A poet of considerable stature and ability in the Twenties and Thirties, Kenneth Fearing turned to the writing of novels in 1939 and to the psychological] thril1er in 1941 with Dagger of the Mind. (This novel, set in a summer artists colony, caused something of a stir when it was first published: Raymond Chandler, for instance, in his famous essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” called it “a savage piece of intellectual double-talk.”) In all, Fearing wrote five novels that can be considered criminous — by far the best of which is The Big Clock. This quintessential tale of psychological suspense is so good, in fact, that labeling it a small masterpiece would not be unjustified.
It is told in that most difficult of narrative techniques, multiple first-person viewpoints. Most of the story, however, is related by its chief protagonist, George Stroud, a reporter for Crimeways, one of a chain of magazines put out by Janoth Enterprises. Stroud is a sensitive man, a man who hates the pressures and conformity of his job, his slavery to what he cal1s “the big clock”; he yearns to be more like his boss, Earl Janoth. Janoth, with his “big, pink, disorderly face, permanently fixed in a faint smile he had forgotten about long ago,” doesn’t have to live by the dictates of the big clock. He doesn’t even know there is a big clock, Stroud reflects.
But that is before the night Stroud happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the night Earl Janoth murders his mistress, Pauline Delos: Stroud is the only person who knows his employer is guilty. This is only the beginning of his troubles, however — for Janoth knows that somebody saw him that night. Under the guise of performing a public service, he mobilizes his staff in an all-out campaign to find out who it is. And the man he assigns to head the task force is George Stroud himself.
The suspense that Fearing builds from this situation through skillful intercutting of scenes told from Janoth’s viewpoint and that of other members of his staff, such as Steve Hagen, Edward Orlin, and Emory Mafferson — is the kind that keeps you up into the wee hours turning pages. But The Big Clock is more than just a fine thriller; it is a novel of character and metaphysical insight in which the symbol of the big clock takes on more and more significance and ultimately becomes the focal point of the story.
One runs like a mouse up the old, slow pendulum of the big clock, time, scurries around and across its huge hands, strays inside through the intricate wheels and balances and springs of the inner mechanism, searching among the cobwebbed mazes of this machine with all its false exits and dangerous blind alleys and steep runways, natural traps and artificial baits, hunting for the true opening and the real prize.
Then the clock strikes one and it is time to go, to run down the pendulum, to become again a prisoner making once more the same escape.
For of course the clock that measures out the seasons, all gain and loss … this gigantic watch that fixes order and establishes the pattern for chaos itself, it has never changed, it will never change, or be changed.
Almost as good is the 1948 film version directed by John Farrow and featuring brilliant performances by Ray Milland as Stroud and Charles Laughton as Earl Janoth. It has been hailed, and rightly so, as one of the best noir films of the Forties.
Fearing’s other suspense novels are worth investigating, although anyone who has read The Big Clock first will find them something of a letdown. The best is Dagger of the Mind; the others are The Loneliest Girl in the World (1951), The Generous Heart (1954), and The Crozart Story (1960).
WILLIAM L. STUART – Night Cry. Dial Press, hardcover, 1948. Avon, paperback, 1949. Avon #597, paperback, 1954. Basis for the film noir Where the Sidewalk Ends, directed by Otto Preminger from a script by Ben Hecht and starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney. Adapted for TV: Kraft [Mystery] Theatre, NBC, 13 August 1958. starring Peter Falk and Jack Klugman.
Ken Paine just came back from WWII, a war hero, and now he’s adrift. He’s drinking and gambling and generally making an ass of himself. He gets in a fistfight with some jerk at the gambling joint, knocks him out, and leaves. Later that night, the jerk winds up dead. Paine is suspect #1.
Lieutenant Mark Deglin is on the case. A tough cop who doesn’t take shit from anybody. Deglin tracks down Paine. Paine pretends he knows nothing about the murder—and he gets surly when the cop tries to push him around:
Paine stared at him, his one eye wide, his face mottling with anger. He stepped forward, his arms out. Deglin feinted at the eye, and when the arms came up, he hit Paine in the belly. Paine shuddered and Deglin hit him, as hard as he could hit, in the face on the blind side, then chopped at Paine’s neck. Paine started to buckle forward. Deglin hit him again, savagely, and again chopped at his neck. The blows turned Paine and carried him back onto the bed. He lay for a moment, breathing rapidly in choking gasps, then he floundered awkwardly and slid to the floor. The rapid breathing stopped.
