More Man than Philosopher

The Awkward Pause

2014-01-10T18:50:00.003-08:00

I walk into the 'blog. I look around. Dust everywhere. The broken chair in the corner. The abandoned projects.

Well, I think that did it. Somewhere along the way two things happened: first (and least important) Google made it damnably difficult to juggle my [ever-increasing, since my move to the University of Alabama] e-mail accounts. Blogger became a pain to use. All that.

Second, I lost my way. I mean, I seriously lost track of what I was doing, or how, or why. And it's taken about half a year to figure it out. But I think I've got it. And I'm ready to get back on the wagon.

But that means change. And part of that change is the abandonment of a blog that's served me since I thought it was a good idea to write about "taking back culture" [that would be me in my teens, by the way]. It's a bit nostalgic, but hey. That's life.

I would like to extend an invitation--to anyone who's still out there, listening to the ether--to pop over to my new site. I'm in the process of porting over stuff I want to keep from here--chiefly the Ellery Queen posts and the Jeremy Brett stuff. And Wolfe. I'm getting back to Wolfe soon.

It's 2014. High time for it.

Nero Wolfe: Murder is Corny (George Bloomfield, 2002)

2013-02-09T18:07:00.001-08:00

And I'm back. This week, anyway. Next week I definitely won't be, and I might as well admit it here--though it's for what I consider a darned good reason (as opposed to the bad ones that have kept me away so far): I'm going to be in Albuquerque next week presenting at the Southwest/Texas Pop Culture/American Culture Association conference. My topic, in case anyone is curious (and why wouldn't you be?) is "The Mean Streets of Wrightsville: The Analytic Detective and the Quest for Naturalism." Although "naturalism" isn't quite what I mean, it's the title I gave and I'm kind of stuck with it. Anyway. There's lots of interesting stuff at the detective fiction panels, including a paper on Hercule Poirot and WWII, as well as one on the Judge Dee novels of Robert van Gulik. The complete program is here, if you're curious.

Now, as to "Murder is Corny"--forget murder, the title is corny. The whole thing develops when Wolfe's weekly delivery of sweet corn is late, for the simple reason that the guy delivering it has been murdered. It's fine, though--the corn's not up to snuff anyway; what does bother Wolfe is the fact that Archie has been implicated by the corn farmer's daughter (that's right. It's a "farmer's daughter" joke). Accordingly, after a bit of typical wrangling, Wolfe and Archie decide to take the case on as a private matter, sans client. Along the way, they mix with the daughter's three would-be lovers (dubbed "the Three Stooges" by Archie) and with her possibly-vengeful father.

You can't win, Wolfe. There can be only one.

The truth is, this episode isn't a particularly great one in the plot department. The red-herring suspects are too obviously red (or too obviously herring) and I'm still not sure if the prime clue that leads Wolfe to the killer is really fair, since it depends on reading of a particular line that wouldn't occur to anyone actually watching (or living in) the episode. It's arbitrary. It's pulled from a hat. It's--

Well, it's unfair until you realize that the whole episode is an extend "farmer's daughter" joke. Then it makes much more sense.

That said, I did enjoy this episode--laughed out loud, even, a few times (which, since I was watching by myself, is either a good sign or a profoundly disturbing one). Again, the affection between Wolfe and Archie comes across pretty strongly, with Wolfe even admitting at one point that he would be devastated if Archie left him. Chaykin is as solid as ever, and Hutton has finally settled down enough to let the comedy work for him, rather than trying to work it himself. He still can't wear hats, though; they sit on his head like dinner plates.

Incidentally, this episode was written by Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin. They've spoken about the necessity, in these adaptations, of sticking to the beats from the original stories, rather than trying to make the episodes fit "traditional" television structure. Well, I have my doubts about the wisdom of such a course w/r/t television, but when you watch the episode at one go, without commercial breaks, it flows very nicely indeed. Of course, what more can you expect? These guys are pros.

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As mentioned above, there won't be a post next week. The next week--hopefully. I may have to cut back for the next bit in order to focus on real-world responsibilities, but I do want to get at least one post a week up here. And I want to finish The Wire. That needs to happen.

A couple of links

2013-01-16T15:56:00.000-08:00

I'll have another post on The Wire up sometime tomorrow; meanwhile, enjoy these links:

First (courtesy Joseph D'Agnese) here's a post by Dale Andrews over at SleuthSayers that deals a bit with Ellery Queen:

Although Queen returned with a final series of books in the 1960s, it is common knowledge that The Finishing Stroke, the thirtieth Queen tome, originally was intended by Lee and Dannay to be the final Ellery Queen mystery. As such, it is a particularly interesting work, which can be read as a culmination of the series, at least as of 1957. The book spans the life of Ellery as well as his creators, and is, in many respects, a retrospective of Ellery Queen both as detective and as writer.

Second, it ain't the conclusion to the Tokyo Trilogy, but at least we now know that David Peace has a new book coming out:

"I have written about corruption, I've written about crime, I've written about bad men and I've written about the demons. But now I've had enough of the bad men and the demons. Now I want to write about a good man. And a saint. A Red Saint. Bill Shankly was not just a great football manager. Bill Shankly was one of the greatest men who ever lived. And the supporters of Liverpool Football Club, and the people of Liverpool the city, know that and remember him. But many people outside of football, outside of Liverpool, do not know or do not remember him. And now – more than ever – it's time everybody knew about Bill Shankly. About what he achieved, about what he believed. And how he led his life. Not for himself, for other people."

Conspiracies and the Divine Mystery (re-post)

2013-01-12T09:01:00.000-08:00

"Birthers," "Birchers," "9/11 Truthers"--all around us are groups fascinated by different conspiracies, obsessed with the idea that the world of appearances is a sham created by a faceless, evil-minded demiurge in the form of Masons, the Government, the Communists, the Catholic Church--and on and on it goes. Lately there's been some outrage in the left-wing blogosphere (and Andrew Sullivan) over allegations in Scott Horton's recent Harper's piece that the Bush and Obama governments are colluding to cover up the murder of Guantanamo prisoners in 2006.* It seems that unanswered questions are simply more interesting than the answers they produce--that Obama was born in Hawaii, that 9/11 was what we saw, rather than a byzantine plot on the part of traitors in our own government, and that (perhaps) the suicides in Guantanamo were in fact suicides and even (horrible as it sounds) actually were acts of war.

It's not just real-world conspiracies, of course. I suspect that much of the appeal of shows like "Lost" and "The X-Files" isn't the answers they provide. For all that we hear complaints that "Lost" has just gotten needlessly complex, remember that the moment they started explaining the conspiracies in "The X-Files" seems to be roughly the moment fans say it "jumped the shark."** And detective novels in the past were routinely criticized for being more interesting in set-up than they were in solution (the prime example would be the novels of John Dickson Carr, which tended to hinge on impossible crimes and bizarre situations).

"It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter," (Prov. 25:2). I suspect that the mystery-solving yen is something innate in humans, but what does it mean that we are never satisfied with the answer when or if we find it? We are seeking beings, searching for a system or idea or Person that will pull everything together into a neat package, and so we build systems to help solve the mystery. Conspiracy theories seem like one outgrowth of that--rather like Umberto Eco's theory of lists, where he says "We like lists because we don't want to die," I suspect we like conspiracy theories because they give the illusion of completion, an illusion that the plain unvarnished truth can never give because it is stuck in the world of chance and coincidence, a world that is not just irrational, but in many cases anti-rational, that works against the way we think things should work. And in that a conspiracy theory is a quest for completion, we might say that a conspiracy theory is a search for the Divine.

When you think about it, the grand unifying theory of everything is the idea of God. God pulls together all the senseless and arbitrary strands of our lives under the title of Divine Will. God makes sense of our lives.*** Smaller mysteries point upward and outward to the Divine Mystery that (we hope) will show us how our lives of pain and suffering have meaning in the larger scheme. Whether we will reach that point is an existentially open question. It is true that the Apostle Paul promises some sort of closure:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

But, in the end, that promise is a remote one, and it's our business to get from here to there. And something tells me that "there" is not a solid place, but an ever-retreating goal that leads us deeper and deeper into the heart of the Divine Mystery. And I suspect that, if we were honest, we wouldn't have it any other way.

[Blog Note: I first posted this piece three years ago, in the middle of the whole "Birther" nonsense, as well as during a time when Harper's was suggesting that there was a conspiracy to conceal murders at Guantanamo Bay. Since then, the Guantanamo affair has disappeared without so much as a ripple, and the "birthers" have been more and more exposed as a loony fringe. Which, y'know, they always were.

