Another Song of the Week time has arrived

Another song that has a lot of personal meaning for me, related to a particular time in my life and one very good friend who helped me survive, Jackson Browne's "That Girl Could Sing":

"She was a friend to me when I needed one
Wasn't for her I don't know what I'd done
She gave me back something that was missing in me
She could of turned out to be almost anyone
Almost anyone--
With the possible exception
Of who I wanted her to be..."
(Video here.)

Turns out you can fall in love with someone for the wrong reasons, and come out on the other side with a friend for life, if you're lucky.

Once again, it's the best song on a very fine album, Hold On, Hold Out.  "Hold Out" is a fine some  ("Baby I guess you know my story/ Baby I guess you know my side/ It seems I've traded love for glory/ But I'm still not satisfied" is how it opens); as is "Boulevard" ('Nobody rides for free/ Nobody gets it like they want it to be/ Nobody hands you any guarantee/ Nobody").  "Call It A Loan" ("Oh.../can we call it a loan/ And a debt that I owe/ On a bet that I lost ")...and the others.  This is an album about realizing what you've lost, and why you've lost it--why you have lost it, not alibis. 

 A little more from "That Girl Could Sing":

"Stumblin' into the lights of the city
And then back in the shadows again
Hanging onto the laughter
That each of us hid our unhappiness in.."

Song of the Day (or Week, or Month, Depending on How Often I Get Around to It)

Looks like weekly for the time being.

I think this is a brilliant song, if only for this:

...Out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.
A little voice inside my head said "Don't look back, you can never look back..."

The Boys of Summer.

This song was on Building the Perfect Beast (1984), and came out at a time of a little turmoil in my life.  Somehow, it helped (and the MTV video was awesome).  The whole album is pretty damned good, especially the title song, and "All She Wants To Do Is Dance," "Sunset Grill" ("You see a lot more meanness in the city/ It's the kind that eats you up inside/ Hard to come away with anything that feels like dignity/ Hard to get home with any pride"), and "Driving With Your Eyes Closed" ("I met a Frenchman in a field last night/ He was out there with an easel painting carnival light/ He said, "I used to paint the princess, I used to paint the frogs/ Now I paint mustaches on dangerous dogs").

I always thought that "Dangerous Dog"s would be a good name for a band.

Song of the Day (or Week, or Month, Depending on How Often I Get Around to It)

When you're 65 and a half years old, the lyrics have a somewhat different meaning than they had when you were 25 and a half...

Neil Young's "Heart of Gold."

"I want to live,
I want to give
I've been a miner
for a heart of gold.
It's these expressions
I never give
That keep me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.
Keeps me searching
for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old."

Plot Holes in Books We Love: Mr. & Mrs. North Edition

Once in a while, I re-read books that I like a lot.  The “Mr. & Mrs. North” books by Frances and Richard Lockridge fall into that category, and I just re-read Death of a Tall Man.  Now, while I like these books a lot, I would be the last person to argue that the Lockridges’ are great writers.  Their plots tend to be formulaic, many of the (non-continuing) characters are more-or-less from stock and not very well developed.  And their plots frequently have significant, shall we say, shortcomings.

It’s the plot shortcoming in Death of a Tall Man  that I noticed this time through.  Oddly enough, despite my having read the book several times, I hadn’t actually noticed it before.  So if you haven’t read the book and think you might want to, the entire rest of this is a plot-revealing spoiler. 

The murderer has been revealed, and Bill Weigand (Acting Captain in the Homicide Bureau) is explaining what actually happened to the cast (including, of course, Pam and Jerry North).  For the murderer to have pulled off the murder, he had to impersonate, first, a patient awaiting (in an examination room) an eye examination, and, second, the doctor doing the examinations.  In this case, there were six patients in individual waiting rooms, all referred for a specialist examination for worker’s compensation claims.  Each patient has a card with his name (and other information) on it.  Here, from early in the book, is a description of how the patients were handled:

Between 11:35…and 11:55, five more men came in,,,They identified themselves…and were assigned to the examining rooms in the order of their arrival, Weber going into the first room, Oakes to the second, and so on…[At this point, they are all in the waiting room]…At noon, Grace Spencer came to the door and said, “If you gentlemen—“ and they stood up…Grace took their cards, which Deborah [Brooks] had numbered in pencil in accordance with the room assigned.