Okay. Well big deal. A murderer gets killed resisting arrest. It’ll be okay.
Deglin calls in to report to the captain, who says: Oh you can forget about Ken Paine. We got a full confession from the murderer! Ken Paine is no longer a suspect.
So at this point Deglin has a choice to make. Admit that he killed an innocent man. Or hide the body.
Paine’s dead anyway. Whatever Deglin does, it ain’t gonna bring him back. So why should Deglin suffer, derailing his promising career? He decides to dump the body and make it look like Paine split, dumping the weighted body in the Hudson.
Of course it’s all well and good long as the body stays sunk. But bodies rarely stay sunk in a crime novel. And this body no exception.
So the body is found. And guess who is assigned to the case?
Yep. Deglin is chasing after a murderer who is himself. But now, instead of an arguably victimless crime, this time Deglin’s gonna have to frame somebody.
The question is, just how bad a Bad Lieutenant is Lieutenant Deglin?
It turns out not nearly bad enough. And his ambivalence alternatively haunts him, and tempts him, while he struggles to decide how far he’s willing to go. And how much he’s willing to risk and suffer for a choice long past chosen.
—
It’s a good, tough novel. Not sure I buy the ending, which is a bit too cute. But other than that, a solid hardboiled read. On the other hand, when an author blows an ending, asking me how I like it is a bit like asking Mrs. Lincoln, other than that, how was the play?
ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION. August 1967. Editor: John W. Campbell. Cover art by Chesley Bonestell. Overall rating: 2½ stars.
POUL ANDERSON “Starfog.” Short novel. Ranger Daven Laure is assigned the task of returning a lost spaceship and its crew to their home planet. Complications arise since they have some from a strange region of space, a globular cluster, where abundance of stellar matter and sheer closeness of stars make ordinary navigation impossible. Lots of meat for the astrophysicist, but the story fails to inspire the ordinary reader, Quite boring. **
CHRISTOPER ANVIL “Babel II.” The next world crisis will be caused by the inability of scientists in different fields to communicate. Pertinent, and the analogy is apt. (3)
FRANK HERBERT “The Featherbedders.” Novelette. A race of telepathic beings think Earth would be useful for their purposes, but they don’t quite suspect they’re being exploited in turn. (3)
WALT & LEIGH RICHMOND “Cows Can’t Eat Grass.” A stranded space scout uses bacterial symbiosis, such as a cow does, to survive. (3)
MACK REYNOLDS “Depression or Bust.” A national depression is trace from its very roots. The solution” Go back to that family that started it all. Too long. [21 pages] (2)
JACK EHRLICH – Revenge. Dell #A168, paperback original, 1958. Covert artist: Robert McGinnis.
A mention in Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Blog led me back to Revenge, and I thought I’d dig it off the shelf and have another look at it.
I still remember buying this in 1970 at a used-paperback joint in Cleveland, back when a dime (or three-for-a quarter) would buy gaudy-covered tomes by Woolrich, Hammett, Jim Thompson or any number of then-forgotten authors whose works are now fashionable and high-priced. In fact, Bill compared Revenge to Jim Thompson’s work, and there are some similarities here for sure.
Jack Ehrlich, though, ain’t no Jim Thompson. He ain’t even Dan J. Marlowe. Revenge is a workmanlike effort, fast when it needs to be fast and suitably tense in the suspenseful passages, but it’s the in-between stuff — the filler, motivation and set-up — that let me down here.
Ehrlich’s protagonist is an outwardly normal guy who pushes himself from robbery to rape to murder, partly to settle old scores but mostly for the thrill of the thing. And he never rang true for me. Where Jim Thompson’s killers seem genuinely twisted, and Dan J. Marlowe’s are propelled by their own sick circumstances, Ehrlich’s sociopath seemed just too normal; the first-person narrative of Revenge doesn’t give us the compelling characterization a story like this really needs, and as a result it fell flat for me.
Still, it’s a good enough book that I’ve hung onto it for almost forty years. And I’m glad I did.
