#LITERALLY Holmes is his source of income

[doingbad]

“You know detective isn't even my job. And it is not doctor, which is a common misconception. My job…. is just Sherlock Holmes”

#I feel like I've been making this joke for months so sorry if I've posted before #john watson #holmes x watson #LITERALLY Holmes is his source of income #acd canon #“oh but watson is a doctor?” Only when he is married to someone else #“what about the income he makes from the stories?” THAT IS SHERLOCK HOLMES #holmes tag

[polish-art-tournament]

minigame XIII

proposed by @essaytime 💙

Let's look at some Witkacy Portraits™! look under the poll for some more info about them, esp. if this is your first time hearing about this artist...

as there are literally thousands of these portraits, i decided to split the poll into women's and men's portraits, so expect the other one next week probably. after much deliberation choosing which ones to include, i hope i managed to select a more or less representative sample:

from culture.pl:

In 1925 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz a.k.a. Witkacy gave up oil painting and founded the S.I. Witkiewicz Portrait Firm, which became his primary source of income (‘For a 100 zlotys I’ll make a portrait of an entire figure. Destitution, creativity and life are coming to an end’). Clients had to respect the firm’s Regulations which included a rule saying that ‘misunderstandings are banned.’ In a dozen or so years he created thousands of portraits. Not everyone, however, could count on the privilege of being depicted. Some requests were rejected with a stern: ‘I see no reason for that!’

the various letters and numbers abbreviations on the portraits was witkacy's way of tracking what drugs, intoxicants and/or medicine he was on at the time of drawing. he was supervised by a doctor, so, i guess, it's not that unhinged? pretty bonkers still. sherlock holmes if he were a polish painter XD

examples include: C for alcohol, Co for cocaine, Cof for caffeine, her for tea, Et for ether, F.ZZ. for smoking a pipe, Eu for eukodal (pain medicine), pyfko for beer, NП + [number of days] for how many days he went without alcohol...

#witkacy #stanisław ignacy witkiewicz #portrait #polish art #polls #minigame

[teawaffles]

The Fugitives from the Fire: Chapter 1

T/N: Takes place before Chapter 39 of the manga (“The Dark Night of London”). Also, in order to appreciate a certain plot point to the fullest, I would recommend reading Book 2 Story 4 (“It Happened One Night”) before starting this one.

TW for this story // All the elements you would expect from a murder mystery: injury, blood, mention of suicide, violence, death

——The moment Miss Hudson opened the door to his room, Sherlock let out a long, long sigh.

It sounded as if he was squeezing every inch of air out of his lungs.

“What is it, Miss Hudson.”

Sherlock was sunk deep into his armchair, newspaper in hand. As if she could feel a headache coming on, Miss Hudson pressed a hand to her forehead.

“Every single time — what’s going on in this room, Sherlock?”

Frowning, she looked around the flat this great detective shared with his assistant. As always, it was thoroughly in a mess. But as always, Sherlock gave his typical response.

“There isn’t anything to get that upset about, is there? Besides, I’m not doing any scientific experiments right now.”

“I can never understand your concept of hygiene: how do you manage to live among all this without batting an eye……? Anyway, at the very least, make sure it’s clean enough that you’re not embarrassed to let people in. In a sense, we are in the service industry, you know.”

Standing tall and firm in the doorway, she began to lecture Sherlock, when an enigmatic grin broke across his face.

“If a client turns away just upon seeing this, then doesn’t it reflect the triviality of their request? In other words, I’m trying to screen my clients as soon as they enter this room.”

“If you quibble on like that, you’re the one who’s going to get screened out by your clients and lose your income. I certainly detest the idea of allowing someone with no earnings to live here.”

She launched into a scathing rebuke of those lazy words, and Sherlock raised both hands in a gesture of temporary surrender.

“Alright. When John comes back, we’ll tidy up together,” he said, looking out the window.

At that perfunctory remark, Miss Hudson placed both hands on her hips.

“John-kun, John-kun — you never stop talking about him. At least, when it comes to cleaning, I’d like you to do it yourself even without anyone else telling you to. My heart truly goes out to your future wife.”

“No need to worry: I consider myself married to my work.” [1]

“……So that means, I’m going to have a bachelor living here for the rest of my life?”

She thought of herself in her old age, briskly caring for an elderly detective; at that unpleasantly vivid image, a chill ran down her spine. [2]

And so they went on and on like this, as they normally did — when all of a sudden, a knock came from the ground floor entrance. From Sherlock’s experience, a visit at this time was usually linked to a “riddle”.

“Yes yes, please hold on just a moment.”

Breaking off their conversation, Miss Hudson pattered down to the ground floor. Sherlock put his newspaper on the table, and listened as she answered the door.

Then, as he’d intuited, after they exchanged a few words at the entrance, someone promptly came up the stairs — he could hear it creaking — and a familiar face appeared at the open door.

Sherlock flashed him a bold grin.

“——Hey, Lestrade. Tough case?”

It was Inspector Lestrade from Scotland Yard. Sherlock had brought up a “tough” case as a matter of course, and to that, Lestrade gave a solemn nod.

“Exactly, Holmes. It’s a bit of a tricky one — I need your help.”

“Details?”

Skipping the pleasantries, Sherlock lit a cigarette, as he was wont to do. But Lestrade’s expression turned grave.

“Sorry, but it’s urgent: I don’t have time to fill you in right now. Can we talk in the carriage?”

“Wha? Hmm……”

Looking out the window at the street below, Sherlock began to sway restlessly.

“What’s wrong? Is there a problem?”

The detective didn’t have an immediate response, and as Lestrade questioned him, Sherlock began mumbling to no one in particular.

“Look, can’t you see John’s not here? ……Goddammit, seriously — where did he go?”

“…………”

Lestrade kept his expression sombre, but for a split second, even he nearly broke into laughter at that line. This eccentric man, who lacked scruples about troubling the people around him, had just admitted to feeling an ordinary emotion like loneliness — and it did feel a little odd.

Standing to the side, Miss Hudson also broke into a smile. For the man known as Sherlock Holmes, it seemed John H Watson had already become an inseparable part of his life.

Seeing their reactions, Sherlock narrowed his eyes in confusion.

“Oi, why’re you two smiling away? Did I say something weird?”

“Nothing, it’s nothing,” Lestrade replied. “It’s just, that was an unexpected line coming from you, so I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t making fun of you. It’s good that you have such an irreplaceable friend.”

“That’s none of your concern…… Though, is there really no time to wait for John?”

In a flash, Lestrade’s expression reverted to its grim state.

“Sorry, but yes: I want to get going as soon as we can. However, if you need Dr Watson, we could wait a while longer……”

But Sherlock quickly waved his hand, interrupting Lestrade’s compromise.

“No, it’s fine. Anyway, I don’t know when he’s coming back. There’re times like this too.”

Saying that, he stubbed his barely-smoked cigarette in an ashtray, dressed himself and got ready to leave. Uttering a quick word of apology, together with the detective, Lestrade headed to the Brougham four-wheeled carriage waiting outside.

Placing one foot into the vehicle, Sherlock waved to Miss Hudson as she stood at the entrance.

“So, Miss Hudson: I’ll attend your marriage counselling session when I get back.”

“I don’t recall having ever mentioned such a thing?”

She smiled at Sherlock’s joke, concealing within it a quiet rage. As if fleeing from her terrifying presence, the two men set off in haste.

Footnotes:

[1] Oh yes I saw my chance and took it — this is a BBC Sherlock reference |ω･)ﾉ But to be super-precise, I’ve dug into the exact translation in the notes below.

Aside: There was another small reference back in Book 2 Story 1, when Sherlock told William that he was “flattered” :3

[2] This is actually hinted at in the original stories: when Sherlock retired in Sussex, he said he was living with his old housekeeper (Wikipedia)

Translator’s notes

That line about marriage

I took some liberty with that translation, so here’s a more pedantic version of it. The reference comes from Season 1 Episode 1 of BBC Sherlock (“A Study in Pink”), when Sherlock and John were having dinner in an Italian restaurant while on a case.

The line as written in the book: “俺にとっては仕事が嫁さんみたいなもんだからな”

(Because) to me, my work is like my wife.

The line from BBC Sherlock’s Japanese dub: “ジョン、僕は仕事と結婚したつもりだ。” (source)

(It’s a literal translation of the original line below)

The original line from BBC Sherlock: “John, I consider myself married to my work.”

Aside: The “flattered” reference comes from the line immediately after this one — “…and while I am flattered by your interest…”

#moriarty the patriot #yuukoku no moriarty #yuumori #english translation #the girl who sees rainbows

[houseofbrat]

Britney vs Spears

Watched this last night and was not impressed.

Journalistic “standards” are clearly a low bar these days since this was made by two über fans, who are literally incapable of understanding how much of Britney’s problems are of her own making. Literally incapable.

When you start off a “documentary” that absolves Sam Lufti and Adnan Ghalib, you might as well make your next film about how Richard Nixon was attempting to save democracy via a break-in at the Watergate. Never ceases to amaze me that the two über fans behind this “documentary” ate up every word those two assholes spoke. 

The über fans cannot mention that Britney losing full custody of her kids at the beginning of the “documentary” was a MAJOR sign that Britney has severe problems. California is a state where shared custody is basically the default. (This is why Katie Holmes filed for custody of Suri in New York state, which favors single-parent custody, instead of California when she fled from Tom Cruise.) Did they mention simple details such as those to give a well-rounded picture? Nope. 

And the irony of having a geriatric psychiatrist on and not asking how a dementia diagnosis is established for a conservatorship?! Could have asked him to simply define the process and the cognitive tests used so their audience--and themselves could be aware. Nope! Didn’t go there. Wouldn’t go there. 

These people do not want to know, understand, or grasp the situation of Britney’s mental health and lack thereof. Amazing. All they want to do is sit in front of a camera and act shocked at the details they do not like. Dementia is a diagnosis that has multiple stages to it. They could have asked and explained that in the film, but that would take away from their disbelief that Britney is not well and that Jamie is to blame for all of Britney’s problems. It’s clearly as if they did not want to show what the MoCA exam is and have their audience realize that Britney may not score well on one.

They also could not mention simple details that The New York Times mentioned this past summer, such as the previous judge telling Britney that she would consider ending the conservatorship if Britney could stay clean for a year and maintain a consistent relationship with a therapist. 

The judge said that she would consider ending the conservatorship if Ms. Spears established a healthy relationship with a therapist and returned one year’s worth of clean drug tests. But the judge would not guarantee it.

Those gathered, including the judge and lawyers on both sides, raised the possibility that Ms. Spears’s boyfriend was provoking her discontent.

The über fans do not want to admit that Britney is not sober and probably has not been the majority of the time she’s been in the conservatorship. 

Instead, they need to scapegoat Jamie. Jamie, who did not live off of his daughter--unlike Lynne--and had his own career as a professional chef prior to having to become the conservator. Lynne, who was the stage mom from hell twenty years ago, gets a pass because she was always around Britney during the early days of Britney’s rise to fame. Lynne was Pimp Mama Kris before Pimp Mama Kris (Kardashian) became PMK!! Jamie, who earned $10k/week, as a professional chef (according to court documents filed in 2008) is to be vilified because he did not follow his daughter around all the time prior to the conservatorship. Somehow, people cannot string two thoughts together and realize that Jamie was not living off Britney prior to the conservatorship. They are unwilling to realize that one of the reasons why the court chose Jamie as the conservator was because he had an income independent of his daughter. The income h

Looks to me that Lynne--as the likely “anonymous” source--has done a good job getting her pr to consistently paint her as the saint, and Jamie as the sinner. Lynne does not want to be blamed for anything. Even after her daughter is already beginning to spiral downward. 

