Crack in the Teacup by Michael Gilbert

I mentioned in a previous blog that this book is a rip snorter. It was published in 1966 and we see the influence of how the nastiness of society can be discussed in the 1960s in a way that would never fly in the 1930s: not only do we have a homosexual teacher (deeply closeted) being overly friendly with young men (I think around 16 and 17 years old) but the young men are so savvy to this that they (it is hinted at) tolerate sex acts so they can blackmail the men for "dosh". These boys think the whole situation is very funny and enjoy watching the men squirm as they realize how much they have to lose if their predilections become public. Very nasty. The basic theme in the story is that a very old and small seaside town is being squeezed dry by developers who want to attract London money. It seems that Londoners no longer feel obligated to live where they work and like the idea of moving their nuclear families to this town which they assume is crime free--so long as the town is interesting enough to keep them amused all the time (hence the need for clubs with bars and racketball courts and movie theaters, restaurants, a "Pleasure Dome" (which sounds horrible and seems to be a place where little kids hang out and spend loads of money on bumper cars, pinball machines and junk food during the day, then teens cluster in dark corners to make out and push some envelopes in the eveing, and then after 10 pm, the older and seedier crowd arrive for betting and drug dealing) all downtown, and loads and loads of new houses that are eating up farm land) while the fathers spend all their non-working hours traveling to and from The Big City. The paradox, of course, is that with all that new money comes all sorts of opportunities for crime, from teens stealing and smashing stuff to beating old people up, to the local council working in cahoots with corrupt developers who falsely assign low rates of value to coastel land and farmland that they own through shell corporations that have no public names attached so they can then sell that same land to developers at inflated prices who turn around and sell the land again to home buyers once shoddy homes have been built on them!  A nice deal for everyone all round except those with tenancy on the land (and now I know what that means) and those that own land on the other side of the railroad tracks that want to make deals with their land with a different set of developers. And into all this we have our hero, Anthony, who is a young lawyer who just moved here to help take over his father's law partnership because his father just had an "attack". Anthony tells his friends who are still plugging away in London (but only until they have children and then they'll move to some other idealic small town on some other seaside), that he is going to help out until either his father is back on his feet or until he can find someone else to take over, and then he'll get back to London where he can do REAL lawyering. Yeah, sure.

Next thing he knows, Anthony is seeing evidence of corruption all over the place, making enemies everywhere he turns, being beaten up on trains, and--worse of all--bullied by his (extremely attractive he suddenly notices) secretary, Ann, who has no qualms with asking her secretary pals to steal their bosses secret files so she and Anthony can take a gander to find out exactly who owns what and who.  Ann wants to burn the whole place to the ground, rooting out the corruption roto and branch.  Anthony, who just wants a quiet anonymous lifem finds his ethical standards slowly weakening once he realizes that perhaps Ann is correct and the right does outweigh the good.  I won't get into the details of this land grab story as it's all too familiar and depressing, but this novel has everything in it to make it an excellent read: a cast of interesting and varied characters who are all portrayed very well (with with humor or nastiness) and danger and, of course, romance.  

Garden Update

 Out of nowhere appeared this sunflower.  I had purchased a very large bag of sunflower seed and tossed them about in March to help the birds make it through a surprise cold snap (after a ridiculous heat wave in February) and, among a million-odd seeds this is the only one that turned into anything.  There is a bumble bee fast asleep in the flower.  This was about 6 pm and I was doing my usual evening rounds, checking on things, trying to find all the damage one ground hog can do, and that bee was there, not moving, the whole time I was outside.  I had read something about bees eating so much they get too fat and dozy to fly home at the end of a day's work.  I didn't believe it at the time but it seems that that is what happened here.

Here is another extremely active bee, flitting about on the bee balms which is just about done. So not all bees get dozy:

Film review: Laughter in Paradise (1951)

This would make a fine triple-bill of sillier Sim performances with The Happiest Days of Your Life and The Green Man.  While it's probably the weakest of the three, and Sim is a little miscast, it's still very solid entertainment, with a well-constructed plot, stylish direction and great performances.