But the conspiracy-yen hasn't gone away, as is evidenced by this video. I'm not going to embed it, because it's just not worth the time it would take to click "add video." The basic idea is that the Sandy Hook shooting was actually--dun dun dun--a conspiracy on the part of the Government. The idea--as fact--is beyond offensive; it's unjust to the families who lost loved ones in the attack, and it serves the fairly obvious ideological purpose of distracting attention from issues of, for instance, mental health and gun control.

That said--I still believe that this love of conspiracy theories speaks to something beyond pure looniness; the fact is, we as humans are the kinds of creatures who can't help but tell stories, can't help but suspect that--underneath the brute fact of the "Real"--there is some sort of vast conspiracy--either on the part of the Government or of People Who Hate Us For Our Freedoms or of the Masons...or of God (keeping in mind note 3 below). In other words, it's not looniness; it's loneliness.

As such, these theories--these fantasies--invite us to a different sort of conspiracy, if we can only take the time to look for it. If we could be bothered to embark on a conspiracy of kindness as eagerly as we take up these wingnut accusations, if we would look about us for clues (der. clew, a thread, as in the thing that led Theseus through the labyrinth) that point beyond ourselves and our interests and toward the more expansive (because un-centered) world that is humanity, we might just be able to make it through the next century in one piece.]

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*It is unfortunate that the United States has managed to produce such an atrocious human rights record re: detainees over the past decade that the accusations aren't out-of-hand loony. However, I'm not dealing here with the actual truth of these claims, but with their mythic power.

**Full confession: I've not watched the entire series, so I'm speaking based on what I've read/heard from fans.

***But to say "God makes everything right" is not actually to say anything. The word "God" is a placeholder--not even an Divine Name, just an empty container into which different humans pour whatever meaning they associate with the word "God."

Nero Wolfe: Die Like a Dog (James Tolkan, 2002)

2013-01-11T16:53:00.003-08:00

So here we have the dog episode. Dogs have a long history with detective fiction, of course, going all the way back to The Sign of Four (and possibly earlier, for all I know). The most famous detectival dog, of course, is Asta from The Thin Man. And you have Dumb Witness. And, of course, these days you're as likely to find a dog as a cat lurking in one of the many paperbacks lining the "mystery" section in your local book store. To ask why would be pertinent, of course, and no end of pseudo-academic convolutions could be made, but I think it tends to boil down to--well, they're dogs. Who can hate a dog?*

Not Nero Wolfe, apparently. When a dog follows Archie home from a crime scene, the creature quickly becomes part of the Wolfe household. Wolfe himself grouches and blames Archie, but it's pretty clear that he's as taken with the dog as anyone else (more, perhaps, than Archie). It's to be expected, I guess, but some of the best scenes in the episode come from watching Wolfe and Archie cope with having the new presence in the house. Short of introducing an infant--or a woman--it's difficult to think of a more unWolfeian addition to the fold than a dog.

Of course--as with last week's episode--there's more here to enjoy than just the character stuff. The plot itself works neatly in the allotted space, and there's even a fairly clever red herring toward the middle. Which means that this is the second week in a row that I've unambiguously loved an episode of this show. Now, there's a couple of possible reasons for this. One is simply that I've gone soft on the show. It could be that I've gotten so used to the various deficiencies that I pointed out so much last season, and so am more willing to forgive them.

There is, however, a second option: both this episode and the previous are short episodes. They rely on simple tricks and, as a result, don't require much knowledge of the suspects to suss out. And that means that the show's great strength--the Wolfe-Goodwin dynamic--is allowed room to expand without edging out the plot. Now, I'm a fan of ridiculously elaborate plots--they're an art, just as much as delicately-observed character studies are--but such plots tend to demand characters who, at least, reach the level of stereotype. The problem with the Wolfe series has been, typically, that the "suspect" characters are unmemorable, and so it's nearly impossible to tell who is doing what. But when the episodes are not two-parters, it allows--it forces--the scripts to introduce characters and establish them quickly before moving on. And since they're so short, they tend to rely on interesting tricks--little reversals that turn on a simple fact (here, a raincoat) with beautiful precision.

Whichever is the case, I've been more than pleased with the past two episodes. After all the good things I've heard about the series, it looks like it's finally living up to the hype.

In closing, then, Kari Matchett:

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*Rhetorical question

"Murder on the Orient Express" update

2013-01-07T09:53:00.002-08:00

MovieMorlocks has a great write-up of Sidney Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express:

It is clear from his description of the production that Lumet enjoyed making this old-school mystery. He confessed that he “shrieked with joy” when he finished reading the script and discovered the identity of the killer, who committed murder on the world’s most famous train. I thought I would share some of his strategies as the movie progressed through the different stages of filmmaking, because Lumet’s insights made me appreciate that craftsmanship and aforethought are not exclusive to movies with serious intent and meaningful themes.

The whole thing is worth reading, but I want to highlight one bit that (ironically) illuminates exactly the point where my appreciation of Lumet's version becomes complicated:

Lumet decided from the beginning of his involvement that the key to adapting the novel, which had been written 40 years earlier, was to evoke nostalgia. It was the guiding word for all departments working on the movie, from the period set design by Tony Walton to the satiny Art Deco titles in the opening credits. Thus, the film had an additional intent than the original novel, which was contemporary with Christie’s time when it was published.

Nostalgia. It's true: Murder on the Orient Express is awash in nostalgia. It's filmed with a kind of fuzzy-lensed beauty that turns the whole thing into something akin to a Thomas Kindade painting. Which is odd, when you think about it, considering that we're talking about a movie about murder. But it seems to me that Lumet was keying in to a turn in approaches to the classical-analytic/cozy (that name should tell you something) detective story that would become increasingly prevalent in the coming years.

Consider: if you browse the upcoming releases in the detective fiction genre, excluding the thrillers and the procedurals, what do you get? Lots of "cozy" mysteries, a good number of which are set in the past. Now, historical mysteries are well and good, and I'm not dissing them (indeed, I've not read the upcoming mysteries, so I can't very well discuss them at all). But it seems like there's a lot of emphasis on nostalgia, either for a small-town society that no longer exists (if it ever did), or for a more interesting era (WWII, the twenties, and so on). The idea is that mysteries provide a kind of escape into a simpler world, a more glamorous one, and so on.

Now, mysteries can provide that sort of escape--and, again, I'm not knocking escapism per se--but I think there's a problem when your first instinct when approaching a murder mystery (as with Lumet's here) is to read it as an exercise in nostalgia. The problem with nostalgia is that it works against what (some) scholars of the genre view as detective fiction's greatest strength: its ability to make present the world. See, for instance, Chesterton:

The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life. Men lived among mighty mountains and eternal forests for ages before they realized that they were poetical; it may reasonably be inferred that some of our descendants may see the chimney-pots as rich a purple as the mountain-peaks, and find the lamp-posts as old and natural as the trees. Of this realization of a great city itself as something wild and obvious the detective story is certainly the ‘Iliad.’ No one can have failed to notice that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland, that in the course of that incalculable journey the casual omnibus assumes the primal colours of a fairy ship. The lights of the city begin to glow like innumerable goblin eyes, since they are the guardians of some secret, however crude, which the writer knows and the reader does not. Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to it; every fantastic skyline of chimney-pots seems wildly and derisively signalling the meaning of the mystery.

What is the key difference here between Lumet and Chesterton? Precisely this: that Lumet sees the story as a way to escape the present into a mythical or mythologized past; Chesterton, on the other hand, argues (accurately, to my mind) that the story mythologizes the present. See, also, Doyle's mythic Victorian London, a world that is not (contrary to Starrett) attractive because of its distance but because Doyle was taking the present and exploiting its potential for the uncanny.

So when I think of Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express, it's hard not to think that he betrays or misses one of the core virtues of the story (of any detective story, for that matter). Now, I'm not saying Lumet's movie is bad; it isn't, so much as it's clunky and overbearing (and enchanting and beautiful). But its virtues run in cross-currents to what I think of (personally and critically) as the most interesting function of the detective story.

Anyway, check out the post at MovieMorlocks. It's a fascinating glimpse at the way Lumet approached the material.

It's Sherlock Holmes' Birthday

2013-01-06T12:00:00.000-08:00

Apocryphally, of course; since Holmes is so fond of quoting Twelfth Night, many Holmesians have come to the conclusion that the 6th of January (the real Twelfth Night) is in fact his birthday. It's not provable, and totally unlikely that Doyle himself gave much thought to the matter, but still--why not celebrate by watching a couple of Sherlock Holmes movies.