Following the examination, during which the doctor (Andrew Gordon) has made notes on their conditions, the men leave and their cards are collected and returned to Deborah (subsequently to be provided to Dr. Gordon for him to write up his findings.

Now, we jump to the explanation.

“Somehow he got in and got one of the referral cards in Gordon’s office,” Bill said.  “Oakes’ card, by what turned out, for him to be bad luck.  I suppose Oakes had been in before and the card hadn’t been returned [for which I think we need to read “filed”].  Probably it was on Miss Spencer’s desk.”

We have a reason why both Grace Spencer and Deborah Brooks would have remembered Oakes, which we need not rehearse here.  It’s a sufficiently striking reason, however, that Deborah Brooks would have been likely to remember his name (at least I should think so), but she apparently does not:  “A number,,,More a number than a name.  A man in one of the rooms…”  And our murder got the card, as Weigand says, he “[s]kipped in and got one of the morning cards…They were done with and filed; they wouldn’t be checked for days; with the doctor dead, they would probably never be checked…”

This gives us our first couple of problems.  First, the murderer needs to be familiar enough with the layout of the office, and the office routines, to have some idea how the examination process works and where the cards are likely to be.  Specifically, where the cards from the morning group of compensation patients are likely to be.  (If they had been filed, this would be very difficult; at one point, we’re told that they were on Spencer’s desk, at another that they had been filed.)  But we are told explicitly that neither Spencer nor Brooks knows him well, that he has not been in the office often (or at all?).  Second, the murderer, after arriving (not first, and not last) has to sit in the waiting room for 5-10 minutes.  Now, he has done something to his hair and is wearing dark glasses.  But if he is familiar enough with the office to have found a card, then Spencer or Brooks would have would have been likely to recognize him, disguised or not.  So we have a contradiction.  Third, the card would have a number penciled on it from Oakes’ actual visit to the office that morning.  So either the murderer had with him a pencil and managed to surreptitiously erase the number (without leaving a trace of its presence) or Brooks was incredibly obtuse.

(We are told explicitly, however, that "neither of the women in the office knew him well—“The nurse and Debbie barely knew him by sight; there was hardly a chance that they would recognize him behind the dark glasses, and they had not.”  This is hard to reconcile with his apparently detailed knowledge of how the examination procedure works.)

Then our murderer kills Gordon (in Examination Room 2) and drags him back to his private office and props him up in the desk chair.  He takes Gordon’s glasses (to use now in his impersonation of the doctor), proceeds to “examine” the remaining four patients, and then ducks quickly out of the office by its rear door—where Spencer, the nurse, was sitting.  Presumably, the murderer was physically similar enough and dressed similarly enough (e.g., in a suit of approximately the same color and cut) to get away with this, although we are not told.  He goes away to establish his alibi (which depends on everyone believing that Gordon actually performed the examinations—and here’s our next problem—and presumably made notes on the cards of the patients in writing similar enough to be take for Gordon's.  Cards with no notes would raise an issue, and handwriting too different would raise a very similar issue.  For the murderer’s alibi depends strongly on Gordon’s having been alive after the murderer, disguise and all, had left.

Incidentally, no one seems to have commented on the fact that no one saw “Oakes” leave despite a physical distinctiveness that would have made him very noticeable.

So we have us some problems here, and I don’t pretend to have any clear ideas about how to get around them.  But, then, I did read the book several times before I noticed…

Brian Freemantle's "The Homles Inheritance"

Occasionally, I begin reading a book in which the premise is quite intriguing, the characters themselves interesting, but the writing gets in the way.  In this case, I've come close to putting the book down for good on several occasions, but have, so far persevered; I'm about 2/3 of the way through it as I write this.

The book is Brian Freemantle's The Holmes Inheritace.  I've read a fair amount of Freemantle's writing, and like (with some reservations) most of the Charlie Muffin books.  So when I learned about his books featuring Sebastian Holmes, son of Sherlock and nephew of Mycroft, I searched ABE and found both books, The Holmes Inheritance (2004) and The Holmes Factor (2005). 

I started, of course, with The Holmes Inheritance, and it's driving me nuts.  The premise is this:  Sherlock Holmes fathered a son--Sebastian--while recovering from the Reichenbach Falls incident.  He decided that he could not acknowledge the child, and left him to be raised by Mycroft (the mother died in childbirth).  Now, some 20 years later, on the eve of World War I, Mycroft (working with/for Winston Churchill) needs someone to undertake a confidential mission in the US.  He and (reluctantly) Sherlock agree that Sebastion should be asked to undertake it, and he does.

