I\’m curled up reading one of the books I got at the recent library sale. Normally I approach any detective story only after putting my disbelief on the back burner but when one is reading a book published in the last twenty-five years by an author best known for writing \”friendly hard-boiled-ish\” stories rather than American cozies one doesn\’t expected that crucial suspension to be challenged within the first few pages and destroyed beyond repair before finishing the second chapter.

On the very first page of Sue Grafton\’s \”E\” is for Evidence[1] we learn that Kinsey Millhone (the private detective whose point-of-view the reader shares) has just found out that five thousand dollars had been deposited into her bank account by someone unknown to her. Either it is an innocent error or someone wants to make it look as if she has deposited the money herself.

I immediately stop reading and check the copyright page to find out when the book was originally published. 1988. \’Hmmmmm,\’ I think, \’I wonder what five thousand 1988 American dollars would be worth today.\’ A few seconds later I have found an inflation chart. It would cost you almost 10,000 dollars today to purchase what 5,000 dollars would have bought back then. That is far more money than most people then would have made for several months work. The deposit was made through a night-deposit slot and almost no one used those or deposited that much money at one time except businesses. And businesses are unlikely to make a cash deposit both that large and a round number.

At this point I am ready for Millhone to call the police (to report \”found\” money and a possible attempt at money laundering) and the insurance company for which she is currently doing work investigating possible insurance fraud. Because a cash deposit that large looks to me (as it should to her) like either an attempt to bribe her or and attempt to make it look as if she has taken a bribe.

The willing suspension of my disbelief necessary to read the book is already being stretched. I have known people whose jobs were unmasking fraud and they are routinely suspicious of everything. I have trouble believing that Millhone merely phones the bank to report the error and then goes back to writing up a report to her insurance company/client of her current investigation into possible insurance fraud.

\’Chill out,\’ I tell myself, \’you have the advantage on her. You know that this is important because it is the first chapter of a murder mystery. You have that advantage over Millhone.\’

\’She supposed to be a private investigator,\’ myself grumbles back, \’she supposed to notice things like that.\”

I persuade myself to read further.

Back in the pages of the book, Millhone is thinking about the events that occurred between being assigned this case of possible insurance fraud and the present. A company has filed an insurance claim after a fire at one of their warehouses. Millhone has been sent out to investigate. The company president says, after meeting her, I hope you are not going to give me any static over that. Believe me, I\’m not asking for anything I\’m not entitled to.(15. Millhone tells the reader:

I made a noncommittal murmur or some sort, hopinp to conceal the fact that I\’d gone on \”fraud alert.\” Every insurance piker I\’d ever met said just that, right down to the pious little toss of the head. (15)

A mere four pages later Millhone leaves her handbag unattended in the office of the person who had set off her \”fraud alert\” while she is taken to the actual site of the fire. Yes, the man whose office it was disappeared from the scene after answering a telephone call and yes, she did remove her wallet and bring it with her. But she left her handbag behind. In one of the offices of the business she had been hired to investigate.

At this point myself is finding it difficult not to toss the book aside. Either Millhone is a bad detective or the author is \’getting things set up\’ by having her protagonist do something no moderately adequate fraud investigator would do. Either way, I find it difficult to care what happens for the rest of the book. And it is only page 19.

[1] Grafton, Sue. E\” is for evidence : a Kinsey Millhone mystery. New York: Holt, 1988.&#8617
 

The Virgin Heiresses (aka The Dragon\’s Teeth) by Ellery Queen (1939)

Two phrases came to mind when I finally put down this book: \”backdoor pilot\” and \”eight deadly words.\”

Why did I find the first phrase applicable? According to Wikipedia: A backdoor pilot is defined by Variety as a \”pilot episode filmed as a standalone movie so it can be broadcast if not picked up as a series\”.It is distinguished from a simple pilot in that it has a dual purpose. It has an inherent commercial value of its own while also being \”proof of concept for the show, that\’s made to see if the series is worth bankrolling\”. This definition also includes episodes of one show introducing a spin-off.