— Reprinted from The Hound of Dr. Johnson #57, July 2008.
But for whatever reason I’d never read it. Nor any Lovecraft. Now back in my D&D’ing days of yore (Dungeons and Dragons, for the uninitiated), I became somewhat familiar with and frightened by Cthulhu. But that’s where my acquaintance stopped.
Whether because of my general disdain for the horror genre, or due to Lovecraft’s reputation for racism and lack of stylistic panache — or even prosaic competence — I had hitherto avoided reading any. But upon crackling open the spine of this here volume, hither and thither hast my avoidance been vanquished.
In other words, Lovecraft is freaking awesome! I loved these three stories. They’re great and I devoured them as quick as I could before they could devour me.
The three stories were:
1. “The Colour Out of Space.” Amazing Stories, September 1927.
In this one, some weird meteor hits near a farm house, west of Arkham, New England way, near Miskatonic University.
The material of the ‘meteor’ is of some hitherto unknown quality that appears on no periodic table of this realm.
The scientists are all excited to test a piece of it. But as they test it, it starts to shrink, then disappear.
Finally they chip into the thing itself, deeply, releasing some amorphous blue globule. Nothing to see here. All is well. It continues to shrink, then disappear, til near forgotten.
Then the farmer and his family start to grow gorgeous but inedible crops , and they begin to act crazier and crazier, and finally disappear one by one.
There is something corrupt in the soil, in their wellspring. And it’s spreading.
2. “The Dunwich Horror.” Weird Tales, April 1929.
Young Wilbur Whately is born in Dunwich, child of weak-minded albino mother, and fathered by some monstrosity. Gramps is some sort of sorcerer called Old Whately.
Wilbur grows at an inhuman rate, able to walk around and read in multiple languages by the time he was a toddler, big as a 4 year old by 2, big as an 8 year old by 4. And so on.
Wilbur and gramps are working to conjure an ancient spirit to retake the earth and vanquish humanity. Will they get away with it? Tune in next time…..same bat time…..same bat channel.
3. “The Thing on the Doorstep.” Weird Tales, January 1937.
“It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman — madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium.”
And so it begins….
Our narrator has murdered a person who appears to be Edward Derby, his lifelong friend.
But the story tells the tale of Ephraim Waite — a mysterious man of whispered wizardry. And his Winona Ryder looking daughter Asenath who steals the heart of our beloved Mr. Derby, and they wed.
Mr. Derby’s soul seems increasingly to be wrenched from his body, and transported into the body of his strange bride, and vice versa. And there is a struggle for control of the body between each soul. A battle for the corpus of the man, Edward.
If Edward is killed whilst his body is possessed by Asenatha Waite—who then is the victim?
____
Anyway, I really dug these stories. Yeah, the prose is antiquated. But the style fits the mysterious boggy settings. And adds to them, really.
Another thing I liked about the stories is they are narrated in each case by a sceptic — a non-believer in magical spirits and alien powers. It is only by the ‘objective’ appearance of inexplicable happenings that the inherent skepticism is overcome. And you find yourself being slowly edged into belief, an objective observer of ineffable horrors.
HAROLD Q. MASUR – The Legacy Lenders. Scott Jordan #11. Random House, hardcover, 1967. Bantam, paperback, 1st printing thus, April 1968.
While representing a friend whose wife had been killed in a traffic accident, lawyer Scott Jordan us involved in another death, a murder which is neatly and carefully tied into the plot as it develops, The driver of the other car had transferred rights in a future inheritance for a fractional value in cash, but not without involving a number of other people in a fraud necessary to obtain the required insurance on his own life, It is the examining doctor’s nurse who becomes too curious and thus jeopardizing her own life.
A badly written fake-suicide scene detracts for the otherwise tight plotting. The gun mysteriously switched from the right hand to the left, and wrong, hand. And unnecessarily, too, for medical evidence would have immediately indicated murder.
Masur knows people, though, and New York City, and writes of both extremely well. He also has side comments to provide to lawyers as they are portrayed in TV series: Perry Mason, are you listening? Also, the current arguments of gun vs. auto licensing are reversed here. Masur seems to have a deep-seated grudge against automobiles – not strangely, as a resident New Yorker [city-style].
