WILLIAM FAULKNER – Sanctuary. Harrison Smith, hardcover, February 1931. Modern Library, hardcover, 1932. Random House, hardcover, 1958 (revised and corrected). Reprinted as Sanctuary: The Original Text, edited by Noel Polk (Random House, hardcover). Reprinted as Sanctuary: The Corrected Text (Vintage Books, paperback, 1993; this is the edition currently in print). Film adaptations: The Story of Temple Drake (1933) and Sanctuary (1961).

   Temple Drake is a haughty girl, a naughty girl, daughter of a judge.

   She goes to an all-girls school with annoying rules which she breaks with impunity.

   She has a date with Gowan, a dapper dandy, a University of Virginia graduate with a cute convertible.

   Gowan’s a lush. And he insists on stopping at a still in the sticks for some moonshine. It’ll only take a minute.

   But Gowan gets shitfaced, crashes his car, and strands Temple at the still among the yokels.

   The yokels are fine as long as it’s daytime. But come night, the rapscallions all get drunk, horny and rapacious. No female is safe. Least of all Temple Drake. So she hides, unsuccessfully, from the men.

   One of the men, Popeye, takes her and then takes her away, shooting a competing suitor.

   You think Temple Drake is a helpless victim. A faux vamp scared straight from the depths of human depravity. But you’re wrong.

   Popeye, her abductor, is impotent. And Temple taunts him.

   At the end of the day, Temple is the last one standing. All the yokels go onto their reward. And Temple smirks. Mercilessly.

         —

   The book was a real freakin’ slog, I must say. Lots of technical Fauknerian wizardry, switched up POV’s, mélange of styles, cadence, speech patterns.

   Frankly, mental midget that I am, I found it distracting. My understanding is that No Orchids for Miss Blandish is a blatant rip-off. I can’t remember. Orchids wasn’t that memorable. But I guarantee you James Hadley Chase cut to the chase and told the story straight, leaving out the mumbo jumbo.

   Mumbo jumbo aside, Temple Drake is a great character. The story, when there’s a story being told, is gripping, white knuckling, and fearful. I’ll remember the story too. It’s a good story with a telling that gives you the vision of each character, with all the ramps and curls and squiggly lines of real life consciousness. It just wasn’t that fun deciphering it. It was work. But worth it.

… but I’ve been hacked. My laptop, my primary tool in the trade, is over at Best Buy even as I speak, in the capable hands of a trusted member of The Geek Squad. I hope. Won’t get it back till Monday. I hope.

I’m typing this on an old standby, a laptop that’s not only old, but slow, and worse, all the letters are worn off the keys. Touch typing is a skill I lost right after high school.

I’m going to take the weekend off. I’ll tell you more when I can.

ROLE PLAY. Amazon MGM Studios via Prime Video; 12 January 2024. Kaley Cuoco (Emma Brackett), David Oyelowo (Dave Brackett), Bill Nighy, Connie Nielsen. Directed by Thomas Vincent, written by Seth Owen.

   The Bracketts, Emma and David, are an ordinary mixed-race couple, with a couple of kids, but with a difference. He’s an ordinary husband, but she (Kelly Cuoco, previously of The Big Bang Theory) has a secret. She travels a lot, but she is not taking ordinary (boring) business trips, which is what she tells her husband. No, how she adds to the family’s mortgage account is by being a hitwoman. An assassin for hire.

   So she has a lot of things on her mind. Not only her job, but making sure her husband has no clue what her job is. It is no surprise that when she comes home from one of her “business” trips, she has committed the ultimate sin. She has forgotten their anniversary. Dave is forgiving, but they decide as a couple that their marriage needs some spicing up.

   The idea they come up with to accomplish this is the following plan. They will travel to New York, register separately under different names, planning to meet “accidentally” in the hotel bar, and spent an “illicit” night together.

   This is what is called role play.  You may have indulged in it yourself.

   Things go awry quickly. David is late in arriving, and while Emma is waiting for him in a bar, an elderly gentleman (Bill Nighy) starts chatting her up. In an ordinary way, but gradually with more and more of an edge. Menacing, even. Emma senses something is up, and before the night is over, the elderly gentleman is dead.

