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.  

The White Priory Murders by Carter Dickson

 

This is Dickson's second H.M. mystery published in 1934 just two years after Dickson moved to England and started furiously writing, publishing sometimes 5 or even 6 books a year. It goes without saying that this is a locked room mystery--a real head scratcher--but the character development and plotting is a bit rough. Clearly it's an early work. Our friend Inspector Masters is presented as if he's the main character/investigator but (apparently) the public reacted so much more warmly to H.M. (who does not appear qua detective until about halfway through the novel) that H.M. was elevated to the primary detective and Masters demoted to his sidekick in all later H.M. mysteries.  It was the right choice since H.M. is far too eccentric to be anyone's side kick but Masters is a strong enough character that he should have been the star of his own series. There are several features of this book that make it one of the lesser Dickson stories:

(1) The story is told from Jim Bennet's point of view, an American who arrives in London to visit his uncle H.M., whom he's never before met.  Bennet is young and clearly the Dick Powell (of the movie 42nd Street) sort: never the center of action but always "gets the girl".  And the minute we meet this character, we know that (a) he's going to ask the detective a lot of questions to help develop our understanding of what is going on; (b) he's going to be given tasks that require climbing, lifting, hiding, punching and restraining villains; (c) he's going to fall in love at first sight with a hapless female; (d) that female is going to appear as a primary murder suspect but the fact that he fell in love with her means she didn't do it.  And that's pretty much how things played out in this book.  Jim is tolerable but completely predictable.

(2) The mystery doesn't happen until about one third the way through the book and so the first section is Jim relating his work experiences to H.M. (who is sitting in his office avoiding Christmas festivities organized by his long suffering secretary nicknamed "Lollypop".  Since we never see or hear her, I have no idea how she earned that name). So for 70 or so pages we hear how Jim spent his voyage on an ocean liner, surrounded by insufferable American celebrities as well as their entourage and all the backstabbing they do to one another.  I can't even remember why he got that job--what does the guy do for a living?  It's totally unclear.

(3) Once we finally get to the scene of the crime--an outlandishly grand house built in the style of a 15th century royal vacation home designed to allow for maximally secret trysts--the book turns into a strange combination of Citizen Kane, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Sunset Boulevard. The house is too big, too weird, with too many secret hallways and windows through which everyone can see something but not everything going on somewhere else. The house has sneaky servants with strange injuries and is full of various friends and relations whose history and connections are murky.

(4) The first murder victim (there is always more than one in these stories--the minute you are certain "who dunnit" that person ends up at the bottom of a steep staircase with a broken neck) is movie star Marcia Tait who is described as impossibly beautiful. She's always plays the sexpot in movies and so is assumed to be the same in her real life--every man in her orbit is assumed to be a past or present or future lover.  As a result, all women hate her because they think she is going to steal her man and almost all men hate her because they are convinced that she would have sex with them if only there wasn't some other man near her that she (at that moment) favors. In short, she makes everyone around her  unhinged. And she's unhinged herself, with "big star" demands such as having the owner of the house make up the outdoor marble pavillion so that she can sleep there--no small ask.  It is assummed that she wants to meet a lover out there but in fact she wants to meet her manager/agent out there as he has inside information on deals being struck between Hollywood movie companies and London theater companies. She wants out of Hollywood and they aren't going to let go of her easily.  On the other hand, various London theaters want to snap her up because they want to inject a bit of sex appeal to boost their sales.  But if terrible rumors about her are believed (such as "being difficult to work with"--the very words that have killed thousands of women's careers), she may end up with no work at all.  

(5)  Despite being advertised as a "Christmas Mystery" there is nothing "Christmassy" about this book at all: the only reason we know it is winter is because footprints in a light dusting of snow are an important clue. Other than that, there is NOTHING jolly or festive about this gloomy and heavy handed miserable mystery.

