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Group Reading of LAURELS ARE POISON (1942) in September

8/29/2020

Before I discuss the Mitchell Mystery Reading Group event that is right around the corner, allow me two selfish paragraphs to explain and complain about the last two months.

My work situation, my alleged eight-to-five "day job" at a college, has consumed my life since early July. I work with area high school students and, due to the uncertainty of school reopenings, panicked parents have decided they want their charges to suddenly take some or all of their classes online through the college and avoid the high school entirely. (There is state funding in place for this.) Each new student means a few hours minimum of confirming with the school that the student is permitted to take college courses, receiving a transcript, scheduling and completing placement testing, meeting to schedule classes (Zoom, phone, or in-person), making sure high school requirements are being met, updating the guidance counselor, coding it all in the system, and on and on and on. Multiply that process by 200 and that is the circle of Dante's data-entry Hell that I have been experiencing. Lunch breaks, evenings and weekends just mean that I can work to catch up on the emails and phone messages I have missed while attending to others during the day. This is untenable and, once the add/drop period closes next week, I need to think seriously about how long I can sustain this pace and job filled with activities that provide diminishing returns.

While this has been happening, personal moments for pleasure reading, creative writing, and general happiness have disappeared completely from my life. Energy evaporates by the time I reach home; I start yawning in my car after each work shift. My brain has felt drugged and fuzzy for a month, I fall into bed exhausted but then sleep fitfully, dreaming about fictional students I still need to register and parents angry because their Megan or Cody can't get into that waitlisted English class. At the same time, the college has moved aggressively this year from a student-focused to a numbers-obsessed agenda. So I attend multiple meetings about yield and recruitment and goals to enroll x more students than the previous year, with precious little discussion about how to give all of these new online or on-campus students a meaningful and worthwhile educational experience.

Millions have lost their jobs and are struggling to provide for their families. I do not want to sound ungrateful: I was not one of the many around the world who became unemployed due to the pandemic. But the job I currently hold bears little resemblance to the one that excited me five years ago, and it is exhausting me. There is something – likely multiple somethings – better for me out there, a position that lets me draw upon my interests and creative skills to work on and towards a product and a life I believe in.

I'm ready to move on.

I still want to sponsor the planned September group reading and discussion of Gladys Mitchell's 1942 Mrs. Bradley mystery Laurels Are Poison. It would be therapeutic to celebrate this author and her art once more. Join us if you wish; all are welcome, from first-time Gladys Mitchell readers to seasoned Mrs. Bradley veterans. You can read along on this blog or join the conversations by sending me your thoughts!

Here are the September 2020 discussion dates for Laurels Are Poison:

Chapter 1 "Open Sesame" to Chapter 5 "Intrusion of Serpents"
Email comments to me by Tuesday 9/8 for post on Friday 9/11

Chapter 6 "High Jinks with a Tin Opener" to Chapter 9 "Evidence of the Submerged Tenth"
Comments by Tuesday 9/15 for post on Friday 9/18

Chapter 10 "The Flying Facoris" to Chapter 14 "Field-work"
Comments by Tuesday 9/22 for post on Friday 9/25

Chapter 15 "Rag" to Chapter 19 "Itylus"
Comments by Tuesday 9/29 for post on Friday 10/2

I'm planning to breathe deeply in an attempt to awaken my addled brain and start Chapter 1 this weekend. It is the first bit of personal reading I will be able to manage since July.

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Book Review: LAST FIRST (1947) by Richard Hull

7/26/2020

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Dedicated to those who habitually read the last chapter first.

So states the dedication of 1947's Last First, perhaps the author's boldest experiment in narrative order, where one reads the last chapter first and then spends the rest of the book watching the story build to that moment. It is a gimmick, all right, especially as the mystery genre is often all about the final chapter, with its revelations of who, how, and why crimes have been committed. To provide this information at the very top is innovative, to say the least, with many traps attendant.

But that's not what Richard Hull has actually attempted here.

Let me start at the beginning rather than jump in at the critical climax. Last First follows a small group of visitors at the Portray Hotel, a fishing and hiking retreat in the hills of Scotland. A gruff businessman named Appleyard arrives with his young secretary in tow, a flirty woman named Rosemary Mordaunt. The sole feminine presence within this masculine bastion soon stirs up conflict, and the disagreeable Communist Weston, poetry-spouting Romantic Bourn, and athletic and quiet Fielden are soon all very aware of the pigeon among the cats (or vice versa). The long-time resident and unofficial hotel mascot known as The Admiral also notes the tension and wonders whether the strain will spoil the week's planned fly-fishing excursions. It is The Admiral who will become a (rather slight) amateur detective when Appleyard's body is found on a rock with his head in the waters of the river Deren.