   This is maybe 20 to 30 minutes into the movie, no more than that, and from that moment on, the movie has nowhere in particular to go. Billed as an action comedy, it is in fact neither. The two leads have no particular chemistry together, and try as hard as I could, I could not convince myself that Kelly Cuoco (of The Big Bang Theory) is at all convincing as a hit woman for hire. The end result is amusing at best, but far from essential, even for fans of either of the two leading players.

   Your opinion, of course, may differ.

   Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot story “The Second Gong” (Ladies Home Journal, June 1932; The Strand Magazine, July 1932) was collected in The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories (1948). It was expanded considerably as “Dead Man’s Mirror,” which debuted in Murder in the Mews and Other Stories (1937) with three other novellas; Mews was published in the U.S. as Dead Man’s Mirror, initially minus “The Incredible Theft,” restored in 1987. Serialized in the London Daily Express (April 6-12, 1937), “Theft” was expanded from “The Submarine Plans” (The Sketch, November 7, 1923; The Blue Book Magazine, July 1925), originally collected in The Under Dog and Other Stories (1951).

   “Gong” is set on a single night at Lytcham Close, the ancestral home of musician Hubert Lytcham Roche, the last of his line, whose megalomaniacal behavior is either eccentric or certifiable, depending upon who is asked. Among his obsessions is punctuality at dinner, announced with a gong at precisely 8:05 and 8:15 P.M., and woe betide any guest who is tardy.

   It opens as Hubert’s nephew, Harry Dalehouse; Joan Ashby, invited at his behest by the “vague” Mrs. Lytcham Roche; and Geoffrey Keene, Hubert’s secretary, converge in the hall, having heard what Joan insists is the second gong, but although it is now 8:12, butler Digby says it is the first, dinner being delayed for 10 minutes by the late 7:00 train.

   Astounded at this unprecedented departure from tradition, they hear a sound, but cannot agree what it was—a shot, perhaps from a nearby poacher? a car backfiring?—or which direction it came from. They are soon joined by Hubert’s wife; adopted daughter, Diana Cleves, a distant cousin; and friend and financial advisor, Gregory Barling, yet when the second gong sounds, Hubert is not in evidence.

   As the drawing-room door opens at last, it is not he but Poirot who enters, then Digby reports that Hubert came down at 7:55 and entered the study, whose locked door Poirot has Keene and Barling force, revealing him dead of a shot that passed through his head and apparently shivered a mirror on the wall.

   The gun below his hand, locked French window, and paper bearing just a scrawled word, “Sorry,” suggest suicide, the conclusion reached by Inspector Reeves, who amiably says he needs no co-operation from the unconvinced Poirot. Yet his manie de grandeur is not consistent with suicide, and Poirot explains he was summoned by Hubert, who thought he was being swindled, declining to call in the police for “family reasons.”

   Barling says that Hubert was receptive to the idea of Diana marrying him and admits he is in love with her, yet she has “played fast and loose with every man for twenty miles around,” and has been “seeing a lot” of the new estate agent, Captain John Marshall, who lost an arm in the war.

   Di, who says she was in the garden when the shot was heard, calls Barling a crook, while Keene—seen with the “eyes in the back of [Poirot’s] head” picking up something outside the study—states it was a tiny silk rosebud from her handbag, and Marshall confirms that Hubert lost a bundle speculating on Barling’s “[w]ildcat schemes.”

   Poirot finds two pairs of footprints in the garden where Di had picked Michaelmas daisies for the table and later a rose to cover up a grease spot on her dress. Convening everyone in the study, he shows how jarring a loose mechanism can lock the French window from outside, then elicits the terms of Hubert’s will: Di inherits…provided a potential husband takes the family name.

   Yet a recent codicil stipulates that if said husband is not Barling, then Harry inherits, and Poirot “put[s] the case against” Di—who flirted with Keene to deflect attention from true intended Marshall—before he fingers Keene. Shot with a silencer, the fatal bullet hit the gong, heard only by Joan in her room above, and was later retrieved by Keene, who then dropped it under the mirror he’d cracked to help stage the scene, smoothing out Di’s first footprints in the flower bed to conceal his own; he later fired his revolver out the window before dashing from the drawing room into the hall, giving him his alibi for 8:12. Harry generously offers to halve the estate with Diana, disinherited for refusing to wed Barling.

