Death in High Heels by Christianna Brand

 

I didn't even know this book existed until I got it a few weeks ago as part of that book club.  It is Brand's first novel, published in 1941 and written during her evenings while she worked at the very sort of store as is featured in this story.  It's a West End "boutique" called Christophe et Cie where mannequins (again with the mannequins) model fancy new designs by Mr. Cecil, an extremely camp man who is constantly having intense fights with various "boy friends" and then spending weekends crying with his mother. (The fight that gets caught up in our murder mystery results after Cecil's boyfriend tells him he's fallen for one of the women who works with Cecil--and she is the very woman who ends up dead.) Brand seems to know that this stereotype of gay men is a bit over the top as several characters comment on how ridiculously stereotypical he is.  The owner of the store, Mr. Bevan, has similar relationship problems with women: he sees random young ladies out and about and invites them home with his to look at his etchings and next thing you know, they are working at the store, either modeling, sales, or running errands around the store, up and down stairs to take people things or deliver messages.

Brand said in an interview that she HATED that job and HATED all the people she worked with, and she spent her free moments fantasizing about murdering her workmates--and thus her first murder mystery was born! As is usual for Brand, the murder occurs very early on in the story--just a few pages in and Miss Doon (Bevan's right hand who helps him run the business) dies an extremely painful death from poisoning by oxalic acid.  It is quickly determined that she had to have ingested the poison during the lunch she ate while at work. Necessary backstory on lunches at Christophe et Cie:  Bevan realized that he can pay his workers less and make them work more if he (a) keeps them on site during the lunch "hour" (which is actually only about 15 minutes) and (b) if he has served up a "hot meal" each day.  That way, they can be paid less as they won't have to buy their own lunches each day.  The fact that he is a rotter and a cad is mentioned by every character all through the novel. He doesn't even deny it! In the aftermath of the murder, his only concern is whether negative press will harm his business.  When he discovers that, in fact, it results in the store being overwhelmed with new customers--women who want to goggle at the scene of the crime and tell their friends that their new dress came from the place where that woman was poisoned!!--he is ecstatic!  

The list of suspects is limited to those sharing that same lunch or in a nearby room. This includes: Bevan and Cecil, Miss Gregory (Bevan's left hand, who takes care of the business/financial side of things), "Macaroni" (Bevan's secretary--her real name is McEney but the nickname Macaroni was given to her by her friends at work and the name stuck), three shopgirls: Irene, Rachel, and Victoria, two mannequins: Judy and Aileen, and Mrs. 'Arris, the peevish cleaning lady who selectively pretends to be hard of hearing so she can eavedrop on the gossipy conversations among the various young ladies.

And as always with Brand's stories, she manages to deliver a mystery that is both impossible and also too easy to solve.  On the one hand, every single person has reason to poison Doon and everyone knew of the poison, saw it, and could have gotten some. On the other, it is (seemingly) literally physically impossible for any of them to have done it as they are either not in the room at the time the poison had to have been added to Doon's food OR they are in line of sight of at least two others who would have seen if they had added the poison to the food.  And, as always with Brand, every one of the characters has secrets that they are terribly ashamed of that they want to hide which causes them to withold evidence or lie about evidence, making the investigation all that much more impossible to solve.  

And who is our intrepid investigators from Scotland Yard?  Inspector Charlesworth is in charge and has Seargeant Bedd as his right hand man. Charlesworth is very young (his elders laugh at him behind his back) as he is perpetually falling in love and then three weeks later when the relationships explode, he is moping around work, despairing at the pointlessness of existence. [Another novel that features him is The Rose in Darkness, which I have not read and is, as far as I can tell, out of print.] Nonetheless, his chief takes a chance on him and throws Charlesworth into a dress shop full of lovely young ladies.  And the inevitable occurs: each one he meets he's more in love with than the last.  He's particularly smitten with Miss Victoria. The only problem is she is happily married and finds him rather silly.  And he is silly when it comes to love but very serious when it comes to solving the murder. Sergeant Bedd, who says he prefers women with a "bit o' meat on them", isn't so easily distracted and very competently runs around gathering information from various porters and chemists who sell oxalic acid (which, it seems, is very easy to get).  

After several days of getting nowhere Charlesworth's chief assigns Inspector Smithers (who is  loathesome and smug and only too happy to see a pretty young lady hung for murder) as Charlesworth's "assistant". Smithers has no creative intelligence and no capacity to see beneath the surface and sets out to make an arrest--a wrongful arrest, Charlesworth is certain.  Fortunately, their flaming row is just the impetus Charlesworth needs to turn his perspective upside down and get the brilliant flash of insight he needs to solve the case--just SECONDS before the murderer strikes again...

The best part of reading Brand's books is her development of female characters: their conversations, inner dialogs, and her attention to how they think about their bodies, how they attend to their hair, make-up, fit of their gloves and so on. She makes sure we really do understand what each is doing and feeling and thinking when we are hearing the events from their point of view. And here she gives us seven distinctive women, all with (what they believe to be) terrible secrets, a few worth being killed for and a few willing to be accused of murder for. That makes all of them extremely dangerous and interesting, and allows Brand to demonstrate her skill for writing a fast paced yet satisfying story.  In comparison to her others, it is a "first effort" but I would be extremely please if I wrote this after a long day of working with people I hated.

Garden Update

 First I'll start with the good news:

This is the first "strawberries on a wall" pot to produce something.  According to the books I should have nipped off all flowers to cause the plant to grow stronger roots so we would get more strawberries next year, but I'm gardening with the "who knows if we'll even be alive next year" mindset so no plants in our yard are getting radically pruned for the sake of an uncertain future.

Here is the neighboring pot with plenty of fetal strawberries and flowers. And, so far at least, all evidence is that squirrels CANNOT GET AT THESE POTS! 

And for an added bonus, I saw this little thing growing on the ground as I was planting pond plants.  I forgot to take pictures of that task (it is ridiculously hot and sweaty today and even working in the shade was deeply unpleasant) but the idea there is that I cannot simply plant pond plants in the water as the goldfish will eat the roots and so kill the plants.  Goldfish are carp and carp are notoriously evil fish who are (a) ridiculously smart (people who love goldfish and koi swear the fish "talk" to them--I know of several such people) (b) perpetually ravenously hungry and (c) capable of digesting anything and everything--including other goldfish--including their own children!!!  And, of course, the more they eat, the bigger they get and so the more they need to eat.  It's a terrible, self-perpetuating cycle.  ANYWAY...the pond plants need to grow in pond-safe grow bags so the fish cannot get at them.  All this assumes I will get the pond lining holes property patched (thank you raccoons) and get the waterfall pump working (I dread finding out what is blocking the intake tube) and the pond level will get up to its proper level and the water will get much needed oxygenation and the pond will provide a safe place for underhoused amphibians.

And here is a TINY green bean bush in our front yard.  It really is tiny--only about 8" tall.  So far it has produced about a dozen (actually pretty good) beans but the promise was that the plant would climb up to 6-10' tall.  I have no hope of that happening.  

Ok and now the bad news:

Earlier today I was in the diningroom and looked out the window into the back yard and saw something brownish gray and fat toddling around inside one of the sweet potato grow bags.  At first I thought it was a cat using the thing as a catbox so I ran out but--worse!--it was a juvenile groundhog eating its way through ALL MY PLANTS.  All the tomatos that I started from seed are now stems only.

And here is what remains of one sweet potato bag.  They are all like this, with most of the leaves gone.  Of course, none of the other potato leaves had been touched as even a groundhog teens know they are poisonous. I went online to see what the solution was and, apparently, there really isn't one.  The only certain solution is building a smooth wall that is sunken 3' into the ground and is at least 6' tall--wire fencing doesn't work as they simply climb over.  And anything just on the ground is useless as they dig under.  Plan B is predator urine, which I am also not excited about using as the thought of our yard smelling like lion piss is too horrible to think about. And, anyway, I have a vague memory of trying to get rid of a raccoon gang with the same strategy 25-odd years ago and it was useless--they didn't care at all and the backyard smelled like a port-a-potty for years. The final, least severe, suggestion was to plant garlic all around the perimeter of every raised bed and grow bag as, apparently, groundhogs have very tender noses and they cannot stand the smell of garlic.  Unfortunately, in this part of the world, garlic has to be planted in late October. So that ship sailed.

Here is a photo of a young groundhog that I did not take as the second I got outside to get a good look at our resident groundhog, it took off like a shot, squealing like a stuck pig. (They sound like a very loud chipmunk being carried off by a hawk.) Adult groundhogs are the same color but much bigger and very much rounder and they sort of lollop along as they are too fat and their legs too short to run. 

Don't let their cuteness fool you because they can do untold damage and not just to gardens. We have a giant one who has lived underground near our house for years.  It has tunnels all along our basement walls (about 6' underground) which creates the perfect place for rainwater to gather which in turn encourages tree roots to grow, which then prompts those roots to dig through our basement walls which then requires $25,000 of "water and mold remediation" work.  

Film review: Nightfall (1956)

 [Except where indicated, this review is by Jami, because Simon is supposed to be writing a book.]

This is a strange movie. If you consider appearances only, it's very attractive: the city and (later) mountainscapes are beautiful to look at.  But the dialog is forced and the lead actor's delivery is just odd: old Twilight Zone shows had better actors.  What is extra odd is that, aside from the main character, the rest of the actors are really famous. It just goes to show that famous faces don't ensure a high quality product. [I have to object!  Yes, the script is stilted in places, but in the time honored people-don't-actually-talk-like-that Noir way.  And the film is directed by the great Jacques Tourneur, of Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and most illustriously, Out of the Past fame.  In fact, he made this movie right before he directed the all-time-classic Night of the Demon.  But he had to go to England to make that, so maybe this was the end of the road for him in Hollywood.]

The movie starts as all these sorts of movies do, in a gritty, down and out, part of Los Angeles late at night. The only people milling around are the lonely hearts looking for alcohol and a warm bed with a soft pillow.  And so we meet our two protagonists: Jim and Marie [ANNE BANCROFT!].  (Good Biblical names, that's how you know they are the protagonists.) Marie starts the conversation by asking Jim for $5.  She claims she had been stood up by a "girlfriend" and, bizarrely, didn't bring one thin penny with her.  Yet, she has been throwing back the martinis for hours. Jim makes some painfully awkward small talk (yikes) and, surprisingly, this works and she is instantly attracted to him.  He gives her a $5 bill and she pays for her tab, which only comes to 70 cents!  So why did she ask for $5 instead of $1, or simply 70 cents?  He doesn't mind.  Throwing more good money after bad, he offers to buy her dinner, which involves smoking a lot of cigarettes. He reveals he's an artist (for advertising, not the flaky kind--all protagonists in 1950s movies work in advertizing or for the U.N.--it's a fact) and she tells him she's a model. They were called "mannequins" then and they modeled clothing for women who would then ask the designer to craft a version of that dress or swimsuit or whatever for themselves.  This really did happen and people I know were mannequins for a living, too, right up to a few months before I was born.

Wait, why is the evil Senator from The Manchurian Candidate in this movie?  Because he's a too-good-to-be-true agent for an insurance company named Ben and he'd rather find the $350,000 stolen from a bank in Seattle by two goons than see his company take the financial hit. (Are we REALLY supposed to care about an insurance company "losing"money that they will simply shift onto their customers by raising their policy rates??)  Since Wyoming police decided that Jim is wanted for the robbery (wait--what?  when did that happen? hold your horses...) Ben has been watching Jim for months but still "can't figure him out."