This “documentary” is so weak that the director of it exclaims “Patriarchy!” in an attempt to blame Jamie for Britney’s problems. Well, now that Jamie is removed and the conservatorship is going to be removed in about six weeks, who are these two über fans going to blame when Britney continues to spiral and dies? Next year. Seriously. Looks to me that it’ll be six to nine months of post-conservatorship life until Britney kicks it in a tragedy. 

Oh, I’m sure these two über fans will use their “access” to all the other documents they’ve obtained to put out another documentary on all the things they suddenly became “aware of” after Britney dies. These assholes...

#movies #celebrities #media

[tagdersmabi1972-blog]

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[buzzdixonwriter]

Mr. Marlowe, Mr. McGee; Mr. McGee, Mr. Marlowe

Some stories are timeless, and some stories stay firmly rooted in their era. 

It’s not an either / or proposition, where one is always preferable to the other.

Two of my favorite series of crime / detective novels are the Philip Marlowe books by Raymond Chandler and the Travis McGee books by John D. MacDonald.

They are, at first blush, somewhat similar.  Insofar as Chandler defined the modern private eye character (although he never laid claim to creating that archetype), MacDonald has to be acknowledged as following Chandler’s lead.

No matter, there’s plenty of room for both.

Virtually all private eye stories, particularly those narrated by the detective in question, filter their worldview through that character (and, obviously, through the author as well).

As much as I love both author’s series, the advantage seems to fall to Chandler.

The Big Sleep was Chandler’s first Marlowe novel in 1939; prototypes of the character had appeared in various short stories published prior to that but The Big Sleep was the first time the character appeared by that name.

Marlowe is a philosophical private eye, with a penchant for poetry and chess and a literary, almost lyrical look at the world around him.  Like most fictional PIs, he finds solace in alcohol, but not to the point of oblivion, only to ease the pain of being human.  To quote “The Simple Art Of Murder” (Chandler’s classic essay on detective fiction):

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid…a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man…a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it…the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

By comparison, Travis McGee inhabits a brighter, more spacious, more airy world, but not one that’s any less dangerous or debased.

Unlike Marlowe’s Los Angeles milieu, the McGee books typically start in bright, sunny Florida among tanned and trim beautiful people.

MacDonald, like Chandler, was another veteran of the pulp salt mines and though he’d already achieved success as a writer (Cape Fear among many, many other books), the McGee novels were pitched as paperback originals, intended to be churned out like clockwork, filling a particular publishing niche of that era.

As such, the series gets off to a flat, unimaginative, and for the genre, typically gimmicky start:  McGee is a “salvage specialist” who recovers stolen or embezzled money and property through extra-legal means, he lives on a houseboat called The Busted Flush (so named because he won it in a poker game), drives an electric blue Rolls-Royce converted into a pick-up truck named Miss Agnes, has a brilliant economist friend named Meyer who helps out, a colorful cast of background characters, and speaking of color, a linking theme in the titles of all the books (The Deep Blue Good-by, Nightmare in Pink, A Purple Place for Dying, etc.)

In short, pretty typical fodder for the male oriented paperback original action market.

And had the series continued in the vein of The Deep Blue Good-by, we wouldn’t be discussing them.

But MacDonald was too good a writer to just crank stuff out, and while the first McGee novel isn’t what the series would become, it gives MacDonald a voice that wasn’t in any of his other books, and by the second novel he had a firm grasp on what made a Travis McGee story.

Chandler took his time with the Marlowe books, supplementing his income by scripting for Hollywood (Chandler wrote the screenplay for James M. Cain’s book Double Indemnity, William Faulkner wrote the screenplay for Chandler’s The Big Sleep; all that’s missing is Cain adapting a Faulkner story to the screen…).�� He wrote seven novels over a period of 19 years, though his focus remained resolutely on character and literary style as opposed to plot (famously when Faulkner and co-screenwriter Leigh Brackett couldn’t figure out who killed a minor character in The Big Sleep they called Chandler and asked him; there was a long pause on Chandler’s end followed by “…damn…”).

MacDonald, conversely, wrote 21 McGee books in 20 years:  Four in 1964, two in 1965, two in 1966, skipping a year, then two in 1968 before settling down to a yearly pace through 1974, another break then the last five books over a six year period.  (Rumors of a final McGee novel, A Black Border For McGee, involving the character’s death and narrated by Meyer appear to be just the wishful thinking of fans.)

What’s shocking about the McGee books during their primo run is just how good they are.  MacDonald through McGee proved to be a sharp and perceptive observer of not just the larger world around him but of American culture in particular and even more tightly focused on Florida. 

Before Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaason began offering their unique take on the criminal eccentricities of Florida, MacDonald had thoroughly mapped the territory.  Others may have done it better, but he certainly did it first.

It shows in the McGee books, with MacDonald’s garrulous narrator making philosophical asides and observations on every topic imaginable.

McGee (i.e., MacDonald) was concerned with human impact on the environment long before most novelists began picking up on the topic (the exception being science fiction writers, who did see looming problems, but hey -- surprise! surprise! – before he settled into crime fiction as his oeuvre, MacDonald also wrote for the sci-fi pulps and penned two exceptional sci-fi novels, Ballroom Of The Skies and The Wine Of Dreamers).

MacDonald through McGee connected the dots between rapacious human greed and the rape of the environment and the society we live in.  While not all the books touched on ecological problems, they all acknowledged terrible and disastrous change was in the air, change brought about by greed and stupidity.

The two, as McGee / MacDonald frequently notes, go hand in hand.

These philosophical asides were what endeared Travis McGee to us when we discovered him as paperback originals in the 1960s and early 1970s.  The books offered more meat and substance than most books in that genre. 

MacDonald grasped how much his fans enjoyed McGee’s running commentary and began including more and more asides, running longer and longer.

They proved fascinating and entertaining and informative and none of us buying the books back in the day objected…

…but in the end they date the McGee books rather severely, and have probably prevented the character from finding success outside of publishing.

Marlowe, while waxing philosophical himself, knew a little bit goes a long way and held his ramblings in check.

And as a result, he edges ahead because his world, his Los Angeles, remains timeless.

This is not to say there aren’t elements that mark the Philip Marlowe books of a specific time and place, but those are details that can be easily discarded when adapting the stories to film or TV or radio or any other media you desire.

Case in point:  Robert Mitchum made his version of Farewell, My Lovely in 1975 as a period film set just before World War II, then followed it up three years later with The Big Sleep set in Los Angeles of 1978 and nobody saw anything odd about it.

The Marlowe stories transcend specific time even though they stay rooted firmly in Los Angeles and Southern California.  The same cast of con men, aspiring actors, phony psychics, melancholy millionaires, and desperate delirious dreamers have inhabited Los Angeles since before the turn of the century -- the 20th century.  You could set a Philip Marlowe story any time between 1920 and today and save for minor cosmetic details the key elements do not change.

But McGee…ah, McGee is a prisoner of his era.

Mind you, that’s a big hunk of his appeal.  What the Travis McGee books do is offer a running commentary on America-specifically-Florida-specifically-riproaring-capitalist-Florida from 1964 to 1984.

Unlike Marlowe who deals with eternals, McGee deals with the here and now.  His stories all reflect specific slices of time and do a damn fine job of it.

But you can’t take him out of his era.

Sherlock Holmes used to be locked in cobble-stone-hansom-cab-gaslit 1880s London until the recent Sherlock and Elementary series broke him free, but truth be told, that cobblestone imprisonment was a late invention of Hollywood.

Most Holmes stories take place after World War I and he rides in automobiles, flies in airplanes, talks over the telephone and radio, and does any number of technologically advanced things.

The earliest Holmes movies were always set in contemporary times, involving him in fights against Nazi spies in WWII.  It wasn’t until the 1950s that films and TV shows began pushing him back into the late Victorian era.

While some Marlowe films have put him in 1940s L.A., far more have set him in contemporary times.  Marlowe (1969) captures late 1960s L.A. perfectly (and features Bruce Lee as an office destroying thug, replacing the white guy who did the same deed in the source novel, The Little Sister); The Long Goodbye, my personal favorite of all the films based on Chandler’s novels, is resolutely set in 1970s Los Angeles (and features a young and uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of the bad guy’s heavies).

And if you think there wasn’t a world of difference between 1969 Los Angeles (pre-Manson) and 1973 Los Angeles (post-Manson), guess again.  The fact that books written literally 20 years earlier in both instances could be easily adapted into contemporary films marks Marlowe’s timeless nature.

McGee has not fared so well.

Mind you, I would recommend the McGee books to anyone who’s interested in how American culture progressed during the 1960s / 70s / 80s:  They give a lot of first hand in-the-now information.

But they remain trapped in their era/s. 

Case in point:  The plot of The Quick Red Fox centers on McGee trying to find who’s blackmailing a Hollywood movie star with incriminating photos.

The story hinges on the actress’ career being destroyed if the photos are made public.

That was a big deal in 1964, but in 2017?  The Internet has inured us to such things.

But by 1967, a scant three years after The Quick Red Fox’s publication, societal norms had already shifted to the point where such behavior and photos would no longer have a devastating impact on a person’s life, especially a show biz celebrity.

In contrast, the blackmail scheme in The Big Sleep does not target the mentally ill victim, but rather her father, a frail and dying elderly man wracked with shame and guilt over how he has failed his family.  The plot works regardless of when the story takes place because it doesn’t hinge on how society judges the victim’s sexual behavior but rather how one specific character does, and for reasons unique and particular to that character alone.

McGee (read MacDonald) typically was spot on with his observations, but they are too much a part of the character and the stories to enable them to escape their time.

You always find somebody like the characters in the Marlowe books in Los Angeles, but a lot of McGee’s characters have faded with history:

”Without my realizing it, it had happened so slowly, I had moved a generation away from the beach people. To them I had become a sun-brown rough-looking fellow of an indeterminate age who did not quite understand their dialect, did not share their habits -- either sexual or pharmacological -- who thought their music unmusical, their lyrics banal and repetitive, a square fellow who read books and wore yesterday's clothes. But the worst realization was that they bore me. The laughing, clean-limbed lovely young girls were as bright, functional, and vapid as cereal boxes. And their young men -- all hair and lethargy -- were so laid back as to have become immobile.” (The Lonely Silver Rain)

There have been two attempts to bring McGee to the screen, and while both are serviceable and entertaining as movies, both are failures as McGee films.  Darker Than Amber (1970) featured Rod Taylor as McGee and failed because it lacked McGee’s philosophical voice; Travis McGee (1983, based on The Empty Copper Sea) with Sam Elliot failed because it included that voice.

McGee’s narrative musings, while fascinating on the printed page, do not translate well in cinema.  There may be a way of striking a just-right balance, but the two efforts to date didn’t succeed.

In one way it’s a pity:  Sam Elliot would have made a perfect McGee…in 1973. 

If you want a perfect example of why the McGee books are virtually unfilmable, consider the greatest narrative hook ever written, the opening line to Darker Than Amber:  “We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.”

Boom!  You’re already in the middle of the story; the key has been turned, all eight cylinders are firing, the pedal is slammed all the way down.

And it’s McGee’s voice that informs us of this.

The movie shows the unfortunate young lady being tossed off the bridge, and what McGee and Meyer were doing to put them in a position to observe same, but showing this takes too damn long .

By the time she actually is thrown off the bridge, all the impact has been dissipated.

That was MacDonald’s genius…and his curse.