I won't go into too many details because, as usual for Carter Dickson/Dickson Carter, there are several solutions generated only to be tossed aside as impossible.  The central facts are these:  Jim has a wild night in London with friends and sets out for Priory House much later than he intended, arriving at 7 or so in the morning instead of before midnight. Just as he pulls up his car into the driveway (and just as the sun is coming up so he can see clearly), he sees a man (movie star has-been John Bohun--that  ridiculous name would NEVER have been allowed in Hollywood in the 30s) with blood all over his hands and a crazed look in his eyes, standing outside a large marble building. There is about 3" of snow on the ground and one set of tracks--his--leading to the building.  John orders Jim to look around, check out things, but stresses that he (John) (a) just arrived, (b) made the only set of tracks going to the pavillion, and (c) there is "something nasty is inside". Nasty indeed: it's Marcia's cold corpe with the top of her head bashed in. This lady will NOT be having an open casket funeral....

Right from this moment Jim assumes his role as everyone's dogsbody: John orders him about and Jim obeys. When Masters shows up, he tells Jim where to go, what to notice, and what to say to whom.  When H.M. shows up, HE takes over as Jim's boss, ordering him about. Here's the rub: according to the local doctor, Marcia was killed around 3:00 last night but John didn't arrive from London until just a few minutes before Jim, around 6:30 in the morning.  There is only one set of tracks leading to (and not from) the pavillion where Marcia's dead body is.  And the snow started around midnight and ended around 2:00, so before Marcia was killed.  Put all that together and you have a woman killed after the snow stopped, but by someone who left no tracks in the snow either going to or leaving the Pavillion. And thus we have a locked room mystery.

As for the people in the house: 

Maurice Bohun: John's brother and owner of the oversized ugly house, who is unbelievably obnoxious and awful.  He's set up to be the perfect murderer as he is a smarty pants know-it-all and no one would be sad if he was sentenced to be hung for murder. 

Katherine: A relative of Marcia's and it is never explained why she's there. She's beautiful--sort of a watered down version of Marcia so therefore not offensively sexy as Marcia was--just attractive enough for one man to handle. The minute Jim falls in love with her--which is on sight--we know she isn't the murderer despite the fact that she has no alibi at all.

Louise: John's daughter who lives with her uncle Maurice. Louise is the crazy young woman who takes huge doses of opioids to "settle her nerves" that cause her to suffer hallucinations, sleepwalk and sleep scream. When she "comes to" in the morning after the murder, she is on the floor near the back door that leads to the pavillion and one of her arms is covered in blood. But whose blood?  

Rainger: a louse and a cad who works with both John and Marcia. He's a movie exec who has glommed onto Marcia because he's trying to manipulate her career for his own profit. He's a lecherous drunk and he propositions every female he meets (no servant or neice of Maurice is safe) by promising a movie career in exchange for sex.  Once he's had the sex, he frees himself of them by telling them they are "too ugly" to ever make it in the movies. Another horrible person set up to be the murderer because we'd all love to see him executed.

Mr. and Mrs. Willard: primary servants in the house who seem to operate on no sleep whatsoever as they both see no end of shenanigans during the night Marcia is killed: people turning lights on and off all over the house, people creeping up and down this hallway and that, people running in and out of the pavillion until midnight, cars arriving, cars leaving, dogs barking, dogs not barking...is it any wonder with all that larking about that someone ends up with their forehead bashed in?

Potter: the local inspector who initially is excited to be involved in such a big case but, once he sees what he is up against, quickly puts in a call to London asking for help, hence the arrival of Masters.  Potter doesn't leave though as once Masters arrives, he's required to run hither and yon, checking fingerprints, blood types, taking photos, checking backgrounds. And why does H.M. show up? Because once Potter calls Masters out and Masters sees what he's up against, Masters calls H.M.--only he's familiar enough with H.M. to know that he can't simply ask for help on a murder case so he tells H.M. that "Jim got himself into a situation" and it's Jim that needs H.M.'s help--a call for help H.M. is willing to answer.

So who dunnit?  Well, in true Agatha Christie fashion, it's the person we are least likely to suspect because it's the person we are led to believe (a) doesn't exist and (b) once we learn of their existence we are told they didn't show up at the house until the day AFTER the murder.  And what's the deal with the footprints--how did the murderer get into the pavillion to kill Marcia? They didn't.  As H.M. says, you solve a locked room mystery by proving that it isn't a locked room....