One of the main characters in this book is Beau Rummell, the son of one of Inspector Queen\’s old colleagues who opens a detective agency with Ellery Queen. Much of the book is seen either seen through the eyes of Rummell or centers around him and his interactions with other characters. Rummell appeared in none of the books published previous to this one and continues to not appear in the books published afterwards. It feels as if the authors were either trying out a new character or a new style of writing. In the opinion of this reader they do neither well.

Which brings us to the second phrase, Dorothy Heydt\’s eight deadly words \”I don\’t care what happens to these people.\” The characters failed to interest me enough to care whether they lived or died or were railroaded for committing murder. Ellery Queen himself seemed to have been replaced by an even more bloodless pod-person version of himself and the rest of characters rarely rose above being (very thin) cardboard cut-outs being moved around rather lackadaisically by authors who did not themselves really care what happened to most of them.

The measure of how boring, uninvolving and uninteresting this book was is that I didn\’t even have the heart to catalogue the racism, sexism, classism and essentialism of the story and characters.

Rating: 0 stars

When your research project involves reading a representative sample of popular murder/detective novels written in (or translated into) English and published in the first half of the last century–well you aren\’t surprised to find yourself reading books that vary greatly in the quality of writing, the soundness of the plotting, the believability of the characterizations, the verisimilitude of the science and police procedures and the amount of overt, covert, passive and active misogyny, racism and classism.

As I have mentioned before in reviews published here and elsewhere, it is not uncommon for the protagonist/detective to (apparently) outwit the plodding, stodgy (and usually working class) policemen by the clever ruse of actually removing clues from the scene of the crime. When the protagonist/detective finally reveals his actions to the baffled police officers they never never respond by arresting him on the spot for obstructing justice. For example:

They were tightly, watchfully quiet, as if each had a deep personal stake in the least word being uttered by Mr. Queen. He glanced at his watch again.

\”I must now confess,\” he went on with a faint smile, \”to have engineered an unquestionably illegal suppression of important evidence. How important I leave you to judge. But I did suppress it when Mr. Rummell and I found it beneath the radiator of Room 1726 only a short time after the murderer of Ann Bloomer fled from it. In short, it was a companion-piece of the fountain-pen—an automatic pencil of the same hard black rubber composition, with similar gold trimming.\”

Inspector Queen glared at District Attorney Sampson, who glared back, then both glared at Mr. Queen.

The Inspector rose and roared: \”You found what?\”

\”I\’ll take my punishment later, please,\” said Mr. Queen.\” [1] (227)

But there was no punishment then or ever. Queen, Vance and their like are never punished for actions like this. The implicit (and sometimes explicit) rationale for their behaviour (and for their not being punished for this behaviour) is that the police would not be able to appreciate the full meaning of the clue or perhaps simply hat the police would get in the way of the detective investigating the crime as they wished. The behaviour of the detective/protagonist is not merely portrayed as justifiable it is often given a meritorious patina. On that basis they are justified in their minds, the minds of the authors and, presumably, the minds of most readers, for actively interfering with the police investigation.

No wonder the police are then unable to solve the crime.

Something else strikes me as I reread these books and that is how lacking in the basics of logic, deduction and common sense are many of these detective/protagonists. They are wont to expatiate at such length that the weary readers finds their eyes blurring as they skim over the words until they reach the end of the \”proof\” such as it. They aren\’t really presented well sourced arguments grounded in logic and accurate observations of places and people. They are just throwing loosing related pieces of information and random pieces of data in the eyes of the readers.

The only way these books work as \”mysteries\” and \”puzzles\” is that at least some (and all too often most) of the core participants do something stupid or overlook something obvious. So reader beware, don\’t focus on the inordinately complex set-ups of the crimes and don\’t get distracted by lengthy side-trips down avenues of knowledge that the author may find fascinating but which do not really move the story forward (for a good example of this read The Kennel Murder Case by S. S. Van Dine. \”Ah,\” one imagines the author thinks his readers will exclaim, \”anyone who knows so much about the breeding of that type of dog must indeed have the type of superior intellect that will allow him to solve arcane murder cases.\”)

There are quite a few books in which the reader can figure out what is really going on from the very beginning if only they set aside their presumptions that the detective knows best and instead reads the story as if everyone involved was no different than their family members, their co-workers or members of their local community group. Using the same deductive skills and knowledge as they use in everyday life most readers will suspect the true perpetrators of the crime long before the protagonist/detective has done so.