First, we have Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman (1944--read the Flick Attack review here):

Sherlock Holmes Baffled (1903--the earliest Sherlock Holmes movie):

Murder at the Baskervilles (1937):

And--more for the stupid fun of it than anything--here's a mildly NSFW rap battle between the two greatest detectives ever know: Sherlock Holmes vs. Batman:

Nero Wolfe: The Next Witness (James Tolkan, 2002)

2013-01-04T11:59:00.000-08:00

It's very rare that I unambiguously love an episode of Nero Wolfe. I like most of them, and even the ones that do little for me generally have some interesting angles that make me glad I've watched. But most of the time--and this is too well-documented hereabouts for me to go back over my complaints--even the better episodes leave me a trifle discontented.* "The Next Witness" is the exception. It's got all the strengths of the series--mostly centering around Wolfe and Archie, who are both very good in this episode even if Archie gets precious little to do--and still manages a neat little plot that fills out the episode's run-time without becoming obscure or boring.

It's also substantially different, in terms of set-up, than other episodes in this series. We open at a trial-in-progress, in which a man named Leonard Ashe is accused of murdering a woman who refused to spy on his wife. It seems like a pretty clear-cut deal (of course, such an assumption is false)--and then we see Wolfe and Archie being served subpoenas; Wolfe, it turns out, had refused to help Ashe earlier, and his refusal is part of the State's case. So to the courtroom Wolfe goes--looking like a kind of Napoleonic Gideon Fell--only to storm out once he realizes (a) that Ashe is innocent, and (b) that Wolfe's testimony will certainly lead to the man's conviction.**

On the run from a charge of contempt, Wolfe decides to ferret out the truth. First he visits the call agency where the victim worked, then he calls on another of her co-workers. In each case, he is belligerent--and in each case his victims are far more forgiving of his harshness than is normal under the circumstances. This fact makes him suspicious, though what he suspects is (of course) left in shadow. Then--back to town, a night at Saul Panzer's (since they can't, of course, return to the brownstone), and into court the next day where--by an ingenious bit of trickery on Wolfe's part--the detective is able to lay out his theory to the jury.

Now, this isn't an "important" episode, but it's fun for several reasons. First, of course, we have Wolfe out of his element, which is always good for a chuckle or two. The difference here is that Wolfe out of his element turns out to be Wolfe very much in his element. Or, rather, Wolfe creating his element. Where previous episodes have shown Wolfe complaining about snow, about food, and so on, this episode has him actively appreciating the chili served him in a roadside diner. And when he and Archie visit Saul Panzer's apartment, the result--far from being the fish-out-of-water comedy I half hoped for and half feared--is surprisingly heart-warming. It reinforces the idea that Wolfe and Archie are two members of a much larger "family" that includes the eager-to-please Saul.

My favorite part of "The Next Witness," though, was the end--more specifically, the way in which Wolfe manipulates a trial designed to preclude his theories so that the Prosecution practically begs for them. It really is a nice bit of plotting, and it works marvelously. The key here is that the plot doesn't depend on the criminals--that is, we as the audience are not supposed to be surprised when the real killer is revealed. Rather, the whole working-out is a function of Wolfe's machinations. Since the series really has little use for any of the characters outside the regular stable, this sort of storytelling is far more effective than the straight-up whodunnit plots found in other episodes. In this case, it doesn't matter if we can remember who the suspects are. They are, as it were, extraneous to what's really interesting about the episode.

And that's all to the good, and it serves to make "The Next Witness" one of the stronger episodes in the series; speaking personally, it might even be my favorite so far. It represents a perfect marriage of the series' great strength--the characterizations of Wolfe and Goodwin--with a plot-form that complements, rather than distracts from (or is distracted by) that central dynamic. All in all, an excellent episode.
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*Oddly, this has not been my experience with the books. Though I would be hard-pressed to remember details from the last Stout novel I read, I didn't feel dissatisfied after I finished it. I remember that much.

**There's also the matter of a "smelly woman" who is sitting entirely too close for Wolfe's comfort. In fact, that's Wolfe's main complaint, and it's the reason Archie offers at the conclusion to explain Wolfe's actions in the episode. I am...not convinced.

How to Be a Detective

2013-01-03T14:55:00.003-08:00

Speaking generally, the significant rule is this: Egoism, laziness and conceit are the only human motives on which one may unconditionally depend. Love, loyalty, honesty, religion and patriotism, though firm as a rock, may lapse and fall. A man might have been counted on for one of these qualities ten times with safety, and on the eleventh, he might collapse like a house of cards. Count on egoism and laziness a hundred or a thousand times and they are as firm as ever. More simply, count on egoism—for laziness and conceit are only modifications of egoism. The latter alone then should be the one human motive to keep in mind when dealing with men. There are cases enough when all the wheels are set in motion after a clue to the truth, i. e., when there is danger that the person under suspicion is innocent; appeals to honor, conscience, humanity and religion fail;—but run the complete gamut of self-love and the whole truth rings clear. Egoism is the best criterion of the presence of veracity. Suppose a coherent explanation has been painfully constructed. It is obvious that the correctness of the construction is studied with reference to the given motive. Now, if the links in the chain reach easily back to the motive, there is at least the possibility that the chain is free of error. What then of the motive? If it is noble—friendship, love, humaneness, loyalty, mercy—the constructed chain may be correct, and happily is so oftener than is thought; but it *need not be correct. If, however, the structure rests on egoism, in any of its innumerable forms? and if it is logically sound, then the whole case is explained utterly and reliably. The construction is indubitably correct.

Criminal Psychology at Project Gutenberg

"The Wire" Wednesday: "Old Cases" and "The Pager"

2013-01-02T15:25:00.000-08:00

And so I return at long last to The Wire. My plan--at least, for now--is to knock out a couple of episodes a week; since the episodes aren't so much discrete units as they are "chapters" in an over-arcing story, this is a method that makes the most sense to me, even if (as today) I wind up talking about just one or two things a week.

These episodes see--finally--the emergence of something resembling the titular "Wire"--in this case, a beeper set to the same frequency as D'Angelo Barksdale's, which allows the cops to snoop in on whoever is contacting him. The fact that the Barksdale gang uses beepers is the subject of a good bit of humor in the episode itself, and that humor is amplified by the fact that now, a decade later, the technology seems even more antiquated. But there's a catch: the numbers coming in (as we see in "The Pager") are encoded somehow.... This obstacle leads to what might be the second or third bit of solid sleuthing in the series, when one of the most seemingly-useless members of the investigative team cracks the code using basic word-search techniques.

This is actually pretty ingenious, and it's the sort of thing that might be comfortable in a classic detective story--a fact that made me pretty happy, rest assured.

Even better, though, is the infamous sequence where McNulty and Moreland investigate the scene of a young woman's murder. I'll put the YouTube video below, but be aware that the dialogue consists of variations one word--and that an obscenity--and there are a couple of flashes of forensic nudity.

Now, this scene could probably lend itself to a kind of quasi-Theory reading ("There comes a time when the horror of the Real becomes so great that all that is left is the meaningless repetition of obscenity"), but that's not the direction I want to go here. Rather, let's look at what this scene does in terms of story. Too often--not just in crime drama--exposition is doled out regularly to help the plot along. The idea is that it can't be helped, that you've got to get the information out there if the viewer is to keep up, etc etc etc. To a certain extent that's true, but it leads to a lot of bad dialogue and scenes that exist for no other reason than to convey information.

It's not just crime drama that does this, of course. Inception (a movie I really enjoy) is roughly half exposition and half action. And look at this famous bit of cinema:

That's just a little bit, too; Star Wars grinds to a halt while Obi-Wan explains the Jedi, the Force, Luke's father.* And the question becomes--why? Are we, as audiences, really so far behind the film-maker that he or she has to stop everything to explain what's going on?** Imagine the scene from The Wire as it would be performed in a standard-issue procedural: the agents would doubtlessly be talking it out. "So if she fell here, and the bullet entered here, then where's the slug?" "Hey, come here a second." And so on. It would probably play well enough, but it wouldn't "pop." The scene as it stands does pop, because we as the audience are allowed to look around with the cops, to see what they see, and to make conclusions with them as they make conclusions. It's a much more interesting way to get information across.

Of course, it's not like The Wire is innocent of exposition. A few scenes earlier, D'Angelo Barksdale narrates the events that led to the shooting of the young woman. And he does it in a monologue. The truth is--as well-written and -acted as the monologue is--I could have done without it. And that's true of most exposition, I find; I think the scene with the cops would have been enough to tell us all we need. Then again, I'm not the screen-writer.