Finally, after Jim heads to his apartment and goes to sleep (about 2 am) Ben heads home and pours out all his troubles to his ridiculously tolerant wife.  Clearly she knows everything (is that even legal?) and they've had a version of this conversation dozens of times before. She also has no problem with him coming home at 2 am, sleeping for 90 minutes and then getting up again to mull over the puzzles. If Jim stole $350,000, why does he live in a shitty apartment, work his ass off for an advertising company?  Why does he eat cheap diner meals and wear off the rack suits?  So many puzzles...

Given that everyone talks about how hot is is, they sure are heavily dressed all the time, like when they wear full pajamas and thick robes.

Next day: [no it wasn't!  It's very important that this happens right as Jim and Marie walk out of the restaurant.  Marie is revealed to have been helping the goons, which is very much a turn-off for Jim.  She scuttles off before...] Things take a dark turn as Jim is abducted off the street (where is Ben when this is happening?) by two goons, John (the brains [played by the nice dad in the original Parent Trap]) and Red (the brawn with the itchy trigger finger) who drag Jim out to an oil rig (they still had those in the city when we lived in LA) [I would say it's an oil derrick] and made clear how easy it would be to remove one of Jim's legs below the knee by simply laying it down under the nodding donkey part of the rig.  Jim gets the point, but he insists that he doesn't know where "it" is.  But what is "it"?  We don't know but it's likely that $350,000 Ben talked about endlessly with his wife the night before.

Finally we get some back story:  Some time ago in relatively recent history, Jim and "Doc" (appropriately nicknamed because he's a doctor) are camping outside Moose, Wyoming (a real place), having the time of their lives--eating butter breaded fried fish, drinking coffee and shooting the breeze  beside a campfire, when out of nowhere a car comes racing along and smashes into a fence just up the road near the turnoff to their campsite.  Doc and Jim race to see what happened and meet John and Red for the first time--we know they are evil, but Jim and Doc don't realize it yet and if they had, perhaps Doc would have tied that tourniquet on John's arm a lot more tightly. John and Red inform them that, after they kill both, they are going to steal their car.  Why all the gum flapping?  Why not just get the job done?  Well, there is a reason these two hapless idiots never get the big score.

Doc and Jim are trying to buy time, but this is not going to end well. Red's idea is this: Red will shoot Doc with Jim's rifle and then force Jim to turn the gun onto himself--an obvious murder/suicide sort of arrangement. Fortunately, just seconds before John and Jim showed up, they had been sort of talking about in a very indirect way that John loved Doc's much younger wife [actually she came on to him and he honorably resisted].  So, unbeknownst to our killers, a ready-made motive for this otherwise ridiculous event exists.  

With Doc quickly out of the way, it's Jim's turn.  He's given the rifle and told to kill himself.  Didn't anyone notice that the rifle is too damned long to be used to blow one's brains out?  Doesn't everyone know that if you are going to blow your brains out while "cleaning your rifle" you have to take your shoes off and fire the thing with your toes?  This is basic stuff American kids are taught in grade school. Yet here we are, Jim is wearing heavy early winter clothing and his hunting boots and trying to decide how not to shoot himself in the head when it's actually physically impossible...stupid.

Well, Jim flat out refuses.  Wise choice--what can they do, shoot him with a handgun? Yeah, that's precisely what Red does.  Now our two goons really have a mess on their hands because this is no "murder/suicide".  So John and Red race off, driving recklessly and swerving and sliding all over the road (just like they were when they caused the car crash that created this whole mess--why were they doing that since the Seattle robbery was at least 900 miles behind them?) as they make their getaway.  BUT....moron that Red is, he grabbed the Doc's medical bag rather than their bag of money (which conveniently looks exactly the same).  Can Jim really be dead?  Of course not--Red is so stupid he didn't even manage to shoot Jim when Jim was firing the rifle at him, but instead Red hit a rock that ricocheted into Jim's head and knocked him senseless.  But can't Red tell that Jim is alive and breathing with no bullet holes in him? By this point it's clear that Red is too stupid to be allowed to live.

Ok, now fast forward to back to the oil rig.  AGAIN Jim manages to get away from these two bozos--and John's arm isn't even in a sling! Yes, they got a few punches in but they didn't sheer off one of his feet. Jim knows he can't go back to his place (but does he? [actually, that's not it - he's mad at Marie, but also curious about her connection to the goons]) so he goes to Marie's place at 4 am.  She's not too happy to see him--she has a big modeling gig tomorrow.  At first he accuses her of working for the goons but she says she knows they are the police and that he's a robber.  Amazingly quickly, all misunderstandings are resolved.  He informs her that she can't stay there because (bozo that he is), the two goons took the piece of paper with her address written on it from his pocket while they were rolling around, fighting near the oil rig. So he tells her to pack up all her things as from now on, she lives on the run.  And she agrees!!  [She does say that her therapist told her she has terrible taste in men.]

Then the two head back to his place--but wait, I thought he couldn't go to his place!?! [See previous note.  The reason the goons had to use Marie to lure him was because they didn't know where he lived.]  So the goons know her address but not his? How did they find him in LA when they kidnapped him off the street and took him to an oil rig? It makes no sense!  More excruciatingly awkward small talk and then both fall  into a peaceful sleep, him on the floor and her on the couch/bed--very proper.  

Would you go to sleep if two goons had found you and just threatened to slice off your foot using an oil rig?  Wouldn't you get moving asap?  No, you wouldn't, because  Marie insists on doing her modeling gig while Jim buys "supplies" and bus tickets for two for Moose, WY.--back to the scene of the crime.  Well, the second crime--not the bank robbery and not the oil rig which is the first crime we learned about in the movie. [Also, as Jim explains when Marie asks why they don't go on the run immediately, he's been waiting all this time for the roads in Wyoming to be cleared of snow, which apparently happens on a very specific date, which he has circled on his calendar, and which is TOMORROW.]

