have jammed his hand, covered with an oven mitt, into their mouth so that they couldn’t scream. Most of them were attacked while out running or after getting off a bus. Spokane was the victim of The South Hill Rapist.

In 1981 Spokane police arrested Kevin Coe, from a prominent family, the son of the Spokane Chronicle editor. He was found guilty of the four rapes for which there was the most evidence against him. His mother, with whom he had a tangled relationship, has been described as making Lizzie Borden look like a combination of Mother Teresa and Mary Poppins. She proceeded to hire a hit man to kill the prosecutor and the judge. Unfortunately for Ruth Coe the man she chose was an undercover cop.

Coe’s original convictions were overturned on the grounds that the victims had been hypnotized but he was tried again and found guilty. He was sent to prison in Walla Walla and when he was eligible for release he was declared a dangerous sexual predator on the basis of new evidence including DNA tests and was incarcerated for life.

Jack Olsen tells the story in mesmerizing detail in this true-crime book which was the basis of a TV movie, Sins of the Mother (which starred Elizabeth Montgomery of all people.)

2011 No 93 Coming soon: Kissed a Sad Goodbye, by Deborah Crombie

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A Linzer cookie cutter set from King Arthur Flour to make my favorite cookie.

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Charlie Chan

Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Yunte Huang was teaching in the English department at Harvard University when his new book was released and he was scheduled to do a book signing at the Harvard book store. With a title like Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (yawn), it was a challenge to get a crowd to attend so the English department secretary made up a poster for the event and in an attempt to make it more appealing she included a photo of Charlie Chan.

Now some Chinese-Americans are a bit sensitive about Charlie Chan, seeing him as an Asian Uncle Tom figure, a stereotypical racist image of a Chinaman. So the author was a little disturbed about the poster.

Being polite (the Chinese, he tells us, are very polite, kind of like Charlie Chan), he thanked the woman for the poster and asked her why she had included Charlie Chan. “Oh,” she replied, “I grew up watching Charlie Chan movies. He was so smart and wise and they called him in to solve the most difficult murders and he was always able to figure them out and he was witty and polite . . . He was my hero!” This set Yunte Huang to thinking and eventually to investigating the Charlie Chan books and movies and this book is the result. The story is fascinating.

There really was a Charlie Chan, called Chan Apana, a detective with the Honolulu Police Department in the late 19th and early 20th century. Born in China, near Canton, he was illiterate and spoke broken English. He spent a decade in his youth as a cowboy (the second largest cattle ranch in the US is in Hawaii.) As a police officer he was delegated to keep Honolulu’s Chinatown under some semblance of control (closing gambling dens, brothels, opium dens, etc.) Although he was only 5 ft tall and weighed 130 pounds at his heaviest, he carried only a bull whip and he routinely rounded up 40 bad guys single-handedly.

Enter Earl Derr Biggers (from a town very near Canton, Ohio, interestingly), needed to make some money when he graduated from Harvard. He decided to write a book and the first Charlie Chan mystery, The House Without a Key, was the very popular result. Published in 1925 it was set in Hawaii and the exotic tropical setting, combined with the clever and witty Chinese detective as a central character, made it a best-seller. Biggers went on to write five more Charlie Chan books before his early death in 1933.

Yunte Huang’s book takes off from the mystery, its author, and the man who was its inspiration to talk about the history of Hawaii and the story of Chinese in America, the figure of Charlie Chan in the movies and the various actors who played him, the two most famous being Scandinavians, Werner Oland and Sidney Toler. He describes the years when Chinese laborers were encouraged to come to the US to do the dangerous work on the trans-continental railroad, and the years when they were forbidden to immigrate to this country or to become citizens. Things were always a little better for various racial groups in Hawaii but when the islands became a US territory in 1898, the Chinese Exclusion Act applied there. (Hawaii became our 50th state in 1959.)

2011 No 92 Coming soon: Son, by Jack Olsen

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Reader's Toolbox - Jane Austen's Reading List

Katie Halsey and Gillian Dow of The Jane Austen Society of North America have put together a bibliographic essay of the books that Jane Austen mentioned in her letters or were mentioned in the letters of others.

She loved novels, and especially Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, a door-stop of a book that I read 45 years ago but do not much remember. Lots of poetry, Scott, Fielding, Maria Edgeworth, Fanny Burney, and of course, Shakespeare.

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Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters

Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary by Daniel Patrick Moynihan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Over the years there have been a handful of public figures whom I’ve come to admire greatly, and at the top of that list is Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A brilliant man, honest, brave, witty, compassionate, he was truly a statesman and we could use many more men like him.

This book is a collection from his letters and papers compiled by his daughter. From his years as a member of the administrations of John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford, ambassador to Indian and to the UN, and senator from New York, he wrote so much and so well that it must have been difficult to pick only the best. Here are some of his comments:

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.

. . . one of the things I found most curious was the ease with which we obtained money for the education of children formally denoted as “uneducable,” while I could not interest the most wild eyed, radical, give-a-way, spender in the notion of a program of special state aid to provide “enriched” programs for the smart kids. . . . I ought not to sound cruel, but the faintly distasteful fact behind this is that the allocation of resources in education, as elsewhere, reflects the political power of the interests concerned, and where the parents of backward children were organized parents of the bright ones were not.

On the Catholic church: . . . while I am reasonably strict in my observances, I am like Lord Melbourne, more a buttress of the church than a pillar, in that I support it from the outside.

Since about 1840 the cultural elite in America have pretty generally rejected the values and activities of the larger society. . . . The leading cultural figures are going – have gone – into opposition . . . they take with them a vastly more numerous following of educated, middle class persons, especially young ones, who share their feelings and who do not need the ‘straight’ world. It is their pleasure to cause trouble, to be against. And they are hell bent for a good time.

. . . Among a large and growing lower class, self-reliance, self-discipline, and industry are waning . . . A large segment of the population is becoming incompetent and destructive. Growing parasitism, both legal and illegal, is the result; so, also, is violence. … today, there is the ‘spirit of confrontation,’ in which self-interest and a desire to change the system are merged in groups which depend for their existence on pursuing a ‘conflict’ strategy . . . the more one knows about welfare the more horrible it becomes: but not because of cheating, rather because the system destroys those who receive it, and corrupts those who dispense it. . . . . a services strategy tends not only to exclude working class whites, but also to set up a great many middle class whites (and blacks) in the resentment business. They earn very good livings making the black poor feel put upon, when they are, which is often the case, and also when they are not. 


Letter to the president of Stanford University, 1975, regarding protests to his commencement speech: No one was disagreeing with any views I had put forth,. The disagreement (in its essentials) was with views I was falsely accused of holding. My accusers were and are liars. I recalled to you the Stalinist origin of this technique, which leaves the accused spluttering and mumbling that he never said any of those things, etc. . . . liberal academia, faced with the neototalitarian assault on persons such as myself who might be described as liberal dissenters, has adopted a devastatingly effective device for avoiding having to deal with what it is we have to say. They d not acknowledge the fact that our views are systematically and viciously distorted by the Left. To the contrary, they let the lies stand unchallenged. What they do instead is to say we should nonetheless be allowed to speak.

In the best universities the best men are increasingly appalled by the authoritarian tendencies of the left.

From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future – that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder . . . are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable. And they are richly deserved.

And his famous statement after the assassination of John Kennedy: I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess that we thought he had a little more time.

2011  No 91  Coming soon: Charlie Chan, by Yunte Huang

Quotable

I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.

     --  Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad

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The Emperor of All Maladies

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I want to say something that will make you eager to read this book. “Important” will make you yawn, but it really is an important book. It’s not “entertaining” but you won’t be able to put it down. It’s full of surprises, though not the kind that make you gasp.

Did you know that “Jimmy” of the Jimmy Fund was a Scandinavian boy who lived to old age in northern New England? That the origin of chemo-therapy was a Boston doctor injecting various caustic chemicals into patients who were in the last stages of leukemia? That cancer research was set back decades by the Cancer Society, which wanted lots of money thrown at the disease but didn’t fund the kind of research that has eventually explained how cancer develops on a cellular level?

There are many things that make this book so engrossing. One is the personality of the author, which comes through his writing – despite his trying to step back from his subject. Another is the fascination most of us have with cancer. So few of us are untouched by the disease, with public figures, friends, or family members being diagnosed with one of the many kinds of carcinoma.

The story of trends in cancer treatment leads to the innovative and often successful treatments of today. It’s a book filled with hope.

2011 No 90 Coming soon: Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary

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Take me out to the ball game!

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Emma

Emma by Jane Austen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As I work my way through the Jane Austen oeuvre once again I’m finding that I like Emma Woodhouse more than I used to do. She is not an admirable character and the author was correct when she said no one else would like her. I used to feel superior. I would never make those wrong assumptions. I would never get myself into such a fix.

Part of the reason she is so annoying is not just that she is headstrong, but that nobody can do anything about it because she is the most important social figure in the neighborhood. When she nourishes an inappropriate friendship with Harriet Smith only Mr Knightly dares to say anything to her about its inadvisability.

But she doesn’t always listen to him, and so she is deserving of the embarrassment of Mr Elton’s attentions. She doesn’t learn from it – she goes right on assuring herself that she knows better than anyone what’s appropriate. Until she gets tripped up in her own petticoat ribbons and realizes suddenly how wrong she has been and how much hangs on her blundering.

I was interested to note this time as I read the book that although Emma is very wealthy – or her father is – Mr Knightly is not. He is a large landholder and Mr Woodhouse’s estate is a pie-shaped piece cut out of Donwell. He has the land but she has the money. Emma criticizes Mr Knightly for using his carriage so seldom (always a bad sign in Austen whose really noble characters prefer to walk.) In a throwaway phrase the author mentions that he doesn’t have the money to keep carriage horses.

Austen’s novels are ever-new. On now to Persuasion, I think.

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2011 No 89  Coming soon: The Emperor of All Maladies