   “Dead Man’s Mirror” features a return appearance by Mr. Satterthwaite, who was usually seen in Christie’s stories of Harley Quin but crossed paths with Poirot in Murder in Three Acts (1934), first serialized in The Saturday Evening Post (June 9-July 14, 1934) and then published in the U.K. as Three Act Tragedy. Adapted by ITV with David Suchet in 1993 for Series 5 of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, “Mirror” backtracks to Poirot receiving the letter in which Gervase Chevenix-Gore imperiously summons him to Hamborough Close. At a duchess’s party, he seeks out Satterthwaite—given neither explanation nor introduction—to pump him regarding the old family (“Sir Guy de Chevenix went on the first crusade”).

   The novella also briefly describes his journey, but beginning with his arrival, many of the mechanics of the story, even specific passages, are anologous, with the usual renaming of characters (if not always in a one-to-one correspondence). Di, Marshall, Digby, Barling, Harry, and Joan are roughly equivalent to, respectively, Ruth, Captain John Lake, Snell, Colonel Ned Bury, Hugo Trent, and his girlfriend, Susan Cardwell. Keene is effectively bifurcated into secretary Godfrey Burrows and research assistant Miss Lingard, assisting Gervase with the family history; newly added lawyer Oswald Forbes notes that “my firm, Forbes, Ogilvie and Spence, have acted for the…family for well over a hundred years.”

   Local law is here represented by Major Riddle, the Chief Constable of Westshire County, whose investigation—with old friend Poirot—puts to shame the cursory one by Reeves, a virtual walk-on. Christie eliminates much of the humor inherent in the collective surprise over the host’s failure to appear for dinner, but compensates with his wife, Vanda, a self-professed reincarnation of Egyptian queen Hatshepsut and “a Priestess in Atlantis,” who claims to see Gervase’s spirit in the study. Forbes explains that although he disapproved of his sister’s marriage, his proposed new will stipulated that Ruth marry Hugo, not Bury, whose ill-advised investment was in the Paragon Synthetic Rubber Substitute Company.

   It is Lingard whom Poirot espies picking something up, which she identifies as a pencil that Bury had made out of a bullet fired at him in the South African War, and murdered Gervase with Ruth—secretly wed to Lake three weeks earlier—as a motive. Bury reveals that unknown to her, she was no distant cousin, but the illegitimate daughter of Gervase’s brother and a typist, who’d “renounced all rights” after he died in the Great War. Poirot’s apparent accusation of Ruth has the desired effect and Lingard confesses, confirming the truth privately to Poirot: she was the typist, who wanted to protect Ruth’s happiness by preventing the new will, and burst a blown-up paper bag to simulate the sound of a shot.

         — Copyright © 2024 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   

Up next: Remembered Death

      Editions cited —

“The Second Gong” in Witness for the Prosecution: Dell (1979)
“Dead Man’s Mirror” in Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories: William Morrow (2013)

THE SAINT MAGAZINE. July 1967. Editor: Hans Stefan Santesson. Overall rating: ***

FLEMING LEE “The Gadget Lovers.” Simon Templar. Complete novel (73 pages), adapted from a teleplay by John Kruse. Russian spies are being murdered by exploding equipment, and naturally enough the Western allies are suspected. The Saint is sent to stop the assassination of a Colonel Smolenko, who turns out to be a woman. It is her idea to play the part of his secretary, as he becomes the target. The trail leads to Switzerland and to a monastery taken over by the Chinese. The handicaps of TV restrictions, and the required flashy beginning, are very well overcome. If the idea of a beautiful woman as a Russian officer can be accepted, the story becomes an interesting study of East meeting West. ****

MICHAEL INNES “Imperious Caesar.” John Appleby. First appeared in MacKill’s Mystery Magazine, April 1953. A malevolent professor commits suicide during a bloody Shakespearean production (4)

HELEN McCLOY “Through a Glass, Darkly.” Novelette. First appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1948. Basil Wiling takes on the case of a woman who fears meeting her supernatural double. She has reason, for it is part of a plot to frighten her to death. Too many people take it too seriously, (2)

