Nota Bene

Ah, distinctions—tart little appetizers for the mind. I like this one, from Within the Context of No Context, by George W.S. Trow (1981):

A tease is a con. You press a spot because you know that it can be pressed, and while the sucker is feeling the pleasure or the pain resulting from the pressure, you take something from him. “Do you have the money? Good. Good. She’ll be right down. Wait here; she’ll be right here.” And then, nothing. A flirt doesn’t do that. A flirt does a dance in the context of giving pleasure. Referring to this, referring to that. And suddenly, following the references, you find a little surprise.

Rookie Season

Spring came along, and thoughts turned naturally to baseball—the crack of wood against horsehide, the sight of a fresh green infield, the annual return after a long winter of sentimental chatter about the National Pastime. Brimming with seasonal spirit, I read a mystery novel that uses the game (and the sepia-tinted memories of it that come easily to middle-aged American boys of a certain kind, of which I am one) as its background. The book, rather like a typical spring, fell somewhat short of its promise.

TROY SOOS. Murder at Fenway Park (1994).
The perils of a superficial approach to historical fiction are vividly on display in this sojourn through the summer of 1912, when Fenway Park was brand-new and the Red Sox were on their way to a pre-“Curse” World Series victory. As hero and narrator Mickey Rawlings tells the story, that golden summer was a blood-tinged affair. A utility player recently acquired by the Boston Americans (the team’s official name back then), Rawlings no sooner arrives at Fenway than he stumbles upon the freshly dead body of a Detroit Tiger, its face turned to pulp by a baseball bat. Other incidents, among them an ominous warning to keep quiet—a favorite bat appears on Rawlings’s hotel-room pillow, suggesting that his head might be next in line for a not-so-sporting clout—place the tale firmly in the genre of hokey melodrama.

Giving Them Big Shoulders a Rub

And so we leave the quaint precincts of Chicago. We leave behind a land of tall buildings, big shoulders, and toddlin’ people, but we take with us our memories—our thrilling, thrilling memories . . .

I just returned from a long weekend in Chicagoland, for the chief purpose of attending a wedding. The city was gorgeous, the wedding was lovely, and I had a fine time all-around. But I never did find an answer to a question that has long burned a hole in some pocket of my brain: What is this thing called “toddlin’”? I did learn that Chicago gained the nickname “Windy City” not because of the gales of air that sweep through the Loop from Lake Michigan, but by virtue of a New York journalist who, in the late 19th century, raised an eyebrow at the gusts of self-boosting oratory that emanated from the rising prairie metropolis. (The eyebrow-raiser was Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun, and the occasion was Chicago’s bid to host a world’s fair in honor of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America in 1492. The story of that fair, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, is the main subject of The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson, a book that provided companion reading during my trip.) Still, what Frank Sinatra and others mean when they sing the praises of “that toddlin’ town” remains a mystery.

Nota Bene

In my review of Brick, I commented on the retro glamour that spreads a shimmery finish across a lot of film and fiction in the noir mode, obscuring the bleak vision underneath. Scraping away that finish can be a good thing, and so it is in Brick. But the style and scenery of classic hard-boiled writing are still nice to behold—as in this passage about a “swank big-city nightclub” that I found in Halo in Blood, a 1946 detective romance in the Raymond Chandler tradition. The author is Howard Browne, and the narrator is Paul Pine, Chicago private eye.

“Bingo” Was Its Name

For years now, I’ve been playing Scrabble with my wife, and usually losing to her, often because of her ability (which I lack) to deploy all seven of her letters in one move—a feat that carries a 50-point bonus and leaves lesser players (me, anyway) fumbling with their little wooden tiles and joking lamely about their need to “buy a vowel.” I had no idea that a term existed for this masterstroke of the game. Now I do, after viewing Word Wars, a documentary that came out in 2004 and arrived yesterday in a Netflix envelope. It was relatively mindless fare, not unlike a Scrabble match, and watching it was a suitable distraction from the chore of packing for a trip that we take today. But I did learn a few things from it.

Karma Killer

Season of the Monsoon, set in Bombay (or Mumbai, as Indians have called its since 1995), leaps forward from Bombay Mail both in time and in realism. I saw no serial killers—that I know of—on my visit to Mumbai. But I saw much else that Mann had noticed, and skillfully captured, before me.