Thus, in The Virgin Heiresses by page 6 this reader was \”onto\” part of the plot that it would take the \”brilliant protagonist\” several hundred more pages of uncover (and not because of the rather rusty anvil which the author drops on the reader about bumping into door jambs.) Reading the rest of the book became nothing more than an exercise in boredom, frustration and annoyance as the reader is given page after page of evidence that contact with Hollywood did not improve the writing skills of the authors and that watching too many hard-boiled crime films did not improve their handling of dialogue. Rather than being what they had been—tolerably competent writers of the American let\’s-pretend-it-isn\’t-a-cozy-by-setting-it-in-a-big-city cozy with a protagonist who will only sound well-educated and upper-class to an audience that strives for both of those things but has achieved neither—they wrote several books that read as weak attempts at sounding like Dashiell Hammett or James M. Cain.

The trouble with setting up your protagonist as a brilliant thinker is similar to the problem of setting up your protagonist as a brilliant reporter. Fred Clark addresses this frequently in his deconstruction of Left Behind. If the writer describes a character as a talented singer the reader can play along because the reader will never hear that person\’s voice. If the writer describes a character as a great dancer the reader can play along because the reader will never see that person dance. However when the writer describes a character as a brilliant thinker capable of unraveling the most deviously intricate of mysteries then the reader needs to both read of brilliant thoughts and dazzingly complex mysteries. Far too often writers demonstrate the characters brilliance by having them unravel a complex mystery which is only complex because the character is actually not that good a detective.

Tomorrow…..not so great moments in the lives of fictional detectives or \”they did WHAT?\”

[1] Queen, Ellery (1954:1939). The Virgin Heiresses, New York, NY: Pocket Books Inc. &#8617

The reason I mentioned the question of the ease/difficulty of voting in the previous post is that right now, in the United States, people who are worried about the outcome of the next election should be paying less attention to the polls and debates and more attention to the many laws and regulations recently (or soon to be) enacted that will make it more difficult for some people to vote.

Since the 2010 elections brought Republicans to power in numerous swing states, officials in many of those states have made it harder for minority, poor and young voters to cast their ballots. GOP governments have been curtailing early voting (in Ohio and Florida) and requiring voters to produce official photo-identification cards (in Wisconsin). In South Carolina, the poll tax lives again: Voters who want an official photo-ID card must present a passport or a birth certificate, neither of which can be obtained for free. The Washington Post \”The GOP is trying to rig the electoral college\”

All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – cut short their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures – Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic – including 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African-Americans.[Rolling Stone \”The GOP War on Voting\”]

There are many ways in which to win an election by suppressing portions of the vote without sending thugs out onto the streets to intimidate the population. You can have some polling stations in hard to find locations with inadequate parking and bad lighting. You can make it harder to vote without types of identification that some portions of the population are less likely to have that others. You can make it hard to vote without types of identification that carry a non-trivial cost for portions of the voting population. You suppress the vote by having \”voter lists\” purges that use dodgy criteria that impact some groups in society more than others. You can suppress part of the vote by having polling stations that are difficult to reach using only public transit and having the hours they operate inadequate for those who cannot get (paid) time off for the long trek by bus and subway from their place of work to their polling place.

If I can sit here and think of dozens of perfectly \”legal\” ways of suppressing portions of the vote then I guarantee you that there are political operatives right now who have thought of even more ways of doing so.

One of the first things one needs to do to protect democracy is to make sure that no one finds it easier, safer or cheaper to vote than anyone else.

Pundits (particularly American pundits) like to talk about the importance of holding elections. The thing is that \”holding an election\” is actually not a single thing. It is a process that takes place over time. In the United States it takes place over a very long time and the process of registering to vote and then casting one\’s vote is far more complex in the United States than it is in some other countries.