But last night our two goons DID go to Marie's apartment and found her modeling portfolio and so knew what company she worked for--and from there, they knew exactly where she'd be modeling the next day!  (Really?  That seems incredibly unlikely...)  But wait--how did they get to her apartment from the oil rig--Jim stole their car from after knocking them out!  (Why didn't he stick THEIR legs into the oil rig?  Things would have been must simpler if he had.) Then, seconds from the end of her modeling gig, the goons show up to smirk at Marie while she models an evening gown!  (Wait--if they didn't know who she was or where she lived or where she worked until AFTER Jim met her, how did they hire her to ensnare Jim???)  She sees the goons and makes a very slow beeline (her dress is ridiculously tight down to her ankles and she's wearing stilleto heels) for Jim who is also there, waiting to take her to the bus station.  

And they make it to the station and onto the bus without any incident at all.  And lo and behold, here is Ben showing up at a rest stop bathroom just to give Jim a jolt of nerves.  Ben is a little too friendly and a little too knowing and it doesn't take Jim long to realize something is up [particularly as they'd already met - before Jim went into the restaurant/bar where he met Marie he was standing out on the street and Ben went up and asked for a light.  Presumably he wanted to look his quarry in the face and read his character]. But what?

Now we see our heroes waking up on the bus in Wyoming, just 10 minutes from Moose, fully refreshed and ready to hunt for a bag of money. (Having taken a Greyhound from Phoenix to Yellowstone I can attest that that is at least a 3 day ride with a LOT of stops at all hours. It'd be even longer and more miserable going north from LA and then over through Nevada or, worse, Idaho. Nobody wakes up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.)  

And here is Ben again!  But this time, he lays his cards on the table. And so does Jim!  And now they are best friends with common enemies, the two goons!  So our duo becomes a trio and all three head out to the campsite in search of the damned bag of money.

But wait--John and Red got their first!  HOW??  And if they were going to do that, why didn't they just do that right from the start save everyone--including themselves--a lot of grief?

And the movie ends as the story began, with Red and John with guns with a plan to kill our hapless trio.  But, as always happens with goons, after having been like conjoined twins for over a year, they really, really hate each other and John now has the itchy trigger finger and desperately wants to be free of Red.  But then Red kills John! I actually did not see that coming...But Jim has plans for Red and again we have another fistfight only this time instead of an oil rig waiting to cut off limbs we have a very very slow snowplow headed right for the cabin in which Ben and Marie lay tied up, very quietly and calmly waiting for someone to untie them.

SOMEONE is certainly going to die by snowplow.  But who?  And when?  And where is the money????

And what is Ben's wife doing all this time?  [Hey, he's got enough money for a new LIFE, let alone wife.  As soon as he bumps off Jim and Marie...]

Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert

Another good murder mystery with great story telling.  This book is widely considered Gilbert's finest novel but since I haven't read several dozen of his books I'm in no position to say.  It is set in a law office (published in 1950) and so, given that he worked in a law office for about 40 years, it's safe to say that he is in his element. So not only are we treated to a ripping yarn but we get to see how a high profile London law office operated 76 years ago.

The basic idea is that Henry Bohun (our protagonist) was recently hired to work at a law firm that regards itself as one of the more prestigious offices in London.  We start with him bright and early on his first day when he is just meeting everyone and finding his feet. The reason there is an opening is because one of their senior partners, Mr. Horniman, died from heart disease recently.  Bohun is a bit of an odd nut, having bounced from subject to subject (studying medicine, accounting and then law in addition to spending some time in the military) and so while young to his profession, he isn't wet behind the ears. The office has an odd atmosphere since everyone's every single action is absurdly regimented by The Horniman System: a method of annotating and storing legal documents that is overly detailed and ridiculously complex.  Every client has a card with their name as well as dozens of letters and numbers that are codes that tell you the dates of events, quantity and nature of letters written and received, topics addressed, problems solved and problems remaining.  Each client--with their obscenely inflated piles of folders, letter copies and notes is assigned to a long coffin (!!!) shaped file. And each file is hermetically sealed (so no silverfish, damp, rats or nosy Nancies are going to get to those files and damage, eat or steal them) and locked with a series of keys that only two people have: the lawyer who worked for that client and the office security guard who opens up and locks down the office every day. 

As Bohun meets each person we get a sense of not only how a work day goes but also the mood of the place.  The office has seven lawyers, each of whom has various axes to grind about the others, generally because each is convinced that they are the only one who works a full day and actually earns their salary. It also has five secretaries, three assigned to the senior partners (at least until one died) and the rest are shared among the remaining lawyers. The one who was assigned to Horniman now works for all the lawyers and she regards this as seriously beneath her. The fact that Horniman Junior was hired to "replace" Horniman Senior does not lessen her resentment as Horniman Junior is widely considered to be a wholly incompent lawyer who isn't even trying to cover that fact up. (He spends all his time at the seaside on his boat, dreaming of stocking trout. I mean, really!) There are also two staff people, the security guard I already mentioned and a cashier.  

Gilbert's special talent is shifting the storytelling from one person to the next so we cycle from room to room, finding some people farfing around while others gripe about others farfing around, some innocently flirting and others making thinly veiled insults and threats. And just as we start to get a handle on the lay of the land in one room with one pair of people, one character interrupts themself and says, "Was that a scream I just heard?"  Then we move to another room, travel back in time a bit, find out how this office pair operates, and, again, one says to the other, "I say, was that a scream?" And round and round we go until we finally get to the nexus of the matter: three people (Horniman Junior, Miss Cornell who is the female character voted "most likely to scream hysterically until someone soundly slaps her," and the security guard Sergeant Cockerill) who have used blunt force to open up a file that no one had the key to and finding no files but instead a dead body crammed inside.

