Malice Aforethought by Frances Iles

 

Simon insists that I have read this before, sometime in the early 90s.  It's possible but it all seemed new to me as I was reading this this past week. I think he's confusing this book with Before the Fact, which I know I read and was written by Iles (and was made into the film Superstition by Hitchcock). But until time travel is invented, we'll never know.

It's amazing that Frances Iles is really Anthony Berkely Cox who wrote all the Roger Sheringham mysteries (of which there are a dozen at least).  The Sheringham stories read like Bertie Wooster Turns His Idle Hands to Criminal Detection. But with no Jeeves to keep him focussed and ensure success.  Instead, Sheringham blithely stumbles along, usually getting the answer completely incorrect and pissing a lot of people off in the process.  And then, almost as an after thought, the killer is discovered and everything works out for the best.  Cox must have written the two Iles books when he was feeling particularly jaded with humanity as this book and Before the Fact are nasty.  The main character is doctor Bickleigh who, we discover, practices medicine in a tiny town where he is much beloved--except by his wife.  Indeed, no one loves his wife, not even her family of origin.  She makes it plain every chance she gets that she only married him to escape a miserable family household.  You'd think she'd be more grateful or at least make at effort at being polite.  She's not even pretty.  At every opportunity parts of her body (like her chin and eyebrows) are described as "thick" or "heavy."  

The story is written from Bickleigh's point of view so we know what he knows.  The problem is that he is an inverterate liar: he lies to everyone else and to himself.  So we can't trust him at all.  Moreover, he's convinced he's smarter than everyone else--not in terms of knowing more stuff but in terms of having the ability to outmanipulate everyone.  Every conversation is an opportunity to plant a seed in another's mind so they slowly have only those beliefs that advantage him.

The very first sentence of the book lets us know that Bickleigh has decided to murder his wife.  Giggling with excitement, Bickleigh congratulates himself for being so much smarter than everyone else because, unlike the typical murderers who kill their wives, he knows he will get away with it.  Unsurprisingly, not long after having made the decision to kill his wife, Julia, he realizes that there are other people in the village that "need to be murdered, too."  Idle fantasy?  Not at all.  No sense in doing things half-assed, after all. If you decide to murder your wife so you can be happy, it stands to reason you need to eliminate ALL the people who bring unhappiness into your life.  Pretty soon our little Dr. Bickleigh has all sorts of irons in the fire, planning drug overdoses and botilism poisoning along with a tidy collection of alibis and character witnesses.  And when he isn't incubating poison he's having attacks in the middle of the night when he suddenly wakes in a fevered panic because he's certain that "everyone knows everything and the net is closing in"!  But, in the morning light, he is calm and laughs at his own silliness--imagine being worried that he would be caught!  Ridiculous!

It really is an incredible story--a a very fast read that is impossible to put down. It was published in 1931 and reviewed as "the best English shocker ever written."  That may be hyperbole but it is easily in my top 5 psychological thrillers masked as a cozy murder mysteries.

Young Petrella by Michal Gilbert

 

Another collection of short stories, these all featuring Patrick Petrella as a very young police officer--pre-marriage and still renting a room from an older lady who has her pulse on all the happenings in the neighborhood.  I'm just repeating myself at this point, but it is amazing how varied all these short stories in terms of topic/content but even they are when it comes to writing style.  How does he do it?  The standout story (in my opinion) is the one that begins with Petrella talking about an undercover mission he is getting briefed for so he can find out how a criminal gang is bringing cocaine into London from Europe.  (Those Europeans are ALWAYS bringing terrible stuff into London....) He is going to become a youth advisor (not a minister or priest but he does work in a live in a church--I don't get it myself: my sense is that there is the equivalent of a YMCA run from a church that allows local teen boys to make use of the space in the buidings after school and on weekends so they avoid getting sucked into gangs.  And, if the story is anything to go by, if the youth group leader does his mentoring well, then the kids join when they are 11 or so and grow up with the place and then they, too, mentor younger kids in sports and stuff.  ANYWAY: so the idea is that the local youth leader was so old he finally had to retire and the church is sending around a new/young guy.  Petrella knows him from some OTHER city/area because that is where Petrella started.  So he tells his cheif that he will meet up with that new guy, tell him that he (Petrella) is going to temporarily replace him.  Petrella's last word to his supervisor is, "I hope Jim goes for it.  He is very stubborn."  Next thing we know, "Jim" is at work, meeting the kids, trying to figure out what local guy has an outsized influence on the place, hanging around, asking kids to do "odd jobs," that sort of thing.  The young kids know exactly who he is talkinga about and soon "Jim" and the kids set to work, trying to figure out exactly how, when and where the crime is happening.  