The basic plot is very simple: infamous practical joker (we see him on his deathbed setting his nurse's newspaper on fire before the lighter falls from his lifeless fingers) Henry Russell divides his fortune in four pieces of  £50,000 each (in 1951 money!) to four relatives, conditional on them (a) not contesting the will, and (b) performing certain tasks that each of them (with one exception) will find uniquely unpleasant.  Sim plays mild-mannered ex-Colonel Deniston Russell, who is engaged to the always-reliable Joyce Grenfell (who is still in the armed forces, and whose father is a judge who disapproves of Deniston), but hides a secret that he is a best-selling author of numerous pot-boilers under various pseudonyms.  His adoring secretary (played by Eleanor Summerfield, 

who is very winning but doesn't seem to have done much of note other than this film (and its panned re-make)) thinks they're (and he is) wonderful, but he is ashamed enough that he won't reveal his secret to his fiancee, and on hearing of his cousin's death, believes that now he will have the money to devote his life to serious writing.  This snobbery and fear of what people will think is targeted in the will, where his task is to get arrested and serve no fewer than 28 days in prison.  (This will mean postponing the wedding again, when the engagement has already been going on for ten years, and to make matters worse, he is forbidden from talking about the will until the task is complete.)

The next biggest part, and the most unexpectedly moving performance, is Henry's sister Agnes, played by Fay Compton.  She is a bitter spinster (we find out why later) who is cruel to her one young maid, 

so of course her task is to become a maid for a "middle class" family and not get fired for 28 days.  The family that hires her consists of a lovely young woman and her hypochondriac Scrooge-like father, played by the wonderful John Laurie, in whom Agnes certainly meets her match.  On the first night she is cooking him steak for dinner, and while he calls her up the stairs for the umpteenth time, the family dog scarfs the food, causing John Laurie to fire her.  She begs him not to and even offers $1,000 if he doesn't, which both alarms him and piques his interest enough so that he hires a detective to follow her around.  What he doesn't plan on is the handsome young detective and his daughter falling in love.

Next we have George Cole as Herbert, 

who on this performance seems to have been the model for Michael Crawford's Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'em role, as he, a humble bank clerk, is severely lacking in, as his cousin says, "push."  His task is to burst into his manager's office with a mask and a toy gun and hold him up.  As he is completely petrified of said manager, who regards him as an utter fool, this requires some girding of loins.  (Deniston offers him one of his books about a bank job to give him pointers.)

Finally, there is the Terry-Thomas-like (alas, not the actual Terry-Thomas, but Guy Middleton) utter cad, predictably named Simon.  His task is to marry the very first woman he meets, as he is a perpetually broke playboy who never maintains relationships.  He thinks he's got the best task of the lot, and has no compunction at breaking the rules (the first person he talks to is a cigarette girl whom he has no intention of marrying, played by Audrey Hepburn, in presumably her first role), 

waiting to find a woman who looks wealthy enough to make it worthwhile.  He runs into one such while on the way to spend some time on his boat, because news of his good fortune has leaked out and he is being besieged by gold-diggers.  She has broken down on the way to visit her brother at Eton, and trying to avoid the man her rich uncle wants to set her up with.

We cut between the various stories, and there are twists and turns each one of which you will be able to see coming, 

but none-the-less, you are carried along very pleasantly, especially by Deniston's story.  Everyone learns a lesson, and just about everyone is better off for it.  And Fay Compton is a revelation in a role that could very easily have been trite or maudlin in the hands of a lessor actor. 