The body, Mr. Smallbone (hence the name of the novel), is both an unimportant client and a trustee for a very large (half a million pounds!!!) and extremely important trust fund. Senior Horniman was the only other trustee. Well, that opens up a lot of sticky legal issues: who manages the money if both are dead? how was the money being managed? was Smallbone murdered because of something he knew--or something he did? Unfortunately, not one single file concerning Smallbone or the trust is anywhere to be found--which means someone worked very hard to (a) eliminate all records of the legal issues concerning Smallbone and (b) eliminate Smallbone as well. To deal with (b), we have the arrival of Inspector Hazlerigg of Scotland Yard.  Apparently this is the Inspector's 4th time appearing in a novel by Gilbert but I haven't read those books so he is new to me.  He's another example of the perfectly competent Scotland Yard inspector that populates all these cozy murder mysteries.  Imagine how crap all these novels woud be if they had American police detectives?  As for (a), Bohun is the obvious choice because (1) since it's his first day of the job he is off the suspect list (it's estimated that Smallbone has been dead 4-8 weeks--remember, the file was hermetically sealed), and (2) he's a lawyer and an accountant, so he'll be able to make both heads and tails of whatever he finds concerning the trust.  

Of course everyone assumes that Senior Horniman was up to some financial larking about, spending trust money to save the law office during the lean war years and then shaving funds from other accounts to secretly restore the trust balance. That is, until Body 2 appears!  Well, that means that the murderer is not only alive but is desperate: their dream that Smallbone (an annoying albeit unimportant person in the grand scheme of things) would remain stuffed in a file for centuries was smashed and now they are against a wall and lashing out. Who are they and will they kill again?

I'm not going to give away anymore as it's extremely tightly plotted with no end of false clues and fabricated alibis. While the mystery is good, the best part of the novel is the conversations behind closed doors in the various offices--after all, with two dead bodies within a few days, it's pretty difficult to do anything else except throw people you hate under a bus in the hopes that they get arrested for murder. 

Garden Update

The weather has been erratic in the past few weeks, torrential rainstorms alternating with blazing hot muggy weather.  Everything is growing at a snail's pace.  In theory, all the little plants are putting their energy into establishing a good root system but at this rate but everything is very runty still.  Here is one of the tomato plants I grew from a seed.  I have no idea what sort it is as I had 15 or so packets of so-called "heirloom" tomatoes (which means they are odd shapes and colors but are alleged to be extra delicious).  

In the spirit of science, I am planting tomato seedlings in three different ways.  The raised bed above  is one way.  The second way is to "keep them in pots of ever increasing size":

Because of what some random person said on a tv show, I clipped off the lowest branches on both these and buried them up to almost the top. (So they were about 8" tall and now they are 2" tall.)  The idea is that the stems will produce more roots and then that will end up generating more tomatoes. Right now it just seems to mean that the plants are extra runty. The final trial will be with tomato sprigs stuck into the straw bales in the front yard.  So far, I'm not sold on the straw bale method as the only plants growing great guns are all the grasses and random plants that grew from seeds that were in the straw--which was NOT supposed to happen.  I think most straw ends up as bedding for large animals so the people that bale straw around here don't care much what gets mixed in.  It'll be raised beds in the front yard next year...

Another experiment is growing dahlias from dried up tubers.  Full dahlia plants are ridiculously expensive here but you can get big bags of old withered tubers for pennies.  So I bought 20 or so and soaked them in water and then, once plumped up, stored in a bucket with cedar chips until the weather was warm.  About a month after that, some of the tubers started producing a bit of greenery---about a 50% success rate. Again, if they don't get it together, there won't be any flowers by the end of this summer.  But unlike tomatoes, these tubers can be stored in the basement and grown again next year and the claim is that each year they get hardier and more productive. 

Below is a gaggle of dahlia pots.  I have no idea what colors the flowers will (perhaps) be so if they are hideous, I'll be pretty ticked.

Potato time:  As promised these tubers are putting a lot of energy into their leaves and I piled up dirt around the leaves every time they got a few inches taller.  Now the dirt level is pretty much even with the top of the bags they are in, so I can just forget about them and let them do their thing.  Once the leaves turn yellow and collapse in a few months, it's time to dump out the bags and see what has been created.  I remember Thomas and I tried this at least 24 years ago and we got about 6 TINY potatos, each about the size of a pinky fingernail and he was THRILLED.  I had to cook them up right away and he had them as a (very slight) snack. I'm sure his teachers heard all about it the next day at school.

A few weeks ago I tossed thousands of lettuce seeds into the raised beds to fill up the spaces between the other plants.  The seeds were years old as I bought a big box of random lettuces to use in the Lettuce Grow during winter months.  Since I can only use 2 or 3 seeds of each kind every two or three months, most of the seeds wouldn't get used for decades. So I decided to toss them all into the ground to see if any were viable. It looks like about 75% sprouted. You can see the cluster of seedlings in the upper left section of the photo.  

I don't remember what I put in each raised bed so it will be a surprise--assuming of course they aren't eaten by something else. We don't get slugs but we do get a LOT of possums, birds, squirrels and raccoons--and raccoons are famously wasteful eaters who just wreck stuff for fun.

Here is new growth on the fig tree. The thing produced a few leaves in January (it mistakenly thought spring had arrived) and when I put the thing outside in March, the cold nights seemed to damage them.  Then nothing happened so I figured the tree was a dud.  But yesterday I noticed TINY leaves starting to grow and today they are already 3-4" inches across.  They are famous for being fast growing so now I am a believer.

And here are our strawberry plugs in the Lettuce Grow.  As is always the case, the plugs look like they are doing nothing for weeks when first put into this thing and then suddenly they grow at a fantastic rate.  And, as I wrote before, it's the best sort of gardening as, so long as the water level doesn't drop too much, you do NOTHING to care for anything: the timer does the watering and it only needs fertilizer added every month or so--just three scoops of  both Fertilizer A and B.  (I can't remember which is which, but one is for plant growth and one for root growth.) They all have kicked into gear but that one in the middle is really going to town.

This is clematis, peony and creeping Jenny corner. The clematises are extremely happy on the fence but for years nothing I tried would grow on the ground--all kinds of annuals and roses just up and died. The ground is very dry as it's near the house and fence and so most water seems to get diverted away.  Also, it gets morning sunlight only and is in total shade after noon. Last year I tried peonies with creeping Jenny and they were thrilled: everybody settled in happily and this spring I could see all the plants were putting out twice as many shoots. Then those idiots who removed three trees a few weeks ago walked all over the beds and stomped on the peonies as they were just 1" tall and dragged tree branches across the clematis plants on the fence. I can't see why they did that since they had to go out of their way to walk into that corner, but there you go. So I am surprised anything is alive here.  Only two peonies had flowers a few weeks ago and one of the clematis is 1/3 its size this year but at least everything is alive.

Death in Captivity by Michael Gilbert

Another corker by Michael Gilbert, this one based on Gilbert's experiences in a WWII Italian POW camp and Gilbert's escape with three other POWs--with a couple of murders tossed in to ratchet up the tension even more. It was published in 1952 when, certainly, the memories of WWII were still fresh.

This POW camp is set in Italy and holds about 300 soldiers, most of whom are English but there are a few Americans and "other colonials" as well. The war is winding down and while you might think that would be good news for POWs, it isn't because they don't know how things are going to play out and none of the options are good. First, Italy's army is in its death throes with most senior officers (including those supervising POW camps) madly collecting wealth so that, if/when Italy collapses, they can flee the country before they are tried for war crimes. And if a camp loses its leaders, its very uncertain how the subordinates will act once they are outsmarted and outnumbered. Even if the POWs live through the collapse of Italy, it isn't clear who will take over: Germany is coming in strong from the north but there are also rumors that England has made a landing at the southern end. While that's great news for the POWs in southern Italy, our story is in one of the northern camps and the German army is NOT very far away--however brutal the Italians guards were, they know the Germans will be far, far worse.

So the only sensible thing to do is to plan an escape. Each "hut" houses 20 or so men.  There are 14 huts, plus a dozen or so "admin" buildings for Italian soldiers and various "orderlies" (technically POWs but for some reason regarded are harmless and so allowed to move around the camp following order of the Italian officers. Huts A and C have both decided to build an escape tunnel. Escapers in other huts focus their attention on "going over the wall." So far, all wall jumping efforts have ended in quick death.  Indeed, SO quickly, the general feeling is that there must be someone in the camp who is working for the Italians. The "Escape Committee" (composed of 6 most senior English officers) holds a meeting to decide how to focus their efforts. The need for this Escape Committee soon becomes clear when they approve the continued building of both tunnels, despite the risk that the Italians know about one or both, and order the tunnelers to make use of any materials they need--including stuff other soldiers have traded for (including their beloved rugby goal posts).  The "theft" of tunneling materials (bags for removing sand, boards to keep the ceiling from collapsing, timber for supporing the ceiling boards) causes no end of resentment, especially among those who are opposed to escaping because they are banking on the English arriving and freeing them. Why waste energy and risk being killed, when you can sit tight and wait? 

More about these tunnels:  Tunnel A is unambitious. It is not far below the surface and headed to just beyond the northern camp wall, which runs along the nearest road. This tunnel will be 50 or so feet long and is almost complete. The idea is that it will take the least time and effort to complete and the escaping men can work their way along the road at night, finding sympathetic farmers to get food from and barns to hide in while waiting for the English invasion. Because successful escape requires knowing which Italians are on guard at any time as well as delivery schedules, the men in Hut A spend all their spare time watching and meticulously recording the guards' activities.  

The characters we learn most about, including protagonist Goyles, are digging Tunnel C.  Tunnel C is far more ambitious: it is deep--20' straight down then levels, heading south for 400'. Its exit (if all goes according to plan) will open up into the side of a small canyon that runs along a wide river.  Across the river is wooded forest on rough, mountainous terrain. The idea is that, though much slower to build, Tunnel C is much safer than Tunnel A: since they will emerge below the line of sight of the camp, escapees can simply scoot down the side of the canyon, float downstream, then climb out of the water wherever the woods are deepest and darkest. The extra wonderful part of Tunnel C is that its entrance is right underneath a collosal iron stove. Hut C engineers rigged up an astonishingly complex pulley system with ropes and tackle (ostensibly for drying wet laundry) they use to hoist up the stove's stone foundation, revealing a 3' diameter hole with ladder going into the tunnel.  Four men stand guard at the stove while two tunnel, one digging through sand and the other collecting sand, bagging it up and crawling back to the entrance to hand the bags to the four men on watch.  Those guys hand off the sandbags to one of their "baggers" who hides them under their clothes, slowly distributes the sand around camp, and then returns the empty bags back to Hut C.  The description of the tunneling process was harrowing: a very detailed account of the difficulty of jiggling along on your stomach, arms stretched out in front, hot stuffy air, only a few weak light bulbs tacked to the ceiling, and constantly dribbling sand falling from the ceiling, all while removing and paddling sand back along ones sides (so effectively the digger is narrowing the tunnel segment they are in) all while Tunneler 2 goes back and forth, collecting up and eliminating the sand as it accumulates. Those minutes while Tunneler 2 is gone, back at the tunnel entrance, are an eternity. Tunnel sessions are limited to 2 hours per team to keep the men from going bonkers.    

One day, extra excited about recent progress, Goyles and Long (another Hut C guy) advance far beyond their ceiling supports and the inevitable happens: a cave in right on top of Goyles. His body is trapped and he can't dig himself out because his arms are stretched out in front of him. The weight of the sand crushes his body and each time he exhales, the sand presses down more, preventing him from inhaling.  Within a minute his eyeballs feel like they are bursting out of his head and he's losing consciousness. Long manages to find him in the dark and, using a piece of lumber as a lever, pulls Goyles' limp body free. Goyles regains consciousness but it is clear that, the closer they get to the river, the softer the soil is, so the more ceiling supports are needed. Digging is halted while they set to work collecting all the boards and lumber they can find for ceiling supports so that there is no risk of the tunnel ever collapsing again.

Then things take a turn: the morning tunneling team shows up ready to get to work and lifts up the stove.  Two enter the tunnel and there, just a few feet along, they find a corpse: it's a Greek soldier named Coutoules face down in the sand and it seems he's died because of a ceiling collapse. They haul his body out and hide it in Hut C. It certainly looks like he died in a tunnel collapse--indeed his fingernails are broken off from his desperate attempts to scrape himself loose. But how did he get into the tunnel by himself--he wasn't even part of a tunneling team!  And that part of the tunnel had the most supports--there just seems to be no way that it could have collapsed. Extremely mysterious. Well, they can't keep a corpse secret from the Italians so the real question is, what do they do with him and when do they report his death? They decide to sacrifice Tunnel A. They convince dozens of men to stage a fight between two rival rugby teams and two "players" carry Coutoules's body as the mob moves across the camp from Hut C to Hut A. This allows them to get the corpse inside Hut A and then down in toTunnel A.  They wait for the following morning and alert the Italians.

The Italians conduct a healf-hearted post mortem and announce the cause of death as suffocation, blaming Coutoules for his own death. They order Hut A to collapse their tunnel but then say no more. One of the POWs is a doctor and he asks to observe the post mortem: he agrees that Coutoules inhaled sand, but there are unexplained dark bruises on the back of his neck which falling sand wouldn't cause.  He's also suspcious of their estimate of time of death--they put his death just a few hours before his "discovery" yet he knows Coutoules's death was at least 24 hours earlier.

Once again the escape committee convene: it is obvious that someone killed Coutoules: he could not have gotten into Tunnel C by himself and no team works at night. But who? And why?  And how?

As the tunneling tension builds, it is discovered that everyone is not as they seem: a new guy, Potter, is put into Hut C.  He claims he knew Coutoules from another POW camp.  He claims that Coutoules had "worked his way" across Italy, hop skipping from one POW camp to another for years. If he's an agent for Italy, then was he killed by English soldiers who found out? Or was he an agent for someone else--Germany?--spying on Italy to permit an easier take over?  In that case, the Italians must have killed him him--but that means they know about Tunnel C and yet allow its contruction to continue. But maybe Potter is an Italian plant and is lying about Coutoules to ingratiate himself into the inner circle of tunnelers. It's time to start keeping an eye on everyone.  

Finally everything comes to a boil: Italy has surrendered, the senior Italian guards are fleeing and the German army is closing in. Safety be damned, it's time to finish the last stretch of the tunnel and make their escape. And then they devise a bold plan: every single POW is going to escape through Tunnel C in 40 minute shifts of 20 people, from 9 in the morning until late evening after lights out. The scheming required to pull off this plan is incredible: people are assigned to teams because of their skills, personality and reliability--the LAST thing they can do is have "Potter" (or whoever he is) in the first group only to have him circle around to the front of the camp and alert the guards before even 10 people have gotten free. Outfits, maps, rations and tools all have to be divvied up and distributed, ensuring that each group has an equal chance of surviving. Once through the tunnel and across the river, mini-teams of three or four will head off into different directions in the woods ensuring that, even if one team is caught, the others are not. Half the book is spent describing that one day, every action of every person, as a slow trickle of people works its way through the tunnel.

Goyles is in the last team, the team least likely to escape as the more POWs disappear the more obvious it becomes that people are gone. You may fail to notice that 20 of 300 people have gone missing if those remaining are milling around noisily but it's pretty difficult to fail to notice 280 of 300 POWs have gone missing no matter how frenetically those last 20 move about. Goyles and his pal Long (the guy who pulled him out of the tunnel) and Byfold (another mate from Hut C) are in the last group and form a three-person team once across the river. Is that the end of the book?  Not by a long shot--we still have 1/3 the book to go! Not only do we have to know if our team is able to trek 400 miles south to "the line" but Goyles finally has an epiphany and figures it all out--how and why Couloutos was killed and why all the wall jumpers were caught and killed: there was indeed a spy in their camp and it wasn't Potter a German, working as a double agent against the Italians (ensuring a quick and easy German take over from the north) and against the English (pumping POW officers for information about weaponry, numbers and strategies), ensuring that Germany wins the war.

If any of this sounds like the movie Stalag 17, it should: many of the themes (how spys in a POW camp get installed and operate, how they are discovered, how escape plans are hatched and carried out, how a  POW camp is organized and operates) are exactly the same in this book as they are in that movie. And the crazy duality of the whole experience is the same: on the one hand, the Italian officers take special glee in torturing and killing the POWs (apparently pulling off fingernails during questioning is at art form) but they also like to attend theatre performances put on by the POWs and give genuine praise for skillful acting and high production value. So are the Italian guards friends with the POWs?  Yes but also no: they joke around, do trades, permit the POWs a certain level of jocularity and teasing but then, seemingly randomly, they drop the boom and haul a POW away "for a few questions", never to be seen again.

Flint Central High

 Flint Central High (and the attached Whittier Middle School) are magnificent old buildings right smack dab in the "College Cultural Area" - next to the library and the Flint Institute of Arts - that have been empty since 2009.  Apparently people (we know one for a fact) have offered to buy the buildings from the city, but they've held off, the suspicion being that they would eventually get a deal from some salvage company to demolish them.  The past year or so they've really started to go downhill - it was obvious that people were breaking in, graffiti started to cover the outside, and parts of them appeared burt-out from the inside.  BUT!  A couple of months ago wire fencing appeared round the perimeter (which was annoying to me because, thanks to the old Mott parking structure that had provided a route from home to UM being shut, I was cutting through the grounds of the high school - no longer.  I now have to take a slightly less convenient route on my bike.

Anyway, a couple of days ago they "broke ground" on a NEW Flint High School.  As usual this is funded by the Mott Foundation, Mott being one of the early GM guys (also the apple sauce) who made his mint here and set up the foundation which seems to have bottomless cash, to the tune of about a hundred million dollars!!  And this is what you see when you go past now:

In that last one, the dirt on the left is where there used to be a basketball court, which so far is the only visible construction (destruction) work they've done.
 

Death Has Deep Roots by Michael Gilbert

 

This is my second read by Michael Gilbert and this is even better than the first. The novel centers on the murder trial of Victoria Lamartine, a French woman now living in London.  She was part of the French Resistance and trained to murder German soldiers--and admits to having killed one using a very specific method: holding an extremely sharp and long kitchen knife in the left hand, blade up, then forcefully shoving the blade right under the victim's right rib cage, up through the liver, the lung, and into the heart.  The person loses blood so quickly they don't have time to scream or fight and, since you are only going through soft tissue, a motivated child could accomplish the task.  And, it turns out, Major Eric Thoseby, an English soldier who during the war specialized in transferring funds to strategically useful branches of the French resistance, moving English spies into France to acquire information about the German occupation, and moving important French figures out of France away from the reach of Germans, was killed by someone using precisely this method. Worse, it was Lamartine who was found with Thoseby's dead body just minutes after he was killed. The police do not believe her story, that she is innocent and desperately wanted Thoseby alive, particularly after she admits that she knew Thoseby in France. She is arrested and charged with murder.  Her defense lawyer insists that her best chance is to admit guilt and claim that she was provoked because she was mentally unhinged (the equivalent of manslaughter in the US) so at worst, she would get 20 or 30 years in prison. But at least she wouldn't get death. Given that her past is both heroic and tragic, the lawyer insists the jury would go easy on her. But she claims she is innocent and demands a new attorney. The only one who will take the case is Noel Rumbold who is partnered with his father, and who specializes in contract law. Both father and son agree to take the case after interviewing Ms. Lamartine because they both (to their own amazement) decide they believe her. Unfortunately for them and her, given the facts, they decide that their only chance of winning is not merely to argue that she did not kill Major Thoseby but to prove who did--and if they don't come up with the killer and a really plausible motive, they are sunk.

So if Lamartine did not kill Thoseby, who did?  The key to the whole puzzle (implied by the title of the book) goes back to events that took place during the war, when Lamartine worked at a farm (but really a resistance cell called a 'Maquis') in the rural parts of northern France. She claims that a Captain Wells, a British  soldier and agent in their secret service, arrived at the farm and stayed there for three weeks while he gathered intelligence. During that time, Wells and Lamartine fell in love and she she became pregnant. One day she was sent on an errand to another Maquis and found the whole placed abandoned (extremely suspicious).  She came back to her farm and discovered everyone either dead or gone. The only possible conclusion is that someone betrayed them. She hid in the woods with the hope of making her way to another village where she could contact other resistance cells but within a few hours she was arrested by the Germans and sent to a work camp. She gave birth to a son but conditions were so brutal in the camp that the boy died very young--hence the horrific past that would play on jury sympathies. Who wouldn't get a bit stabby if they had been through all that?

Years go by, the war ends, she applied for residency in England. Mr. Sainte--the head of the neighboring Maquis (the one abandoned just minutes before the Germans arrived)--opened a hotel and hired Ms. Lamartine along with a few others who were part of the resistance. And then Lamartine makes a fateful decision: she decides that she must find Wells. She is certain Wells is alive (she has "a feeling") and, since Thoseby was his only contact in the military, she wants Thoseby to find Wells. She writes Thoseby a letter. Then another. Then another. Thoseby digs around and then tells Lamartine that the only reasonable conclusion is, given the complete absence of any record of Wells after the day the Germans took over the farm and killed or imprisoned everyone, that Wells was killed too: if he had been taken prisoner, Germans would have kept records; if he had escaped and fled to another part of France, he would have communicated with Thoseby when he had the chance; if he had "turned" and worked for Germany, they would have told the English; if he had fled to eastern Europe, they would have heard about him through their contacts there. Yet, Thoseby is not satisfied with the story he tells Lamartine: Thoseby knows that Wells had stitched into his uniform dozens of bars of gold worth a small fortune that he was to turn over to the Maquis. What happened to the gold? 

Because Lamartine switched attorneys the court delays her trial and grants her lawyers eight days to build their case.  So, they divvy up the tasks: Rumbold the Younger sets off to France to see if he can find out anything that was not included in the British files on Wells, Wells's mission and the disastrous events of that day when the Germans "discovered" them. Rumbold the Elder stays in London and does what he can to drag out the early days of the trial to give their team time to find out ANYTHING that will save Lamartine's bacon.  Major McCann, a friend of Rumbold's from the military (a brusk, no-nonsense Scottish person--they're always like that in English novels: when you need someone to threaten thugs, call in a Scottish friend) heads to where Wells spent his early years to find out anything about his schooling, work experiences, former relationships.  If Wells is alive, maybe he contacted someone. Any name, any address will give them something to work with.  

With our players in place (and us only about 30 pages into the book), Gilbert develops the story masterfully: each chapter centers on one member of our team and we discover along with them, Lamartine's backstory, Wells's backstory, and the secrets of that suspiciously lucky Maquis cell. Most of Rumbold the Elder's chapters are transcripts of witness testimony along with the questioning by the prosecution and cross examination by the defense. Central to the prosecution case is that the four other people in the hotel at the time of Thoseby's murder were all in sight of each other at the time of death and so establish for each mutually supporting air tight alibis. But none are what they claim and soon we discover that they are working together and all their testimony is a tissue of whoppers. But why? Well, that's what we have to find out.  And we do in a typically climactic way with gasping jurors, members of the press stampeding out of the court to get their stories to their editors in time for the next edition, and plenty of fainting, weeping and whooping all around.

And what about Wells?  Let's just say that (a) he, not Lamartine, is the real center of the story and (b) her "feelings" aren't as reliable as she claims they are.