All the same, the scene stands: one word of dialogue (repeated endlessly). Two cops. One crime scene. And no need to scamper around to make sure the viewer's keeping up. It's really exhilarating storytelling. I hope there's more scenes like that in the remainder of the season.

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*Heresy alert: The Phantom Menace is, in this respect, superior to A New Hope in that it just introduces the Jedi and--until the midichlorian disaster--manages to pretty much not explain them. The newer movie fails in a lot more ways than it succeeds, but I don't think the lack of "world building" exposition is part of its failure.

**Perhaps we are, at that, given how many people called Inception a brain-twister. I've seen the plot of the Red Riding trilogy called incomprehensible, though I didn't find it so once I got past the thick Yorkshire accents.

New Year's Day

2013-01-01T18:45:00.000-08:00

It could not be said that Mr. Queen greeted the dawn of 1930 with hope. For one thing, when he opened his eyes it was five minutes of one on Wednesday afternoon. For another, when he tottered to the window to gaze upon the bright new world he found it universally gray, with clouds as thick as the inside of his head, the air with a sludgy quality, and rain the obvious fate of the day. "Ring in the false, ring in the true," Lord Tennyson had written, but Ellery doubted that the bells clanging in his skull foretokened any such millennium.

(Queen, Ellery. The Finishing Stroke. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958).

Ring Out, Wild Bells

2012-12-31T08:51:00.000-08:00

In Memoriam, [Ring out, wild bells]
by Lord Alfred Tennyson

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws. Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the fuller minstrel in. Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good. Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be. Happy New Year, everybody. Catch you on the flipside.

Nero Wolfe: Death of a Doxie (Timothy Hutton, 2002)

2012-12-28T19:44:00.000-08:00

Another day, another Nero Wolfe two-parter. For the Season Two set, though, A&E seem to have sensibly decided to package the double-headers as single episodes. That certainly helps with the flow, even if the seams still show a little. Death of a Doxie is the season opener, and as such it's pretty effective. Stylishly directed by Timothy Hutton--who has a good eye, or at least a good eye for cinematographers--the episode takes its time reintroducing Wolfe and Goodwin, as well as the show's extensive stable of characters. I won't rehash my usual complaints about the plot; I found myself forgetting plot points as soon as they were introduced and the non-regular characters (with one exception) were marvelously forgettable.

But what an exception it was! One of the pleasures of watching this series has been getting introduced to the entrancing Kari Matchett.She's played the femme in nearly every episode, and here she pulls double duty as Archie's friend Lily Rowan and as Julie Jaquette, a young chorus girl who is nearly as eccentric as Archie and Nero put together. The chemistry between Hutton and Matchett is beautiful to behold. IMDB informs me that the two have frequently found themselves paired as love interests and it's easy to see why. Next to Chaykin, I think Matchett has become my favorite thing about the series; I certainly cheer whenever she shows up, in whatever role.

This episode is another for the "this time it's personal" files, which is fine by me. I've come to believe that detective novels (as opposed to episodic television) need to be events. Things need to happen that challenge the detective and his world. And since the Nero Wolfe series is based on novels and novellas, not short stories (for the most part), it makes sense that each episode is an event. In this case, Archie is trying to prove that Orrie Cather, one of Wolfe's stable of detectives, is innocent of murder. It's less earth-shattering than the revelations in the previous episode, but it's effective enough.It would, admittedly, be more effective if Orrie had shown up in Season One (he was, apparently, in the pilot episode)--but that's to the side.

One other note: it seems that, while the series remains stuck in a kind of fantasy Fifties, the costume designers made an effort to make the clothing worn by Matchett as mod as possible. You see the costume above. Look now on this:

Now, I'm not all up on my sartorial history, but that looks awfully sixties to me (as does the poetry recital Archie attends early in the episode). It's the sort of thing Emma Peel would have worn. It's not a problem with the episode--just an observation. See, too, Matchett-as-Lily:

I'm not sure if this will continue through the season, but I kind of hope it does--a kind of melting-into-the-sixties kind of thing.

In all, not a bad episode at all (if you can forgive the forgettable plot). Hutton and Chaykin are as fun as always, and Matchett delivers what must be her most bewitching performance so far. I look forward to seeing what the rest of the series has to offer.

Over My Dead Body (Timothy Hutton 2001)

2012-12-14T17:29:00.000-08:00

"Over My Dead Body" is the last Wolfe story in my Season 1 set, so now might be the time for me to look back to the first story and admit...ok, I was wrong. About a couple of things. First--I was wrong, wrong, so wrong about Timothy Hutton as Archie. He was grating at first--and he still sometimes gives the feel of a boy playing dress-up--but as the series has gone on, I've come to be very fond of his interpretation of the character. It's a tricky thing; the ease with which he plays Archie takes the form of unease, so that at first glance he seems mannered or stagey. His father was the same way as Ellery Queen, so perhaps it's a family trait. Anyway--as with Jim Hutton and Queen--after a few episodes I seem to have gotten used to the way Hutton talks and moves, and even though he still doesn't match my vision of Archie from the books I've read...well, it really doesn't matter. I'm not the arbiter of Hutton's acting decisions, and if it works it works. And, yes, it works.

Happy?

The second thing I was wrong about was in suggesting that starting the series with Wolfe going up against the FBI was a weak decision. And my realization of this fact stems entirely from this episode. The FBI come back--but they're not the Big Bads they were in the first episode. In fact, their presence is kind of inconsequential, and that's because the focus here is on Wolfe and Archie and the sudden revelation that Wolfe--Wolfe, of all people--has a daughter. Adopted, we're quickly assured; there's no way that the prickly Nero Wolfe could actually have had a romantic liaison at any point in the past (could there?) This revelation casts Wolfe in a whole new light; we see that he was, at one point, a freedom fighter and an idealist, and that revelation makes the whole episode feel bigger than the FBI drama at the beginning of the series.

When we talk about "mystery" in a detective story, most often we mean whodunnit. And that's a fair assumption; after all, the whole plot hinges on mysterious death. But there's another mystery here: the mystery of the detective him- or herself. Sherlock Holmes--whatever Holmesians might say--would not be as interesting if we knew absolutely what his date of birth was (Twelfth night?) or what his relationship with his father was or how he picked up the cocaine habit. Poirot's idiosyncrasies, we are assured, mask a depth that we can never see. And Nero Wolfe--immense, grouchy Nero Wolfe--what goes on in his mind?

Throughout the series, we've seen Wolfe be gruffly kind (or kindly gruff); we've seen him panic over the idea of losing Archie. And now we see him being (almost) fatherly. There is no melodramatic peeling of onion layers, though; Wolfe remains Wolfe, and to that extent he remains mysterious. But those flashes of humanity are enough, and serve to make the episode almost as imposing as Wolfe himself.

The plot? Couldn't tell you. The twist is obvious, of course, but (despite having watched this thing twice) I can't for the life of me remember who got murdered. That's still a major flaw in this series--and in the Stout novels, for that matter--but I'm going to give this episode a pass because it gets so much else right. This is a solid episode and a good conclusion to the season.

Next Friday--I start in on season 2. Really. I promise.

In Which I Promise I've Not Vanished....

2012-12-13T17:35:00.002-08:00

...I just hit major time constraints/writer's block over the past bit. But that should be all sorted for the next little while, anyway. For starters, here's a piece I just posted at Filmwell: Ten Notes on Elementary; or, Why Can't I Love It?

For another thing, I should be continuing the Nero Wolfe series tomorrow, and The Wire sometime after that.

Midweek Not-A-Mystery Post: Bob Dylan in "Rolling Stone"

2012-09-12T13:05:00.001-07:00

This is getting to be a habit, but I'm going to roll with it. Rolling Stone has an interview with Bob Dylan in its latest issue, and there's an excerpt on the website. Considering I spent several posts following the Henry Timrod "controversy"--was it really six years ago?!--the link especially caught my eye:

Oh, yeah, in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. That certainly is true. It's true for everybody, but me. There are different rules for me. And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him? Who's been reading him lately? And who's pushed him to the forefront? Who's been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it's so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get. Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff. It's an old thing – it's part of the tradition. It goes way back.

This is the first time Dylan's directly addressed the kerfuffle--and it's strikingly non-cagey--so it's worth noting, I think.