Chandler, showing much more restraint, gets more done even though he does it in (seemingly) a more conventional manner.  There have been awkward adaptations of Chandler’s books, but the fault lays in production decisions, not the actual underlying material.

The crucial difference is that Chandler did not let Marlowe age or otherwise pass through time.

The brilliance of MacDonald’s work is that it traces a long arc through the heart of the 20th century; the brilliance of Chandler’s is that he ignores what is going on around him to focus on foundational issues.

There is also this:  While Chandler faced emotional and physical problems that marred his latter years, he never voiced that pain through Marlowe --  at least not clearly enough to be picked up by his fans.

But following a heart attack in the late 1960s, MacDonald allowed McGee to become more fatalistic, more morbid, more morose, more aware of his own mortality.

His first post-heart attack book, A Tan And Sandy Silence, had fans actively worrying that he was set to kill McGee off; it is certainly as despondent a tale of failed knight errancy as one might hope to find.

The series briefly bounced back to form with The Scarlet Ruse and The Turquoise Lament (though they, too, offer their notes of grim finality; more so than one would expect in a series crime novel), then dipped irretrievably with The Dreadful Lemon Sky (the weakest of what I consider the “real” i.e., original run of McGee novels), followed by a four year gap and then the mediocrity of The Empty Copper Sea.  

I remember reading it when it came out and thinking -- hoping! -- that it was just a temporary setback, that MacDonald would get the McGee series back on its feet and running great guns again.

No.

The quality started faltering badly after that, and though fans tried to convince themselves through The Green Ripper and Free Fall In Crimson that these were still good stories, by  Cinnamon Skin and The Lonely Silver Rain there was no doubting the old magic was gone.

MacDonald died two years after The Lonely Silver Rain was published. 

A lot of us feel it would have been better if he had hung up McGee’s spurs with A Tan And Sandy Silence.

McGee drops back further and further in the rearview mirror; the day will eventually arrive when you will need to be a historian of some kind in order to fully appreciate MacDonald’s sharp writing and observations.

Marlowe will be with us always, even as technology and social changes alter the landscape.

I love Marlowe, I love McGee;  I love Chandler, I love MacDonald.

But only one of them is going to be read by my grandchildren.

. . .

The Philip Marlowe novels of Raymond Chandler

The Big Sleep (1939) Farewell, My Lovely (1940) The High Window (1942) The Lady in the Lake (1943) The Little Sister (1949) The Long Goodbye (1953) Playback (1958)

[Poodle Springs is based on four chapters written before Chandler died in 1959 and finished by Robert B. Parker in 1989; as they are not purely Chandler’s work I don’t consider it canon]

. . .

The Travis McGee books of John D. MacDonald

The Deep Blue Good-by (1964) Nightmare in Pink (1964) A Purple Place for Dying (1964) The Quick Red Fox (1964) A Deadly Shade of Gold (1965) Bright Orange for the Shroud (1965) Darker than Amber (1966) One Fearful Yellow Eye (1966) Pale Gray for Guilt (1968) The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper (1968) Dress Her in Indigo (1969) The Long Lavender Look (1970) A Tan and Sandy Silence (1971) The Scarlet Ruse (1972) The Turquoise Lament (1973) The Dreadful Lemon Sky (1974) The Empty Copper Sea (1978) The Green Ripper (1979) Free Fall in Crimson (1981) Cinnamon Skin (1982) The Lonely Silver Rain (1984) 

#writing #paperbacks #pulps #Raymond Chandler #Philip Marlowe #John D. MacDonald #Travis McGee #crime fiction #detective novels

[copperbadge]

Hi Sam! Random question I've always wondered about, which I think you might be eminently qualified to answer given what you've mentioned about your research at work: how accurate do you think the net worth estimates of particularly wealthy people are? For example, one site suggests that RDJ's net worth is $240 million. Based on what you've learned in your research of the super rich, is that likely to be way overstated, probably about right, or possibly even under-estimated?

Estimating net worths of people is literally what I do for a living so you are RIGHT TO ASK ME THIS, Anon. 

Here’s the short answer: It’s probably not that wrong. If you want to know why I say “not that wrong” instead of “correct”, read onwards! :D

The long answer is complicated. In part it depends on who’s doing the estimating; automated wealth estimations are available for pay through a number of sources (WealthEngine, for example) but are carried out by computer and have no sense of nuance, so they’re not very good. Forbes, on the other hand, has people with financial training doing the estimating, and they are aware of stuff like whether someone’s real estate is going to realistically reflect their wealth (Richard Branson: yes, because he owns an island. RDJ? Probably not, for reasons I’ll get into in a second) but Forbes also tends to base its current estimates on past estimates so you have to tread carefully. Journalism that falls somewhere in the middle -- it’s a person doing the estimating, but perhaps not a person with extensive financial research/document training -- are usually in the ballpark, but they try not to get too granular. Then again they may have expertise in entertainment earning, which in this case could be a help. 

But let’s talk about estimation itself. There are certain things we can never know for sure: bank balances, for example. Journalists who do this kind of work generally have to stick to public record, which can be informative, but is never the full picture. And a lot of people will discuss their net worth, but we have no way of knowing if they’re being truthful. Plus, for the work I do, our estimates are not precise: they fall under “bands” that encompass X value to Y value -- net worth of $1M to $4.9M, for example. And after $1B we basically give up because how much detail do you need once someone’s a billionaire?

So, estimation. There is a readmore below! Read more! 

Real estate is one source we always go to, because until you hit a certain wealth level, real estate is a pretty good metric of wealth -- the value of your home, whether you own multiple homes, how you purchased those homes, all of that is (relatively) public data. It can get tricky because a lot of people with high wealth will purchase property through a trust -- I’d have to check my database but I believe RDJ’s home is held in his and Susan Downey’s name, but we know he has a ranch somewhere and I think that’s held in a trust under some other name. Chris Evans, who apparently got really exceptional advice from someone, has property in LA but it’s held in trust and the address of the trust is his agent’s office, so he’s not findable in California by public record search. Or wasn’t when I looked him up for kicks a few years ago. 

Also, after a certain point real estate stops being useful, because most people don’t need to own more than five or six homes (we call these people Global City Residents because the homes tend to be scattered wherever they do business or play -- Aspen, New York, California, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo, usually one in Switzerland somewhere, sometimes Mumbai, etc.) If someone owns multiple homes worth multiple millions each...we can set a baseline for what they’re worth, which is all we really need. Setting a ceiling is harder. But when someone is THAT wealthy, generally there are other indicators, so real estate becomes one data point among many. RDJ is super wealthy, but he’s not at THAT level of wealth, and likely won’t ever be, because that’s the province of hedge fund managers and tech gurus. 

There’s also the question of liquidity and fluctuating asset values -- RDJ, I know just from random reading I’ve done, has formed his own production company with his wife, and they try to be the people who produce his movies so that the two of them aren’t separated for long periods of time (there is some speculation that this is why there’s been a kibosh on new Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes films but I don’t have enough inside Hollywood info to confirm that). But the upshot is that he probably has some of his net worth tied up in the production company which in turn means he is tying up some of his net worth investing in films, which is a super risky business. So do you count the potential net worth he has tied up in films? It’s not liquid, and it might vanish if a movie he produces flops. (I don’t know if The Judge was a flop. It was indy, so the numbers change.) But it might show a return if the movie is a success, and it will become liquid again if the movie breaks even. 

With someone like RDJ, who has made his payout from films relatively public, we can estimate some of his income, but again, his income is going to fluctuate from film to film. In his case that’s not a huge deal because he obviously has a minimum income he’s going to make per film, and that’s going to be public in the entertainment papers, but with someone like a just-starting-out Chris Evans of ten years ago, his income might be more heavily based on how the film did, and there’s no way to know that information because he’s not Chris Evans yet, he’s just the guy from What’s Your Number. Also even now he likes to do indy movies and produce his own films so he can do the kind of movie he likes, and those generally aren’t going to make a lot of money, and if they do we have no way of telling what he made.

ANWYAY 

It’s much easier to estimate the net worth of people who work in investment at the upper levels, or as c-suite (management) of public companies, because not only do you have real estate data (which is frequently what we use as a rough metric of net worth -- there are formulas involved) but you also have public statements (Annual Reports or annual Proxy statements) that tell you how much they earn and how much stock they hold, which is a great indicator of wealth, even if it’s not currently liquid. If someone has a zillion shares of Google stock, they are astronomically wealthy, and they can trade in that illiquid wealth for liquid wealth any time they please. And that’s usually public on some level, because they have to file that shit with the SEC. 

There’s obviously a lot of research involved. Oh, the SEC filings I read. 

So offhand I couldn’t say what RDJ is worth, since I would want to look at his property holdings and news reports of his income from his films. I’d want to see if he’s talked about putting money into any investment vehicles like a family office or a hedge fund. I’d want to see what his wife’s professional activity has been like in the past few years, since when they met she was already a wealthy film industry pro in her own right. They have a charitable foundation, so I’d want to see if it has filed any 990 forms yet (probably not, it’s too new). I’d be googling for the kefuffle in the news a few years ago where RDJ talked about what he made and how he was mad his costars weren’t making the same amount. I’d want to see how his last few films have done at the box office, particularly internationally, and do some research into whether he co-produced, and if not, what a standard lead star’s percentage of box office might be. 

Off the record, I’d say $240M probably hits the mark. He’s a big deal star and he can command big deal prices, Avengers has been astonishingly lucrative as a franchise, and he’s a savvy guy and I would imagine he’s got some good investments going. If I were researching him, $240M would be a good number, smack in the middle of one of our net-worth bands, and would mean we can confidently say “Well he can give X amount, and it’s highly unlikely he’s actually worth over $500M which would put him into Y amount territory.” 

Sooooo yeah. $240M is entirely possible for him, but I wouldn’t tell my boss he’s worth that much just based on the article. :D

#Anonymous

[psychicstudentcolorthings-blog]

Integrated Asset Management (IAM)

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[originaldetectivesheep]

Year in Review - Books I Read In 2016

In between writing three books this year, I read a hundred or so book-equivalents of other people's work.  About half of these were read while traveling; I read fast and spent a lot of this year on or waiting for airplanes.  Most of these are extremely old and not many of them were great, but casting a wide net can produce unexpected results; 2017 just from what I already have available is going to likely be dominated by more Gutenberg-grinding, but I'm also going to try to get farther outside the box and continue to work on picking up more diverse and widespread influences.

John Buchan - Witch Wood Buchan took a long leap away from his typical hard-bitten inter-war suspense plots for this historical romance set in 17th century Scotland, a time of witch hunts, plague, and disputes between hardcore Calvinists and even-crazier hardcore Calvinists that occasionally flared up into actual civil war.  The language is a little clunky, and there is a lot of impenetrable Scots dialect that isn't translated, but in terms of total quality it's not greatly different from his Hannay stuff.  If you like Buchan's pacing, but tend to lose patience with the public-school-Toryism of a lot of his lead characters, you might want to take a look at this one, which is far enough removed from modern politics that he's out of that mode.  He only did something like this the once, so it maybe wasn't a commercially-successful experiment, but it's an interesting one all the same.

Abraham Merritt - various short stories While cleaning up my pile of Gutenberg Australia texts, I read through a bunch of Merritt's stuff.  The quality was kind of intermittent, but what really struck me was how relatively non-racist it was, for a guy in this time period writing through a bunch of east-Asian subjects.  Edgar Wallace or Edgar Rice Burroughs would have been terrible on this stuff.  The best one of these stories is probably "The Fox Woman", with "The Women of the Wood" being pretty solid as well.  "The Drone" is a little disposable, "The People of the Pit" is a worse version of Lovecraft's "At The Mountains of Madness", and "Through the Dragon Glass" is trying too hard, dumping in a bucket of Orientalist cliches where a teaspoon would have been enough.