So the situation is interesting, the activities of Germany in the US are a very good starting point for such a story, and if it's more of a spy novel and less of a detective novel, that's OK.  But the writing is something I would never have expected of Freemantle.  Here are the examples I've run into so far:

Freemantle seems to hate to use the word "said," instead substituting some other verb for it, and these all appear on p. 100:

protested
defended
reminded
disputed
insisted (twice, in successive paragraphs)

That's probably the single most glaring stylistic issue I have, although there's also this:

"...he left, no longer feeling pretentions with the swordstick..."

And similarly awkard, or (as in the use of "pretentions") just wrong uses of language occur throughout.  There are also cases of getting the historical setting or facts just flat wrong.  For example, early on, a character is referred to as a "venture capitalist," a term that did not come into use until the 1970s at the earliest.  In 1913, someone who looked for places to make investments would have been called a "capitalist," with no modifier needed.

And:

"Sebastian's excursion to Long Island...this time [he] travelled [sic] from Penn Station in a scheduled first-class carriage..."

Now I realize that railroad passenger cars in England and on the Continent were separate classes of accommodations, but that was not true in the U.S. at that time; there were sleeper cars and private cars but no separation of classes of carriage in ordingary coaches.  (And from Penn Station to Long Island, no sleeper cars, either).  This may be somewhat specialized knowledge, but it's not all that arcane.  I'd expect an American author, writing about using English trains, to know that there were separate classes of carriage.  So why shouldn't I expect a British author to get it right about the US?

In another scene--a birthday reception in honor of Kaiser Wilhelm II at the German Embassy, we are told that the U.S. Secretary of Defense, the Undersecretary of Trade, and the "senior permanent advisor at the Treasury" are present.  That should be the Secretary of War (the department and the title were changed to Defense only after World War II) and the Undersecretary of Commerce (the Ministry of Trade is the English equivalent).  As for the "senior permanent advisor at the Treasury," no such positon exists in the U.S., and never has (although the Permanent Undersecretary of the Treasury is, in England, a civil servant and not a political appointee; the highest-ranking civil service position in the Treadury Department in the U.S. today is the Fiscal Assistant Secretary, who is three levels down from the Secretary of the Treasury).  (What the comparable position would have been in 1913, I don't know, but all of the Assistant and Under Secretaries were then, and are now, political appointees.)

Then, we have this:

"...continuous radio news programme..."

Complete with remote broadcasts of an interview on the Capitol steps.  There were no radio stations in the U.S. until at least 1916, and the early ones were on-air for only a couple of hours a day.  There were no radio news programs, although what was then called the "radio telegraph" was used to transmit news to newspaper offices.  And the notion that a hotel room would have had a radio receiver in 1913 is laughable.

Now, writing historical fiction is hard.  And I suspect that most English readers of the book would not really notice them.  But the events of the early 20th century in the U.S. are not that difficult to discover, and many, if not most, potential readers of this sort of book are likely to be fairly well informed.  So such elementary errors as these have a tendency to pull the reader out of the story.  Which is too bad for me, because I spent a hot $4 on this book (and on the sequel).

Couches, France

Another picture from the hard drive...actually, two versions of the same picture.  This is a medieval castle at Couches in France,  The first version is "straight;" the second version has had a Photoshop transformation (called "Fresco") applied to it...I like them both, and wobble back and forth on which I like best.  (Taken in June 2000.)

"Wish You Were Here"

One of my favorite songs is Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here.”*  The lyrics, by Roger Waters, clearly refer to Syd Barrett, one of the original members of the band, who stopped performing in 1968, and spend the remaining years of his life living privately and gardening.  His behavior, attributed at the time to his drug use, had become erratic, and his ability to perform declined. 

What I find interesting about the song is that if contains the affection felt by Waters for Barrett, but it also has an underlying anger that Barrett had left the people who loved him (including the band) for a retreat from the world.

Combined with a hauntingly beautiful guitar part, this is one of the most compulsively listenable songs I know.

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
Blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

And did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk on part in a war
For a lead role in a cage?

 *© 1975 Warner/Chapell Music; words & music by Roger Waters & David Gilmour