It all plays out, the kids are hilarious yet very realistic (not unlike the kids in the film Hue and Cry--sidebar: if you haven't seen that recently, you should) and everything wraps up swimmingly: the bad guys lose and the good guys win.  And then, with no warning, we discover that "Jim" really is Jim--he was too stubborn to let Petrella take his job from him and Petrella was "Michael", a useless guy who hung around freaked out the kids because he was nosy and weird. 

Garden Update....

Despite the fact that we are getting nighttime temperatures hovering right at freezing (that's 32F for those that want to do some algebra), I still have tomato plants going strong: flowering, fruiting, ripening...it's crazy.

 

I also have a half dahlias (the same plants I grew from tubers that were supposed to flower in June) suddenly come to life and are blooming like crazy.  But I forgot to take pictures of them so that will have to wait until tomorrow. Meanwhile all those "fall vegetable" seeds I was told to plant in early October (spinach, beets...) have done DIDDLY SQUAT because the daytime temps are too HOT.

Pics since the last pics post

 

Film review: Duck, You Sucker! (1971)

This is the forgotten Sergio Leone spaghetti western.  The number of people who were intended to be in this movie but ended up not being is large.  Essentially the character played by Rod Steiger is Tuco from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and indeed Eli Wallach was supposed to play it.  He initially refused because he was signed on for another film, but Leone badgered him so much that he backed out of that one, but by that time the studio had given Leone Steiger (who owed them a film) and so Wallach was out.  Understandably, he was peeved, and sued.  Clint Eastwood was approached for the James Coburn role but decided he was becoming too associated with spaghetti westerns, so he instead made... Hang 'Em High.  If Eastwood and Wallach had been the leads and the film was called something more sensible, like, I don't know, For More Than Dollars, this would be legendary.  (Its alternative title is A Fistful of Dynamite, which would have worked with those two, I'm sure.)  If anything, Wallach is missed more than Eastwood.  Coburn's character is Irish (would he have been if Eastwood was cast?) and has a romantic backstory, and it required a kind of softness and range that is not really Clint's forte.  But Steiger, while definitely charismatic, is doing a dangerously-close-to-parody version of Wallach's cod-Mexican accent, and somehow it's more glaring with him (perhaps because we're so familiar with him from On the Waterfront and In the Heat of the Night).

Anyway, the actual film, while it has stretches of pure Leone noodling (lots of slow motion being cool for no good reason), is fairly coherent (I defy anyone to summarize the plot of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly) and actually fairly political.  The film starts with Steiger's Juan Miranda pissing on an ant hill (is this a comment on the insects at the beginning of The Wild Bunch?) and then being reluctantly admitted on to a fancy stagecoach (which is huge and incredibly luxe inside, complete with an entire dining table) where the poshos mock him and call him an animal, and ask if he even knows who his father and children are.  Well, very soon the joke is on them, 

because they pass a group of men and boys lazing around that immediately surround the stagecoach and kill its guards, and it emerges that they are Juan's father and sons (the smallest of which is particularly bloodthirsty).  The poshos are taken out and stripped, while squirmily enough, the one woman who was particularly condescending (accusing the poor of rutting like animals) is taken off and Juan sexually assaults her.  One would hope that this scene would not be part of any remake.  Anyway, shortly after the stripped poshos are driven off the road into a ditch, the attention of our baditos is diverted by a series of explosions in the distance.  They get closer and then out of a cloud of dust rides a figure on a motorcycle.  