My suspicions, from living for years in the U.S., is that most Americans don\’t get how their election/voting process looks to the rest of the world because they don\’t have a clear sense of how elections are run in other countries.

So this is a short description of what this voter did to get onto the voter\’s list for the provincial election on October 6.

Nothing.

I did nothing. I didn\’t pick up the phone, I didn\’t answer the doorbell, I didn\’t fill something out to put in the mail.

I did nothing.

Some number of years (several elections) ago some nice people knocked on the door and asked if anyone old enough (and eligible) to vote lived in the house. I wasn\’t home but mmySpouse gave my name as well as hir\’s.

That\’s how I got on the voting list.

Now every time there is an election I get a card in the mail reminding me of the date of the election and the location of my poll. It also lists eight advance polls (held in a variety of lcoations over 8 days.) I also have the option of voting at the returning office–which is also open on Sunday. All I need to do to vote is take with me the card I received in the mail and one piece of ID. Acceptable forms of ID range from Canadian passports, to birth certificates, health cards, armed forces IDs, and social insurance cards. Among the forms of acceptable ID are many that are available without cost.

I didn\’t need to go anywhere to get onto the voters list. The only questions asked of me (or rather of mmySpouse) were a) was I a Canadian citizen, b) was I eighteen or older and c) where did I live.

How hard would it be to get on the voters list I had just moved into the neighbourhood? Not very.

You can vote if you are in prison. You can vote if you are homeless. You can vote if you are confined to a hospital bed.

In short, it is the job of the government to make it possible (and safe) for you to vote.

And that, in my opinion, should be step one in running an election.

For over a week newspapers across Canada were filled with news about a missing 3-year child in British Columbia.

3-year-old B.C. boy may have been kidnapped, say police ran the headline in the Toronto Star on September 9. It was an \”every parent\’s nightmare\” story. The parents tucked their son into bed at night and when they went to his room the next morning he was gone. Missing.

The child had been known to walk in his sleep but never before had he left the house when doing so.

At the same time a man who had previously served time for violent behaviour was named by the police as a person of interest.

An Amber alert was issued. No one knew where either the man or boy might be. Neighbours took time off work to form search parties. A ferry was called back to the dock and searched after someone thought they saw the boy among the passengers.

On the 9th of September the mother of the \”person of interest\” publicly called for her son to turn himself in. On the 10th of September the police announced that they considered the boy not lost but abducted. On September 11 the police announced that morning they had received a call informing them that the boy had been returned to his home (which was temporarily empty) sometime during the night. The police rushed to the house where they found the boy asleep on the sofa in the living room. His parents, staying at a house just a few doors away, saw the police cars and rushed to their home wondering what was going on. What they saw was their son. On September 14 the police announced that the man suspected of kidnapping the boy had been located and arrested.

No one knows what happened to the little boy over the days he was missing but he was returned in apparent good health to the arms of his family. As child abduction stories go this is about as \”good\” as it gets.

Today, the Toronto Star published a much needed PSA, Why Kienan’s abduction was 1 in 10 million, about child abduction. Kienan\’s case is unusual in many ways. Most children who go missing are killed within a few hours of their abduction. More importantly most children who go missing are not abducted by what the article refers to as \”complete\” strangers. The person lurking in the woods, the monster checking out the house as they drive slowly by and the predators who hang on in the park. Yes, it was the bogeyman who stole Kienan away in the night but statistics tell us that what parents really need to know is the person to watch for is the angry ex, the baby-sitter and that cousin who only started to spend time at the house after the kids were born.

Most ad placement services, such as Adsense, use some combination of keywords on the current page and the nature of the website itself in order to select the ads that do (and perhaps more importantly) do not appear on a given webpage.

Which is why the placement of the following two ads on the same page caught my attention:

Ad #1

Ad #2

I understand why ad #1 is there. The site I was looking at hosts a large number of Christian/Evangelical blogs. The individual blog I was reading focuses on issues of evangelical Christianity.

In the process of doing my work I wander around many website and I have only seen ad #2 on that particular website.

So the question is — is the service that selects those ads for that page \”broken\”/\”made a mistake\” or — do they know something about the typical reader of that site that I don\’t know?

Were it not for Hart I would not have had access to thousands of books I have read over the decade. His vision, books that would be free and easily accessible is one that I think may be even more important now than it was when he first started his work.

I always have a push/pull response to \”free\” books since I abhor the idea of enjoying the fruits of someone\’s labour without paying them a fair wage for their work. I want the authors who made these wonderful books to be free to quit their day job and spend all their time creating the stories/books I want to read. But there are many, many books that are out of print and whose authors are long since dead. I want to be able to read those books too. I want to have access to them even though I do not live in a large city with a world famous library.

What Michael Hart helped to create is a world in which I can read R. Austin Freeman and try one of Delafield\’s books without cost. What Michael Hart helped to create is a world in which I can do my research at little cost from the desk in my front room no matter the weather.

So thank you Michael Hart. You gave a wonderful gift to millions of people around the world.

Founder of Project Gutenberg dead at 64

Obituary for Michael Stern Hart (Gutenberg Wiki)

RIP Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart

On Monday I read (in The Toronto Star article Bush to make promotional appearance in Toronto for Christian college) that

The former U.S. president has a stopover in Toronto next week that will include a Sept. 20 breakfast gathering on behalf of Tyndale [University College & Seminary] for an invited audience of 150 at the Hilton Toronto Hotel. Bush is expected to address the subject of Christian higher education.

In the article Gary Nelson, Tyndale\’s president, acknowledges that Bush was a controversial figure even among the different Christian groups represented at the university:

Nelson pointed to the fact that Tyndale represents 40 Christian denominations, making it the most multicultural seminary in North America. Included among the staff and students are Mennonites and followers of other pacifist faiths.

On Wednesday the same newspaper published a follow-up article Outrage spreads over Bush visit in which the reader learns that although none of the faculty at Tyndale University College had resigned, other members of the staff had and there was considerable controversy among current and former students, faculty and staff about how appropriate it was that Bush \”could be given a place of honour at a promotional event for a school that stands for peace and justice.\”

Also on Wednesday three former students started a petition asking that the college cancel the planned event

On Wednesday the college posted an announcement on its website that \”due to scheduling change\’\”[sic] the event has been canceled. According to the spokesperson quoted in Bush’s Toronto appearance cancelled there are no plans to reschedule Bush\’s visit.

This entire sequence of events stands out to me as an example of people within evangelical Christianity reclaiming a rhetoric/territory they believe Bush attempted to take as his own. There are, as the articles point out, many pacifists within the Christian denominations who are part of Tyndale\’s community. Many of them (and a good number of other Canadians) consider Bush to be a war criminal. Current and former students of Tyndale did not wish Bush and his worldview to be associated with their institution.

One part of the Christian community has declared firmly that what Bush calls speaking and governing as a Christian they call a war crime.

Vatican Lists Core Teachings for Traditionalists reads the headline. The Vatican is, in this instance, involved in tactical skirmishes while losing the strategic battle.

While I am fairly sure that the press release from the Vatican did not describe the Society of St. Pius X as traditionalist by not addressing the claims of that group (and others like them) that they are traditionalist the Vatican has ceded to them the best ground on the battlefield.

When I was growing up (Catholic) \”obeying the stricture, rules, and admonitions\” of the Vatican and its appointed officials would have been described as being a traditionalist and \”openly defying Church authorities\” would have been described not only as schismatic but revolutionary.

The various hosts that I listen to on American Catholic radio make it a practice never to simply say \”same-sex\” marriage. They always refer to it as \”so-called same-sex marriage.\” The strategists at the Vatican should be sending out a note to those same Catholic pundits to always refer to the Society of St. Pius X as \”so-called\” traditionalists.[1]

As we have learned over the last few years — those who frame the terms of the debate almost always go on to win it.

[1] Friendly advise from a no-longer Catholic.