Monday, September 30, 2019
Principal Characters
GEORGE JACKSON
Since splitting up with his wife, he had seen her occasionally but then he met Lee—and no other woman would do!
HENRY CONLEY
He came to George with $7,000. When he died George didn't know what to do with the money—or Henry's wife either!
LEE CONLEY
Tall, voluptuous. Next to her Lady Godiva looked like the winner of a baby contest. But no man could unlock the secret she kept from the world!
FRANCIS F. HENDERSON
George's retired neighbor. He played poker to win money and loved to look into his neighbor's windows. He gave his age as reason enough for both forms of indulgence.
JOE COLLINS
Worked for same company as George. A middle-aged Romeo, he got quite a shock when his son came home from overseas and acted just like him!
WALT COLLINS
Joe's son. His father had planned for him to go to college when he was discharged but the Army had taught Walt a lot, and he was changed now, changed into a wise guy—with angles!
FLO JACKSON
George's estranged wife. She saw him every now and then and they tried to start over, but when Lee came into the picture, her chances sank to a new low!
Monday, September 23, 2019
If
you find Holmes and Poirot insufficiently cerebral, a little too
everyday action hero, then Zaleski is the detective for you. Exiled and
lovelorn, he broods alone (but for a black manservant, of whom frankly
the less said the better) in a wing of a ruined abbey set among
cypresses and poplars. We first see him reclining beside a
partially-unwrapped mummy, "discarding his gemmed chibouque and an old
vellum reprint of Anacreon". From the opulent, narcotic haze of this
sanctum he declines to shift for the first two adventures, unravelling
otherwise insoluble mysteries of ancestral curses and ancient gems
simply from what is reported to him by the narrator Shiel, who might
thus be considered a far more poetically-inclined Watson. Shiel
considered himself Doyle's superior, and the solutions are exactly the
sort of thing someone might come up with when they're trying to outdo
Holmes but haven't twigged the very precise - if indefinable - limits of
fairness in a puzzle; everything hinges on word association, dubious
scholarship and the like, such that the reader's reaction is less likely
to be 'Good heavens!' that 'You what?' But in Holmes the intricate
solutions were only ever part of the appeal, and in Zaleski they're
barely even that. It's the atmosphere that matters. And in the last of
these three original stories*, that atmosphere is whipped into such a
ferment that you start to wonder if Shiel (the writer) was receiving
some distorted yet overwhelming vision of the future. True, there is the
line at which one can only respond with a hollow laugh, where Zaleski
tells his friend that war will doubtless be extinct within their
lifetimes. But otherwise...an epidemic of murder and insanity which
begins in Germany. Eugenic tirades. Visions of a future society in which
technological advancement goes hand-in-hand with sacrificial hecatombs
devoted to preserving the purity of the race. And the story is entitled
'The S.S.'.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)