As a reminder, here's the song that initially brought up the Timrod connection:

Nero Wolfe: Christmas Party (Holly Dale, 2001)

2012-09-07T18:34:00.003-07:00

Another day, another slightly-plotted episode of Nero Wolfe. But this episode, unlike the previous one, does not disappoint. Sure, the clues may be obvious and the suspects bland, but for some reason I found it easy to forgive and forget--to like the episode, rather than feel conflicted about it. A good deal of that has to do with the set-up: Archie announces out of the blue that he is getting married. A married Archie means, of course, one of two things: either he must leave the household of Nero Wolfe or his wife must join it. The latter is unthinkable; the former is, as we learn, intolerable.

Wolfe is desperate. Chaykin conveys this well; his whole world is quite suddenly coming apart, and he acts to save it. And here be spoilers: Wolfe is so desperate that he disguises himself as Santa Clause and acts as bartender at the titular Christmas party. It's a great concept, and the way in which he tells Archie (though not the viewer--we have all figured it out about the time the words "Santa Clause" are first mentioned) is funny and oddly moving. Which, of course, brings us up against what's really been the central theme of the series so far. Or--not theme; theme is not the right word. Motif.

I've mentioned before how much Holmes needs Watson; I indicated how oddly homey I found the Ellery Queen television series. In both cases, far from being an Isolated Recluse who descends into the world in order to put it to rights, the detective is a man who desperately needs--and values--those around him. Watson keeps Holmes human; the Inspector keeps Ellery from absent-mindedly drinking Drain-O. It's an idea that clashes with everything we're supposed to know about the Classic Detective. Isn't he the person-supposed-to-know? Isn't he the voice of Law and Order? Doesn't he sweep into society and clean it up before vanishing back into the sky?

Well--yes and no. The detective doesn't inhabit the world of the crime, but he does inhabit a world, a world that is made up of people he cares about. This is, I think, an important but often neglected factor in detective fiction. Holmes and Watson and Lestrade; Ellery and the Inspector and Velie; Gideon Fell and Hadley. And, of course, Nero Wolfe and Archie. All of these work well because they work well together; Wolfe without Archie would be less of a Wolfe. And he knows it, and Archie knows it. So, when it seems as if Archie will leave him, Wolfe exerts an effort of the kind he seldom does; he dons a humiliating costume and serves drinks in order to find out if his employee--his friend--really will leave him.

The family dynamic I've mentioned even extends to Cramer; late in the episode, as Wolfe is preparing to expose the killer, he indicates that Cramer should sit. When Cramer seems about to refuse, Wolfe points insistently and almost pleads (!) "It's your chair. Sit." If Wolfe would be diminished without Archie, one suspects that he would also be diminished without Cramer.

The fact that all of these sets I've mentioned are male might mean something, but I'm not sure. The stereotypical assumption in the past was that both the Reasoner and the Actioneer would be male. Perhaps there's something about the all-male household in Nero Wolfe that would raise eyebrows, but I'm not entirely convinced; all the same, it's interesting (if only in a "huh" sort of way) that the Wolfe stories follow the hard-boiled tradition of thinking of women as trouble, as disturbances in the calm waters of male sociability.

For the rest, I found the episode enjoyable. For some reason, when they put these matched sets together, the quality always seemed to lean toward the second installment. That's the case here. The acting (including, alas, Hutton) is once more inclining toward the hysteric, but in the end it's bearable because the story itself is a good one, and because Chaykin's performance continues to get better. Wolfe has gotten consistently more desperate over the course of the series; I'm curious to see if this trend continues.

Nero Wolfe: Door to Death (Holly Dale, 2001)

2012-08-31T18:51:00.002-07:00

"Door to Death" is a frustrating episode. Somehow, it manages to combine everything good about this series with everything weak about it, leaving me in the awkward position of patting its back with one hand and slapping it firmly across the face with the other. I don't know whether to love the episode or hate it, but something tells me I should do one or the other. Put another way, it elicits strong feelings, but I'm not sure what those feelings are. And so I'm afraid this review is going to be as muddled as the episode itself, which I suppose is a fitting enough tribute.

Once again, we have Wolfe as a fish-out-of-water. Driven to distraction by the need to hire a new gardener to help with his orchids, Wolfe forces Archie to drive him out into the country where they can meet with, and hopefully hire, the crack orchid-grower Andy Kransicki (Nicholas Campbell). When they get to their destination, though, they find a body, and Kransicki is the prime suspect. And so Wolfe, in order to get the gardener he wants, is obliged to take on the case. Over the course of the episode, he shouts and hollers and misses lunch and tromps through the snow wearing a ridiculous-looking hat. It's loads of fun.

To me, the best thing about this series is Chaykin's Wolfe. In the novels--at least, the ones I've read--Wolfe comes across as a kind of forbidding guy; when I compare him to Greenstreet, I'm specifically thinking of Gutman from The Maltese Falcon. And Chaykin can be pretty forbidding, if the need arises; but his Wolfe is much more of a...I hesitate to say "overgrown baby," but that's exactly what he's like in this episode. Any rancor he felt over the woman who was strangled in his study a couple of episodes back pales in comparison to the tantrum he throws here. It's enormously entertaining to watch him get into a huff over being called by his first name.

Then again, Chaykin's Wolfe is a man who cannot really function outside his domicile.* That silly hat I mentioned is, of course, television shorthand for "homebody." It's the sort of hat a man wheres if he's afraid of catching a cold. So, too, is Wolfe's scarf. And when the occasion arises to tromp through a snowy wood, he protests that he didn't bring his galoshes. In terms of readiness for the Great Outdoors, Nero Wolfe makes Poirot look like Bear Grylls. It works, it's really funny, and it underlines the great strength of this series: making Wolfe (and yes, Archie) seem like slightly off-kilter but still likable people. I doubt any of us would care to deal with Wolfe firsthand, but it's hard not to view him with affection.

Unfortunately, the episode spends so much time focusing on Wolfe that it forgets (or Stout forgot, which is the same thing in the end) to give us any idea who the suspects are. There's the old man, the girl, that other old man, a couple of offstage women, and the son who "can't tell men from women" and is very devoted to his mother. They flash across the screen with a couple of entertaining scenes and then are gone, and the focus shifts to Wolfe complaining about being chased out of the house. Which means that when the killer is revealed...well, it doesn't matter.

To be fair, the viewer can actually recognize the killer this time, actually remember the character. That's to the good (compare to Eeny Meeny Murder Moe). But the fact that the identity of the murderer seems like an afterthought (and isn't preceded by a clue of any kind, unlike in the previous episode--unless you count some slight Freudian stuff as a clue) fatally undercuts the mystery. We, as viewers, need to care--I don't mean this in an emotional sense, but in an intellectual one--who the killer is. We need to have an idea who the suspects are in order to care. If we have no idea who these people are, then the killer might as well be the butler.

In the end, "Door to Death" isn't really successful because it doesn't present much in the way of a mystery. The Wolfe stuff is fun, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. But if all that character-work with the detective means that we get no character-work with the suspects, I don't really see it as a fair trade. Better far to jettison the mystery entirely and focus on Wolfe's escapades in the snow (although, of course, he wouldn't be in the snow if there were no mystery). It's an odd sort of problem: rather than focusing on plot at the expense of character, the episode focuses on character at the expense of character. I'm not sure I've seen this problem pop up this severely anywhere else.

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*I say "Chaykin's Wolfe" because I'm not familiar enough yet with Stout's Wolfe to make any sort of identification between them. I do know that when Wolfe is forced to operate outside his environment in Where There's a Will, he gets on far better than he does here. Of course, he's still in the city then....

And Now--A Break for Bob Dylan

2012-08-29T04:56:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted on something not related to detective-based television. Which is fair; blogs are like people in all sorts of tired and cliched ways, and this one's no different. But I want to take a midweek break and point out that Bob Dylan has a new album hitting shelves on 11 September, and his first single, titled "Dusquesne Whistle," has been released.

And it has a video.

Rolling Stone calls the video shockingly violent. I call it very funny. Even hilarious. Because I think, more than any of Dylan's other recent videos (the truly shocking "Beyond Here Lies Nothing" and the exuberant "Must be Santa,") it gets to the heart of whatever-it-is that Dylan is doing at this late stage in his career. So, watch the video and then skip back here and I'll share a couple of thoughts.

###

Ok, so the video starts out with a young man flipping cards into a coffee can. He sees a woman, is instantly smitten, and follows her down the street, dancing, stealing a flower, pulling all sorts of charming japes until the instant he opens her door and gets a face full of pepper spray.