Ellis Parker Butler - Philo Gubb, collected More people should be more aware of the adventures of Philo Gubb, the determined-but-derpy detective and wallpaper-hanger from Riverside, Iowa.  A lot of people parody Sherlock Holmes, but what Parker Butler's parodying here is Holmes mania.  Step by step, Gubb actually does solve his mysteries like a less hilarious detective; he's just living in the universe of absurdity that comes with being a wallpaper installer with a correspondence-school detective certificate as a main character.  The twist endings are all pretty clever, and the dialect in dialogue doesn't obstruct the humor; of these, the "Greatest Case" is probably the best, for both its extremely well-crafted setup, and then the hilarious end where Gubb literally falls ass backward into the resolution of the case.

Joseph Conrad - A Set of Six This was the first larger thing that I completely finished reading in 2016; if I recall correctly, I started Witch Wood at the very end of '15.  There are some parts that felt like a re-read, but you read a lot of Conrad getting a reasonable education in the English-speaking world, so that might have been it; some of these are probably in Tales of Unrest, another collection I read back in '13.  This is one of his classic collections, and it definitely earns it: "Gaspar Ruiz" is not the strongest, and is overwrought in the way that people who don't like Conrad frequently criticize him for being, but "The Informer" and "An Anarchist" should be mandatory, and "The Duel" is good not just for the psychological characterizations, but in the way that he weaves in and presents the whole Napoleonic era.

L. Roy Terwilliger - Cuban Folk-Lore My dad sent me this ethnographic thing at the end of January for little immediately-discernable reason, and since it was short and I had some time burning backups, I read it down.  I got a couple ideas out of it, but it's wicked old (late 19th century, probably before the American conquest), as racist as anything from that time period and with the usual intermittent methodology and absent sourcing, and the actual content describing local practices is not enormously novel to someone who's even a little familiar with Afro-Catholic syncretic practices from the Caribbean.  It's short, though, so that's maybe something.

Joseph Conrad - Twixt Land and Sea I finished this faster than I thought I would, again at the laundromat, and can heartily recommend it.  "The Secret Sharer" is in here, for one, and that should be enough, but the final story, "The Lady of the Isles", is a damn masterpiece.  It's still, as noted above, a little wrought in places, but Conrad's language, man, his knack of locating exactly the perfect word in his fourth goddamn language to build exactly the right impression -- even if his psychology can get a little wrought, it's worth reading Conrad just to read him.  And -- and this sticks out especially in this last tale -- in Conrad as in very, very few of his contemporaries, stylistic or chronological, everybody in the story is always a fully-paid-up human being.  The men, of whatever nation, the women, the "natives" -- they all have their foibles and their failings, but they're all fully human and always worthy of the reader or the narrator's respect.  If Conrad in himself isn't enough to get you to read him, that bit ought to be: and the rewards will pay off, intensely.

Shelagh Delaney - A Taste of Honey I read this as a consequence of doing research for a Linksshifter story, and enjoyed it well enough, even though it really needs a director's hand to transform the lines and inconsistent, weirdly placed directions into an actual dramatic performance.  While the hellish conditions of pre-slum-clearance Salford are no longer current, I've seen enough historical stuff from the bad parts of Glasgow at the time the play was written to fill them in, and I seriously know like all of the main characters in this story.  Jimmie and Geoff are fairly stock and generic, but Helen, Jo, and Peter are real people I could easily cast just from the circles of people I know from the north of England and the Irish diaspora.  Maybe that gives it more kick than it might have for other people, but at least from my perspective this is more than just a kitchen-sink drama.

Piotyr Kropotkin - Mutual Aid This took up most of February and nearly all of March at the laundromat, but is well worth the long, long read.  Some of Kropotkin's zoology is a little shaky, and his ethnography and sociology are probably out of date, but this isn't a textbook, and wasn't even when it was written.  If you don't take it too literally, though, this is a treasure trove of practical, well-referenced information supporting the now well-populated fields of inquiry into cooperation and altruism in biological evolution and human society.  Not all of it is correct or complete, but the sheer volume of evidence crushes the life out of Spencerian/social-Darwinist arguments as not remotely correct or complete either.  That this is normal and familiar instead of revolutionary is just an indication of how much better we've gotten, in the last hundred or so years, at not being dicks to each other out of misunderstood interpretations of science.

Piotyr Kropotkin - The Conquest of Bread The style of this tract has oddly aged better than the content.  Kropotkin's rigorous anti-racism and anti-sexism put him streets ahead of nearly all his contemporaries, but his ideas about how agriculture works were at the trailing edge even at the time.  The heart of the agro-mech revolution then in process -- admittedly not in Russia, where he did most of his field observation -- was that people who were specialists in their fields could increase production by knowing the fields and machinery inside and out, and Kropotkin wants to change that out for mechanics and professors and ditch-diggers working rotating part-time shifts.  This is dumb, but the basic idea -- that work and production and opportunity should be spread as evenly as possible -- is still relevant.  The moment of anarchism has probably passed, but the post-scarcity, post-employment society is still coming, and if we don't put in some kind of implementation of Kropotkin's ideas, we're going to be looking up at this book instead of down.

Piotyr Kropotkin - The Place of Anarchism In Socialistic Evolution A speech or tract rather than a full book, this still was on my Kindle this year and still got read.  As always, Kropotkin glosses over how independent organization is supposed to guarantee fair distribution of stuff without turning into government or corporations, but the principles are sound and vital: that what we want to do is get away from a society where people devour each other and toward one based on being nice to other people via education and more cultural interconnections, to make sure that where there is no scarcity, no one is deprived, and to reduce crime and social problems by reducing inequality.  There is still no implementation in any of this, but when capitalists and governments alike are seriously mooting the idea of basic income as a real, humane replacement for employment in automated-out jobs and the current paternalistic, judgy, inadequate safety net, it's definitely time for another look at Kropotkin.

Laurence Donovan - Moon Riders Stepping around actually naming the Klan, this novella is the FBI versus the Klan in a little town in the mountain West circa 1920; taut and relentlessly violent, it was a nice palate cleanser after nearly two solid months of academic anarchism.  The characters are mostly cardboard, and the love interest is transparent, circumstantial, and virtually unnecessary, but this is pulp, and pulp gon pulp.  It's pretty good pulp for all that, though, and a quick read regardless.

Laurence Donovan - Pin Up Girl Murders This story is too busy for its wordcount: ramming a spy heist, a murder, another incidental killing, and two love-affair betrayals into barely enough pages for a novella makes everything far too complicated, and there is too much twee drawing-room-detective bullshit in it to fit either the space constraints on the narrative or Donovan's two-fisted, red-blooded style.  You can barely do a mystery where forensics are relevant in this little space, and dumping a bunch of wordcount on setting up the love triangles does not help.  This is disordered crap that keeps tripping over its own feet.

Minna Sundberg - Stand Still, Stay Silent Book 1 As awesome as SSSS is on the internet, it is even more beautiful on the printed page -- and in this form, the prologue especially hits like a ton of bricks.  This is barely the start of a story that continues to build and grow, but this tome doesn't need to wait for the rest of it to be complete.  Sundberg's infinite passion for scene painting rules all and pops from cover to cover; the story, good as it is, is almost incidental to the art.  SSSS isn't ideally perfect (that Washington Post award was a make-up call for passing on A Redtail's Dream, not for this still-unfinished work), and people coming into the story cold will probably notice a lot of stuff in the prologue that can be read much more darkly about author intent than is likely to be the case, but if you can get past that, there's a lot of reward waiting here.

Laurence Donovan - Whispering Death I have some longer-form Donovan that is not loaded up yet, and after this one, I really want to get to it and see what he can do when he doesn't have to go backwards.  The constraint of pulp writing means that you have to start with a hook or sting -- like here, a shot-up patrol face-down in no-man's-land with German bullets whistling over their heads -- but in the middle of that action Donovan has to back up via flashback to do his love interest, and this really breaks up the flow of the narration.  This one's good enough, but if there was more forward or just less backward, it would turn out better.

Marie Corelli - A Romance of Two Worlds I'd loaded Corelli's works onto my device for the Russia trip three years ago, but only gotten to the first of them, this one, just now.  It's very easy to write off her style and subjects as overblown and tired theosophic crap -- the mystic, gnostic "Electric Christianity" in this one could have been written as a satire of the new religious movements between 1848 and 1914 -- but there's good stuff in here as well.  Corelli wasn't writing a lesbian relationship between Zara and the narrator, but I defy modern audiences to read it as anything but; as a male writer, reading women writing women in love with women gives me a perspective that's distinctly outside my experience -- one reason among many that I need to read more women more often.  I read enough crap male writers: not reading women writers because they happen to be mawkish theosophical women writers isn't going to wash.  That said, this book is about three books glued together badly, and full of poorly-reasoned gnostic garbage and bad science.  If you have better woman writers at your disposal, read their stuff first.

Perley Poore Sheehan - Captain Trouble A marginally bearable hodgepodge of orientalist crap written at about a fourth-grade level that will frequently sound hilarious to the modern ear (if you know, like, anything about China and/or central Asia at all), the Captain Trouble stories are not quite at the Dan-Brown "The famous man looked at the red cup" level of shittiness, but an author who can put up "The Chuds ate human flesh. The Chuds lived in caves. The Chuds were a cross of bears and bats." as consecutive sentences is getting pretty damn close.  You will get a brain cramp if you read too much of this; as far as I can tell, the correct order (I got these from Gutenberg and had to re-collect them) should be something like: The Fighting Fool Where Terror Lurked The Red Road to Shamballah The Green Shiver Spider Tong The Black Abbot The Chinese in use throughout these stories is somewhere between "archaic", "geographically inappropriate", "mistranslated", and "plain wrong", but occasionally you can see what Sheehan was going for and how he got it right, or almost did in his poorly-preserved pinyin.  The racism is mostly of the "funny foreigners" type rather than the kick-em-while-they're-down shit; these features combine for a story cycle that is today still antiquated and problematic, but was a goddamned model of progress and equality in its time and pulp context.

Perley Poore Sheehan - Monsieur de Guise A bare sketch of fantasy, this space-filling creeper is probably not worth your attention.  Sheehan is not great at description generally, and his American swamp feels less real than his Chinese deserts.  This does not have a lot going for it other than being short and probably can be safely skipped.

Perley Poore Sheehan - Kwa and the Ape People On the surface, this is yet another wannabe Tarzan, thoroughly possessed of the racist conceit that white people are so super-awesome that, if brought up in "savage" circumstances, they will necessarily become super god-heroes in that world.  And yet, this is infinitely better than Tarzan on the axes of taking Africans seriously as human beings, and of not treating African animals as monsters or an inexhaustible font of murder victims.  The fight with Sobek that opens the book is a great piece of naturalistic writing, from observation and from the literature on crocodilians, and later parts that are more spoilery to discuss here show that Sheehan was willing to put in the work on at least some bits of African folklore and language rather than just making shit up.  Burroughs got in first and poisoned the well, but of the lesser Tarzans, Kwa is the best I've encountered so far.