Wadin' not Swimmin'

Tried to take Frederick for a walk/swim today and found the route that we've used for years washed away.  So we had to get into the lake where it was about thigh deep, with very silty mud at the bottom (along with several razor sharp submerged trees).  And then when we got to the other side, it was an almost vertical climb to the path.  Frederick was decidedly pouty for a while there, but recovered nicely.  Looks nice, though, doesn't it?

Garden Update

I've planted out all the beds with tomotos (that I grew from seeds and while they are alive, they are runty--I really doubt we'll get any tomatos this year..), some sort of squash or legume thing, and tossed in some lettuce seeds to fill in the spaces.  If the weather vacillates between scorching hot sunshine and explosive thunder/lightening rain storms like we had two nights ago, they should live but it does seem like they have a lot of growing to do in just two months.

Expanding on the "try it and see if it works" approach, I decided to hang some pots on the side of our garage.  Strawberries take up too much space on the ground and everyone here spends a lot of time complaining about the damage squirrels do to strawberry plants they can get to (hence the Lettuce Grow being stocked with only strawberry plugs).  So I decided to hang some there hoping that no squirrel can reach them (though I am sure they'll try).  That side of the garage gets blazing hot after about noon until about 7:30 pm each day, so they should like the space.  As to watering needs, they are under an eave so they won't get rain and, being in black pots, they will dry out quickly.  So, I invested in a solar powered watering system.  It won't arrive for another week but in theory, it should be really cool: a solar panel powers a pump that sends water up from a bucket through a tube that is connected to drippers which are placed in each pot. You can install as many drippers as you want and space them any way you want by cutting the tubing into whatever length sections you want. You can also add fertilizer directly into the bucket water so it can do two jobs at once while you do absolutely nothing.  And, if your bucket has a lid with only a tiny hole for the tubing to get through, it shouldn't evaporate or get mosquito larvae in the water.  

And I can report that so far at least, the strawberries are happy as two have grown babies in just one day:

I didn't think I'd need pots in row 2 for weeks, but apparently I was wrong.  Amazing what a plant can do in just 12 hours if it puts its mind to it.  In theory, these can be allowed to die off in Fall and left out all winter and they will spring to life next year.  That seems hard to credit but, again, would total strangers on YouTube lie?  

Film review: More Than A Secretary (1936)

Simon is officially done with both picking out movies and writing up reviews of them so anyone reading this blog is going to have to put up with my choices and my opinions for the forseeable future.

We are subscribed to The Criterion Channel which is a mixed blessing: it is not overly expensive and they have movies we enjoy watching but navigating through the site is extremely frustrating and recently, all the movies run at 1/4 speed--which means that after we select a movie we have to then switch to our Roku account to watch the movie on that site--which is even MORE annoying to navigate.  So while Simon claimed to be working on his book in his office, I was at home trying to find a decent movie to watch. I found a Criterion collection called "working relationships"--a vague description if ever there was one--but I gathered from the few titles I was familiar with that they were screwball comedies that criticize notions of 'modern' love. Adam's Rib and His Gal Friday were in the collection.  But this movie, More Than A Secretary, was new to me and since it stars Jean Arthur I was all in.

The movie was made in 1936 and, aside from comments about "men," it is decidedly unpolitical.  It begins with the camera zooming in through a tall office building window. As we close in we can hear the steady tap tapping of dozens of mechanical typewriters and we can see two rooms filled with young women steadfastly typing away as a teacher in each room dictates various sentences or rhyming words to give them the chance to practice. Here is Ruth Donnelly, who plays one of the teachers Helen Davis, the best friend of the female lead: she's smart, honest, funny, loyal and dearly cares for her silly best friend, Carol Baldwin, who is played by Jean Arthur.  And, according to the Rules of the Side Kick, she's never going to get a man. 

Both Carol and Helen are exasperated with their worst student, Maize, who can't type to save her life and doesn't even care. She doesn't want to be a secretary, she wants to be the wife (or, failing that, the mistress) of a rich businessman. Maize has mastered being the woman the businessman wants and tells her teachers that they are saps for trying to be anything other than an appendage on a rich businessman.  To underscore her point, she's offered a job right in the middle of them telling her she's failed out of their typing program.  Looking smug, Maize sails out of the room with her eye on the prize.   

Meanwhile, another businessman, Fred Gilbert played by George Brent, who is the managing editor of Body and Brain magazine, has hired (and fired) many secretaries from this school and calls to complain to Carol to tell her that the secretaries feckless and stupid and he demands a secretary who can actually do the job. Carol is of two minds--given what she has seen with Maize, she knows only too well that most of her students are useless but she's also determined to find out what exactly he wants. She arrives to a bewildering scene: an entire office of employees who alternate from working demonically on a magazine and doing calesthenics for 10 minutes every hour. Their mandated lunches, bran muffins and butter milk, are provided free. Here is Mr. Gilbert's right hand man and exercise guru, Ernest played by Lionel Stander, shouting out stretch moves.  

Carol is both astonished and quickly finds herself (a) forced to exercise and (b) strong armed into becoming Mr. Gilbert's new personal secretary.

But she is also genuinely attracted to Mr. Gilbert: he is completely serious about running the office like a well designed machine.  To Helen's amazement (and mine, too), Carol takes the job which requires longer hours, less control over her career, and less pay.  Why?  Because she's smitten.  Why?  I'm not sure.  George Brent the actor is good looking enough, but the character of Mr. Gilbert is really hard to take: he's prudish (won't tolerate any "cheesecake" images of women in his magazine depite Carol telling him that "sex and celebrity sells"), he forces other people to eat intolerable food (vegetarian meat substitutes that are badly done), and he demands perfect compliance with his unending exercise regimes at work. He is also overly interested in The Liver, the subject of every editorial article he writes.

That is, until he catches a cold (which he feels he must lie about because sickness is weakness in his mind), and stays home so Carol has to put out the next Body and Brain issue.  She decides to make a "few changes" and adds plenty of sex appeal and it works: the new issue sells out in minutes and rather than be grateful, Mr. Gilbert is furious and fires her. Annoyingly, Carol is devastated. Then, in true "will they, won't they" comedy/romance style, he gives her a groveling apology, she goes back to the magazine, he promotes her to associate editor and he then hires....MAIZE to replace Carol as his personal secretary.  (Why is Maize unemployed?  Because the guy who hired her at the start of the movie has a wife who is "coming back from Europe" and she knows what he's really up to when he's "working.")  

Well, Maize hasn't changed but Mr. Gilbert sure has: if he was softening under the influence of Carol, he melts into jelly in the hands of Maize and they go off on wild benders until 4 in the morning every night for weeks.  Needless to say the magazine suffers, Carol gets angry, quits, and she and Helen buy a car, a camper/trailer and head out to Yosemite with the plan of never coming back. (At this point Simon asked if this was a Lavender Romance movie?  I don't think so but what do I know....)

Just seconds later Mr. Gilbert comes to his senses and fires Maize only to find Carol is long gone.  So what's Mr. Gilbert going to do to get her back?  The only thing he can do: put out the next issue of Body and Brain with editorials and ads that are thinly veiled messages to Carol, each one telling her how much he (thinks he) loves her. Will they work?  Well, it is a comedy romance...

Despite Jean Arthur doing her best, this movie doesn't really fire on all cylinders--which is a shame because the side characters are really funny, particularly exercise guru Ernest, who is happy to stretch anyone into ridiculous contortions even when they scream in pain. "It'll hurt a lot more tomorrow!", he tells them. But the relationship between Carol and Mr. Gilbert (I don't think she ever calls him by his first name) just isn't sexy, or cute, or remotely plausible.  I sure wouldn't give up teaching at a school I owned to be with a guy who thinks only about liver health and I can't believe anyone would. (Though having said that, I do know someone who really does believe that the solution to most health problems is liver health so, maybe there really are people who would fall head over heels for such a guy.)  

Second Swim

 

Big Seven Lake today.  Water crystal clear.  A bit weed-choked, though.