RON FAUST – Tombs of Blue Ice. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1974. No paperback edition.
During a mountain-climbing expedition in the French Alps, a sudden storm breaks and one of the two companions of American Robert Holmes is killed by a bolt of lightning; the other climber, a German named Dieter Streicher, is seriously injured. Unable to move Streicher, Holmes returns to the village of Chamonix to report the incident and request immediate help for the wounded man.
A search party is sent out to the high mountain ledge where the accident occurred, but surprisingly finds no sign of Streicher, alive or dead. What could have happened to the man? Could he have managed to leave the ledge under his own power, for some unknown reason? Or has he been a victim of foul play?
Streicher is the son of a vicious Nazi Occupation leader, and there are many in the little French valley who have good reason to want him dead: among them a woman named Christiane Renaud, whom Holmes desires; and her stepfather, the bitter old mountain guide Martigny.
Holmes sets out on his own to find Streicher and the truth about the man’s disappearance. Most of the novel involves his determined quest, and most of it is harrowing, especially Holmes’s descent into a huge crevasse, literally a tomb of blue ice. This is high-tech adventure writing, with a simple plot, strong characters, and evocative prose that includes memorable descriptive passages about mountain climbing and the glacial Alpine wilderness.
Ron Faust excels at outdoor crime/adventure fiction of all types, as his other novels prove: The Wolf in the Clouds(1977) which is about a pair of U.S. forest rangers and a madman on the loose in the Colorado Rockies; The Burning Sky (1978), which deals with a deadly big-game hunt in a mountain valley in New Mexico (and which John D. MacDonald called “strong, tough … with that flavor of inevitability that seasons the good ones”); and three paperback originals with Mexican settings: The Long Count (1979), Death Fires (1980), and Nowhere to Run(1981).
BASIL HEATTER – The Dim View. Farrar Straus & Co., hardcover, 1946. Signet #668, paperback, 1948. Popular Library #602, paperback, 1954.
Jim Masters (like Basil Heatter), is skipper of a PT boat in New Guinea in WWII. He gets blown up, ass over tit, and wakes up recuperating in Australia.
A young, pretty barmaid falls in love with him, and he with her, as much as he can after what he’s been thru. He’s been thru enough and served long enough, he can get discharged if he wants.
He talks it over with an Navy psychiatrist, German Jewish defector, Dr. Schwartz. “’It is a bad thing to run away,’ Schwartz said. ‘It may not seem important at the time but later there is always a little soft spot, a spot of fear. It is like cutting open a fine, healthy-looking fruit and finding inside a little spot of rottenness. Unless the rotten spot can be cut out quickly, it grows bigger and finally the whole thing must be thrown away.’”
Masters replies “That spot is in me. I guess it was always in me way down. But today it started to spread. It’s rotten, al right, I can taste the rottenness in my mouth.”
How do you cut out the rotten spot of fear once it begins to metastasize? Dr. Schwartz says the most effective way “is simply to go back to whatever produced the fear and to face it and try to master it. I say this is more dangerous because it is a gamble. If you win, the fear will be gone but if you fail then the fear will master you completely and you will be broken and done for.”
So to the dismay of Masters’s cohorts and his lady friend, he decides to return to the New Guinea front rather than be discharged safely to California, to once again captain a PT boat against constant bombardment from above and torpedoing from below.
At 155 pages told in wonderfully clipped language, the story clips along at quite a clip. This is a first novel, and it feels like Heatter put a lot of himself in it. Achingly authentic, the contrast between the languid pace of the Australian recuperation and the Autobahn-esque speed of war quickens one’s pulse as the story unfolds.
Nero Wolfe on Page and (Small U.S.) Screen:
“Eeny Meeny Murder Mo”
by Matthew R. Bradley
The Final Deduction (1961) sees the return of Ben Dykes, head of the Westchester County detectives in the Zeck trilogy, and introduces their D.A. du jour, Clark Hobart, and Captain Saunders of the State Police; Ben earns a “Competent and admirable” from Wolfe, whose weight is given as 285 pounds. Stout is inconsistent about Archie’s weekly poker game with Lon and the ’teers, now held on Wednesday, not Saturday as in “The Next Witness” (1955), with Saul as rotating, not regular, host. Ditto Archie’s Ohio birthplace, given in Too Many Women(1947) as Canton and in “The Cop-Killer” (1951) as Chillicothe, invoked here when he recalls his Aunt Anna’s chicken pie.