Perley Poore Sheehan - Kwa and the Beast Men Well, that didn't last too long.  This shorter Kwa adventure is purer Tarzan-ripoff shit, probably from commercial considerations; pulp audiences didn't want to read about real animals or real anthropology, they wanted to see White Dudes kicking the shit out of Darkest Africa.  Sheehan's patent inability to describe things leaves you with zero picture of the Beast Men from the title, despite the huge role they play in the narrative; the lack of any kind of structure in the animal-telepathy bits is similarly unhelpful.  Ignore this garbage, re-read ...Ape People.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - Parasite Planet I was initially pretty hot about some bad mistakes in the science up front (Venus is not tidally locked to the Sun), but got over it (this wasn't discovered until radar astronomy came in in the '60s) and eventually warmed up to this formulaic but well-done adventure of life on the rocket frontier.  The world-building is good and seldom overruns the narrative, and while the gender roles are pretty '40s, at least it's not '20s.  If I can keep getting relatively solid science and relatively good writing, it's going to be a good thing I've got more Weinbaum on the stack.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - Proteus Island Back on earth, Weinbaum can't avoid the taint of the racism of his day, which may make the start and the abuse of the Maori guides a little hard to take.  However, if you fight through it, you get a really neat story about biological variation with some, as usual, nearly correct science at the foot of the science fiction.  I'm not a fan of the "explain everything in the epilogue" school, but it does tie up a lot of the mystery here; if more of this could have been done in-narration and a harder climax hit, this story would probably work better.  Maybe back in the day people put up with more falling action generally, dunno.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - Pygmalion's Spectacles A really neat story, this one takes advantage of multiple psychological elements -- set up, significantly, by reading a lot of contemporary SF and fantasy (in particular H.G. Wells) -- to become significantly better than it appears to be by a very cool twist ending.  If you need an in to Weinbaum, this isn't a bad place at all to start.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - Redemption Cairn If you know LITERALLY ANYTHING AT ALL about how narrative works, you will figure out the important part of this rocket noir's ending pretty much as soon as it's introduced.  That said, it's a fun read after you accept the relentless sexism as just going with the territory, and Weinbaum's trademark Almost Correct Science is well-built-out here to furnish an alien world and a moderately hard vision of rocket mechanics.  It could be more progressive, sure, but this is of an age with Radar Men From The Moon, where women went to space literally because the men needed someone to cook for them.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - Shifting Seas If a lot of Weinbaum has aged poorly -- overtaken by more modern science and more modern ideas about people who aren't white males being fully qualified humans -- this has if anything improved.  The ending gets a little into Wellsian utopianism, but the immediacy of the climate-change and geoengineering plot could have been ripped from tomorrow's headlines.  More of the science is right here than in many other parts, and the telling of the tale doesn't lack either.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Adaptive Ultimate I am the wrong person to unpack Weinbaum's rather deep weirdness about women; if this sort of thinking was general back in the day, it is no wonder that a herd of neuroses flourished and psychotherapy became popular.  This tale is less sexist than most of his other ones, the science approximately correct, and in its own way it's probably the most self-sufficient of these... ...but, owing to that weirdness, should not be the only Weinbaum story you read.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Brink of Infinity Send this one to your high school math students.  This is less a story than a logical exercise, a parable like Einstein's teachers used to explain algebra.  I've written stories like this one to test job applicants on their background in algorithms; this one provides the answers to that test, and is a pretty neat study in mathematical thinking by exclusions.  The terminology may be a little out of date, but the fundamentals are all right, and they make the story pop the way it's supposed to.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Circle of Zero In the modern day, this story would be spun up from many-worlds quantum and make dumb references to Roko's Basilisk.  This is marginally more right than the interpretation of the laws of probability used to set the stage here, but that's not the point.  The trick works as well in either context, and Weinbaum's hand for the eerie in the narrator's visions doesn't fail.  Another good one.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Ideal Weinbaum has some good characters in this one, but the early-20th-century sexual weirdness has the narrative tripping all over itself from a modern perspective, twisting and mutilating into desperately strange corners.  There's some good stuff in here, but a lot of Weinbaum's work is a lot better than this.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Lotus Eaters If you can make it through the negging field in here (seriously, did people use to act like this on purpose?), you will find probably Weinbaum's best work.  The exobiology is, in light of modern cladistic ideas, pretty dumb and wrong-headed, but the plot and the particulars are rock-solid and relentlessly imaginative.  Read this after Parasite Planet for narrative reasons; it's a rare example where the sequel's better than the original.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Mad Moon Weinbaum's world-building, good elsewhere, is absolutely excellent here, a jewel of alien environments and future society that would be worth reading even if he hadn't managed to dial the usual sexism down to levels approaching those of modern content.  The story in amid the setting is good too, and if you're paying careful attention, you can see the elements and corners of other parts of Weinbaum's ouevre; he'd obviously plotted out his solar system of tomorrow outside the printed pages, keeping everything consistent to make sure things linked up right, and that all of these stories had a common base to build from.  The craft is awe-inspiring; the art built on it covers joy.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Point of View Another van Manderpootz comic adventure, this one works better than "The Ideal", and clarified the points in that one that seemed missing; there's a predecessor to both of these stories, hopefully in the queue somewhere, and both Dixon and the Professor gain by being repeating characters reacting to different situations.  This one is good enough to justify reading the rest of them in order -- and in that progression, perhaps, we may find Weinbaum working his way out to less mental attitudes about women in full.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Worlds of If That first van Manderpootz adventure?  Well, here it is, and a much better start it makes than "The Ideal".  Maybe some of this is coming back with the formula in mind, and it's not as good as this series got as late as "The Point of View", but the quantum is nearly correct, the sexual politics not unduly problematic, and the writing just as comic as Weinbaum can be at his best.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - Tidal Moon Not quite as good as "Redemption Cairn" if its sexual politics are slightly less bad and its main trick slightly less stonneringly obvious, this one is good mostly for the world-building.  Even Weinbaum can't be super-good all the time, and this one is a slack one; there's probably a better story about his Ganymede out there, to be written if nothing else, but this story doesn't really get close to that ideal.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - A Martian Odyssey The French and German/Yiddish dialect is a little unnecessary here, and the plot could use some more development.  Weinbaum's powers of description hold up this point-to-point adventure across Mars, with some nifty thoughts about cognition and intelligence along the way, but there's better stuff of his out there.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - Valley of Dreams This is really the second half of "A Martian Odyssey", and there's so much left unfinished and unanswered that I desperately wish there was more of this out there.  There's more plot to this one, and a lot more meaningful exobiology and exosociology than in the first part, but also with shadows of "At The Mountains of Madness" that are begging for a third part and further exploration.  Alas, it's not on the pile, if it even exists.

Stanley G. Weinbaum - Dawn of Flame Longer than most of the novelettes I ground through prior to finishing up my Weinbaum course, this one is a post-apocalyptic fiction probably inspired by the 1919 flu pandemic.  It's better than Burroughs' America-re-emerged-from-the-primitive stuff, and much better on gender politics than nearly anything else that came out of his pen, which helps make up for the clunky flow, footnotes, and occasional leaps in logic.  Weinbaum's usually better in more hopeful futures, but this one is a good read all the same.

Marie Corelli - Ardath If you wanted a sword-and-sandal novel glued into the middle of another theosophic Christian treatise, this is the book to pick up.  Corelli's range is tweezers-wide, but bearing that in mind, she manages to pass out thoroughgoing kicks, by turns, to atheism, democracy, literary criticism, science, and people who don't like improvisational music; this gets a bit on-orbit at times, and a lot of it is not real good, but the feeling and tone can't help but get through.  Corelli's arguments are not good -- you don't need religion or gods in order to derive the axiom "be nice to people, because you wouldn't want someone being a jerk to you", and on this principle rests, um, all of civilization -- and she is rather too fond of exclamation points, but you need to read some of this style for exposure, if only to see the arguments in advance.

Marie Corelli - The Secret Power Corelli proves as vulnerable to the effects of the Great War as anyone.  In its day, this was nearly up to the standard of a 'liberated' novel, and her religious collapse back into 'gut' Catholicism is a sure reaction against the mad spiral of spiritualism and theosophy into madness and black magic during and after the war had proved them utterly bankrupt.  This is the first Corelli book I can actually recommend to other people without reservation.

Marie Corelli - The Soul of Lilith There are some good parts in this three-master, but a lot of bad ones, including a TRANSPARENT author self-insert crushing the plot so badly in the last two parts that a "Mary Sue" might and should well have been called a "Irene Vassilius".  If you've gotten stuck reading a bunch of Corelli for some dreadfully-stupid reason, this will provide a good release laughing at her self-insert, but otherwise, let this one drop.

Marie Corelli - Zizka This is self-contained, not focused on screaming at literary critics, subdued in its Christianity -- is this actually a Corelli?  Well, it's got a wack sword-and-sandal drop-in, barely-veiled closeted-lesbian disparaging of marriage (admittedly, in this time period you didn't have to be queer to get totally messed up by marriage practices as a woman) and persistent if not overdone theosophical Christianity, so yup, yes.  This is about as good as Corelli gets, so totally check this one out ahead of most of the others.

Marjorie Bowen - Black Magic This opens up as a fairly conventional yaoi-esque tale of gay monks worshipping the devil, but then snowballs through the maze of high Middle Ages imperial politics and drops an atom bomb of a twist in the third act that is probably harder to guess coming in the modern day.  In preference to Corelli among Gutenberg women writers, definitely read Bowen, and definitely read this one.

Marjorie Bowen - The Crown Derby Plate A short piece, this is a nice, original ghost story that does a good job tipping its hand and putting up reasons for the protagonist not catching on.  A quick story, but definitely good.

Marjorie Bowen - The Folding Doors I kind of overdosed on Revolutionary France last year reading all of Orczy's Pimpernell between various travels and laundromat visits, so this suspense tale of an attempted royal rescue and how it didn't happen kind of left me cold.  The structure is good and the twist hits nice and hard, but you read too many of these and they start to blur together.

Mary Shelley - Falkner Continuing with the "read good women Gutenbergers rather than bad ones", I picked up this classical three-volume romance and ground on through the telegraphed plot, predictable twists, and needlessly florid language to pick up the good points; this is through and through Romanticism in its style and sentiments, and you could almost use it as a template for writing a three-master romance.  It's not awesome, but it's still pretty decent and your eyes don't glaze over too often in the reading process.

Mary Shelley - Lonore This three-volume potboiler can't make up its mind as to how it's going to shake itself out, and basically just keeps rattling and creaking on until it stops.  There are good ideas, but too few of them connect to each other to be really worth reading.  Shelley did better than this, and you should put your emphasis on those.

Mary Shelley - On Ghosts Two ghost stories worked into an essay, this is essential Shelley, and also bails out before her language overruns the narrative.  The "king of the cats" bit is particularly critical, and is probably the seed of hundreds of stories before and since -- I'm probably going to end up taking a stab at it sooner or later as well.

Mary Shelley - The Dream This is a poorly executed bit on a good seed -- the legend of the Bed of St. Catherine -- that shows that even the best writers sometimes screw up a sure thing.  It's pretty short, but this doesn't make it any clearer or better.

Mary Shelley - The Evil Eye Kind of a cash-in on the Greek conflict of the time, this is a decent story of banditry, but for the modern reader, it's probably encumbered with too many names and relationships of sub-Albanian and sub-Macedonian ethnic groups that for better or worse have been extirpated or absorbed by other identities in the present.  Again, it's short, but that in itself isn't a virtue.

Mary Shelley - The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck This three-master is Romanticism down to its bones, but this rather more obstructs than enlightens the tale of the last of the Yorkist Pretenders; in a modern context, this story is called Game of Thrones.  The language, artifice, and emotions are class; the storytelling muddled, the sense of where this whole novel is going beyond Shakespeare and the chroniclers he borrowed from lacking.  Shelley has better stuff out and this can probably be avoided.

Mary Shelley - The Heir of Mondolfo In this one, Shelley keeps herself at novella length, and her beautiful pastorals, strange lands, and wild passions are the better for the relative restraint of language.  The story flows and moves with ease, and doesn't trip over itself or tie itself up in knots; one could only wish that more of her novels were this good.

Mary Shelley - The Invisible Girl This one doubles back on itself, a frequent problem in Shelley's work, but due to the fairly short length, this is more easily managed.  The heart of the story is really good, the scene dressing around it a little less so, but the ultimate effect is still enjoyable.

Mary Shelley - The Last Man This is an interesting book if not a great one.  Broken into two halves, it's a well-done if not super-imaginative vision of England at the end of the 21st century as barely different from the start of the 19th.  Shelley was not really a science-fiction writer, let alone one for far-future stuff like Wells or Weinbaum, but her talent in siting what appears to be her circle of Romantic writers as the lead cast in the first part (look carefully, it's hard to see otherwise), and then working through the macabre Grand Tour of the second half is impeccable.  As someone who likes untying these kinds of referential puzzles, I liked it, but other people may well want more science fact in their science fiction.

Mary Shelley - The Mortal Immortal This one is a little closer to Frankenstein (which for some reason isn't in the pile, what the hell) as a mystic science fantasy; the novella length keeps Shelley dialed back to brass tacks, and the result is a good explication of the usual look at the downsides of eternal youth.  It's not a barn-burner in its own right, but it's Gutenfreed now, so who cares?  Definitely worth the time.

Mary Shelley - Valperga Once you get past the hilariously-named Euthanasia (there was a Perdita in The Last Man, so this sort of on-the-nose naming is nothing new), this is a much better novel of intrigue and medieval conflict than, say, ...Perkin Warbeck, and Euthanasia herself is an impressively strong and complex character who should be much better known to literature fans.  The conclusion of the book is unsatisfying and poorly done, though, ditching in the name of historical accuracy all the good work that Shelley'd put in on the plot, the actions and personalities of the two women orbiting Castruccio, and how this stuff should impact the conclusion to work as literature.  It's flawed at the most important part, sure, but most of the time you're reading this, it's excellent.

Max Brand - The Ghost As a short foretaste of Brand's stuff, this is more humorous than his regular run, but it's still a solid, realistic, and decently gritty Western alienated from any real setting and plopped into Brand's slice of backcountry where it's always about 1880 and the law is always on the take or far, far away.  You should be able to spot the turn in advance, but it's still a good read.

Max Brand - The Night Horseman These are in sequence as I read them, and they preserve the fact that I read this one before The Untamed when it's technically a sequel.  In the modern age, this is probably wrong.  Reading that one first makes it read like a tall tale that gets an unnecessary second act here; this first throws the reader into a properly-alienating (the lead-in character's an Eastern tenderfoot) atmosphere of fear and mystery that really helps sell Whistlin' Dan as a character, and then you read The Untamed as a prequel and get his backstory as layers peeled off the onion.  As written, these are pretty much just oat operas; 'backwards', they turn into a powerful meditation on the nature of humanity and wildness set against the harsh and inhuman landscape of the high desert.  Definitely read both, but read this first.

Max Brand - The Untamed As above; this was a good book, but it benefits by getting read out of order after its sequel, or it's barely more than a tall tale about a fey ninja-cowboy.  Brand is good here, but he gets better.

R A J Walling - The Corpse in the Crimson Slippers I was kind of on the edge of passing out from exhaustion when I started this country-house murder case, so I'm not sure how well it was read out in advance, but Walling is no Christie.  This is decent enough as a point-to-point detective story, but if you're looking for a case where the clues are in place and you have the chance to solve it before the detective does, that's not what you're going to get here.

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Bully of Brocas Court Cleaning up some of the authors who I'd mostly read out, I came across this little horror piece from the author of Sherlock Holmes.  It's not quite the best -- the setup is pretty obvious, and some of the turn could be better handled -- but it's good enough for a short read, and gives a good proper chill.

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Great Brown-Pericord Motor Doyle puts his hand to science fiction in this one, and while it's still more in the line with his true-crime writing, which he was also majorly into at the time, it's still pretty decent.  As you might expect from a man who later came to believe in fairies as an absolute fact, the machine is barely described, but it's barely more than a Macguffin anyways, so this doesn't hurt the tale as much as it might for like HG Wells or someone.

Arthur Conan Doyle - Playing With Fire Doyle is on surer ground with this one; his narration of a spiritualist seance is obviously drawn from life, down to the medium tricks -- well, until the monster that was signaled from the start pops out.  This is better horror than "The Bully of Brocas Court", drawn so faithfully from life, and with the conviction of a true believer.

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Brown Hand There's room in this neat but pedestrian ghost story for readings as both brain-bendingly racist and a subtle but sharp critique of racism and colonialism.  It's probably both, but the story itself is decent enough -- if kind of predictable -- that people should read it themselves to come to a decision rather than looking for one here.

R A J Walling - The Man With The Squeaky Voice With a second one down, I can be unequivocal: Walling is rubbish, and you should not read his stuff.  There are parts like this with decent description to them, but as in ...Crimson Slippers, too much of the plot action happens off-screen and gets reported by side characters in a way that's out of left field based on what's happened so far.  Walling would have had a good career doing adaptations of movie scripts for print, as he's a good technician, but asking him to come up with his own interesting and logically coherent plots is a bridge too far.

Arthur Conan Doyle - True Crime From The Strand This covers the following three stories: The Debatable Case of Mrs. Emsley The Holocaust of Manor Place The Love Affair of George Vincent Parker Given that these are all mostly-true stories, the main interest is not in the details of the cases, but how Conan Doyle writes about them, and what that says about him and his readers.  Most of this can be covered with "embarrassing attitudes about women, who are not expected to know anything", but there are some other bits of Victorian social mores that come through as well.  These aren't really any more potboilery than the Holmes stories, but they're not as good either, and can probably be ignored.

Rafael Sabatini - Bardelys the Magnificent I haven't gotten to Sabatini's Captain Blood stuff yet, but this one is a pure and vital swashbuckler, the kind of book you'd hand someone to demonstrate what this genre is.  But it's more than that, too: as Edgars Wallace and Rice Burroughs have demonstrated in the past, Sabatini doesn't need to treat women like human beings, but he does, and he doesn't need to have his hero also go through a crisis of personal development to sell a novel about romance and swordfighting, but he does that too.  This is a good book, and I'm hoping for more good stuff in my large pile of Sabatini in the reader for laundromat and travel purposes.

Heinrich Boell - Billiard um halb elf I read this in German -- hence the non-translated title -- over a period of about eight months.  This is a physical book, and thus more difficult to read during my typical slots, but it was awesome and worthwhile; Boell's characters and style are strong enough that I was always able to keep it in memory, even when I was picking it up weeks or months after the last stretch I had to really sit down and just read.  I don't generally read a lot of literary fiction, so this is probably going to stay the best book I read in 2016 -- and may even stay in that slot if I get to Maurice Stendahl hanging around airport waiting rooms in the Pacific at the end of the year.

Rafael Sabatini - Captain Blood I haven't read enough Sabatini yet (this will change by the end of the year) to be categorical about this being a best entry point, but it's definitely the first appearance of his most famous character, and a rollicking swashbuckler from first to last.  Sabatini of course romanticizes the Golden Age of piracy a little, but keeps strong to the real as well, and it's that reality, the brutality of the slave system, the reality of blood and wounds and broken ships, casual inhumanity and subpar prizes, that gives this one its kick.  We'll see if the rest of the Captain Blood series is equally good, but the first one is definite quality.

Rafael Sabatini - The Chronicles of Captain Blood The first appearance of the character was a full-length, fully-realized novel that went beyond just the swashbuckling, but when Sabatini and his editors realized that they had a franchise on their hands, a collection of episodic short stories like this one was a natural move.  With looser connections to each other, the chapters in this one are hung off the cornices of the original book, some characters and subplots returning, with others still unresolved.  This is less of a literary achievement than the first book, but still a fun read.

C.L.R. James - Beyond A Boundary I read a lot, as the list above indicates.  But for all the stuff I read, I don't read enough right, partly because there isn't a whole lot of right out there.  But C.L.R. James, that is right enough, all the way around.  This is the first thing I really read from James, and his masterwork by all accounts, but it will almost certainly not be the last.  At times I had trouble following the cricket vocabulary, but the narrative flow always carried me on and wound me up at the end; this is not a book about cricket, but a book about how cricket reflects the dispersion and history of Englandism, a unifying idea for the shards of Empire almost in spite of themselves.  Even if it was only a cricket book, though, it would still be probably the best book I've read yet all year; there is James writing on W.G. Grace, and then there is pretty much everyone else writing about pretty much anything.  Deep springs don't come much deeper.

Jean Jaurès - Studies in Socialism I had to read this as part of the setting production on Three Pretenders In Ruritania, and I picked a good fin de siecle socialist for the character in question to take as her leading light.  Jaures is smarter than a lot of his contemporaries about what's practical and useful, clear-eyed about history, and always puts reason over dogma and experience over theory.  The result is a socialist tract that's committed to the real world, and how that program can be actually achieved; unlike Kropotkin way up top there, it's clear that Jaures actually knows and has interacted with real working people and has an understanding of how a modern industrial economy works, and the struggles that will need to be done to transition it out of a capitalist model to something else.  I hew more closely to the non-idealist/technocratic line of his engineer friend in the closing essay, but I can appreciate Jaures' ideals as well, along with a first-class intellect that doesn't ever seem to get stuck in translation.

Lesley M. M. Blume - Let's Bring Back I read this as more research for Three Pretenders In Ruritania, and while it's useful in that role, that's about as far as I can recommend it.  A condensation of Blume's blog column of the same name, there's a lot of useful stuff in here, mainly focusing on polite society in the English-speaking world between the US Civil War and the start of the Second World War, but the alphabetical organization, rather than by time period or subject matter domain, makes it difficult to use as anything except a blaze-through trawling for things that you wouldn't spot otherwise.  It's also significantly weighted towards Blume's own style icons, making it less of a comprehensive survey than it might be, but on the positive side it's a quick read, it covers a hell of a lot of stuff across multiple areas of everyday life, and she's got a good knack for getting straight to the point and getting good observations out of her guest contributors.

Carl E. Schorske - Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture I blasted through this somewhat disconnected set of long essays -- that's what it is, much more than a book -- again doing research for Three Pretenders In Ruritania, but unlike most of the stuff I used for research, I did actually read it all the way through (I need to go back and give the same treatment to Robert Beachy's Gay Berlin and Greg King/Sue Woolmans' Assassination of the Archduke once the dust settles a little).  Schorske is perceptive and informative, and at least tries to tie everything together, but you're looking at a book that covers both the redevelopment of the Ring and the emergence of Freudianism in addition to a shit-ton of other stuff, and there's only so much cohesion that you're going to get out of this.  It's a little dry in places (so much passive voice in transcription) and a knowledge of both German and French will make the reading faster, but this is still a pretty cool look at a culture that most English-speaking people have about zero contact with.

Eduardo Galeano - Soccer in Sun and Shadow (translated from Futbol en Sol y Sombre) I'd read this before in a smaller edition, but did not have a copy of my own until I decided to throw it in the basket with James' Beyond A Boundary above; it makes a nice companion piece, with Galeano demonstrating fitba's mirroring of the rest of the world through poetry while James works through cricket as an analogy of Britishness by oratory.  The end trails off a little -- the edition I have is an extended one that runs on from 1995 with a lot less focus than Galeano puts onto the game's first hundredish years -- but there is so much in this that is good and cool that you can forgive it.  It's undoubtedly better in the original, but my Spanish isn't good enough for that yet; one for the future I guess.