LEIGHLA WHIPPER “Death Comes of Chuchu Valente.” Miss Bennett [a recurring character], professional assassin, is hired to kill a Mexican bullfight announcer. Ridiculous. (1)

EDWARD D. HOCH “The Oblong Room.” Captain Leopold. An LSD religious experience leads to murder in a dormitory room. (3)

CORNELL WOOLRICH “Screen Test.” Jimmy Galbraith. First appeared in Dime Detective, November 1934, as “Preview of Death.”. A request for police protection fails as the heroine’s dress goes up in flames on the [movie] set, but the detective solves the case by watching the film rushes. A good story. (3)

LINDA GRANT – Lethal Genes. Cat Saylor #5. Scribner, hardcover, 1996. Ivy, paperback, 1997.

   With her four previous books Grant has become one of my favorite female authors. She isn’t a glib as Grafton, or as intense and angst-ful as Paretsky, or as focused on relationships as Muller, but her stories have substance and well-developed characters, and are very well written. Her business-world settings are a refreshing change, too.

   San Francisco Pl Catherine Saylor steps into a new world when she takes a case involving a biotech lab at the University of California. Someone is sabotaging experiments in cutting-edge dot com gene research, and no one there can figure out why, much less who.

   Cat finds a fair amount of academic jealousy, and some pretty lax security procedures, but the culprit and a motive prove more elusive. Then someone dies, and someone else is killed, and the com patch becomes a deadly place.

   My only cavil first off: the villain as eventually revealed wasn’t totally convincing to me, because I didn’t think the character and motivation were nearly well-enough established. That out of the way, I thought  this was Grant’s usual excellent job. She focuses more on the crime and less on the personal life of the protagonist than do most of the female, authors, which is at all to say that Saylor is not a well-drawn and engaging character — she is. Grant’s first-person narration is smooth and paced nicely, and her prose straightforward. She remains one of my favorites.

      The Catherine Sayler series —

1. Random Access Murder (1988)
2. Blind Trust (1990)
3. Love Nor Money (1991)
4. A Woman’s Place (1994)
5. Lethal Genes (1996)
6. Vampire Bytes (1998)

JIM THOMPSON – The Criminal. Lion #184, paperback original, 1953. Reprinted many times.

   Bob Talbert is 15 years old. He raped and killed his 14 year old neighbor Josie. Maybe.

   There’s not a lot of evidence one way or the other.

   The DA’s about to let him go when he gets a heads up that the paper is about to go crazy about it: ‘DA Lets Killer Loose!’. The DA decides it would be better for job security to go ahead and force out a confession. Which he does.

   The book is a Rashomon-like POV kaleidoscope with the perspectives of the parents, the law, Bob, the witnesses, and the fourth estate each taking a turn at telling their side of the story.

   No conclusion is reached, and you’re left not knowing who committed the crime. Bob’s not even sure anymore.

   All we know is that everybody is corrupt and no one knows truth from fiction.

   At the end, the paper has played out the ‘DA Lets Killer Loose’ angle and is now ready to push a new story: ‘Innocent Youngster Victim of Miscarriage of Justice’.

   There’s no more truth behind one story than another. At the end of the day, it’s all dollar signs and the stench of mendacity.

         —

   The fact that we’re left without a denouement is disconcerting. We’re just left with a bunch of puzzle pieces of different sizes from different angles of the same scene, none of which fit together. On the other hand, I guess that’s the point. That truth is hard to find. For example, Bob names an eyewitness who, once located, says: ‘What do you want me to say and how much will you pay me to say it?’ Bob’s lawyer says: I just want the truth. They respond: I’m having trouble remembering—how much did you say I’d get paid—and who was it I’m supposed to have seen?

   It’s a unique novel and different from the Thompson’s usual pantheon on psychos on perdition’s path. Ambiguity is not something Thompson is known for. But that’s what he serves up here. Here the psychopath is the criminal justice system itself: Damned and it don’t give a damn. I dug it.