One of accountant-turned-writer Richard Hull's genre strengths is his continued interest in trying new storytelling approaches and set-ups: his celebrated debut novel, 1934's The Murder of My Aunt, is an inverted tale where the hopeful murderer documents his attempts in diary form (which we are reading); the flawed but amusing The Murderers of Monty (1937) hinges on violence drafted and agreed to by a limited partnership committee; and the highly enjoyable My Own Murderer (1940) has us rooting for an amoral lawyer who tries to frame his criminal client. Hull's output is inconsistent, but nearly all his stories show some curiosity about how expectations of the detective fiction format can be subverted and challenged.

So it is with Last First, a book that I found not wholly successful but intriguing in parts. How does the author manage that tricky "last chapter first" gimmick? If all is truly revealed from the beginning, i.e., if the identity of the murderer, the explanation of the crime, and the fate of the guilty party are all announced before the story even starts, then there is no suspense and little reason to read the detective story, as the reader can no longer play the game. To avoid this, Hull paints a climax where the characters are not positively identified. A man is atop a bluff, holding a gun, while three figures below walk across the rocks and grasses that trace the winding waters of Ben Deren. Rosemary Mordaunt, the only person not referred to by a nickname – everyone else is "Bongo" or "Greggy" or "Hoots", a childish naming habit of the flirtatious secretary – joins the man with a gun. Soon, the gun is fired, but is it to "warn off" a man below from stepping away from the path and into a dangerous bog or for a more sinister reason?

So we have a rather disorienting final scene first, followed by the story told chronologically to get the characters to this moment. The striking Scottish setting is agreeable and I was willing to let the story unwind – or more precisely meander – in order to complete the circle. The drama that unfolds at Portray Hotel and environs, however, is not especially believable or engaging, unfortunately. As I have felt with some other Hull novels, such as A Matter of Nerves and Invitation to an Inquest (both 1950), some of the scenes in Last First have a sort of page-filling, time-marking quality, and they are scenes that prove mostly unnecessary to the greater plot and are built upon chattery dialogue that doesn’t offer much in the way of clues or even characterization. I notice that Hull's last six books, including this one, have a tendency to wrap up at exactly 192 pages; it makes me wonder if he was writing to a strict word count, which in turn makes me suspect that those desultory conversations that pad the middle of these stories help to serve that purpose.

Still, Last First has moments of interest, although I have to wonder what a truly brilliant mystery fiction plotter might have done with the challenge of telling a detective story with the last chapter presented as the start of the narrative. (Note that the challenge would lie in tackling a true fair-play whodunit this way; a thriller tale where climax is offered up first seems a lot easier to craft, and in fact that's partly what Hull leans on here.) One wonders what Agatha Christie or Nicholas Blake might have done with the conceit. As for Richard Hull, he makes an attractive fly-cast, but falls short of hooking a fish of any substance this time around.

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Book Review: THE NOSE AND OTHER STORIES by Nikolai Gogol (2020) transl. Susanne Fusso

7/14/2020

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These nine stories serve as my introduction to Nikolai Gogol, a celebrated Ukrainian writer who I must admit I have never read before now. I was aware of and intrigued by his final tormented work, Lost Souls, and years ago I had attended a production of his stage play The Government Inspector, a sharp satire of petty bureaucracy. With only those glancing references, my approach to this collection was (hopefully) one of an open mind and a healthy curiosity, and the experience was a good one.

Often in these stories, the author uses Russian folklore and supernatural elements to explore class distinctions and Nationalist mindset. They can certainly be read for entertainment on the surface level, but like all worthy literature, there is much going on underneath that rewards analysis. Take, for example, "The Portrait," which invites comparison with Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, but in my estimation Gogol's tale is more complex and less moralistic. As a young painter takes money found in the frame of a demonic portrait and his drive as an artist suffers as a result, there is more at work in the writing and intention than a simple cause-and-effect parable.

Even in translation – and Susanne Fusso does excellent work making the Russian-to-English prose accessible, readable, and unfussily poetic – Gogol's ambitious descriptions and resounding ideas are often beautiful and striking. Take this passage chronicling the troubled painter's changing of values from warm idealism to cold materialism; it circles an age-based human reaction that feels universal and timeless, and it was one of many moments in his stories where I felt the author achieved a perfect little revelation of perception:

His life was reaching the years when everything that breathes of impulse begins to shrink within a person, when the powerful violin bow reaches the soul more faintly and does not twine about the heart with piercing sounds, when contact with beauty no longer transforms virginal powers into fire and flame, but all the burned-out feelings become more open to the sound of gold, listen more attentively to its alluring music, and little by little, imperceptibly, allow it to put them completely to sleep.