Wolfe pledges temporary silence to his client, Althea Vail, whose husband, Jimmy, and secretary, Dinah Utley, are murdered after conspiring to fake his kidnapping and commit tax fraud … the titular deduction being that she killed them. To keep his promise, he flees the brownstone with Archie—avoiding Cramer by taking overnight refuge in the home of Doc Vollmer while his son, Bill, is away at school — and, in appreciation, sends orchids to Vollmer and his assistant, Helen Gillard. Archie hands Lon his “fattest scoop” ever, plus a “second hot exclusive” within three days, while oft-mentioned A.D.A. Mandelbaum has suddenly become “Mandel,” and will apparently remain so in all subsequent appearances.
Two of the novellas in Homicide Trinity (1962) were serialized in The Saturday Evening Post — “Counterfeit for Murder” (as “The Counterfeiter’s Knife,” January 14-28, 1961) and “Death of a Demon” (June 10-24, 1961); “Eeny Meeny Murder Mo” bowed in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine #220 (March 1962). Although Stout rarely revised his work, “Assault on a Brownstone,” a radically different early draft of “Counterfeit,” appeared in the posthumous collection Death Times Three(1985). The “Demon,” Barry Hazen, uses his p.r. business as a front for blackmail until one of the victims he tortures puts a hole in him, and tries to frame Mrs. Hazen with the very gun he used to kill her father years ago.
“Counterfeit” opens with back-to-back visits by showbiz landlady Hattie Annis — told to return when Wolfe descends from the plant rooms, entrusting Archie with a package for which a hit-and-run driver wings her — and aspiring actress Tamiris Baxter, a concerned tenant to whom he admits nothing. Discovered in Hattie’s parlor, the package contains c. $10,000 in new $20 bills; after stonewalling Albert Leach of the Treasury Department’s Secret Service Division, asking about both women, Archie confirms it as phony. But on arrival at the house with Hattie, who hates cops and hopes to split a newspaper’s reward for finding a counterfeiter, he spots Tammy on the parlor’s floor with a knife in her chest.
Turns out she was an undercover T-woman, the counterfeiter/killer presumed to be one of Hattie’s other four tenants, who come to the brownstone en masse at her behest when her intransigence gets her arrested. After a turf battle over confiscation of the bills, Leach’s Federal court order trumping Cramer’s, Archie talks with D.A. Macklin. This took a hard left seven pages into “Assault,” in which the hit and run is fatal, Tammy lives — and even has romantic potential, and Leach’s titular search for the package Archie cached in Grand Central piques Wolfe into action; Stout’s biographer, John McAleer, observes that Hattie 2.0 engages them in “some of the liveliest dialogue to be found anywhere in the corpus.”
In “Eeny,” Bertha Aaron comes seeking aid: the private secretary to Lamont Otis saw an unidentified younger partner of Otis, Edey, Heydecker, and Jett meeting secretly with the opposing client, Rita Sorell. Not surprisingly, Wolfe — up in the plant rooms — refuses to touch a case even tangentially involving Rita and Morton’s divorce, so he tells Archie to get rid of her, but on returning to the office, he finds somebody has beaten him to it. She has been strangled with Wolfe’s own necktie, left on his desk after he got a spot on it, and is presumed, while alone in the office, to have intercepted a call from said partner, who’d followed her, offered to explain … and opportunistically killed her once she admitted him.
Otis arrives with associate Ann Paige, who is asked to wait in — and decamps through the window of — the front room while he reads the statement Archie gave Cramer. He agrees to help with background on Frank Edey (drafted the Sorrells’ marriage agreement), Miles Heydecker (represented gold-digger/ex-actress Rita, née Ramsey, when sued by a former agent), and Gregory Jett (a spendthrift, rumored to be interested in Ann). Archie writes a card claiming that Rita was seen in the lunchroom, hoping that she can be smoked out of the Churchill and followed by the ’teers; he returns home to find Jett, who was tipped off by Ann, his alleged fiancée, and thinks Bertha might have known of a dalliance with Rita.
Just after Edey and Heydecker arrive to complete the set, Rita calls and “admits” she was with Jett, so Wolfe tells them she named the man, although “not satisfied of her veracity,” if not who. “We knew that one of three men had committed murder, and how and when. Okay, which one? Eeny meeny murder mo”; Cramer and Purley arrive with warrants for them both, leaving in defeat after Wolfe calls Parker and their bluff. He then arranges for the other interested parties to be listening in from the front room as he confronts Rita with the truth — it was Heydecker, not Jett, who met with her, followed Bertha to Wolfe’s, and phoned Rita to warn her of possible exposure, while Rita herself committed the murder…
“Eeny, Meeny, Murder, Moe” (sic; 6/3/01) and the subsequent episode of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, “Disguise for Murder” (6/17/01) — both directed by John L’Ecuyer, here making his series debut, and adapted by Sharon Elizabeth Doyle — were attached for international broadcast and DVD in a faux telefilm, Wolfe Stays In. As with “Door to Death” (6/4/01) and “Christmas Party” (7/1/01), yoked as Wolfe Goes Out, the novellas were spaced years apart. Doyle links these two with original material about those poker games, now played on Thursday with Lon (Saul Rubinek), Orrie (Trent McMullen), and Saul (Conrad Dunn), over which Archie (Timothy Hutton) explains Wolfe’s (Maury Chaykin) sparerib mishap.
Bertha (Christine Brubaker) says she fears the news might kill Otis (George Plimpton), who is 75 and has a bad heart, and that when she’d confronted the “traitor,” his reaction precluded an innocent explanation, hence her visit. Of course, Cramer (Bill Smitrovich) is convinced that he withheld the name she refused to provide until or unless Wolfe took the case, while Archie insists that, even absent a client or a fee, “this aggression will not stand,” per the Dude. With Angela (Janine Theriault) sequestered, Wolfe tells Otis, “My self-esteem has been severely injured,” warning him against an attempt at damage control by shielding the killer, but Otis insists he will not put the firm’s interests ahead of justice.
Invoked but never onstage in the novella, Morton (Howard Hoover) is briefly shown here in flashbacks with Rita (Kari Matchett); she “wanted more than half, and … had carefully collected evidence of certain enterprises” of his, which any of the partners could provide. Chaykin beautifully depicts how, due to his rancor at the killer, “I can’t think clearly. My brain-processes are muddled,” and he even declines Fritz’s (Colin Fox) offer of food. Jett (Robert Bockstael), Edey (Wayne Best), and Hydecker (sic; David Schurmann) all come to the brownstone after grilling by the authorities, but Wolfe considers their alibis for the time of the lunchroom meeting worthless, and they were in conference during the murder.
Up next:The Mother Hunt
Editions cited–
The Final Deduction: Bantam (1963) Homicide Trinity: Bantam (1970) Death Times Three: Bantam (1985)
JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything. Gold Medal s1259, paperback original, 1962. Reprinted several times. Made-for-TV movie with Robert Hays and Pam Dawber, 1980.
Kirby Winter’s uncles had died and instead of the millions Kirby expected to inherit, he received only a gold watch as a keepsake. But he finds that there are others, quite unscrupulous, who believe that he must at least have received the secret of his uncle’s success. And in fact he has; the owner of the watch has the ability to stop normal time and t o exist in that stopped world for up to an hour, free to act without fear of exposure or reprisal.
Such a secret carries with it a tremendous responsibility, and Kirby’s uncle had set up conditions in his will to guarantee that his nephew would have to quickly show that he was worthy. During his adventures, he meets Bonny Lee, and it is his love for the uninhibited singer-dancer that helps change him from the poor ninny he was, afraid of women and life.
Humorous, wild, sexy, science-fantasy: not to be believed, but wouldn’t it be great? Of course moral philosophy is emphasized: responsibility and other obligations restrict the honest user, but then the watch should also not be used solemnly, but, ah, frivolously or happily. Removing bathing suits, for example, rather than killing folks.
Which is precisely what happens. Happily. And justice triumphs.
Devoted to mystery and detective fiction — the books, the films, the authors, and those who read, watch, collect and make annotated lists of them. All uncredited posts are by me, Steve Lewis.