The Doors Open by Michael Gilbert

This book, also featuring Inspector Hazlerigg, was published in 1949.  I'm not sure what to say about it as I really have no idea what was going on in it.  It featured three heroes: a new guy, Paddy Yeatman-Carter who is recently out of the army, our friend "Nap" Rumbold who is firmly out of "Intelligence" and now doing boring law stuff, and Inspector Hazlerigg who, I think, meets Nap in this book.  Major McCann, who got established in the previous novel in this series, features briefly, but does not play a significant role.  (We do hear an update that he has gotten married to a woman who was running one of those dicy businesses in the shady part of town that we were introduced to in a previous novel and it it is hinted at that they are now running the place on the right side of the law.) The events that kick off the story are clear enough: Paddy has a job he hates and is coming home on the train late one cold, dark early Spring night and sees through the windows on his car into the next car, a guy who looks extremely morose and Paddy immediately gets the sense that the guy is going to do himself in. So, torn between thinking "it's none of my business" and "the problem with the world today is that everyone says everything is none of their business", Paddy decides to chum up and glom on to the guy until he's brought around to his senses. Once off the train (they get off at the same stop), Paddy realizes they are (sort of) neighbors.  He uses that as an excuse to greet the guy, make small talk, and then suggest they go out for a drink at the nearby pub. The guy agrees and within a few hours, it seems that Paddy's plan worked: the sad sack, Mr Britten, admits he is in a dark place because he's just been laid off, and also tells Paddy that he's convinced it's retaliation because he saw something suspect "in the books".  He shows Paddy some slips/receipts (that mean absolutely nothing to Paddy since they are enumerated transaction reports). But, after a few more beers, the slips are forgotten and they stumble to their separate homes. The next morning, when Paddy is leaving his apartment, he sees Mr Britten's lights are still on in his livingroom--even though it's sunny and almost noon. Then, Paddy sees a crowd of looky-loos and finds out that Mr Britten was just pulled from the river.  The police are saying that he'd been in the water a while and there was no evidence of foul play.  The preliminary conclusion is that he jumped.  Paddy finds this hard to swallow: so last night after cheering up, Mr Britten went into his dark apartment, turned on the lights, rested for a few hours, then got up, left his apartment (leaving the lights on), and toddled off to throw himself into the river?  Well, it's not IMPOSSIBLE, but it is ODD.  Or so Paddy tells the police--which puts Paddy at the top of the suspect list. And, because he was held over night in a police cell, Paddy loses his job.  Well, now he is really in a pickle.

From that point, things kind of spiral into really complicated weirdness: Paddy meets Nap (they don't know each other up to this point) and become roommates and Nap gets him a job as a journalist for a newspaper that specializes on business and the economy (I guess like the Wall Street Journal) which gives Paddy the excuse to be a Nosy Nelly, poking around businesses and asking impertinant questions. Paddy goes to Mr Britten's work place and sees a guy with one eye coked out of his mind (he's the accountant who generated the suspicious payment slips!) and Mr Britten's supervisor (who is all Crocodile Tears) pretends to care that Mr Britten is dead--until Paddy makes an anti-commie remark and THEN the mask slips!!!  Then there is another "suicide" and Paddy is again on the scene--and now the police are decidedly suspicous: why is Paddy relevant to two completlely unrelated suicides? THEN Nap goes to a swanky club run by mobsters and is surprised when they start threatening him--and, just in the nick of time, strangers (who turn out to be undercover detectives who are keeping an eye on the mobsters) cause a scene so Nap can escape before he gets himself killed.  At that point, Paddy, Nap and the police are working together.  And into all that Nap decides he wants to get married and Paddy decides HE wants to get married and a nurse (Paddy does spend a lot of time in the hospital after getting into fights with strangers when walking home late at night) and a secretary show up and start getting into the mix, playing Nancy Drew and Bess Marvin when the boys, Nap and Paddy, are off being the Hardy Boys:

[That's Bess up front with Nancy, always a red head, in the back, on the left.  The blond, I can't remember her name, is their client.]

As far as I can tell, the bad guy is a sleeper agent for Russia and is a fanatical communist in London  pretending to be a fanatical capitalist so he can (a) accumulate a lot of money while also (b) destroying the frail British economy from the inside, who occasionally partners with Italian-English (NOT Italian immigrants, we are assured) mobsters who (a) monopolize cocaine imports and sales and (b) kill people so it looks like suicide as a side hustle.    

I never did understand RICO laws when in law school--I'm not at all surprised that organized crime pays so well in this country because I doubt anyone actually understands where business ends and crime begins--and this novel is just a lengthy case study of two (and sometimes three) organized crime units in London with converging interests and fairly useless police using two hapless ex-army guys as their unwitting undercover agents. I would say the only people who need to read this are those completists who want to know everything that happens in the personal lives of our regular characters.

Meanwhile, after finishing that, I started Gilbert's Crack in the Teacup (published 1966) and it is (so far at least) BRILLIANT--Gilbert in true form. I intended just to read the first few pages to see if it was any good or if I needed to take a break from Gilbert and the next thing I knew it was 2 am and I was on page 122. 

Monster Vine and Melon Update

This morning I was SHOCKED at the size of a watermelon I had never seen before:

I have ordered some jute melon hammocks (as they are called) but they haven't arrived yet. As to the Vine Beast, it, too, grew in the night with a brand new 5' tall branch growing up the back fence, heading toward our neighbor's house:

Finally, I see some evidence of blossoms, soon to be squash or gourds or whatever:

 

Another Watermelon and a Monstrous Pumpkin (?) Vine

I hadn't seen this one before and suddenly it was a real mini-watermelon.  I'd guess there are about 15 at this point, from 1/2" to 2" diameter.  I believe this is the point that they need a lot of water so I've been watering them in the evenings.  Weather.com, now with access to weather balloons only because the powers that be in Washington decided last year that we no longer need to have access to information from weather sattelites, has been reporting a 79% chance of rain every day for the past week and we got nothing.  Then, this morning, exactly when it said there was a 0% chance of rain, it started to rain.

I remember when I was growing up people made fun of weather reporters because they were ALWAYS wrong.  Then, sometime in the 80s, every rinky dink TV station got access to the "Dopplar Radar" (whatever that is) and the weather reports became the most scientifically reliable part of the news, while everything else turned into entertainment.  (In the immortal words of KTLA's Hal Fishman, "I guess that's news.")  Now we are back in the 1970s in more ways than one and I don't like it. 

At the very back of the yard, between our stone wall and a raised garden bed a vine of somt sort sprouted up from where we used to have our compost pile.  I have no idea what it is but it is larger and more aggressive than any plant I've ever grown before. You can't see it well from this picture, but it is about 2' tall, and runs along the wall for about 6'.  The leaves are the size of dinner plates and yesterday one blossom appeared, and it is larger than my hand:

And here it is growing over and between two raised beds, and taking over the entire path I need to use to get to my strawberries and tomatos.  To be honest, I'm slightly afraid of it.  Its stems are 2" thick and too tough to bend to comply with my trellis supports--it's going to do what it's going to do and that's all there is to it.  Even the ground hog leaves it alone.  

Hummingbirds and Bees continued

Here are the hummingbird vine blossoms mentioned in the previous post.  Each flower is between 5-6" long and each branch has buds for 12-15 blossoms which bloom in succession so they last for many weeks once it gets piping hot every day.

1

 

Butterflies and Strawberries

 I was outside yesterday evening, just at dusk, at noticed this fellow/gal flitting among my echinaceas.  According to google, it is a Canadian Tiger Swallowtail and I believe it: 

At Thomas's insistance, I planted a butterfly and hummingbird zone in our yard probably 20 years ago and it has always floundered, producing a whole lot of not much. But this year, after doing absolutely nothing for it, it is going great guns: the echinaceas (which are normally 3' tall here at most) are ridiculously robust--one is over 6' tall!--and a hummingbird vine that has languished ever since we had a deadly freeze a few years ago has decided it really does have a will to live and has pumped out dozens of blossoms specially designed for hummingbirds ONLY--no bees allowed.  So far I haven't seen any hummingbirds as I don't get up early enough in the morning but what is Simon's excuse, I'd like to know?  And, meanwhile, we have this bounty on the Lettuce Grow hydroponic device (which I just topped up with water and nutrients a few days ago after doing absolutely nothing for it for weeks and weeks):

I can testify that the one strawberry I ate was delicious. And there are more on the way: