Le Cafe Singe Bleu

Death By Water, A Phrynne Fisher Mystery

2009-03-26T20:13:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading Death By Water, by Kerry Greenwood.

The nice men at P&O are worried. A succession of jewelry thefts from the first class passengers is hardly the best advertisement for their cruises. Especially when it is likely that a passenger is the thief.

Phryne Fisher, with her Lulu bob, green eyes, cupid's bow lips, and sense of the ends justifying the means, is just the person to mingle seamlessly with the upper classes and take on a case of theft on the high seas-or at least on the S.S. Hinemoa-on a luxury cruise to New Zealand. She is carrying the Great Queen of Sapphires, the Maharani, as bait.

It's a well-written book, by its Australian author. I'm actually only half-way through, but it's enjoyable. You like the character of Phrynne and her maid, Dot, and the 1920s milieu is well drawn.

However, as is my way when reading a mystery, I have peaked at the end, and while it is a satisfactory ending in many ways (as two plots are entwined in one), one of the two is illogical, although I can't explain why without giving the plot away.

I shall put a spoiler and then explain the problem.

SPOILER

The jewel thieves go on cruise after cruise, robbing people...but someone on board knows that they are the jewel thieves, and forces them to hand over the jewel, which they then sell and give the proceeds to a needy person (done dirt by the person who originally owned the jewel.) It's uncertain, to me, anyway, whether the 10% handling fee referred to is given to the thieves, for their trouble, or taken by the person who knows about them. Presumably the 10% fee goes to the thieves...why else would they continue to steal jewels on the cruises when they weren't allowed to keep the proceeds????

Goldfinger: Anthony Newley vs Shirley Bassey

2009-03-22T11:35:00.000-07:00

I've just discovered that Anthony Newley - who co-wrote the Goldfinger them, and who was a friend of Shirley Bassey's, actually did a demo tape of the theme... before being beaten out by Bassey to do the actual movie version.

Compare this to Shirley Bassey's version:

and here's Bassey live

The Fuller Brush People

2009-03-18T15:52:00.000-07:00

A couple of Lucille Ball movies were on today, ones from the 1940s before she became a sitcom star as I Love Lucy.

I missed most of Miss Grant Takes Richmond, and I regret it, as I like both Ball and William Holden. Then came The Fuller Brush Woman. I didn't watch it, just DVD-Red it, but I saw the opening credits of it and it shows a woman's heels walking along, knocking on people's doors, getting water tossed on her, and doors slammed in her face, because she's a door-to-door sales person.

After that was The Fuller Brush Man, with Red Skelton. And that opens the exact same way, except of course it's a male's shoes gettng the brush off. And I though, ah hah, Fuller Brush Man is going to be an exact copy of Fuller Brush Girl. Not so, as I found out when I checked the IMDB... Girl was a remake of Man.

Anyway, the bumbling central character gets involved with gangsters, and there's lots of slapstick until the finish.

Who knew audio performers used pseudonyms?

2009-03-14T15:23:00.000-07:00

I was looking for audio books to listen to on a long drive, a couple of days ago, and came across The Masque of the Black Tulip. The author is Lauren Willig.

It sounded like another DaVinci Code or National Treasure type of thing, where investigators today accidently come across information that will alter the course of history in the future...

Turns out it wasn't like that at all.

Nevertheless, it was serendipitity - I quite like the book. It takes place in the "real world," but in a real world where the Scarlet Pimpernel actually existed back in the 1700s, and after he was unmasked the Purple Gentian and then the Pink Carnation took his place, meantime they had to battle the Black Tulip.

Okay, the names are amusing, but it's really good, light-hearted, funny, and exciting...

It takes place both in present day England and in Napoleonic France and England.

The performer is "Kate Reading", an "accomplished member of a London theatrical family."

Well, that's not really true. The performer is Jennifer Mendenhall, who had a brief TV career from 1992 to 1994 (if the IMDB is to be believed) and now works on stage in Washington DC and does auiobooks, of which she's done dozens. (Interesting pseudonym.... Reading...because she's a reader... get it?)

And I really like her voice and am impressed by her range. She starts out as the narrator, an American woman, and then segues into various British accents for everyone else in the book. Turns out in real life she was born in the US but raised in Britain.

The first book in this series by Lauren Willig is The Secret History of the Pink Carnation (I love her titles). Check it out - but go the audio book route!

Bones and Bathwater

2009-02-20T15:37:00.000-08:00

I have only recently started watching the TV series Bones, starring Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz. Thanks to holiday marathons I think I've seen most of the episodes now, and they're quite enjoyable.

However, I do have to question some of the science.

For example, the episode I'm watching right now, "Mother and Child in the Bay", has the plot (based on the Lacy Peterson disappearance) that a women's skeleton is found in some water. She's been in the water for a year. Yet the "squints" are able to find DNA material under her fingernails.

But the body was not just dumped into the bay... it actually apparently came down a stream over the course of the year... to the bay.

So, first off... there would be no fingernails, so there could be no DNA.

Secondly, even if there were fingernails, there would be no way that DNA could remain under the fingernails for a month.... let alone a year.

I mean... we've all done it. Had dirty fingernails and gone swimming, and gee, at the end of an hour your fingernails would be perfectly clean! And after a year in water...

The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

2009-02-20T13:27:00.000-08:00

The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, by Dorothy Gilman, first published way back in the 1960s, is one of my favorite books, and frankly rather an inspirational one.

The 60-ish Mrs. Pollifax is all alone, her husband dead, her children moved away, and she's feeling unwanted and unused. After reading about a 60-year old woman who finds a new career as a character actress, Mrs. Pollifax decides to follow her own dream - to be a spy.

She goes to the office of the CIA, and is ushered into a room where she is interviewed. However, her interviewer leaves the room, and the next man who enters mistakes her for the woman he's asked for - someone to act as a courier to bring some microfilm out of Mexico.

From there, Mrs. Pollifax is sent on a deadly (if light-hearted) adventure, in which she finds out that life is indeed worth living, and women in their 60s "still" have much to give.

I tried to listen to the audio version of this, narrated by Barbara Rosenblat (who also does the Elizabeth Peters books), but I confess I couldn't. Oh, there was nothing in particular wrong with her voice. Although she really didn't "gruff up" her voice when doing male characters, she did use diffent tonal inflections, etc. etc., so that part was all right. The problem is... she pronounces Mrs. Pollifax.... Mrs. Pollyfax, and I just couldn't stand it. (It's Poll-eh-fax, as far as I'm concerned!) Once or twice per chapter would be fine... but Mrs. Pollifax is referred to as Mrs. Pollifax on every single page, and I just couldn't stand it!

Mystery books read by Robin Bailey

2009-01-15T19:50:00.001-08:00

Actually, I supposed "performed" is the better word.

Robin Bailey, whom I first saw over twenty years ago as Charters on Mystery! in the 6-part serial Charters and Caldicott, has a great voice and is able to do a wide range of accents.

I first came across his audio work in Agatha Christie's Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and thought he did a great job in this, one of my favorite Christie novels.

He also seems to have been the performer of choice for the Catherine Aird novels, featuring Inspector C.D. Sloan, which I quite enjoy.

Indeed, I now have quite a collection of audio books on tape by Bailey, unfortunately because libraries are de-accessioning them. I've been able to pick them up on Amazon.com, cheap.

Some of his Agatha Christie ones, at least, have been transferred onto CD. And then again, some haven't! (You can tell by the width of the "cover" - if its square, it's now on CD, if its rectangular, they are still cassettes.)

Catherine Aird

However his Catherine Aird ones appear not to be reissued in that format, which is a pity.

An Alpine Christmas

2009-01-02T08:21:00.000-08:00

An Alpine Christmas, by Mary Daheim

It's an interesting irony that, when the Christmas season comes around, many mystery lovers like to relax by reading books with a Christmas setting. Christmas - time of joy and cheer and present, vs the murder and mayhem of a mystery novel. Well, typically we read the cozies - not the police procedurals, so Christmas cheer isn't entirely destroyed!

Well, it's the new year but I decided I'd read An Alpine Christmas anyway - as I'm staying at my parent's house and Mary Daheim books are prevalent.

And I found it, if not educational, giving me cause to think about getting an education in certain areas that were brought up:

I read this paragraph, and then I had to check to see when this book was published:

Regarding a 10-foot plastic Santa Clause statue to tower over Old Mill Park:
"It will be an apropriate seasonal reminder, and a compromise in response to criticism of the manger scene that has stood in Old Mill Park every Christmas since 1946. Let it not be said that the City of Alpine is insensitive to those who do not share basic Christian beliefs."

The book was published in 1993.

And I thought that was interesting. So the "attack on Christianity" in the US has been going on since at least 1993 - that's 15 years...

(Don't get me wrong, I'm an atheist. But I'm tolerant. If people want to believe in God, I don't mind. I don't even mind if Muslims want to believe in God, if only they wouldn't insist that their women are dirt and have to wear burkhas and cover every inch of their body, and if it's even suspected that they've been seen by a male outside their immediate family, they must immediately be killed to preserve the "honor" of the family).

In other words...the sight of a woman wearing a burkha offends me much more than driving past a creche on some public building's front step. Yet it's apparently the creche's that have to go, because that's bad, but we must accept women wearing burkha's, because that's being tolerant of Muslim beliefs!

Then there was this paragraph:

"...And the Hopis have been plucked right down in the middle of the Navajos. No wonder they hate each other. The federal government's relocation in the Seventies still causes hard feelings."

Now, I was born in 1961, and so was a teenager in the 70s, and actually don't know much about Native American history after the end of the Civil War, when their subjugation and removal onto worthless land called reservations was complete, but I would've thought that by the 1970s the guv'mint couldn't go around relocating American citizens anymore. (Although if they live on reservations, are they actually considered citizens of the US as well?) As you can see my knowledge of Native Americans today is sketchy.

But it's typical. I wonder if all the problems of the modern day can be ascribed to the fact that oblivious white folk have rearranged tribal and ethnic boundaries with no knowledge or caring of the ethnic strifes that that would cause - from the partitioning of Europe after WWI and WWII, settting Isreal in the middle of Palestine - yep, that was a great plan and there was no way at all of knowing what would ensue from that! - and in the US, reservations in which migratory Native Americans were forced to become farmers or starve, and hereditary enemies were slapped down on the same land....

Well, too complex of a subject to discuss on a mystery book blog. But...that's the educative power of the mystery novel. I'll have to look up this stuff - educate myself.

After I finish reading the book.

The Amelia Peabody series

2009-01-01T10:34:00.000-08:00

As I said in an earlier post, Elizabeth Peters is one of my favorite authors, and Amelia Peabody one of my favorite characters.

The flaws I find in the series are with the Sethos, Ramses and Nefret characters. The courtship between Ramses and Nefret was just annoying, and Sethos, who turns out to be Radcliffe Emerson's half-brother, too contrived.

Nevertheless, I still enjoy reading the books, though I confess I skip through them to find only certain passages, although eventually, I end up reading the entire book. What's fascinating about these books is simply the insight provided into the "Golden Age of Egyptology" - back in the days when Tutankhamen's tomb could actually be found, with tons of treasure in it, all the famous names of archaeology like Petrie, Howard Carter and so on...

Anyway, I confess I haven't kept up on the latest entries in the saga, but I picked them up from the library yesterday and am making my way through them. (Good old library.)

Amelia Peabody's Egypt is a book I really recommend - a mixture of fiction (treating the Peabody clan as if they really existed) and non-fiction, revealing Egypt as it really was in the 1920s - a lot of fun!

Dive Deep and Deadly

2008-12-31T12:32:00.000-08:00

I'm about half-way through this book, the 2000 debut for Glynn Marsh Alam, which I purchased specifically because the heroine was a scuba diver. I'm a scuba diver, who'd like to write mysteries featuring that skill... so thought I'd check up on what others had written.

So far, I'm enjoying it. It's well written. Establishes the ambience of southern Florida, with its ethnicities, the diving in caverns and caves, and so on.

Here's how the back jacket describes the book:
From the Florida swamp land, where sudden violent death is a fact of nature, comes Luanne Fogarty with a knack for survival and solving murders. Lush with the feel of the wild Florida swamp, Dive Deep and Deadly seethes with danger both above ground and in the treacherous underwater caves. This book is a steamy Southern mystery filled with swamp danger and diving know-how.