PAUL MANN. Season of the Monsoon (1992).
In a land that teems with death almost as thoroughly as it does with life, a slain and mutilated male prostitute usually wouldn’t garner much attention. When such a corpse turns up near the center of India’s Bollywood movie colony, however, several people take notice—not just the untouchable kuli who must dredge the body from a lake in northern Bombay. Film City nabobs are on hand, and so is Inspector George Sansi of the Maharashtra police force. A brown-skinned, blue-eyed wonder, with a mixed-race pedigree that makes him an ideal outsider’s insider, Sansi comes across as a figure of fancy, if not of fantasy. He has an Indian feminist mother, a well-to-do English father, a law degree from Oxford University, a scar to prove his valor in the fight against drug-running terrorists, and now, perhaps, a hip American journalist girlfriend. Taken as a whole, it’s almost enough to help him contain the multitudinous chaos of India. Almost but not quite.

Indian Winter

In late January and early February of this year, I traveled to India. This was my first trip to the subcontinent, and it may well be my last—not because it failed to leave an impression on me, but because it left such a bewilderingly strong one. In fact, the title of this journal takes its inspiration from India. A loose translation of “the Nataraja,” as the dance of Lord Shiva is called, the phrase “cosmic dance” for me summons an image of inexorable, formless movement, out of which form mysteriously emerges—rather like the movement of culture.

I hope at some point to write more about what I saw in Bombay and Delhi and dusty points beyond. But for now, here and in a subsequent entry, I present capsule reviews of two thrillers set in India that I read after my return home. India, famously, is all about chaos. And there’s nothing like a good mystery yarn, or even a bad one, if what you want is to contain the reality of chaos within the illusion of reason.

LAWRENCE G. BLOCHMAN. Bombay Mail (1934).

Swift and sure, on track and mostly on time, a train hurtles across the plains and hills of central India. Moving to the rhythmic clatter of steel wheels on steel rails, it excavates a kind of core sample of the land and its people, allowing passengers to take in a timeless parorama: dun-hued mud huts and strange trapezoidal temples, men in red turbans and women in blazing-yellow saris.

A Fine Italian Murder

The detective novelist Michael Dibdin, a Brit who lived in the United States and wrote about Italians crimes, died last month. Seeing his obituary spurred me to take down from my shelves a book by him that I bought years ago, on the strong recommendation of a friend, but had never read. So I read it, and discovered that it belonged on my all-time-best list. I’ll be stocking my shelves with more of Dibdin’s work.

MICHAEL DIBDIN. Ratking (1989).
A cardinal defect of the mystery novel, in many critics’ eyes, is its need to skimp on character development. Almost by definition, a whodunit must guard from the reader’s view the deepest thoughts and urges of all characters who might be suspects, lest it become apparent (say, through interior monologues) that they could or could not have done the foul deed in question. A certain shallowness therefore seems instrinsic to even the best-written examples of the genre. Dibdin, in this first entry in his series about Italian police commissioner Aurelio Zen, remedies that flaw by taking the narrative structure of so-called serious fiction and turning it upside-down. Near the end of his tale, once Zen has figured out who kidnapped the Perugian industrialist Ruggiero Miletti, who conspired with the kidnappers, and who then murdered the old patriarch, the author unfurls a tapestry of acutely imagined, finely woven data on several key suspects—their back-stories, their innermost drives—all of it comparable to what a “literary” writer would roll out in the early going of a novel. Somehow it all works, and brilliantly so.

A Book by Any Other Name . . .

Today (I’m writing this post on April 23), the world celebrates the birthday of William Shakespeare—the “Stratford man,” born in 1554, who ostensibly wrote the 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and assorted other works in verse that make up the most lauded body of literature by a single hand in all of history. Shakespeare also died on this day, in 1616.

Death figured prominently in the Bard’s writing—as a haunting off-stage presence in his love poetry, as an unavoidable plot device in his work for the stage. So it’s not surprising that those who write murder stories have frequently borrowed language from Shakespeare to create titles for their own work. Barbara Paul, herself a crime novelist, features on her Web site a compendium of book titles that later and lesser writers have extracted from the Shakespearean corpus.

Nota Bene

Adam Gopnik, in a piece about Kingsley Amis (“The Old Devil,” The New Yorker, April 23, 2007), adduces a transatlantic divide in favored types of satire:

The Larry David character [in "Curb Your Enthusiasm"] doesn’t mind keeping up the nice-guy act so long as he never actually has to do anything unselfish; the Amis men expect that they will eventually have to act unselfishly, since that’s what life and the world squeeze out of you, but they hate having to keep up the nice-guy act. . . . One kind of comedy comes from having to show more than you can really feel, the other from the embarrassment of feeling more than you ever want to show.