   I tested positive yesterday again for the Covid virus. I had this sh*t once before, and I thought it was one and done. Not so. So far it’s been only little worse than a bad head cold, and they’re treating me with ordinary OTC medications: ibuprofen, Flonase and some honey-based throat remedy I don’t know how to spell.

   I thought (since I don’t have much else I can do) I’d keep the blog going, but while thinking about what I could be doing, and actually doing it is another. So I’ve decided that the best thing to do is wait it out and start again fresh when it’s run its course.

   And start a New Year all over again! As to what’s happened so far this year, I’d just as soon forget it.

PAUL BOWLES – Let It Come Down. Random House, hardcover, 1952. Signet #1002, paperback, 1953. Reprinted many times since.

   Nelson Dyar is a bored bank teller in the U.S. of A. Waiting for nothing. An acquaintance has apparently established himself in the International Zone (which Burroughs calls ‘Interzone’) of Tangier and invites Dyar to work at his travel agency. Dyar accepts. Nothing else to do.

   The phrase “Let It Come Down” is from MacBeth. One of the characters is scheduled for a hit. He walks by his hit man, saying: ‘Looks like rain’. The hit man says, swinging his sword upon his neck: ‘Let It Come Down’.

   Dyar arrives and his buddy is not all that friendly. In fact, his buddy is just using him as a money laundering mule. British Sterling is strictly controlled in Morocco. And sneaking it in is worth its weight in silver.

   Dyar suspects precisely what is happening, and lets it happen anyway. Let’s himself be seduced by a countess, let’s himself be taken in by a whore. He had nothing going on anyway. So why not?

   And then he finds himself with a shitload of money. And decides, for perhaps the first time in his life, to do something: He steals it.

   He absconds to a hovel in Spain where he waits, smoking more and more hashish, getting more and more stoned, more and more paranoid. And waits. For it to come down.

   Which it does. Inevitably.

         —

   Starts off promising, ends with a meh. I picked this one because I’d just read Peter Rabe’s The Box which got me in the mood for more North African island intrigue. However, as the book goes on, as Dyar gets more and more stoned, as his attentions start to blur and glaze, the book starts to meander too. Like Dyar. Like the camera’s eye. Which is realistic. Just not enjoyable for this reader.

   So the thing is well executed, I guess. I just prefer straight, hardboiled execution. And when the character and narrative start to fall apart, so did my attention.

   I read that a fan once knocked on Bowles’s door excited to visit Tangier, and Bowles, upon opening the door, responded: If you’d read my books, why would you want to visit Tangier? He paints a portrait where everyone and everything is for sale in the International Zone. That there’s nothing too perverted, for a price.

   It’s a place where, if you have no values, you’ll be sucked into intrigue quicker than a duck in a jet engine. But for me, this book was more quack than pâté. And I never liked pâté anyway.

MICHAEL CONNELLY – Trunk Music. Harry Bosch #5, Little Brown, hardcover, 1996. St. Martin’s, paperback, 1998

   Connelly is to me one of the strongest authors to emerge in this decade, and I am a bit surpassed that he hasn’t been nominated for more awards. The Black Echo did win a Best First Edgar, but what I thought was his best, The Concrete Blonde, went almost unnoticed.

   Harry Bosch is back in homicide, after a disciplinary assignment away from trouble and the limelight His first case after he returns is a sleazy filmmaker’ s body in a trunk, one that has all the earmarks of a Mafia hit. The LA Organized Crime boys want no part of it, though, and this makes Harry a little suspicious. He gets even more so when the trail leads to Las Vegas and some mob figures. He follows it there, and finds a troublesome lady from his past, and more suspicions, and a lot more problems than he wanted, needed, or could comfortably deal with-but that’s par for Harry.

   [A line I spotted:] “He smiled glibly.” I’ve always wanted to do that, but never knew how.

   I think this is the first time I’ve given a Connelly book less than a [double star rating], but this was a very ordinary book for Connelly — which means it was above average, and better than most [authors] can  write.  One of the plot elements — his Achilles heel from the first book — wasn’t believable to me, and there wasn’t anything really exceptional about any part of the story.

   It was nevertheless a good book, because Connelly is good enough to be readable even at half speed,  On the whole, though, it was a little disappointing, if only because of the high standard he’s set.