Anthony Hope - The Prisoner of Zenda I had not actually read this -- or seen any of the film adaptations -- before I had to do so in order to avoid copying it in Three Pretenders In Ruritania -- I'd been introduced to the genre by a second-rate ripoff of it called By Right Of Sword and had my defaults formed mostly by Burroughs' The Mad King and some stuff of E. Phillips Oppenheim -- and was glad to note that I wouldn't have to fix the outline or characters to dodge around it.  This is an ok swashbuckler, but its Victorian narrative sense ties itself in knots at seriously, the most critical junctures possible, and as usual, the villain and the hero's retainers are the most interesting characters.  What was even more weird to me was how small it was -- I read it through in about half an hour, and there's roughly half as much action in this in terms of story beats as there is in something that I'm planning to write in under a month.  With another 120 years of development in literature, I ought to be able to do better than this -- whether I actually can or not is going to be down to my abilities or lack thereof.

Rafael Sabatini - The Fortunes of Captain Blood Unsurprisingly, the Captain Blood franchise got a third season with this volume, continuing much in the same vein as the second volume in the series; briefer, barely-connected episodes hung off the corners of the original novel.  Despite the way that the production on this must have been formalized by this time, Sabatini still mostly keeps it fresh, and doesn't repeat himself or get too crank-turny.  It's still not as good as the original, but also still a fun read all the same.

Rafael Sabatini - Casanova's Alibi and Others A collection of Sabatini's Casanova stories, this one swaggers through the legendary adventurer's career with a bunch of generally cool stories of varying quality.  Some, like the last, are stellar examples of Sabatini's hand with a tail-twist; others are too reliant on too-stretchy MacGuffins to really hang with his best work.  In total, this is good stuff, but it is less good than Captain Blood and should not take precedence over it.

Rafael Sabatini - Collected Stories This is a pretty uneven volume that trails off at the end; it's cool to see Sabatini exploring different genres as he gradually finds his ouevre, but there are two versions of the same story -- "The Sword of Islam" and "In Destiny's Grip" -- one after the other, and the collection concludes with a Captain Blood episode that of course got into the second volume of that character's adventures.  If you read a lot of Sabatini, like I've been doing for the last few months, it's ok to stop this one early.

Rafael Sabatini - Columbus Sabatini's research skills are good enough that he has to keep this to the immediate vicinity of Cristobal Colon's voyage rather than making it a 'life'; there are hints of the congenital pride, vanity, and dickholishness that would characterize Columbus' brutal career as the actual viceroy of New Spain, but for the most part, the events of him selling his dream, and the web spun around it by love, enemy agents, and court intrigue allows the title character to be mostly a hero -- a flawed and kind of grasping one to be sure, but he did take an enormous risk on incorrect information and nearly lost everything several times over.  This is a good story even where it's incomplete history, and there's enough *good* history in the scene dressing -- Sabatini is as usual awesome in the interplay of political strands in the blending of religious cultures in Spanish/Mediterranean society -- to overwhelm any objections.  As an exposition of the context of Columbus' pitch-making, this is better than a lot of history, and it's still a really good novel besides.

Rafael Sabatini - Dagger and Sword A quick short story among a range of three-masters, this one gets in, gets its work done -- and well -- and gets out.  There's not a whole lot of inside fencing baseball in it, but enough to satisfy heads while still keeping clicking for normal audiences.  Try to get this in a collection though.

Rafael Sabatini - Fortune's Fool This romance of the London Plague takes a good while to get moving, and some of the foreshadowing is plain clumsy, but it is still good, well-executed, and effective in the swashbuckly scenes where Sabatini always shines, and with his resolute and disciplined eye for historical detail.  In comparison to some of his other works this one is almost straightforward, so try not to get too fed up with the occasional running in place.

Rafael Sabatini - In the Shadow of the Guillotine A sharply acted and smartly restricted novella, this is Sabatini at his best, taut with inter-character tension and shifting loyalties and motivations -- and with a notable sting in the tail.  It's not long, but this is one of his better set pieces.

Rafael Sabatini - Love-at-Arms Some idiot publisher titled this, no doubt; this is a neat look into Italy's sengokujidai that creaks only a little in setting up its main conflict, where the best of the condetorri defends an impregnable castle against a besieging army with twenty men and empty cannons.  The romance is well-developed and believably sprouted, and if the build to the climax is a little over-rotated, the actual climax is excellent and Peppe is one of the best of Sabatini's side characters outside the Captain Blood series.  This novel may not quite stand with those paragons, but it's close.

Rafael Sabatini - Mistress Wilding This over-plotted chronicle of the Monmouth Rising distinguishes itself by the increasingly contrived and unproductive circles it runs around in from first to last.  This is historically accurate, but its main character takes a while becoming sympathetic enough to justify the investment in his adventures, and there are almost too many things going on for the reader to really keep track of.  This needed a second editorial pass and never got it, but fortunately Sabatini also produced a large volume of really good work to balance out relative duds like this.

Rafael Sabatini - Scaramouche In this wide-ranging three-master Sabatini takes on revolutionary France with his usual eye for historical detail and social conditions, and does kind of go on for three books in one, but he succeeds in keeping all the various elements current and connected, and ties things up nicely if a little tritely at the end.  The general forms have been done before, but Sabatini as usual focuses on different themes, elements, and perspectives than the typical courtly romances around the revolution, and also has an excellent cast of characters here, especially in the middle third with the troupe of actors.  This is probably the other Sabatini work people have heard of after Captain Blood, and it's with good reason.

Rafael Sabatini - Scaramouche the Kingmaker If there was a thought to make of Scaramouche another enduring character as Captain Blood, it foundered on this over-complex and over-researched volume.  Sabatini does an excellent deep dive on the corruption and infighting of the Jacobin Assembly, but in the process bogs down his plot and characters in a stew of intrigue that it takes an intensive grounding in history and almost a degree in finance to keep straight.  There is too much there here, required to fill the historical span of time that he has to cover, and while several of the set pieces are really good, there are too damn many of them, and this gets exhausting after a while.  There is good craft here -- the thematic quotations from commedia del'arte in the furnishing of stock character types are well-integrated and always useful -- but the overarching art is too ponderous and the frame of the story is crushed by the weight of ornament piled onto it.

Rafael Sabatini - St. Martin's' Summer The cramdown of the romance in this one is deeply unsatisfying, but Sabatini repays that in spades with the larger-than-life character of Granache and the strong rogues' gallery he has to fight his way through in this one.  And fight is the operative word: the fight in the tower that sets up the break to the critical point is one of the best fights I can recall in swashbuckling literature, and then there's the duel where the Condillacs put on a jolly-gaff worthy of a Musashi and the other duel inside an inn bedroom.  Granache is a fighter, not a lover, from the first, and if his love scenes are inconsistent and forced, the fight scenes are anything but.

Rafael Sabatini - The Carolinian It's tempting to accuse Sabatini of falling off the pace here via an American setting for this one rather than his normal European metiers, but the truth is that South Carolina works fine as a backdrop, and his research on the social-political scene of the place and time is as usual impeccable.  No, the real complaint against this one is that the back half/third of the book -- everything after the pistol duel in the middle -- is somewhat unnecessary, deforms the characters, and in large measure feels like a political thriller plotted by R. A. J. Walling or someone else who sucks.  It is well executed craft, but it strains disbelief too hard and introduces unnecessary conflicts poorly in setting itself up.

Rafael Sabatini - The Historical Nights' Entertainment (three volumes) Published in three collections initially, it's not necessary in the age of the ebook to draw distinctions between these.  The stories are mostly unconnected, and the theme -- a historical novella barely connected to the 'night' aspect referenced in the story's title -- is similarly flexible.  It's neat to see Sabatini moving through subject areas outside France, Restoration England, and Renaissance Italy, but it is also a little trying to take these on all at once.  They are probably best consumed in small chunks, as originally magazine-published, and with intervening spacing, rather than en bloc for like thirty stories at once.

Rafael Sabatini - The Life of Cesare Borgia Sabatini sets himself a tall order here -- "rehabilitate the goddamn Borgias" -- but works yeomanlike against it, and may actually get to a result.  This result is likely to be "the Borgias were not worse than other Renaissance tyrants and Alexander VI was not worse than the other bad popes of his era", but there's only so far this is going to stretch.  He does a good job of separating fact from fiction in the case of a few of the more egregious crimes posted up by Cesare and his family, but there are others that are less easily discarded, and too often Sabatini hides critical evidence or first-hand impressions in untranslated Latin or Italian; if you wondered how homosexuality got to be the love that dared not speak its name, just look here, where sodomy is the crime that is ceaselessly danced about but never directly mentioned in English.  In the main, I prefer Sabatini's fiction to this nonfiction, but this is a good biography of one of the leading families of the Renaissance, and as such preferable to Sabatini's less-good fiction that has been clogging the queue recently.

Rafael Sabatini - The Lion's Skin When you read as much of a single author as I've been reading over the last few, things start to run together.  In this Jacobite romance, though, there's some of Sabatini's best spycraft, one of his best villains in Rotherby, and a whole family of excellent characters in the Ostermeres.  The twists are well-executed if not wholly surprising after reading so much of this, and the final effect is a good one.

Rafael Sabatini - The Marquis of Carabas Superficially resembling The Lion's Skin, this one sets up a bit differently through its twists, and what look like pagecount-padding subplots in the beginning turn out to be vital exposition by the end.  In its detailed exposition of the Breton Chouannerie and the fatal stupidity that destroyed counterrevolution in the west of France, this one is another case of Sabatini doing history better and closer than the professors, but the ALL TEH FEELS ending is so because this one really succeeds as a novel beyond and above its historical merits.

Rafael Sabatini - The Plague of Ghosts and Others A Gutenberg Australia collection of stuff mostly not collected elsewhere, this one packs together a couple of structurally similar highwayman stories with some French secret agents before and after the revolution and, predictably, "The Sword of Islam" yet again.  This is a good story, so no wonder it keeps getting packed in, but most of the rest of these are nice quick puff reads whose absence from collections is kind of understandable.  The best of the lot is "Kynaston's Reckoning", where the twist is telegraphed from miles and miles away, but executed with the hand of a master; this alone makes the collection worthy, but if you can get it on its own somewhere else, that will probably suffice.

Rafael Sabatini - The Pretender What sells this novella, more than anything, is Sabatini's own history: when you read Sabatini, you expect Jacobites and swashbuckling and knaves turned by gold, so when this one starts going there, and then doesn't, the twist hits all the harder for it.  This is one of his best twists outside the Casanova stories, and it's too quick a read to go further into spoiling it here.

Rafael Sabatini - The Sea Hawk Another of Sabatini's better ones after a couple of recent relative clunkers, this one takes on more of his favorite subjects, being in this case bare outer corners of canonical history and unexpected springs of heroism.  The idea that Christian renegades might have fought, and well, and even converted, for the corsairs of Barbary might almost be too hot a take for modern minds, but in that age both sides had no lack of converts, fellow-travelers, or plainfaced adventurers for whom race or religion was just an accident of birth, and Sabatini as always follows these threads faithfully.  Some of the tricks and plot dressing are a little too convenient to really be believable, but this is an XL-sized story that can barely be held in its traces even as it is.