Indeed, I found myself with more than a dozen quotations jotted down by the time I finished the collection, which is fairly impressive. Many of these sentences illustrated Gogol's winking sense of humor, which I greatly appreciated. Often, the comedy is grounded in the societal social order and class system that make some citizens "important" and others "valueless" based on their title or lack of one. There is this gem from "The Carriage," about a mid-level army lieutenant who brags about the quality of his horse-drawn cart to such an extent that his colleagues catch him by surprise when they request a visit:

Chertokutsky, despite all his aristocratism, bent so far over in his carriage and with such a sweep of his head that when he got home he brought with him two burrs in his mustache.

The first two tales here, "The Lost Letter" and "Viy", describe their protagonists' encounters with demons and witches and were founded in regional tales of Ukraine folklore. In Gogol's most famous short story, "The Nose", the author takes an absurdist premise and once more looks at Russian class consciousness as Collegiate Assessor Kovolyov is irritated to find that his nose has gone missing, and then discovers that its new incarnation is of a higher government rank than he is!

"Nevsky Avenue" is a lively and colorful overview of 19th-century street life in Saint Petersburg, while "The Overcoat" is a tale full of pathos, recounting the arduous saving of a menial clerk to replace his winter coat, only to have his new possession and the clerk himself disappear while the world around them takes no notice. Only with the lengthy "Rome, a Fragment" did my interest flag, which likely had more to do with the absence of a central character or single thematic idea than with the quality of Gogol's examination of Roman Catholic customs and attitudes in a land so foreign to him.

Translator Fusso also meticulously annotates the text to define and explain the many Russian cultural, political, and geographical references. If, like me, you're new to Nikolai Gogol's writing (or if you would like to revisit his work in a new translation), this is a great place to start. I received an advance reading copy via NetGalley in exchange for a forthright review.

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Mitchell Mystery Reading Group September Event Announced!

7/5/2020

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I think most of us can say, with understatement, that this has been an unusual year. I count myself lucky, as I am still in good health and employed, which is more than far too many people around the world can report. But all of the incidental anxieties and uncertainties take a toll, and it has been difficult to find much energy outside of the daily grind of work and coronavirus precautions for creative or holistic projects. I have become a more passive and less active human artistically – a change that frustrates me – and these days I would rather read someone else's mystery story or watch a classic movie than tell my own tale or write my own review.

I hope to change that, or at least find a balance between passive and active living. To that end I announce the next Mitchell Mystery Reading Group event: anyone interested should join us for a joint reading in September of the 1942 Mrs. Bradley book Laurels Are Poison. This story of mayhem and murder at Cartaret Women's College received the most mentions when I conducted an informal poll of 1940s titles way back in March, edging out other suggestions Death and the Maiden (1947) and The Rising of the Moon (1945). Laurels also introduces the "three Musketeers" who will make future appearances in the series, the trio of friends featuring Alice Boorman, Kitty Trevelyan, and Laura Menzies, with the latter stepping up to become Mrs. Bradley's trusted factotum through the many mystery stories recorded after this one.

As with the previous reading group titles, I would like to frame the conversation by encouraging a discussion on a set of chapters each week. Readers and contributors can certainly read through the novel earlier than scheduled, but the chapter division allows us to have a more focused exchange of ideas and observations. Those who want to offer comments only need to email them to me, and I will do my best to organize and incorporate everyone's thoughts in weekly blog updates. And if you want to read but not take part in the public forum, that is also fine.

Here are the September 2020 discussion dates for Laurels Are Poison:

Chapter 1 "Open Sesame" to Chapter 5 "Intrusion of Serpents"
Email comments to me by Tuesday 9/8 for post on Friday 9/11

Chapter 6 "High Jinks with a Tin Opener" to Chapter 9 "Evidence of the Submerged Tenth"
Comments by Tuesday 9/15 for post on Friday 9/18

Chapter 10 "The Flying Facoris" to Chapter 14 "Field-work"
Comments by Tuesday 9/22 for post on Friday 9/25

Chapter 15 "Rag" to Chapter 19 "Itylus"
Comments by Tuesday 9/29 for post on Friday 10/2

I hope you are able to join us in the group reading, and if not, I wish you well in finding another satisfying story to read or tell, as your mood dictates. Stay well and make healthy choices, and feel free to send a message to jason@jasonhalf.com if you want to connect or need to commiserate with a fellow human.

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Group Reading of LAURELS ARE POISON (1942) in September

Book Review: LAST FIRST (1947) by Richard Hull

Book Review: THE NOSE AND OTHER STORIES by Nikolai Gogol (2020) transl. Susanne Fusso

Mitchell Mystery Reading Group September Event Announced!

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