Day two--again the young man. Again the woman, the following, the japes (somewhat more subdued). Only, this time, the owner of the flower stall flags down the cops. The cops give chase, the young man runs, he knocks over a ladder with a worker on it, and then is caught and sent to jail.

Day three--after his release from jail. Young man, woman, following. No japes. Determination. He's following closely now...and a van pulls up to the curb. Burly men grab the boy and toss him into the vehicle and the next thing you know he's being beaten while the guy from the ladder looks on. Then they drive the boy back to the street and toss him out while he fantasizes about romancing the girl.

That's the summary. A couple of notes:

1. This video is obviously subverting standard romantic comedy cliches. You get a good look at the woman several times in the video, and it's clear that she not only doesn't want the young man following her, she's worried about the fact that he's always around. I mean, she maces him! So the idea that a guy sees a girl and immediately acts out and wins her over is under the gun. What's more, all the tricks he pulls (opening her car door, stealing the flower, etc) have consequences that never occur in those sorts of movies (well, the cops might. Jail time, no. Beating, no).

So far, so standard. Those sorts of cliches are ridiculous, and I think most people have the good sense to know they're ridiculous. Although--it's still lots of fun to see the tropes deflated.

2. The contrast here is striking: romantic comedy meets violent crime. What's more, it's romantic comedy of a particular sort. They follow a similar pattern today, but I suspect Rolling Stone is correct in tying the video to Chaplin. That is, it's a comedy from another time (that "other time" is actually pretty broad, though; replace the boy with Cary Grant and you'll see what I mean). Which fits the music; "Dusquesne Whistle" is late Dylan, which means it's the product of a Dylan who's interested in mining older forms of music in a way that's more transparent than in, say, Blonde on Blonde.

3. So we have a comedy from the past set to music in the past. But it takes place in the present (both the action and Dylan's music). So there's already some sort of contrast here; the boy doesn't fit the world around him. He's acting like Chaplin, but he doesn't live in Chaplin's world. So all these outmoded tricks--stealing the flower, etc etc etc--don't have the result he anticipates. Indeed, their consequences are disastrous.

4. When the boy tries to act out his time-displaced ardor, he winds up beaten. Now, it could be that we're supposed to sympathize, but I doubt it. Dylan doesn't--look at him stepping around the young man's beaten body there at the last. The idea isn't that the boy is a young Romantic crushed in the cruel cycles of modernity; he's a young fool (as, perhaps, Dylan is an old fool in the classic sense of "fool"--a jester) who can't accommodate his backwardsleaning proclivities to the world around him. It's a pity, to a certain extent, but it's also well deserved. I mean, honestly, the boy's a creep.

5. The irony, of course, is that Dylan's own time-displaced music has been very well received since "Love and Theft" came out eleven years ago. But his music does exactly what this video does--it takes an older form and injects it with a harshness that the older variety doesn't have:

"Spirit on the Water" is a lovely song; it's the sort of song Bing Crosby would sing. And it ends like this:

I wanna be with you in paradise

And it seems so unfair

I can't go to paradise, no more

I killed a man back there

You think, I'm over the hill

Think I'm past my prime

Let me see what you got

We can have a whoppin' good time

The whole song is full of this sort of thing; it's composed like an old Standard, and it's got the lyrics of...well, of a Dylan song. Which is to say--rough, uncouth, sometimes dirty.

6. I suspect that Dylan intends this contrast to both poke fun at the bouncy exuberance of the older "romantic" notions, to critique them, and to redeem or resuscitate them into something else. The boy's stalkerish tendencies can't live in the real world, but the enthusiastic way he dances is contagious, and Dylan's music captures the enthusiasm nicely, even if Dylan himself seems more weary and ragged and torn--though not weak--when he appears. Threadbare romanticism? Maybe.

7. None of these points is conclusive. I'm still chewing it over. I was afraid the video would dull my appreciation of the song, but if anything it's heightened it. So I offer these reflections as pieces of thought, not fully-rounded ideas.

Nero Wolfe later this week.

Nero Wolfe: Disguise for Murder (John L'Ecuyer, 2001)

2012-08-25T18:39:00.000-07:00

"Disguise for Murder" follows directly on the heels of "Eeny, Meeny, Murder, Moe," opening as it does with the poker game that introduced Archie's account of the previous adventure. One of my points of puzzlement with "Moe" was with the card game; it works well enough as a framing device, but since it's never returned to in that episode, one is left to wonder why it exists at all. Wikipedia explains:

In international broadcasts, the episodes "Eeny Meeny Murder Mo" and "Disguise for Murder" are linked and expanded into a 90-minute widescreen telefilm titled "Wolfe Stays In."^[2] The two episodes are connected by scenes of Archie playing poker with Saul, Orrie and Lon — extensions of the Stout originals written by head writer and consulting producer Sharon Doyle.

--which makes sense, right? Actually, even if the linkage is a marketing ploy, it happens that they couldn't have found two better episodes to fuse into a two-hour omnibus mystery than these two. They're both concerned with a murder that takes place in Nero Wolfe's own study, and in both of them we find one of the protagonists (Wolfe in "Moe," and Archie in "Disguise") suffering from rancor against the killer, since a certain part of the responsibility lies with him. So they fit together nicely as a matched set.*

As a matter of fact, it's precisely this set of resonances that make this episode so enjoyable for me. When Wolfe turns to Archie and asks whether he's feeling rancor, it's a turning point for the episode; it's a moment when Wolfe allows himself to be swayed by Archie because they have this common point, this experience of rancor. Chaykin plays it beautifully, as always. So, too, with the last scene, when Archie is explaining to his poker buddies why he had to go it alone when catching the killer. He explains that Wolfe knew that he had to do it, had to go after the killer himself, because it was personal. Wolfe overhears all this. It's a nice moment.

Of course, if there's a weakness to this episode (the plot is slight, but not exactly weak), it's that there's no reason for Archie to feel rancor here. I mean, there is--he should know by now to lock the door to the office when there's someone inside who fears for her life--but why should this bother him more than, say, the death of the girl in "Champagne for One"? There is, it's true, the fact that here the murder occurs in Wolfe's study, but we don't get much of a sense from Hutton that this matters terribly to Archie, beyond being an inconvenience in the smooth running of the house. Hutton's good here, but there's no sense that he has any particular beef in this case.

As to the plot--well, it's slight, no doubt there. It hinges on a neat verbal clue that slipped past me; that it's the sort of clue that you find in those "One Minute Mystery" books should be of no concern here. It's good, it's fair, and it got me. Considering the fact that this is not a two-hour episode, perhaps such a trick is the ideal sort of clue. More problematic is the fact that we don't really get much in the way of character from the suspects; if the killer comes as a surprise (and, in this case, the surprise was wasted as soon as I saw the killer in disguise), it's going to be mostly because the viewer has forgotten the cast entirely in the whole maze of Archie chasing down notes and trying to arrange a meeting with the killer.**

But that's to the side; the fact is, I turned this episode off and immediately felt like blogging about it because it's pretty darn good. The character work involving Nero and Archie (and Fritz, who gets more to do with each episode, it seems) is top-knotch. The plot's not much to look at, but it does play fair and doesn't feel like a cheat in the end. Or random. Or obvious. So a gold star there.

I'm enjoying this show more with each episode, and I don't think it's just because I've read more Stout since I started. The atmosphere of the show takes getting used to; it's not straight-forward (albeit Gothic-tinged) realism like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie's Poirot; it's much more tongue in cheek. Much more stylized, too--the acting isn't naturalistic; it's forced. It might be called stagey. And all these factors are very offputting at first. But I've come around, the more I've watched, because Nero Wolfe also manages to create for itself its own consistency, its own world. And, within that world, it's very effective indeed.

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*Of course, Archie should be over his feelings of rancor by now. He has yet, to my knowledge, been able to protect anyone who came to him for help. If you want to live, going to Archie for help is the last thing you should consider. You'd be safer with Mike Hammer; he might slug you around, but Archie will walk out of the room and make good and sure you're dead.

**Not to say that "surprise" is the highest good, even in a detective story. It's actually about fourth on my list of essentials. The primary qualification is that the murderer not feel random--as the killer often does in my experience of Stout. Here, though, the killer is clearly the only person implicated by the clues at hand. The solution hinges on such a tiny detail that I'm inclined to call it a technicality--which is why I say the plot is "slight"--but it's absolutely and utterly fair.