Rafael Sabatini - The Shame of Motley As expected with the hero playing the fool, this one doesn't stint on the jokes, even as the adventure winds its way around the edges of the ascent of Cesare Borgia.  That Life from a few notes back is a good companion to this to set the context, but it's not really necessary, filled as this is with plots nefarious and quick-witted, brazen impostures, bloody battle and some truly horrific set pieces of murder and torture, and of course the excellent passage in the cathedral that sets up the point of no return.  If you wanted a fictional story around that Life of Borgia, take this one: it's just as well executed, and as prime an example of the author's craft as that one is of the historian's.

Rafael Sabatini - The Snare For people already familiar with the Peninsular War, this is a mediocre intrigue of an overwrought giri-ninjou clash strapped to a third-rate detective story.  For those like me who weren't, this is a passable if replacement-level romance that gives the opportunity to see Sabatini discourse on Wellington and the complicated travails of being the smartest person in the room while occupying someone else's country.  This would probably have been a better essay than a novel, but the characters -- especially Sylvia, one of his best heroines -- save it from failure even for the jaded.

Rafael Sabatini - The Strolling Saint Sabatini continues his Borgia-stanning here fifty years after their era, in a strong Bildungsroman with a hell of a well-hidden twist that may be even better than The Shame of Motley.  Some of the push-pull around the Inquisition is a little weak, but Sabatini's Cinquecendista game is still strong, and Agostino, in his thorough development, is one of his better heroes.  A definite rec.

Rafael Sabatini - The Suitors of Yvonne This loses a little steam as the love story picks up, which is not really groundworked or developed in terms of signs of increasing affection, but this is a swashbuckler through and through, and there are so many jokes, sick burns, and good fights especially at the start and continuing on through that it is really hard to put this one down.  Sabatini's style and how he approaches history can make him a little grave and pedantic at times, so when he's having fun, as here, you revel in it.

Rafael Sabatini - The Sword of Islam Misleadingly titled to say the least, this one deals with not Dragut Reis, mostly, but Prospero Adorno, the Genoese captain who is put into the role of the suggester of the canal from the other two times this tale, under this title and others, has showed up in print.  Prospero's story is bits and pieces of other Sabatini novels glued together to give a frame to the sea-fighting; on the waves, Sabatini still does the clash of galleys and the interplay of cultures and loyalties on the Mediterranean littoral like nobody else, but on land or out of battle, this tale has a tendency to drive this one into the ground.  There is probably a good novel on the life and career of one of the Barbary captains of this period that would be worthy of the title, but this one isn't even sure what it's trying to be.

Rafael Sabatini - The Tavern Knight Sabatini digs himself into a mighty hole on this one, which he extricates himself from by an offensively dumb and blatant deus ex machina.  There was a better resolution to this somewhere, and in his other works there's every indication that he might have found a way to thread the needle, but for whatever reason, we don't get it.  The good, well-drawn characters deserve better than this hamhanded plot.

Rafael Sabatini - The Trampling of the Lilies With all the stops pulled on the brutality of rural France before the revolution, it should come as no surprise that Sabatini can have a soft spot for Robespierre here.  (Or really, dude stans for the Borgias hello)  He did a lot of stuff about the French Revolution, but each tale is different, each tale is new, and this one is no exception: there's a lot in the superstructure of Scaramouche or "In the Shadow of the Guillotine", but the plot still develops after its own way, and the characters are sharp and fresh throughout.

Rafael Sabatini - The Word of Borgia The episode from this novella probably showed up in the Life of Borgia, unless including it would have kept Sabatini from stanning as hard for Cesare as he does there.  Here, crime is returned with crime: first some swashbuckling and then an intricate work of evil that is done with such careful glee as to undermine any thesis that called it jigo jitoku.  Very good and definitely worth a pack-in if/when that Life is republished.

Ralph Adams Cram - Excalibur: An Arthurian Drama Before considering to write an equivalent of the Ring, you should first check and make sure that you are the equal of Wagner.  Cram is not.  This stupid and overly pietist melodrama -- when you make Merlin, the very icon of prechristian druidism, into a man of God, you are already well off on the wrong foot -- derps itself around in circles as though it is conscious that there is not enough material in Arthurian legend to carry a focused trilogy, and if you make it through the broadsides of non-cared-about origin story and hopelessly archaic language, all you get is the source of a couple of the references in Monty Python and the Holy Grail -- which is fast becoming the one authoritative treatment of the Arthurian legends.  This one can be pretty safely ignored.

Ralph Adams Cram - In Kropsberg Keep Cram pulls this off better than the mess that was Excalibur, and these few ghost stories make light reading and an interesting diversion.  At the least, they're different and free from the blockhead milk-and-water Christianity of Cram's drama -- in some cases, severely so.

Randall Craig - Satan's Incubator If you want to be a double Batman, both a philanthropist and a vigilante in secret, you really ought to not link the two so easily as by being "Dr. Skull" -- a hell of a name for a medical man -- and the "Skull Killer".  As red-blooded and as bloodthirsty as the Secret Agent X stories that inaugurated my discovery of bad imitation Batmans from the pulp years, Craig's Dr. Skull is fortunately a little less stupid, significantly less racist, and possessed of some legitimately smart and cool tricks, especially around his adversaries.  Nevertheless, this is still a long episode of When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong, as hardcoreness for the sake of hardcore bottoms out in hilarious stupidity.  It's a fast read and a page turner, but wicked ephimeral even for pulp.

Randall Craig - The City Condemned to Hell The first adventure of Dr. Skull, this is confusingly plotted and hangs together poorly.  It's possessed with the same needless brutality as its sequel, but can't reliably keep track of who's alive or dead at any one point in time and its science is mind-bogglingly dumb even for pulp horror.  The same mechanics (and large chunks of the intro) are reproduced later in Satan's Incubator; if you must read one Craig novel, make it that one and consider this an abortive first draft.

Robert Barr - A Rock In The Baltic Barr was a favorite of mine when I was just starting to get into Gutenberg tests, and I'm glad to finally wend my way back to him all these years later.  This one opens up as an nice and sharp novel of manners, with two excellent female characters in Kate and Dorothy, and over the epistolary bridge takes a very well-executed turn into intrigue.  The science in some parts is a little iffy, and the climax could come off a bit differently -- Sabatini would *definitely* had them shell the island and then have Jack and Drummond fight their way out by disabling the soldiers, then put the Russian supply ship, which would have turned out to have been a Q-ship full of secret police, out of action by one of the girls dropping a round onto its rudder -- but even taken for what it is, this is a really good and smart novel of love and spies and jailbreak, turned by the hand of a master.

Robert Barr - From Whose Bourne Barr is playing several games in this tight but winding spiritual detective story, and manages to keep all the balls in the air until the surprising twist ending.  It's almost a meta-commentary on detective stories and the conventions of romances like he usually writes; for that, make it past the occasional maudlin tones of Victorian spiritualism at the start and check this one out.

Fred M. White - Real Dramas This had to be recollected from the following (in order): His Second Self An Extra Turn Not In The Bill The Plagiarist The Man In Possession A Pair of Handcuffs Being a bunch of set-piece short stories set around the theatrical scene on various continents, this collection has its high and low points, but is not really outstanding anywhere and frequently slides back into Edwardian melodrama.  The general style of this recalls Barr significantly, but the execution is low-energy and the results indifferent.  I have a lot of Fred White in the queue ahead, and if this is an accurate indication of his abilities as a writer 2017 is going to be pretty boring.

Fred M. White - The Doom of London The order of these is dubious, but this collection of London-centric apocalypses composes: A Bubble Burst The Dust of Death The Four Days' Night The Four White Days The Invisible Force The River of Death White is on a little sounder ground here, when grappling with issues of engineering or public health -- all of these are realistic catastrophes born out of the hypertrophism of turn-of-the-century urbanism and the lagging ability of government to deal with emergent problems -- though his ideas on biological science float somewhere between 'hopeless' and 'godawful'.  The pressure of getting to a happy ending inside the span of a short story hampers most of these, but in most of them, there's also the germ of a really good story -- and most of these problems are still not completely resolved in our modern age of climate change, deregulation, and service-underfunding.  The time's ripe for new dooms -- and ones that don't blink at the actual enormity of the underlying issues, and the real difficulties that need to be faced in resolving them.

Fred M. White - Drenton Denn Another after-the-fact collection, containing: The Yellow Moth The Red Speck With a good deal more questions than answers and an unwillingness to actually press on questions of life, death, and eros as they come up in the narrative, this is high-school-jazz-band level pulp imitation, on the level of a properly-spelled Eye of Argon.  There are good elements in here, but White or his editors consistently end up in a position where they're suppressed by too-timid plotting or comics-code sanitization.  White is not a bad writer overall, but this sort of weird fiction is not what he's good at at all.

Robert Barr - Revenge More of this collection of short stories on the themes of vengeance and comeuppance some to good ends rather than bad -- this is Barr after all, and like E.P. Oppenheim and a lot of Victorians/Edwardians he has a hard time resisting Love Conquers All -- but those that do are seldom less sharp and smart than the ones where things do go over the edge.  Not all of these are great, but there are a lot of good ones in here, and if you get stuck with something middling, the next one is going to come at you fresh and vital.

Phillip Francis Nowlan - The Prince of Mars Returns I've written stuff like this, so I shouldn't be over-critical.  However, I was in middle school when I did, so fuck that.  This is horrid garbage with no consistent tone that wastes itself burping in circles about bad world-building and exobiology nearly as bad as its real Earth biology.  The actual writing is not as bad as, say, Sheehan above, but it is boring and telegraphed and clunky and unable to hold the interest of the audience.  Post Burroughs, there is no need for sword-and-sandal on Mars to be this goddamned bad, and the wretched science looks even worse in a year with this much Weinbaum.

Phillip Francis Nowlan - Armageddon 2419 AD This turns out to be the first appearance of Tony aka "Buck" Rogers, and the overly-explicated story of how he awakened in 25th century America to fight the world-dominating Chinese.  There are good bits, but the world-building is illogical and clunky, the science might as well be magic, and the military tactics are complete ass.  When Rogers and his friends are raiding the Han archives to find the traitors, battling hand to hand and zipping between buildings on rocket ships and flying belts, the story pops, but there is too little of that here and too much explicatory garbage. It's somewhat interesting how merely peripherally racist this story is; the Han are evil oppressors, but not incompetent or senselessly cruel or caricatured, and while physically different from the American resisters are not monstrous or decrepitly corrupt.  There was no lack of anti-Chinese racism in the US at the time, and those fears definitely did play into the success of this franchise and how it developed, but the genesis here looks to be mostly Nowlan reacting to the emergence of the Republic of China and the end of the dysfunctional empire and going "wow, there are a shitload of Chinese people, if they actually get their shit together they could be a world power".  The book still kind of sucks, but not as bad as it would if written with, like, Burroughs-level racism settings.

Phillip Francis Nowlan - The Airlords of Han And theeeeere's the racism.  Seriously, the ramp-up on the implausibly disordered morals of Han society, the intimation that they are partially non-human, and the maniac blind spots of a fully automated civilization shifting gears are not even the worst parts of this story; the science is not discontinuous with what was known of atomic physics prior to the discovery of the neutron, but even if the paint-huffery about breaking stuff into sub-quarks and reconstituting it was remotely correct, you don't take a break in the middle of an action sequence to spend two separate and distinct chapters doing scientific worldbuilding.  Nowlan's ability to set scenes is good, but like a movie director who shoots a billion feet and then tells his editor to make sense of it, his ability to put them into an order that makes sense and keeps the attention of the reader is sharply limited.  Even with the racism turned down, this would be an incoherent mess of unnecessary sequel; as it is, drop this entirely and stick to the better appearances of Buck Rogers in other media.

#meta #criticism #how i wasted 2016