Fogarty, a scuba diver, does body recovery for the local police force. She is called in when a trio of teenage divers find a woman's body anchored in one of the caves. As Fogarty investigates, more women's bodies come to light, and she realizes she has a serial killer on her hands.

Crocodile on the Sandbank

2008-12-30T16:34:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Peters (also Barbara Michaels) is one of my favorite mystery writers, although I must confess I haven't liked the latest books in her Amelia Peabody series. For no other reason than I don't care for the Ramses/Nefret dynamic.

But the earlier Elizabeth Peters, and Barbara Michaels, are pretty good. (Peters, aka Barbara Mertz, her real name, in which she actually is an Egyptologist), is in her 70s now, and I think every writer declines in their 70s, especially when they write a novel a year...

But that may seem like I'm dissing Elizabeth Peters, and I'm not, for, as I said, I love her early stuff. In particular, Crocodile on the Sandbank, published in 1975, which introduced the world to Amelia Peabody - now Peters' most popular character and the one whom she writes most of her books about.

It starts out similar to Agatha Christie's The Man in the Brown Suit (written in the 1920s) about a woman who is the daughter of an archaeologist, father dies, and she goes off on adventures. (After the first chapter, of course the stories diverge. On a couple of occasions, Peters pays homage to Christie, which is kind of fun.) In Amelia Peabody's case, she comes into a fortune which enables her to travel to Egypt, where she meets Radcliffe Emerson. They spar,they spat, they fall in love. And the mummy walks.

Highly recommended.

Mini-Review: Saddled Wtith Trouble

2008-11-07T20:00:00.000-08:00

Saddled With Trouble, by Michele Scott, 2006 - is the first in the "Horse Lover's Mystery Series" - another one of those series where the heroine/detective knows nothing about police work, but nevertheless always gets mixed up in murders.

The author, Michele Scott, is also author of the "Wine Lovers' Mystery Series."

Well, I have to say I didn't care for it very much. The heroine, Michaela Bancroft, is a horse trainer, with a husband who has cheated on her and wants a divorce. The hubby's mistress, a beauty pageant winner, is not shy about harassing Michaela to sign the divorce papers, which she doesn't want to do until her soon-to-be ex owes her a great deal of money.

Michaela's uncle, Lou, another horse trainer, is found murdered in a stall, trampled by a horse.

Michaela sets out to find out who did it. She lives in her house with a new roomate, Camden, a beautiful woman who goes around marrying men for their money. Her latest husband, however, had been too smart for her, and she ended up not getting enough money in the divorce to support her in the habit she'd become accustomed, so she's freeloading off Michaela. (Not that Michaela thinks of it that way - that's my take on it.)

I didn't care for the characters, I didn't care for the soap opera -- I want detectives who don't have personal problems or who have solved them long ago -- and I wasn't very impressed with the writing, either. It just didn't seem to flow.

Warren William as Perry Mason

2008-11-04T20:32:00.000-08:00

November, 2007 was "Programmer Month" at TCM, and they showed a lot of the classic crime dramas from the 30s and 40s.

For the first time, I saw Warren William (December 2, 1894 - September 24, 1948) - as Philo Vance, Perry Mason, and Michael Lanyard aka The Lone Wolf.

And I quite like him! He's an excellent actor, handsome, with a sense of humor. Sadly, though, one can see him aging rapidly in the later Lone Wolf pictures (he died at the age of 54 of multiple myeloma (bone cancer)).

The IMDB points out:

Personally, Warren William was a shy and retiring type. Speaking of him, five-time Warners co-star Joan Blondell said that William "was an old man even when he was a young man." According to San Francisco critic Mick LaSalle's 2002 book "Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man" (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002), William, who quite unlike his early Warner Bros.' stereotype as a heartless "love 'em and leave 'em"-style seducer, remained married to one woman throughout his adult life. He was an active inventor with multiple patents, designing one of the first recreational vehicles, reportedly so he could continue to sleep while being driven to the studio in the morning.

In future blog entries I'll discuss Warren William's characterizations of Philo Vance, Perry Mason, and The Lone Wolf.