The Wire: The Buys (2002)

2012-08-25T14:47:00.000-07:00

"The Buys" is another episode that illustrates exactly how hard it is to write recaps on The Wire (or, really, any HBO show). So much happens, especially in the last ten minutes or so, that will radically change the face of the show as it's been presented so far: a key member of the investigation force is revealed to possibly be dirty, and a new rival for the Barksdale gang shows up. The former may or may not be game-changing; from reading around, it seems that the latter is key, since it introduces Omar Little (Michael Kenneth Williams), a character declared as the best in the show by no less a person than Barack Obama (who, admittedly, isn't a TV critic. But neither am I. So there).

Anyway. The episode does feature a couple of interesting scenes with D'Angelo Barksdale. The most interesting--and, I suspect, the most talked-about, though I've not done all that much checking--is the chess scene. D'Angelo comes across two of his lackeys playing checkers with chess pieces. Rolling his eyes, he sits down and starts to explain the finer points of chess. But as the scene rolls on, it becomes apparent that there's more going on here; this chess scene is really a way to explain the dynamics of gang culture: the rooks are the "stash," for instance.

It's a fine enough scene, and I suspect that it was one of the early hints that The Wire aspires to the state of televisual novel. I've got a couple of issues with it, though. First: giving a character an understanding of chess strikes me as a cheap way to show that there's more to him than meets the eye. Now, I'm admittedly influenced by that most famous of grumpy frauds Edgar Allen Poe, who exclaimed in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" that it is in checkers, not chess, that true analytical genius resides:

I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen.

My second issue is the way chess becomes a metaphor for gangland crime. Not that it can't be, but there seems to be little need for it here; we, as the audience, can guess or know what sort of world we're witnessing from...well, witnessing the world. It's dog-eat-dog. The pawns have little chance of making it all the way to queenhood. We get it. We would have gotten it without the scene.

Now, all that said, it's an effective scene because it does show a little more of D'Angelo's character, and it does show that the members of the gang give a good deal of thought to their place in it and in the world around them. My gripes regarding the chess device are mostly because it strikes me as just a little too obvious for the purpose; then again, racking my brain, I have a hard time coming up with a better metaphor.* Going to a gangland movie would be just as hamfisted. More so. So I'll not press my gripes too much.

The other interesting scene with D'Angelo--and a far more effective one, at that--comes earlier in the episode when he urges his subordinates to stop beating up customers. The whole world is like that, he says; why does the drug business have to be like that too? It's a neat exchange and, I think, far more subtle than the chess scene. First, because it shows D'Angelo still processing the murder of the witness in a previous episode. He's trying to work through how he thinks the business should be run. Second, because it neatly inverts the idea of gangs as necessarily violent. Of course, they most often are; but to see a drama suggesting that they might actually try to be more humane than the cops is neat storytelling. It gives a twist to the conventional black-and-white morality (in all senses of the term) that we see in shows like Law and Order.

And now the twist at the end. McNulty is out in his car drinking (this is, incidentally, the third episode and every one of them ends with McNulty drinking in his car. I sense a theme) when a friend in the FBI pulls up to tell him that Lt. Daniels is suspected of being a dirty cop. I'm not sure what to make of this. Daniels has certainly seemed intense--too intense, at times--and willing to compromise in order to get by. Given his actions in the previous episode, I suppose we could even call him "dirty," though of course every cop on this show is dirty in one way or another. But this is more serious, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the show plays with the possibility.

Tomorrow: Nero Wolfe. Or tonight, if I feel inspired. Blogging is liable to get choppy again for the next week or so until I get my graduate seminar legs under me again.

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*"Checkers" whispers the ghost of Edgar Poe.

Nero Wolfe: Eeny, Meeny, Murder, Moe (John L'Ecuyer, 2001)

2012-08-17T18:19:00.000-07:00

I could make a joke here about how Stout chose the killers in his novels, but I'll let it slide. The truth is, this episode isn't the most complex of the episodes we've seen; indeed, it depends upon a rather simple reversal that should be obvious from, oh, the first time the killer's name is mentioned. As a matter of fact, the solution is so obvious that I'm betting I'll be able to blog the entire episode without giving away even a single spoiler. So consider yourself warned: there are no spoilers here. How's that for a reversal of my usual method?

Of course, the real joys of this series do not lie in plot; they lie in the Archie-Nero dynamic--and, more particularly, in the ways that dynamic can be upset or played with. Out of the, oh, four stories we've covered so far, I think every single one has featured the sentence "Wolfe made it a rule never to discuss business over dinner"--in order to cut to Wolfe discussing business over dinner. Similarly, we've seen the sanctity of his orchid room invaded at least three times and we've seen Archie royally bungle his job as protector twice in a row.

Now, don't think I'm complaining. I'm not. The truth is, for a series detective it is imperative that every case have a reason to exist--a reason, that is, to be put into book form. If every case were routine, we would very quickly tire of the series. It's primarily in the differences, in the ways that the detective (in this case, Wolfe) is forced out of his comfort zone, that the individual stories gain their reason to exist. How boring would it be, otherwise, if Wolfe not only never left his apartment, but never strayed from his usual routine? So I can see why Stout thought it wise to occasionally shake up the story--and why the television series focuses so much on these sorts of stories.

Eeny, Meeny, Murder, Moe isn't a great story. Its mystery is hardly developed, and its killer is as surprising as snow in Antarctica. But it's a terrific episode for pure character moments. And that's all because of the setup: a woman comes to Wolfe for help and finds herself strangled by a necktie that Wolfe negligently left on his desk. It's beautiful because Wolfe's impatience about the tie is such a characteristic thing. Of course he would impatiently take off a stained tie and leave it on his desk; of course Archie wouldn't do anything about it, choosing instead to fume in silence. So when the woman is murdered, there in Wolfe's office, there's a sense in which the detective brought the crisis upon himself. And, naturally, it rattles him; indeed, he is unable to think or eat for the entire evening, much to the consternation of Fritz (Colin Fox).

Now, this setup seems like one of the Archie stories from earlier, but there's a crucial difference. As much as I loved Prisoner's Base, and as far as Hutton shot in my estimation after that episode, one doesn't get the feeling that Prisoner's Base was inevitable. Not for Archie--that is, his failure there didn't arise from any flaw in his character, but as the result of the unstoppable force of nature known as Nero Wolfe. But here, the fault is not in the stars but in Wolfeself. His own eccentricity lands him in this state, and though he regains his composure and triumphs by the end, it can't be denied that this fact rankles him.

And Chaykin sells it. I know we're only four episodes in, but this may be my favorite performance from him so far. Wolfe gets a lot to do; his emotional life is all over the map. He's disoriented and puzzled and angry--sometimes all at once. Like the setup, it's beautiful to watch.

For the rest, well. It really ain't that great. Wolfe sets up a typical scene at the end, but really--one is at a loss to know why, beyond puzzling the viewer. And the viewer--take this to the bank--is not puzzled. Could never be puzzled, unless s/he were some sort of naive refugee from a world where even the Hardy Boys don't exist. I'll take the music and the Archie-Nero stuff--and, ok, the always-enchanting Kari Matchett--but none of it really adds up to a good episode. It's just too slipshod for that.

The Wire: The Detail (2002)

2012-08-12T16:02:00.001-07:00

"The Detail" outlines the first few steps taken as a detail is formed to investigate the activities of the Barksdale family. McNulty (Dominic West) runs around doing his own thing and his new boss (Lance Reddick) comes down on him pretty heavily; McNulty and Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce) pull D'Angelo (Lawrence Gilliard, Jr) in and run a scam on him which nearly convinces the young man to confess; and then, several members of the detail go off the ranch and start a fight with a number of civilians.

So far, so standard (well, except maybe that last). The truth is, two episodes in I'm fascinated by the way The Wire plays with cop show stereotypes. You've got your maverick cop, his more stable partner, and his hard-nosed boss. The maverick goes off message and gets called out on it...but, of course, he's right. He and his partner call in a witness and bully or cajole them into confessing. And this, too, is right. You've seen it on any episode of Law & Order. Heck, we saw it last Friday in Nero Wolfe. It's not a bad formula, really.

But with The Wire something is different. Take that scene--exactly halfway through the episode--when McNulty and Moreland grill D'Angelo. It's an undeniably effective ruse, to tell the suspect all about the victim's life--his loves, his faith, his children. Again, I'm pretty certain Goren and Eames pulled the same thing more than once. But here's the difference: when Goren does it, we might suspect that he's playing fast and loose with reality, but there's a sense that he isn't, really; or, to put it more directly, it doesn't matter if the victim's hopes and dreams were as Goren describes them. "The Detail" takes that one step further: not only does it not matter, but the fact that it doesn't matter is itself the essential point.

Which is to say--The Wire is pretty cynical. No surprise there. McNulty and Moreland make up the victim out of whole cloth; the real corpse exists only as a slab of meat which they then dress with kids and a religious background, etc etc etc.* All that matters to the cops is getting D'Angelo into an emotional state where he'll compromise himself; and even then, only in a way that could never be admitted in a court of law. It's part of the game.

Of course, perhaps this show isn't all that cynical; the phoney story does continue to bother D'Angelo after he's been lawyered away from the clutches of the police. Whether it will bother him after this episode is, of course, an open question to me. But it shows that there is some sort of basic faith in human nature operating below the surface. There's plenty of bad in the "good" guys, but there's a not inconsiderable amount of good in the "bad" guys.**

But that human nature, as we see at the end of the episode, operates on compromise. Lt. Cedric Daniels is faced with the fact that several members of his detail have had a run-in with civilians, resulting in a boy getting injured. He scrambles to invent a cover story to keep them--and himself--out of trouble. This is, of course, a parallel to D'Angelo's crisis: either case involves either tacitly condoning or deliberately ignoring an injustice. Injustice here means "any injustice outside the normal injustice of the life we lead"--thus, killing is par for the course, but killing a family man who wasn't a real threat is problematic. Or--lying to suspects and extracting inadmissible confessions is part of the job; cold-cocking a kid isn't (naturally) but it can be papered over for the greater good of everyone concerned.

Which is, then, one point at which The Wire opens up in a way that, say, Law & Order doesn't. L&O rarely expects us to find our protagonists confronted with an ethical decision. Jack McCoy might wonder if he's overstepped his bounds, but he never compromises. Daniels does compromise, and so does McNulty and so does D'Angelo Barksdale. It makes for difficult-to-summarize, or even discuss, television, but once you crack open the themes it looks pretty rich.

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*Relax, I'm not going to suggest that the victim exists as a "gap" or a "void"--although it's tempting.

**Actually--and surely I'm not alone in this--I find the criminals in The Wire more interesting than the cops. I don't mean that in an Al Swearengen way, that they're more gutsy or anything like that. They just seem like better people; family men who happen to sell drugs and kill people. This isn't novel to The Wire, of course, but so far none of the cop characters are remotely as compelling as the Barksdales.

Nero Wolfe: Prisoner's Base (Neill Fearnley, 2001)

2012-08-10T14:55:00.001-07:00

Prisoner's Base is another two-part story, but per my previous comments I'm going to treat it as a single unit. The break between episodes is not quite so abrupt in this case as it was in Champagne for One, but taking a broader view helps lay out the problems (not many) and strengths (quite a few) of the story.

The biggest strength here lies in Hutton's performance. Now, that's funny, because his bouncy interpretation of Archie still rankles me occasionally (I sometimes feel the urge to shout just put your hands down! Quit waving them!). But he's demonstrated before--and nowhere better, so far, than in Prisoner's Base--that when he settles down, he can give a very down-to-earth, human reading of Archie. For, you see, Archie feels a good deal of responsibility for the murder at the core of Prisoner's Base (plot summary here); the victim, Priscilla Eads (Shauna Black) shows up at the beginning of the episode seeking asylum in Wolfe's house. Archie does his best, but Wolfe will have none of it and turns her out. Shortly thereafter, she is found dead.*

And Archie's mad--mad at Wolfe, mad at himself, mad enough to go rogue and try to investigate the case without Wolfe's help. Wolfe, for his part, winds up so impressed by Archie's foolish but gallant desire to go it alone that he (Wolfe) decides to take on Archie as a client. Now, this is one of my favorite bits of Prisoner's Base; it seems fairly evident to me that Wolfe doesn't give his full reasons--that he has, perhaps, talked himself into a corner and needs a way to extract himself and take the case even though there is no client involved. Call it a conflict of better nature versus pig-headedness. He certainly refuses Archie's attempt at giving him a retainer, and tries to dismiss the whole thing at the end with a brusque "phui".

So you've got the Archie and Nero stuff, which is top-knotch, and Archie's interactions with not one but two ill-fated women, one of whom dies in a maneuver which gives the novel its title. And in all of these, Hutton more than delivers. You feel his affection for Wolfe, obviously; but more surprising is the tenderness he demonstrates toward Sarah Jaffee (Kari Matchett), a widow who is only just getting over her husband's death.** Of course, the episode also flirts with social issues (feminism, in this case), but not very seriously. And it has one flaw that I want to pick at (derived, of course, from the source novel): the identity of the killer.

Generally speaking, the culprit in a murder mystery is at once the most important and the least essential element in the plot. His name might only appear twice in the whole book or he might be the narrator--both have been done (one by Ellery Queen and the other by Agatha Christie). Either one is fair, as long as the revelation of the killer prompts a snap of revelation, a re-orienting of previous events into a new shape. The identification of the killer takes on a prophetic aspect, in which the prophet-detective looks on the world-as-it-is and speaks the truth about it, stripping away the layers of deception.

In Prisoner's Base, however, the unveiling of the killer doesn't feel, in the end, very important--in spite of the fact that he's killed two women whose deaths Archie very much regrets. True, Archie gets to punch him in the face--which is satisfying--but he vanishes so thoroughly from the memory that one could wish that Stout had decided on another culprit. Indeed, one almost thinks that Stout could have randomly changed the identity of the culprit and not impacted the plot at all.***

That said, I'm impressed. Nero and Archie continue to be very entertaining, and if the mysteries seem somewhat randomly resolved, they're more than held up by the chemistry between the characters.
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*Actually, between this story and Champagne for One, it's becoming increasingly clear that the one person you don't want looking after you if your life is in danger is Archie Goodwin. But rest assured--if you do ask for his help, he'll feel very sorry when you die.

**One of the few tonal missteps in this story is the way Jaffee's reluctance to remove her husband's coat from the hallway is introduced. It plays like comedy, which seems...awkward, considering. But it does lead to a very charming flirtation between Jaffee and Goodwin.

***As I slowly acquaint myself with Stout's literary output, I'm coming to suspect that this is the rule for the Nero Wolfe books. Certainly, the most recent book I've read--Where there's a Will--features a killer so randomly chosen that the logic pinning him down applies equally well to another character--and the "twist" is simply a flip-flopping from one to the other. Not that this is a devastating weakness; Claude Chabrol never cared much for the mystery aspect of his films, but still produced some solid and entertaining thrillers.

Nero Wolfe: Champagne for One Part II (Timothy Hutton, 2001)

2012-07-06T19:43:00.001-07:00

And so on to Part II. Assume spoilers. The episode picks up almost immediately after the abrupt ending of the previous half of this story, which ties in to the idea of keeping the general beats of the original novels--and also argues strongly that these two-part stories should be viewed together. Which is, of course, what I'll be doing from now on. Fortunately, since this episode is the last half of the mystery, it doesn't stumble along nearly as badly as the previous one. It also ties up some of the thematic stuff I hinted at last week.

I said then that the episode set itself up as a "battle of the sexes." That turn of phrase isn't quite right, since it suggests that the sexes are battling each other in the manner of some sort of screwball comedy. More properly, the story in general is concerned with a struggle for social power, with the weapons used by the various combatants being gendered or sexualized in certain ways. Remember Mrs. Robilotti insisted in the previous episode that the house she shared with her husband was her house? Or that the various unwed mothers are said to be looking for husbands at these society banquets? Well, it turns out that the trigger for the murder of Faith Usher was a power play between Mrs. Robilotti and her nephew; he was trying to humiliate her (perhaps to extort money, though the question is left...a little doubtful), and she reacted in rage both at his gesture and at the fact that her dead husband humiliated her by fathering an illegitimate daughter.

I find all of this very interesting, but a little underdeveloped for one reason: there's no reason to think that Mrs. Robilotti's position is at all as tenuous as that of Faith Usher or any of the other women who appear in the story. It's true that legitimacy means a great deal in the upper-crust society of late-fifties New York, but we don't really get a chance to feel what's at stake. So the motive comes across as a little weak (and the method is suspect, at best); in what is perhaps an attempt to make up for it, Mrs. Robilotti is portrayed as a bellowing harpy. Seriously, I'm thinking of starting an award for the shoutiest actor in an episode of Nero Wolfe; if I did, Marian Seldes would win this one. In all, though, I think this was a strong finish to the mystery. It's got some stuff worth thinking through further, and it boasts good performances all around.

No Nero Wolfe next week; I'll be out of the country. Take care, ya'll.