He rides right by them, but Juan shoots out his tire to stop him.  He responds by getting off, examining his tire, then strolling back (not saying a word) to where they stand next to the ransacked stagecoach, gets a light off the stunned Juan (this foreshadows the end of the film, in a nice bookend), and throws something the size of a cigarette on to the roof of the stagecoach.  Then, walking back to his motorcycle, he says "Duck, you sucker!" and the roof explodes.  When Juan threatens to shoot him in return, he demonstrates 

what the bottle of Nitro he is holding can do with just a single drop and then asks them to imagine what would happen if they shot him and he dropped it.  Then he goes and relaxes in the stagecoach, instructing them to fix his motorcycle.  Juan has quickly worked out that these explosives could be very useful (he has a dream of robbing a fabled bank in Mesa Verde (a name that should be familiar to fans of Better Call Saul) that his father failed to rob when Juan was a boy).  But as the tire is fixed, he and his henchmen go through all the baggage strapped to the bike.  One of the henchmen says that they could just do the dynamiting themselves.  When Juan says it requires expertise, the henchman says "all you need is matches and some balls" (sidenote: this is definitely a seventies film, because the amount of "fucks" that get thrown around is eye-opening, considering Once Upon a Time in the West was just three years earlier - but who knows, maybe they were there in the Italian in that one), so Juan gives him the chance to demonstrate, and of course he blows himself to bits (a charred hatbrim falls at Juan's feet) and Coburn's character (John/Sean Mallory) smiles to himself with his eyes closed, and mutters "short fuse".  However, Juan does find an Irish newspaper in the luggage with a wanted poster in it with John's face on it, and that, along with the "IRA" flag also in the luggage reveals to him that John is on the run from a revolution (and finds himself in the middle of another, as this takes place during the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s).  Indeed, periodically throughout the film, we get gauzy, wordless flashbacks of John's time in Ireland, where he was part of a Jules et Jim-style menage a trois 

with a buddy who ends up betraying the cause after being tortured by the British (and Johnny kills him for it).  

So Johnny carries emotional baggage as well as literal.  

Anyway, John initially resists Juan's "Johnny and Johnny" 

proposal to team up to rob banks (and departs on foot, after Juan shoots his motorcycle again, and in return Johnny blows up everything that remains of the stagecoach.

However, Juan basically tricks him into blowing up the owner of the local silver mine by accident and he has nothing to lose in joining the bandit gang.  Then my memory gets hazy, and they take separate routes to Mesa Verde, with Juan and his gang going by train, where they meet a doctor who surprisingly assists them in dealing with the guards.  

The doctor turns out to be a revolutionary leader (you know, like Johnny's friend from Ireland) but and Juan is tricked into raiding the bank only to find it full, not of gold, but imprisoned revolutionaries.  

He is a reluctant hero of the revolution.  But revolutions are a long process, and they soon encounter a Nazi-style leader of the counter-revolution, Colonel Gunther Ruiz 

(who has a skeletal face that reminded me of Richard Widmark with a hint of Steve Buscemi), who vows revenge on them after they destroy a line of tanks of his.  Indeed, shortly after this, tragedy strikes, and Juan loses his entire family ("all six.  I never counted them before" (turns out the sneering poshos were right)).  This fully converts him to the cause, but it also means he needs rescuing after he is captured trying to get his revenge.  In the course of rescuing Juan, John sees something that gives him serious flashbacks and sets up a major train-collision scene at the climax of the movie.  

In general, this movie looks epic.  The scenery is incredible, there are thousands of extras, 

there are lots of very real and very large explosions, and the train crashes look very realistic.  This definitely deserves to be at least as well-known as the Dollar trilogy and OUaTitW, even if its Morricone score isn't quite at their level (which still means it's better than just about anyone else's would have been).  There are some definitely a bit, well Italian moments that sort of take one out of the picture, but also genuinely moving moments.  No western fan, and definitely no spaghetti western fan can hold their head high without having seen it. Just be prepared for some very heavy fake accents.

Pics of THIS week

So, it's finally got cold at night (again) and in fact, we lit our first fire of the year (first heating of any kind) yesterday.  Here's what it looks like: